The German Federal Foreign Office invited Dr Jeremy Silvester of the Museums Association of Namibia from 6 to 17 April 2017 for a research trip to three German museums which house collections of artifacts from Namibia. The programme was organized by the Goethe Institute under the Visitors Programme of the German Federal Government. 

Dr Silvester is the Chairperson of the ‘Africa Accessioned’ Working Group that was established by the International Committee of Museums of Ethnography. The ‘Africa Accessioned’ project was initiated by museum workers from Namibia and Zambia with the aim of obtaining information about cultural heritage objects held in European museums.  

The support of the Federal Foreign Office enabled Dr Silvester to visit the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, the German History Museum and the collection of the German Ethnographic Museum (both in Berlin).  He was also able to visit the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMaH) at Humboldt University.   

The museum visits followed a conference at the Five Continents Museum in Munich that Dr. Silvester attended and which was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, where museum curators and academics had discussed the issue of `provenance’ research on objects collected by museums during the colonial period. The study of provenance is about tracing the origins of an object, the way in which it was obtained and the journey it took to, eventually, end up in a museum’s collection.