The storerooms all began to look alike to me. Doors were opened, and rack after rack came into sight with plates on which the names of continents and countries were written. While racks were being unrolled, new rows of exotic artefacts continued to loom before my expecting eyes. They seemed to be waiting there silently and secretly for someone or something to come along. On the ‘Africa’ rack, my brain almost automatically began registering all kinds of features. My eyes rushed from object to object and my internal database made searches of names of regions and people who had once manufactured what was preserved here so neatly.

Many a curator was caught off guard at first by my request to see the Sudan collection that was stored in their museum. Then, after some searching, they conceded that the collection concerned was indeed there and that I was most welcome to come round and have a look. Paying visits to several storerooms in Europe, I was able to have a glance at what Africa travellers had donated some one hundred and fifty years ago.

The heritage of the nineteenth-century expeditions in Sudan lies scattered across Europe in the storerooms of over fifteen museums. Still more could be elsewhere – in private collections or other museums, hiding their history, consisting only of nameless ethnographic items once sold and purchased, without any mention of provenance.

Starting in Italy, I looked at the collections brought to museums by the Italians Carlo Piaggia, Giovanni Miani and Marchese d’Antinori, early explorers of the White Nile in Sudan, just after 1860 (Museo Archeologico in Perugia, Museo di Storia Naturale in both Venice and Florence). Still more from Miani's collection remained in the Museo Pigorini in Rome. Then it was on to England, where substantial parts of the collection of the British first consul John Petherick were preserved at the British Museum in London and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. In Sibiu, Romania, I found the collection of Transsylvanian tradesman Franz Binder, who returned from Sudan to his birthplace (then named Hermannstadt) in 1863.

Travelling around, I was seized by a longing to map out this entire midnineteenth- century Sudanese heritage. The reason was simple: these collections had largely been forgotten and were waiting for someone to gather them up and publish them in a catalogue.