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Samuel Bachmann is curator of the African collections at the Bern Historical Museum. He earned his PhD at the University of Basel’s Centre for African Studies with research on the history of African cultural heritage in Swiss museums.
During the colonisation of Africa, hundreds of thousands of everyday objects, works of art and documents, as well as minerals and rocks, plants and other organisms, but also animal skins, skeletons and human remains, were appropriated and transferred to Europe.
Often justified on the grounds of scientific necessity, they were subsequently numbered and catalogued as “objects” in museums. The six largest ethnographic collections in Switzerland alone now hold more than 100,000 items of African cultural heritage.
Not all of these objects originate from a colonial context in the strict sense. Yet their provenance histories constitute a vast body of sources for researching Switzerland’s involvement in the colonisation of Africa. Seen in this light, cultural and natural history museums become colonial archives of a country without a formal colonial policy. They are therefore key reference points for writing the history of Switzerland’s global entanglements.
