Digitization Is Not Decolonization

Abstract A year ago, the South African Cabinet approved the National Policy of the Digitization of Arts, Culture, and Heritage. With a focus on digitizing the country's heritage resources for preservation, access, and management of ownership, this act is emblematic of a broader trend conflating digitization of Africa's cultural heritage collections with decolonization. Yet, by examining how one of the continent's oldest museums documented its ethnographic collections, this article demonstrates how normalized colonial knowledge systems still are, and why decolonization requires more than making collections digitally available. Cognizant of this challenge is Amagugu Ethu, a South African not-for-profit organization, whose work developing a digital Museum-in-a-Box I analyze in the second part of my article as an important way of resisting and interrupting colonial knowledge production in (South) Africa's museums.