Actions, not words

Decolonise is a verb. It’s an obvious point, but as the conversation on decolonising museums gathers pace, it is important to remember that decolonisation cannot happen without action. It is not simply a conversation, but one that must result in change. It is a personal, political, economic and, for some, spiritual process. 

In its original political roots, decolonisation was the result of a struggle to liberate territories from colonial rule and form independent nation states. In the context of a museum, decolonisation and decoloniality are twin concepts that work to dismantle the ongoing legacy of colonial narratives and power structures. The scale of decolonisation can lead people to think it is too big, too threatening or too radical to address. 

If decolonisation requires fundamental changes in how we imagine collections, resources, people and power, does this mean the museum will cease to exist? How do you translate the concept of decolonisation into practice? Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum and Liverpool’s World Museum offer insight into these questions, exploring the potential of decolonisation to transform what a museum represents. 

“People are afraid that they’re going to have to give something up,” says Marenka Thompson-Odlum, a research assistant and PhD student based at the Pitt Rivers. “But it doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the museum or the end of that object’s story.”

Founded in 1884, the Pitt Rivers takes its name from founder Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, a Victorian with a multi-hyphenated career to match his name: officer of the British Army-ethnologist-archaeologist. Collecting at the height of the British empire in the 19th century, he left his collection of 20,000 objects to the University of Oxford, on condition that it built a new museum and maintain the original display. 

It is partly this display that led Rhodes Must Fall activists, who wanted the university to remove a statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, to describe the Pitt Rivers as “one of the most violent places in Oxford”. Its labyrinth of glass cabinets and handwritten labels gives the museum the illusion of existing as an immersive time capsule.

“On one hand, the front end of the museum is just this imaginary identity of the museum for people,” says Laura van Broekhoven, the director of the Pitt Rivers. “I say imaginary because it’s always been changing, but it has this visual identity as if it’s stuck in the Victorian age. For people who come from cultures that suffered colonial violence, it’s a very hostile space.” 

Since joining as director in 2016, Van Broekhoven has begun to frame the museum’s practice through the lens of decoloniality – an ongoing attempt to analyse and disentangle the museum’s colonial framework. While the museum has worked for decades behind the scenes to build relationships with indigenous communities and challenge western ways of looking, it has only recently begun to foreground decolonial approaches in the physical space of the museum. 

Many of the objects retain their original labels, leaving visitors to stumble on a variety of colonial hurdles – from historically racist terms for non-Europeans to euphemistic summaries of violent events. Thompson-Odlum is leading the Labelling Matters project to provide better context and challenge the colonial narrative still embedded in the museum. 

“The idea is to create a display on labels, where we can prepare people to see this terminology before they actually go into the museum,” says Thompson-Odlum. “It’s an entry route into why we are talking about language in museums.” 

It is difficult to know how far these labels should be retained as historical artefacts themselves, a means of holding the institution to account for its colonial legacy, or whether they should be removed to lessen the violence they impose on some visitors. 

Thompson-Odlum points to labels edited with Tipp-Ex in an attempt to solve this as an example of literally “white-washing” history. Instead, Labelling Matters deliberately confronts this tension, acknowledging the assumptions and power structures behind the language used throughout the museum, and inviting people to use it as a launchpad to turn theory into practice.

“I kept looking for examples of people who had put all the stuff I was reading on decolonisation into practice within the museum space – permanently. I thought, maybe we can physically map this on to the cases,” says Thompson-Odlum. 

She created transparent worksheets (using acetate and marker pens) to create tables that outline a “colonial matrix of power”. These sheets can be placed on any of the museum cabinets to help people know what to look for, posing questions such as “what power structures does this uphold?” and “does this case divide people in certain ways?”. 

The process simplifies decolonial theory and puts it in the hands of people who walk into the museum. Labelling Matters is a reminder that decolonisation requires new forms of storytelling.

 

The World Cultures Gallery in the World Museum, Liverpool, invited comedian Daliso Chaponda to perform after hearing his commentary on the city’s Slavery Museum on Radio 4’s Comedy Hour. The World Cultures Gallery, which contains National Museums Liverpool’s (NML) collections from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, has started a major redisplay in an attempt to dismantle the museum’s colonial assumptions. This is being framed by the question: “Where next for the World Cultures Gallery?”

“It’s a process of trial and error,” says NML senior curator Emma Martin. “We don’t want to fix anything in stone.” 

Instead, the museum is working with several diaspora artists to reimagine the interpretation and the physical space. Chaponda’s performance was not a one-off – museums seeking a surface-level form of decolonisation often invite artists in, but only temporarily, so that the structure of the museum remains unchallenged. 

The comedian worked closely with the curators in the gallery to research the performance, and elements of his comedy will be used to build a new display called “Are museums a laughing matter?”. The display will explore issues of racism, power and who gets to joke about race and empire. “I think it’s great to use humour as a way of making things that are opaque to people who aren’t lecturers or academics accessible,” says Chaponda.

Irreverence is key to the approach in Liverpool. Poet Sarah Howe is reinventing the museum’s display of Chinese ceramics, while looking at her family ties to Hong Kong and Britain. “The current display is rather regimented, displayed according to dynasties and still accompanied by ‘connoisseurial’ language,” says Martin. 

Howe’s intervention will use poetry to imagine the lives these objects have led, posing questions such as “did this plate hear gossip in Amsterdam?” and “where did that chip come from?”. Howe is working with students from a local school, and her poems will shape the redisplay. Martin says the new displays will be “much more dramatic and narrative based”. 

The conversation will extend further beyond the walls of the museum, to sports centres, cafes and shops around Liverpool and the rest of the UK. “People are also keen for us to talk about object return,” says Martin. “We are used to having these discussions internally, now we’re having them publicly.” 

Like the Pitt Rivers, the World Museum Liverpool has found that people are more receptive to simple, practical tools to engage with the conversation. “We’ve found that when we’re looking for responses, postcards and pencils are still what people want,” says Martin. “Smartphones and polls are less popular.” 

This DIY approach can mobilise museums of any size. Beginning the process of discussing decolonisation does not require high budgets, just open minds. However, decolonisation does extend beyond public-facing interventions. “If you work in this sector, you need an honest intellectual engagement with what we’re doing,” says Van Broekhoven. “It requires us, as leaders, to go and find out what exactly this is all about. 

“It’s not necessarily easy because it does ask you to think about how some of this is systemic,” says Van Broekhoven. 

“At the Museum Ethnographers Group’s Decolonising the Museum in Practice Conference, we discussed how to decolonise our databases to reflect indigenous thinking, and probably more human thinking. How do we decolonise our budgets – where do we spend our money? Why is this work funded only as project funding when it should be core to our work? This is an important fundamental change to bring about.”

The need for structural change means that for a museum to decolonise, it cannot remain the same. Seeking to confront whether this is conceivable for a museum with colonial origins, Tristram Hunt, the director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), recently wrote an article in the Observer newspaper asking whether museums should return their colonial artefacts. 

His concluding claim that “for a museum like the V&A, to decolonise is to decontextualise” provoked frustration among activists and museum workers committed to decolonising museum practice, not least because most institutions are yet to provide adequate context on the colonial origins and legacy of their collections and power dynamics. 

While the article focused on repatriation and restitution claims, it sparked a wave of responses defending decolonial practice. Museum Detox, a network for black, Asian and minority ethnic museum, art gallery and heritage workers who identify as non-white, published a comprehensive Twitter thread, which said: “Decolonisation in museums isn’t purely about restitution and repatriation. It is decolonising the culture, disrupting the norms, the status quo – being radical rather than being grateful. It is holding a mirror up, looking at practices, policies and attitudes to decolonise our minds.” 

In this light, reinterpreting collections and displays to decolonise our museums is part of the process, but not the completion of it. The proof of decolonisation is in whether minds change, structures change and people change – a process or reflection and action that opens up new ways of thinking and new ways of doing. The scale of the work ahead does not mean we should not start to act, as decolonisation opens up new possibilities for what a museum can be.