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Mabafokeng Hoeane, University of South Africa, South AfricaAbstract
The nomenclature of museum collections is rarely treated as a site of politics, yet every catalogue entry, accession record and display label carries an epistemic charge. Objects removed from African communities were renamed as they were removed, described through European frameworks and ordered according to taxonomies that positioned them as evidence of difference rather than as expressions of knowledge. This reflective essay argues that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s philosophy of linguistic decolonisation, developed principally in relation to literature, offers a usable framework for curatorial and conservation practice. Working from my position as a heritage practitioner and doctoral researcher in South Africa, and drawing on encounters with African collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art during an African Museology Exchange fellowship, I trace how the argument that language carries memory and worldview can be extended from the novel to the object label. The essay proceeds through four movements: a reading of Ngũgĩ’s linguistic philosophy and its relevance to material culture; a reflexive account of my own formation, including a formative encounter with the African Writers Series; an examination of renaming as a curatorial practice, illustrated through isiZulu terms such as umkhonto and isihlangu; and an honest reckoning with the institutional, geopolitical and personal constraints that limit such work, including my own reliance on English. Renaming is not proposed as a technical correction. It is advanced as a modest but consequential act of epistemic justice, and one whose contradictions must be held in view rather than resolved rhetorically.
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Conference: ECAH2026Stream: Arts - Literary Arts Practices
This paper is part of the ECAH2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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