Why museums should hide sacred African objects to truly see them

In a quiet gallery in a Western museum, a sacred object from Zambia rests behind glass. It might be a clay mbusa figurine from a Bemba Chisungu initiation, once used by elder women to mould a girl into womanhood through secret teachings on social responsibility, becoming a woman and the physiology and psychology of being a woman. Or perhaps it is a Makishi mask, which for the Luvale and related peoples is not a costume but the living embodiment of an ancestor, whose power is activated within the secluded, sacred space of the mukanda male initiation camp. To the uninitiated, its purpose was to be unseen, its knowledge guarded. Today, it is exposed to the casual gaze of thousands, its story flattened by a small text panel.

This act of display, seemingly one of preservation and education, is in fact a profound dislocation. The journey of such objects from the firelight of a ritual enclosure to the sterile illumination of a museum vitrine is a story of colonial extraction and epistemic violence. The glass box is not a neutral frame; it is a colonial one that strips the object of its context, silences its power, and violates the very secrecy that gave it meaning.

Now, a growing decolonial movement is forcing a radical reckoning within these institutions. In a move that seems counterintuitive, museums across the world are beginning to cover their displays and empty their vitrines. They are doing so not to hide these objects, but to finally begin to see them for what they are, by acknowledging that for some sacred items, the most respectful and honest form of display is no display at all.

From living archive to silent artifact

In Zambian societies, as in many indigenous cultures, knowledge is not a static text to be read but an embodied experience transmitted through performance, ritual, and tangible teaching aids. The secrecy surrounding initiation rites was not about arbitrary exclusion; it was a crucial mechanism for preserving the integrity and potency of this knowledge. The learning process was personalised and experiential, designed to transform the initiate physically and socially. To make this knowledge openly accessible would be to risk its misinterpretation and desecration, diluting its power and rendering it ineffective. The mbusa emblems, for example, are meaningless without the accompanying songs, dances, and esoteric instruction from the banacimbusa (female elders). The awe and fear inspired by a Makishi ancestor depends on the strict separation between the initiated and the uninitiated. These objects were never meant for public consumption; their agency was contingent on their restricted context.

The colonial encounter violently disrupted this system. Missionaries and ethnographers, operating within the colonial project, collected these objects under a ’salvage’ paradigm, claiming to preserve cultures they were simultaneously working to eradicate or transform. This process, which scholars call ’musealisation’, is a form of death. The object is severed from its lifeblood—the community, the ritual, the secret knowledge—and is reborn as something else entirely: an ethnographic specimen, a scientific curiosity, or a work of ‘primitive’ art.

Once inside the museum, the object is subjected to a Western framework of knowledge that privileges the visual. Placed in a well-lit vitrine, it is offered up to the ‘empire of sight’, to be analysed for its form, material and aesthetic qualities. Its spiritual power and pedagogical function become secondary, often reduced to a brief, essentialising description on a label. The museum, through its very architecture and display techniques, asserts its authority to define the object, transforming it from an active agent in a living culture into a passive ‘dumb’ thing whose story is told for it.

The ethics of exposure

The central contradiction of displaying a secret-sacred object is that the act of exhibition fundamentally undermines its nature. To place an object whose power is derived from concealment into a transparent box is to perform a continuous act of desecration. It prioritises a Western public's perceived ‘right to know’ over the source community's right to control its own cultural and spiritual heritage. This is not education; it is the perpetuation of a colonial power dynamic where one culture's epistemology is imposed upon another's.

In recent years, a wave of decolonialising critique has forced museums to confront this uncomfortable history. This movement demands more than just repatriation or rewriting labels; it calls for a fundamental shift in museum practice, from a model of institutional authority to one of community collaboration and shared power. The question is no longer simply ‘What does this object mean?’ but ’Who has the right to decide and share its meaning?’

The power of the empty case

The most radical and, perhaps, most meaningful response has come from a growing number of institutions that are choosing to remove culturally sensitive items from public view. Spurred by updated regulations like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in the United States, major museums like the American Museum of Natural History, Chicago's Field Museum, and Harvard's Peabody Museum have recently closed entire galleries or covered display cases containing sacred and funerary objects.

This is not an act of censorship or erasure. It is an act of listening. It is the museum finally acknowledging the limits of its own authority and respecting that some knowledge is not universal property. By removing an object from display with the consent of or at the request of its source community, the museum honours its true nature in a way that a thousand words on a label never could. The empty space in the vitrine becomes a powerful statement in itself, speaking to the object's sacredness, its history of removal, and the museum's commitment to a new, more ethical future.

Institutions like the Wellcome Collection and the Museum of Anthropology have formalised this approach, creating policies that commit them to working with source communities to determine the appropriate care, storage and display for culturally sensitive items, explicitly recognising that this may mean keeping them secret.

For the sacred Zambian objects held in Western collections, this offers a path forward. It suggests that their stories can be honoured not by subjecting them to the stripping gaze of the vitrine, but by acknowledging the sanctity of their origins. The future of these objects may not lie in better lighting or more detailed labels, but in the quiet of a secure storeroom, accessible only to those community members who hold the knowledge to engage with them correctly. It may mean returning them, not just to their country of origin, but to the communities who can reactivate their purpose. Or it may mean leaving the vitrine empty, a silent testament to the understanding that true respect sometimes means looking away.