This paper discusses recent critical re-framings of collections of African art in museums. On the one hand, Annie Coombes’s important study Reinventing Africa (1994) suggested that European museum collections of African art precluded a primarily African art history, because the invented representations of Africans they disseminated necessarily told us more about European colonizers’ interests in Africa and Africans than they did about African histories and Africans’ cultural concerns. On the other hand, Coombes’s important re-framing of the significance of African art in museum collections inevitably underplayed the often hidden significance of African agency and nuanced colonial encounters in contributing to the make-up of these collections. The paper outlines my recent research and re-framing of the World Museum African collection and presents a couple of case studies in which individual historical Africans are able to emerge as complex historical subjects in their own right, whose cultural interests and agendas can be seen to be interwoven into the fabric of the World Museum African collection.