About

Ukubuyiswa is a multidisciplinary research project that moves beyond repatriation as only a legal or logistical act, Ukubuyiswa treats restitution as a relational practice: an iterative process of re-presencing objects through co-research, ritual, and multi-voiced interpretation. We pair archival tracing of provenance with oral histories, residency-based co-creation, and experimental exhibition-making to surface erased life-histories and the cosmologies that animate material culture.

Anchored in Xhosa epistemologies and a Code of Repair, the project reframes museum objects as living carriers of memory rather than inert trophies of collection. Through case studies of the Zagreb Ethnographic Museum in Croatia and interviews with diasporic co-researchers, Ukubuyiswa asks: who becomes custodian of meaning; how can museums enact accountable pedagogy; and how might cultural institutions become sites of ongoing relational return rather than terminal archives? 

The project contributes to debates on provenance, reburial, and the ethical governance of museums by proposing practical protocols for co-research, community stewardship, and reparative exhibition practice—offering a model for museums that seek to repair colonial modernity while remaining accountable to the living networks those objects continue to embody.