This project investigates modes of curatorial practice that engage with the harmful historical contexts under which mbusa, chisungu female initiation objects, came to be constituted in the Moto Moto Museum in Zambia. By foregrounding community perspectives, embodied knowledge, and collaborative models of care, the project explores how museums can contribute to reparative futures without claiming to restore what has been irreversibly damaged. Damage to ritual systems such as chisungu is also damage to bodies, relationships, and modes of knowing. Reparative museum practices, when grounded in care and accountability, can help rebuild forms of connection, knowledge, and community that continue to matter in the present and future.
DR. MARY MBEWE
CURRICULUM VITAE
Mary Mbewe obtained her PhD in history from the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). She served as the keeper of history at the Moto Moto Museum in Zambia from 2006 to 2016. Since 2016, she has been teaching history at Mulungushi University in Zambia. She has held several international fellowships, including the Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC (2013–2015), the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences doctoral fellowship (2017–2023), the SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory doctoral research fellowship (CHR/UWC), and the Action for Restitution to Africa research fellowship (2021–2022). She received the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Award in 2018 and served as an international visiting graduate student at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto in 2019. Mary Mbewe has worked extensively on colonial collections, the history of anthropology, and missions in Africa. For the summer semester of 2025, she was a visiting professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, where she held seminars in critical museum and heritage studies, colonialism and missions, and archival methods in research on colonial collections.