MAA was proud to work with the Congo Great Lakes Initiative (CGLI) during 2016 on this ‘Our Heritage’ project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The project is intended to benefit the Congolese diaspora living in London and the UK by reconsidering the collecting legacies of British baptist missionaries in the Congo. The project will focus on the photographic collections made by Kenred Smith and the ethnographic collections made the missionary brothers, John Lawson Forfeitt and Williams Lansbury Forfeitt, now held at MAA.
The project involved three workshops between April and August, leading to an exhibition that opened in MAA’s Micro Gallery for Black History Month in October 2016.
Exploring gifts made by Congolese people, photographs made by missionaries, as well as material exhibited in the past by Baptists missionaries will create a space of dialogue between University of Cambridge academics and community members. The project will involve indigenous collaborators contributing to contemporary narratives collected by missionaries during the nineteenth century. Organisations and individuals taking part in this project will be contributing indigenous voices on what these items means for themselves today, but will also contribute to building models of collaboration between academic institutions and community organisations.
The CGLI is an organisation established for the benefit of the people of central Africa and those of the Great lake region of Africa both in Africa and in England, residing in the Greater London , in particular in Brent, City of Westminster, Camden, Islington, Wandsworth, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham.
