It is the job of every museum to grow its collections. In 2019, the KZN Museum purchased an important collection of items collected among the BaTonga people of the Zambezi River Valley. The BaTonga, who number about 300,000 were forcibly resettled from their homes in the valley by the oppressive Rhodesian administration to enable the construction of the Kariba Dam in the 1950s. The Tonga language is widely spoken in Zimbabwe today as it is an important lingua franca. The items were collected in the Siabuwa area, south of Kariba in north-western Zimbabwe in the 1970s by Thomas Huffman, as ‘scientific mementos’ arising from his ethnoarchaeological study of the relationship between architectural structures, pots and population numbers. Items included in the purchased collections include drums, thumb pianos, clothing, headrests, hunting weapons, and stools. The collection was accessioned and then fumigated before being catalogued, photographed and stored in the collection rooms.