‘Reflecting on my early tour days to now’ by Pennie Mendes
When I joined Janet Brown’s pioneering V&A project — the first museum programme to offer African and Caribbean Heritage Tours — I had already worked as a museum guide for ten years. Yet nothing had prepared me, as a white woman, to lead this particular kind of tour.
I diligently studied the course material, walked the galleries repeatedly, and listened carefully to my colleagues and mentors. Even so, I felt uneasy. Why? After all, I had spent more than two decades living and working in the Caribbean. Yet I still carried a sense of trepidation about interpreting histories shaped by colonialism, enslavement, and representation.
Before taking my assessment, I decided to test myself by introducing one of the African Heritage objects into one of my regular Highlights tours.
Standing beside the marble Bust of a Black child in the Europe 1600 – 1815 Galleries, I described how, during the 18th century, young African boys were bought or captured, separated from their families, and displayed as ornamental servants within elite European households and royal courts.
As I spoke, a Black visitor standing nearby began listening more closely. At that time, Black visitors to the museum were still relatively rare. As he approached said, “Lady, you are a brave person.”
His words stayed with me.
Only afterwards did I fully understand the significance of his remark: museum objects are never simply inert or decorative things. When connected to the realities of the colonial past, they can provoke discomfort, reflection, anger, sadness, and dialogue. I began to realise that every object carries questions about responsibility, voice, and context. My role was not simply to provide information, but to create a space where difficult histories could be explored openly and thoughtfully.
I learned that sharing knowledge while inviting reflection and personal perspectives fosters meaningful dialogue. At their best, museums are vital indispensable spaces where people can engage with the beauty of craftsmanship, the complexities of human history and different Cultures.
During the past decade, I have witnessed an extraordinary transformation within the V&A. Across its museums, the collections have expanded to include a far wider selection of African Diaspora objects, mostly by contemporary artists, who address social and political issues in imaginative and challenging ways.
Among them are works by Hew Locke, whose Souvenir 4: Princess Alexandra (2019) explores colonial identity and power; Sokari Douglas Camp’s Wrestling with Oil Shell BP, confronting environmental destruction and gender politics; and Thomas J Price’s Tasman Road, Figure 2 (2008), which examines communication and technology in modern society.
Other important acquisitions include Virgil Abloh’s Sculpture Bag IKEA, reflecting ideas of consumerism and affordable luxury, and Kehinde Wiley’s Melissa Thompson, which powerfully reimagines the traditions of historical portraiture. The museum has also embraced documentary and collaborative practices through works such as Charlie Phillips’s photographs of the Nottingham Carnival, celebrating Black British street culture, and Unity 2026, by Amponsah Dwumfour, Nana Poku Buramuhene Amankwaa Opoku, and Emefa Cole, a collaborative goldsmithing project connecting artists in Africa and Britain.
With the growing spaces now available across the V&A’s museums in London, I hope these collections will continue to expand, inspiring future generations of volunteers and museum visitors alike. Looking back, these tours changed not only the conversations I had with visitors but also become my passion to understand how the role museums can play in confronting history, encouraging dialogue, and shaping a more inclusive future. It has been both a privilege and a pleasure to be part of that journey alongside such supportive and enthusiastic volunteers.
‘Guiding the unseen’ by Joy Johnson
Ten years. Even writing that feels fantastic. A whole decade has passed since I first stepped into the V&A as an African Heritage Guide, clutching my notebook, nerves buzzing. Then came Janet Browne’s (V&A’s Senior Producer Audience Development) groundbreaking training sessions, the ones that opened our eyes to the African presence threaded through the museum’s vast collections and now, somehow, ten years have flown by.
Time is a trickster. It races by faster than greased lightning, yet when I pause and look back, the years feel wonderfully full. One of the greatest gifts has been the engagement with the visitors on the tours and the friendships formed among the original guides. Some have moved on to new adventures, but my own journey has felt like peeling an onion — every layer revealing something unexpected, sparking new questions, and deepening my curiosity.
Receiving a Highly Commended Marsh Award early in my guiding role was a moment I will never forget. It felt like stepping onto a stage with a spotlight, warm, affirming, and slightly surreal. To be recognised by the Marsh Charitable Trust for our voluntary services in sharing stories that matter was deeply humbling. The memory still glows, reminding me that the work we do resonate far beyond the gallery walls.
One of the joys of this role has been the intellectual growth it has offered. The V&A staff members have encouraged us, challenged us, and championed us with genuine warmth. Workshops, research exchanges, and visits with other African Heritage Guides across museums have expanded my world in ways I never imagined. Each conversation, each shared insight, has shaped me not just as a guide, but as a person.
I still laugh when I think back to one of my early Caribbean Heritage tours. I lost my bearings completely and ended up leading a full-blown magical mystery tour of the V&A. We wandered through galleries I am sure were not on the map — and may not have existed at all. Luckily, everyone stayed cheerful, and I learned a lasting lesson: always set markers before a tour, preferably visible ones!
And then there is the V&A’s staff and volunteers’ Christmas Party, the one night a year when I transform from “knowledgeable guide” to “disco queen,” complete with the traditional dance around my handbag. It brings back memories of my clubbing days, minus the questionable shoes. The party is always buzzing, the Director always gives a heartfelt thank you, and I always leave with sore feet!
Recently, a visitor told me she had attended several African and Caribbean Heritage tours and loved how each guide brings a different flavour, perspective, and personality. Her excitement was contagious. Her gratitude was sincere. And in that moment, I felt incredibly proud to be part of this community of storytellers.
Ten years on, I remain grateful for the laughter, learning, friendships, surprises, and countless stories shared. Being an African Heritage Guide is something I truly treasure, and I want to thank my family, friends, and everyone who supported me on this journey to becoming a volunteer guide at the V&A.
‘My 10 Years’ by Nadia Denton
The past 10-year journey as a volunteer African Heritage guide with the V&A has meant an incredible deal for me personally and creatively. Connecting members of the public with the histories of the museum’s objects and making them more relatable for them has been tremendously rewarding. I have learned a great deal about the expansive public appetite for historical storytelling.
I am really proud to have been part of this very first cohort of African Heritage guides at one of the world’s leading art museums. When I joined the programme all those years ago, I would have never imagined that it would have taken me so far.
My experience as a guide over the past decade has been varied and almost entirely enjoyable. There have always been new things to learn; with each audience creating distinct contexts and opportunities to explore the tour content and object histories in slightly different ways.
A notable guiding experience was delivering a bite-size version of my tour as part of the Friday Late V&A Fashioning Futures with the media platform GUAP. The event attracted large crowds of enthused young adults who were eager to learn about the presence of people of African descent in the 17th and 18th century examples of European art featured.
The teachings of visiting, world class lecturers, S.I Martin and Robin Walker at our training and development sessions have stayed with me and acted as intellectual foundations that I continue to build on.
The Bust of a Child (Joannes Claudius de Cock,1668 – 1735), a marble piece of very young African boy is by far one of my favourite objects included on my tour of the Europe1600 – 1815 Galleries. There is something so touching and tender about how this child’s likeness was captured. Audiences immediately recognize his beauty and feel so affected by his story.
The tapestry, The March (Philipp De Hondt, Judocus de Vos, Brussels, 1718 – 24) is an unlikely military landscape which features a soldier of African descent. It’s illuminating for audiences to consider this young man’s presence which they may have otherwise walked past and missed.
Over the years, audiences have overwhelmingly indicated how nuanced the historical perspectives offered on the tour have been from what they learned at school. They often express gratitude at having had their eyes opened through learning these alternative histories; and feel empowered to explore more widely within the museum.
Tour delivery over the decade has shown me how audiences can be personally touched by what from a distance might seem like random objects within the display case of the V&A. I am proud of the fact that as their guide, I have acted as a key activation point for them to explore past world events, encouraging them to be open to asking difficult questions about what artefacts tell us about our common history.
This past 10 years I have learned a great deal not just from the public but fellow African Heritage guides who have been the unspoken champions of these less well-known histories within the V&As walls.
Avril Horsford
When the inaugural group of V&A African Heritage Guides embarked on their journey by delivering their first tours, many of us would probably have expressed some surprise that we would arrive at this significant milestone and would now be celebrating ten years of the V&A African Heritage tours, which became the forerunner of similar tours which were delivered in similar establishments.
The anniversary has prompted a great deal of sentimental reflection on my part; as my personal memories have left me wreathed in smiles; and, to my surprise, my emotions are those of pure delight. My reaction surprises me, as with the exception of the first few tours, which felt like the first night of a long-awaited theatrical drama, the past ten years as an African Heritage Guide have been full of excitement, fun, and opportunities for personal development.
I learned from all the volunteer guides I encountered at the V&A; as collectively, their specialisms are very broad, allowing visitors access to a broad education by simply following our tours; and I came to view the delivery of the African and Caribbean Heritage tours as a ‘performance’, for which I often needed to grab the attention of passing visitors, and hope to enchant them with the stories of the history of each object they would encounter on my tour.
But more than that, however, I became enchanted by the make-up, commitment, and emotional investment of those largely Caribbean visitors who had planned their visits in advance; some of whom often returned several times, bringing other members of their family to use the objects of the Caribbean tours as an opportunity to reminisce about their previous lives, “back home”. The older visitors, in particular, appeared to gain enormously from their visits to our African Heritage tours.
In general, African Heritage audiences are often willing participants at many audience events; as can be witnessed by any visitor to our ‘Black Churches’, where many members of the congregation contribute as much to the service as the pastor who is paid to preach the gospel to them. This shared, and mutually accepted, equal participation is how I experienced the earliest V&A African Heritage tours. I had never previously felt so much warmth from audiences who loudly agreed with the contents of my tour, or in any other situation involving an accepted element of ‘learning’. Within this new framework, African heritage audiences hollered, clapped, shouted, laughed out loudly, (and some even wept), in order to express their approval of specific information, as it was delivered to them. I became used to the fact that they also added pieces of information to the middle of my sentences, or the stories I was narrating in order to bring the artefacts to life; and we developed a specific pattern of communication within our tours which many of my fellow guides later referred to as our special ‘call and response’ example of our Caribbean church-based cultural heritage; and, together, with my African Heritage audience we developed a new pattern of ‘Gallery Etiquette’ based on our expressive cultural backgrounds, and this memory of cultural bonding will remain with me for life.
I have personally migrated from my buttoned-up, pre-tour, guide-personality to become the guide who now enthusiastically exchanges greetings with those V&A visitors I occasionally meet in the street; who, like old friends, having previously attended the African Heritage tours, and warmly exchange hugs and greetings, whilst expressing their delight of their experience of the African Heritage tours at the V&A.
Kim Sheldon
I ask them to lean in.
Physically. Step closer to a painting from 1616 and look past the horses, the banners, the thousands of faces. Look for three people you weren’t expecting to find.
Then it happens. Every time.
Surprised. Intrigued. Who are they? Why are they there?
Those three questions have shaped ten years of my life as an African Heritage Guide at the V&A.
The painting is The Ommegang in Brussels on 31 May 1615: The Triumph of Archduchess Isabella, painted by Denys van Alsloot the following year. I call it an Instagram moment of its day. A city showing off. Thousands gathered. A painter documenting everything he saw, including three African figures most visitors never notice.
A camel driver. A drummer. A young boy fanning a king with feathers.
Not background figures. People with roles, with presence, painted in because they were simply there. That they were included, unremarked, is what now intrigues people. No grand revelation. Just the quiet, undeniable fact of their presence in a time most people assume Africans weren’t in Europe at all.
This is why I return to this painting every time. There is a particular feeling that never gets old. Finding people who look like me, painted into a European celebration in 1615, and getting to say, look, we were always here.
Visitors arrive thinking they’re on an art and object tour. Something shifts by the end. They start asking about history, about whose stories get told, about what else they were never shown. One visitor told me the tour brought the objects and paintings to life, that the stories and narratives behind them made her want to come back and explore the rest of the museum. I watch that curiosity catch and I recognise it because it happened to me too, and kept happening, year after year.
This role gave me a way into my own heritage. Through objects. Through the lives of people history chose not to name. Each tour, I’m still that person leaning into the painting, still finding someone I wasn’t expecting to find.
Four hundred years on, the journey looks different.
Sokari Douglas Camp’s Wrestling Oil Shell BP from 2018 is a small piece. You could walk past it. Two figures wrestling on an oil drum, addressing the devastation of fossil fuel exploitation in the Niger Delta, mismanagement and profit. Small in scale. Un-ignorable in weight.
What sits between these two objects is the distance between being painted into the edge of someone else’s story and making the work yourself, about your world, on your own terms.
That’s the journey my tours try to trace. It’s also, the journey this decade has taken me on.
Stella Akintan
On the day I received confirmation that I had been appointed as an African Heritage Guide, I literally jumped for joy. Having spent the previous few years learning Black history in a community setting, it was a perfect and natural progression.
Long before the Black Lives Matter movement, Janet Browne, Senior Producer Africa and Diaspora V&A, had the conviction that more could be done to improve the representation of African and Caribbean stories at the museum. The redesign of the Europe galleries, incorporating 22 relevant and distinct objects, formed the basis for the first African Heritage tours. The Caribbean tours were developed a year later, in 2017.
It has been a journey of joy, tears, frustration and hope. This is because everyone involved in this project, or should I say movement, has been so invested in improving representation, addressing historical omissions and making our public museums truly representative of their communities.
Our tours were distinct from the outset; we were encouraged to provide context for each object and tell its story, as well as focus on its craftsmanship. As guides, we spent time carrying out research, hearing from experts and gathering as much knowledge as we could.
There are many wonderful stories to tell about being a guide, including when information about the tours went viral. Between 60 and 100 people would attend a single tour, from all walks of life, to learn more about African and Caribbean heritage. Many were eager to see themselves and their heritage represented in these spaces.
We have had many excellent training sessions over the years; historian Steve Martin stands out for his in-depth understanding of the Black British experience over the last 500 years.
Our work continues amid ongoing debates about the rightful return of objects to their places of origin. Although many in the museum sector are keen for this to happen, they are often hindered by legislation, particularly the Heritage Act 1983.
Many visitors feel a sense of frustration, and sometimes anger, at the injustices of the past revealed during our tours but sadly miss the opportunity to appreciate the exquisite craftsmanship of the objects themselves. The Ethiopian Crown and associated religious regalia particularly come to mind. Find out more about our Ethiopian collections
It has been a privilege to be an African Heritage Guide. Huge thanks go to Janet, whose vision and determination inspired this work at the V&A. Museum-led African heritage tours are now taking place at the British Museum and Tate Modern, while privately and independently run tours are delivered in partnership with other London museums.
Thanks also to Caterina, our Senior Volunteer Manager, for her unwavering support and enthusiasm.
Of course, a special word must go to my fellow guides, who have worked passionately and tirelessly to maintain momentum, keep our work visible within the museum and contribute to research in this important area. It has been a privilege to work alongside you.
