Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Africa. Crisis or Renaissance? Edited by Kenji Yoshida and John Mack (James Currey and Unisa Press, 2008). Azania Vol 47, Issue 2, 2012 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Towards a renewed Concept of Museum in Africa – and in Europe*
2021
The debates about what to do with collections from colonial contexts, and how to deal with them, have developed pace and unexpected momentum in the last three years. This is especially true for artifacts from the African continent, whether they are in museums or collections in Europe, North America, or elsewhere outside the continent. But the same is true under different circumstances, and we do not want to pass over this, for colonial collections and museums in Africa. Let's take a closer look at both in light of recent debates. The discussions about whether, to whom and when under which circumstances a return, or rather indeed: an unequivocal restitution is appropriate or not, have recently experienced differentiations. This applies already to the preconditions of most restitutions, namely the opening and making accessible of the inventories. While some think that in principle everything should be put online, another opinion maintains that whenever possible, the creators or or...
Introduction: Regarding national museums in Africa
National Museums in Africa: Identity, History and Politics,, 2022
How this volume came about Recent debates about the restitution of heritage objects taken from Africa during the colonial era have thrust African national museums into the limelight. But what do we know about these important institutions? Not a lot. As part of the process of becoming independent nation-states, virtually all Africa's 54 nations established national museums with the primary responsibility of representing the nation to their respective citizens as well as to the rest of the world. In doing so, they were charged with conserving and exhibiting cultural heritage upon which national identities have been inscribed. Despite their apparent importance, little has been written about national museums in Africa. There are a number of journal articles and chapters in books that consider specific museums, but little that offers a comprehensive view of the continent and nothing that considers the various trajectories that national museums have taken over the last 60 years, since the era of independence for Africa's nations. 1 In light of recent debates that address the allied issues of decolonization (i.e., confronting the legacies of colonialism) and the restitution of expropriated heritage objects, seeking a better understanding of these vital institutions seems particularly timely. So it was back in April 2016, when two of the editors, Probst and Silverman, met in Boston at Tufts University, that we hatched the plan to bring together a group of colleagues from the Global South and North to explore the histories and current state of Africa's national museums. The 2017 Triennial Symposium on African Art in Accra was on the horizon, so we submitted a proposal for a triple panel that sought to offer broad regional representation on the subject. 2 A number of key issues informed our conceptualization of the panel. First, we were aware that with very few exceptions national museums in Africa had their origins in the colonial era, virtually all of them have evolved from institutions established by colonial governments. Since independence, national museums have pursued a variety of trajectories, some similar to the work of the past, others radically different. We decided to give BK-TandF-SILVERMAN_9780367821401-210187-Intro.indd 1 25/05/21 2:49 PM BK-TandF-SILVERMAN_9780367821401-210187-Intro.indd 2 25/05/21 2:49 PM BK-TandF-SILVERMAN_9780367821401-210187-Intro.indd 12 25/05/21 2:49 PM
Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe: a new field for museum studies (book review)
Museum Management & Curatorship , 2020
This book ushers in a very important contribution and comes at a time when there are debates on how decoloniality can be empirically approached within African museum practice. In many African countries, museums were established during the colonial era and served narrow interests and audiences. Their collection, classification, containment and representation practices were influenced by biased knowledge practices of the period. While there have been many developments since their establishments, these museums still struggle to shake off their tainted colonial past. Recently the International Council of Museums (ICOM) proposed to change the museum definition in order to embrace alternative world views, cosmologies and epistemologies that connect objects and their social biographies (Sandahl, 2019). The proposed definition has been fraught with intense contestation and disagreements and as a result its adoption at the recent ICOM General Conference (Kyoto, Japan September 2019) was postponed. However, looking at African museum practice, the new definition is a call at the right time as it somehow brings together many of the views that are shared by contributors in Museum cooperation between Africa and Europe: A new field for museum studies. These contributors critically think about how to disengage and reflect beyond western epistemologies and binaries by illustrating African museum practices that are undergirded by community collaborations, inclusivity, critical dialogue and multivocality.
A historical and conceptual analysis of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS)
2011
In 1998 the University of the Western Cape together with the University of Cape Town, and the Robben Island Museum introduced a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies. This programme was innovative in that not only did it bring together two universities in a programme where the inequalities of resources derived from their apartheid legacies was recognised, but it also formally incorporated an institution of public culture that was seeking to make a substantial imprint in the post-apartheid heritage sphere as part of its structure. In 2003 this programme attracted substantial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and was rebranded as the African Program in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS). While this rebranding of the programme might seem to be innocently unproblematic and commendable as part of the effort at re-insertion of South Africa into Africa after the isolation of apartheid, an analysis of the concepts employed in the rebranding raises serious theoretical, conceptual, and disciplinary questions for heritage studies as an academic discipline and for its connections with other fields, especially the interdisciplinary study of Africa. What are the implications of a programme that brings together the concepts of "African-Heritage-Studies"? Does the rebranding signify a major epistemological positioning in the study of Africa or has it chosen to ignore debates on the problematic of the conjunction of the concepts? This study address these issues through a historical and philosophical analysis of the programme, exploring how it was developed both in relation to ideas of heritage and heritage studies in Africa and, most importantly by relocating it in debates on the changing meaning of "Africa" in African studies.
Museum Management & Curatorship , 2019
In this paper we present the Marange Community Museum as an empirical example of how decoloniality can be approached within the museum practice. We argue that the Marange community made use of indigenous ontologies and epistemologies in establishing their museum where rituals and cultural objects are connected in use and in an ongoing dialogue. Ritual processes associated with burials of chiefs and rain petitioning ceremonies are discussed in this paper as inseparable from the physical fabric of cultural objects on display in the Marange Community Museum. We also posit that the way in which this museum was formed is as an empirical illustration of how the museum practice can be decolonised because it embraces collaborations with community members. Hence, a decolonial perspective represented by a community museum acknowledges that objects are not mundane but rather represent the coming together of a multiplicity of factors and it also questions the binary division between tangible and intangible heritage knowledge production.