Brighton & Hove Museums to return 45 objects to Botswana in repatriation move
Brighton & Hove Museums in southern England is preparing to send 45 objects back to Botswana, where they will become part of a permanent display at the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe. The group includes clothing, accessories and hunting implements gathered in the 1890s by the English reverend William Charles Willoughby.
The museum said the artefacts are due to be returned in April, with a permanent exhibition set to open on May 27. Staff from Brighton & Hove Museums are working with curators in Serowe on the installation, underscoring how repatriation is increasingly being handled not as a single transfer, but as a shared curatorial process.
The return follows a partnership between Brighton & Hove Museums and the Khama III Memorial Museum from 2019 to 2021 through the Making African Connections project, led by the University of Sussex. After that collaboration, the Botswanian museum requested the repatriation of the objects.
According to the museums’ website, Willoughby likely collected the items as discards from African Christian families or purchased them from local artisans or storekeepers during a period of significant social and political change. He later gave them to Brighton Museum in 1899. That history places the objects within a familiar but increasingly contested museum story: items acquired in colonial-era contexts, then held for generations far from the communities connected to them.
Gase Kediseng, curator at the Khama III Memorial Museum, said in a statement that the return is “an act of restoration.” Sandra Bauzá Santos, assistant curator at Brighton & Hove Museums’ World Art Collection, said she and colleague Hannah Mortell will travel to Serowe to support the installation, calling it “a real privilege” to see the objects go back to where they belong.
The repatriation comes as debates over decolonisation and museum ownership continue to gain momentum in the UK. For institutions with collections shaped by empire, the question is no longer only what they hold, but how they choose to respond when communities ask for their histories back.
