Massive stockpile of African artefacts discovered

An estimated 350 000 African artefacts and manuscripts, as well as human remains, photographs and natural history specimens, have been found in a UK university collection. Dr Eva Namusoke spent 15 months liaising with University of Cambridge librarians, curators and archivists to uncover the items. BBC News reports that she said it was fairly common’ for large museums not to display most of their collections, ‘but it was still surprising to see this scale and diversity from the entire African continent and some there for decades and decades’. The project is the latest in recent work at the university to tackle questions about its museums' relationship with colonisation and enslavement and reveals the majority of artefacts were acquired during British colonisation. The items include Maasai armlets, a small mammal collected in a Boer War (1899-1902) concentration camp and a collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts. The majority of the artefacts were acquired during British colonisation, some gifted, bought, commissioned or excavated – while others were stolen, confiscated or looted.