The interdisciplinary workshop ‘WE NEED NEW NAMES On Cultures of Care and Difficult Knowledge in Southern African University Museums’ took place at Stellenbosch University in April 2025. It was generously supported by the African Critical Inquiry Program, AVReQ and the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre (NAHECS) at the University of Fort Hare. The workshop developed out of a conversation between a small group of scholars at AVReQ and NAHECS, University of Fort Hare, in 2024. The initial group included Dr Sophia Sanan and Dr Anell Stacey Daries from AVReQ and Dr Thozama April Maduma and Sinazo Mtshemla from NAHECS.

Both trans-disciplinary research centres deal with memorialization, the possibilities of repair and the responsibilities of curation and care in productively different ways. The archives that NAHECS cares for raise crucial questions about the legacies of the Pan-African intellectual history of Fort Hare in the present, the role of canonical black art in thinking about African art histories and questions around inherited colonial legacies via the erstwhile ‘anthropology’ collections and their meaning, social role, and relevance in the present. AVReQ explores critical questions about the afterlives of violence, problems around race, power, identity, ethics, and possibilities of social repair. While AVReQ doesn’t care for archives directly, currently, with new research projects and collaborations, it is expanding its core lines of inquiry in relation to museum spaces, collections, archives, and studies on (repressed) institutional histories.

What makes the rather dry topic of university museums and university archives compelling to this collective, is the contention that the kinds of historicizing paradigms produced within and through our institutions have a direct bearing on how the present (and therefore the future) is narrated and rationalized. Such paradigms have broader social consequences much beyond the university. These are also questions about entanglements with irreparable colonial and apartheid ‘pasts’, and indeed about the possibilities of social repair.

While we believe that emergent grammars to deal with the ‘difficult knowledges’ that we sit with are being expressed in our various Southern African university contexts, work in this field often faces strong institutional pushback, complex forms of self-censorship or silencing and minimal intellectual and resource support. Additionally, scholarly work in the field of collections and archives often prioritizes curatorial and museological thinking and often neglects a focus on the relationship between archives, collections and research methodologies and teaching practices.

Through this collaboration, we have tried to create the space to think with a wider group of colleagues, about the role that university museums, collections and archives are playing as both resources for thinking about the past in higher education; and in the ways in which research and thinking produced from the university/ museum nexus relates to a wider public discourse about the past, forms of remembrance and repair.

We organized the workshop contributions into three streams of intersecting thought: first, the idea of tracing fractures and fault lines as modes of enquiry in institutional research. Higher Education Institutions have been trying to engage with their pasts through conventional languages and forms of historiography. This often allows a glossing over of uncomfortable chapters or moments. We suggest that looking at fractures, points of conflict, as important entry points to consider trajectories of institutions and to grapple with how institutional cultures manifest. What happens when we study institutions from the margins, from the overlooked, the excluded, the chronically unseen or what is hidden in plain sight?

Anell Stacey Daries and Rabia Abba Omar presented a walking tour of the campus to help think about the behemoth of Stellenbosch University, rooted as it is in South Africa’s colonial, segregationist, and apartheid pasts through a methodology of walking, reading, and looking together in the campus “to uncover how historical narratives are constructed and contested, as well as the complexities of how people navigate and engage with these spaces”.

Phindile Thabata from WITS shared from her PhD research looking at ‘Black women’s self-published literature and the publishing ecosystem in South Africa, 2010 – 2020’, considering the power dynamics and historical legacies that underly this field of cultural reproduction and perhaps also its own forms of institutionalization.

Amohelang Mohajane, talked about the under examined legacy of the University of Bophuthatswana (UNIBO) Art Department (1985–1999) and consider its role in the broader project of ‘Historically Black Universities’, her engagement with this archive speaks to a commitment to unveil “the “difficult knowledge” embedded within these collections—those stories of cultural resilience, erasure, and identity”.

The second clustering is around the idea of New Archives | Old Archives | Closed Archives. A key word here is ventilation: do we have methods to recognise the human that is in the archive? How do young people (and educators) engage with a history so enmeshed with language that replicates colonial ways of thinking in the world? What are the inherited epistemic frameworks (colonial, settler colonial, art historical and elitist, liberation related, nationalist, ethnocentric) tethered to museum collections and archives and what kind of research is de/ re-centering these?

Colleagues from UJ (Ruth Sacks and Khaya Mchunu) are thinking about the processes of teaching histories of art(s) in South African university contexts, burdened as they are with the ‘overwhelming’ legacies of the past, considering what kind of reparative, imaginative work needs to be developed from a pedagogic perspective.

From Michaelis, Amie Soudien gestured to the “overwhelming archive of some 70 000 photographs” in the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands, asking amongst other critical questions ‘what could be gained in working from the orientation of the Wereldmuseum knowing about its role as a mouthpiece for settler colonial interest: an, if not the, epicentre of colonial knowledge production in the Netherlands’.

Sophia Sanan considers open and closed archives relating to residence cultures on this campus and thinks about the politics of visual representations and the ethical dimensions of sight to chart a methodology to look together, across generations at a troubling institutional archive and a troubling environment of this ‘historic’ town.

Finally, we thought about Inheritance, Knowledge, and Embodied Knowledge in the Museum. Work around archives, collections, and museums on a global level, is being strongly influenced by discourses of decoloniality and restitution. The repressive and violent logics that structured the colonial museum and its imposition in African contexts has been well recognized and documented in scholarship. And yet, methods to overcome the inheritances of museums and their modes of knowledge production are not easy to realize.

In the early 1990s, UFH decided to close its university museum and place its collections into storerooms – a kind of holding space that recognizes the various levels of violence (physical, cultural, epistemic) associated with the museum, its modes of display, the collection, and its relationship with the people around it. Thozama April and Sinazo Mtshemla shared thoughts about the process of entirely rethinking the Fort Hare Museum and considering its archives as ‘a holding space’.

Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja from the University of Namibia explored theatre methods that might open ways of ‘performing heritage at selected public sites at a university and a museum’ as a way of visibilising “cultural work that has been suppressed underground as a result of colonial modernity and Christian evangelism”.

Across all our contributors, we saw an engagement with difficult knowledge related to some kind of archives; a questioning of reparative possibilities, and a concern with research methodologies, practices and innovations in archive-based learning and teaching practices. We aimed to create a space of open-ness, mutual learning through this workshop.