Dr. J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi will give a talk at the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre Seminar Series of the University of York (22.10.2024)

Dr. J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, our postdoctoral research fellow, will contribute to the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre Seminar Series of the University of York on 22 October 2024 with the talk Ọfϙ in the age of decolonisation and restitution: interrogating Igbo objects of sovereignty and authority in the collections of the MAA, Cambridge.

In this lecture, Dr. Ugwuanyi explores the changing narratives of Ọfϙ, a sacred object of sovereignty and authority among the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, which were collected by colonial anthropologists and are held at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), University of Cambridge. He reflects on the meaning of the objects within the Igbo knowledge systems, how the meaning was transformed during the colonial era and the way they have been conditioned at MAA for over 100 years.

He attributes the loss of context and meaning to a concept in Nigerian pidgin English, ‘kolo’ with the suffix ‘collecting’ to give ‘kolo-collecting’ – a logic of loss of rational reasoning or systemic madness characterising the extractive-modernist anthropology of the African colonial era. He also applies the Igbo term, ‘nkali’, meaning ‘to be greater than another’, to illustrate the power dynamics that disempowered, exiled, and imprisoned these objects of sovereignty and authority.

Dr. Ugwuanyi uses a type of restitution practice he encountered in a local community in Nigeria to discuss how museums and heritage institutions can achieve reparative justice through other forms of restitution to move beyond the fixated focus on the actual return of objects to the originating communities. He argues that museums can contribute meaningfully to the ongoing conversations on decolonisation in a manner that disentangles it from colonial crimes by unlearning and relearning collections in a just, equitable and inclusive manner.

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