The University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in England is set to return historic artefacts to the Uganda National Museum in Kampala. The items were collected and donated to MAA by the late British anthropologist and missionary Rev John Roscoe.
Roscoe (1861-1932) was a missionary from the Anglican Missionary Society to East Africa.
In 1884, he travelled to what became the British Protectorate of Uganda and lived there among several indigenous tribes until 1909.
According to Derek R Peterson, a professor of History and African studies at the University of Michigan, US, the Cambridge Museum holds around 1,400 separate ethnographic objects from Uganda, many of them were acquired by Roscoe, others were donated by Buganda Kingdom’s then Katikiro (prime minister), Sir Apollo Kaggwa (1890-1926). Most of Roscoe’s collection has not been displayed in Cambridge.
Dr. Peterson will serve as principal investigator for the pilot project dubbed, Repositioning the Uganda Museum, working with a team of colleagues from both MAA and the Uganda National Museum to repatriate these objects from the Cambridge Museum to Uganda.
The project was recently awarded 100,000 US dollars (Shs356m) grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation based in the US will repatriate several dozen artefacts, a small subset of the hundreds of thousands of objects taken from Africa in the colonial era.
The project team will select a set of artefacts from the Cambridge museum, repatriate them to Uganda by the end of 2022, conduct research on their history and provenance, and exhibit them in the Uganda museum in late 2023.