Expanded Range: Projects on African Material from Welcome's Historical Medical Museum Open Access

As you will see throughout this issue, addressing the collections formerly in Henry S. Wellcome's Historical Medical Museum (WHMM) is a task that may never be fully accomplished. Encapsulating an unfathomable range of material including books, manuscripts, paintings, sculpture, medical tools, scientific apparatus, natural specimens, weapons, and ethnographic objects that today we call art—even in selecting a focus on the African material from the WHMM, the projects discussed in this issue are just the tip of an enormous iceberg of research.

Throughout 2022, researchers across institutions with African collections from WHMM formed a working group to discuss our research and to share resources. This group included: Kate Anderson (Fowler Museum at UCLA), Nathan Bossoh (formerly Science Museum, London, now Southampton University), Njabulo Chipangura (formerly Manchester Museum and now National University of Ireland, Maynooth), Alexandra Eveleigh (Wellcome Collection), Carlee S. Forbes (formerly Fowler Museum at UCLA, now Baltimore Museum of Art), Ruth Horry (Wellcome Collection), Erica P. Jones (Fowler Museum at UCLA), and William Gmayi Nsuiban (National Museum of Ghana). We invited JC Niala (History of Science Museum, Oxford) as the group's moderator. Following several discussions about the group's goals, we determined that the most pressing necessity was to connect more researchers across intuitions with dispersed WHMM African material. We then organized and convened a Zoom gathering of a working group with twenty-six attendees on May 2, 2023.

Attendees hailed from institutions that had received WHMM dispersals, including those based in the UK, several African national museums, and the Fowler in Los Angeles. In addition to those already listed, these participants represented a range of institutions across several continents: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (Birmingham, England), British Museum, (London, England), Horniman Museum (London, England), Glasgow Museums (Glasgow, Scotland), Livingstone Museum (Livingstone, Zambia), National Museums of Ghana (Accra, Ghana), National Museums of Scotland (Edinburgh, Scotland), Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, (Oxford, England), Science Museum (London, England), and Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences (Harare, Zimbabwe).

Each individual and institution had a different perspective and aim for examining the WHMM material. We welcome this diversity of perspectives, as it can only widen the scope of our entanglement with this immense collection.

In this meeting, we learned of several new and proposed projects surrounding the material. So, in addition to our proposal for a special issue, we (Jones and Forbes) proposed to the UCLA board of African Arts to use the “Dialogues” section of the special issue to focus on WHMM material and its dispersal. We invited authors to discuss the possibilities of emerging research and respond to the general prompt: “How do you envision future paths forward, in light of current ideas about colonial-era collecting, with the African material formerly in the WHMM collection at your institution?”

By including these descriptions alongside the longer articles, we see an even fuller depth of the range of topics that may be addressed with this collection.

Throughout the course of editing the issue, several unforeseen circumstances affected our authors’ ability to contribute, but in an effort to provide an acknowledgement of the work being done on the continent, I offer a brief introduction to the dispersal material in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Farai Chabata (senior curator of Ethnography for the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe) and Victoria Phiri (director of the Livingstone Museum in Livingstone, Zambia) both participated in the May 2023 working group and proposed work with the material that their respective museums received from several of the WHMM's postwar dispersals.

The collections of the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences (formerly the Queen Victoria Museum in Harare) include a small number of objects dispersed from the WHMM. In 1950, Elizabeth Goodall, curator of the Queen Victoria Memorial Museum, approached the curator in charge of the dispersals of Wellcome material at the British Museum with an interest in acquiring objects from Southern Africa for her museum. In a letter to Wellcome Collection Director E. Ashwood Underwood, she explained that the museum was interested in anything from Southern Africa, including musical instruments, weapons, tools used in weaving, beadwork, personal adornment and dress, and religious objects.¹ She was able to select a small number of works (mostly musical instruments, bead ornaments, objects connected to smoking, and others of miscellaneous character) for the museum. In the May 2023 convening, Chabata described that about 10% of the museum's 10,000 objects come from the WHMM. He is interested in understanding the provenance history and collection biographies for these works (particularly, how to address gaps in the histories) and contextualizing them within the museum's trajectory.

Phiri previously worked with the WHMM material at the Livingstone Museum in 2000-2004 and has since returned as the museum director. In Zambia, Desmond Clark, director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum from 1938-1961, selected material from the later dispersals (1951-1954). Clark specified a regional focus for the museums’ acquisitions at the time, stating, “While we are primarily interested in Central African material, comparative specimens from Southern, West, and East Africa would also be very useful indeed.”² Later letters from Clark thank the WHMM for the contributions of regional comparative material, woodcarving, and South African beadwork. This history could spur many research projects. First, how did the dispersal process function within the context of building a national museum? Further inquiry could be made into Desmond Clark's actions as a whole, the building of new campus facilities, and the relationships with other museums. When Clark was not in England, for example, Geoffrey H.S. Bushnell, curator at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge University, made selections on Clark's behalf. Of note, the material sent to Zambia has a somewhat systematic notation as “deaccessioned” in Wellcome Collection's archives. Like the dispersals sent to UCLA, the many flimsy cards and registration log entries include an indication that they were sent to the Livingstone Museum. Thus, with a careful cataloging of the objects in the museum that notes prior numbers, it may be possible to significantly enhance the provenance records for these objects. On a preliminary basis, it seems as if many of the objects were part of the January 1952 (seventh installment) dispersal, which was largely works purchased at the December 1928 sale of Belgian collector Henri Pareyn's holdings from the Congo. Phiri has also been active in bringing together community panels to inform the museum's displays. Like many others in this volume, community engagement with the material may allow for new interpretation and care for the works that were once in the WHMM.

It is our hope that the 2023 meeting and this special issue are only the beginning of a much longer relationship between institutions and researchers as we continue to seek understanding in the African material from the WHMM.