Post-2020 reckonings with institutional racism, the accelerating return of looted objects, and centenary reviews of colonial-era collections have made the decolonization of African heritage institutions an urgent and contested project. Yet existing debates insufficiently address language itself as a site of ongoing colonial violence. This paper argues that decolonizing African museum collections remains incomplete without confronting the linguistic imperialism embedded in curatorial naming practices and that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's philosophy provides the most generative framework for this task. Ngũgĩ is applied not by analogy from literary studies but because his theorization of language as "the keeper of memory" directly captures what curatorial naming does: when African objects are catalogued through colonial taxonomies, the ontological and relational worlds from which they emerged are systematically suppressed. No other postcolonial thinker articulates with comparable precision the relationship between linguistic dispossession and the erasure of collective memory. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as an African Museology Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and focusing on South African institutions, this paper identifies three dimensions of harm: colonial taxonomies misrepresent the ontological significance of African objects; recovery of indigenous terminologies is obstructed by suppressed oral archives and fragmented custodian communities; and institutional structures—funding dependencies, international cataloging norms, and curatorial professional formation—constrain transformative renaming even where political will exists. Theoretically, the paper establishes linguistic sovereignty as a museological problem, expanding decolonial critique within postcolonial African studies. Methodologically, it proposes renaming practices as epistemic justice and offers an evaluative framework for heritage institutions working toward genuine decolonization.

Authors:
Mabafokeng Hoeane, University of South Africa, South Africa

About the Presenter(s)
Mabafokeng Hoeane is a researcher at the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair and PhD candidate in Visual Cultural Studies at the University of Pretoria.

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