Bonsile Rachel Zamandlovu Ndlangamandla, Eswatini and Henrique Entratice, Portugal

This week Bonsile Rachel Zamandlovu Ndlangamandla and Henrique Entratice visited the Weltkulturen Museum. Their residency is part of the international exchange program TheMuseumsLab for partner museums in Europe and Africa. The aim of the program ist that Museum professionals as well as academic and cultural professionals come together to create space for an engaged discussion on museums past and present for a joint shaping of the future of museums as well as to promote mutual learning between African and European museum professionals.

Bonsile Rachel Zamandlovu Ndlangamandla is the Director of Cultural Heritage Eswatini National Trust Commission (ENTC) in Eswatini, South Africa. As Director, she ensures that the objectives of the National Trust Commission Act with regard to the cultural heriatge are fully observed in the policies and the practices of the Commission. In addition, she oversees the full cultural heriatge management function by supervising staff and monitoring the daily operations. In her role as the curator of the National Museum, she is also responsible for the collection, analysis, interpretation of cultural heritage information and trends. One of her other key tasks is to raise funds for various projects that are currently running in the National Museum.

She introduced us into the diverse cultural heritage management function that she is dealing with at the national centre.

"Being part of TheMuseumsLab program has not only opened my eyes on the systematic extraction of African objects in the context of colonialism, but it has created a need to address the commitment of European governments on restitution. A clear framework for restitution of African objects should be developed in order to bring back the dignity lost by our forefathers during the colonial period." - Bonsile Rachel Zamandlovu Ndlangamandla, 2024

Henrique Entratice is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and a junior researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal. His research deals with the oldest collection of Karajá Dolls, an anthropomorphic object widely collected by European scientists at the end of the 19th century, made by the Karajá group at the heart of Brazil. His research is carried out in partnership with the Federal University of Goiás (Brazil) and the Ethnological Museum of Berlin (Germany).

He shared with us his research in collaboration with the Indigenous groups, the Karajá and the Xambioá, from the Araguaia River region in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, that deals with the return of intangible heritage from an ethnographic collection in Germany.