As a child growing up in London, the Geffrye Museum and the Horniman Museum and Gardens were my family’s go-to standbys for rainy days or when no childcare arrangements were in place every Saturday.
The first was an exotic place for me: dark Tudor rooms, strange instruments and odd people wearing big hats and bigger dresses. The second was even odder: I looked for familiar reflections of my East European/Zulu/South African family and got back masks and headdresses that bore no resemblance to my lived experience. The only black people I saw in museums were guards, or porters. It was strange.
Now I understand it: I didn’t have the English background to help me understand the Geffrye Museum, and the exoticising of Africa at the Horniman made no sense. So I dismissed it, relying instead on the ample global artistic, literary, musical richness that my family were keen to bombard us with.
This gets to the heart of the museum problem – for many of us, collections feel at best simplistic and inaccurate, at worst harmful and racist.
In 2016 a series of tweets from Danny Birchall, the digital editor of the Wellcome Collection in London, ignited lively discussions in the museum sector that continue today. They included: “British museums are constitutionally incapable of making honest exhibitions about the British Empire” and “Museums should offer free entry to PoC  (people of colour) whose countries they stole stuff from”.
Decolonising museums starts with a nuts and bolts examination of just exactly what museums are for.
“Western disciplinary frameworks that shape and dictate our experience, learning and understanding of museums are entrenched in racialised theory,” says Sandra Shakespeare, a museum consultant and co-founder of Museum Detox, a network for BAME heritage professionals that is leading the way in proving that colonialism and museums’ very existence are invidiously intertwined.
“A museum in its traditional sense is a dictator of beauty, aesthetic, taste and style,” Shakespeare says. “We trust the museum and value what it tells us to.”
Questioning this authority, critically evaluating and challenging these choices and aesthetics, is precisely what decolonising involves.
What is decolonisation?
The term decolonisation was coined by the Martinique philosopher and writer Frantz Fanon in 1961 and picked up by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in 1986.
Initial decolonisation work centred on critically evaluating the detrimental effects of schooling in Algeria and Kenya in colonial languages, and the importance of reinstating indigenous systems of thought, legal processes, learning, being and doing.
In the 1970s and 1980s, focus moved on to how colonial settlers and occupation (especially in relation to colonised America, New Zealand, Australia, East, West and Southern Africa) systematically devalued and denigrated local populations through genocide, occupation, slavery and a host of dehumanising practices including pass laws and group areas acts.
British ships involved in a huge range of trading and scientific enterprises, including slavery, came back with loot from their travels. “Exotic” treasures of the “Orient” were ogled as trophies of status and power, while the “other” was invented wholesale as a fiction of sex, war, waywardness and cannibalism.
Much of this booty (or loot) forms the backbone of colonial museums. The more egregious end of very humdrum daily acts of spectacle and brutality in museums are exemplified by Bronx Zoo, which in 1906 incarcerated a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga and put him in an enclosure with orangutans for visitors to “observe”.
And the Africa Museum in Belgium, which was founded on the International Exposition of 1897, an exhibition that had a recreation of an African village; more than 200 Congolese people were imported to inhabit this human zoo, seven of whom died during their time in Belgium.

According to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art it was a black African woman – Princess Ennigaldi, the sixth-century ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire – who is credited with collecting and curating Mesopotamian artefacts with origins spanning 1,500 years. She probably had little idea of the controversy (and irony) that setting up the first museum would cause.
The current situation

Interest in decolonisation comes at the same time as awareness of the climate crisis is spreading.
Danny Chivers, from the activist group BP or not BP?, says: “We think a key priority for the climate change movement right now is to properly engage with the issues of racism and colonialism, and to see how they are deeply connected with the struggle for a safer climate.
"We can’t tackle any of these things in isolation – we need to see the connections and ensure that any work we are doing is supporting, not ignoring or undermining, other social struggles.”
Despite ongoing work by Museum Detox to support museums and individuals to decolonise, the absences, racist stereotypes and particularly unequal power structures in museums (especially in relation to labelling, authoring and gatekeeping) are too disguised, or familiar, to be easily disassembled.
Shakespeare says: “Institutional racism remains a reality for many black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) workers who ultimately pay the price with their emotional labour, wellbeing and health.”
According to Museum Detox, contemporary decolonising work in museums isn’t “purely about restitution and repatriation”. It also involves “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.”
Inspired partly by the Rhodes Must Fall movements against statues of slavery profiteers, the Decolonise Now movements from Sussex University, Brooklyn Museum in New York and Museum Detox recognise that decolonising is much more than just tackling racism, or getting more diverse audiences and staff members, although these do help.
A recent Twitter thread by Museum Detox said: “We need to question the dominant narrative that excludes and denies the deep and complicated relationship of large groups of people (from across the world) and their belonging here, why these people continue to be marginalised and how these collections are stripped of context.”
By necessity then, we have to question the origins of why museums exist. Taxonomy, typology and categorising are inextricably linked to the European projects of progress and scientific enlightenment.
This is brilliantly and clearly described by Subhadra Das, the curator of University College London science collections, and Miranda Lowe, the curator of zoology at the Natural History Museum in London, in an 2018 article on decolonising natural history collections.
Das and Lowe show how cultural institutions that hold, curate and interpret collections of plant, animal, and human remains, and geological specimens and fossils are still actively implicated in perpetuating racism today.
They question the historical and political motives of categorisation and archiving, arguing that it is the product of colonial explorations, and an obsession with hierarchies that placed white men at the top of the pyramid.
Divya Tolia-Kelly, a professor of geography and heritage studies at Sussex University, has also argued that colonial superiority and dominance is so intertwined with categorisation of knowledge, that a sort of brainwashing takes place.
In 2016 she wrote: “Exhibiting and narrating other cultures [in] museum spaces depends on naturalising imperial ‘regimes of truth’, categorising other world, peoples and places. Imperial ‘ways of seeing’, of labelling, categorising, curating and framing other cultures – always in relation to Europe – are the dominant technologies. Collectively, this creates a ‘grammar of ordering and narrating’ that is reproduced and re-experienced on various non-European cultures.”
This feeds into more obvious racism-both in the museum collections, and in the people who make up museum workforces.
Shakespeare says: “Decolonisation practice is never about individualisation; we continue to press for change through the solidarity of all museum workers, allies and critical friends. It is a shared process, a generational work, that is certainly not new, cannot be done in isolation, and nor should it ever be seen as such. To do this is to miss the point entirely.”
Thembi Mutch is a freelance journalist and academic