In the context of the colonisation of the African continent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of artefacts, artworks, documents, organisms, minerals, plants, and animal and human remains were appropriated and transformed into museum objects and specimens. This study examines these processes of appropriation and transformation within a specifically Swiss context. Drawing on a broad range of case studies, I conceptualise African material heritage held in Swiss museums as historical sources and the museums themselves as colonial archives in which these sources are embedded.

I argue that approaching museums as Switzerland’s—largely unexplored—colonial archives offers significant potential for deepening our understanding of the multiple forms of complicity linking Swiss institutions and individuals to colonial Africa. At the same time, I demonstrate that despite the striking absence of information on African biographies, social histories, and the contexts of exchange and encounter surrounding these collections, relational, affective, and testimonial approaches allow us to recover meaningful interpretive traces of specific African micro-histories.

The central case study traces a so-called ethnographic collection of 286 Namibian cultural belongings, assembled by a Swiss railway engineer and his wife between 1903 and 1905 amid the extreme violence that accompanied the construction of colonial railway infrastructure. In collaboration with descendants of the railway workers in the Namibian town of Usakos, I investigated the collection’s provenance as well as its historical and cultural origins. The thesis thus presents a substantial contribution to provenance research on colonial heritage, advances collaborative museum practice, and highlights the role of museums in processes of reappropriation and restitution of African heritage.

Samuel B. Bachmann holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology and an interdisciplinary Master of Arts in European Studies from the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel. His academic training focused on global history, heritage studies, and museum studies, culminating in a master’s thesis in political science and private law entitled “Der Schutz des kulturellen Erbes Europas: Internationale Kulturerbepolitik und die Rolle der Europäischen Union.” In December 2025, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, which was awarded summa cum laude.

Since 2006, Samuel has held a range of positions in leading historical and ethnographic museums in Switzerland. He served as Assistant Curator in the African Collections Department and as Director’s Assistant at the Museum der Kulturen Basel. From 2015 to 2017, he was Exhibition Curator at the Historical Museum of Basel. Since 2017, he has been Curator for African History at the Bern History Museum.