Agrippa Njanina

Sharon Heal, the director of the Museums Association, travels to Belfast to meet Agrippa Njanina, a community engagement officer at National Museums Northern Ireland.

Agrippa has more than 15 years of experience in the non-profit, education and community sectors, specialising in ethics and community engagement. At National Museums NI, he plays a vital role in coordinating and facilitating the Global Voices Local Choices programme across six museums in Northern Ireland. He is also a member of the MA’s Ethics Committee.

Agrippa tells Sharon why Belfast is a special place for him, how he is working with local museums, the importance of social impact, and the impact of colonial legacies on Northern Ireland today.

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Music: The Right Direction © 2020 by Shane Ivers, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Transcript

Sharon Heal I'm Sharon Heal, the Director at the Museums Association. We're a campaigning and values led organisation that has been exploring what radical practice and activism means for museums for a number of years now. Our current campaigns include decolonisation, anti racism, climate justice and wellbeing. I'm here in Belfast to interview Agrippa Njanina, a Community Engagement Officer at National Museums, Northern Ireland.

Agrippa has been leading the work on decolonisation in Northern Ireland through the Global Voices Local Choices project. Let's go and meet Agrippa. 

So Agrippa,you work on the Global Voices Local Choices. which is a project funded by the Museums Association's Esme Fairbairn Collections Fund. And it aims to empower marginalized communities across Northern Ireland to make choices  relating to national museums, world cultures, collections. Can you introduce yourself and describe your role?

Agrippa Njanina So my name is Agrippa Njanina and I am the Community Engagement Officer on the Global Voices Local Choices Project. So this is a creative engagement program. which aims to bring diverse voices, cultures, perspectives into the museum. Uh, so it avails ethnic minorities the opportunity to have their voice heard in the museum.

And the way that we've done it is to have an engagement programme, which is six weeks for each community group. So we've got six groups enrolled onto the program in different parts of Northern Ireland. And, uh, They go through six weeks, they come into the museum, um, explore the World Cultures Collection, a number of objects, then they will pick one object that they will take back to a local museum.

So, we have local museums involved through the partners that are involved. So we've got, uh, the National Museums of Northern Ireland, NIMC, that has the collection that holds the World Cultures Collection. And we have NIMC Northern Ireland. So they bring their expertise working with accredited local museums.

And then we've got the African Caribbean support of Northern Ireland, who bring their experience working with people with lived experiences of marginalization and representation. Um, so. I'll expand on what I've just said, but just briefly, if I can say. 

Sharon Heal That's a really good sort of summary overview of what the project is doing and helping to deliver.

And obviously from talking to you and our members meeting, I got a real flavour of the impact that it's having. But I just wanted to sort of step back from that a little bit because Belfast is a very particular place. Northern Ireland's a very particular area of the world. Can you just kind of tell us a little bit about what, you know, what listeners could expect and to find in Belfast and in this part of the UK?

Agrippa Njanina Well, um, I'm originally from Zimbabwe, so coming to Northern Ireland and ending up in Belfast, raising my children here, it's, it's a, it's a beautiful place. It's a special place for me. And, uh Well, if you come to Belfast, you know, maybe the media doesn't always put the good news about this place. And it tends to be depicted as kind of a place where there's ongoing travels.

But our two universities here, the Queen's University and the Ulster University, attract thousands and thousands of global students. It's multicultural, so the city will be quite diverse in that regard. Belfast is also surrounded by beautiful landscapes and nature. The Belfast lock here, you see the ships docking and it takes five minutes to get to the spot where the Titanic itself was made.

In terms of culture and heritage, if you want to learn anything about Northern Ireland, the National Museum, so many, a lot of sites that you can experience. We've got the Fog Park down in Hollywood, all places that tell you about Belfast, where you can actually learn about the true Belfast that you don't get much of in the media.

Sharon Heal Belfast is one of my favourite cities in, uh, in the world, actually. Um, my family originally is from just outside of Northern Ireland, across the border in Sligo. So I've got family connections, you know, and, and quite often we would sort of come into Belfast and then drive across because that was like the, the cheapest, quickest way of getting to where the family's at.

Belfast is lovely as well, so. Oh, yeah. The whole island is beautiful. It really is. It's amazing. And what I would say is I really agree with you. I, you know, I think people don't have that expectation of diversity, like visible diversity. And I've seen that change, I think, in the last year. 20 years that it's, it's a much more global city than it previously was.

Agrippa Njanina Yes. I should mention that. Well, I talked about landscapes and buildings and things I didn't mention people, but the people here are amazing. I mean, I told, I would say when I came here, uh, to live in Belfast and I ended up in a house. Uh, and I, neighbours near me, one out of one or two, a whole blade. Connect with them.

And my neighbor was the first one. One of my neighbours was the first one to come to my house and say, You're welcome. Oh, that's nice. You're welcome. And one day, and I'm planting flowers in the garden. And that neighbor comes into my garden with flowers and we start planting flowers together. And those flowers have stayed in that garden for about seven years.

Up till now, those flowers are just growing in that garden. So it shows you the people everywhere I go. I mean, yes, you can have the odd comment and all that, but mostly people here are quite welcoming. Yeah, very welcoming and very chatty and very talkative, which is great, you know, that's great to hear. So, so it's a special city in a special area of the world and I think this project is really special as well.

Sharon Heal So, as I said earlier, it's funded by the Esme Fairbairn Collections Fund. I'm on the selection committee for that fund and when the application came in. Everybody around the table really wanted to fund it. We're, you know, we're just really keen to make sure that it works and happens because it's in this area of world, but also importantly because it's a partnership scheme, isn't it?

So, it's not, not just the National Museum. So you explained a little bit about the partnerships, but can you, can you just talk about a little more about how that works? 

Agrippa Njanina Maybe a good point to start is my work in the African Caribbean support. And I, uh, Northern Ireland, which is a support group really for the growing community of African and Caribbean people, but it's not the only association.

We also have other ethnic minority groups. But what we were trying to do as a group, um, was to find ways of really being a part of society for the past 20 years or so. So, you find that the education here, or the city itself, or the country was designed for people that were living here before many people moved here.

But with increasing populations, you realise that, um You know, in education, people are beginning to request like, okay, would we have a little bit tweaks to the curriculum so that it can be more inclusive? So that's kind of the work we were trying to do quite freely, because as an [00:08:00] organization we're underfunded, we're trying to create.

Uh, those revenue streams, but when the museum came along and said they could work with us to explore, and this is after the murder of George Floyd in America, and then all that came off the protests that went on in Belfast. Yeah, it was a big racking in point when that happened. So, it was interesting to see that organisations, institutions like the museum are willing to listen and they came with an empty page and said, what can we do together?

You know, and this is when, right at the start we thought, okay, decolonisation, what is your definition of decolonisation? What we thought decolonization was this. So all the partners that ended up ended up coming into the project were drawn to want to address the issues to do with exclusion and bringing new voices into the museum.

So, I called the Northern Ireland Museum Council. They work with a number of accredited museums in Northern Ireland. So, we were going to find a way to, how do we use the local museums? To help marginalized communities in their local area and connect them with the world cultures that is held here.

So it worked for, for all the, the partners, uh, to come together in that regard. So moving forward now to, I've talked about, um, the world cultures being the center of this project. So Aksoni would have led the selection of those objects and their experience working with them. marginalized communities meant that when they came to the table, they were able to bring that knowledge.

So we've grown from strength to strength, bringing in the ideas and the creativity that is there. You know, what we tend to do with objects, really, if I can go in that direction, what we tend to do with objects is that when they are brought here, and one of the things, why are the World Cultures Collection here?

That's one of the questions we were asking you to, thinking about decolonization. Were they acquired violently? Were they donated? So those are questions that we were thinking about, as well. So, once we had the World Cultures Collection as main focus, one of the things was to think the narratives that is given by the collectors is mainly the focus that you get in the gallery.

So when you come into a museum, you find that the conversations you're hearing are quite imperial, very colonial, because the collector has the bigger voice. But it was agreed that, let's shift the focus, and that is the radical element you can find in this project. Let's shift the focus from the voice of the collector and the curators who admit they don't know everything and include the voices of, um. That's, that's really interesting.

Sharon Heal I remember many years ago when we were kind of first at the Museums Association thinking about what kind of social impact work is and social justice. We had a discussion with a round table of community organisations. Um, and the one message that they gave us is. We've got communities, we talk to our communities all the time, we talk to people all the time, we can bring people together.

What you've got in museums is objects and space, and we need to put the two things together and it sounds like this project is, is, is really bringing those, uh, community groups into the museum spaces, not just, uh, National Museums NI, but also in those local museums. Um, before we move on to the object that you've chosen, can you just give a quick description of one of the objects that was chosen by one of the community organizations from a local museum?

Okay, so maybe it's important to also just give a sense of what happens in our, uh, sort of programme. So, they've got six, each group, so we've got six groups, each attends six workshops. Som the first workshop, we'll travel to the local museum, just look at the space where the display is going to be. We are meeting the community so that we can plan how, let them know about the project a little bit more.

Then, we'll go back a second time to the local museum within. African facilitator, African Caribbean facilitator, who will teach about African culture, Caribbean culture. And it's, it's, it's been a very powerful way of educating each other about our values and our beliefs. So why do Africans have faced Maxwell, for instance, which are called mutilation in other [00:13:00] places. And they call it beauty. Some people call it beauty in that tradition. Here it's called mutilation, or why are you paying dowry to, for a woman? You know, you're devaluing her. And an African man will say, no, I'm not devaluing, I'm actually showing that I care about this woman.

So, it's a, that African Caribbean culture workshop is a very powerful way of cross cultural learning. Then after that, each group visits the Alstom Museum and attends the Inclusive Global Histories exhibition, which we've just been up to, which shows all the different objects and they will Um, usually be surprised that, Oh, we've got objects here.

And some of the themes and the stories that they bring, sometimes we think, thinking about slavery, we're thinking about colonialism and those reflections are always like being brought up to the surface, like, Oh, this shouldn't have happened. Or, you know, and, but we go into a deeper engagement workflow where they then get to actually handle the objects.

And, um, You know, touching an object and smelling it and, you know, thinking about it at a closer range is always quite powerful. That leads to the selection of one object that then the group creatively responds to. And, uh, so most of the groups here have chosen Some of the options that have been selected for the World Cultures Collection will be Ethiopian headdress, there's a Muslim prayer mat, so obviously religious things come into it as well.

Somebody who you would look at and think, oh, that's a Muslim because they look Indian or Asian. You'd be surprised that members of that group that chose that mat would have said, no, I'm not a, I'm actually a Christian. Although, I look black, you know. Yeah, and I think those things kind of break down our cultural assumptions and stereotypes as well.

That's exactly what these discussions achieve. The other object that was selected was the, um, mbira from Zimbabwe, a musical instrument by a group in Derry, and also a comb. that attracted the Ukrainian families that are based in Amar Robertson, uh, library. So, yeah, the sixth group is still yet to pick their object, but, uh, you can see the interest and the conversations also that come out, the reflections that come out from these objects, uh, are quite interesting.

Because, for instance, one of the, uh, Ukrainian participants spoke about, uh, the comp. Uh, because they will later write into. Um, and then they, she highlighted the feelings, um, emotions of war, the ongoing war in Russia. Uh, she wants all that to be over so that her future self could be back in that place with sunshine and golden, uh, sunsets and harvest, you know, being harvested and feeding the whole world, which is what she's used to.

So that's what the conscious can do. So that's the, the, um, workshop. The rest of the workshops are really about. They've selected one object. They will then go and creatively respond. So, I mentioned letter writing, music, drumming, um, creative writing, uh, with the prayer mat, uh, things like that really.

Sharon Heal Yeah, so creative responses to really diverse group of objects that have been chosen by community. Yeah. So, speaking of choosing objects, I did ask you to to bring in an object, to choose an object that was meaningful to you. So, so what have you got for us today? Well, it ended up being more than one object, really.

Agrippa Njanina I've brought three. Ha ha ha ha! So, well, if you, uh, I'll just take a few. So, this is a stick here. So, that's why I've seen this brand of food. So, this stick, uh, I picked it up in Belfast here, so it's not from anywhere exotic. And this is, um, NB right here. 

Sharon Heal Can you describe that?

Agrippa Njanina Yes, so the NB right here is just a wooden board, maybe, uh, 15, 15 by 20 centimetres, if you like.

They can be made in different sizes. So, you've got the wire here that is hammered into tones, into musical notes. Uh, bound to that wood, like all, most musical instruments would be wooden metal, isn't it? Even a guitar has got like strings and the hood. So this, uh, round container here, uh, with all the, um, African art that you can see, you can see the people dancing and drumming and the bright colors that show black sunshine law. So, it mimics a, a pumpkin that would be, that she used to grow. Yeah. It's just, just for the listeners, it's about the size of half of a decent sized pumpkin as well. So just as a , just as a description, that's a better description yet . So in, in, in the setting in, in, in, in the Una culture, in , they would grow these pumpkins wait for them to dry and.

Cut the seeds out, then place the Bambira inside and use the stick to hold it together. So this is a musical instrument that's used, that they use for celebrations. Um, whatever, weddings, music is always a part of that society. And this is handmade as well, tuned by ear, so you can expect a little bit of dissonance.

But in that setting, it's very natural, very distinct. So why did I pick this instrument? Um, you know, I grew up, and this is the power of colonialism really, because Zimbabwe was colonized. If you ask a lot of people, they'll tell you it's Rhodesia. But, after 1980, it's called Zimbabwe. Um, and you wonder, why is a person from Makulise village, Zombe River, in Zimbabwe?

Why is that person called Agrippa? How did the name Agrippa get there? So, we can already see the connections that happened, uh, that happened in the past. 

Sharon Heal So when missionaries came to Zimbabwe, one of the first things that they did was to discourage, or to ridicule, or to mock, um, sort of things that are made locally because That would have been their way of undermining your, your culture.

Agrippa Njanina Yeah, exactly. So, playing the mbira in this day, so I grew up listening to Michael Jackson, all the pop music that was playing at the time. And I didn't even listen to the mbira until I got here and I picked up the mbira. And um, it's a way of connection, connecting with my roots. So I wanted to explore whether the truth that it was demonic, it's most of my friends that look at me today and they look at me playing the guitar, they're wondering because living in that colonial mindset where it's already been said to be demonic, so don't touch it. So I wanted to explore if that was true. And also think about The, I told you about the undermining that has really happened.

So I wanted to go against that and say, no, this is a musical instrument with eight notes that you can find on a guitar. So for instance, I was to play that if you let me play. Yes. Yes. I'd love to hear it. So it tries to [00:21:00] go. So it's got that scale that, so it plays exactly like a harp or a guitar. So somebody would play.

And the songs that they play as well. These are people that have held back, not moved with some of the. colonial mindset. So they've remained holding back to some bits of their culture. So when they sing, they also sing as a fight back in their songs. So it's part of the protest? Yes. So, I don't know whether I've just naturally chosen to Being with the ones that are kind of oppressed, you know.

So, It might sound something, try just a little, play something like this. 

Music plays

So this one is just talking about, uh, give me my bow and arrow so that I can try to fight. But could they fight with the guns and the weapons that, uh, have been made. So that's kind of the story that I tried to bring with the video. 

Sharon Heal It's beautiful. I feel like I've just had a personal audience with Agrippa. Absolutely amazing. And actually, it just shows the power of cultural objects in resistance and protest as well, that you might not People historically might not have had the weapons or physical capacity to fight that oppression, but still through other means people find ways of protesting and resisting.

Agrippa Njanina Yeah, you're right. And this is why this project has been very powerful. in helping museums to think about how they tell their stories about objects. Because it was interesting in one of the workshops, because we had the boomerang from Australia and the headrest together. So it was easy to see, to hear one, uh, participant saying, the headrest and the boomerang are all nomadic kind of.

Tools that a person would have used as they lived the life, uh, their life. And again, the boomerang would be used, when you look at it at first sight, it would be like, it's a weapon. But positively, it would be used for hunting, for feeding your family. But on one way, you could turn it against another human being and So that's how we get the lenses that you get used by the views that you can get from, um, participants in the project.

Yeah. And it just, again, it kind of highlights that there's so many different stories that can be told. And quite often in museums, we just have one story attached to an object. Um, and especially with World Culture Collections, we know that there are many different, um, stories behind them and many new interpretations that can come forward.

You know, of course, um, Global Voices, Local Choices, and this is what we have said at the beginning, is shifting the focus from that story that will be told by the collector. Because it's a story of powers that who has the power at the given time is the one who will tell the story. We spoke about the The boat from the, the canoe from the southern islands is told that it was used for carnival.

So it gives the reason why it had to be, it was just used in carnivalism. So it gave the reason why it had to be impounded from these natives. And also as a trophy of Congress, really, uh, it's a huge boat and for it to be [00:26:00] brought here. It shows a lot of determination and then the ownership of the narrative, um, behind that object.

But that's why Global Voices, or inclusive global histories, is actually working with a number of researchers from all over the world that can shed more light in terms of the origins of objects and the real stories. They try to incorporate the stories of the people from those places that haven't been heard.

Sharon Heal And I'm impressed or inspired by the fact that the museums. You have gone through this process and accepted that that's the right course of action to take to allow more voices and bring perspectives in their narrations. Yeah, and I think that the work that you're doing here is amazing and amazing that it's across the whole of Northern Ireland.

And I suppose one of the challenges is that, and we know this as a funder, that it is project funded, so it is time limited like any project. Now you've got the, um, Inclusive Global Histories Gallery here at the museum, which is amazing, and that's on permanent display for all to see. But how do you think you can incorporate and embed some of the learning that you've had through this project into the core of the work of the museum?

Agrippa Njanina Yeah, you've just said the point there, which is the issues we are dealing with have happened for hundreds of years, and you couldn't solve them and describe them in 18 months. So I think the way to, the learning that is going to come out of, uh, this project, we've listened to a lot of people, we've had a lot of perspectives, we've learned a lot, we've built a lot of relations.

So we are not going to let those relationships die. So I don't think it's advisable. Museums have to serve more people and they have to serve for everyone from every background. So they should continue that path of, uh, inclusion and sort of leverage the sort of what we've achieved, what we've learned from this bridge.

So the guidance will be so useful and, um, developed from what we've learned so far. And I think in terms of. The way the museum is going to include people, it's not just a matter of putting a gallery on the top floor somewhere. But I think it's to also showcase the connections throughout the museum to the rest of the world.

So inclusive global history is trying to do that. For instance, we've got the Biliq collection, the tea collection. Tea is not just original for being in here and even the Ornaments that I used to drink, tea, are from all over the world and it's showcasing those connections. That's so important, isn't it? I mean, I know tea is very important in Northern Ireland, just the drinking of tea.

And it's a, it's a, it's a cultural act. Um, but, uh, the important thing is that it's not just the World Cultures Collections. It's every collection, it's every object can tell a story. So I, when we worked with our decolonization guidance working group, Um, one of the first things that the group said to us, and they were all people who were practitioners and, and leading the work in their own sphere.

They said, this is not just the World Cultures Collection, it's not just the links to slavery, it's how the museum operates, it's all collections, it's everything from how you're greeted at the front of the door, whether you're invited in, whether you're welcome, whether you feel able to cross the thresholds, and that was such an important learning point, I think, for us to sort of think about it much more globally and inclusively.

Sharon Heal Yes, you're right there, it goes back to the way we are going to change the language that we use. Language itself is very important. Because when we call one object and say, okay, that's the world culture's collection, we are excluding it in a way because we are saying it's a collection of its own. So it's being creative and being flexible in trying to find ways, because we are humans and we feel, and curators are human beings.

Uh, front of house. Um, uh, people here at the museum are people. So, if we have that human touch to the objects, then we'll be able to bring life into these objects, and they'll be able to tell us their real stories. And we're talking about, um, you know, every object. The subject, one of the biggest topics is climate change.

And we might not even realize that all these objects also bring all of us to a collective conversation about climate change, which affects all of us. So, I think it's now important for us to establish a language that brings us all together and have the right view that works at the time where we are.

Absolutely. And also that links those big challenges that we're facing in society because obviously there are links between climate change and climate justice and also decolonization and the impact on the global south and, and communities that that struggle disproportionately with the impacts of global change because of the impacts of colonialism and, and empire as well.

So it's kind of unpicking those big stories. Some of our participants, one of the questions, because, you know, when they came to Global Voices, for instance, and they're in a workshop, and they start engaging in artworks, one of the things that they say, oh, this is so therapeutic. They just feel like they're being healed.

And in one of the discussions, they go, the worst question that I get asked on the street is, what are you doing in Belfast? Why are you here? So again, it goes back to, those people that arrive here think they are coming to a place where they can find sanctuary, a place where they can find the home and continue their lives because where they're coming from, a lot of things have happened.

Colonialism has shaped that place. Um, extractive, um, materials that is sometimes war and I'm being very modest there. All those things happen and affect people. And that's why I go back to the point that Belfast is a special place for me because when I thought I needed a place where I could just go and raise my family.

It was Belfast, and that's now Northern Ireland museums have opened up spaces. And it's not only the museum as well. It's nice to hear BBC play a song from Africa. And organizations like Advice Inai as well have started projects that are inclusive, digital inclusion for instance. So I'm just delighted that [00:33:00] institutions And National Museums and other museums are some of those institutions leading in terms of beginning to bring in, showing people, uh, us to be included.

Sharon Heal Brilliant. I think that's a lovely point to end. We kind of started with Belfast, what it means and, and we're ending with Belfast. It's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you. Far too brief, but I'm sure we're going to have many, many conversations going on. And thank you so much for playing your music and bringing your objects to this podcast today.

You've been listening to the Museums Association's Radical Museums podcast. This episode was presented by me, Sharon Heal. Other episodes of our Radical Museums podcast can be found on all the usual podcast channels. We'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts about this podcast [00:34:00] and what museum activism means to you.

You can find out more about us and all our campaigns through our website www.museumsassociation.org. Thank you for listening.