Author Lucinda Canelas gives the example of the National Museum of Ethnology (MNE) where only one staff member is responsible for carrying out systematic digitisation to create an inventory of the objects.
According to the director of the museum, Paulo Ferreira da Costa, soon, tens of thousands of pages that document how objects arrived at the MNE’s collection – be it through acquisition, donation or transfer from other entities – will be available online.
RM* comment: The director does not reveal whether this includes information about how the objects were collected in the first place from their places of origin.
Amongst the objects is a collection of more than 2000 items that were transferred by the General Agency for Overseas in 1963, before the MNE was founded in 1976. This collection has never been studied nor photographed.
The article quotes Bénédicte Savoy who visited Portugal in 2022. Savoy: ‘In Portugal information about colonial collections is almost non-existent. During my last visit to Portugal, I went to the Ethnology museum and saw collections on display that came from Africa after decolonisation, but where are the others? Those that were collected during hundreds of years of empire?
She also argues: You can’t wait to have all the information to start sharing it. How can Angola or Mozambique make requests for restitution to Portugal if they don’t know what is in Portuguese museums? How can Mozambique or Angola contribute to the study of these objects, in the development of knowledge, if they’ve never seen them?
The author refers that it is mainly due to this reason that Portugal has not yet received requests for restitution. And this is exactly one of the arguments used by those who are against restitution (that is, that there have been no requests and therefore it is not necessary to engage in this discussion).
The author asks: shouldn’t museums and universities actively take the initiative to, more frequently, seek contact with researchers and curators in the former colonies to promote this debate and to open up their collections to the countries of objects?
One exception is the University of Coimbra that since 2023 has been engaging with these questions. This university holds a collection of 29 decapitated skulls from Timor that arrived in Portugal in 1882 to be used in controversial “racial studies”.
Until the end of 2024, a group from this university will be presenting a plan towards the “decolonisation” of its cultural heritage, with concrete recommendations. Hopefully, these will be openly published, to counter the closed conversations that have been the standard in the Portuguese context in the last 50 years.
