Abstract

Repatriation, the act of returning cultural objects to their communities or countries of origin, has become a focal point in global heritage discourse. In recent decades, the question of restitution has become one of the most visible contestations of our times confronting museums and nation states in southern Africa. Globally, institutions that once defined themselves as universal repositories of human culture are increasingly pressured to return certain categories of cultural objects acquired during the colonial period or through unethical forms of extraction. With governments leading the diplomatic negotiations of returns, and museums taking stock of their possessions and reassessing their future roles, indigenous communities are increasingly becoming aware of their moral duty and authority to assert their rights to their ancestral heritages. One difficulty with repatriation concerns the opaque provenance, contexts, and histories of many of these contested objects in museum collections. This presentation explores some cases of international repatriation and intra-national restitution to indigenous communities, and the growing importance of digital technologies and databases in preserving cultural materiality. Using a parallel indigenous notion of ukubuyisa (Nguni word) or go lata (Sotho-Tswana word), which is a widespread cultural practice among southern African Bantu-speaking people meaning to ‘bring home the spirit of a deceased person’, it critically examines the oft-unenlightened treatment of the intersection between tangible and intangible assemblages of materiality in restitution practice. This relates especially to complexities of indigenous cosmological beliefs concerning the spiritual dimensions of repatriated materials, challenging the primacy of diplomatic agreements and legal frameworks through which these returns are negotiated and executed, and the elevated agency of museums as surrogate acquirers, interpreters, exhibitors, and even authorised ‘disposers’, of returned objects and collections. Ukubuyisa or go lata signals that the focus and weight of repatriation is not necessarily so much on the physical materiality of the heritage object as it is on its immaterial attributes. In this practice, it is the invisible essences—the soulical character of the object or being that animated its former mediatory role—and not the outward visible form that is at stake. This view has important implications for the increasing usefulness and proliferation of digital materiality in heritage preservation and presentation. Accordingly, the talk ends with the examination of the adequacy of digital surrogating, and asks whether a reconfigured, digitally empowered museum institution—supported by a new heritage covenant between the Global North and Global South centring indigenous knowledge, concepts, and principles—can forge a more just, moral, and inclusive future for heritage collections along with their associated layers of power and information. Can traditional museums reconfigure their transformative influence through big data and digitisation initiatives to drive an indigenous-powered philosophical shift in how restitution, access, and stewardship can be understood and accomplished?

Dr Siyakha Mguni bio:

Dr Siyakha Mguni holds a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Cape Town and is currently Senior Lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. His research focuses on San rock art, Khoe and San cosmology and the study of hunter-gatherer visual heritage through archives, orality, and ethnography. He has authored two well-received books, Termites of the gods: San cosmology in southern African rock art and Archival theory, chronology and interpretation of rock art in the Western Cape, South Africa and published articles in international journals, among them Antiquity, Current Anthropology, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Journal of Social Archaeology, South African Archaeological Bulletin, and Azania. In 2006, he won the Ben Cullen Prize from Antiquity. Dr Mguni contributes to research partnerships in southern Africa, Europe, Asia, and the US. Beyond academia, he has curated exhibitions at both national and international levels. Working closely with communities on local heritage initiatives and public archaeology activities, he has featured in global media, such as CNN and the BBC among others. He brings African perspectives and indigenous knowledge systems into contemporary discussions on art, archives, curatorship, and cultural heritage.