Community Collaborations and Social Biographies of Museum Collections from Colonial Contexts

In this article, we look at collections of Zulu beadwork at Manchester Museum and Ditsong National Museum of Cultural History tracing their provenances and social biographies. We present these two institutions as colonial museums founded on similar ideals of presenting objects as cultures of the “other” in absence of object and community agency. In rethinking colonial contexts associated with processes of collecting beadwork, we look at how these museums can be decolonized by collaborating with communities. Decolonization is deployed here as both a theory and a method toward the integration of Indigenous ways of knowing and doing in museum practices. Methodologically, the article highlights decolonial strategies in the form of open, democratic, inclusive, and multivocal engagement that we embraced undertaking the research.