The artifacts were originally collected from different parts of the country by British colonial administrators, anthropologists, missionaries, and soldiers as early as the 1890s. “Among the most consequential objects are a collection of balongo–sacred ‘twins’–that had important ritual purposes in Buganda. We are working with the Buganda kingdom to return them to the tombs from which they were taken,” said Peterson Peterson, a history professor from the University of Michigan, currently working with the Uganda Museum to expand its capacity, says that these artifacts are a significant step towards helping the museum tell a more concrete Ugandan cultural history story, unlike the present which was designed by a colonial mindset, and this is what is being worked on now.
Today, and received 39 of Uganda’s cultural heritage artifacts that have for over 100 years been kept in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, having been taken from Uganda during the 1890s. These invaluable pieces were taken from..
. — Hon.Bahinduka Mugarra Martin (@mugarra) He points out that such items ended up in Britain, as loot because the British curators, missionaries, and officials, were convinced that African cultures were not worthwhile, and belonged to the museum.
“They ended up in Cambridge, because all the ways of life, all the religions, had been devalued, and collectors like John Roscoe, could go around and acquire extraordinarily important items and take them off to Cambridg.