April 10, 2025
Dr Nathan Bossoh, Research Fellow in History at Southampton University (UK)
Title: Imperial Legacies and Decolonial Futures: Curating the 'Wellcome' African Medical Material
Abstract: In 1913 the businessman and collector, Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), established the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum (WHMM) as one of the first museums in Britain to focus on the history of human health. Exhibitions in the WHMM were overtly shaped by Wellcome’s racial anthropological views, in particular placing African collected objects as primitive precursors to modern European ones. Wellcome’s legacy lives on today through his collection of over one million items - items which were transferred to numerous institutions by the Wellcome Trustees after Wellcome’s death in 1936. Between September 2022 and 2023 I worked as the African Collections Research Curator at the Science Museum, London where I was tasked with conducting a major collections-based investigation into the over 5000 ‘Wellcome’ African material transferred by the Wellcome Trustees in the 1970s. This investigation led to an over fifty-page Report that I produced appraising the collection and recommending steps for its future enhancement. My research on the ‘Wellcome’ African material led to further discussions with the Wellcome Collection which cemented plans to develop a new small display based around a specific case study item I had been exploring – the West African Kola nut plant – as part of my wider work at the Science Museum. Therefore, in this presentation, I will talk about my experience of conducting collections-based research on the ‘Wellcome’ African material and how this led to the opening of my current display The Kola Nut Cannot Be Contained hosted at the Wellcome Collection. Within this context I will discuss some of the challenges that came with working in museums steeped within imperial histories of scientific collecting, and how the Kola nut exhibition has functioned as an experimental space of decolonisation through its curatorial approach centred around ‘many stories about one object’ in contrast to the more typical ‘one story about many objects’.