In the traditional museum, the object is a captive of its label. The small rectangular placard – often printed in austere, sans-serif typography – has historically functioned as the definitive boundary of meaning, establishing what an object is, where it came from, and who made it. This instrumental approach to knowledge assumes that history is fixed, decipherable, and entirely legible to the curator. But what happens when the archive is silent? What happens when the register relies on the hasty, culturally illiterate notes of a nineteenth-century colonial officer or an opportunistic trader?
In late 2025, the Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester, opened its Africa Hub – a gallery, research space, and conceptual intervention that quietly but decisively reframes the definition of a museum object. It is no longer treated merely as a relic, a decorative illustration of a foreign land, or solely a work of art. Instead, it is approached as a unit of information and, crucially, as a site of ongoing epistemological negotiation.
At the heart of the Africa Hub is a simple, disarming phrase that replaces the authoritative certitude of the traditional museum label: not yet known. This admission of institutional ignorance is not a failure of curation; it is a profound epistemological shift. It acknowledges that meaning is not static, and it invites the very communities from whom these objects were sourced to speak into the archival silence.
A Legacy of Archival Silence
The Manchester Museum is the custodian of approximately 40,000 items originating from the African continent, a vast repository spanning both the humanities and natural sciences. The provenance of these objects charts the complex, often violent history of the British Empire. Many entered the collection through looting, punitive expeditions, confiscation, or unequal trade, before being formalised in museum ledgers as “donations,” “purchases,” or “institutional transfers.”
For decades, the majority of these items have languished in storage. They have remained under-researched, disconnected from their living cultural contexts, and often inaccessible to the diaspora communities who reside mere miles from the museum’s doors.
Material culture transmits knowledge in complex, overlapping layers. The colour, form, and texture of a piece speak to the physical environment from which it was born. The symbols carved into wood or cast in brass reflect cosmologies and social structures. The technique of its making reveals historical trade routes, the exchange of metallurgical skills, or the availability of specific pigments. Yet an object, no matter how eloquently crafted, cannot interpret itself. The museum register – often limited to stylistic classifications and vague geographical approximations – is an insufficient tool for understanding. It tells us what a thing might physically be, but it rarely articulates what it meant to the people who made it, or what it continues to mean to their descendants.
Here, epistemology enters the gallery space. What constitutes valid knowledge? When is a claim to understanding justified? And, most importantly in the context of the ethnographic museum, who holds the authority to justify it?
Classical philosophy offers Agrippa’s trilemma, which posits that any claim to knowledge rests on one of three unstable foundations: an infinite regress of proof, circular reasoning, or a foundational but unproven assumption. Historically, the western museum has solved this trilemma by relying on its own institutional authority as the unproven assumption. This object is what we say it is, because we are the museum. The glass case and the printed label become the epistemic anchors. The Africa Hub dismantles this architecture of authority.
“Not Yet Known”: The Admission of Ignorance as Institutional Strength
By explicitly stating that an object’s history or purpose is “not yet known,” the Africa Hub embraces an approach of “thinking in public.” Rather than presenting finished, hermetically sealed research, the gallery exposes the gaps in the museum’s knowledge. It is a space built around what is absent as much as what is present.
Visitors, particularly those from African diaspora communities, are invited to share their knowledge, insights, and familial memories. As new information emerges, the displays rotate. Community groups are brought in not merely as consultants, but as co-curators who actively shape the narrative. Objects transition from deep storage into the gallery and onto digital platforms not as fixed truths, but as evolving propositions.
Esme Ward, the Director of Manchester Museum, has been the driving force behind the institution’s broader transformation toward social responsibility and community engagement. Under her leadership, the museum has redefined its civic role. “Museums have the power to be empathy machines,” Ward has stated, “bringing generations and communities together to build understanding, while confronting the past with honesty and transparency. More than ever before, we need museums that are values-led, imaginative and confident about what they stand for.”
This philosophy is materialised in the Africa Hub. The museum ceases to be a monolithic arbiter of truth and becomes instead a dynamic site where rationality and justification are openly negotiated. It recognises that the authority to interpret is not centralised in the curator’s office, but distributed across living communities.
The Ikenga Ihu-abua: A Case Study in Semiotic Correction
To understand the stakes of this epistemic shift, one must look at the specific objects that have undergone this process of re-evaluation. Consider the piece previously catalogued under the sterile alphanumeric identifier: 0.9323/494.
For years, the museum’s internal record described this object in reductive, almost clinical terms: Mask/Costume. Probably from Nigeria. Made in the second half of the 19th century. Devil head mask made of wood. Janus head figure with each face painted white. U-shaped curved piece of wood on top of head. Salford register says it was used for scaring children. Cultural group: Ibo.
The classification was tidy, the tone neutral. The uncertainty of the curator was neatly contained within the word “probably.” But when the object was brought into the light of community consultation at the Africa Hub, a radically different reality emerged.
Through collaboration with the Igbo Community Greater Manchester (ICM), the object was correctly identified not as a “devil mask used to scare children,” but as an Ikenga ihu-abua. The Ikenga is a powerful symbol in Igbo cosmology, relating to personal strength, achievement, and the right hand. This specific Ikenga figure features two faces – one male and one female – a duality that suggests genders cannot exist in isolation from one another. It would have functioned as a family Ikenga, a symbol of domestic unity that was present at critical gatherings attended by the entire family.
Furthermore, the “U-shaped curved piece of wood” was identified as representing two hands directed upward, communicating with the divine. The open hands demonstrate that they are “clean,” a symbol of ethical purity. In Igbo belief systems, only those with clean hands and pure hearts are permitted to communicate with beings in the spiritual realm.
The shift in meaning is profound and destabilising to the traditional museum narrative. An object previously dismissed as a grotesque tool for frightening children has been restored to its rightful status as a sophisticated cosmological symbol of familial unity and moral purity.
What changed in this scenario? The physical object remained unaltered. The wood did not reshape itself; the pigment did not change hue. What changed was the interpretive community. This transformation vividly illustrates the epistemological stakes of material culture. The earlier, colonial-era label was not necessarily malicious in its intent, but it was structurally ignorant. It exemplified the violence of instrumental knowledge substituting for lived knowledge – when external, superficial classification overrides internal, deeply felt cosmology.
Honourable Mrs. Sylvia Mgbeahurike, Vice-Chairlady of the Women’s Wing of the Igbo Community Greater Manchester, reflected on the experience of co-curating the display. Her words capture the complex emotional and historical resonance of the project: “Some of [the objects] were given, some of them were stolen, some were taken forcefully, out of conquest. But it’s good for us to start bringing them together again. It shows inclusiveness. It shows there is strength in diversity. It shows we are one people.”
Embodied Transmission: From Classification to Cosmology
Anthropologists and semioticians have long understood that objects function within vast, interconnected systems of meaning. A mask is never simply “a mask” – it is an active sign within a specific cosmology. A carved wooden head is not merely decorative; it is deeply relational, facilitating interaction between the living, the ancestors, and the divine. Meaning does not emanate from the physical object alone, but from the network of beliefs, rituals, songs, and embodied practices that surround it. Without the community that animates it, the semiotics of the object collapse into mere projection, allowing the curator to impose their own cultural anxieties – such as the concept of the “devil” – onto a sacred artifact.
Knowledge, particularly within many African cultural frameworks, is not transmitted solely through propositional explanation. It is embodied. Contemporary knowledge holders often repeat gestures without explicit verbalisation: the specific cadence of dance movements, the rigid postures of ritual, the careful, deliberate handling of sacred attributes. The repetition of the action is itself the transmission of knowledge. The human body serves as the ultimate archive.
The discipline of anthropology recognises this as tacit knowledge – knowing how, rather than knowing that. Western museums, historically oriented entirely toward knowing that, have consistently struggled to capture or respect knowing how. The Africa Hub’s model gestures toward a necessary integration. By acknowledging that objects alone are insufficient and require living voices to articulate their meaning, the museum becomes an active platform for live dialogue, performance, and memory work.
The Epistemological Stakes of Restitution
The re-evaluation of meaning at the Africa Hub is inextricably linked to the broader, urgent conversation regarding restitution. The Manchester Museum has publicly committed to furthering its work on the return of cultural heritage, aiming to tell the truth about the imperial past and take concrete steps to repair historical injustices.
This commitment is not solely a political or ethical stance; it is fundamentally an epistemological one. If a collection of objects was obtained through coercion, violence, or looting, then the knowledge architecture built upon that collection will inevitably be structurally distorted. The colonial archive is a compromised dataset. Therefore, correcting the record – replacing “devil mask” with Ikenga ihu-abua – is an act of epistemic repair that must run parallel to ethical repair. Truth-telling is not an optional accessory to museum display. It is the absolute precondition for justified knowledge.
The Africa Hub poses a critical question for the future of custodianship: how do we determine the best future for these collections? For some objects, the logical and necessary outcome will be full restitution to their communities of origin. For others, it may involve developing new, community-led paradigms for displaying and celebrating them in Manchester, serving the diaspora who now call the city home.
Towards an Epistemic Humility
In Manchester, a quiet but radical dialogue is occurring between culture, community, and custodianship. It is a dialogue between those who physically hold the objects in temperature-controlled storage, and those who hold the meanings of those objects in their cultural memory.
The museum is finally becoming anthropological in the fullest, most ethical sense of the word. It is no longer a repository of fixed, authoritative narratives, but a site of negotiated understanding occurring in real time. The ultimate aim is not necessarily to arrive at a perfect consensus, but to achieve mutual intelligibility.
To establish genuine understanding between cultures, institutions must first ask themselves: how do we know what we know? What unexamined assumptions structure our interpretations? Where are the epistemic traps – where authority masquerades as certainty, where crude classification substitutes for rich context, and where superficial aesthetic appreciation eclipses deep cosmology?
The “proper elevation” of culture – to borrow the somewhat paternalistic language often invoked in institutional discourse – requires a profound epistemic humility. To raise something up responsibly, one must first understand its foundations.
By refusing to present its knowledge as complete, the Africa Hub presents it instead as emergent. It reframes the museum object as neither silent nor fully legible, but as an open invitation – to justify, to question, and to co-construct meaning. Between the faded colour of a wooden carving and the living cosmology of a diaspora community, between the rigid colonial archive and the fluid embodiment of memory, a new kind of transmission is taking place. It is a transmission defined by what is not yet known, and therefore, by what is entirely open to the future.
