Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies 9783839443811

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Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, Raphael Schwere (eds.) Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe

Museum | Volume 33

T homas L aely , M arc M eyer , R aphael S chwere ( eds .)

Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe A New Field for Museum Studies

Co-published by: Fountain Publishers P.O. Box 488 Kampala, Uganda e-mail: [email protected] [email protected] Website: www.fountainpublishers.co.ug

transcript Verlag Hermannstraße 26 33602 Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Website: www.transcript-verlag.de

On behalf of: Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, Pelikanstrasse 40, 8001 Zurich, Switzerland © Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich 2018 First published 2018 This publication was kindly supported by the Swiss Society for African Studies.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld and Fountain Publishers, Kampala Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Melanie de Visser Layout: Fountain Publishers Proofread by Fountain Publishers Typeset by Fountain Publishers Production managed by Die Produktion, Cologne Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-4381-7 PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-4381-1

Contents

List of Figures | viii Acknowledgments | xi Preface | xiii Heterodoxy and the Internationalisation and Regionalisation of Museums and Museology | xv

A Foreword by Anthony Shelton | xv Building a Critical Museology in Africa | xxi

A Foreword by Ciraj Rassool | xxi

INTRODUCTION 1 Rethinking Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe Do we need a new paradigm?

Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, Raphael Schwere | 3

PART I: MAPPING THE FIELD – THE HISTORY AND CONTEXT OF MUSEUM COOPERATION BETWEEN AFRICA AND EUROPE 2 Connected by History, Divided by Reality Eliminating Suspicion and Promoting Cooperation between African and European Museums

George Okello Abungu | 25 3 Cooperation between European and African Museums: A Paradigm for Démuséalisation?

Germain Loumpet | 43

PART II: LOCAL COMMUNITIES AND INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS – RELATIONS OF PARTNERSHIP? 4 Shifting Knowledge Boundaries in Museums Museum Objects, Local Communities and Curatorial Shifts in African Museums

Jesmael Mataga | 57

5 Who Shapes the Museum? Exploring the Impact of International Networks on Contemporary East African Museums

Rosalie Hans | 69 6 The Road to Reconciliation Museum Practice, Community Memorials and Collaborations in Uganda

Nelson Adebo Abiti | 83

PART III: ACCESSIBILITY OF COLLECTIONS FROM AFRICA 7 The Junod Collection A new Generation of Cooperation between Europe and Africa

Cynthia Kros and Anneliese Mehnert | 99 8 The Africa Accessioned Network ‘Museum Collections make Connections’ between Europe and Africa: A Case Study of Finland and Namibia

Jeremy Silvester | 111 9 The Hazina Exhibition Challenges and Lessons for International Museum Collaboration

Kiprop Lagat | 129 10 Artworks Abroad Ugandan Art in German Collections

Katrin Peters-Klaphake | 143

PART IV: CRITIQUE AND EVALUATION OF MUSEUM COOPERATION 11 New Considerations in Afro-European Museum Cooperation in Africa The Examples of PREMA and Other Initiatives in Ghana

Kwame Amoah Labi | 165 12 Investigating Museum Development in Africa: From Museum Cooperation to the Appropriation of Praxis

Emery Patrick Effiboley | 179 13 Conservation and Restoration as a Challenge for Museum Cooperation The Case of the Palace Museum in Foumban, Cameroon

Michaela Oberhofer | 195

CONCLUSION 14 What are the Opportunities, Challenges and Modalities for African and European Museum Cooperation?

Cynthia Kros | 215 Index | 229 List of Contributors | 237

List of Figures Figure 1.1:

Craft centre linked to the Museu Nacional de Arte, Maputo, Mozambique, 2013 .......................................................12

Figure 4.1:

A ritual hut erected by a spirit medium at Ntabazikamambo/ Manyanga archaeological site in western Zimbabwe..................59

Figure 4.2:

The Mukwati Walking Stick. Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences. According to the agreement between the NMMZ and the descendants of Mukwati, this artefact must always remain covered with a black ritual cloth. It can only be unwrapped in the presence of a spirit medium and should only be handled by male staff............................................................64

Figure 5.1:

The Abasuba Community Peace Museum seen from its garden......................................................................................70

Figure 5.2:

The Museum of Acholi Art and Culture under construction.......71

Figure 6.1:

Signage in the garden of Aboke Girls’ School.............................89

Figure 6.2:

Mato-oput, Lukodi.......................................................................91

Figure 6.3:

Exhibition poster, Uganda National Museum, 2013....................92

Figure 7.1:

A basket with a lid woven from dried grasses. From the Junod Collection at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa. Accession No: 1/75/11............................99

Figure 7.2:

A letterhead stamp carved from wood. It reads: ‘C.P.21L. MD.*HAJ*’. From the Junod Collection at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa. Accession No: 1/75/52................................................................................103

Figure 7.3:

The divination set, or Bula, found in the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa. Accession No: 1/75/9a-w. Note Junod’s handwriting on some of the pieces...............................................................................107

Figure 8.1:

Mrs Magdalena Kaanante, the curator of Nakambale Museum and Ms Charmaine Tjizezenga of the Museums Association of Namibia examine a pot from the Rautanen collection....................................................................................114

Figure 8.2:

A specimen Ekola from the museum collection at the University of Oulu...............................................................117

Figure 8.3:

Catalogue number 5620 – ‘Piece of Ondonga sacred stone, Oshipapa. The piece is from a meteorite fallen on the Earth in 1883 or 1886. Power stones are believed to symbolise good government, stability and connection with the forefathers’ spirits’.......................................................119

List of Figures  |  ix

Figure 8.4:

The second stone was described in the translation from the FELM catalogue as: Artefact Catalogue number 8248 – ‘Ritual stone from Angola or Namibia, a “rain stone”, may be a kind of stone with the help of which rain could be roused or engendered’...........................................................121

Figure 8.5:

The original Finnish caption for this photograph was simply translated as ‘Native attire’. ....................................................123

Figure 9.1:

The poster publicising the exhibition........................................130

Figure 9.2:

(Left to right) Tony Eccles, Curator of Ethnography, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, UK, Kiprop Lagat and Juma Ondeng, both from the National Museums of Kenya, examining the beadwork collection from East Africa at the British Museum Ethnography Store in Orsman Road, London...............................................................132

Figure 9.3:

A display unit depicting the Hazina exhibition layout...............133

Figure 10.1:

Photograph of an exhibition in the gallery space, ca. 1970. Self-published catalogue..................................................151

Figure 10.2:

Painting by Fabian Kamulu Mpagi, title and year of production unknown. Oil on hardboard, 57.5cm x 46 cm. Collection Klaus Betz................................................................153

Figure 10.3:

Balthazar Sanka, ‘Lady watch your step’. Print 1/10. Jochen Schneider Collection, Weltkulturen Museum Inv. No. 62725..................................................................................155

Figure 12.1:

Two exhibits from the exhibition Femmes, bâtisseurs d’Afrique, which were offered to Benin and presented to the Maison du Brésil at Ouidah.......................................................182

Figure 12.2:

A photographed papyrus representing the pharaoh worshipping the sun...................................................................186

Figure 12.3:

Signs in Porto-Novo (left) and Cotonou (right) illustrating extraversion at work..................................................................189

Figure 13.1:

King Njoya sitting on his beaded throne in front of his palace. The male twin figure holds a glass bottle in his hand, which was replaced when the throne was given as a present to Kaiser Wilhelm II......................................................199

Figure 13.2:

The new throne of Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya was produced in a modern court style by the beadworker Ndam Mama for the Nguon festival 2008.................................202

Figure 13.3:

The New Palace Museum of Bamum Kings (near completion) combines traditional symbols of the Bamum Kingdom with a modern museum architecture.....................................................205

Figures 13.4 and 13.5: This wooden throne is associated with King Nguwuo and was transformed into an ‘ancient-modern object’ after being covered with beads....................................................................208

Acknowledgments

This anthology is one of the outcomes of a cooperation project between three museums in Africa and Europe – the Uganda National Museum in Kampala, the Igongo Cultural Centre in Mbarara (south-west Uganda), and the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. It resulted from a conference of museum scholars and practitioners in December 2016, which aimed at discussing experiences and expertise in museum cooperation between Africa and Europe. The conference was hosted by the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich on behalf of the Swiss Society for African Studies in cooperation with the Swiss Anthropological Association. It was the desire of the conference participants that the results of the meeting shall be further reflected and published. We would like to thank everyone who helped conceptualising and editing this anthology. The volume is the yield of an extensive exchange with the authors of the contributions, so we first are deeply grateful to them – they have been available to support us with their thoughts and comments, and answering our numerous questions time and again. Our particular acknowledgment goes to Cynthia Kros for her thoughtful concluding chapter as well as Ciraj Rassool and Anthony Shelton for their prospective introductory words. Even if some of the presented papers could not be included, we would like to give special thanks to all the conference’s contributors and presenters for their firm engagement with the issues at stake. Marc Bundi, Melanie Boehi, Marie-Eve Celio Scheurer, Zoë Cormack, Fatima Fall, Marie-Angès Gainon-Court, Alexandra Galitzine, Nikki Grout, Winani Kgwatalala, Birthe Pater and Sarah Worden have been setting precedents with their contributions and were strongly pointing the way ahead. We acknowledge the way they have influenced further reflection and eventually the argument of this book – they are essential contributors to the final outcome. We wish to express our great appreciation to the discussants, chairs and facilitators Larissa Förster, Julien Glauser, Clara Himmelheber, Alexis Malefakis, Anne Mayor and Fiona Siegenthaler who gave direction to the debate and provided many valuable insights. While it is invidious to identify individuals, this anthology would not have been possible without the dedication and help of Helen Rana whom we are indebted to for all her editorial input, lingustic fine-tuning and copyediting of the entire volume. We are also thankful to Elisabeth Heseltine who translated Germain Loumpet’s chapter from French into English. Special mention and acknowledgement deserve the very involved audience of the conference as well as many other colleagues and specialists in museum affairs who have inspired us with their reactions and questions, and benevolently accompanied and commented on our publication project. Special thanks go to Mareile Flitsch, Alexis Malefakis, and Thomas Kaiser for their comments and critical advice as well as to Renate Koller, Agnes Kovacs and Adrienne Wegmann for their thorough corrections of all bibliographies. Eventually we would also like to express our heartfelt thanks to the whole Ugandan and Swiss museum cooperation core team, Nelson Abiti, Samuel Bachmann, Daniela Bollinger, Jacqueline Grigo,

xii  |  Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe

Moses Kashure, Amon Mugume, Rose Nkaale Mwanja, Birthe Pater, James Tumusiime and Melanie de Visser, without whom we would not have dealt with this issue in the first place. This publication was kindly supported by the Swiss Society for African Studies SSAS and the Carl Schlettwein Foundation in Basel.

Zurich, March 2018 Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, Raphael Schwere

Preface

In a rapidly-changing world with its incessant flows of commodities, values and people, the awareness of our overall global complexity and entangledness is growing. So is a consciousness of the role that cultural heritage plays in identity building and self-reassurance about the human condition. Museums and collections seem to be gaining momentum globally in this process. The entwined histories of migrating people and objects are displayed as stories about their multiple trajectories from places of origin into European museum collections. Collaborative academic research is urgently needed to understand, document and shape this process. Understood against this background – and referring to a concept put forward by the British anthropologist Paul Basu – European museums host ‘object diasporas’. These urge us to listen to each other and discuss their varying contexts of origin, along with wider concerns around former and modern meanings of collections. Basu’s conceptualisation describes collections as historically-grown remittances of the communities of origin in Western museums, from which there is a duty to collaborate on issues of their exploration, on access to collections, on questions of sovereignty in interpretation – as well as the emerging sensitive suggestion, in certain cases, of restitution – or at least digital repatriation. In December 2016 the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich was honoured to host a pioneering conference on museum cooperation between Africa and Europe. The spirit of its highly-engaged discussions and debates provided a deeply inspiring experience; this volume is one of the conference’s many potential outcomes. I warmly thank all the contributors for their dedication and open-mindedness, as well as the energy they put into finalising their chapters. This anthology is intended to address not only theories around museum cooperation, but especially to foreground, critically discuss and further develop current topics on the issue, as well as developing further projects and the practice of cooperating. The goal of this young – yet generation-spanning movement – and of this volume, is clear and farsighted: to make some first steps towards long-overdue natural, well-funded and sustainable academic collaborations between European and African museums. I hope this volume will help to pave the way!

Mareile Flitsch Director, Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich Zürich, February 2018

Heterodoxy and the Internationalisation and Regionalisation of Museums and Museology A Foreword by Anthony Shelton

Stewardship over cultural and art works can bring together or split different peoples, communities and nations widely apart. While museums and galleries imbue works with their own meaning, objects can also easily be mobilised by alternative and sometimes contested narratives that challenge their significance regardless of whether fixed by Euro-American or African academies and institutions. The indeterminacy between works and meanings is partly what endows them their capacity to act as catalysts for creative thought, but it also imbues them the power to arouse intense passions over their care, display and interpretation. Little surprise, that this intrinsic and unavoidable field of potential tensions often discloses a museum’s own political culture and values and provides telling indications of its conservativism or critical and creative predisposition that can majorly affect its prestige, vitality, relevance and the love or other sentiments its public bestows it. Nelson Abiti’s accounts of the National Museum of Uganda’s commitment to reconciliation, and the work done by similar institutions including the National Museums of Kenya; Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares (founded by Bonfil Batalla) and El Chopo Museum; Italy’s Lampedusa Museum of Migration, and the work of holocaust museums, exemplify museums at their best, which by acknowledging that their fundamental cultural mission exceeds historical and contemporary material culture, become part of a society’s essential institutions. In a newly interconnected digital age, and a neo-liberal world with its proliferate and increasing new and shifting borders caused by current geo-political re-alignments, these wall-less museums also question the applicability of the notion of the contact zone twenty years after it was incorporated into museological literature. Contact zones are today everywhere and are increasingly ambiguous, insecure, indiscriminate and, with internationalised militarisation in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, latently deadly. Collecting long predates European colonization and is not restricted to any one type of civilization. Collections were assembled in fourteenth to seventeenth century Ming China; sixteenth century Aztec Mexico, and in Africa, in the nineteenth century Kalibari trading houses of the Niger Delta described by Nigel Barley (1988); the sixteenth century royal palace of Benin recounted by Joseph Eboreime (2001); the pre-colonial palaces of Bamoun in Foumban and later that which became the Museum of the Bamoun Kings discussed by Germain Loumpet and Michaela Oberhofer, and in pre-colonial Ghana described by Kwame Amoah Labi (all in this volume). Moreover, African mask houses, shrines and groves all contained meaningful object assemblages. While all these examples attest that collecting has long been a global activity, secular museums characterised by their heterogeneous holdings and the systematic typological, material or comparative taxonomies used to order their collections are undoubtedly a uniquely Western invention as are the genres of exhibition they favour. How many exhibitions, for example, have been mounted on Pende masks displayed as art, typological sets, or as part of a larger thematic category, compared to the

xvi  |  Anthony Shelton

dearth of displays on their histories and dynamic innovations including that most intriguing strategy of all described by Strother (1997), of how new forms of Pende masquerades were devised to specifically channel and harness powers against colonial intruders? I know of none, partly because such exhibitions would require deep local historical knowledge, the acknowledgement and valorisation of non-empiricist epistemologies and singular ontologies, and the recognition of the existence of different ocular regimes. However, museums that dare contravene epistemologies, mobilise local histories, and pluralise ways of seeing, as Jesmael Mataga so perceptively argues, become place of unsettlement and destabilisation where everyday categories lose their absolute authority, and meanings are suspended and become relativised as well as interrogated in favour of acclaiming openness to the plurality of human wisdom, ingenuity and intellect – strategies which Jacques Hainard has distinguished as the objective of what he calls a museology of rupture. When everything becomes relativised, museums become the safe places of dialogue and debate, what George Abungu describes as essential to conflict resolution, sensitisation and the propagation of peace, which are needed more than ever in the dangerous world order being politically imposed on us. Only through this epistemological revolution can museums transpose themselves into knowledge repositories, stages for community voices; laboratories and studios in which students can participate in the constant redefinition of culture and identity, and lounges to promote communal dialogue and inclusivity that so many of us rightly think important. The Ugandan and Gaoan scholars, Paul Wangoola (2000) and Claudio Alvares (2001) have proposed the assemblage of multiversities, a counter knowledge institution to that of the Western university model, which seems to me to be well suited to the world’s museums. Wangoola and Alvares argue that the imposition of a universalised empirical, ‘scientific’ knowledge on communities and societies afflicted by colonialism and still marred by coloniality, has disparaged, marginalised and often eradicated Indigenous knowledge systems that once more effectively described and explained the complex and interdependent relations between a region’s natural and cultural habitats than those imposed from outside. The multiversity, they argue, is a project to deconstruct and relativise Western knowledge, while attempting to rescue, revalorise and reapply Indigenous knowledge systems. The multiversity, like museums, therefore protects and disseminates cultural diversity. Once different knowledge systems are equally ranked and valued, they argue, Western knowledge from science to travel writing, need to be deconstructed to reveal their limited epistemological values before being placed, and I would say visualised, exemplified and displayed, next to those from elsewhere. Museums, by employing communities from around the world can reorganise collections to express the multiple ways of perceiving, knowing, interpreting and co-existing on a culturally diverse planet. It is paradoxical that while museology and conservation too often struggle to attain scientific status, and the badge of professionalism it confirms, post-colonial perspectives, and I am particularly thinking here of JeanFrancois Lyotard’s The Post-Modern Condition (1984) and Miriam Clavir’s convincing critique of the practice of conservation in her Preserving What is Valued (2002), demonstrate the conditionality of the metanarratives that collude dominant Western ethical injunctions with scientific method to ascribe them their shaky legitimacy. With their diverse collections and anthropology’s own deconstructivist and critical aspirations, ethnographic museums can become places of heterodoxy where diverse interpretations, opinions and theories, and their inevitable metanarratives, intersect, engage, struggle, ravel and become unravelled

Foreword | xvii

to remind us of the world’s generous and enormous diversity and its value in instilling diplomatic compass and modulating our thoughts, passions and creativities. If successful, anthropological, ethnographic or world culture museums stand a good chance of becoming models for other types of museums and galleries and of providing a new public framework for the humanities. If museums do not yet fully embrace the challenges and heterogeneity to which the contributors to this volume aspire, these essays attest to the continuing journeys many such institutions in Africa and Europe began in the past fifty years and how much more open, adventurous, flexible, and even courageous they have become. Recently, Laura Osorio Sunnucks, a curator in my own museum, has made repeated excursions into dangerous areas of Mexico controlled by drug trafficers, dealt with road blockages and confrontations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous protestors and worked with the families of the forty-three disappeared student teachers from Ayotzinapa to curate the exhibition, Arts of Resistance: Politics and the Past in Latin America (MOA, 2018). Curators elsewhere, like Boris Wastiau and Beka Economopoulos have also been forced to leave the comfort of their offices and libraries to become activists in order to tell contemporary and relevant stories that provide a platform for contentious issues and for marginalised and isolated peoples. Thanks to international organisations museums have undergone global changes. The idea of community collaboration grew independently in different parts of the world. In Mexico, it was championed by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (1983), and in Canada by Michael Ames (1992). Aspects of the history of collaboration in Africa, include the philosophy behind the District Six Museum in South Africa, described by Ciraj Rassool (2006); and in this volume, in Zimbabwe, by Mataga, and in Kenya, by Abungu and Rosalie Hans. Community collaboration, despite the absence of critical evaluation, has become in large parts of the world, a major museum methodology. Similarly, our understanding of colonialism has become more complex. It is insufficient to be aware only of its different historical and cultural variants, policy divergences, and impacts. We need now to focus on its continual legacy as theorised, for example, through Walter Mignolo’s concept of coloniality (2007), and Pablo Gonzalez Cassanova’s formulation of the conditions and effects of internal colonisation (1965), which rescale former external asymmetric power relations responsible for dislocating the distribution, uses and benefits of resources away from local communities, to a focus on internal exploitative mechanisms manipulated by the state. In the cultural arena, this unequal mosaic of internal power relations is expressed in countries like Mexico, Indonesia and Canada, by local and regional museums pursuing repatriations from their own national museums as well as foreign ones. Magnolo’s and Gonzalez’s theoretical frameworks provide alternative ways of interpreting postcolonial relations depending on whether they are seen as determined by ethnicity or by an internationalised, hierarchical class-based system. Nevertheless, museums need to be understood, along with the exhibitionary complexes they institutionalise, as inclusive aspects of what Regina Bendix (2012) defines as ‘heritage regimes’. These include the local and national policy contexts underlying the conceptualisation of heritage which inevitably affect the entirety of a museum’s complex, inflected, and multifaceted relationships. Only at this detailed level of relational analysis can this crucial debate between ethnic and class based determinants of internal and neo-colonial relationships be freed from the polemical assertions that bedevil it.

xviii  |  Anthony Shelton

The fields of museums and museology, through the processes of regionalisation and internationalisation have, as the editors of this volume acknowledge, changed enormously. Demands for greater inclusivity and democratisation; the assertion of Indigenous rights; the change from monocultural to multicultural and intercultural citisenries, and the scholarly critical scrutiny focused on museums during the final three decades of the last century, have transformed many beyond recognition. We still need to deepen that critique to the political histories of their wider heritage regimes, but the time has arrived to begin the work of systematically reconfiguring museums. Change will take different shapes depending on the country and/or region where museums are located, but some general principles are emerging. Internally, outside of Europe, many nation states are culturally disarticulated and governments need to enact better integrated cultural policies. In Canada for example, the majority of citizens outside the southern flange of large conurbations located within a hundred miles of the US border, have limited cultural provisions and few and grossly underfunded museums able to accommodate major exhibitions. National museum legislation is required, as it is elsewhere, to create meaningful cooperation and share resources between national, provincial, local and community museums and Indigenous cultural centres. This network is essential to promote the movement of objects, exhibitions and community based expertise to improve access, inform cultural diversity, educate and realign knowledge and creativity, and disseminate shared values of respect, tolerance and understanding that benefit and ground national or geo-political regional citizenry. Effective international networks need to be developed and stabilised for the same reasons, but they also need to encourage cross-cultural curatorial practices and, because of the increased transparency of museums through social media and the internet, they ought to improve awareness of threats that exhibitions might periodically attract from intolerant internal factions and foreign regimes and their potential effects on curators and sponsors. Culture wars although up to now largely polemical, are becoming increasingly fierce and may, under US, Russian or Turkish irresponsible political leadership, become hot. None of these things can be accomplished without deep, meaningful and effective international cooperation. Museums in the digital age are borderless, and therefore, mutually more accountable. While there are many positive examples of collaborations between European and American museums, and those from Africa, Labi, Oberhofer and Abungu are correct to appeal for greater mutual respect, equality and unanimity in devising and managing shared projects and clarifying mutual assumptions. In Canada, Indigenous communities have emphasised the importance of drafting specific memorandums of understanding with museums, because through conversing, devising, setting parameters, understanding logistics, and confirming ethical protocols and expectations, respect, fairness and understanding become mutually rooted. Soon after I took up my current position at The University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, an institution that has widely employed collaborative methodologies from at least the 1980s, I asked three curators what for them constituted collaboration. The first answered that it involved the role of curator being transformed into that of facilitator to enable the community to independently take responsibility to determine an exhibition’s subject, text, object selection and design; a second curator, opined it involved periodic dialogues with the community to ensure the fidelity of the exhibition with their expectations, and the third, described collaboration as a dialogical process through which culture was generated by the conversations between curators and community repre-

Foreword | xix

sentatives. The first approach corresponds to what Michael Ames called participant action research; the second approach, museologists might equate with a consultative model, and the third might best be defined by what Johannes Fabian would describe as a dialogical approach, but what is important is that each method generates a different genre of exhibition which in large part is conditioned by the community itself. The question I would now ask, thirteen years later is, can we add to these, a fourth category of cooperative ethically motivated curatorial practice represented by Sunnucks, Wastiau and Economopoulos, of the type that has already motivated the works of certain groups of artists? Despite these essential analytical discussions which are so desperately needed, outside of the obfuscations of new intellectual and geo-political realities, and the complexities of an often disarticulated museological landscape, we are fortunate to have at least one imperative and largely shared anchor that can help us navigate these complex issues and, I think assist in their resolution. That is that access to culture is an inalienable right, and museums whose governments are signatories to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are encumbered to seriously apply especially articles eleven, twelve and thirty-one, to their future practices. Article eleven unequivocally states: ‘Indigenous people have the right to practice and revitalise their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestation of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature.’ This, at the very least requires either cultural diversification and changes in the power relations within museums or an object’s restitution to another place where these conditions prevail. Instead of fearing difficult conversations, we might accept instead that this is perhaps a good place from where to agree fundamental philosophies that can help reconfigure the future relationships between our varied and diverse institutions and provide encouragement to compose together a shared vision and purpose, which must inevitably be internationalist. New ways of configuring museums and their collections inevitably lead also to cultural reconciliation.

Anthony Alan Shelton Visiting Research Fellow, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka Director, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology Professor, Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

References Alvares, Claude. 2001. The Original Multiversity Proposal. http://vlal.bol.ucla.edu/multiversity/Right_menu_items/Claude_proposal.htm Ames, Michael. 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes. The Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Barley, Nigel. 1988. Foreheads of the Dead: An Anthropological View of Kalabari Ancestral Screens. Washington D.C.: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution Press.

xx  |  Anthony Shelton

Bendix, Regina. F, Aditya Eggert and Arnika Peselmann (eds.). 2012. Heritage Regimes and the State. Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property, Volume 6. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. 1983. ‘El Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares.’ Nueva Antropología V(20): 151-155. Clavir, Miriam. 2002. Preserving What is Valued. Museums, Conservation and First Nations. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Eboreime, Joseph. 2001. ‘Recontextualizing the Horniman’s Collection of Benin Bronzes.’ In Re-visions: New Perspectives on the African Collections of the Horniman Museum, edited by Karel Arnaut. London: Horniman Museum. Fabian, Johannes. 1990. Power and Performance. Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial Wisdom and Theatre. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gonzalez Cassanova, Pablo. 1965. ‘Internal Colonialism and National Development.’ Studies in Comparative International Development 1(4): 27-37. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2007. ‘Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking.’ Cultural Studies 21(2-3): 155-167. Rassool, Ciraj. 2006. ‘Making the District Six Museum in Cape Town.’ Museum International 58(1-2): 9-18. Shelton, Anthony. 1997. ‘The Future of Museum Ethnography.’ Journal of Museum Ethnography (9): 33-48. Shelton, Anthony. 2000. ‘Curating African Worlds.’ Journal of Museum Ethnography (12): 5-20. Shelton, Anthony. 2001a. ‘Museums in an Age of Cultural Hybridity Folk.’ The Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society 43: 221-249. Shelton, Anthony. 2001b. ‘Unsettling the Meaning: Critical Museology, Art and Anthropological Discourse.’ In Academic Anthropology and the Museum. Back to the Future, edited by Mary Bouquet. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Shelton, Anthony. 2016. ‘European ethnography and world culture museums.’ Museumskunde 81(1/16): 20-27. Strother, Zoë S. 1997. Inventing Masks. Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Wangoola, Paul. M. 2000. ‘Mpambo, the African Multiversity: A Philosophy to rekindle the African Spirit.’ In Indigenous Knowledge in Global Contexts: Multiple Readings of our World, edited by George Dei, Budd Hall and Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Building a Critical Museology in Africa A Foreword by Ciraj Rassool

As we continue the work of rethinking the museum on the African continent, we are grateful to the museum scholars, practitioners and activists who gathered in Zurich to deliberate about the histories and cultural politics of connections and cooperative projects between museums in Africa and Europe. The publication of this collection of essays is particularly timely, in the wake of the French president Emmanuel Macron’s important call in November 2017 for the ‘temporary or permanent’ restitution of African artefacts held in European museums. This anthology provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the field of different models of museum connection, as well as the complex biographies of African cultural artefacts held in museums – both in Europe and on the African continent. This is not merely a compilation of case studies, although we are taken on journeys of museums, museum associations, artefacts and cultural practices in societies ranging from Namibia, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Benin, South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. These are also expeditions through models of museum partnerships, sometimes driven by the development discourse, but other times by a new ethics of exchange and reconnection, despite deep inequalities. The articles included contain important debates on critical questions about how to address and repair histories of disconnection between artefacts and society, how to rethink the work of the museum in mediating relations between objects and individuals, and how to reconsider partnerships between African and European museums. These debates speak to the ways in which museum and collecting histories between African and European societies have been fraught with deep contestation and contradiction over the legacies of colonialism and questions of whether African artefacts should be returned to African nations as part of a process of redress. Demands for repatriation have been met by large Western museums with the assertion that they are ‘universal’ museums, caring for collections on behalf of all the world’s people. The search for a middle ground has given rise to projects framed around projects of ‘shared heritage’ and temporary loans of African artefacts to African museums for special exhibitions. In the background of these debates and controversies are the challenges of rethinking the work of the museum in Europe and Africa. In Europe, many ethnographic museums have rebranded themselves as museums of world cultures, with new digitally-enhanced displays, but often with classificatory categories left intact. Nevertheless, in some cases, deeper methodological interrogations have seen the focus shift to museums’ collecting histories and their storage rooms, and to deep engagements with artefacts and artworks by artists in residence. Amidst these contested new directions, the argument has also been advanced for the postethnographic museum, as a way to conceptualise the interrogation of the ethnographic. And in Africa, doubts have been expressed about the future of the ethnographic museum, as a museum form that is steeped in colonial classification, while new approaches such as the living museum, the community museum, and the peace museum have elicited new questions about museums and citizenship, beyond the administration of people and objects.

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In examining these cases and debates, I was taken back to different moments of attempted reconnection that I was able to witness and even participate in. During the 1990s, the Swedish African Museums Programme (SAMP), founded to initiate twinships between Swedish and African museums, also became a forum for colleagues from African museums to meet each other and exchange ideas. What was created as a development initiative by ICOM, working through Sweden and the resources of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), also became a source of stimulation for Swedish museums, whose conventional methods and approaches were challenged by new ideas from African museums about museums and community. Such reversals of the conventional flows of development have almost always been difficult to achieve, especially since expertise has generally been seen to reside with the European partner museums or consultants, with African museums positioned as grateful recipients who are also able to facilitate access to authentic local voices. In addition, the education of African museum professionals has very often been limited to technical aspects, with the intellectual effort of conceptualising and leading museum work seen to be the prerogative of outside consultants. This contradiction between technical training and intellectual education has marked almost all African museum and heritage training and education initiatives, which have often been confined to the technical terms set by international agencies and partners. Some of the most significant initiatives have been the Centre for Heritage Development (CHDA) in Mombasa, Kenya and the School for African Heritage (EPA) based in Porto Novo, Benin. Both had their origins in efforts by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) to enhance the ability of the African heritage community to care for their continent’s rich cultural heritage. Perhaps the most important continental museum development project occurred through the work of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM), established in 1999 as an autonomous, Pan-African NGO that sought to build social, professional and intellectual resources for African museums as generators of culture and agents of cultural cohesion, and to strengthen museum collaboration throughout Africa. While EPA has continued to exist as a largely Francophone and Lusophone centre for training and development, CHDA and AFRICOM were not able to survive the difficulties of donor dependency and the limits of developmental frames. Moreover, the demise of AFRICOM was also caused by the enormous obstacles posed for giving the repatriation of African collections to the African continent a programmatic life. To counteract repatriation, ‘universal’ museums have embarked upon new programmes of African partnerships and training alongside temporary loans of African artefacts for special traveling exhibitions. This might mean that the very donor and foundation resources that should have attended to the strengthening of African agencies of museum and heritage development have instead been redirected to such European-based projects of partnership and development, and have perhaps served to reinforce relations of dependence. The desires for museum autonomy and the creation of African museum leadership rooted in critical museologies and museum debates lay at the centre of the work of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS), founded in Cape Town in 1998 through a partnership between the University of the Western Cape and Robben Island Museum, the first new museum of the post-apartheid South African nation. Over the

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last 20 years, the APMHS has sought to build a core of African museum leaders through a critical, intellectual programme grounded in the cultural politics of museums, rather than merely through technical training in preservation and care. While we need to find the right balance between the technical and the intellectual challenges of museum development, this clearly shows how important it is for African museums to be affirmed as the locus of social theory and critical debate on the major questions of our time. Only then will it be possible to question the tyranny of developmentalism, and to embrace new partnerships with European museums.

Ciraj Rassool Professor of History Director, African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies University of the Western Cape Member of the High Level Advisory Committee on Museums, UNESCO

Introduction

Rethinking Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe Do we need a new paradigm? Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, Raphael Schwere

A heated debate, open questions and a neglected museological field Following a presentation by a representative of an international museum body, a heated debate broke out, creating a sudden increase in tension in the previously warm, calm and courteous conference debating culture. Almost all the African and European participants energetically criticised what they perceived as an expression of a paternalistic view of African museum institutions, embedded in the intercontinental museum cooperation approach presented. This approach was challenged as describing a one-way direction of action, for being insensitive to African museums’ needs and postcolonial self-conception, for being unilaterally patronising and Eurocentric, for positioning partners as less than equals, and for generally being a relic of an outdated development approach which, however, stubbornly refuses to die despite scholarly, activist and professional opposition. This outburst of blatant disaccord occurred during a conference entitled ‘Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe: Opportunities, Challenges and Modalities’ at the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich,1 which eventually resulted in this publication. The main aim of the conference was to bring together museum professionals and scholars from Africa and Europe working in and on museums, to exchange knowledge, discuss contemporary issues and critically reflect on their experiences of cooperative projects between African and European museums. Against the background of the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM) call to complement the classical core activities of museums – conservation, collection, research, communication and exhibition – with international cooperation,2 the conference aimed to explore and critically assess the opportunities, challenges and modalities, which emerge out of cooperation practice, from the perspectives of both practitioners and academics. The topic and the motivation to host the conference emerged from a cooperative project, which the hosting museum was undertaking with two African partner museums. In this Ugandan-Swiss project, it was felt that there was a need

1 On 1-3 December 2016, organised by the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich on behalf of the Swiss Society for African Studies, in cooperation with the Swiss Anthropological Association. 2 ICOM Code of Ethics, Article 6.1. stipulates: ‘Museums should promote the sharing of knowledge, documentation and collections with museums and cultural organisations in the countries and communities of origin. The possibility of developing partnerships with museums in countries or areas that have lost a significant part of their heritage should be explored’ (2013, 10).

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to reflect on the museums’ cooperative practice – not only within the team of cooperating individuals, but also by sharing experiences, ideas and uncertainties with a wider group of experts. The project, initiated by the Uganda (National) Museum in Kampala, the Igongo Cultural Centre in Mbarara, and the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, declared shortly after its kick-off that one of its aims was to thoroughly and consistently analyse the cooperative aspects of the practical activities directed towards jointly curating exhibitions in all three institutions. The heated debate during the conference offered one answer to the question of why and how African and European museums cooperate. Almost all of the African and European museum practitioners and scholars present agreed that the paradigm of development is not a suitable approach for museum cooperation. However, the participants proposed a multitude of alternative ideas, opinions and approaches about how and why this kind of intercontinental cooperation should be pursued. Thus, the conference disappointed those who were keen to return with a unanimously endorsed lesson in cooperation best practice. Instead, the discussion raised more questions than it answered, with a plurality of points of view coming to the fore. Furthermore, the descriptions people gave of opportunities, challenges and modalities of museum cooperation did not come out of the notion of museums in Africa and Europe as self-contained institutions, but as variable entities, stretching much further than their individual premises, professionals, core activities and classical aims, beyond the workings of bilateral ties between two particular museums. Thus, despite the fact that national and international cooperation is standard practice for many European and African museums today, apparently, there is currently no new paradigm guiding museum practitioners engaged in such working relationships. On the contrary, although the traditional development approach is being questioned, no successor paradigm has yet been devised. This is reflected, for instance, in the challenges presented at the conference and the chapters of this volume. These indicate that, despite fierce criticism, the current hegemonic heritage discourse is still predicated on a Western museum model – namely the ‘culture and development’ approach that is predominantly advocated by international heritage and development organisations. Thus, it seems that only a few of the many examples of international cooperation between African and European museums today live up to the demands of postcolonial critique. Cooperation was (or is) mainly unidirectional, displaying European exhibitions in African museums or aiming to coach African institutions in fields such as conservation, restoration or curating, generally following a development approach. When viewed from the European museum perspective, cooperation all too often remains a consultancy-level knowledge exchange with Afropolitan museologists. Only a few collaborations demonstrate a joint practical implementation of projects, taking into consideration the expectations, goals and needs of all the stakeholders, sharing project management responsibilities, guaranteeing collective decision-making processes and equal access to shared resources. This book is particularly relevant at this time of omnipresent talk about cooperation with ethnographic collections’ countries of provenance.3 Today, there is an awareness of the importance of academic and museographic partnerships and a requirement for ethnological 3 It is relevant to note in this context that this is one of the reasons why the Africa sections of permanent exhibitions in several ethnological museums in Europe are closed for a complete overhaul

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museums to concern themselves with contemporary – as well as historical – issues, which goes far beyond the museum sector.4 Furthermore, in recent years, many actors have increasingly begun realising how important it is to undertake colonial-era provenance research. At the same time, debates about immigration into Europe, as well as the role and position of ethnological museums in relation to this, are intensifying. All of these points consistently highlight the significance of international perspectives on present-day ethnological collections. Against this background, the aim of this book is to provoke and define a new, long-overdue museological sub-field of study into transcontinental museum cooperation, by raising questions concerning: • Motivations and agendas. What makes museums decide to cooperate and for what purposes? Who benefits, and in what ways? • Actors. What types of museums and museum-like institutions, international museum networks and representatives, as well as targeted and affected local communities are mandated or involved in museum cooperation? • Cooperative practice. How are cooperative and collaborative activities conceptualised, implemented and evaluated? • Difference and inequalities. What happens when different worlds of practice converge? How do cooperating entities perceive, react to and come to terms with different structural environments and working conditions? How do inequalities, such as different levels of access to funding, influence power relations between the cooperating institutions and individuals? • Normative and theoretical rationales. How imperative or inevitable are calls to cooperate? Who demands cooperation and for what reasons? What role do decolonisation efforts or restitution demands play? How do cooperative projects deal with colonial legacies connecting the partners?

The state of the art in theorising transcontinental museum cooperation In postcolonial, as well as in new and critical museology, questions about the representation of culture, about museums as a colonial institution and the restitution of objects have been posed, worked on and discussed intensely (cf. Vergo 2006; Peterson 2015; Chambers et al. 2014). Against this background, we propose to consider cooperative projects, the development of partnerships and collaboration between museums in Africa and Europe as a way to

at the time of publication (for example, this is the case in Hamburg, Leipzig and Stuttgart, just in Germany alone). 4 See, for instance, the French president, Emmanuel Macron’s ‘Ouagadougou Discourse’ at the end of November 2017, in which he invoked the necessity ‘…to change the ways we look at others’ (Macron 2017; authors’ translation).

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reflect on and overcome the colonial legacy which has become a major point of criticism levelled against museums in recent decades. International museum cooperation is especially relevant for ethnographic museums, which are currently trying to reinvent themselves in the context of the theoretical debates mentioned above. Numerous well-known European and North American museums with ethnographic collections have started to critically reflect their colonial history through their exhibitions. Examples of this include the Ethnographic Museum of Stockholm, the National Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Bodenstein and Pagani 2014). As this book shows, this move towards reflecting and reinventing is not just confined to Europe and North America – there are examples from the African continent too. Cooperation between museums in Africa and Europe is not a new phenomenon. However, its forms have changed over time due to shifts in ideologies, ethics, politics, academic theories and museum practice. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the colonial powers established museums in many of their territories in Africa, following the example and model of European museums. Early cooperation between these newly-established African museums and European museums mainly consisted of practical collaboration, such as sending objects to the museums in Europe for restoration, conservation and research, or European institutions providing financial support for those in Africa (cf. Labi in this volume; Cooke 2015). After the former colonies gained independence and autonomous African nation states were founded, some scholars and policymakers viewed museums as a possible instrument for consolidating national identities in these newly-established states (Myles 1976, 197). Soon afterwards, practices and ideologies evolving from the predominant paradigm of development transformed the previous colonial relationship with Europe into a new form. While development was mainly seen as a question of economics, there was a tendency to stress the role of culture and cultural heritage in development planning and initiatives from the 1970s on, which led to a new conception of the term ‘international development cooperation’ in the 1980s (Akpomuvie 2010: 530-31). In that decade, UNESCO set the strengthening of the role of culture in development as one of its goals for the World Decade for Cultural Development, which it defined as 1988-1998 (UNESCO, n.d.a). The resolution was passed by ‘the Group of 77, representing a majority of third world countries’ (Arizpe 2004: 175), showing that the so-called ‘developing’ countries were gaining influence over the global policies which affected them. Although this could be seen as a shift towards a more inclusive approach to development, with more respect given to those countries’ cultures, the underlying logic of connecting culture and development was later criticised as being over-simplistic and ethnocentric (Arizpe 2004: 175). The role of culture in development has been a recurring theme in UNESCO’s resolutions ever since, as can be seen, for example, in the fact that the institution stresses the major role of culture in most of the goals in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, n.d.b). In the domain of museum cooperation, this understanding of culture and museums as both factors and target institutions for development has left lasting effects and is still highly influential today (cf. Akpomuvie 2010: 531). There are many examples of cooperative projects in which European organisations (including museums) support the cultural and museum sector in African countries, for instance by providing professional training for African museum staff or by cooperating for restoration purposes. One well-known developmental

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cooperative approach is the Swedish-African Museum Programme (SAMP), an initiative of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA 2002). As a result of the general crisis of representation in the social sciences, cultural history museums – and ethnographic museums above all – have completely lost their status as treasurers of world heritage that has been lifted out of time and place (cf. Thomas 2016; Förster 2013; Noack 2017: 966). Questions are being asked about who has – or should have – the authority and the right of interpretational sovereignty over objects and collections. A strong eagerness has emerged to involve new interest groups, (indigenous) stakeholders, artists, all sorts of cultural practitioners and – not least – members of the so-called ‘source communities’.5 Other premises and assumptions about a ‘critical museology’ (cf. Boast 2011; Shelton 2013; Noack 2017) bring into focus practices like collaborative curating and exhibiting, diverse forms of restitution, and the ‘contact zone’, a term originally coined by the linguist Mary Louise Pratt (1991) and later re-used and introduced into museology by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford (1997). In essence, the term describes negotiation processes, particularly between external stakeholders like the collections’ ‘communities of provenance’ and museum staff, over questions of their access, usage, interpretation and presentation. The core underlying issue is the representation of culture. Indeed, the contact zone marked a move towards a more inclusive approach, as museums started to partner with the communities whose cultures they were about to exhibit. The more recent approach of engaging external stakeholders, along with other efforts to make museums more inclusive and collaborative, has been called the ‘participatory turn’ (Lynch 2014: 79–80), which surely meets a key target of the new museology. Throughout these academic discourses and transformations of practices, museums as institutions have changed radically, from quiet temples of timeless contemplation, information and education into forums of dialogue, social meeting points, and places of criticism and conflict. Noack (2017: 966) conjectures that university research museums, as less entrenched types of museums, are particularly suitable for exploring and sounding out the potentials of collaborative projects. It should be noted that, even though many examples of cooperative projects have been described and discussed in numerous publications, including some with African museums, there is no comprehensive body of literature on the topic of museum cooperation as such. In the following, a short review of the available literature will be provided. Kaufmann (1993) asserts the need to build up international networks of cooperation between museums, as well as between museums and communities of origin. Starting from the observation that most long-term cooperative projects have failed, he claims that international cooperation is a necessity for the future of ethnographic museums, calling for a dialogue between museum professionals on all sides. In addition to the overall aim of generating international dialogue, he develops some ‘specific aims’, including opening up source materials and making them available to the entire museum community; offering to provide help with organising temporary exhibitions in countries of origin; and allowing temporary job exchanges between museums within cooperation programmes (Kaufmann 1993: 49–54). 5 This widespread term has been criticised for being inaccurate, since it is often unclear precisely which groups it means – if they can ever be identified and if they even actually exist as groups or qualify as communities.

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ICOM’s International Committee for Education and Cultural Action (ICOM-CECA) has published two volumes on the topics of cooperation and partnership. The articles they contain focus on museums’ educational activities and are mostly descriptive, rather than analytical. One of the contributions, written by Cedersand (1995), seems relevant for this review. It describes an outreach programme run by the National Museum of Botswana, which took place within a long-term partnership with the National Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden. The relevance of museum cooperation is explained more explicitly by Nicole Gesché-Koning (2005), who points out that museums’ educational activities rely on partnerships to a large extent. According to her, while financial issues are always important, the key point is the exchange of ideas and knowledge in partnerships. Cabral stresses the importance of cooperation even more, stating that ‘their [museums’] activities, in any area, can only happen with the support of partnerships, with several actors besides museum representatives’ (2005: 5). Hilgers-Sekowsky (2015) published a volume about the limitations of cooperative projects between museums, suggesting how they could be overcome. This is a very helpful book for museum management, in both a practical and a theoretical sense, as it analyses museum cooperation from an economic perspective. However, it does not take into account the above-mentioned debates in museology, nor does it analyse any specific cooperation projects in light of these debates. Thus, although the topic of museum cooperation has been taken up by individual scholars, as well as institutions like ICOM, there is still a clear lack of literature that takes an analytical approach towards museum cooperation. There is a need to address and develop the (pre-)conditions under which museums actually cooperate and to ascertain how far cooperative projects reflect and implement the insights and new approaches, such as the participatory turn, which were brought about by new and critical museology, as well as postcolonial theory.

African museumscapes and heritagisation Current museumscapes in Europe – their history and development, trends and politics, the background and essence of museums as a part of cultural systems and policies – have been researched and documented far more than those in contemporary Africa. The sparse literature on African museumscapes emanates largely from external, mostly Western, authors. A knowledge of the texture of each political and cultural context is crucial for situating their analyses and the examples cited in the following chapters, which are mainly written by museum practitioners and scholars active in Africa. In the last twenty years museums in Europe and Northern America have become progressively incorporated into a market-oriented economy. Today they are not only required to serve collection, information and education purposes, but entertainment as well, by regularly organising events, festivals, special days, and even nights, which is entailing a good deal of enforced conformity. These trends, observable in all industrialised countries, should be seen in the context of accelerated globalisation, which is contributing to a certain flattening of the concept of the museum as one more aspect of the general ‘cultural flow’ (Noack 2017: 963). At the same time, Europe’s entitlement to interpretational sovereignty, European in-

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terpretative patterns and terminological definitions have become questioned and watered down. This means that what can, and should, be understood as the institution ‘museum’, its contents and its functions, has been challenged, co-opted and captured from other sides. On the African continent, another cultural trend was noticeable in the same period, divergent from Europe owing to its different cultural and economic context, but still linked to the same broader global framework. The term cultural heritage acquired a high profile in the cultural and political discourse. This concept was intrinsically linked to the reassurance of political, social, ethnic and – above all, national – identities. Cultural heritage is a profoundly political issue, highly controversial and contested. Memory and the tradition of heritage are always closely linked to conflict and loss – to the selection of what is to be remembered and what is to be suppressed (cf. e.g. De Jong and Rowlands 2010). In many African countries national museums became part of the constellation that Bennett (1988) calls the ‘exhibitionary complex’, finding a place and role next to tourism and education. Like the heritage industry, they became part of a transnational order which provides locally-coined forms of global trends. This leads us to several other research questions. If museums in colonial times were part of the infrastructure to impose order on Africa, as Western scholars such as Peterson (2015) posit, how effective was this? What were the influence and impact of the regimented views of museums – on Western eyes, local audiences and African agents in the political and cultural domains? In recent years, growing attention has been given to this issue, as part of the larger patrimonialisation and heritagisation processes (see e.g. De Jong and Rowlands 2010; Galitzine-Loumpet 2012; Peterson 2015). For colonial powers to get a grip on the dominion, it was deemed essential to categorise and standardise all domains of life – not least the cultural aspects – to be able to organise society. Museological practices provided useful assistance to that end – not only in newly assembling and composing, but also in detaching, dissecting and dismembering, as demonstrated by the examples from Uganda given by Peterson (2015: 5f) and Thomas (2016: 86-89): contentious or dangerous objects could be neutralised, and politically and culturally highly-charged items could be tamed by their ‘museumification’. In other words, by removing them from the public domain and inventorying them in a museum, they were transformed into ethnographic artefacts and objects of scholarly study or aesthetic adulation. In Peterson’s words: ‘Colonial states were ethnographic states’ (2015: 4). Under colonial regimes most museums were either equated with and identified as part of the colonial political administration, or at least seen as adjacent to it and in its service. So what was their role in the newly-independent states? To what degree were they instrumental in helping the transformed political and cultural machinery to regiment the new order? Numerous former colonial museums became new national museums. From an objective distance, however, we can readily discern that they are often housed in former government buildings, much in the same way that museums in colonial states reemployed other former sites of power (Galitzine-Loumpet 2012: 622). Although colonialism undoubtedly had a significant impact on the development of museums in Africa, it would be incorrect to see museums in Africa just as leftovers from the former colonial regimes, renewed in a nationalised form. In fact, they have come a long way since the achievement of political independence and the many efforts to gain cultural independence. The conception of the museum was also influenced by local forms of preser-

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vation and adulation of culturally charged objects, as several African scholars have shown (Alagoa 2000; Ardouin and Arinze 1995; Konaté 2007; Effiboley and Labi in this volume). They refer primarily to ancestral shrines, groves and mask houses or places for the custody of religio-political paraphernalia in Western Africa which, in their view, can be deemed as precursor models, but also to different forms of ‘living museums’ as well as community participation and ownership. Those museological institutions and processes popular in several parts of Africa facilitate access to the artefacts stored in the museums, sometimes including their loan to members of the communities from which they originate (cf. McLeod 2013; Keita 2007; Mew 2008). Ultimately, though, national museums did not turn out to be one of the core institutions in the cultural domain, nor even a catalyst in the process of nation-building in the postcolonial states.6 Peterson (2015) posits that ethnographic musealisation has been instrumental in sustaining the colonially-regimented order. Along with the essentialisation and pruning into standardised categories of many domains of daily life went the invention of tradition and ‘valuation of the archaic’ (2015: 9). This changed in the postcolonial situation, when museums started to construct grand narratives and an ‘imagined community’, as part of building up newly-independent states. However, museums were too distant from people’s social and political daily life and were perceived as official institutions. The former colonial structure, now nationalised, was largely characterised by its mapping of life out of history and time, as well as its reification of the dead, neatly classified, and defunct. Most museums transformed from components of a colonial to a new, postcolonial hegemonial state apparatus without any disruption. People do not go to museums because they are simply too removed from everyday life. As the art historian Kinsey Katcha suggests, ‘it hasn’t become contemporary with its surroundings. That is, the elements found there […] don’t have relevance in people’s daily lives’ (2015: 28, 31–33). Museums and their contents are either too historical, or completely ahistorical, fixed in a finite past that was pre-determined by the state. Culture as represented by the Senegalese museum IFAN (l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire), for instance, is detached from actual life (and contemporary art). This representation reveals the official comprehension of heritage by the state and its cultural institutions. State cultural policy on heritage is intrinsically linked to the past. As part of the nation-building endeavour, museums generally represent ‘monumental time’ as opposed to ‘social time’, referring to established historical events in the time of the nation-state and its fixed chronological history to anchor national identity (cf. Katcha 2015: 30-31). Museums did play a role in the process of nation-building, but they did so as contributing to a larger trend and flow of heritagisation. Whereas ethnic fragmentation and categorisation was no longer considered appropriate, in the time of assertive African nationalisms the discourse on African heritage arose, bringing with it a new interest in origins, history and culture which should help to evidence the authenticity of age-old civilisations, lost under the colonial dominion. In this move under postcolonial regimes, museum collections were reassembled and historically-important artefacts, regalia and relics reclaimed. As Peterson states, ‘heritage always involves reclamation’ (2015, 15), and this is the main motivation behind demands for restitution and repatriation. In the age of robust nationalisms, museo6 ‘The nationalised colonial museum did not constitute a melting pot for the development or expression of national identity’ (Galitzine-Loumpet 2012: 619).

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logical restructurings and restitutions were meaningful for underpinning a politically-centralised usage of heritage. But the much more important role of staging, performing and displaying political and cultural unity was assigned to other formats. Cultural events and festivals, with a foremost performative character, which are more malleable devices and versatile in their application, were given this function. There are numerous examples of this stratagem from the 1960s on, such as the oft-cited Senegalese Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (World Festival of Black Arts) in 1966 in Dakar7 and the great diversity in staging authenticité in the Congo under Mobutu’s regime. This celebration and staging of ‘living culture’ gave rise to and invigorated the emergence of phenomena such as living museums (musées vivants), cultural villages and craft centres linked to museums, as well as forging a growing recognition of the category of immaterial, intangible cultural heritage. As part of this ‘heritagisation’, or the ‘heritage turn’, the ethnographic contents of many African museums, resumed from their colonial predecessors, were complemented by ‘living’ elements: from plants and animals to the sale of arts and crafts, craft workshops and even entire artisans’ villages – located in an outer or inner court, that were directly attached to a museum. This extension of the (cultural history) museum concept by adding attractions and bringing museums to life by locating in and attaching them to historically-charged sites and buildings raises several questions and can result in conflict.8 In addition to performative events and newly published or re-written history books, monuments and memorials have played a major role in the display of the nation and the construction of grand narratives. ‘Due to their visibility and symbolic function, they act as places for memory or lieux de mémoire, but also as museum objects at the scale of the national territory: they either substitute museums to signify history or, in the case of museum buildings, the architecture represents a historical moment, thus allowing the container to take precedent over its content’ (Galitzine-Loumpet 2012: 622). There were – and still are – several forces fuelling the tendency of the state in Africa to monumentalise itself, in every sense of the word: as a monumental memorial on a massive scale. As well as the influence of colonialism and the model of European nationalisms, this tendency is also being strengthened by the policy of UNESCO and other international agencies to promote technologies of heritage production that generate a formalised past. De Jong and Rowlands (2010, 15) show ‘how official urban landscapes of memory act as stages for framing myths of national identity’. They believe that UNESCO’s heritage policy of sharply differentiating between tangible and intangible heritage ‘has privileged the idea of an authentic Africa as performative rather than monumental’ (15).

7 The ‘Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres’ was an initiative that arose out of a review of the Présence Africaine and the Société africaine de culture by the Senegalese government and poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor. 8 Effiboley has given several examples from Benin that show how conflicts can arise between museum staff and other residents where buildings that have been used as a domicile or site of customary power are transformed into museums but still invested with politico-religious functions (2008: 128, 2015).

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Figure 1.1: Craft centre linked to the Museu Nacional de Arte, Maputo, Mozambique, 2013

Photograph: Thomas Laely

The contributors in this volume draw their analyses of transcontinental cooperation predominantly from museums’ situations in Africa, alongside politics of culture and heritage. Before introducing the central issues that will be discussed, we need to acknowledge a basic distinguishing feature of museum institutions in Africa, which are notable for their distinct objectives, commitments and resources. For the purposes of this book, it is important to differentiate the two broad types of historico-cultural museums that prevail in sub-Saharan Africa today (aside from art museums and galleries), which have diverging trajectories. On the one hand there are the classical national museums. These are typically multi-genre institutions, committed to bolstering a national ideology and history as secondary props of the hegemonic complex in a Gramscian sense, conveying these in a more or less doctrinal way in their permanent exhibitions (cf. Gaugue 1997, 1999; De Jong and Rowlands 2010; Galitzine-Loumpet 2012). As demonstrated, these establishments have played an emancipatory role in the struggle for, and reassurance of, political independence, alongside performative events, cultural festivals and monuments, but have never entirely lost their fundamental ambivalence because they have been – and, above all, have been perceived as – offshoots of the ancient mother country and colonial legacy. On the other hand there are community (-based) museums. Although several sub-types of community museums can be ascertained

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– local and regional, communitarian, private, public and hybrid forms,9 they all feature some common characteristics. They are answerable to local and relational interests, even parochial or familial ones. Their main aims are to revitalise and empower the cultural identity and self-assurance of a particular ‘community’ (cf. Hans in this volume). Often, less priority is given to collection and custody, and more to social aspects, such as providing a social meeting place, cultural reassurance – even activating peace and reconciliation traditions (see Abiti’s chapter). Thus, it is not just tangible material heritage, but also intangible cultural heritage which is of key concern.

Central issues In recent years the institution of the museum has vigorously reappeared in Europe and Africa with new power at national, regional and even local levels. This has been happening in different forms and is driven by diverse forces, as the numerous examples given in this book demonstrate. The process of re-appropriation of the museum was sustained and backed by several endogenic and exogenic factors. These include renewed national narratives, a more heteropolar civil society, international museum programmes and cooperation as well as changing political and cultural environments. Regarding Africa, Effiboley (2008 and in this volume) and Galitzine-Loumpet (2012: 625) consider that these changes were induced less by new cultural policies than by changed political personnel – as well as by the emergence of new actors and partners. Furthermore, today – in marked contrast to the 1960s and the first decade following independence – the nation is no longer king, the market economy is. The contributions in this volume are clustered around four central issues. The two opening chapters are about the historical evolution, different phases and the context of museum cooperation between Africa and Europe. Part II (Chapters 3-5) focuses on the place and importance of the local communities in international cooperation between museums. The chapters in the third part (Chapters 6-9) are concerned with the question of access to collections from Africa, be they on the African continent or abroad, discussing the advantages and challenges of digitisation and the online presence of collections. The three chapters of the fourth and last section evaluate and critique different examples of intercontinental museum cooperation practice, and outline elements of prospective relations in the coming years. Mapping the field – the history and context of museum cooperation between Africa and Europe The contributions to this first section review some diverse examples of, and approaches to, transcontinental cooperation and partnership between museums in Africa and Europe. They recall their networks and different stages of cooperation, and inspect the overarching issues of cultural politics and global cultural trends. Moreover, they consider the institutional embeddedness, the missions, strategies and visions of museums in Africa. Abungu (Chapter

9 See e.g. Rakelmann and Rundle 2003 on southern Africa – South Africa, Namibia and Botswana; Mew 2008; Rassool 2006.

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1) provides a brief outline and review of the different developmental phases of transcontinental museum relations, from the colonial period on and its accompanying characteristics, to restitution debates and the growing relevance of the involvement of communities which the museum artefacts were taken from. Against the backdrop of this historical perspective, Abungu scrutinises the different ways and kinds of projects that are more or less effective in creating bridges between museums in Africa and other continents, especially Europe (see also Abungu 2001). Loumpet (Chapter 2) analyses how the emergence of the museum concept in sub-Saharan Africa is less linked to artefacts and their preservation than to processes of musealisation on one hand, and ambiguous relations between ethnic groups, the national and international – especially at the European level – on the other. He asserts that this has meant the musealisation process is steered by the influence of extra-ethnic authorities under the aegis of international development cooperation, which he considers the most important driving force in the process. Therefore, it is not the museum and its legitimacy as such that is contentious, but rather the unresolved latent conflicts of diverse identities, as Loumpet illustrates using examples from Cameroon and Mali. He observes processes of patrimonialisation within the construction of self-suggested identitarian imaginaries and a re-exoticising of objects. Using the example of Cameroon, he examines the processes of musealisation which were pursued by a national museum project over many years, and the fabrication of a collective memory and national conscience being imposed on all local museum ambitions on a national territory. Furthermore, Loumpet scrutinises the problematic transposition of the European concept of the museum to sub-Saharan Africa and traces the roots of the patrimonial and museological conscience in Africa to its entanglements between international, national and regional interests. He differs from Labi (Chapter 10) by asserting that there was no museological tradition or respective imaginary on the African continent prior to colonial times (see section on ‘Evaluation and critique of museum cooperation practice’ below). Local communities, national museums and international networks – relations based on partnership? Since the participatory turn, it has become imperative for ethnographic museums in Europe and North America to cooperate with communities of origin, but this kind of cooperative practice is also being implemented by museums within Africa. Mataga (Chapter 3) focuses particularly on the relations between Zimbabwean museums and local communities. Examining the latter’s access and links to artefacts in the museums and to sacred sites – exploring the different understandings of heritage held by communities and museum staff – he identifies a need to acknowledge different ways of seeing, alternative visions and perspectives. Mataga postulates that acknowledging and integrating local ways of knowing is as central for African museums as for those in Europe. This is especially so when it involves sacred cultural objects, not least in order to avoid, as he puts it, the recurrent ‘epistemic violence meted out by European modernity and its associated museum practices’. He shows how source communities can become involved in the museum field actively as well as passively, based on their agency to make claims of ownership and involvement, thereby transforming the role of museums to spaces of public involvement. In recent decades, a large number of community museums in African countries have been created. Furthermore, restitution requests have become frequent. It is, therefore, clear

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that local communities are actively engaging in, and laying claim to, the representation of their cultural heritage, as well as its preservation and documentation. But it would be wrong to see them as isolated entities. On the contrary, their heritage activities are embedded within larger networks at a national and international scale. Hans (Chapter 4) positions East African museums towards the reigning heritage and the culture and development discourse which have both become integral to international NGOs’ practice. By way of contrast, she highlights the divergent, basic needs of African ‘contemporary museums’ (regional, local and community museums) whose goals, differing from the borrowed Western model and institutional blueprint, are primarily to reinforce and strengthen cultural identities and cultural self-confidence. Their priorities are less about collection and conservation but rather social aspects, fulfilling functions as social meeting points (cf. Abiti’s chapter in this volume), places of cultural reassurance and, even, forums to activate peace and reconciliation traditions. This comprises not only tangible material heritage, but also the intangible cultural heritage which reconciliation procedures are part of, as we see in Abiti’s chapter (see below). Hans argues that international cultural networks and NGOs have sufficient leverage to influence and work towards a new museum model that is more appropriate and better adapted to local circumstances than the standard Western version. Hans concludes that the structural setting of community museums within international networks is better understood as a ‘zone of contact’ than a ‘contact zone’, because community museums in Africa are at the periphery of the international networks, at the centre of which are European and North American museums, and have engaged in participatory museum practices, following the ideas of Clifford and Pratt. Abiti’s chapter (5) illustrates what meaningful activities and appropriate models of museums in Africa can look like. He explains the background and cooperative practice of a three-way cooperation between local communities, international organisations and the Uganda National Museum, showing how this collaboration successfully met the local communities’ needs concerning cultural heritage, by tapping into international networks. Specifically, Abiti describes and analyses a case study of one museum’s active engagement in reconciliation efforts in post-conflict northern Uganda. The cooperation partners successfully fostered dialogue in the local community and integrated local cultural institutions. In 2015 the newly-formulated Ugandan Museums and Monuments Policy included community memorial dialogue as an important part of museum work. Accessibility of collections from Africa Silvester’s account (Chapter 7) of the Africa Accessioned project grows out of a case study of Namibian collections held in Finnish museums. The main aim of that project is ‘to locate and list African ethnographic collections held in European museums’. Silvester shows how this example could provide a viable model for developing new international relationships between museums, as well as stressing the importance and relevance of museums’ work to initiate dialogue with the communities their objects came from. His chapter offers a lucid materialisation of the significance and possible scope of partnering between museums within and outside Africa, demonstrating the different kinds of results that can be attained by museum collaborations. A key aspect of these types of relationships is that they would not only review and reprocess the past, but would also concern the present and future.

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The collections could be used to forge contemporary links between different places, which would provide the basis for other forms of cultural exchange, since reviewing the past can inform and stimulate debates on contemporary issues. Silvester also asserts that the kinds of communication beyond museum walls initiated by numerous ethnographic museums in recent years should not only reach out to African diasporas, but should also open up communication with additional stakeholders – not least museums on the African continent itself. Lagat (Chapter 8) challenges some of the popular arguments against the restitution of objects to African countries, relativising the fears of Western museums to loaning objects to African museums. He uses the Hazina exhibition at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi to show that African museums do implement effective measures to protect and preserve valuable objects in their exhibitions and collections. The Hazina example vouches for many African museum institutions’ preparedness to host international loan exhibitions. Thus, Lagat proves that not allhistorico-cultural museums in Africa can be measured by the same yardstick, or are less professional or competent than their European counterparts. He demonstrates that there are ways for well-managed and staffed museums on the continent to partner up at an international level and to host international loan exhibitions, correcting a one-sided and stinted image of African museums. Kros and Mehnert’s contribution (Chapter 6) is a vivid illustration of the potential of partnerships and collaborations in a more general sense. They highlight the pervasive omnipresence of museum cooperation, pointing out that it should not be reduced just to the institutional level of museums, but should also be executed at the level of individuals, scientists and experts on both sides. The case they examine, of the Swiss missionary and natural scientist Henri-Alexandre Junod and his African interlocutors, is just one example of this, which highlights the African agency that has, so often, been neglected. Debating the reasons for and against digitisation and museum collections’ online presence, they discuss the possible pitfalls of producing a completely static website, with only the curator’s interpretation present and no dialogue possible in the sense of a ‘contact zone’ with outsiders, communities of origin, visitors and other stakeholders. In the field of arts, Peters-Klaphake (Chapter 9) shows the assets attainable by a close collaboration between institutions and individuals based on different continents and rooted in distinct cultural and political surroundings. Her contribution advises that collections should not be considered and accepted as firmly-established and static, but rather they act as intersections and hubs whose intrinsic nature calls for various and multiple actors, for different approaches and views. She reaches a similar conclusion as Silvester, showing what could be obtained by international and transcontinental partnerships between museum institutions – as the slogan of the Africa Accessioned project states: ‘Collections can generate connections – museums can build bridges’ – just as Peters-Klaphake demonstrates in her example. Instead of closing down and enshrining collections tainted with the colonial stain, or dealing with them purely as a group of objects associated with a particular cultural group, museums in and outside the African continent should open up their collections and their institutions, in pursuit of potential new collaborations. These collaborations should take place at both an international level with museums holding collections originating from their country, and locally with communities (not necessarily just those of alleged ‘provenance’). In their chapters, Kros and Mehnert and Mataga discuss the significance and opportunities

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that such a collaborative approach might create, by enabling existing knowledge to become intertwined with additional, yet untapped, knowledge systems. It is no coincidence that both contributions come out of the political context of South Africa, with calls to decolonise local museums whose collections largely date from the colonial period. In times of movements like ‘Rhodes must fall’– and many others, too10 – ‘decolonising’ stands for encouraging and admitting alternative views and perspectives. The concept of ‘decoloniality’ implies a challenge to the universalisation of European modernity and authority of interpretation. As the authors postulate ‘new ways of seeing’ through a ‘perspective of decoloniality’, they are advocating a much broader vista of knowledge-making, arguing for the inclusion of African intellectuals and specialists’ voices, acknowledging their agency and, thereby, sharing knowledge and authority of interpretations of exhibits, contextualising collections by investigating their history and collectors. In short, this means seeking to achieve plurivocality and multi-perspectivity. Evaluation and critique of museum cooperation practice Effiboley (Chapter 11) contextualises museum partnerships in the broader context of culture and heritage politics in Africa, based on an example from Benin. He scrutinises and questions the astonishing disinterest that today’s political leaders and politicians in Benin have in image-building, national representation and representational institutions like museums in general. He contrasts this indifference towards lasting monuments or ‘des grands travaux’ set up in their name, with other times and continents, from the Pharaohs to Senghor, Wade or Mitterand. Furthermore, Effiboley argues that, despite manifold projects aiming to improve the quality of African museum service in the decades after independence, museums have not managed to emancipate themselves from their colonial past or reinvent themselves in the postcolonial era. According to him, this is mainly down to politicians’ lack of vision and responsibility for the African museum sector. In describing and discussing the case of museum development in Ghana and the bestknown international capacity-building programme, PREMA, Labi (Chapter 10) questions the impact of foreign-initiated museum projects and interventions, proposing a complete paradigm shift for partnerships and collaboration, one in which the critical factors are local leadership and ownership. He suggests that museums should take up some heavily-debated contemporary issues, such as the impact that energy and natural resources policies are having on local communities, and generally thematise cultural and technological changes. Labi confronts the crude argument that museums in Africa are colonial institutions by arguing that, within Ghana’s traditions, a culture of preserving traditional art and cultural practices existed long before museums as a Western institution were introduced.11 Obviously there have been many ruptures to the concept of the contemporary museum, where the custodians are not related directly to the old regalia and new artefacts are all housed together according to a Western system, utilised and mobilised in new ways by local and national authorities. It

10 Regarding the toppling of monumental statuary in times of change, often followed by replacing the older symbols with new monuments, see Peterson (2015: 17ff, 30). 11 This was also argued by other authors writing on western Africa (see e.g. Alagoa 2000: 32ff; Ardouin and Arinze 1995, 2000).

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remains clear that there is not one unilinear trajectory for museums in Africa, but different historical courses. Effiboley and Labi both observe that most international support programmes and collaborations were and are largely donor-driven. They posit that museums in Africa should assume leadership of cooperative projects which target their own concerns, taking up local issues and local views in order to appeal to a wider audience. Oberhofer reveals that neither collecting nor restorative practices were – or are – a Western prerogative, which she illustrates by the case of the Bamum Palace Museum in Fumban, in the grasslands of western Cameroon. Her chapter focuses on the mingling of globalised and local museum and restoration concepts. By an increasingly monumentalised patrimony under the guidance of the local king, a Western museum concept is being adopted by locally appropriating it as a ‘living museum’, in which exhibits are still used in local ceremonies. It becomes clear that an international collaboration with a Western museum – in this case the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, Switzerland – in the domain of restoration and conservation, contributed crucially to the locally-adapted mode of a living museum, affording it the flexibility to continue using some of the core artefacts outside the museum, in royal rituals and ceremonial events. In conclusion, the authors of this volume are convinced that there is a need for more theoretical approaches to the topic of international museum cooperation and, moreover, that more practical cooperation work is urgently required today. As this book reveals once more, relations between Europe and Africa in the domain of museum work have, up until now, been characterised by a far-reaching European hegemony. This hegemony has its roots in colonialism and continues to survive long into the postcolonial era. We argue that it is precisely long-term cooperation and the building of lasting partnerships which will help to redefine the relations between African and European museums. This will foster novel efforts to overcome Western hegemony in museum work, implementing instead the principle of cooperation on an equal footing which centres on knowledge exchange, joint research and curating, and an egalitarian collaborative culture. Instead of cooperating on shorter timescales with a focus on transmitting know-how and technical assistance from Europe to Africa, as well as the ongoing export of cultural objects and immaterial cultural heritage from Africa to Europe, or the self-cleansing of Western ethnographic museums under the flag of the contact zone, cooperative projects should be bi- and multi-directional. Why not display European objects or thematise European culture in African museums? Long-term cooperative projects could create more than fleeting practical exchanges – lasting social and professional relationships which have the room to pilot new approaches. Experimentation is a promising feature of such projects, because theoretical ideas of ways to cooperate need to be tested in practice. It is here that hegemonies can be jointly reflected, difficulties detected and analysed, and solutions subsequently used for improvements. Critical self-reflection is a principle which should be at the core of cooperative projects. Scholars like Boast (2011) remind us that it is, indeed, necessary to critically and continuously reflect on our own actions and question practices that we take for granted, to avoid neo-colonial biases in cooperation and representation. Such critical analyses of the experiences of cooperative projects can be used to develop new approaches and practices for cooperation between museums, which can then form the basis for further theorising on the topic. So yes, it is time to develop a new paradigm for museum cooperation.

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Peterson, Derek R. 2015. ‘Introduction: Heritage Management in Colonial and Contemporary Africa.’ In The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures, edited by Derek R. Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool, 1–36. London: International African Institute; New York: Cambridge University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. ‘Arts of the Contact Zone.’ Profession, 1991: 33–40. Rakelmann, Georgia, and Rundle, Stella. 2003. ‘Museen im südlichen Afrika.’ In Museum und Universität in der Ethnologie, edited by Michael Kraus, and Mark Münzel, 173–187. Marburg: Curupira. Rassool, Ciraj. 2006. ‘Community Museums, Memory Politics, and Social Transformation in South Africa: Histories, Possibilities, and Limits.’ In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/ Global Transformations, edited by Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, 286–321. Durham: Duke University Press. Rowlands, Michael, and Ferdinand de Jong. 2010. ‘Reconsidering Heritage and Memory’. In Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa, edited by Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands, 13–29. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Shelton, Anthony. 2013. ‘Critical Museology: A Manifesto.’ Museum Worlds 1, no. 1: 7–23. SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency). 2002. Museum Cooperation. Accessed January 25, 2018. http://www.sida.se/contentassets/d17e26d31a7f424f81526d66c090f702/museum-cooperation_798.pdf. Thomas, Nicholas. 2016. The Return of Curiosity: What Museums are Good for in the 21st Century. London: Reaktion Books. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). n.d.a. Culture and Development. Accessed January 25, 2018. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/ themes/culture-and-development. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). n.d.b. Culture for Sustainble Development. Accessed January 25, 2018. https://en.unesco.org/themes/ culture-sustainable-development. Vergo, Peter, ed. 2006. The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books.

PART I Mapping the field – the history and context of Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe

Connected by History, Divided by Reality Eliminating Suspicion and Promoting Cooperation between African and European Museums George Okello Abungu

Introduction: Museum origins Museums as we know them today have their origins in the West, particularly in Europe. While it would appear that museums as a concept – or even in practice – might have been present in some form in ancient Greece, museums as they are conceived and understood today can be traced back to the age of curiosity and collections in Europe, with an aristocratic origin from high-status people wanting to show off their collections among the aristocracy from around the 18th and 19th centuries. Museums, therefore, have a much longer history in the Global North than the South. Due to museums’ origins as cabinets of curiosity, holders of war spoils, and object repositories for research purposes, they have a rich history of collecting which spans several centuries and reaches across many continents. The British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris are good examples of public spaces that have a long history of collecting, including donations and acquisitions from nearly every part of the world. Owing to their association with the elite of the time, the powerful establishment and the rich and opulent aristocrats, their positions were rarely contested. To a certain extent, the major museums in the West are a power unto themselves, still endowed with support from both states and benefactors, often perceived as being at the service of society and humanity. Their role as public spaces and holders of knowledge provides them with some degree of ‘moral right’ to expect unfailing support from their governments. Because these large museums’ collections have been gathered from across the globe over the centuries, with support from institutions and individuals such as earlier researchers, missionaries, colonial authorities, and art and artefact collectors, their contents transcend national boundaries. While these collections have been gathered under differing circumstances, with some from conflict areas which could qualify as spoils of war, no distinction is made today between the assemblages, which are all grouped together as museum collections. Because these museums include items from across the globe, they tend to brand themselves in a universalist manner, claiming to represent the whole world (Abungu 2004). Thus, the idea of ‘universal’ or ‘encyclopaedic’ museums has attracted positive and negative critiques. Judging by how far the idea was received and what became of it, it was an idea that never caught on. To the contrary, it has been interpreted as large rich museums with suspect collections wanting to get away with the same. This is further elaborated below. There are, of course, other museums apart from these large and ‘prestigious’ ones, which are either place- or culture-specific. These generally differ from the flagship museums displaying artefacts and memories from the ‘great’ explorers and colonial period. They may be regional or town museums, focusing more on the culture or archaeology of a region within a

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country. However, in the West, it has also become fashionable – even customary – to be seen to be inclusive, by claiming to represent many world cultures in order to express human diversity and cater for a global audience within the museum space. In many circumstances, though, this is evident more in theory than in practice, since representing the entire world under one roof is an almost impossible feat – even for the so-called universal or encyclopaedic museums. However, Gothenburg in Sweden and Vienna in Austria both have a new type of museum, called a ‘Museum of World Cultures’, which claims to represent the world without colonial or conquest material. They assert that they have broken the colour, race and culture barriers that are sometimes prevalent in many earlier museums whose collections were gathered from colonial sources. They also bring an element of informality to an institution that is often very formal and temple-like. Thus, museums are known for their ‘donot-touch’ policies and the almost devout visitors who process through the exhibitions in a silent, meditative manner (Abungu 2012; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2000, 2004a, 2004b). In complete contrast, the world cultures museums promote human-material interaction, including spaces for performances in the museum and allowing audiences to linger and dawdle on their computers. This is definitely a radical departure from the traditional museum model. However, it is questionable whether their collections and exhibits genuinely represent all world cultures from truly diverse perspectives. This transformation in museums is not new or region-specific. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2000) observes that, as museums look to the future, they are redefining their relationship to their past using new models of citizenship, changes in knowledge formations, and responses to the competing media environments that are challenging museums to rethink their role – both as a medium, and in society. Citing the example of Te Papa Tongarewa in New Zealand, she predicts a situation where new citizenships and the need for inclusive voices and multiculturalism will make museums carry out a revolution instead of just evolving, rejecting and fleeing from their past to create a true reflection of the present. This has already happened in many African museums after independence, when they set out to forget the past and rewrite the present. Thus, African museums have a different context from those in Europe. Their experience is shared by others in parts of the world that also underwent colonisation and marginalisation, whose history was not written by the owners and creators of that history but by outsiders, and whose experience in the museum world has been one of compartmentalisation based on race, ethnicity and cultural differences.

The African experience Most major museums in Africa were founded during the colonial period, with contested histories based on colonial-influenced narratives of representation, which were not necessarily in the interests of, or meaningful to, the local people. On the contrary, they were beneficial to the colonisers, as they often perceived – or wanted to perceive – and represented Africa and Africans as less developed people who were stuck in the past. Many museums were also opened in Africa during that time to provide opportunities for local and foreign scholars (mainly of European origin) to undertake research in various fields, especially archaeology, ethnography, palaeontology, botany and zoology. Museums

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were, therefore, seen as places for the privileged white elite which the ‘natives’ were not given access to, either because nothing was of interest to them or because the museums were in areas which locals were not allowed into, lest they be considered trespassing or loitering under colonial laws. Of course, an exception was made for the servants and nannies who looked after the masters’ children, who would be permitted to pass time in whites-only parks and museums. In addition, many of the items assembled as tribal collections – especially in ethnographic sections of museum exhibitions – were often commonplace items from local people’s homes. It would thus make no sense for them to go and see the same things they used in their own lives in a different space, just because they now had labels and were arranged in a certain order to display a particular narrative that stressed the difference between peoples, belittling the creators and users of this material culture. However good the colonial museums in Africa were, they still had intrinsic biases, were produced from a certain viewpoint and were open to discrimination. As such, they appealed less to the local communities. Apart from being laboratories of knowledge for researchers from outside the continent, many African museums of colonial origins and period were basically privileged and legal collection points for African heritage material heading to the West. Until many countries in Africa gained their independence, there were hardly any museum professionals on the continent. Subjects prevalent in the museum field, such as palaeontology, archaeology, botany, anthropology and zoology, were either out of reach for African scholars or were not offered for study in their respective countries. This resulted in the museums being run by expatriates, with local people being hired as cleaners, fossil hunters in archaeological and paleontological expeditions, and the preparers of insect and plant specimens in laboratories under the supervision of the so-called ‘experts’, who were generally white and not from Africa. This intentional discouragement and lack of capacity-building among the black population by those responsible for museums in the colonial period not only ensured that museum practices continued as they had been during colonial times after independence, but also created ruptures and discontent among the local intellectuals, which flowed into future relations between the museums of Africa and Europe. At independence, many museum institutions became places of contestation and subsequent reorganisation. This was because, firstly, their stories contradicted the views of the incoming nationalist governments and, secondly, they were seen as places dominated by elite white people that retained vestiges of colonial interest (Abungu 2005). In some cases, where their roles transcended representing the natives as perceived through the colonial mentality, narratives and research, those in charge were reluctant to cede their privileged positions and autonomy to the locals or the governments of the day. Instead, those in positions of responsibility – who were often the local white elites – found protectors within the emerging independent governments who would provide patronage, so were able to maintain the prevailing status quo (Abungu 1997, 2006). Many museums were, therefore, places of friction and contestation between indigenous locals and foreign elites and, at times, became places of conflict between researchers from different parts of the world who had contrasting interests in the heritage of various African countries. Thus, at independence, some governments decided – or were made to decide – to bestow control over all their country’s national heritage on the museums, including responsibility for issuing permits to researchers. This made the museums powerful entities

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since, as well as exhibiting and researching their countries’ heritage, they also acquired the authority to advise on or approve permits for research in relation to heritage. This crucial, central museum function meant that researchers had to endear themselves to the powers that controlled the museum institutions. In the process, rivalry often developed between competing researchers who wanted to work on the same site or the same subject matter. This was worst in places where museums became the custodians of their countries’ heritage, thereby controlling more than just what they contained within their museum walls. This was – and still is – the case today for museums in several English-speaking countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Nigeria and Ghana, where the government lacks either a Department of Antiquity or a strong Department of Culture. In French-speaking Africa, however, museums have evolved differently, as subject- or region-specific, without gaining a mandate to control the entire national heritage. Despite the presence of major national museums like the National Museum of Mali, the National Museum in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and IFAN Museum of African Arts in Dakar, Senegal, their remit does not cover national sites and monuments. Therefore, there is less possibility for controversies in negotiating the varied research and collection interests from researchers and other interested parties. Nonetheless, these museums still relate to particular museums in Europe, specifically France; individual museums have formed relations based on their specific research interests. So, it is clear that earlier cooperation between European and African museums was based on inequality, at times rampant exploitation, and even plunder and theft. This is exemplified by, for instance, the Abomey raids and looting in the 19th century; missionaries’ collections for museums as well as their contradictory acts of destroying African heritage for being ‘heathen’ during colonial periods (Schmidt and McIntosh 1996); and the wanton appropriation of African cultural materials from the Democratic Republic of the Congo during King Leopold’s time, which led to the creation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Irrespective of all this, and the slow tempo at which museums in Africa have become decolonised, they have evolved and, at times, revolted in diverse ways, to play a major, pivotal role in the lives of peoples and nations. The role of museums as people-centred institutions has been developing over a long time and across the globe in different ways. Pille Runnel (2012) attributes this to the development of digitisation and democratisation of museums. He states that, in order to better fulfil their role as public institutions within a democratic framework, museums must provide more participatory activities, claiming that the two core processes of digitisation and democratisation have forced museums to focus on dialogue with their audiences. He further observes that just providing more information is no longer considered sufficient, and that museums are increasingly having to compete for people’s attention in the arenas of leisure and education. In contrast to Runnel’s assertion, however, in Africa this change has not been brought about so much through a combination of digitisation and democratisation, but by the necessity to make museums relevant, accountable and of service to society, rather than the other way around. It is influenced by the need to decolonise and democratise museum systems, opening them up to the public and meeting the challenges from competing leisure and service-providing facilities, such as the ever-mushrooming shopping malls (Abungu 2012). Museums are obliged to account for the taxpayers’ money they are allocated, so as to

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continue to receive subsidies. In this, they not only have to prove their relevance to society, but also demonstrate a tangible contribution to national consciousness through participatory processes (Abungu 2012, 2006). Today, museums in Africa have started to play a key role in national development, education and leisure, as well as improving interactions between countries and regions through joint research and cooperation, having developed some strong relations with museums in Europe over time.

African museums as custodians of heritage in the face of past and present political dynamics As one of the institutional custodians of heritage, museums in Africa have become centres of power as well as attractions. They are now knowledge banks, voices of communities’ pride in their heritage, redefining existing identities, creating new identities, and acting as places of communal dialogue and inclusion. Some are crucial spaces for gatherings, silent protests, historical and current reflections, defending rights to healing and conflict resolution. The National Museums of Kenya (NMK) have been at the forefront of using indigenous means of conflict resolution to create peace between communities. NMK has used its spaces, researchers and curators to sensitise communities through its exhibition about the vagaries of conflicts and wars, as well as opening its doors to let communities tell their own stories through community-curated exhibitions. District Six Museum in Cape Town is a reflection of a collective community power marshalled around a museum space to defy one of the most powerful systems of state oppression, with people standing up for what they consider to be their rights – in this case, land (Rassool 2006). Equally, the many layers of history depicted at Robben Island Museum stand out as a site of suffering that subsequently evolved into a place of forgiveness and reconciliation, demonstrating the largesse of the human spirit, as Ahmed Kathrada (a former political prisoner) once observed (Robben Island Management Plan 2004). However, this representative nature, where a museum acts as the spokesperson for a society, has not always been the case for museums in Africa; on the contrary, some museums were like mouthpieces for the colonial agenda of belittling local people, promoting a narrative of inequality and becoming instruments of psychological control. Through museum exhibitions’ depictions of unequal human development, the concepts of superior versus inferior, or noble versus primitive races were constructed and presented as the truth. Thus, until the early 20th century, western scholarship promoted a version of ethnic and racial difference that included assertions of different brain capacity in various human races. According to this argument, black Africans were considered to have the lowest intellectual capacity, with the blue-eyed, white western population at the top of the ladder. This, therefore, gave the latter a moral responsibility to ‘colonise and civilise the rest of the world’. For example, in Europe, some museums courted partnerships with the colonial authorities and so took on the appropriation and exportation of all kinds of African heritage, including sacred objects. In addition, others went as far as condoning the garnering of human remains for what were described as ‘scientific experimentations’ (Rassool 2001, 2015). Many museums in the West possessed huge amounts of human remains from different parts of the world, including Africa, in the name of science and research. To this day, some of these mu-

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seums continue holding large volumes of African human remains in their collections, a point of contestation for some present African governments, relatives of the victims and the general population who had suffered such atrocities. While some negotiations and returns have been effected, especially in Southern Africa (Legassick and Rassool 2000; Rassool 2015), other museums in Europe are still considered complacent partners in these atrocities, with no commitment to return or even investigate the provenance of their collections or to open up public disclosure about them. Of course, this all has implications for the normalisation or development of positive, equal relationships between museums in Europe and Africa. Many of these remains, particularly the human ones, were taken under contested circumstances such as thefts and massacres by the German colonial powers of the Herero in Namibia and the Maji Maji in Tanzania. To western eyes, these remains had ceased to be humans and other people’s ancestors as soon as they were appropriated, becoming merely one element of museum collections or heritage (Rassool 2015). Even today, the same museums use these very artefacts to demonstrate the diversity of their collections as a justification of their supposedly global or universal outlook, to qualify them as universal or encyclopaedic museums (Abungu 2004). The concept of heritage or collections of which the museums are the custodians is shrouded in complexities and contradictions which are not easily transferable from one region to another in terms of our understanding, appreciation or condemnation. Thus, what is considered sacred in one part of the world can be seen merely as an object of curiosity elsewhere. For instance, a kigango (plural vigango) is so sacred to the Mijikenda people along the Kenyan coast that it is treated as a living ancestor but, in the West, it is exhibited to museum audiences as a piece of tribal art (Abungu 2002; Abungu and Githitho 2012; Udvardy et al. 2003; Wolf 1986). While museums in Africa cannot be considered blameless in their display of such sacred objects, and some museums are still stuck in past ways of representation, having barely moved on from the colonial ‘hangover’ of ethnographic representation of people and their material cultures in an ‘authentic’ form, there is definitely an awareness in the African museum world of the sensitivities associated with sacred and human remains, as well as representations of people in museum exhibitions. For example, the Iziko Museum in Cape Town moved quickly to dismantle its so-called ‘Khoisan’ exhibition soon after the end of apartheid in 1994 (Bredekamp 2004). Similar changes have taken place in museums in other parts of Africa since gaining political independence. The relationships between museums in Africa and Europe should go beyond that of museum institutions alone, to encompass the people whose heritage is collected, interpreted and exhibited, and whose knowledge is tapped into, to develop narratives where they are participants. Thus, museums as custodians of heritage assets represent places of conflict at both local and global levels because of their aggressive appropriation of people’s heritage, including sacred objects. The call to decolonise and democratise museums in Africa, first expressed by Konare (1996), partly aimed to address these anomalies. These issues include suspicions of exploitation and a lack of respect for people’s beliefs and practices, which might hinder cooperation between African and European museums. However, Africa is not a continent of the innocent where museums are exempt from acting in an unethical manner. On the contrary, many museums are still mouthpieces for the dominant narratives and, like in other parts of the world, it is easy to recognise that a

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selection takes place within the museums, a choice of which stories are told and which are not, where some historical layers are suppressed and others emphasised, depending on who is in control. With a long history of colonially-constructed narratives told through museum exhibitions, museums were previously viewed as being complicit partners in the colonial agenda, and can be seen today as representing a country’s ruling class and intellectual elites. However, there is nothing unusual about this, and the use or misuse of heritage in any context, including museums, has been raised by numerous scholars. For instance, Davison argues that heritage should not be seen as a version of history that seeks to be objective, precise, accurate or universal (Davison 2008). He notes that heritage ‘bends and reshapes the past to a present purpose; sentimentalises, fabricates, distorts’ (Davison 2008, 35), even when it ‘mimics history’ (Davison 2008 in Lowenthal 1996, 121), since it is always specifically ‘written from a point of view’ (Davison 2008, 36). Observers have further argued that heritage is inherently political. Davison (2008) states that heritage is ‘essentially a political idea’, while Smith (2006) and Harrison (2009) argue that, owing to the political nature of heritage, it has the potential to be misused. If not used appropriately, it can result in either exclusion or marginalisation, especially in multicultural societies, through authorised heritage discourses, since heritage entities – whether fossils, landscapes, items or places – become important objects in the symbolism of identity politics. Indeed, this is not unique to Europe or the North alone, but is also applicable to the present African situation. The question then is: Who do museums represent or speak for? In the need for international cooperation, we must understand who are the real and the imagined stakeholders. What kinds of cooperation are feasible and which are not? What are the drivers and who are the driving forces behind this cooperation? The next section discusses who the players are, as well as their respective roles and agendas.

Forging relationships between South and North: Testing unchartered waters Since independence, cooperation between museums in Africa and Europe has taken different forms over time, dictated by historical experiences, politics at home and abroad, various interests, including research agendas, and relations between professionals and politicians. A good example of political dynamics was when Olusegun Obasanjo, the former president of Nigeria, gave away the Nok terracotta artefacts that were held in a museum in France under contested circumstances to Jacques Chirac, the former president of France, without any consultation with stakeholders at home, thereby sanctioning past illegality, to the chagrin of many heritage professionals and scholars in Nigeria and the rest of the world (Abungu 2016b). This state of affairs is also compounded by the numerous stolen artefacts gathered through illegal excavations that have taken place in many parts of Africa, including Nigeria and Mali. Many museums in Europe are known to house large collections of terracotta pottery from Mali and Nigeria that were dug up illegally and exported to Europe over the years (Schmidt and McIntosh 1996). While some national museums assumed the important role of custodians of heritage at the point of independence, those in the English-speaking parts of Africa became less incli-

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ned to cooperate in the collection of heritage on behalf of their European counterparts. The attitude in French-speaking Africa was different, though, as the French retained a strong foothold in their former colonies through their government advisers, who remained on the continent even at African government ministerial level. At independence, there was a shift between the English-speaking countries’ relations, with Kenya, Tanzania and other fossil-producing countries in eastern and southern Africa switching their attention to look more towards the USA for research cooperation. Local professionals such as archaeologists, palaeontologists and natural science researchers were sent to the USA for further study and training, and the number of North American faculties working with museums in English-speaking Africa increased. This was because the USA had more research institutions and foundations, funding and training opportunities than Europe, which attracted up-and-coming museum professionals. The people trained in North America subsequently developed an easy alliance with North America, rather than Europe. In the 1960s, President Kennedy’s administration initiated the Peace Corps movement, which sent young Americans to do voluntary work with communities, mostly in developing continents and countries. This played a part in cementing relations between the USA and these places, as young Americans took their country’s values to the grassroots communities and even to some governmental institutions, such as schools and museums. Thus, from the 1960s on, a reduction in cooperation between Africa and Europe could be observed, with a relative increase in relations with North America, particularly the USA. Through Kennedy’s extension of assistance to the newly-independent nations, the early 1960s also saw what became known as the ‘great airlift’ of young Africans for training in the USA. For instance, Kenya sent planeloads of its young people to be trained in various fields. When they subsequently returned, they assumed positions of responsibility in government ministries, as university academics and in the private sector. This cadre of American-trained professionals became the country’s opinion leaders and bureaucrats, making decisions which involved developing government policies. It was, therefore, natural to see a leaning towards and a close relationship with North America from every angle, including museums and the heritage sector. Numerous other factors have also influenced African-European relations, both positively and negatively. One of these was the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which criminalised unorthodox collecting practices and allowed for the return of heritage items of suspect provenance taken after 1970, with a proviso to negotiate for those taken before 1970. This convention opened the door to discussions about what had previously been unmentionable and where silence prevailed, even in situations of unease. It also caused ruptures in relations between Europe and the rest of the world. For example, a number of countries, museums and even communities started asking for the return of what they saw as their illegally-taken cultural heritage. This was not confined to Africa, but occurred all over the world, including requests from the First Nations of North America (Canada and USA) and the New Zealand Maori (Gabriel and Dahl 2008). One more concrete example is the Zimbabwean government’s attempts to retrieve Zimbabwean carved stone bird figures, the symbol of the royal power of the great Kingdom of Zimbabwe, after which the present-day country, Zimbabwe, is named, from Germany and South Africa (Matenga 2011). The opening up of discussions on these secrets in the closet, including materials of suspect provenance, led to many demands for their return, especially for objects with spi-

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ritual and ritual significance to communities, and human remains. This caused uneasiness and fear in the West, leading to a decline in tangible cooperation and a further reduction in the exchange of exhibitions taking place between European and African museums. Part of the fear about exhibition exchange was that some European museums were concerned that some of the source countries might refuse to return exhibitions, especially those containing contested material exhibits. The call for the return of unethically-acquired materials from many source countries, therefore, made viable cooperation between European and African museums unattainable. The fact that these calls also came from countries in the West, such as Greece (e.g. the ongoing demand to return the Elgin Marbles from Britain), further energised some in the South to make the same kinds of requests, producing more suspicion and misunderstanding. The response from western museums that they were better placed than the source countries to take care of the heritage, with their superior knowledge and conservation facilities, further offended and infuriated African museum professionals in particular, creating more rifts. Thus, African museum professionals felt as if their counterparts in the West were implying that they were engaged in the museum field without adequate qualifications and were not competent or capable of taking care of their own collections. The 1990s, however, were a game-changing decade for the African museum scene which brought about evolving dynamics that led to a paradigm shift. The postcolonial museum priority was decolonisation, with a call not only to change the way in which African museums are imagined, constructed and presented, but also to do away with the very institution of a museum as designed and perceived from the European or western perspective. Omar Konare’s (1991/2) reflection that Africa needed to divorce its colonial past through the types of museums it has wrought a mental revolution within the museum fraternity and settings. The question of relevance, in relation to a museum’s role in serving its communities, became of utmost importance. There was a call to symbolically break down the museum walls and allow communities in, doing away with the notion that curators know it all and allowing everybody to partake in their heritage (Abungu 2006, 2016a). This demand for museum decolonisation came at the same time that the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) was founded, bringing African museums and museum professionals together to chart a way forward. At the same time, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) was promoting its Code of Ethics, calling on museums to respect community sensitivities and, where applicable, to return contested materials, including objects and collections of suspect provenance. Many major European and American museums felt challenged, and some responded by asserting themselves as ‘universal museums’ (ICOM 2004). This meant claiming that, since they held large collections from around the world – some of which lacked any form of provenance – they were world museums representing the interests of all humankind. They further declared that they had no responsibility to return any heritage items to their source communities, as all the collections they held were for the benefit of humanity. This argument can be challenged for four main reasons. Firstly, these museums were self-appointed representatives of humanity and their heritage interests; secondly, they were exempting themselves from any responsibility to ascertain or prove provenance and assuming the right to possess other people’s heritage unilaterally; thirdly, they were trying to suppress any discussions around restitution and return which might impinge on their own

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interests; and, lastly, they demonstrated pure arrogance by implying that the West was better at caring for museum collections than other countries, so had the responsibility to continue performing that role on everybody’s behalf, irrespective of historical injustices and contested heritage ownership. Fortunately, this uncalled-for grading of a few museums as privileged entities whose actions could not be questioned did not flourish, as can be seen in ICOM’s discussions on the subject of universal museums. It is worth noting with some concern, though, that a few museums in the West are making a similar attempt now by re-branding themselves as ‘encyclopaedic museums’, complete with the same kinds of features. This, of course, is not helpful for developing proper cooperation between museums in Africa and Europe, as the same contestations of the past are bound to arise. In the uncertainties over recent decades, however, other good efforts have emerged, especially from Scandinavian countries’ support for museums and museum professionals in the developing world. Always positioning itself as a friend of the oppressed and disadvantaged, Sweden has invested both in training African archaeologists at the University of Uppsala under Professor Paul Sinclair and in founding the Swedish African Museums Programme (SAMP), which ran from the 1990s for over ten years under Ms Elizabeth Olofsson, and transformed museum cooperation between the South and the North. Based on the notion of equality and sincerity, SAMP started from the premise that Swedish museums, and especially their staff, needed to learn from the African experience just as much as African museums required assistance through cooperation with Swedish museums – a new kind of relationship and cooperation that took the form of museum twinning. SAMP grew to create opportunities for genuine, fruitful cooperation between African and Swedish museums by both exposing Swedes to the African museums and Africans to the European museum environment. Many of the projects that have been sustained and made a mark in museums in both places were commenced during the SAMP period, which created excellent networks of museum professionals that have lasted for decades and still exist today. It was a partnership that saw projects reaching out beyond the museum walls into their surrounding communities. This could have been partly due to the fact that the programme was long-term, was devised by the twinned museums together, and implemented in unison, rather than adopting some superior and enlightened guidance from Europe. In Tanzania, for example, it resulted in the restructuring and reorganisation of the National Museums of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam, including the opening of the House of Culture. The author of this chapter is a living example of the results of this cooperation between Swedish and African museums who, convinced by the late Hans Mannerby (then Chair of ICOM’s Regional Museums Committee and Director of a Swedish Museum in partnership with a Kenyan Museum), stood to become a member of the ICOM Executive, supported by the Committee for Regional Museums, and then spent twelve years on the Executive Council, as a member and Vice President. However, this programme was not all plain-sailing. In fact, its management was overly concentrated in the hands of one person, Elizabeth Olofsson who – despite her energy, passion, commitment and dedication to duty and to SAMP – was only human, and whose preferences sometimes differed from others’. Moreover, the funding all came from one sour-

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ce, the Swedish government through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA’s) Department for Research Cooperation (Sarec) and was negotiated by Olofsson. When the interest and money dried up, SAMP seems to have just come to a natural end. In addition, SAMP was more active in linking museums in Sweden with those in English-speaking Africa, with very little contact with those in French-speaking Africa. This certainly created a mismatch of relationships, since a vast part of the African continent was left out of this important programme. Although these were shortcomings of the SAMP programme, they also provide useful experiences that any future museum cooperation between Africa and Europe can learn from. On the other hand, through the efforts of Professor Paul Sinclair and support from the Swedish government, the University of Uppsala trained almost half of all currently practising African archaeologists, many of whom, by their own efforts, have risen to senior positions such as university professors and museum directors, and to other heritage positions across the continent. Other forms of cooperation between African and European museums occurred in terms of country support from the 1990s to 2000s. For example, through its Flemish-speaking region and the organisation Education for Development (VVOB), Belgium supported educational programmes in Kenya. Under this, the NMK and the Museum in Tervuren developed some important interactive programmes which supported public programming and capacity-building in exhibition and conservation at the NMK, by financing Belgian experts to work with and train their counterparts for a number of years. It provided work and experience for the Belgians in Kenya and capacity-building opportunities for Kenyan museum professionals. The International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) was created in 1999 to act as an umbrella body for all museums in Africa. As well as being a representative of, and a platform for, African museums, in its early years AFRICOM assisted in the creation of robust networks amongst museums and museum professionals in Africa, as well as with other parts of the world (Awinda 2012). AFRICOM provided a solid basis for African heritage professionals to meet through its General Conferences. It also organised specialised training for heritage professionals working with established heritage institutions like Ecole Patrimoine Africaine (EPA) and the Centre for Heritage Development in Africa (CHDA). It inspired new thinking about the role museums play, removing the barrier between communities and museum professionals by providing platforms for community engagement and the application of new working methods. Furthermore, AFRICOM, together with partners, including those from Europe, championed and guided African museums about the important need to ensure proper documentation in their museums, as a means of heritage protection as well as accurate record-keeping. It assisted museums with relevant projects by creating a bridge between African museums and those elsewhere, especially in Europe and America. The concept of universal museums was a failure. It never took off or gained recognition from other museums – on the contrary, it largely met hostile reactions and even sarcasm (Abungu 2004, 2006, 2008). This resulted in a need for reflection, especially by the big museums of the West, about how they would engage with their counterparts in Africa and other continents. One of these cooperative partnerships is centred on the British Museum in London, which has carried out training and capacity-building activities, along with exhibition upgrades, in a number of African countries. Supported by the Getty Fund, they have

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trained NMK and Uganda Museum staff, among others, in exhibition design and layout. For example, Fort Jesus Museum in Kenya, a world heritage property, benefited from the refurbishment of what is known as the Omani House exhibition, while Kisumu Museum’s main gallery was reorganised. Kitale Museum and Uganda Museum, both in Kampala, have overhauled their displays to conform to current notions of good practice. The British Museum has also helped to develop some uncontroversial exhibitions, such as Hazina which took place in Kenya (see Lagat in this volume). Although small, and not based around any contentious issue, this opened doors for collaboration that finally led to the British Museum starting long-term cooperation with some African museums. This has resulted in staff capacity-building and exhibition refurbishment in a number of museums in countries including Kenya and Uganda, as noted above. The programme has sponsored some African counterparts of the British Museum representatives working on these museums to complete further training, including master’s degree studies in the UK. Other staff have also benefited from the exchange programme by undertaking training at the British Museum itself. Some people were trained locally on the job and are currently using the same knowledge and skills attained at their various locations. Another notable cooperative project took place between the Uganda National Museum and the Norwegian Directorate of Cultural Heritage between 1986 and 2006. This considered how to use the memory of conflict in northern Uganda to memorialise violent occurrences, whilst seeking resolution and helping communities to deal with the pain and suffering of the past. One of the initiators is Nelson Abiti, a curator at the Uganda National Museum who comes from the north of the country. Originally a concept developed between Abiti and Inger Heldal from Norway, this project has made an impact on the people affected by war and atrocities in coming to terms with their past suffering and developing a spirit of forgiveness and renewal (see Abiti in this volume).

Challenges of cooperation Cooperation in any form involves two or more partners. For it to succeed, there must be trust, interest, commitment, and a give-and-take situation and attitude. No cooperative endeavour will be perfect, and challenges occur which may not always be negative and can provide lessons for future cooperation. This section describes the five key weaknesses of the cooperation discussed above. First, as already mentioned, SAMP was mostly based in the English-speaking parts of Africa, which created a barrier and disproportionate allocation of resources and opportunities to the continent. Moreover, it was dependent for its core coordination on one individual and one single source for its financial sustainability. This kind of arrangement is not sustainable in the long term. Second, even though AFRICOM was effective, its existence depended on funding from donor organisations that included SIDA, the Getty Fund, the Smithsonian and other USA foundations. As soon as this funding ended, it practically ceased to exist. This kind of overdependence on foreign resources is unfruitful, and one of the lessons learnt is the need for cooperation that builds sustainable means to survive beyond the donor-funded period. To some extent, even ICOM was not able to assist with AFRICOM; it might even be that

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ICOM considered AFRICOM a competitor in Africa. By the time assistance was on the horizon, those in charge of AFRICOM appeared to lack any idea about what help they needed. Good leadership is, therefore, imperative for such cross-continental organisations. While AFRICOM started on a very good footing and lasted many years, providing much-needed services to its stakeholders, in the past few years AFRICOM has become a shadow of its former self. In my opinion, recently, AFRICOM’s leaders have either lacked clarity about how to run such an important organisation or used it as a stepping-stone for their own benefit. There has been so much unexplained inaction on the part of those entrusted with managing the organisation that I can only conclude they were not interested in nurturing a successful organisation. Ultimately, they are responsible for the collapse of an important – if not the most important – African heritage organisation ever founded. Third, over the past few years, the British Museum has tried to develop working relations with African museums, as discussed above. However, although it has done some commendable work, it is based on the assumption that African museums do not have insights about their deficiencies and are looking to the British Museum for answers. The British Museum even requested funding from the Getty Fund to help African museums without carrying out consultations or feasibility studies on the continent. It was only when the Getty Fund insisted on this that they carried out some needs assessments. Thus, approaching the results from the point of view that the British Museum knows best is unproductive, as illustrated by the African saying: ‘If you do it for me without me then you are against me’. The British Museum has tended to ignore the adage ‘not for me without me’ and, in doing so, it has been accused in some quarters of using its privileged international position to access funds in the name of building African capacity, thereby (ironically) competing with African organisations such as AFRICOM, CHDA and EPA which should, themselves, be doing such work. This, obviously, has a negative effect on heritage sustainability in Africa, since the very organisations that should be supported to ensure sustainability in Africa are facing suffocation and elimination by the powerful, well-connected and well-funded Western institutions. Fourth, some of these programmes are based on personal relations, so when the individuals involved leave, their successors do not want anything to do with them. Therefore, relationships must be based on strong institutional foundations that go beyond personalities. It has also been mentioned within the African museum circles that the more uncritical people within African heritage institutions tend to be favoured for training by the West, since any criticism is often seen as negative and a challenge. This imbalance in honesty cannot lead to long-term relationships and, as things in Africa are so fluid and political, there are frequent personnel changes in the museum sector. Fifth, while the past is gone, there is a need to learn from it and avoid repeating the same mistakes, although it should not always be the point of reference for developing new relations. Spending too much time brooding about the past is not helpful – although neither is forgetting or avoiding confronting it, especially the injustices and unequal relations of the past. Addressing the challenges of the past should, therefore, be seen as a learning process and used to enrich any future relations.

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A way forward in the age of migration It is arguable that the world today needs cooperation more than ever before, since there are such vast movements of people and settlements across the globe. Today there is constant migration resulting from wars and conflict, from people seeking economic opportunities, providing necessary skills to new places of migration, or just looking for different alternatives. The issue of migration from Africa, along with other continents, has been in the news recently, especially individuals boarding boats in North Africa in an attempt to reach the greener pastures they presume can be found in Europe. However, despite this topicality, migration is as old as humanity itself and, without this, everybody would reside in Africa and nobody would live in other parts of the world, including Europe. All humans originated from Africa so, in a sense, we are all Africans. Migration will never end and will always bring challenges. These include the reluctance of settled populations to share their limited resources with newcomers. Many people choose to move between countries because of favourable economic potential and liberal migration laws, for instance, within the European Union. Others are forced to escape violence and persecution, such as Syrians today fleeing the civil war and Jews under the Nazi regime. All of these people need welcome, comfort and acceptance in their new, often unknown countries. Food, money, physical comfort and accommodation alone are not enough, especially for those on their own or those transplanted from the spaces they are familiar with, for instance, mothers with children confined to their new homes as men look for work and socialise with their pioneer peers. These are often culturally and socially dislocated people, to whom any reminder of the things they know or places they have been bring satisfaction and feelings of ease. The question is how can museums attempt to engage such people by bringing them a home away from home – even through temporary exhibitions? How many museums in the West offer these comforting materials to their new migrant audiences and exhibit them in a way that enables the communities to feel connected, recognised, respected and appreciated as part of the family of humanity? Do museums have a role to play in this? The Migration Museum at Lampedusa in the south of Italy demonstrates how museums can successfully perform this function, by engaging new arrivals to make them feel welcome in Europe. The museum works with new arrivals, welcoming them, soothing the souls of those lost in space and from home. They work mainly with children, reflecting a true commitment to ensure the future by investing in young people’s hopes and needs. This approach was described by the Director of Lampedusa’s Migration Museum during ICOM’s 2016 General Conference in Milan. She received a huge round of applause for her presentation, in recognition of the merit of this attitude. Wouldn’t the world be a better place with more similar cases? There is need to work towards a shared future through museums and collections. Only then can there be real cooperation between people and regions, including Africa and Europe. There is no better time to realise this than now, redefining and demonstrating the role of museums at a time of global population movements and conflicts. While this is a challenge, it also offers an opportunity for museums to prove their worth through genuinely inclusive cross-continental cooperation.

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References Abungu, George O. 1997. ‘Kenya: Museums, Archaeology and the Public.‘ In Museums and Archaeology in West Africa, edited by Claude D. Ardouin, 142–154. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press; Oxford: James Currey. Abungu, George O. 2004. ‘The Declaration: A Contested Issue.’ ICOM News 57, no. 1: 5. Abungu, George O. 2006. ‘Africa and Its Museums: Changing of Pathways?’ In Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy, and Practice, edited by Barbara T. Hoffman, 386–393. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abungu, George O. 2008. ‘Universal Museums: New Contestations, New Controversies.’ In Utimut: Past Heritage – Future Partnerships, Discussions on Repatriation in the 21st Century, edited by Mille Gabriel, and Jens Dahl, 32–42. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. Abungu, George O. 2012 ‘Africa’s Rich Intangible Heritage: Managing a Continent’s Diverse Resources.’ In Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, edited by Michelle L. Stefano, Peter Davis, and Gerard Corsane, 57–70. Woodbridge: Bodydell Press. Abungu, George O., and Anthony Githitho. 2012. ‘Homelands of the Mijikenda People: Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests, Kenya.’ In World Heritage: Benefits Beyond Borders, edited by Amareswar Galla, 147–157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Abungu, George O. 2016a ‘Walking the Long Path to Partnership: Archaeology and Communities in Eastern Africa – Relevance, Access, and Ownership.’ In Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa: Decolonizing Practice, edited by Peter R. Schmidt and Innocent Pikirayi, 46–69. London: Routledge. Abungu, George O. 2016b. ‘Illicit Trafficking and Destruction of Cultural Property in Africa: A Continent at a Crossroads.’ In Art Crime: Terrorists, Tomb Raiders, Forgers and Thieves, edited by Noah Charney, 240–254. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Awinda, Francis. 2012. ‘The Role of AFRICOM in Museum Development in Relation to Human Rights.’ Paper presented at the Third International Conference ‘Museums and Human Rights’ of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums, International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, UK, 9–10 October. Bredekamp, Henry C. 2004. ‘Transforming Representations of Intangible Heritage at IZIKO Museums, SA.’ Paper presented at the Session Museums and Living Heritage, ICOM General Conference, Seoul, Korea, 2–8 October. Davison, Graeme. 2008. ‘Heritage: From Patrimony to Pastiche.’ In The Heritage Reader, edited by Graham Fairclough, Rodney Harrison, John H. Jameson Jr., and John Schofield, 31–41. London: Routledge. Harrison, Rodney, ed. 2009. Understanding the Politics of Heritage. Manchester: Manchester University Press. International Council of Museums (ICOM). 2013. ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums. Paris: International Council of Museums. International Council of Museums (ICOM). 2004. ICOM News, no. 1 (2004). http://icom. museum/media/icom-news-magazine/icom-news-2004-no1/. Gabriel, Mille, and Jens Dahl, eds. 2008. Utimut: Past Heritage – Future Partnerships, Discussions on Repatriation in the 21st Century. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs.

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Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2000. ‘The Museum as Catalyst.’ Keynote address, Museums 2000: Confirmation or Challenge, organised by ICOM Sweden, the Swedish Museum Association and the Swedish Travelling Exhibition/Riksutställningar in Vadstena, 29 September 2000. Accessed January 30, 2018. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/ bkg/web/vadstena.pdf. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2004a. ‘Refugium für Utopien? Das Museum – Einleitung.’ In Die Unruhe der Kultur: Potentiale des Utopischen, edited by Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, and Annelie Ramsbrock, 187–196. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2004b. ‘From Ethnology to Heritage: The Role of the Museum.’ Keynote address at the 8th Conference SIEF, Marseilles, 26–30 April. Konare, Alpha O. 1992. Speech at the conference What Museums for Africa? Heritage in the Future, Proceedings of the Encounters, Benin, Ghana, Togo, 18–23 November 1991, 377–379. Paris: ICOM. Konare, Alpha O. 1996. Unpublished Paper Presented at a Conference on the formation of AFRICOM. Legassick, Martin, and Ciraj Rassool. 2000. Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Museums and the Trade in Human Remains, 1907-1917. Cape Town: South African Museum. Lowenthal, David. 1996. Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Free Press. Lowenthal, David. 2000. ‘Stewarding the Past in a Perplexing Present.’ In Values and Heritage Conservation: Research Report, edited by Erica Avrami, Randall Mason, and Marta De La Torre, 18–25. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Conservation Institute. Matenga, Edward. 2011. The Soapstone Birds of Great Zimbabwe: Archaeological Heritage, Religion and Politics in Postcolonial Zimbabwe and the Return of Cultural Property. Uppsala: Uppsala University, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History. Rassool, Ciraj. 2001. ‘Towards the Repatriation of Skeletons in South Africa’s Museums: Sacred and Sensitive Materials.’, South African Museums Association Bulletin 27, no. 1 (June): 69–73. Rassool, Ciraj. 2006. ‘Making the District Six Museum in Cape Town.’ Museum International 58(1–2): 9–18. Rassool, Ciraj. 2015. ‘Re-storing the Skeletons of Empire: Return, Reburial and Rehumanisation in Southern Africa.’ Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 3: 653–670. Robben Island Museum (RIM). 2004. Robben Island Museum Management Plan 2004. Cape Town: Robben Island Museum. Runnel, Pille, and Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt. 2012. ‘Theorising Museum Participation.’ Paper presented at the DREAM Conference, The Transformative Museum, Roskilde University, Denmark, 23–25 May. Schmidt, Peter, and Roderick J. McIntosh, eds. 1996. Plundering Africa’s Past. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Udvardy, Monica L., Linda L. Giles, and John B. Mitsanze. 2003. ‘The Transatlantic Trade in African Ancestors: Mijikenda Memorial Statues (Vigango) and the Ethics of

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Collecting and Curating Non-Western Cultural Property.’ American Anthropologist 105, no. 3 (September): 566–580. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). 1970. Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970. Paris: UNESCO. Wolfe, Ernie. 1986. Vigango: The Commemorative Sculpture of the Mijikenda of Kenya. Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art.

Cooperation between European and African Museums: A Paradigm for Démuséalisation?1 Germain Loumpet

My aim is not to evaluate or describe cooperation between European and African museums but, rather, to use recent museographic experiences to propose hypotheses about a more general idea, based on a transposition of the concept of a museum in Africa and the unique issues that this raises. It should be noted that, with one exception, the contemporary tradition of museums has not been established in sub-Saharan Africa, and there was even less of a notion of museums before the colonial period. In practice, museums emerged from Western thought and the Western cultural space which invented them. By extension, all forms of international cooperation in this field can be legitimately assimilated with European development aid; the two are thus interchangeable. The first museums in Africa were not established for the native population, who rarely visited them, but mainly for the European colonial population. They were based on the naturalist model, like cabinets of curiosities. Next to mineral and biological specimens, ‘tribal’ 2 masks and sculptures were displayed, often described as fetishes, which the local populations saw as retrograde images of themselves. They considered such exhibitions a mockery or secularisation of their beliefs, which instilled fear and stigmatisation. For example, one of the first ethnographic museums, created in Uganda in 1908 by the British Special Commissioner Sir Hesketh Bell, was described by Africans as ‘the house of spells and fetishes’. The Ugandans shunned the place, from which they believed the government drew all its power. After independence in many African states, most of these museums either disappeared completely or were transformed into national museums, usually by the new governments as a form of self-congratulation for their regimes (Gaugue 1997: 564). Much later, between 1990 and 2000, there was an explosion of new community museums in French-speaking Africa – particularly in the west of Cameroon, where each chiefdom opened its own museum – often in cooperation with European museums or nongovernmental organisations.

From empirical heritage to identity heritagism: the heritage awakening The modern conception of heritage was also introduced recently in Africa, although it has been reappropriated and reinterpreted locally in constructed identities, particularly in patrilineal systems in which the cult of ancestors is maintained. The father, the head of the 1 The chapter was translated from French by Elisabeth Heseltine. 2 This is still the case in the National Museum in Niamey, Niger, established in 1958 by Pablo Toucet with the collaboration of Boubou Hama (see Galitzine-Loumpet 2011: 620-21).

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family or tribe, who is the successor of an ascending order, is considered to be the guardian of a common heritage that is both material and immaterial, called either tradition or custom. In the 1970s, however, a certain awareness emerged when a royal protective statue of the Kom called Afo-A-Kom, which had been stolen from northwest Cameroon and sold in the USA, was retrieved by elite members of the diaspora from the region and returned to the community. It was greeted with relief, as its disappearance had brought the tribe bad luck. The story was instrumentalised by the government in two ways: to reaffirm the role of the state as a supraethnic (‘cultural’ in local political parlance) organiser and regulator; and as a demonstration of its power to recontextualise its pre-eminence over ethnicity. Although the reactions to this event varied, because some people saw this male statue ostentatiously demonstrating his virility as the re-emergence of magical rites from a bygone era, intellectuals seized the occasion to reignite nationalist fervour for the return of cultural objects that had been carried off during the colonial era. The beginnings of a consciousness of heritage and museology in Africa can be traced back to the first World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966, when the notion of African values was affirmed in a spirit of both universality and introspection (Dupuis 1991; Ficquet and Gallimardet 2009). The subject of African art was discussed by Black and Afrodescendant intellectuals for the first time during a symposium on Black Arts, with amazed recognition of an art that had hitherto been the subject of negative prejudice. Nevertheless, the speakers’ simple utilisation of a concept of Black art that was inspired by the European avant-garde indicated that conceptual emancipation had not yet been achieved, as it was still borrowing the basic code for interpretation from Western art. One of the important outcomes of the festival was that the concept began to be used as a new political dimension of an argument for resistance, against a cultural domination that was being increasingly challenged. This new attitude was confirmed by the Organisation of African Unity’s Cultural Charter for Africa, produced ten years after most African countries had gained their independence. The resolutions in the charter ring out like revolutionary manifestos: ‘that culture constitutes for our people the surest means of overcoming our technological backwardness and the most efficient force of our victorious resistance to imperialist blackmail’ or, even better, ‘that African culture is meaningless unless it plays a full part in the political and social liberation struggle, and in the rehabilitation and unification efforts…’ (OUA 1976). One of the objectives of the Charter, in Article 1, is ‘the rehabilitation, restoration, preservation and promotion of the African heritage’ (OUA 1976, 3). A decade later, the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972) was ratified by nearly every African state, thus making it official. The terms ‘heritage’ and ‘museum’ thereby became a legitimate part of the political vocabulary, with local interpretations generally being associated with various scales of identity, of which ethnicity appeared to be the basic category. Michèle Tribalat explained, from this perspective, the way in which ‘the categories of ethnicity indicate how consecutive practices of bringing together different cultural identities in the same space are born, intersect and become political’ (2007: 71-84). Therefore, ideological and political issues mainly determined the future of museums in Africa. This suggests that the problem was associated less with the institutions themselves than with the process of muséalisation, as interpreted by Philippe Dubé, who described a

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process that confers a museum-like character to any element that is considered to be fit for a museum, and noted the ambiguity of the relations among an ‘ethnic group’, ‘nation’, ‘Europe’ and the ‘world’, the last two terms being a hindrance to the legitimacy of those involved in any type of cooperation. Therefore, extra-ethnic influences introduced during cooperation might be considered to reorient the process of muséalisation at several levels. These kinds of projects are chiefly bilateral, multilateral or intergovernmental, involving: UNESCO, with its philosophy of conserving African heritage, which had a strong influence on national policies; the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), which set up a specific programme and a dedicated training centre to develop museums in Africa; and European nongovernmental organisations with long-term field activities in Africa. In this context, the recognition of museums’ place and legitimacy as a means of expressing important stories remained unchallenged. On the contrary, grand buildings were usually provided for museums, from the first one, in Dakar, to the future national museum in Cameroon. The problem was an inability to face up to the latent conflicts of identity and traumatic historical events under colonial rule and in the postcolonial nation states. The European Union integrated culture into its social and human development plan (Article 27), as follows: ‘The aim of cultural cooperation is to promote cultural identities, favourise the individual creativity of ACP [African, Caribbean and Pacific] countries and establish the means for the production and dissemination to ensure expression’ (ACP and Cacao/Ccawa 2006). These organisations support and orient the processes of national and ethnic patrimonialisation by creating museums that are based on convention resolutions, international policies and current ideas, such as cultural diversity, sustainable tourism and protecting the environment.

Heritagisation and démuséalisation, a paradoxical situation Two examples from Mali and Cameroon illustrate an original form of muséalisation that was essentially associated with identity, at the interface between the form and content of a traditional museum. The European Union’s European Development Fund3 supported the establishment of three projects to create regional museums in Mali – in Sikasso in Senoufo country, in Bandiagara in Dogon country, and in Djenné. From an analytical point of view, there was a clear discrepancy between these cultural projects and their ethnic roots. Once again, ethnicity prevailed, because the museums are individualised according to the region in which one cultural group dominates: Sikasso, capital of the Sikasso region, is considered to be the birthplace of the Senoufo and the Mianka people and the historical heroes Tieba and Babamba, who resisted the French colonial conquest. The founding Berthé, Diamoutene and Traoré families constitute the moral and ethnic base of the community and do not allow any other ethnic group to intrude.

3 In the framework of activities outside the European Union in 2008.

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These cultural entities have therefore shown indifference to the government of Mali and the European Union ever since the museum was constructed. The purpose and mission of the building was to reinforce a unifying political ideal, a collection of groups in a large administrative area and an imaginary supra-ethnic geographical region, which the state would have found easier to control. The coexistence of sacred objects from all the ethnic groups in the region, such as the Bamana, Peuhls, Bobo, Dogon and Dioula, remains potentially conflictual and could be considered insidious – or even profane. The quasi-instinctive mistrust induced by such an amalgam of tangible and ideological content appears to be the source of recurrent inertia: several years ago, the brand new building intended to house the museum had vacant exhibition rooms. This dramatic, grandiose scene of emptiness clearly illustrates a facet of démuséalisation, when a museum’s purpose is confronted with passive resistance from the community it is dedicated to. The difficulty lies in reconciling established museographic obligations with the requirement for participation. It is not enough to simply propose a display; the actors – who are, at the same time, the subjects and objects of their own history – must also be present. The second case, which again set the state as a supra-ethnic power against an ethnic group, occurred in Cameroon, in a project to establish a national museum and some museums in the west of the country’s Grassfields. As the first project aimed to unify all ethnic groups in an ideal national collection, it bears the tutelary brand of the second. In practice, the state is itself comprised by belonging to a dominant ethnic group with related collaborators. Thus, museums become the object of a subtle duel, which is played out with symbols, in a semiological, non-verbal rhetoric that is nevertheless completely comprehensible to the players. In this way, patrimonialisation opens onto identities and the construction of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 2006) through their articulation and staged interconnection. In the colonial situation, the world was organised on the basis of a simple dichotomy between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’, with a tendency towards modernity that provided its underlying rationale. Questions about particular cultural identities and their recognition or reproduction had little meaning, so were relegated at best to ethnographic curiosities depicted through history – and museums (Collomb 1999). Furthermore, public authoritarian power could use its regal prerogative to form new administrative divisions, primarily to thwart any incipient desire for self-determination in historic territories. Cameroon is a mosaic of peoples, with about 250 ethnic groups which are historical micro-nations. There are two official languages, with French spoken by about 80% and English by 20% of the population. These cultural entities are involved in a constant power struggle, after a violent and painful process of liberation. This situation, referred to as regional equilibrium – which is actually an ethnic balance of the different spheres of national participation – is almost obsessive and is seen to be at the heart of the dialectic of national unity. When a new law on the freedom of assembly was passed in 1990 to replace the 1967 law which had prohibited meetings that were ‘exclusively of tribes or clans’,4 it was a decisive

4 Law no. 67/LF/19 on the freedom of assembly was ratified on 12 June 1967 by the National Assembly of Cameroon (see Direction des Affaires Culturelles 1985).

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moment in establishing the invincible role of ethnicity in political competition, as well as in the area of symbolism and heritage. A multitude of so-called cultural organisations – which were, in fact, tribal and ethnolinguistic communities – were formed along ethnic lines and worked to gain recognition for what they presented as their cultural heritage. Thus, along Cameroon’s Atlantic coast, heterogeneous groups of peoples whose linguistic unity was not clearly established came together under the name ‘Sawa’, which simply and prosaically means ‘riverbanks’. Inland, diverse peoples gathered around the forest ecosystem, despite their linguistic or historical heterogeneity. In the western part of the country, the Bamiléké chiefdoms – a purely colonial invention based on a phonetic misunderstanding – appeared to be considering an expedient grouping in order to obtain maximum advantage from the new context and a potential redistribution of political power. Elsewhere, historically transnational ethnic groups came together on either side of the borders inflicted by colonisation, such as the Kanuri, the secular Sokoto Empire of Nigeria. Such regroupings based on identity are inherent to an ethnic society as defined by Bastenier: ‘that in which the cultural dimension of human activity establishes itself as a specific responsibility of the collective processes in which numerous actors find themselves in situations that encourage them to modify their identities, find new adherences…’ (2008: 4). Initiatives to produce local museums, encouraged by public and private foreign institutions, tend to bypass the state-ethnic group relationships to establish themselves within global spheres. These initiatives are characterised by dynamic museum activity and an extreme patrimonialisation of ancient popular authorities, recreated and oriented towards cultural tourism.

The museums of the western Cameroon Grassfields: the reconquest of historical legitimacy In western Cameroon, most of the presumed traditional chiefdoms, the seats of ancestral institutions, now have sites set aside for museums, which are meant to establish not only their legitimacy, but also the vitality of an endogenous order that has survived the imposition of a transposed state. The Museum of Civilisations in Dschang, inaugurated in 2006, which sees itself as the centre of the museum network along the so-called ‘Chiefdoms Route’, intends to supplant the state by bringing together all intrinsic national cultures, proposing nothing less than a museum of the civilisations of Cameroon, in a project financed by the French region of Nantes Pays de Loire and the European Union (Galitzine-Loumpet 2013: 90-92). This is simply a manifestation of démusealisation, appearing this time in the form and the artifices of illusion, as it does not take into account the need for an objective, precise attribution of each object and its context. For example, the Punu masks of Gabon are displayed as if they were relevant to the Grassfields. Such contempt for their inherent meaning indicates a lack of interest in the exhibition content. This museographic project reproduces almost exactly the unrealised proposal for a national museum and shows that problems of identity are also symbolically present in the appropriation of national history and its presentation. Nevertheless, by the extravagance of

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its building, the museum depicts the stereotyped view of an Africa that conforms to exotic nineteenth-century images, usually reduced simply to mythology – in suggestion of an ‘ethnic market’ (or ‘cultural difference’). Furthermore, the exaggerated visual effects in the exhibitions dislocate the narrative, which diminishes their value, in line with Walter Benjamin’s (1936) assertion that museum presentations are not intended to provide a discursive coherence but an essentially dramatic, spectacular notoriety. Clearly, the exhibitions in Cameroon do not represent exact historical or chronological facts. They overemphasise seniority, aiming mainly to demonstrate that tradition has been well preserved and recorded from time immemorial – albeit not clearly defined. Thus, the origin of the Bamiléké ethnic groups has been situated in the eighteenth century and their arrival depicted as the result of long migrations from Syria, Egypt and Sudan – a purely fictional origin myth. In fact, the items on display to support the myth were made recently, and most come from workshops in Foumban that specialise in the reproduction of all types of ancient African pieces. These objects, which are presented to visitors as regalia, royal treasures or ritual artefacts, are simply the introspective product of an imaginary auto-suggested identity. This re-exotification reverses the paradigm that ‘it is the ethnic group that subverts the categories constructed in the North but also situates itself as the bearer of ethnic signs that are considered attractive and in demand around the world’ (Cunin 2006). However, one early, exceptional initiative to establish a museum was initiated by King Njoya, the enlightened monarch of the pre-colonial Bamoun kingdom. His idea to create a museum in the 1920s, during the colonial period when cultural evolutionism triumphed, is unequalled in Africa. It appeared not only as a transgression of the balance of power but also as the true precursor of the object–subject point of view, which is the basis of the paradigm of ethnology. The French colonial administration that took over from Germany in 1916 set about securing its authority by destabilising, to the point of extinction, the previous political organisation and its symbols (Loumpet 2008). It ordered that the royal objects and symbols of secret societies should therefore be exhibited in public (Loumpet and Galitzine-Loumpet 1992: 90), in order to demystify them and empty them of their power of evocation and subjugation. Njoya’s reaction was immediate. In 1924, he opened a museum to show the objects that had been exhibited and encouraged a general public and amateurs to come and admire them in his own palace. In this way, the king took control of the inevitable functional and semantic changes made to the objects and gave them a new value in the eyes of Europeans. At the same time, he devised a new, demystifying form of presentation by exhibiting religious objects to the people from which they were derived, with the undeclared objective of neutralising their subjugation – an unprecedented act among ethnologised peoples. The Museum of the Bamoun Kings has survived all the vicissitudes of Cameroon’s modern history as well as several modifications, the most extensive of which were made during the palace’s restoration in 1985. The collections which had piled up in a small room at the entry to the great courtyard were transferred to the second storey of the palace by a Swiss consultant nominated by UNESCO, Jean Bosserdet. He completed all the technical activities for conservation and exhibition within two weeks, as part of an assignment named ‘Operation for the preservation and reintegration into modern life of cultural heritage

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objects’ (Bosserdet 1985). He described the highly-simplified museography as essentially provisional, and emphasised in his final report that ethnographers and museologists should be brought in to set up the definitive working museum (Bosserdet 1985). Thus, an unfinished museum was opened to the public for more than a decade, although it was enormously popular. In 1994, the museum began a new phase, with a complete restructuring of its exhibits by Cameroonian anthropologists and museologists.5 An ambitious project for a new museum is currently being undertaken by the Bamoun King, probably in response to the new local and global issues of identity and symbolism. Active collaboration with the Museum Rietberg in Zurich has been instituted for conservation and training purposes (see Oberhofer in this volume).

The national museum: the utopia of a great new narrative At the national level, the state had remained on the fringes of the passion for museums since the independence of Cameroon and only decided to open its own institution in 1991, at a time of social instability. Situated in buildings in the French-inspired gardens of the old presidential palace, this project aimed to build a national museum that was a model and a synthesis of the cultures of Cameroon (see Loumpet and Galitzine-Loumpet 1992). From the beginning of the project, in 1992, cooperation was a key priority for equipment and training (because no Cameroonians were trained in museology). Negotiating visits were organised around the world. The diversification of development partners rapidly became a central geopolitical issue among the previous colonial powers, going beyond the establishment of a national museum. The general process focused on founding a museum that would become a framework for establishing roots and evoking a collective memory whilst, at the same time, reflecting the diversity of national culture. Thus, it was intended to provide the structure for a network of regional museums around the country. A decision was made to display semi-permanent and temporary exhibitions, curated by themes: the natural environment, origins through prehistory and archaeology, technology and material culture, lifestyles in forest and savannah ecosystems, nomadism and seminomadism, urban phenomena and their syncretism. The space designated for Cameroon’s relations with Europe addressed their first contact, the slave trade, colonisation and independence movements. It was planned to reconstruct Cameroon’s various architectural styles in the gardens. The crucial question of ethnic representation was not included in this programme, being replaced by ecological distribution, and the overrepresentation of culture was avoided, since that might give rise to the question of political domination. Furthermore, certain tribes still continued to insist on their historical role in the national movements and demanded recognition for their acknowledged sacrifices, which was incompatible with the leitmotiv of national unity extolled in the political rhetoric. The history of independence and its 5 The reorganisation of the Palace of the Bamoun Kings Museum was undertaken between March 1995 and March 1996 by Germain Loumpet and Alexandra Galitzine-Loumpet, after a systematic inventory of the collections.

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main actors remains a sensitive political taboo, and the scars and resentment still present in people’s minds are not included in school curricula. Therefore, a challenge to the museum’s historically-disputable legitimacy was to be expected. The validity of the museum and a national cultural identity was compromised by its own definition. In this context, identity is generally defined in relation to a new foreigner, the designated oppressor, whose image should be disintegrated. The old tutelary power did not remain neutral in the process of fabricating this collective memory and national consciousness in vivo, which would be transformed into a movement against them. Muséalisation always slows the creative spirit. Thus, the project sank into a persistent lethargy for around twenty years, which was long enough to dampen the ardour of the claim for memory that had lasted ever since the crises surrounding the introduction of a multiparty political system in 1991–1992. The process consisted of both an exaltation and an erasure of memory and identity, which live on, reprieved in an indeterminate timeline. The reasons for this impotence lie in a complex combination of syndromes of collective memory, the trauma associated with the birth of the nation and the illusion of a multicultural or, more exactly, pluriethnic, unified identity, built on the decaying vestiges of a historical tragedy. Démusealisation is seen here as the passive involvement in a utopia and the paradox of a unitary ideology which, itself, contradicts the old colonial powers’ wish to control the memory and history of the countries they ruled, thus orienting both the partners and the goals of cooperative endeavours towards a specific direction.

Auto-muséalisation and auto-construction among the Baka pygmies of Cameroon An experiment in auto-patrimonialisation, conceived in 1991 by François Hers, is being conducted according to the ‘New Patrons’ (see Nouveaux Commanditaires n.d.) protocol among the Baka pygmy populations of the Dja Faunal Reserve in the huge equatorial forest in eastern Cameroon.6 The protocol proposes: to any person in civil society who so wishes, alone or in association with others, the means to commission a work of art and to justify an investment in its creation that will be commissioned from the community. In this way, each person should be able to understand and state the raison d’être of art. (Hers 2017)

Although this model is not directly applicable to the institution of museums, it suggests an interesting alternative in the search for original and integrated muséalisations. The Baka community, originally nomadic hunter-gatherers living in the equatorial forests of eastern Cameroon, has undertaken a thorough, tedious process of conversion to a sedentary lifestyle run according to new rules over the last fifty or so years. This mutation has been accompanied by a number of problems, such as understanding the effects of their evolving technical system on their earlier value system. These peoples are renowned for understanding their ecosystems: trees and plants are part of their daily culture, and every individual is deeply knowledgeable about their place in an exhibition, a different type of living museum, in 6 Mediator: Germain Loumpet.

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which temporality is confused, the past living on in the continuity of the present with no hiatus. This model is a test of an inflected and reflected way of seeing both the subject and otherness at once: the pygmy as an object of ethnological predilection. At the same time, the mobile technology which these nomads were past masters of is slowly giving way to the use of industrial products. They consider it important to preserve their mobile heritage, which will inevitably disappear. These human groups, who have been relatively sheltered from ‘modernity’ and, thus, the industrial consumer society, still have a narrow opportunity to choose how to transform their technology, which has become urgent. Furthermore, the people have been classified as a form of intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO because of their songs, as has their environment, the Dja Faunal Reserve (UNESCO 1987, 2008). The project was facilitated by the fact that they function using consultation, discussion and consensus. The project is thus a unique form of muséalisation, in accordance with the spirit of the New Patrons. The protocol defined by François Hers inverses the traditional order of demand, such that the patron is an individual or group of people who realise their ideas from start to finish by participating in all the stages of a project, thus creating social bonds. Together, they have expressed the wish to fabricate symbolic works that both change the perceptions and the prejudices about them, and reflect their journey towards new ideas. The site will have modern structures to foreshadow their transition towards a semi-sedentary life in heritage areas, such as an in-situ plant conservatory, an area for showing their ancient and recent techniques for making objects, adapted to their new lifestyle, and a space for performances.

Conclusion In conclusion, European cooperation projects with African museums tend to both crystallise and make more complex all the explicit and intrinsic issues by intervening in local identity processes – for example, by extolling the right to difference and cultural diversity – which result in contradictions with local government policies. All these patrimonialisation processes are part of an essentially political approach which is based on the progressive weakening of states and arises out of the constant conflict between ethnic and tutelary powers at various levels. They show that, originally, the symbolic power struggle involved various levels of confrontation: in relation to the self; inside the field of immersion; where it reveals a troublesome pertinence of the value attached to objects and their perception in an autonomous visual field; and in the break from experience based initially on a negative perception of a marginalised otherness. Specifically, patrimonialisation may be seen as therapy for a historical syndrome and a deep wound: as an attempted memorial and symbolic rehabilitation.

References Anderson, Benedict. 2006. L’imaginaire national. Réflexions sur l’origine et l’essor du nationalisme. Traduit par Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat. Paris: La Découverte Poche. African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group of States Secretariat (ACP) and Cacao/Ccawa. 2006. Manuel sur les industries culturelles ACP. Accessed January 6, 2018. http://www.acpcultu-

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res.eu/_upload/ocr_document/ACP-Bosman_ManuelIndustriesCulturellesACP_2006. pdf. Bastenier, Albert. 2008. ‘Pour une sociologie de l’ethnicité.’ La Vie des idées, October 14, 2008. http://www.laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20081014_bastenier-ethnicite.pdf. Benjamin, Walter. 1936. L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée. Accessed December 30, 2017. https://monoskop.org/images/archive/a/a0/20130112193812!Benjamin_ Walter_1936_Loeuvre_dart_a_lepoque_de_sa_reproduction_mechanisee.pdf. Bosserdet, Jean. 1985. ‘République unie du Cameroun: Au palais des sultans à Foumban.’ RP/1984-1985/XI/1/4; FMR/CLT/CH/85/133. Accessed December 30, 2017. http://condor.depaul.edu/mdelance/images/Pdfs/065344fo.pdf. Direction des Affaires Culturelles (Cameroun). 1985. L’identité culturelle camerounaise: Actes du colloque de la deuxième semaine culturelle nationale, Yaoundé, 13-20 mai 1985. Yaoundé: Ministère de l’Information et de la Culture, Direction des Affaires Culturelles. Collomb, Gérard. 1999. ‘Ethnicité, nation, musée, en situation postcoloniale.’ Ethnologie française 29, no. 3 (juillet-septembre): 333-336. Cunin, Elisabeth. 2006. ‘La globalisation de l’ethnicité?’ Autrepart, no. 38. Bondy: IRD Éditions. Dubé, Philippe. 2011. ‘Le musée dans ses états gazeux, vu sous l’angle de deux concepts: Muséalité et communalité.’ Sociétés, no. 114: 79-93. Dupuis, Annie. 1991. ‘De l’art nègre à l’art africain.’ Gradhiva, no. 9: 100-103. Ficquet, Éloi et Lorraine Gallimardet. 2009. ‘On ne peut nier longtemps l’art nègre.’ Gradhiva, n.s. 10: 134-155. Galitzine-Loumpet, Alexandra. 2011. ‘An Unattainable Consensus? National Museums and Great Narratives in French-speaking Africa.’ In Great Narratives of the Past: Traditions and Revisions in National Museums, Conference proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Paris 29 June-1 July & 25-26 November 2011, edited by Dominique Poulot, Felicity Bodenstein and José María Lanzarote Guiral, 617-634. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press. Galitzine-Loumpet, Alexandra. 2013. ‘E-matériel. De la virtualisation du patrimoine au musée-signe: exemples du Cameroun et du Gabon.’ Ethnologies 35(2): 77-100. Gaugue, Anne. 1997. Les états africains et leurs musées. La mise en scène de la Nation. Paris et Montréal: L’Harmattan. Hers François. 2017. ‘Le protocole des nouveaux commanditaires.’ Programme du Séminaire doctoral ‘Territoires esthétiques’, 9 mai 2017. Accessed January 6, 2018. https://territoiresthetiques.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/confc3a9rence-f-hers-programme.pdf Loumpet, Germain. 2008. ‘Nguon, une rhétorique métaphorique de l’ordre cosmique et horizontale chez les Bamoun de l’Ouest du Cameroun.’ In Multiplicity of meaning and the interrelationship of the subject and the object in ritual and body texts, edited by Wazaki Haruka. Nagoya: Graduate School of Letters, Nagoya University. Loumpet, Germain, and Alexandra Galitzine-Loumpet. 1992. Le projet du Musée National du Cameroun. Yaoundé: Ministère de l’Information et de la Culture. https:// www.academia.edu/14117174/Projet_du_mus%C3%A9e_national_du_Cameroun._

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Transformation_de_lancien_palais_pr%C3%A9sidentiel_en_mus%C3%A9e_national_1992_National_Museum_of_Cameroon_Project_1992_ Nouveaux Commanditaires (website). n.d. Accessed January 30, 2018. http://www.nouveauxcommanditaires.eu Organisation de l’Unité Africaine (OUA). 1976. Charte Culturelle de l’Afrique. Accessed January 6, 2018. http://www.unesco.org/culture/natlaws/media/pdf/africa_regional_leg/ afr_charte_culturelle_freorof.pdf. UNESCO. 1987. ‘Réserve de faune du Dja.’ Accessed January 5, 2018. http://whc.unesco. org/fr/list/407/. UNESCO. 2008. ‘Les chants polyphoniques des pygmées Aka de Centrafrique.’ Accessed January 5, 2018. https://ich.unesco.org/fr/RL/les-chants-polyphoniques-des-pygmeesaka-de-centrafrique-00082. Tribalat, Michèle. 2007. ‘Hétérogénéité ethnoculturelle et cohésion sociale.’ Futuribles, no. 332 (juillet-août): 71-84.

PART II Local communities and international networks – relations of partnership?

Shifting Knowledge Boundaries in Museums Museum Objects, Local Communities and Curatorial Shifts in African Museums Jesmael Mataga

Introduction While this contribution acknowledges the difficult history of establishing museums in Africa – an issue which many authors and curators have discussed over the past few decades – it seeks to move beyond simply bemoaning the idea that museums in Africa suffer from a colonial hangover, struggle with relevancy and are in a financial malaise. Instead, I seek to foreground the potential for new forms of engagement and the exciting features that museums in Africa contribute to global exchanges, which could frame the way they relate to their counterparts in Europe. This chapter argues that cooperation between European and African museums should fully acknowledge and engage with the spiritual associations of materials held within museums, to avoid perpetuating the skewed knowledge practices engendered through colonial museum practices. This calls for museum approaches where the relationship between experts and local communities leads to a shift in curatorial practices and stimulates a radical rethinking of the place of the ethnographic other in African museum collections. The biography of the Mukwati Stick – a seemingly mundane wooden object – illustrates several pertinent points about museum cooperation between Europe and Africa. Its mobility relates to issues around collection practices, representation, and the relationships between experts and non-experts. This case also hints at new approaches to repatriation between Europe and Africa. As Africa and Europe seek new ways of engagement, these are all themes that need to be critically reviewed. While this case study may not fully represent all the relevant issues, it highlights one particularly important theme – the need to acknowledge and include local knowledge in any cooperation projects involving sacred cultural objects. For museums on the African continent, the repatriation, interpretation and use of the Mukwati Stick points to new ways in which the thousands of ethnographic objects in African museums can be re-curated and connected to the people around them, thereby increasing the relevancy of museums for their local communities.

Museum practice in the context of African ethnographic collections1 By examining the backstories of some museum objects and relics in a museum in Zimbabwe, this chapter highlights certain curatorial activities that challenge and question museums’

1 Sections of this paper were derived from my PhD thesis and subsequent published research (see Mataga and Chabata 2012; Mataga 2015).

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own histories, contesting the universalisation of European modernity and the authority of interpretation that they have traditionally been accorded. Given the problematic pasts of museums that were established in colonial times, it is only through re-interpreting their artefacts and adopting more inclusive curatorial practices that these institutions can become pluriversal places which are relevant today to the environments in which they are located. Museums should be open to differences and should allow local communities to unsettle the museum space, using locally-produced forms of knowledge. By responding to, and accommodating, local knowledge, museums can create spaces where a range of epistemologies may co-exist, and where there is more than one way to create knowledge. By integrating local ritual practices into their curatorial functions, the museum galleries can become spaces which embody more than one central truth and where the many ways of knowing are recognised and represented. This study was significantly influenced by my own professional experience in Zimbabwe’s museum and heritage sector. For five years, I was employed by the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ), a state-funded agency which manages and preserves the country’s natural and cultural heritage. Between 1999 and 2004, I was employed as an assistant curator of ethnography based at the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences (ZMHS). During my tenure at the second-oldest and second-largest museum in Zimbabwe, I was directly responsible for over 8,000 ethnographic objects housed in what had previously been called the Queen Victoria Memorial Museum (QVMM). This assemblage of items had been accumulated through donations, bequests, exchanges, and research activities since the museum was established in 1903, thirteen years after the territory had been occupied by the British South Africa Company (BSAC). However, when I joined the institution, the work that I and the other curators did, focused on looking beyond the museum especially at a time when the museum was strategically positioning itself to become more relevant, by attracting diverse visitors and more diverse interest groups. My role as a curator of ethnography placed me in a fascinating position, where I was responsible for looking after monuments, in addition to my museum work such as collection management, object documentation, exhibition curating, and research. I dealt with all sorts of matters, from unusual requests concerning witchcraft in the suburbs, to conducting research and curating exhibitions on historical and spiritual issues, and liaising on behalf of the museum on anything considered to be a ‘traditional’ or spiritual issue. This role was so entrenched that the museum staff and curators from other disciplines mockingly viewed my department as the one that handled ‘strange’ issues – even earning the apt title of the Department reZvikwambo (Department of Goblins). One of my colleague’s research projects on tracing, collecting, and exhibiting goblins did not help us to shake off this droll perception of our remit. Yet, all this stereotyping and caricaturing of ‘ethnography’ also alluded to a key role that my department, and the museum as a whole, was expected to play in postcolonial Zimbabwean museological practice. My position conferred on me a unique position – as the guardian of all the spiritual objects in the ethnographic collection. These items had been brought into the museum by colonial officers, military personnel, missionaries, priests and travellers over several decades, ever since the Rhodesian museum had been set up at the end of the 19th century. When I joined the institution in the late 1990s, issues concerning spiritual or sacred sites and intangible heritage were beginning to become very topical. For

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this reason, the ethnography portfolio included administering requests from local communities to have their sacred sites examined, researched, or declared ‘national monuments’. In response to this demand, the organisation adopted a multidisciplinary approach which brought together experts including archaeologists, historians and anthropologists to conduct what they termed ‘ethno-archaeological’ surveys. These mainly consisted of oral interviews with the local communities alongside archaeological surveying and mapping of sites. This approach demanded constant interaction and exchange with communities where several concerns around sacred sites were beginning to become apparent. Working on archaeological and sacred sites and listening to the local communities made us aware of the discrepancies between official concepts of site preservation and the communities’ understanding of heritage. The challenge posed by this gap could not be addressed using single-disciplinary methodologies. This convergence between disciplinary inclinations was a challenge, but also an opportunity for us to see how the functions of the NMMZ and the relevance of sacred places were connected. Our work became strongly linked to what was happening outside the museum, as we began accommodating local communities’ perceptions and requests for access to archaeological sites and for sacred sites to gain official recognition (see Figure 4.1 below). By addressing this, as professionals, we sought to create a balance between the grounding of our institution in disciplines such as archaeology or ethnology and the spiritual and social perceptions of sites that were held by local communities. Figure 4.1: A ritual hut erected by a spirit medium at Ntabazikamambo/Manyanga archaeological site in western Zimbabwe

Photograph: Jesmael Mataga

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During the ethno-archaeological surveys, as our archaeologists scrutinised landscapes for archaeological traces, the communities called our ethnographers’ attention to burial grounds where their ancestors were interred and to sacred caves, groves, pools and ritual sites. This divergence led to several contestations about custodianship and the interpretation or use of sites, which demanded continual discussion and negotiation. Eventually, these discussions were always resolved through agreements between the heritage managers and local communities, particularly with concerning how communities could use the sites without compromising their physical integrity. On numerous occasions, the museum representatives’ interpretation of a site was changed to accommodate the local communities’ interpretation of it. At several archaeological sites, local custodians from the local communities were given space to carry out rituals and visitations. For instance, spirit mediums were allowed to settle at certain sites and carry out rituals (see Figure 4.1), whilst in other places, such as at the Domboshava Rock art site near Harare, the on-site exhibition descriptions were rewritten to include local stories and narratives. These experiences alerted us to the need to find a different way to view, record and write about heritage sites, even when this conflicted with our normative methods as museum curators. The spiritual aspects and ritual importance of archaeological sites and objects or relics is a long-standing issue in Zimbabwean heritage. The intangible aspects, sites, objects and spaces, most of which were turned into national parks, listed as national monuments or collected into museums, have been acknowledged as the central tenets of Zimbabwean heritage (Matenga 1998; Ranger 1999, 1982, 1989; Ndoro 2005; Fontein 2006; Pwiti and Mvenge 1996). In the current period where there is a well-documented level of dissatisfaction with lack of community involvement at heritage places in Zimbabwe (Chirikure et al. 2010; Chirikure and Pwiti 2008), the recognition of locally-derived knowledge, practices and usage becomes integral in opening up sites and museums to wider audiences. It is my assertion that building on the spiritual value of sites or objects, the integration of locally-generated forms of knowledge will begin to release museums and sites from their concentration on materiality – a process which is key to decolonising museum and heritage site management.

The concept of decoloniality: implications for African museum practice This chapter is ideologically rooted in the concept of ‘decoloniality’, particularly the way that this advocates for challenging the power relations perpetuated by the universalisation of European modernity and calls for a ‘delinking’ from Eurocentric notions of knowledge through ‘epistemic and aesthetic disobedience’ (Mignolo 2000a, 2000b, 2007a, 2007b: 451; Quijano 2007; Saal 2013). Over the last few decades, this epistemological focus on decoloniality has been championed by scholars from Latin America and elsewhere, and several aspects of this approach are being adopted by pressure groups, civic societies and university students who, in southern Africa, are increasingly calling for what they call ‘decolonisation’. Walter Mignolo (2011) argues that institutions such as museums and universities have traditionally functioned to consolidate Western modernity and European imperial expansion. Mignolo sees museums and universities as the ‘holders of coloniality of knowledge and the makers of modern/colonial subjectivities’ (2011: 72). As European modernity spread to

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Africa and elsewhere, ‘ethnographic museums served to store the stolen memories of the colonised while Art History and Fine Arts Museums served to build on the memories and achievements of Europe and Western Civilisation’ (72). But what is the relevance of decoloniality to African museums, and to seeking new forms of interaction between museums in Europe and Africa? The answer to this question lies in recognising the perception that most African museums are the product of a painful colonial past and that the museums were participants in the project of colonising and marginalising local cultures. Because of this, most societies still consider museums to be elite institutions that are disconnected from local people. This perception is a challenge for African museums as they seek to become more relevant to the societies in which they are located. Perhaps adopting the notion of decoloniality is one way that museums could reframe their position in African societies. In recent years, there has been an increase in demands to deconstruct the colonial hegemony of institutions such as universities and other spaces like urban colonial monuments. In southern Africa, public campaigns using Twitter continue to call for the ‘fall’ of colonial monuments, Western knowledge and university curriculums that are seen as being steeped in European or American-influenced ideas and worldviews. One example of this was #Rhodesmustfall at the University of Cape Town in 2015. There are ongoing debates – some more blunt than others – about how universities should ‘decolonise’ their curriculums, centring around issues of knowledge production, language and race. These circumstances offer new platforms and spaces for rethinking museum practice in Africa. The emerging intellectual trajectories may be able to boost the place of African museums – and give them leverage in any cooperation projects with their counterparts in Europe. Given the chequered history and epistemic violence that were integral to the development of museums in colonial Africa, any new forms of engagement between the two continents need to be wary of reproducing skewed power relations. As Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye asserted, ‘museums are also institutions rife for decolonial interventions given that they have been imbricated within both historical colonialism as storehouses for expropriated objects and coloniality’ (2014: 2). Over the past decade, some museums in Europe have been rethinking the place of African material culture in their institutions, with the aim of ascertaining how to use their archives in ways that do not perpetuate the prejudices of the eras in which they were collected and exported from Africa (Wintle 2013; L’Internationale Online 2015). This is partly because many museums which contain so-called ‘world culture collections’ have been forced to think about the challenges of representation, since these institutions displaying the material cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas have long been associated with colonial expansion into these continents. The entities of a collection, an international exhibition and a museum have each been firmly situated as ‘committed participants’ of colonial histories and retain complex links with imperial agendas. Nevertheless, museum displays of artefacts and documents from once-colonised communities provide important lessons to bear in mind when developing postcolonial museum practices today (Wintle 2013: 185). There has, therefore, been significant postcolonial reflection on the limits and possibilities of such museums in the 21st century. In writing about decolonising museums, a collective of European-based intellectuals and curators called L’Internationale Online, suggests that ‘“decolonising” means both resisting the reproduction of colonial taxonomies, whilst simultaneously vindicating radical multiplicity’ and that museums should ‘resist the attempt

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to produce the spectacle of the Oriental and use the collection in self-reflexive ways as a contemporary resource to produce meaning’ (2015: 4). In 2014, a seminar held at Leiden University by researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium, Decolonising the Museum – Limits and Possibilities, grappled with issues of postcoloniality and globalisation, raising pertinent questions regarding decolonising museums in Europe that hold collections from other parts of the world. Prompted by the 2013-2017 renovation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren, Belgium and the budget cuts faced by the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the seminar highlighted how ‘museums exhibiting Europe’s colonial legacy have increasingly been subjected to criticism… as they often focused on exhibiting the past… [which] promoted a unilineal evolutionist modernity that subordinated the Other’ (Universiteit Leiden 2014). Among the many issues they raised, two are particularly worth highlighting here: firstly, can museums be separated from the ideologies within which they took shape? and secondly – and perhaps more importantly – is it possible to create ‘a renewed responsiveness to the colonial archive from within the archive itself?’ (Universiteit Leiden 2014). The case study in this chapter attempts to answer this second question. Most museums in Africa contain thousands of cultural materials collected from African communities throughout the 20th century. Most of these items have lain dormant in museum store rooms, detached from the communities they were collected from. They remain ‘dehistoricised, depersonalised and untribed’ (Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016: 44). Despite this extraction, the objects still retain cultural significance to some sectors of local communities. Thus, they have the potential to be reconnected with those communities and to assume a different value than just that of a collectable. In southern Africa, as Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer (2016) stated in their two-volume series ‘Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods’, there is a dissatisfaction that, often, the dominant frameworks for interpreting Africa’s past are not rooted in the continent’s own value system and philosophy. Colonial museum practices in collecting, classifying and interpreting African material culture demarcated the tribal and traditional as being sharply distinguished from modernity. In the process, African cultures’ changing histories were denied and instead became seen as static and timeless. This satisfied colonial preconceptions about local cultures and tradition, and fuelled forms of prejudice against Africans. Hence, African museums today need to devise new strategies for engaging differently with the artefacts, by inserting these nameless, timeless material culture objects into specific histories of individualised and politicised experience (Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016). Through innovative and inclusive curatorial actions, African museums can participate in ‘recasting such objects... as archival items, that is, as items from the past that carry histories, and that come alive in the present as both sources in the business of rethinking the history of African societies in pre-industrial times, and as the subjects of archival histories’ (Archive and Public Culture, 2015). In postcolonial Zimbabwe, several academics have called for community involvement in interpreting and reinterpreting archaeological sites (Ndoro 2005; Fontein 2006; Chirikure et al. 2010). While these calls for reinterpreting objects in museum collections have rarely been documented, developments within museums indicate a growing need to open up these archives (Ucko 1994; Chipunza 2000; Mataga and Chabata 2012; Mataga 2015). As Dawson Munjeri (1995) stated, in the context of Zimbabwe and Africa, the ‘spirit of the

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people’ is indeed the ‘nerve of heritage’, even within museum collections. Local communities are increasingly demanding access to sites, places and objects in museums, to carry out rituals. In turn, these local community practices could be used to articulate new interpretations of museums’ ethnographic archives. These demands from local communities and their acceptance by museums not only leads to new and inclusive ways of interpreting cultural objects, but also prompts new relationships between museum experts and local communities. The next section outlines these possibilities.

Itinerant ancestral relics and spirits in the museum In the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences’ ethnography collection, there is a small wooden stick about one metre long. This relic, which is kept in the museum’s strong room (a high-security room reserved for extremely treasured objects), is always wrapped in a black cloth tied by a white strip at each end (see Figure 4.2). The history of this object illustrates the story of over 8,000 other objects in the museum’s ethnographic collection, which was formed at the beginning of the 20th century. The Mukwati walking stick, collected and taken to Europe by Robert Baden-Powell2, not only points to the symbolic and spiritual importance of these kinds of objects, but also to the ways they can be useful for challenging normative museum processes of classification, storage or interpretation. This traditional walking stick is believed to have belonged to Mukwati, a Shona spirit medium who was active in the last quarter of the 19th century. Mukwati was one of the three important religious individuals who played a central role in the earliest protests against the country’s colonisation, called the First Chumurenga (Ranger 1967) or first war of independence. He was connected to the Ndebele resistance uprising against the BSAC in 1896, working with another religious leader, Kaguvi, until he was killed in 1897 (Ranger 1967). Mukwati was directly linked to a spiritual site in southwestern Zimbabwe and became a messenger of the Mwari religion. He was one of that religion’s last high priests and he operated from the Matopos in western Zimbabwe. The ‘stick’ was collected by Robert Baden-Powell, who had been one of the BSAC military leaders at the end of the 19th century. After his death in 1941, the relic was taken to the United Kingdom as part of his estate. Having been away for more than a century, the Mukwati walking stick was repatriated from London and was officially handed over to the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ) in 1998. Herbert Mandunya was instrumental in repatriating the object, working through the Restoration of Revered African Sites – an organisation that seeks to ‘reconnect African communities with their sacred sites and relics’ (Mandunya 1998, 1). Herbert, who claimed to be a direct descendant of Mukwati, managed to track down Baden-Powell’s descendants, 2 Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell (1857-1941) was a British Army officer and writer who founded the Boy Scouts Association and the Girl Guides, acting as the movement’s first Chief Scout. Baden-Powell served in the British Army from 1876 until 1910 in India and Africa. He participated in the expedition to relieve British South Africa Company personnel under siege in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe during the Second Matabele War (1896-7) and in the Siege of Mafeking in 1899, during the Second Boer War in South Africa (Wikipedia, s.v.).

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who helped to locate the stick in his collection. After several negotiations, the artefact was handed over to Herbert’s family, who subsequently passed it on to the museum for ‘safekeeping’ (Chipunza 2000). Figure 4.2: The Mukwati Walking Stick. Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences. According to the agreement between the NMMZ and the descendants of Mukwati, this artefact must always remain covered with a black ritual cloth. It can only be unwrapped in the presence of a spirit medium and should only be handled by male staff

The curation of spiritual objects in the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences respects the wishes of the owners of objects. For the Mukwati stick, one of the instructions of the family that owns the object is that the sacred object should not be used, publicly displayed or photographed without their consent and without the family performing proper rituals. It is for this reason that in this chapter, there is no image of the object. The blank space here is meant to acknowledge the family’s prescripts and the museum policy. This blank space, where the image would have been displayed symbolises the absence of the sacred object – the “unphotographed” sacred object.

Although the relic was deposited into the museum’s care, this was on the strict condition that it would be treated differently from all the other artefacts. The museum allowed the family to carry out activities that were outside ordinary museum preservation procedures. For instance, the transference of the relic between the Baden-Powell collection, the Mukwati family and the museum was accompanied by rituals which were coordinated by Mukwati’s descendants. At the official handover ceremony, the deliberate involvement of several political figures and chiefs who ‘unveiled’ the object was intended to reaffirm the position of Mukwati as a ‘national’ spirit medium (Chipunza 2000, 3). After accepting custodianship of the relic, an exhibition was mounted at the ZMHS in 1999, to give the returned stick a place in public life (Chipunza 2000). Thus, the museum space – itself regarded as a product of colonial knowledge practices where marginalised traditional objects were stored – was used to confer a public existence on the relic. The museum became a sacred space, where rituals associated with national spirits could be held. Earlier colonial collecting practices had appropriated this ancestral

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cultural relic from the local communities and this same institution, inherited from the colonial era, was now used to re-establish the object’s spiritual significance in the public sphere. When it was deposited back into the museum, the object challenged the relationship between museum experts and the local community since, this time, its spiritual significance was fully acknowledged, respected and documented by the museum. Its ownership was negotiated between the museum and Mukwati’s descendants. The family retained ownership of the relic, but agreed to permanently loan it to the ZMHS, which agreed to keep the object ‘safe’ by preserving it properly and exhibiting it in the museum. However, this agreement also confirmed that the Mukwati family and other spirit mediums would be allowed exclusive access to the relic as and when their rituals demanded. The descendants agreed to cede custodianship of the relic to the museum but, in turn, prescribed their own taboos, rituals and restrictions which had to be observed by the museum experts when handling the object. One of these requirements was that the stick should always be swathed in a black cloth and that no women – even female museum workers – were allowed to touch the relic (Chipunza 2000). Furthermore, they stipulated that the cloth could only be opened with the consent of Mukwati family members and/or their appointee. Thus, this case study illustrates how a source community became powerful in relation to one artefact, challenging the conventional museumification roles that often privileged the authority of museum experts over those of source communities. The existence of this object in the museum store room imparted a sense of ownership to the object and gave the source community space in the museum. For the NMMZ, this development was hailed as a crucial step in changing the way that museums operate in the postcolonial period.

Conclusion This chapter highlights how museum objects collected during colonial times and previously confined to museum store rooms have the potential to inspire a new approach to museum practice in Africa. It shows how the objects they hold which have strong spiritual significance have enabled a new trajectory for expert-community relations and engendered a new curatorial approach. The chapter suggests that, for many African museums burdened with collections uprooted from communities during the colonial era, these new approaches should reframe museum practice and facilitate self-representation – where space is given to local people so that they can challenge mainstream curatorial practices and reconnect with objects. Local narratives and ritual practices, which others have called ‘knowledge at the margins/at the frontier’ (Haber 2012; Haber and Gnecco 2007), allow previouslymarginalised local communities to become participants in curatorial exchanges between African and European museums. This will stimulate deeper, more nuanced knowledge flows and improve the interpretation of ethnographic material culture held in museums across the two continents. In terms of international cooperation projects, this case study reveals the importance of deconstructing and challenging the tainted history of museums and skewed knowledge flows that were inculcated through the colonial encounters between European and African museums. For example, any international cooperation programmes between local African museums and European counterparts will need to acknowledge and embrace the local prac-

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tices embedded in the specific ways that local communities relate to the past. In the case of southern Africa, these are usually manifest through concepts of sacredness, ritual practices and claims of ancestral ties to objects, landscapes or sites. They are embedded in oral traditions, locally-produced histories, rituals and forms of visitation that foreground age-old traditions, which are deliberately altered and reformulated in the present and are considered to be crucial aspects of the local communities’ history or culture. Thus, rather than promoting fixed values or emphasising material forms, museums should increasingly incorporate the spiritual and non-material dimensions of the artefacts in their safekeeping. Acknowledging and including locally-derived narratives and practices needs to become the bedrock on which any effective international cooperation can operate.

References Archive and Public Culture, UCT. 2015. ‘Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Workshop Report.’ APC Gazette, March 2015. Accessed February 18, 2017. http://www.apc.uct. ac.za/news/tribing-and-untribing-archive. Chipunza, K. T. 2000. ‘Mkwati Walking Stick: the One Object Exhibition.’ NAMMO Bulletin 7:12–13. Chirikure, Shadreck, and Gilbert Pwiti. 2008. ‘Community Involvement in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Management: An Assessment from Case Studies in Southern Africa and Elsewhere.’ Current Anthropology 49, no. 3 (June): 467–485. Chirikure, Shadreck, Munyaradzi Manyanga, Webber Ndoro, and Gilbert Pwiti. 2010. ‘Unfulfilled promises? Heritage Management and Community Participation at Some of Africa’s Cultural Heritage Sites.’ International Journal of Heritage Studies 16, nos. 1–2: 30–44. Fontein, Joost. 2006. The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage. Harare: Weaver Press. Haber, Alejandro F. 2012. ‘Un-Disciplining Archaeology.’ Archaeologies 8, no. 1 (April): 55–66. Haber, Alejandro F., and Cristóbal Gnecco. 2007. ‘Virtual Forum: Archaeology and Decolonization.’ Archaeologies 3, no. 3 (December): 390–412. Hamilton, Carolyn, and Nessa Leibhammer, eds. 2016. Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods. 2 vols. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Hamilton, Carolyn, and Nessa Leibhammer. 2016. ‘Tribing and Untribing the Archive.’ In Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods, edited by Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer, 13–48. Vol. 1. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. L’Internationale Online. 2015 Introduction to Decolonising Museums, 4–7. Accessed June 14, 2017. http://www.internationaleonline.org/media/files/decolonisingmuseums-2.pdf. Mandunya, Herbert H. 1998. Matosi Speaks 1/98, January 1998, Restoration of Revered African Sites, Harare.

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Mataga, Jesmael. 2015. ‘Museums Objects, Relics and Counter-Heritage Practices in Postcolonial Zimbabwe.’ In African Museums in the Making. Reflections on the Politics of Material and Public Culture in Zimbabwe, edited by Munyaradzi Mawere, Henri Chiwaura, and Thomas P. Thondhlana, 163–200. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG. Mataga, Jesmael, and Farai M. Chabata. 2012. ‘The Power of Objects: Colonial Museum Collections and Changing Contexts.’ International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 4, no. 2: 81–94. Matenga, Edward. 1998. The Soapstone Birds of Great Zimbabwe: Symbols of a Nation. Harare: African Publishing Group. Mignolo, Walter. 2000a. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2000b. ‘(Post)Occidentalism, (Post)Coloniality, and (Post)Subaltern Rationality.’ In The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Fawzia AfzalKhan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, 86–118. Durham: Duke University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2007a. ‘Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking.’ Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (March–May): 155–167. Mignolo, Walter. 2007b. ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality.’ Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (March–May): 449– 514. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. ‘Museums in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992).’ In Globalization and Contemporary Art, edited by Jonathan Harris, 71–85. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Munjeri, Dawson. [1995?]. ‘Spirit of the People, Nerve of Heritage.’ In African Cultural Heritage and The World Heritage Convention: First Global Strategy Meeting, Harare (11–13 October 1995), edited by Dawson Munjeri, Webber Ndoro, Catherine Sibanda, Galia Saouma-Forero, Laurent Levi-Strauss and Lupwishi Mbuyamba, 52–58. [Harare]: National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. Ndoro, Webber. 2005. The Preservation of Great Zimbabwe: Your Monument Our Shrine. Rome: ICCROM. Pwiti, Gilbert, and George Mvenge. 1996. ‘Archaeologists, Tourists, and Rainmakers: Problems in the Management of Rock Art Sites in Zimbabwe, a Case Study of Domboshava National Monument.’ In Aspects of African Archaeology: Papers from the 10th Congress of the PanAfrican Association for Prehistory and Related Studies, edited by Gilbert Pwiti, and Robert Soper, 817–824. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications. Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.’ Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (March–May): 168–178. Ranger, Terence. 1967. Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–7: A Study in African Resistance. London: Heinemann. Ranger, Terence. 1982. ‘The Death of Chaminuka: Spirit Mediums, Nationalism and the Guerilla War in Zimbabwe.’ African Affairs 81, no. 324 (July): 349–369. Ranger, Terence. 1989. ‘Whose Heritage? The Case of the Matobo National Park.’ Journal of Southern African Studies 15, no. 2 (January): 217–249.

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Ranger, Terence. 1999. Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe. Harare: Boabab; Oxford: James Currey. Reynolds-Kaye, Jennifer. 2014. ‘Exhibiting the Decolonial Option: Museum Interventions by Pedro Lasch and Demián Flores.’ Decolonial Gesture 11 (1). Accessed March 15, 2017. http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/reynoldskaye. Saal, Britta. 2013. ‘How to Leave Modernity Behind: The Relationship Between Colonialism and Enlightenment, and the Possibility of Altermodern Decoloniality.’ Budhi 17 (1): 49–80. Ucko, Peter. J. 1994. ‘Museums and Sites: Cultures of the Past within Education – Zimbabwe, Some Ten Years on.’ In The Presented Past: Heritage, Museums and Education, edited by Peter G. Stone and Brian L. Molyneaux, 237–283. London: Routledge. Universiteit Leiden. 2014. ‘Decolonising the Museum – Limits and Possibilities.’ Accessed June 10, 2017. http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucas/pocoplatform/activities/decolonisingthe-museum.html. Wikipedia, s.v. ‘Robert Baden-Powell.’ Last modified December 30, 2017, 02:59. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Baden-Powell,_1st_Baron_Baden-Powell. Wintle, Claire. 2013. ‘Decolonising the Museum: The Case of the Imperial and Commnwealth Institutes.’ Museum and Society 11, no. 2: 185–201.

Who Shapes the Museum? Exploring the Impact of International Networks on Contemporary East African Museums Rosalie Hans

Contemporary museums in East Africa Community, local and grassroots museums are a recent phenomenon in eastern Africa. While emerging in diverse forms and contexts, they share a significant number of traits, such as a focus on ethnic culture, and can be considered together here under the umbrella term ‘contemporary museums’. For present purposes, they are defined as museums that have been established recently – in the last 10 to 15 years in Kenya and Uganda – and operate independently from the state. The fact that they have been established as non-state entities, by individuals or civic organisations, is of particular interest here. The contemporary museums discussed in this chapter are located in remote places, and emphasise the community-focused nature of their mission. As they are recent additions to the museum and heritage field in eastern Africa, it is worth investigating the reasons why they were established and their subsequent development. As independent, local and community-based institutions, these museums allow for an innovative take on current museum modalities. Their distinct position in the heritage landscape encourages us to take a different and critical perspective on museum cooperation between Africa and Europe, in which stakeholder influence on the foundation and development of museums becomes apparent. The impact that global networks – with actors such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) – have on the development and management of contemporary East African museums has not been fully assessed or debated before. This chapter explores the connections and interactions between contemporary museums in East Africa, examining how such international networks impact upon their conceptualisation and development as museum entities. Therefore, a broad analytical perspective is taken, spanning museums in Kenya and Uganda. While it is imperative to recognise that these well-connected museums are part of local, regional and national networks as well, this chapter focuses mainly on their international connections. By taking this approach, this work represents a departure from most other literature on museums in Africa, which tends to analyse national museums and their particular circumstances on the African continent, although some notable exceptions focus on independent museums.1 This chapter contributes to the visibility of smaller contemporary museums in Africa and their specific challenges. 1 The recent book, Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya, by Coombes, Hughes and Karega-Munene, discusses community peace

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Two community museums in Kenya and Uganda Even though every country has its own specific context, the contemporary museums in Kenya and Uganda have remarkably similar models. Moreover, their global networks overlap, allowing us to explore the complex, ongoing international relationships that shape these museums. This section provides a case study of two contemporary museums – one in Kenya and one in Uganda. Figure 5.1: The Abasuba Community Peace Museum seen from its garden

Photograph: Rosalie Hans, 2016

The first is the Abasuba Community Peace Museum (ACPM), which can be found on Mfangano Island in Kenya. This island is located in Lake Victoria, part of Homa Bay County. The lake region is mostly inhabited by the Abasuba, an ethnic group who trace their Bantu origins to southern Uganda. The largest surrounding ethnic groups are the Luo, whose language and customs have almost completely eclipsed the Suba language and way of life (Okello Ayot 1979). The museum was established around 2000 by a Suban man, with the objective of preserving the Suba language and related material culture. The museum soon became part of the Community Peace Programme headed by Dr Sultan Somjee, then museums in Kenya. The District Six Museum has been the subject of a number of publications (see Rassool 2006), as have community museum initiatives in West Africa (see, for example, Ardouin and Arinze 1995).

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Head of Ethnography at the National Museums of Kenya – an initiative intended to preserve indigenous peace and reconciliation traditions such as objects and language used for conflict resolution. For this programme, funded by the Mennonite Central Committee, the founding curator researched and collected peace and reconciliation traditions from the Suba culture, as well as collecting artefacts for the museum. In 2008, the museum buildings were completely reconstructed as a result of a collaboration with the Trust for African Rock Art (TARA). The grant they received together from the Tourism Trust Fund led to the museum being redeveloped into a gateway to Mfangano Island and its rock art sites. Following this reconstruction, the museum is now owned by the Suba Council of Elders, who occasionally meet at the museum. In spring 2016, the museum offered the local community a space to watch films and other television programmes during the day and broadcast football matches at night. The ACPM is one of the few Community Peace Museums that actively collaborate with government institutions like the National Museums of Kenya. Figure 5.2: The Museum of Acholi Art and Culture under construction

Photograph: Rosalie Hans, 2016

The Museum of Acholi Art and Culture (MAAC) is located near Kitgum, in northern Uganda. This region, also known as Acholiland after the ethnic group that resides there, has suffered terribly from a conflict that began in the late 1980s and lasted until 2006. The land and its people were ravaged by fighting between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government forces. The MAAC was founded in 2011 by an Acholi citizen from the region, partly in response to the post-conflict situation. In its first conception the

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museum was housed in a rented space, but it has now moved to a building being constructed on land near Kitgum. Its founding curator is an artist by profession, who incorporates his reflections on the past conflict in his work. The museum displays artefacts from the Acholi region alongside photographs illustrating the processes of metal and pottery making. It also displays some images from the conflict and the peace negotiation process. The new museum building is still under construction and the curator is working to expand its collection of artefacts. Owing to the destruction wrought by the war and life in internally displaced people (IDP) camps, there is a general feeling among the Acholi people that their culture and traditions have declined and that younger generations do not know the ways of Acholi life. There is nostalgia for the peaceful period before the war and a hope that this way of life can be restored. The museum aims to celebrate Acholi culture as well as commemorate the conflict. It is a member of the Uganda Community Museum Association (UCOMA), which brings together a number of contemporary museums in Uganda from outside the national museum structure.

Local museums, global networks While both of these museums are in remote locations, operate on a local level and identify themselves as community-based museums, their networks are vast, intricate and – above all – international. These are not all direct, one-to-one relations; the museums are mainly indirectly linked through a chain of financial, technical and educational support. Connections with heritage non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been vital for the museums’ development, by linking them to global organisations. The international stakeholders consist of large funders such as the Ford and Getty Foundations, smaller supporters including embassies and cultural centres, museums, academics, cultural organisations like the Prince Claus Fund, and global organisations such as ICOM and UNESCO. The main NGO supporting contemporary museums in Uganda is the Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda (CCFU). Based in Kampala, CCFU runs a range of programmes which aim to employ culture as a means to support the country’s development. Their mission is ‘to promote the recognition of culture as vital for human development that responds to our national identity and diversity’ (CCFU 2016). CCFU belongs to a wide-ranging network which includes UNESCO but also development organisations such as Plan International. UNESCO and the Prince Claus Fund contributed to funding CCFU’s activities with museums. One instance of the long chain of connections that tie the Museum of Acholi Art and Culture to international organisations is the indirect support it has received through the CCFU from the Prince Claus Fund, a Dutch organisation that is itself sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Dutch Postcode Lottery. Similarly, the key NGO involved in developing the Abasuba Community Peace Museum (ACPM) in Kenya is the Trust for African Rock Art (TARA). They collaborated in 20072008 on a major project which intended to ‘promote rock art tourism in Suba District’ (Borona and Nyasuna-Wanga 2008, 19). This was funded by the Tourism Trust Fund, an initiative supported by the European Union. TARA is a very well-connected organisation, whose mission is ‘to create global awareness of the importance and endangered state of African rock art; survey and monitor rock art sites; serve as an information resource and ar-

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chive; as well as promote and support rock art conservation measures’ (TARA 2016). In order to achieve their multi-focused mission, TARA works with a wide range of international partners, including embassies and ICOM, as well as the Prince Claus Fund and UNESCO. Thus, CCFU in Uganda and TARA in Kenya make a significant contribution to the heritage field in East Africa and beyond, both being renowned for their successful projects and collaborations. This chapter aims to increase awareness of the role that NGOs such as these play in shaping the development and conceptualisation of contemporary East African museums.

From a ‘contact zone’ to a ‘zone of contact’ James Clifford’s concept of a ‘contact zone’ (1997), adapted from Pratt (1991), has long been used by authors in museology to analyse the interactions between museums and their stakeholders.2 However, efforts to analyse the two museums and their international connections as contact zones proved to be inadequate in East Africa. In both case studies, the contact zone idea did not correspond with the actuality of contemporary museums inside Africa. So, to better reflect the situation, and to engage with recent criticisms that this notion of the contact zone has been simplified in recent years into a neo-colonial concept, it became necessary to re-evaluate the concept itself (Boast 2011). Returning to Pratt’s definition of the contact zone reveals that it is still relevant for the East African context (and, indeed, for museums in other parts of Africa): ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’ (Pratt 1991, 34). The validity of the contact zone concept notwithstanding, the realities of contemporary East African museums mean that this definition needs to be redrafted. As a result, this chapter proposes a subversion, called the ‘zone of contact’. Museological theory generally situates the museum at the centre of the contact zone, where authority, or control, resides (Clifford 1997, 193). This is what makes the contact zone neo-colonial, as Boast argues (2011). It describes the space where the museum of the ‘West’, perceived as the former coloniser, meets the previously colonised source communities in the museum. However, this generally describes the situation of museums in the northern hemisphere and national museums on the African continent, rather than the independent, recently-established museums that are the subject of this chapter. Contemporary museums in East Africa tend to be located away from the capital and, thus, operate outside the locus of power. They are in what might be called the periphery, both geographically and in terms of authority and influence. This implies that the traditional concept of a museological contact zone cannot be applied to these museums. In fact, it should be reversed to allow for the major differences in the East African environment. Contemporary museums are placed at the periphery, the place usually reserved for source communities who are encountering and grappling with the centres of power where NGOs and global professional organisations reside. The space where contact is made is not inside the museum, but in the interactions of museums and international stakeholders; through meetings, phone calls, emails, workshops 2 For examples of recent publications using the idea of a contact zone, see Schorch (2013) and Message (2015).

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and memoranda of understanding. Like the contact zone, the ‘zone of contact’ steers clear of reducing relations to binary settings of coloniser versus (neo-)colonised, since it is also a space for collaboration, struggle and mutual exchange. Nevertheless, as will become evident in the next section, the ‘zone of contact’, with its remaining power imbalance between stakeholders, still runs the inherent risk of reproducing neo-colonial relations. Essentially, the ‘zone of contact’ returns to Pratt’s original concept of the contact zone but repurposes it to reflect the realities of East African museums in the present day.

International stakeholders and contemporary East African museums This new concept of the ‘zone of contact’ endeavours to expose what happens in the museums’ networks – the dissemination of a heritage discourse which is still predicated on a Western model of what constitutes a museum. The networks also rely heavily on the ‘culture and development’ discourse advocated by UNESCO in particular, and international heritage and development organisations more broadly. UNESCO’s 2015 Recommendation Concerning the Protection and Promotion of Museums and Collections, their Diversity and their Role in Society describes museums as playing ‘an important role in education, (…) social cohesion and sustainable development’. Among other functions, ‘[m]useums also support economic development, notably through cultural and creative industries and tourism’ (UNESCO 2015, 7). Similarly, the UN’s Transforming Our World: 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development mentions culture and heritage in several Sustainable Development Goals as both creating, and benefiting from, sustainable development (UN 2015).3 UNESCO applauds this by stating that, for the first time, the Agenda includes ‘unparalleled recognition’ of the influence of culture (UNESCO 2016a). These efforts to recognise the power that culture and heritage have to effect change are laudable and represent a significant step forward in acknowledging the value of culture. However, the current prevalent discourse is somewhat limited; it casts museums as tools for sustainable development, emphasising their economic value as predominantly generating cultural tourism. Undoubtedly, this has an impact on how museums are defined and shaped. This heritage discourse impacts on the development of contemporary museums through their involvement in international networks. Ideas on museum management and policies are passed down from the centre of the zone of contact to the periphery. For example, the CCFU traces its engagement with museums in Uganda to 2009 when, in partnership with UNESCO, CCFU staff travelled around the country looking for ‘initiatives that illustrated the positive role that culture can play in development work’ (CCFU 2012, 20). The fact that museums are considered to be one of these initiatives illustrates the particular role museums are expected to play. This culture and development discourse is actively communicated in texts and embodied unconsciously through the museum networks. This may be described using the concept of habitus, as coined by Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1977)

3 This Agenda is also known as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and serves as a follow-up from the Millennium Development Goals, whose targets ended in 2015.

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and concisely explained by Loïc Wacquant, as the notion that ‘human agents are historical animals who carry within their bodies acquired sensibilities and categories that are the sedimented products of their past social experiences’ (Wacquant 2011, 82). It provides the key to understanding how stakeholders at different levels have internalised ideas about culture, development, heritage and museums. According to Basu and Modest, viewing heritage as habitus offers ‘a useful theoretical framework to consider both processes of social reproduction and social change that are key to contemporary heritage debates, and especially to the relationship between heritage and development’ (Basu and Modest 2015, 9). Although the movement from centre to periphery seems to suggest linearity, this is not how it should be interpreted. The connections between local museums and their international stakeholders take multiple forms; agency and exchange shape their interactions in distinct ways; and these relations may also include governmental institutions at the regional and national levels. The following discussion provides two examples from each of the museums introduced above to illustrate how the zone of contact is made concrete through their interactions.

The challenge of cultural tourism At the Abasuba Community Peace Museum (ACPM) in Kenya, the Trust for African Rock Art (TARA) has functioned as a nexus for the museum’s network. Part of the large grant which TARA and the ACPM received from the Tourism Trust Fund (TTF) was used to reconstruct the museum from just one hut into two large structures reminiscent of traditional architecture. With the TTF providing the funding, it meant that the project focused on attracting tourism to the island, redeveloping the museum as a ‘gateway’ for visitors. The project was based on the premise that creating tourist infrastructure would lead to more visits, encouraging spending on the island and thereby generating income for the local population, which would alleviate poverty. This rationale fits with the expectations of culture as propagated by UNESCO’s policies. Unfortunately, tourism to Mfangano Island did not become as popular as anticipated. This was influenced by several factors, such as the global economic downturn in 2008 and increased insecurity in Kenya, which reduced tourism at national level. However, the situation may have been exacerbated by the island’s remote location and the lack of interest of the average tourist in rock art as a destination. The project did not manage to deliver the benefits for the island community that had been envisioned. The ACPM, however, did benefit from the project through the construction of two large buildings with traditionally-thatched roofs. The materials and skills needed to create the roofs were some of the most costly elements of the project. One building is designed to function as the museum, while the other is a designated gathering space, with a restaurant and seminar room. Currently, this community space is used mainly by young men who come to watch television and drink sodas, providing a popular service for the neighbouring community. The collections in the museum building are displayed mostly on plastic sheets on the floor, telling the story of the history and culture of the Abasuba people. Unfortunately, the traditional constructions are slowly deteriorating because of a lack of upkeep, which is prohibitively expensive. With sections of the buildings designed to be open to the elements, the museum is insufficiently equipped to preserve its collections. The buildings were designed with tourism and rock art promotion in mind, while also reflecting traditional archi-

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tecture, but they are difficult to maintain without structural funding. This case reveals some of the imbalanced power structures in the ‘zone of contact’: the international NGO and the source of its funding have influenced what the museum, the ‘periphery’, looks like in the present. This project-based funding, so common in ‘zone of contact’ collaborations, has led to difficulties in ensuring a sustainable museum built to last for a long-term future.

The power of education Museum education provides the second example of the zone of contact in the East African heritage field. The African museum profession has been supported by a range of museum studies and heritage courses that enable professionals to improve their museums in mostly adverse circumstances. These educational opportunities are often funded either by international programmes or by grants from universities abroad. Examples of such programmes include the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, ICCROM’s Africa 2009 programme, the Getty East Africa Programme and the former Centre for Heritage Development in Africa (CHDA), among several others. The curator of the ACPM mentioned that his international museum education has empowered him to run the museum and make sure that it will not collapse, despite the many challenges it faces. At the same time, his education has also profoundly influenced the way he sees the museum and its management. There is no doubt that education is empowering. From a zone of contact perspective, however, it is also important to acknowledge how each educational programme imparts certain museological views to its students, which influence how they carry out their daily practice. A case in point is the Getty East Africa Programme, which was run by the British Museum Africa Programme (BMAP) and funded by the Getty Foundation from 2011 to 2015 in Kenya. One of its strengths was the emphasis on hands-on methods for managing the practical issues faced by African museum professionals on an everyday basis. The BMAP was run in partnership with the National Museums of Kenya (NMK), and the curator of the ACPM was allowed to participate as an NMK partner. Despite the BMAP equipping the participants with useful skills for running a museum, the programme’s emphasis was mainly on collections management and care. As might be expected from the BMAP’s origins, the programme used the British Museum as its model for good museum practice. But contemporary museums in East Africa do not always prioritise collections in their operations; although they usually keep and display artefacts, they often lack storage facilities. Additionally, they encourage visitors to handle the objects – a practice that is discordant with permanent preservation. Thus, the concept of the museum used in the programme was based on standards correlating to a classical, ‘Western’ model of a museum which did not encompass the new conceptualisation of many contemporary East African museums. The BMAP, while very successful in a national museum context, did not broaden the concept of what a museum is to accommodate contemporary museums. Granted, it was not in the programme’s remit to change museological thinking, but rather to facilitate training for practical needs in national African museums. The BMAP is not an exception but just one of many museums, universities and heritage institutes that embody and disperse the dominant heritage discourse through the zone of contact to African museum professionals.

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Heritage clubs and disappearing culture Each country has its own particular environment and, therefore, specific challenges to deal with. In Uganda, two other aspects of the culture and development discourse that play a role in contemporary museums’ networks can be observed. One aspect is the ubiquitous trope of disappearing culture in Uganda which, supposedly, has resulted in the country’s young people becoming unfamiliar with their own culture. The definition of culture is broadly understood and includes everything from traditional foods and housing to clothing, dances, norms and values. This echoes the concerns expressed in UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which states that ‘the processes of globalisation and social transformation… give rise, as does the phenomenon of intolerance, to grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction of the intangible cultural heritage’ (UNESCO 2016b, 3). In northern Uganda, in particular, the war and the dire conditions of IDP camps are suggested as the causes of a loss of traditional values and cultural systems. A second threat to culture is identified as the influx of foreign influences from the international aid agencies who were present during and shortly after the conflict. Owing to this recent history, there is strong nostalgia for the Acholi ways of the past, particularly among older generations. The pre-war period was described by one Acholi man as ‘paradise’ (pers. comm. 2016). Beyond the particular case of northern Uganda, a more general lamentation of a loss of culture is often repeated by heritage practitioners, government officials and the media. In 2012, the Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda (CCFU) published a booklet and produced a short film on community museums in Uganda. Both had the subtitle: ‘If we do not save our heritage for our children, who will?’ indicating that community museums have been engaged to ‘save’ heritage (CCFU 2012). The NGO has stated that the sweep of modernity is destroying culture and depriving the younger generations of opportunities to know their own traditional culture (CCFU 2015, 11). But one museum professional from Uganda, who did not wish to be named, did not recognise this apparently vanishing culture and posited instead that culture is being adapted to fit contemporary society, especially by the youth (interview with the author on 23 May 2016 in Kampala, Uganda). To counteract the perceived disappearance of culture, CCFU initiated a Heritage Education Programme, which encourages secondary schools to start heritage clubs for their students. The contemporary museums in CCFU’s network have been involved with this programme as coordinators for the clubs and as facilitators of visits and heritage events. The Museum of Acholi Art and Culture (MAAC) is working with six secondary schools in the Kitgum region and most students from the clubs have visited the museum. The programme puts young people in the role of cultural ambassadors, stating that ‘young Ugandans (…) must not only cherish their culture if it is to survive, but they must also assume a responsibility to pass it on to the next generations’ (CCFU 2015, 10). To this end, students learn traditional dances, play instruments, visit the nearby museum, debate cultural subjects and do exercises like making a family tree. Some possible heritage club activities are outlined in a toolkit provided by CCFU and include suggestions on how to use heritage resources to generate income (CCFU 2013). The toolkit aims to convince young people of the intrinsic value of culture but also strongly emphasises the use of culture to achieve sustainable

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development. Coincidentally, most of these activities also relate to the intangible cultural heritage that UNESCO endeavours to safeguard. The Heritage Education Programme starts from the assumption that young Ugandans need to be interested in their culture again but, as the Ugandan museum professional noted, the reality is more nuanced. At a heritage club in one secondary school in Kitgum, students expressed the value of knowing their culture, history and identity. When asked about their music preferences, most heritage club members said they liked both traditional and contemporary songs, but they particularly loved the traditional dances they were learning. When it came to housing they could see the benefits of both: traditional huts are cheap to build and cool inside but modern housing is more durable and less likely to burn down. These rational answers do not suggest that (traditional) culture is disappearing but, instead, is being adapted and changed, as has always been the case. In fact, rather than viewing culture as static and immutable, there is a need to recognise that it is dynamic and responsive to changes in society. The heritage clubs appear to play a valuable role in a society that is trying to rebuild itself after a prolonged struggle, where there is a need to foster a feeling of belonging. However, stating that culture is endangered is an oversimplification which disregards young people’s ability to shape their lives and culture. Nonetheless, this enduring trope, reinforced by the habitus in the zone of contact, is readily shared and accepted by the museums, CCFU and UNESCO, and is evident in their activities and policy documents.

The Uganda Community Museums Association and professionalism ‘Not every craft shop is a museum’. This has become the informal battle cry of the Uganda Community Museums Association (UCOMA) to distinguish themselves from commercial enterprises. The association was established in 2010 with financial and technical support from CCFU, with the aim of uniting community museums to speak with one voice and help them become recognised at national and international levels. This stems from the conviction that as a group, they will have a stronger position in the zone of contact than each organisation on its own, enabling them to negotiate much more effectively. This is pertinent, considering the national government’s current wariness about the professional nature of the community museums. There is a fear that not all museums are genuine and that some are exploiting the word ‘museum’ for profit. This perception is damaging to community museums’ reputations so, in 2016, UCOMA introduced the Quality Assurance Standards for Community Museums in Uganda (2016). The idea was derived from the general NGO quality standards that have been implemented in Uganda to ‘enhance their credibility and effectiveness’ (QUAM 2016). UCOMA’s quality standards document uses similar language to that used by the NGOs: ‘If adhered to, the UCOMA standards will also help community museums to reassure their clientele that they are credible entities’ (UCOMA 2016, 6). This shows a clear concern from the museums to appear trustworthy and professional. But defining what is professional and what counts as a quality standard is a challenging and subjective task. It also goes to the heart of the question: What is a museum? UCOMA has decided to look to the International Council of Museums (ICOM) for guidance, referencing their standards on the way in which collections should be documented. In additi-

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on, UCOMA has made these quality standards mandatory for all their member museums. However, this presumes a level of resources and management that is very difficult to attain for museums that are barely funded and usually staffed by one person. The desire to be part of the wider museum field and the need for national and international support have the attendant consequence – some would say danger – of forcing these contemporary museums to create a narrow remit for themselves, restricting their opportunities for growth. So, instead of creating new museum modalities, UCOMA adheres to the existing model of the museum at the centre of the zone of contact. Uganda’s community museums are under pressure to be seen as ‘serious museums’ but this contradicts their conceptualisation; the most extraordinary aspect of contemporary museums in East Africa is that they are labours of love created as civic initiatives aimed at preserving culture and sharing it with others.

Engaging with the zone of contact The various examples from Kenya and Uganda discussed in this chapter demonstrate how the networks of contemporary East African museums operate to disseminate an influential cultural heritage discourse that impacts on their conceptualisation and development. But one of the most important elements of the contact zone and the zone of contact alike is its interactive nature. It is a space where contact is made and where all the stakeholders involved have agency over the process, despite their asymmetrical relationships. International organisations, NGOs and funders all internalise and spread their ideologies, which are heavily influenced by the dominant culture and development discourse. It follows, then, that museum professionals, academics and NGO workers, in becoming aware of the mechanisms of these networks and the accompanying habitus, can play an active role in redrafting the zone of contact. If contemporary museums in East Africa are to develop independent museological modalities, they should be liberated from the standard museum concepts that constrict the definition of a museum and limit their individual development. There has been a call for African museum models since the 1960s and many academics have advocated living, thriving African museums (see, for example, Monreal 1976; Konaré 1983; Arinze 1998). The concept of the zone of contact is an opportunity for stakeholders supporting contemporary museums to acknowledge their influence on the development of contemporary East African museums and change their ways of thinking. As these new museums continue to innovate the modalities of a museum consistent with their own local needs and situations, international networks can be crucial in creating a museum model that is more relevant to the (East) African context.

References Ardouin, Claude D. and Emmanuel Arinze, eds. 1995. Museums and the Community in West Africa. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press; London: James Currey. Arinze, Emmanuel N. 1998. ‘African Museums: the Challenge of Change.’ Museum International 50, no. 1 (January-March): 31–37.

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Basu, Paul and Wayne Modest. 2015. ‘Museums, Heritage and International Development: a Critical Conversation.’ In Museums, Heritage and International Development, edited by Paul Basu and Wayne Modest, 1–32. New York and London: Routledge. Boast, Robin. 2011. ‘Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited.’ Museum Anthropology 34, no. 1 (Spring): 56–70. Borona, Gloria K. and Gladys Nyasuna-Wanga. 2008. Managing Community Projects: TARA and the Abasuba Community Peace Museum. Nairobi: Trust for African Rock Art. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Coombes, Annie E., Lotte Hughes and Karega-Munene. 2014. Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda (CCFU). 2012. Community Museums in Uganda. Kampala: CCFU. Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda (CCFU). 2013. The Heritage Education Tool Kit: For Heritage Clubs in Uganda’s Secondary Schools and Other Young Ugandans. 2nd ed. Kampala: CFFU. Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda (CCFU). 2015. Annual Report 2015. Kampala: CCFU. Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda (CCFU). 2016. ‘Our Mission.’ Accessed December 22, 2017. http://crossculturalfoundation.or.ug/our-mission/. Konaré, Alpha O. 1983. ‘Towards a New Type of “Ethnographic” Museum in Africa.’ Museum 35(3): 146–151. Message, Kylie. 2015. ‘Contentious Politics and Museums as Contact Zones.’ In The International Handbook of Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald, Helen Rees Leahy, Andrea Witcomb, Kylie Message, Conal McCarthy, Michelle Henning, Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips, 253–281. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Monreal, Luis. 1976. ‘The African Museum in Quest of its Future Direction: Introduction.’ Museum 28(4): 187. Okello Ayot, Henry. 1979. A History of the Luo-Abasuba of Western Kenya: From AD 1760 – 1940. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau. Pratt, Mary L. 1991. ‘Arts of the Contact Zone.’ Profession: 33–40. Quality Assurance Certification Mechanism. 2016. ‘What is QuAM?’ Accessed November 18, 2016. http://www.quamuganda.org/about-quam/what-is-quam. Rassool, Ciraj. 2006. ‘Community Museums, Memory Politics, and Social Transformation in South Africa: Histories, Possibilities, and Limits.’ In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, edited by Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, 286–321. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Schorch, Philipp. 2013. ‘Contact Zones, Third Spaces, and the Act of Interpretation.’ Museum and Society 11, no. 1 (March): 68–81. Trust for African Rock Art. 2016. ‘Mission.’ Accessed November 3, 2016. http://africanrockart.org/about-tara-trust-for-african-rock-art/mission/.

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Uganda Community Museums Association. 2016. Quality Assurance Standards for Community Museums in Uganda. Kampala: UCOMA. United Nations General Assembly. 2015. ‘Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.’ A/RES/70/1. Accessed October 20, 2016. http://www. un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E. UNESCO. 2015. Recommendation Concerning the Protection and Promotion of Museums and Collections, their Diversity and their Role in Society, adopted by the General Conference at its 38th Session, Paris, 17 November 2015. Accessed October 21, 2016. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002463/246331m.pdf. UNESCO. 2016a. ‘Sustainable Development Goals for Culture on the 2030 Agenda.’ Accessed October 20, 2016. http://en.unesco.org/sdgs/clt. UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. 2016b. Basic Texts of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. 2016 Edition. Accessed October 21, 2016. https://ich.unesco.org/doc/src/2003_Convention_Basic_Texts-_2016_version-EN.pdf. Wacquant, Loïc. 2011. ‘Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter.’ Qualitative Research in Psychology 8(1): 81–92.

The Road to Reconciliation Museum Practice, Community Memorials and Collaborations in Uganda Nelson Adebo Abiti

Introduction The Road to Reconciliation was an exhibition that resulted from a collaborative project on heritage work focusing on the memorialisation of war in northern Uganda.1 The Uganda National Museum and the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage (NDCH) had worked together with local communities in northern Uganda to help them restore their cultural heritage in the aftermath of the civil war that occurred between 1986 and 2006. The project was initiated by the community to share their stories of forced movement away from their ancestral lands and resettlement in so-called ‘internal displaced people’ (IDP) camps. Several accounts reveal that up to 2.5 million local people were compelled to live in the 218 established IDP camps (Office of the Prime Minister 2007; Allen 2010; Mwenda 2010; UBOS 2014). Therefore, traditional social bonds and family networks were disconnected during the conflict. Moreover, many children became victims of the conflict by being brutally tortured, raped or abducted and indoctrinated to take part in the armed rebellion. After the war had ended, people began to move away from the IDP camps back to their ancestral lands in order to earn their livelihood in new ways. At this point, issues arose around accountability for the events of the war, and the question of what should happen to the people involved in the atrocities. When the traditional leaders began to assess the magnitude of the conflict, they advocated that Uganda’s government and international bodies such as the United Nations should use a traditional approach to forgiveness as an alternative conflict resolution mechanism for promoting peace and reconciliation. This approach to conflict resolution is rooted in the local culture, as can be seen in the following example. At the end of 2006, the Acholi people’s traditional leaders began to perform the rituals of stepping on eggs (Wong tong) to welcome back and cleanse the returning fighters. These cultural rituals for returning rebel groups, which were held at public gatherings, attracted the interest of the government, nongovernmental organisations and international partners. Hence, the transition period following the conflict provided opportunities for museum staff and local communities to become connected via the memorial project. In 2008, discussions began between the Acholi cultural institution, Ker Kwaro Acholi, and the Uganda National Museum to assess the functions of memorialisation and its usefulness to commu-

1 The exhibition was on display at the Uganda National Museum from 21 March until 30 June 2013.

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nities.2 These personally-initiated talks between museum staff and people from the cultural institution led to the successful formulation of a mapping project in northern Uganda. This demonstrates how collaborations based on mutual understandings built out of individual discussions have the potential to create networks in museum heritage projects such as in northern Uganda, which might otherwise seem like a difficult area to work in. Although the Uganda National Museum did not have any clearly-defined guidelines on implementing projects on issues around memorials when our collaborative project began, a team from the museum started holding consultative meetings, both in Kampala and Gulu.3 The existing policy at the time of project conceptualisation focused on monuments rather than on community participation in expressing the heritage of conflicts and cultural sites for peace and reconciliation (see the Historical Monuments Act 1967).4 Our initial consultative meetings and interactions with several communities shaped this new phenomenon of community memorials, which emphasises the role of cultural heritage in peace promotion and the reconciliation process. The outcomes of these initial discussions about memorials were written into statements in the broader Museums and Monuments Policy, which was formulated and ratified by Uganda’s Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities in 2015. The policy clearly stipulates that one of the roles of the Department of Museums and Monuments is to promote peace and reconciliation through the development of memorial sites. The idea of a professional exchange of knowledge and experiences between the staff of the Uganda National Museum, the Norwegian Directorate of Cultural Heritage (NDCH), African cultural heritage institutions and the British Museum strongly suggested involving their local communities in museum practices of creating citizenship and social cohesion.5 The information-sharing between people in northern Uganda and the staff of the Uganda National Museum mainly centred on the question of how to deal with painful heritage. It thus opened up possibilities for a collaborative project. To advance this idea further, we needed to consider who, ultimately, this cultural heritage is being preserved for. Another factor that led to this collaborative project was the voices of the elders of the Acholi and Langi, as well as the Teso and Madi religious leaders of the north, who were concerned about the local people’s general social situation and living conditions, and how to stabilise this after the long years of war. They strongly expressed the opinion that ‘cultural reconstruction is as important as infrastructural reconstruction’.6 Therefore, in 2008, the 2 In 2008, the Ker Kwaro Acholi administration invited the Uganda National Museum to make a feasibility study of cultural heritage in northern Uganda. 3 Meetings between the managers of the Acholi cultural institution and the Director of the Uganda National Museum identified the need to map and document which cultural sites and practices would be significant for promoting peace. 4 However, the newly-formulated Museums and Monuments Policy of 2015 included community memorial dialogue issues as important aspects of museum work (Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities 2015). 5 The Africa 2009 programme, Prema, CHDA, the Museum and Heritage Programme and the GEAP programmes in East Africa all provided capacity-building programmes for young African heritage professionals. They were strongly influenced by ideas of community participation. 6 Interviews with selected leaders during meetings in Acholi in 2008 with the Acholi cultural institution to prepare a plan for mapping the region’s cultural heritage after the war.

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programme of documenting cultural sites, as well as promoting traditional dances, songs and rituals, was incorporated into the process of cultural reconstruction. The reasons for this were that, firstly, formal approaches to conflict resolution had failed to unite and create harmony amongst opposing groups of people from the same families. Secondly, the mechanisms of traditional restorative justice systems were viewed as simply rebuilding society, rather than imposing retribution, as would be the case through a formal justice system. The sharing of archival materials such as photographs caused further negotiations with the NDCH, about the need to return to the communities a collection of photographs of northern Uganda’s night commuter children, which had been taken by Inger Heldal in 1997.7 However, this request required engaging with the communities to obtain their suggestions on which questions and issues related to photographs of the recent conflict in Uganda. As a result, our encounters with groups of women and men, including students, revealed a need for them to access archival materials. The archival images evoked new recollections from the community members during our consultative meetings. The responses from the elders and community leaders unanimously reflected a need to restore human dignity, hope and cohesion and to share love. The old photographic images, therefore, enabled the community to engage in further discussions on the objective of our collaborative project about using memorials to achieve peace and reconciliation. Interestingly, the collaborative work became more vivid through the involvement of the international partner, NDCH, which focuses on cultural heritage and reconciliation in postconflict situations. In September 2009, the Uganda National Museum and the Norwegian Directorate of Cultural Heritage undertook a fact-finding mission to northern Uganda. This included visits to the northern Ugandan districts of Gulu, Lira, Kitgum, Amuru and Kole, to meet district leaders, community leaders and traditional leaders who were in favour of the project (Uganda Museum 2010). Relationships with these areas had already been established via earlier engagements with cultural leaders and communities of northern Uganda. The Uganda National Museum had built a strong working relationship with the Acholi leadership in Gulu, with politicians and district authorities, who were supportive of our plans. People had started leaving the IDP camps to move back to their villages, but questions of land ownership and compensation for lost properties were being vigorously debated. However, we only piloted the project in four places which contained IDPs: Pabbo, Barlonyo, Aboke Girls’ School and Lukodi in northern Uganda. We held consultative meetings with Norwegian embassy officials to inform them about the need to collaborate with the NDCH. The diplomatic policies of Uganda and Norway had similar views on peace and reconciliation, so the embassy was keen to receive updates about the project. The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs contributed a total of USD 250,000 over three years (2010-2013) to the project.8 During the project implementation period, the Uganda National Museum’s institu7 Inger Heldal, who was a photojournalist in 1997, joined the NDCH’s International Department. The collection of her work became an important part of the northern Uganda memorial project with the Uganda National Museum and the community in 2009. Her photographs depicted northern Ugandan children walking at night towards safe shelters in churches and hospitals – commonly referred to as ‘night commuters’. 8 Meetings with the Norwegian Ambassador in Kampala, Uganda, in September and October 2009. Their Cooperation Fund was awarded through the Norwegian Office of the Prime Minister and

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tional standing was challenged when it was threatened with being demolished and replaced by a 60-storey trade centre.9 As Coetzer (2012) argues, it is clear that regional museums, like many other heritage places, lack a meta-narrative of their design space. This is evident in the example of the Uganda National Museum, which was built without the apparent inclusion of any spatial narrative of the histories of Uganda. The point was whether to retain the museums’ contents as they stood, or to reorganise the museum to ensure a better future. However, the bottom-up approach of involving local communities offered some innovative alternatives to traditional museum curation.

Community memorials The community memorial hypothesis states that people manifest their memory and reconciliation efforts through cultural practices such as poetry, oral storytelling, dance and drama. Having worked with the communities at the IDP camps in Pabbo, Lukodi, Barlonyo and Aboke Girls’ School10 during 2008-2013, I can see how this memorised mythology amongst the local community offers a compelling focus for fostering peace and reconciliation. During my childhood, I learnt the poetic myth of the two brothers, Labong (Nyabong) and Gipir (Nyipir), who were sons of the Luo (Lwo) ancestor from Pubungu, along the banks of the River Nile in Pakwach (Crazzolara 1950). According to the story, an elephant came to Gipir’s home and, when Gipir saw it, he picked up one of his brother Labong’s spears and impaled the elephant. Unfortunately, the elephant ran off with the spear stuck in its side. When Labong returned from the fields, he asked where his spear was. Gipir explained what had happened. Labong angrily demanded his spear back and told Gipir to go and look for it. After tracking the elephant for several days in the bush, he discovered where it had fallen, retrieved the spear and returned it to his brother. Not long after this incident, Gipir came to own some beautiful beads. One of Labong’s daughters saw a bead from Gipir’s compound when she was standing with her mother. She picked up the bead and swallowed it. In revenge, Gipir demanded his bead back and cut the girl’s stomach open to recover it. This quarrel caused the two brothers to split from each other. While Gipir crossed the Nile and moved westwards to the ancestral Alur-land, Labong moved southwest towards

was directed towards the Peace, Recovery and Development Programme (PRDP). This led to the development of an IDP policy and, later, a Peace Paper which has now been adopted as the Draft National Peace Policy 2017 (see Santner 2013). 9 Several public media were alerted by considerable undisclosed sources of information that the government wanted to demolish the Uganda National Museum. Some people supported the demolition, on the grounds that the museum was not attractive, while others, including civil society organisations, opposed it and sued the government (see e.g. Kalumba 2011). 10 The four sites were selected as pilot projects for A Memorial Landscape in a Post-Conflict Situation, 2009-2013. This was implemented through a partnership between the Uganda National Museum and the Norwegian Directorate of Cultural Heritage, with financial support from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2010-2013.

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Bunyoro and, later, north to become the ancestor of the Acholi. The two brothers finally buried an axe in the river Nile to affirm their separation.11 The interesting element of the myth is the way in which it conveys the message that an ancestral relationship of conflict and unity had previously existed amongst the Luo, especially, in this case, the Alur and the Acholi peoples. This story is mentioned here to demonstrate how community memorials were based on ideas and meanings used in the recent rituals that are significant for highlighting cultural ways of transmitting knowledge that is intended to manage conflicts and rebuild societies, using objects to express reconciliation in northern Uganda (Abiti 2015). The community memorial process also points to a debate about understanding the processes of memory-making in a local community, including on how the people’s participation in a museum project might define its future outcome. The project’s measures of success did not focus entirely on its outcomes, but also began assessing the processes of memorials. These were manifested culturally through dance, drama, poetry, debates and prayers. For example, a Uganda National Museum report on the northern Uganda memorial project stated: Since 1997, on 10 October every year, the school organises a memorial prayer in conjunction with the Concerned Parents Association. On 10 October 2012, the team participated in a memorial prayer led by the students in English and the local Luo language. After the prayer, the congregation then walked the memorial route of abduction in the school and lay wreaths with three symbols of Love, Togetherness and Struggle along the route. These symbolise the experiences of girls being brutally plucked from their dormitory, taken to the assembly point at the monument, before being marched out of the school. The students and parents still continue to pray for the one remaining girl whose fate is unknown and the others who died at the rebels’ hands. (Uganda Museum 2012)

From the community narratives gathered by engaging in the memorial process, next we began asking questions like: What is the connection between Uganda’s national memory and the community memorials? We realised that national memorials focus on remembering heroic figures like soldiers or civilians who had contributed to the defeat of earlier regimes.12 But, in essence, such heroism contrasts with community memorials which take the form of rituals, memorial prayers, community drama and festivals involving civil society and local leaders. It could be argued that memorials in northern Uganda must confront the challenging lack of reliable information about the history of the conflict. In reference to questions of memory, Martina Sturken (1996:118; see also Julian 2011:15) asks: ‘How does a society commemorate a war for which the central narrative is one of division and dissent, a war whose whole history is highly contested and still in the process of being made?’ These dilemmas about contextualised memories expose the complex cases of the rebel cult, the Lord’s Resistance Army’s (LRA) use of child soldiers. These children were both victims and

11 This folktale is told in the West Nile and mid-northern Acholi areas. This extract is from Abiti (2015). My appreciation goes to Professor John Mack of the Sainsbury Research Unit, UEA. 12 The ruling party, the National Resistance Movement, has denoted 9 June every year as National Heroes Day in Uganda.

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perpetrators of the atrocities and have now returned to their villages. Thus, how can we, as museum practitioners, present the story of conflict in northern Uganda? The idea of memorialisation at community level was not influenced by a policy directive. However, the Uganda National Museum was keen to involve communities in its representations of heritage, while the communities wanted to use their cultural heritage to achieve peace and reconciliation. Connerton (1989) discusses the connection of personal memory and community memorial in his book How Societies Remember, explaining that societies recall their past in order to define the basic pattern of life, and describing the ways in which societies remember their past through shared memory and bodily practices. The contexts in which such commemorative dances and ritual performances are enacted to produce a social bodily memory could, metaphorically, explain the way in which memorial work manifested itself in the different memorial discourses in northern Uganda. By linking some of the following site-specific stories, the shape of our exhibition narrative took centre stage from today’s narrative of reconciliation. Among the four sites we engaged with, the Pabbo IDP camp was an old trading centre. It was the first and largest IDP camp in northern Uganda, with an estimated population of 75,000 people living in the small, congested area at the height of the conflict between 1995 and 2008 (Report on Pabbo IDP Camp 2012). In contrast, Lokudi, a camp situated only 17 kilometres from Gulu town, was not an officially recognised IDP camp, but rather a temporary community settlement founded to reduce overcrowding and give communities access to their land to cultivate food in the fields (Justice Reconciliation Project 2014). A third site is Barlonyo in the Lango sub-region, where the community commemorates the killing of about 300 of their relatives in February 2004 (Ojok et al. 2009). As part of the healing process, the government had erected a monument at the site of the massacre only a few weeks after the incident. Our community discussions about reconciliation efforts began by questioning official narratives on whether memories comprise truth. For instance, how can we comprehend how many people were killed, when only a small number of victims were recorded on the monument? Who builds these kinds of monuments and who inscribes them? These questions, which might not have definitive answers, led to ongoing conversations about the issues raised, with the aim of making recommendations. For example, roles and responsibilities were allocated amongst the community members, Uganda National Museum staff and the district leaders during the meetings. This resulted in reports and discussions around significant issues related to memorials. The questions also led to community dialogue, with the women’s peace clubs starting to sing songs and perform dances to convey accounts of the brutal massacre and to address the issue of violence against women.

St. Mary’s Aboke Girls’ Secondary School St. Mary’s Aboke Girls’ Secondary School is one of the establishments that held a community memorial art festival in northern Uganda. The school was known globally because 139 girls had been abducted from there in 1996. Following this aggression, the Italian deputy headmistress, Sister Rachele, and a teacher, Mr Bosco, followed the abductors into the bush and secured the release of 109 girls. Although 30 of the girls were forced to stay with the Lord’s Resistance Army, most of them managed to escape and begin the memorial process.

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The school administration engaged a project team to renovate the school dormitory, which enabled us to remain open-minded when planning activities with the community using the available resources. The school used its space to educate young people about issues of peace and reconciliation (see Figure 6.1). The school was also hoping to transform one of their old storerooms to display information about the abduction, but had been constrained by its limited financial resources. Therefore, a strong collaboration was needed, including all the partners, to identify the priorities and the resources required as a core principle of the project implementation. Figure 6.1: Signage in the garden of Aboke Girls’ School

Photograph: Inger Heldal, 2012

These kinds of exchanges forged networks amongst the community. The Uganda National Museum used the community’s skills to engage the Aboke Girls’ School management and organise a memorial art festival. This had not previously been planned, but the idea emerged from meetings between community leaders. Therefore, the issue of memorialisation was strongly described in northern Uganda as including educating young people about peace. The memorial art festival in October 2012 brought together the communities from the four sites of Aboke, Pabbo, Barlonyo and Lukodi, who gathered at Aboke School’s peace gardens. This became a key point of the Museums and Monuments Policy, advocating a rationale of communities contributing to promoting peace and cultural exchanges.13

13 The Memorial Arts Festival aimed to bring together different communities who had experienced traumas, lived in the IDP camps, but had not met to share their ideas of peace and reconciliation. It took place inside Aboke Girls’ School.

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You might ask: Why the notion of reconciliation in northern Uganda? As the writer Okot p’Bitek (1971, 155) observed, ‘the blood-hostility or any violence amongst brothers (kwor) must be settled – if it is not settled the ghosts of the deceased would bring great trouble to their kinsmen’. Therefore, the transition from war to peace in itself required the re-introduction of mato-oput, a ritual to heal hearts and attain reconciliation, as a way to reintegrate offending individuals, including former members of the LRA, into their communities. As already mentioned, the Uganda National Museum was involved in documenting such publicly-recognised ritual practices. Mato-oput was one of the cultural customs recognised by the communities of Acholi which it was decided should be preserved under the Uganda Culture Policy 2006.14 This intervention of cultural memory work in the post-conflict situation was a challenging task for the museum team, who only had a limited idea of who to refer to regarding traditional reconciliation. They discovered it in the memories of the few elders who had survived the destructive war. It was they who found a solution for their community, by remembering the mato-oput ceremony.

The mato-oput ceremony The mato-oput is a form of restorative justice that allows families and communities to tell the truth through a mediated approach, acknowledging and compensating for the loss of life by drinking the juice of the oput tree. This traditional practice was used to enable people to live in harmony together after experiencing violent events which required a reconciliation process in Acholi-land.15 At this point in the project we, as museum workers, needed to listen to the local people and start to redefine the function of the museum, moving away from acting as temples to become more like laboratories, seeking possibilities to interact with a larger interested audience, as Anthony Shelton (2013) outlined in his paper on a critical museology perspective. Reconciliation was preferred to retribution – amnesty and truth-telling rather than punishment of the guilty. Therefore, traditional justice partially contributed to social peace and reconciliation (Allen 2010). Perhaps the key to the production of memorial processes in heritage institutions, such as in this case from the Uganda National Museum, is finding out how the cultural politics of representation evokes memories which lead to truth and reconciliation. The elders’ parallel functions of mediating and performing the healing actions in the mato-oput both transmitted memories to the younger people and seemed to create a positive attitude change towards peaceful co-existence. The most important elements of the museum work seemed to be creating a space for dialogue and advocating the significant cultural sites of reconciliation. This was the first time the Uganda National Museum had ever acted in the capacity of connecting, by both mediating public dialogue on issues around conflict and community healing and showcasing some of the objects held in storage for reference and use in peace negotiations.

14 The Uganda Culture Policy 2006 stipulates that cultural practices should be recognised and documented in Uganda. 15 Interview with Lukodi community committee members on 11 February 2014.

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Figure 6.2: Mato-oput, Lukodi

Photograph: Nelson Abiti, 2014

The Road to Reconciliation exhibition In 2013, the Uganda National Museum decided to initiate an exhibition called Road to Reconciliation in collaboration with the four communities of Aboke, Pabbo, Barlonyo and Lokudi as well as the Norwegian Directorate of Cultural Heritage. The process of devising and staging this exhibition involved interactions with communities in several forums. For example, in a discussion, the community said: ‘We look forward to peace; we have a few elders’. These kinds of exchanges became the foundation for the messages which the exhibition would tell. The next question was how to represent the communities’ memories in a respectful and dignified way. These considerations shaped our approach to the exhibition, which aimed to build trust and mutual understanding whilst listening to diverse voices in the communities. While the exhibition was community-led, it was also intended to inform the policymakers who were promoting the use of peace and reconciliation practices for conflict resolution. The formulation and enactment of the exhibition was a process from beginning to end. Neither the collaborative project team nor the exhibition itself revealed any clear answers – in fact, both attempted to raise questions about the complexities of memorials and exhibitions. As museum professionals, we faced the challenge of how to manage people’s stories, how to minimise the aspect of blame for both perpetrators and victims, and how to ensure that we did not spark any violence or cause more harm. We needed to deal with issues of dehumanisation and make museums a viable tool for cohesiveness in society, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues (2006). We were keen to gain the public’s views in order to understand that reconciliation is shown as a

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process in the exhibition and to rethink societal relationships amongst the groups of people. Therefore, the Uganda National Museum offered space for the communities who had experienced violent conflict and were willing to discuss their future. Figure 6.3: Exhibition poster, Uganda National Museum, 2013

The exhibition project intended to create a network of researchers and stakeholders who would reflect on the role that cultural heritage can play in promoting peace and reconciliation in Uganda, on the African continent and elsewhere. The objective of the workshop was to share different people’s related experiences to discuss memory, peace and reconciliation in northern Uganda, and to engage the public in dialogue about the preservation and presentation of these and other memorials, in the hope of fostering peace and development. For example, Ciraj Rassool from the University of the Western Cape was invited to share the South African experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and memorials. Our local partners at the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP, a civil society organisation in northern Uganda) made some critical observations about approaches to peace and reconciliation memorials. The Makerere Law Refugee Project also joined in the workshop on the work of memorials, by suggesting that a discussion about alternative forms of exhibitions could be used to promote reconciliation in the country. In addition, Gulu University staff worked with us to establish a forgiveness project at the Uganda National Museum.16

16 Gulu University installed an exhibition on human security and recovering from trauma in 2011 at Awach village in Gulu, then transferred it to the Uganda National Museum in Kampala in 2013.

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Conclusion The Uganda National Museum intended to develop three community exhibitions with the goal of promoting community healing, peace and reconciliation after war by creating art, theatres, riddles, dances and stories focusing on young people. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues, there are complexities around defining the role of a museum in (South) Africa, but one of the aims of museums and international partnerships is to promote peace and prosperity (economic development, mainly tourism); the practices have competitive goals of profiting and reconciliatory works which are not always compatible (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006). Hence, in keeping with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s argument, by sharing community stories and voices we sought to connect and build a peaceful society. To us, heritage is a dynamic process, which involves our memory of past events and actions, refashioned for present-day purposes. Post-conflict cultural landscapes are characterised by their dynamism, temporality and changing values. Collective memory and cultural landscape features are connected, although narratives and memories might be at odds. Thus, painful or unwanted heritage is part of the collective memory. This, therefore, raises the question of whose heritage we are protecting, and whose version of history should be told to the wider society. Referring to an example of community museum and memory politics that was discussed by Rassool (2006) makes it clear that our museum became a space for questioning and interrogating the past and present discourses embedded in the institution’s production and reproduction of exhibitions. This raises further issues that were discussed above, such as how the Uganda National Museum began this collaborative project, how far the communities’ expectations and desires were addressed and fulfilled by the exhibition, and whether the community stories and the use of material objects supported the National Museum’s ongoing heritage work. It was noted that collaborations between cultural institutions, such as the Norwegian Directorate of Cultural Heritage, are developed through mutual understandings with the Uganda National Museum and its community engagement activities. Considering community views at the project inception stage, managing expectations and creating synergies in heritage work are important elements in museum cooperation projects. However, a critical challenge remains for Uganda’s cultural heritage institutions, especially the Uganda National Museum, to transform themselves from being repositories of accumulated colonial collections into vibrant, heritage research-oriented organisations working for the societies they are situated in. As Derek Peterson (2015) asserts, the Uganda National Museum collections were formed partly out of the ideological processes of conquests and the dismemberment of local communities during colonial rule in Africa. The permanent exhibitions have outlived their relevance since being installed in the 1950s. As part of the process of democratising and aiding the nation’s healing, the Uganda National Museum should open up its walls to develop exhibitions that reinterpret the material objects as a dialogue, by continuing to use the space of the museum for community engagement.

References Abiti, Nelson. 2015. ‘Reconstructing Memory: Cultural Space, Myth and Reconciliation in Northern Uganda.’ Master’s thesis, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

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Allen, Tim. 2010. ‘Bitter Roots: the “Invention” of Acholi Traditional Justice.’ In The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality, edited by Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot, 242261. London: Zed Books. Anyeko, Ketty et al. 2012. ‘“The Cooling of Hearts”: Community Truth-Telling in Northern Uganda.’ Human Rights Review 13(1): 107-124. Baines, Erin. 2010. ‘Spirits and social reconstruction after mass violence: Rethinking transitional justice.’ African Affairs 109, issue 436: 409-430. Bureau of Statistics (Uganda). 2014. National Population and Housing Census 2014. http:// www.ubos.org/onlinefiles/uploads/ubos/NPHC/2014%20National%20Census%20 Main%20Report.pdf. Coetzer, Nic. 2012. ‘Narrative space: three post-apartheid museums reconsidered.’ In Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions, edited by Suzanne Macleod, Laura Hourston Hanks and Jonathan Hale, 63-73. New York: Routledge. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crazzolara Joseph P. 1950. Lwoo Migrations. The Lwoo part I. Museum Combonianum, 3. Verona: Istituto Missioni Africane. Dolan, Christopher G. 2005. ‘Understanding war and its continuation: The case of Northern Uganda.’ PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science. Finnström, Sverker. 2008. Living with bad surroundings: War, history, and everyday moments in northern Uganda. Durham: Duke University Press. Historical Monuments Act (Uganda). 1967. http://www.unesco.org/culture/natlaws/media/ pdf/uganda/ug_histmonuments1967_engorof.pdf. Hopwood, Julian. 2011. ‘We Can’t Be Sure Who Killed Us.’ International Centre for Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Centre Project. https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-JRP_UGA_Memorialization_pb2011.pdf. Justice Reconciliation Project. 2014. ‘Ododo pa Lukodi Ma Lwak Ocoyo.’ Gulu: Community-led Documentation. Kalumba, Robert. 2011. ‘Let Otafiire Demolish the Uganda Museum.’ Daily Monitor, 22 March 2011. http://www.monitor.co.ug/artsculture/Reviews/691232-1130444135tf09z/index.html. Karp, Ivan and Corinne A. Kratz, eds. 2006. Museum frictions: public cultures/global transformations. Durham: Duke University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2006. ‘Exhibitionary complexes.’ In Museum frictions: Public cultures/global transformations, edited by Ivan Karp and Corinne A. Kratz, 3545. Durham: Duke University Press. Lühe, Ulrike. 2013. ‘Children, youth and transitional justice in Northern Uganda.’ PhD diss., University of Cape Town. MacLeod, Suzanne, Laura Hourston Hanks and Jonathan Hale, eds. 2012. Museum Making: narratives, architectures, exhibitions. Abingdon: Routledge. Margry, Peter J. and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, eds. 2011. Grassroots memorials: the politics of memorializing traumatic Death. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities (Uganda). 2015. Museums and Monuments Policy 2015.

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Mwenda, Andrew. 2010. ‘Uganda’s Politics of Foreign Aid and Violent Conflict: The Political Uses of the LRA Rebellion.’ In The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality, edited by T. Allen and K. Vlassenroot, 45-58. London: Zed Books. Office of the Prime Minister, Northern Uganda Rehabilitation (Uganda). 2007. ‘Peace Recovery and Development Plan for Northern Uganda (PRDP) 2007-2010.’ https:// www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Uganda_PRDP-2007.pdf. Ojok, Boniface, Ketty Anyeko, Emon Komakech, Geoffrey Odong, Geoffrey Opobo, Evelyne Akullo, Letha Victor, and Erin Baines. 2009. ‘Kill Every Living Thing. The Barlonyo Massacre.’ Field Notes 9. Justice and Reconciliation Project. http://justiceandreconciliation.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/JRP_FN9_Barlonyo-2009.pdf. p’Bitek, Okot. 1971. Religion of the central Luo. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau. Peterson, Derek R., Kodzo Gavua and Ciraj Rassool, eds. 2015. The Politics of Cultural Heritage in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rassool, Ciraj. 2006. ‘Community museums, memory politics, and social transformation in South Africa: histories, possibilities, and limits.’ In Museum frictions: Public cultures/ global transformations, edited by Ivan Karp and Corinne A. Kratz, 286-321. Durham: Duke University Press. Reis, Ria. 2013. ‘Children enacting idioms of witchcraft and spirit possession as a response to trauma: Therapeutically beneficial, and for whom?’ Transcultural psychiatry, 50(5): 622-643. Report on Pabbo Internal Displaced Peoples (IDP) Camp. 2012. Unpublished document. Santner, Friedarike. 2013. ‘Uganda’s Policy for Internally Displaced Persons. A Comparison with the Colombian Regulations on Internal Displacement’. International Law: Revista Colombiana de Derecho Internacional 22: 87–120. Shelton, Anthony. 2013. ‘Critical museology: A manifesto.’ Museum Worlds 1, no. 1: 7-23. Sturken, Marita. 1991. ‘The wall, the screen, and the image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.’ Representations 35: 118-142. Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS). 2014. National Population and Housing Census 2014. Accessed December 27, 2017. http://www.ubos.org/onlinefiles/uploads/ubos/ NPHC/2014%20National%20Census%20Main%20Report.pdf. Uganda Museum. 2010. ‘Progress Report Northern Uganda: Preserving and presenting Memorial landscapes to promote Reconciliation and Sustain Peace in Northern Uganda.’ Unpublished document. Uganda Museum. 2012. ‘Progress Report Northern Uganda: Northern Uganda Memorial Landscape Project.’ Unpublished report.

PART III Accessibility of collections from Africa

The Junod Collection A new Generation of Cooperation between Europe and Africa Cynthia Kros and Anneliese Mehnert

Introduction Henri-Alexandre Junod was a missionary with the Swiss Mission Romande, who worked in Southeast Africa between 1889 and 1920. During his time in Africa, he collected a large number of ethnographic objects, which are now held in three different museums. We have not yet explored the collection housed in Switzerland. The MuseumAfrica collection consists of 389 objects including weapons, musical instruments, divinatory and exorcism objects, carved calabashes, woven baskets and a large number of spoons carved from wood (MuseumAfrica, Star CMS, accessed June 20, 2012). The collection at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of South Africa (Unisa) numbers 337 objects, including items carved from wood, woven from grasses and crafted with beadwork, divinatory and healing artefacts, weapons, musical instruments and decorative pieces. This chapter focuses on the Unisa collection. Figure 7.1: A basket with a lid woven from dried grasses. From the Junod Collection at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa. Accession No: 1/75/11

© Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa (CC BY-NC)

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The Junod Collection, like other collections in South African museums, is currently in the middle of a massive period of transition that dates from the end of apartheid and minority rule. The relevance of many collections, which originated in the colonial period, is now being challenged. What value could those collections, tainted by colonialism and apartheid, ever hope to have for today’s society? Since the advent of democracy in South Africa, many museums and heritage sites have been developed or changed to address the previous apartheid-centric historical interpretations. Older state museums still exist, but significantly more funding is provided for newer state museums that focus on the fight against apartheid, the leaders of that struggle, or prisons where the leaders were incarcerated (for instance, Freedom Park, Luthuli Museum and Robben Island). Pre-1994 museums are striving to cope with budget cuts, redundancies and lack of opportunity for career progression or pay rises. This is the context in which collections with their roots in colonialism, such as the Junod Collection, are being curated. This flux in the South African museum landscape is part of a more general upheaval being experienced as the new nation struggles to emerge. Recently, there have been several well-publicised youth uprisings, named after their social media hashtags, such as #Feesmustfall, which have exposed disillusionment with the promises about ‘a better life for all’ that were made in 1994. Substantial inequality persists. Several scholars have taken up the issues brought into the public arena by students, often phrasing demands for a radical economic and social transformation as a form of ‘decoloniality’ (Maldonado-Torres 2016; Modiri 2016; Radebe 2016). This chapter discusses the Junod Collection, including plans for its proposed digitisation and online publication, against this background of voluble social and political discontent.

Colonialism and decoloniality Intellectual proponents of decoloniality make the point that it is not about rejecting modern sciences. Decoloniality entails exploring and acknowledging the reality that European colonists borrowed or appropriated knowledge from the people they encountered and colonised, and then presented it as exclusively their own (Modiri 2016). Sources of so-called Western knowledge which were located in Africa, the Middle East, India, China or among indigenous peoples in the Americas are often not acknowledged. Decoloniality asks for introspection and awareness so as to recognise the divisive nature of capitalism and its role in maintaining expedient stereotypes, based on essentialist notions of race and/or class. Over a period of about 60 years, colonial officials, settlers and missionaries in Africa – to varying degrees – categorised African people as belonging to distinct ‘tribes’, based on perceived cultural differences. There was a tendency to imagine that these ‘tribes’ had lived in an unaltered, ‘primitive’ way for hundreds of years (Sardar 2002; Coombes 1994; Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016). When Junod first arrived in Mozambique in 1889 he did not recognise that the African people he met had developed religious, scientific or musical systems. He continued to believe that the ‘Thonga’, as he called them, needed to be saved from their ‘superstitions’ and that their knowledge systems were inadequate for meeting the demands of the modern world (Harries 2007, 143–145). He did, however, modify his impressions somewhat as he

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came to know and work with African specialists in his chosen fields of natural science and then anthropology, both at mission stations near present-day Maputo and in what is now the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. It became clear to him that the ‘Ba-Thonga’ did have coherent religious beliefs and that they possessed classificatory systems. Although he argued that these were not as advanced as European taxonomies in botany and entomology, he conceded that they showed definite scientific potential (Harries 2007, 137–138). James Clifford (1997) has asserted that, while missionaries arrived at colonies with their cultural and educational background intact, very few left without a changed worldview, which potentially affected their interpretations of the societies with which they interacted. This was definitely the case for Junod. Junod, who was educated in Neuchâtel, Switzerland and, for one semester of his university degree in Berlin, remained in contact throughout his life with European scholars and the debates that were raging across Europe in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries. Missionaries like Junod felt compelled to defend their religious faith and calling against the more sceptical theories of social evolution emerging in Western Europe at that time. Junod could not endorse the theory of the survival of the fittest (Harries 2007, 142; Eriksen and Nielsen 2001, 36–37) since this contradicted his beliefs about a merciful God. But, while he was inspired by the humanist strands of the European debates, Junod also became more convinced, through working with them and coming to understand their society more, of the ‘Ba-Thonga’s’ potential for ‘development’. His personal amalgam of a European humanism that was able to reconcile evolution with a Divine plan and his own greater insight into the dynamism of their society, led Junod to conclude that the stagnation he discerned must have set in only relatively recently. Therefore, he rejected the idea that the ‘Ba-Thonga’ were naturally ‘primitive’ and that their society had not evolved over time (Harries 2007, 186). Although Junod was a pioneering natural scientist, his later anthropological work has probably been more influential in the long run. His seminal work, The Life of a South African Tribe (Junod 1927a, 1927b), was originally published in 1912/13 in two volumes and was held up as an exemplar by luminaries of the British School of Anthropology, including Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski and Kuper (Berthoud 1985). Thus, it may be argued that Junod’s influence on the development of ‘Western’ anthropology was profound. Since, as has been suggested above, the formation of his theories owed a great deal to the contributions of his African interlocutors, by implication, it might be deduced that their intellectual contributions became embodied in ‘Western’ knowledge systems.

The naming of ‘tribes’ and decolonisation Junod’s naming of the ‘Ba-Thonga’ on the basis of what he saw as linguistic and cultural distinctions has survived him, arguably with some very problematic side effects. Historian Patrick Harries (2007) wrote a ground-breaking and insightful study showing how the knowledge systems of the Swiss missionaries who worked in ‘South-East’ Africa at the turn of the 20th century became inextricably entangled with those of the people they had come to convert, as we have suggested above. But Harries also illuminated the mindset of the missionaries who were encountering an environment that was radically and, probably, disconcertingly different from their home country. Harries argued that they sought to control

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and make sense of the African landscape in order to subdue its strangeness. One of the ways in which they imposed order was by creating hard and fast language borders, which often belied the reality of an increasingly fluid social and linguistic situation (Harries 1981, 46). Of course, deciding that there was a single, standardised language in an area that bordered the mission station also facilitated the missionaries’ evangelical work (Harries 1993, 4). Junod began to write down the local people’s spoken language, relying on linguistic structures with which he was familiar. Initially, he named this language ‘Ronga’, which drew him into a serious disagreement with one of his fellow missionaries about the existence of such a category (Harries 2007, 174–175). This suggests the extent of the artificiality used in his interpretation – and possibly in all such similar constructions. As the title of his study Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa implies, Harries (2007) believed that Junod was also strongly influenced by the methodology he had employed as a botanist and entomologist, and thus sought to differentiate humans in the same way as in the natural sciences – that is, according to observable principles. Harries noted the serious consequences of Junod (and other missionaries and ethnographers) situating perceived linguistic groups within supposed geographical locations, as scientists would do when studying butterflies, which was one of Junod’s passionate preoccupations before he turned to ethnography (Harries 2007, 134–136). When he put his mind to what he thought were the devastating consequences of imperialism and modernisation for African peoples, Junod demonstrated that he knew only too well about migrant labour and violent conflict but, in his anthropological work, he often ignored their impact (Harries 1981, 38, 48). He devised linguistic classifications whilst overlooking the large-scale migrations and extensive social interactions which had brought about new linguistic hybridities and the adoption of strategic multilingualism. Junod and the other ethnographers who mapped out hypothetical linguistic areas with geographical designations have left us with a difficult legacy. The collections of objects in South African museums have been divided according to ‘tribal’ categorisations which are very similar to those perpetuated by colonists and missionaries. The problematic nature of this has been explored by several academics (Leibhammer 2007; Nettleton 2007; Vail 1989; Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016). This raises the question of how we can represent African peoples with dynamic histories, rather than as having led essentially unchanged lives in isolated groups whilst other societies were developing rapidly. If we are to ‘decolonise’ the Junod Collection and allow it to speak, we have to move past the ethnic essentialism that depicts distinct African ‘tribes’ living in bounded groups, each adhering to a single language and set of unaltered customs. The late Patrick Harries’ work is particularly important for those of us who are researching Junod’s collection, since his major research themes highlight African agency during the colonial period and the productive interactions between African and European intellectual systems (Penn 2016, 14). The collection, which Junod created during his time in Africa, is much more complex than simply a number of artefacts gathered from the ‘Tsonga (Ba-Thonga)-Shangaan’ culture. This category may be artificial and may hide many nuances or signs of social interaction and change. We can no longer treat the objects in the collection as if they can tell us in any straightforward way about a people called Tsonga-Shangaan. To do so would be to replicate a colonial knowledge structure whilst also ignoring the vast changes southern

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Africa had already undergone and was still experiencing when Junod was conducting his research. So, how can we study, appreciate, present, unlock meaning and create dialogue about the collection today? How can we unearth and explore African intellectual agency during colonial times? How can we do this without repeating the epistemic violence already wrought by the colonial classifications? It is also important to recognise the likelihood that in-depth research and dialogue is lacking from some colonial collections because of the curatorial crisis, precipitated by budget cuts that South African museums are experiencing at the moment. Figure 7.2: A letterhead stamp carved from wood. It reads: ‘C.P.21L.MD.*HAJ*’. From the Junod Collection at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa. Accession No: 1/75/52

© Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa (CC BY-NC)

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South African museums and the internet: Why is a digitisation project so important? This curating crisis in South African museums is characterised by a lack of funding, which makes certain areas of work impossible. Posts are often left empty as a result of budget cuts. This situation places artefacts in grave danger, making it difficult to maintain high standards of collection management. MuseumAfrica, which houses about 389 pieces of Junod’s collection, no longer has a curator on its staff. This means that access to the collection’s storerooms is not managed or controlled. Nobody is left to maintain the collections, ensure that they are stored according to museum standards and used for research, teaching and learning. Government officials have placed museums low on the list of priorities for financial support, being quick to point to the ‘stain’ of colonialism and apartheid on museums and their contents, ignoring the vast potential that they have to serve communities and expand knowledge (Abungu 2016). The call for decoloniality, which is strong in the South African academy at the moment, needs to be explored and engaged with by the country’s museums as well, as it is very difficult to draw out the potential of collections in the midst of a curating crisis. This situation is also causing museums to become isolated from one another and their communities, because of the stress under which their staff have to work. However, we assert that connection is the key to overcoming isolation. Even though it is important to acknowledge the situation currently being experienced by South African museums, it is even more important to formulate strategies to overcome them – or at least navigate through them. The Junod Collection is well placed to become one of the central nodes of such a future institutional network, since it is housed in the museum of the largest open distance-learning university in Africa. It is also located within the South African municipal museum environment because another part of the Junod Collection, as mentioned above, is at MuseumAfrica, a city museum in Johannesburg. The third section of the Junod Collection,1 which is held in Switzerland, allows for the possibility of a connection across Africa and Europe, in this particular case, to Junod’s home country. Considering the curatorial crises in South African museums and the geographical distance between Europe and Africa, the practice of digitisation and online publication seems to offer the best way to create these connections and encourage discussions around the Junod Collection. The value of digitising the objects and their accompanying documentation (where it exists) and making this resource available using the internet cannot be overstated. Making museum collections available to the widest possible audience is an academic necessity and a social responsibility (Corradini 2011), so digitising the collection and publishing it online is the first step in this. Hopefully, it will lead to inter-country student exchanges between South Africa and Switzerland; training opportunities for both Swiss and South African students; workshops and colloquia; and a cooperation which will lead to the sharing of knowledge and skills amongst various museums in both countries. This type of cooperation could also unlock funding opportunities from

1 We imagine that Junod intended the collection to be unified but, as it currently exists in three separate locations we were unsure whether refer to it in the singular or the plural.

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various sectors within South Africa, as the project would be able to show measurable goals and outcomes and is located in one of the largest universities in South Africa. The digitisation and online publication of collections offer new and enhanced ways of presenting, interpreting, supporting and disseminating research on collections that would otherwise be confined within individual museum walls (Keene 1997, 308). Jenny Newell (2012, 290) discusses the advantages of digitisation, such as comparing geographically distant objects, making visible connections which may not have been evident before, integrating information in different forms, including objects, field notes, maps and archival documents, as well as broadening access to collections. The positive outcomes of this sort of work cannot be denied. It includes the potential for instant worldwide publicity; fast and convenient communication with colleagues, researchers and the public about the collection; the negation of distance; and the ability to reach visitors who might otherwise have been unable to enjoy museum collections (Stewart and Marcketti 2012, 524). As well as this ability to generate new research, online access to museum collections may also break down geographical, physical and hierarchical barriers (Corradini 2011, 78). As their working conditions become increasingly challenging, museum professionals are being placed under enormous pressure, including having to keep up with technological advances. Curators are sometimes concerned about the consequences of publishing their collections online. Some see the proliferation of information on the internet as a threat to their autonomy, as well as creating a potential risk for the collections. The theft of museum objects from South African museums has become a significant, legitimate concern, and curators fear making information on artefacts available online, in case it is used by opportunists as a ‘shopping list’. Another concern has been raised (Pickover 2014) about the point that curators cannot guide and contextualise the story of an object or document when it is too readily available to be viewed as a single item on the internet. This issue can also be very challenging in a physical exhibition space, but it is important to keep in mind the point we observed above – that the story never actually exclusively belonged to the curator (or the original collector) to explain and contextualise in the first place. In fact, the common practice of guiding a visitor through a display with the curator intent on making their own point stifles the dialogue which should be occurring between museum staff and visitors. Any attempt to decolonise a museum should probably entail attempts to encourage dialogue amongst people, with the museum as the lynchpin, allowing them to achieve a better understanding of each other. James Clifford (1997, 192–193) has argued that the museum’s function should be that of a ‘contact zone’, where its collection becomes part of an ongoing historical, political and moral relationship between the museum and its various communities. The aim of such a relationship would be to re-negotiate existing power balances and to disrupt long-held binaries such as museum/public; tribe/object; colonist/coloniser; and story-teller/story-consumer (Clifford 1997, 195). Connecting the Junod Collection across its three locations could enrich analysis and discussions around how the collection has been classified and exhibited, what research has been done around it, what it means to the museums which house it, and how it can be used in future to foster understanding and mutual respect. Digitisation and online publishing would support this endeavour. The very high proliferation of cell phones in Africa means that African society is moving rapidly towards wireless connectivity (Albertyn-Burton and Scheepers 2017; Ntwanga et al. 2015, 48; Dalvit et al. 2014). New technology alongside

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this extensive connectivity could serve as the medium to reenergise current debates about colonial collections and their possibilities.

New ways of seeing? It has been argued that the Junod Collection can no longer be studied as an assemblage of objects reflecting a particular ‘cultural’ group. Neither can it continue to be studied without taking account of the profound social dislocations caused by the advent of colonial control and capitalism that were present at its inception. But that does not mean that it should remain silent, hidden away in a rarely-visited museum exhibition space or storeroom. The collection needs to breathe fresh air, be viewed by new eyes and open itself up to thoughtful dialogues among new physical and virtual visitors. George Abungu (2016) has argued that museum collections should be used as tools to foster peace and reconciliation. Admittedly this is a tall order, but the possibilities of the Junod Collection are exciting. How might we present it as the product of the intertwining of knowledge systems which we have alluded to above, drawing on Harries’ work? How could the collection be explored from the premise that it is the material residue of the countless conversations Junod must have had with the African specialists and craftspeople who were his interlocutors? Hamilton and Leibhammer (2016) have described one way of going about this kind of work in Tribing and Untribing the Archive. In this book, they show how the collation, consolidation and analysis of museum objects, together with multiple archival sources, can be woven into a rich account that includes the voices of the interlocutors during colonial times in Africa. If the collection can no longer be seen as a reflection of one particular cultural group, where should we start to reorient the observer’s gaze? Anneliese Mehnert’s (2014) master’s degree dissertation explores what the collection tells us about Junod himself and his probable relationship to the collection, as well as considering how it could be utilised in future exhibitions. Many of the objects have strings attached to them, which were obviously used to hang them up for display on the wall. There is an unverified story from some of his descendants that Junod surrounded himself with the collection in his personal study, indicating how much he valued the objects – and perhaps their associations with people whose ways of knowing and manufacturing he had come to admire (Mehnert 2014, 99–101). The artefacts seemed to mean more to him than he could reveal in his ethnographic work, in which he often felt obliged to adopt the dispassionate tone that was expected of anthropologists of his time. Anneliese Mehnert (2014) studied the collection alongside Junod’s seminal work, The Life of a South African Tribe (Junod 1927a, 1927b). She observed that these volumes are not, in fact, simply anthropological texts, as they reveal aspects of Junod’s complex personality. He was not just a well-educated missionary who subscribed unthinkingly to the scientific theory generated in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries, nor was he merely a servant of European colonialism. There are glimpses of his respect for local people’s knowledge and ways of knowing, even in his exemplary ethnographic monograph. For example, the collection at Unisa contains two divination sets, and MuseumAfrica also has one under its custodianship.

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Figure 7.3: The divination set, or Bula, found in the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa. Accession No: 1/75/9a-w. Note Junod’s handwriting on some of the pieces

© Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa (CC BY-NC)

In his monograph, Junod mentions the individuals who taught him how to divine, Mankhelu and Elias ‘Spoon’ Libombo (Harries 2007, 136). Junod relates that he had made the effort to learn their method of divination from them (Junod 1927a, 3). This claim presents a potential opportunity for exploring the complexity and unevenness of the intertwining of knowledge systems, since it cannot be accepted without probing analysis and wide-ranging dialogue. Discussions with an academic colleague at Unisa highlight the probability that the divining teacher exercised decisive agency in this knowledge exchange. It is possible that the ‘medicine men’ only pretended to demonstrate and teach Junod everything about divination, since they would not feel the need to show this white man everything about their rituals. The individuals with whom Junod interacted in Africa were the intellectuals of their time and may well have enacted their agency by only selectively sharing knowledge with him. It seems likely, on reflection, that they would have chosen how to control their own story. Junod’s account of divination in The Life of a South African Tribe is intriguingly ambivalent. He wrote: I am convinced however high the degree of astuteness engendered by divinatory bones may be, they have been extremely detrimental to the intellectual and moral welfare of the natives. Of course no sensible person would for one moment believe in the objective value of these practices. But I am obliged to admit that the Thonga system is far more ingenious than any other that I have met with. (Junod 1927b, 542, 572)

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In one sense, this passage is characteristic of Junod’s admiration for ‘Thonga’ practices, always tempered by his remembered obligations as a missionary committed to rescuing the people from ‘primitive superstition’ and bringing them to the light of God. But one might also argue that his use of the peculiarly loaded words ‘astuteness’ and ‘ingenious’ betrays an unease and suspicion that they were manipulating him – playing on his credulity – and, in the end, proving their superiority, not just to any ‘other’ systems, but to his own.

Conclusion We assert that the Junod Collection speaks volumes. We just have to work out how to listen to it. It is possible, we maintain, to hear the voices of the African intellectuals and specialists this Swiss missionary encountered, through the artefacts as well as through Junod’s written work. The collection is being caught up in heated debates at a time when old intellectual structures like museums are being questioned because of their monopoly of knowledge and their apparent identification with the legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Museums are being called upon to serve their local communities and new publics by fostering mutual dialogue. Clifford’s concept of the ‘contact zone’ seems to suggest a way forward. In order for this to be enabled, there should be a concerted effort by museums to bring collections into the public domain in a way that can enable dialogue and learning. For this to happen in the case of the Junod Collection, we believe, it needs to be viewed from a perspective of decoloniality that will open up a much broader vista of knowledge-making. The digitisation of the Junod Collection at Unisa has already begun, and we envision being able to unify the three Junod collections online, whilst building cooperation and knowledge-sharing across the three institutions that house them.

References Abungu, George O. 2016. ‘Contestations, Conflicts and Contradiction in Africa’s Nation Building Process: Museum and Heritage’s Double Role.’ Paper presented at the annual Africa Speaks event held at the University of South Africa, Pretoria, 18 May. Albertyn-Burton, Shaheema, and Christo Scheepers. 2017. ‘Exploration into the Rise of Mobile Penetration in a Developing E-commerce Market and its Impact on a South African Company.’ Journal of Marketing and HR 5(1): 259–283. Berthoud, Gérald. 1985. ‘Entre l’anthropologue et le missionnaire: la contribution d’Henri-Alexandre Junod (1863-1934).’ Revue européenne des sciences sociales 71(23): 219–238. Brown, Tom H. 2005. ‘Towards a Model for M-Learning in Africa.’ International Journal on E-Learning 4(3): 299–315. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coombes, Annie E. 1994. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Corradini, Elena. 2011. ‘POMUI: The Web Portal of Italian University Museums.’ University Museums and Collections Journal 4: 77–84. Dalvit, Lorenzo, Steve Kromberg, and Mfundiso Miya. 2014. ‘The Data Divide in a South African Rural Community: A Survey of Mobile Phone Use in Keiskammahoek.’ In Proceedings of the 2014 e-Skills for Knowledge Production and Innovation Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, 2014, 87–100. Santa Rosa, CA: Informing Science Institute. Eriksen, Thomas H., and Finn S. Nielsen. 2001. A History of Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Hamilton, Carolyn, and Nessa Leibhammer, eds. 2016. Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods. Vol. 2. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Harries, Patrick. 1981. ‘The Anthropologist as Historian and Liberal: H-A. Junod and the Thonga.’ Journal of South African Studies 8(1): 37–50. Harries, Patrick. 1989. ‘Exclusion, Classification and Internal Colonialism: The Emergence of Ethnicity Among the Tsonga-Speakers of South Africa.’ In The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, edited by Leroy Vail, 82–117. London: James Currey. Harries, Patrick. 1993. ‘Through the Eyes of the Beholder: H. A. Junod and the Notion of Primitive.’ Social Dynamics 19(1): 1–10. Harries, Patrick. 2007. Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Junod, Henri A. 1927a. The Life of a South African Tribe. Volume 1, Social Life. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd. Junod, Henri A. 1927b. The Life of a South African Tribe. Volume 2, Mental Life. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd. Keene, Suzanne. 1997. ‘Becoming Digital.’ Museum Management and Curatorship 15(3): 299–313. Leibhammer, Nessa. 2007. ‘Tsonga and Shangaan: The Making and Moulding of Identity.’ In Dungamanzi/Stirring Waters: Tsonga and Shangaan Art from Southern Africa, edited by Nessa Leibhammer, 15–34. Johannesburg: Wits University Press and Johannesburg Art Gallery. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2016. ‘Anthropology, Coloniality, and Decolonisation: A Fanonian Meditation on Thinking Beyond Man, Humanitas, and Anthropos.’ Seminar presented to the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of South Africa, 18 February. Mehnert, Anneliese. 2014. ‘The Junod Collection: The Man, the Objects; A Colonial Collection Explored in Contemporary Times.’ Master’s research report, University of the Witwatersrand. Modiri, Joel. 2016. ‘In the Fall: Decolonisation and the Rejuvenation of the Academic Project in South Africa.’ Accessed October 18, 2016. http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/ opinionista/2016-10-16-in-the-fall-decolonisation-and-the-rejuvenation-of-the-academic-project-in-south-africa/. MuseumAfrica, Johannesburg. Artefact list. Star Collections Management System, accessed 20/06/2012. Nettleton, Anitra. 2007. ‘In Search of a Tsonga Style: Figurative and Abstract Woodcarving.’ In Dungamanzi/Stirring Waters: Tsonga and Shangaan Art from Southern Africa, edited

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by Nessa Leibhammer, 123–137. Johannesburg: Wits University Press and Johannesburg Art Gallery. Newell, Jenny. 2012. ‘Old Objects, New Media: Historical Collections, Digitization and Affect.’ Journal of Material Culture 17(3): 287–306. Ntawanga, Felix F., Andre P. Calitz, and Lynette Barnard. 2015. ‘A Context-Aware Model to Improve Usability of Information Display on Smartphone Apps for Emerging Users.’ The African Journal of Information Systems 7(4): 30–55. Penn, Nigel. 2016. ‘Obituary Patrick Allan Lifford Harries (1950-2016).’ Modern Africa 4(2): 5–17. Pickover, Michele. 2014. ‘Patrimony, Power and Politics: Selecting, Constructing and Preserving Digital Heritage Content in South Africa and Africa.’ Paper presented at the IFLA WLIC 2014, Lyon, France, 16–22 August. http://library.ifla.org/1023/1/138pickover-en.pdf. Radebe, Zodwa. 2016. ‘On Decolonising Anthropology.’ Accessed October 18, 2016. https://savageminds.org/2016/05/23/on-decolonising-anthropology/. Sardar, Ziauddin. 2002. Introduction to The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory, 11–14. Edited by Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt and Ziauddin Sardar. London: Continuum. Stewart, Tekara S., and Sara B. Marcketti. 2012. ‘Textiles, Dress, and Fashion Museum Website Development: Strategies and Practices.’ Museum Management and Curatorship 27(5): 523–538. Vail, Leroy, ed. 1989. The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. London: James Currey.

The Africa Accessioned Network ‘Museum Collections make Connections’ between Europe and Africa: A Case Study of Finland and Namibia Jeremy Silvester

Introduction On 28 August 2012 I visited the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich with my colleague, Dr Martha Akawa, Head of the History Department at the University of Namibia. A temporary exhibition was on display, featuring objects that had been collected by the Swiss Botanist, Hans Schinz, during a visit to the famous Finnish missionary, Martti Rautanen, at Olukonda in northern Namibia. The exhibition was beautifully curated, and seemed foreign, yet familiar. Dr Akawa grew up in Ontananga, the village next to Olukonda. This surprising encounter in Switzerland, far from Namibia, with fragments from a familiar past, confronted us, as historians engaged in museum work, with a realisation. We realised that we honestly had no idea of the extent to which Namibia’s material heritage had crossed borders and oceans. We did not even know the sites, the museums, where these objects – which had been collected in various ways – had been accessioned. We felt that the way the objects were presented in stylish glass display cases was attractive. Framing texts in this way also gave some context to the route that these cultural artefacts had travelled before ending up in the museum’s collection. The objects provided a window onto the past of a distant place. However, the objects’ biographies still could not transcend our sense that these cultural artefacts had been severed from the contemporary cultural landscapes, communities and cultural traditions that give them meaning and which provide a link between the past and the present. Michael Ames argued that ‘[m]useums are cannibalistic in appropriating other peoples’ material for their own study and interpretation, and they confine their representations to glass box display cases. There is a glass box for everyone’ (Ames 1992: 3). However, of course, the artefacts in most European museums comprise assemblages which validated themselves as scientific resources, as libraries of material culture. In such collections today, multiple, comparative copies remain locked away in storage, and the vast majority of objects never receive the visibility or framing that might be obtained by being placed inside a glass box in a public space. An alternative vision is long overdue. The release and return of some of these objects in storage could provide the catalyst for a renewed ‘engagement’ with a cultural heritage that has been exported and the ‘empowerment’ of community-based museums and heritage projects in Namibia (Chikozho 2015). The collections held in many ethnographic museums in Europe reflect a history of collecting that is entangled with histories of colonialism, evangelism, trading and raiding. Museums in Europe are, increasingly, engaging with the ‘politics of provenance’ and the biographies of collections and collectors, acknowledging that objects have been decon-

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textualised from both the places and the intangible cultural heritage that give them depth. Tremendous potential exists for an international dialogue that creates connections and partnerships between museums in Europe and Namibia and between museums and communities. Moreover, it is important to challenge the conceptualisation of this relationship as one between museums and ‘source communities’. The dynamic should not be seen as a simple one-way flow of, initially, objects, and, later on, information from Namibia to Europe. Namibia has its own developing museum sector where communities want to build educational resources that reflect their histories and cultural heritage. Partnerships should be based on the mutual benefits that can be achieved through the exchange of knowledge and material culture both ways between partner museums and communities. The first action needed to achieve this goal is information-sharing through the mapping of collections and constructing effective communications via an inclusive network. This was the vision that inspired the establishment of the Africa Accessioned Network.

Establishing the Africa Accessioned Network The national committee of the International Council of Museums, ICOM Namibia, and the Museums Association of Namibia decided that it was important to find a way to establish a network to connect museums which held Namibian collections with the communities and places that had used the objects on display. This conclusion was not novel – for example, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the British Museum in London had created a network in 2009 to link their collections with members of the Haida First Nation in Canada (Krmpotich and Peers 2013). However, no such network existed for southern Africa. ICOM Namibia lobbied for a slogan for International Museum Day (IMD) that would reflect this possibility and, eventually, ICOM Barbados was successful in getting the slogan ‘Museum Collections Make Connections’ adopted by ICOM as the theme for IMD 2014. This slogan presented an opportunity to initiate a pilot project to start mapping collections. Therefore, a small project, called Africa Accessioned commenced, following discussions with a group of members of the International Council of Museums of Ethnography (ICME). The group recognised that the collections found in ethnographic museums reflect a global history of the movement of people and objects through a range of interactions – some of which may be categorised as trading, but many would more accurately be described as raiding. The title Africa Accessioned suggests the reality that there was an uneven international flow of cultural artefacts in the construction of museum collections. Thousands of cultural artefacts from Africa are now entombed in the storage vaults of museums in Europe (and, to a lesser extent) other parts of the world. The pilot project was supported by an ICOM Special Projects Grant of 2,244 Euros. This grant was given to ICOM Namibia (in collaboration with the Museums Association of Namibia) in 2014 and enabled the purchase of a laptop and the appointment of an intern. The project was able to establish a working group comprising a couple of ethnographic curators or museum workers with relevant knowledge from each of the eight countries that had expressed an interest in participating. This working group included members from four African countries (Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe) and four European countries (Finland, Germany, Sweden and the UK). Letters were sent to museums in Europe

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from the project hub in Windhoek, Namibia, asking about the extent of each museum’s collection from each of the four African countries. The responses indicated not only the scale of the relevant collections, but also the ability and willingness of individual curators to engage with our project. For example, the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden provided the following statistics: Botswana 358 artefacts, Namibia 385, Zambia 606, Zimbabwe 119, as well as photographs and archives. The ICOM Special Projects funding enabled us to identify museums with collections from the four participating African countries and to establish contacts with those museums with the largest and most significant collections. The initial summaries, therefore, provided a basis for more in-depth conversations with individual curators. Developing relationships with the particular curators who are responsible for the relevant collections was an important first step. Whilst communication itself does not require large resources, it does take people’s time and effort to maintain relationships. Many museum curators still need to analyse their inventories in order to compile information about the sources of their collections. However, others are digitising their catalogues and inventories and making these available online through various forms of searchable database. For example, a search of the British Museum’s database revealed the following summary of their collections: Botswana 333 artefacts, Namibia 313, Zambia 1,532 and Zimbabwe 2,094. Initial enquiries identified eight museums in Finland, six in Sweden, eighteen in Germany and twenty-six in the UK that have been prioritised for further communication. As the project itself has not received further funding, it has evolved into a more informal network. The next phase seeks to obtain detailed inventories of collections from individual countries, so that these can be appraised and potential partnerships developed. It has become clear that there is a huge amount of information to be processed and that it will be necessary to work on a more bilateral basis in order for us to set achievable targets, given the financial restraints and limited personnel available for the work. Therefore, our next goal is to develop national working groups to link museum curators from institutions that are interested in participating in the project, and to establish a number of collaborative projects which can serve as models for future engagement. The Namibia team have first considered Finland (which is the focus of this chapter) and Germany, which both have collections of particular interest to Namibian museums and communities. The ultimate ambition is to establish a website with a searchable database providing a ‘virtual museum’ of collections from Namibia (and other African countries) held elsewhere around the world. This chapter will describe how the information obtained about Namibian collections in Finnish museums is being used. It is hoped that this case study will demonstrate how making connections with diasporic collections can be of mutual benefit, particularly because the conversations created can generate new forms of exhibition-making – and cooperation.

Finnish collections and Namibian connections Finland has a unique historical relationship with Namibia. The German Missionary Society requested that their Finnish personnel should work in the Ovambo Kingdoms, located in what became northern Namibia in 1870. The Finnish Missionary Society established its first Christian mission station at Omandongo in Onayena constituency in Oshikoto Region,

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having arrived on 9 July 1870. The mission station was established during the reign of Omukwaniilwa (King) Shikongo shaKalulu (1854-1879). Namibia is a strongly Christian country today (with over 90% of the population describing themselves as Christians). However, when missionaries first arrived in northern Namibia, there was considerable resistance to the introduction of this new religion with new beliefs and rituals. It was thirteen years before the first local convert was baptised and by 1900, after thirty years of mission work, the Christian community in northern Namibia numbered just 873 (Nampala 2006: 77). However, the church network gradually spread and the missionaries were also responsible for introducing new forms of education and literacy, as well as a Western-style health system, including establishing the first hospital at Onandjokwe (Mtuleni and Shiweda 2011). Figure 8.1: Mrs Magdalena Kaanante, the curator of Nakambale Museum and Ms Charmaine Tjizezenga of the Museums Association of Namibia examine a pot from the Rautanen collection

Photograph: Jeremy Silvester

One of the legacies of the extensive Finnish involvement in northern Namibia is that several missionaries received gifts from local communities. However, missionaries also collected examples of local crafts and, particularly, obtained objects that were associated with previous belief systems, often from converts to Christianity. These collections included artefacts associated with ancestral leaders or traditional medicine, and rituals used by the namunganga (traditional healers). Such objects were used for mobile exhibitions in Finland,

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providing evidence of the success of the evangelical mission (Miettinen 2005: 118-139). The interaction between Finnish missionaries and local communities also left a significant cultural footprint. For example, many Christian converts adopted Finnish names, while the missionaries also influenced the development of new forms and fashions of clothing in northern Namibia (Shigwedha 2006: 196-198). A grant from the Embassy of Finland enabled a small team from Namibia to visit those museums in Finland with the most important collections of cultural artefacts from Namibia. The Namibian team visited Finland on 6-16 June 2015. It consisted of two staff members from the Museums Association of Namibia – myself and Ms Charmaine Tjizezenga – along with Mrs Magdalena Kaanante. Mrs Kaanante is the curator of Nakambale Museum, a community museum based in the mission house of the Martti Rautanen, the former head of the Finnish Missionary Society in Namibia. The team contacted all the museums with significant Namibian collections before travelling, made appointments and, where possible, requested and obtained catalogue information and photographic images of the relevant artefacts. Preliminary research indicated that the most significant collections of Namibian artefacts were those donated by two influential Finnish missionaries, Martti Rautanen and Emil Liljeblad. Rautanen’s ethnographic collection was donated to the Museum of Cultures (National Museum of Finland) and consists of 127 objects which are supplemented by Rautanen’s own notes (Suomen kansallismuseo 1983). However, the National Museum of Finland also has 67 objects donated by Deacon Hannu Haahti (who conducted an ‘inspection tour’ of northern Namibia in 1911-1912) and 18 objects from various other donors. The most numerous collection of objects donated by Finnish missionaries is held in the museum of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission (FELM). This museum was opened in 1931, but renamed ‘KumbuKumbu’ in 2009 when the exhibition was given a new look. Unfortunately, the museum closed in 2014 and its entire collection of approximately 1,500 objects is now in storage at the National Museum of Finland. The collection includes not only historical items, but also more recent examples of craftwork such as basketry, jewellery and carvings. The second important collection that the team prioritised was that of Emil Liljeblad, which was donated to the University of Oulu. The team was greatly assisted by the publication Namibiana in Finland II (Taskinen 2004), which had identified seven museums with objects from Namibia. However, it was noted that the regional museums only had a small handful of artefacts. For example, the Kuopio Museum of Cultural History had four objects, Huittinen Museum had two items and Hämeenlinna Historical Museum had nine objects from ‘Africa’ (probably all from Namibia). Whilst our project focuses on the larger collections, these collections in regional museums tend to present the biographies of individual Finnish missionaries, whose legacy is a historical link between a place in Finland and a place in Namibia, so they also offer opportunities for further dialogue. We believe that advancing the connections between Namibia and Finland that are depicted in museum collections can provide a good model for developing new international relationships between museums. Such dialogue about collections will have two strands. On the one hand, Namibian communities may engage with museums about specific objects that they feel have particular sacred or political significance, such as the ‘power stones’ discussed in greater detail below. The biographies of objects such as these have the potential to

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create a new form of exhibition that engages with the politics of display and creates greater mutual international understanding. The second form of engagement comes from using the objects in a collection to create greater awareness of the history of northern Namibia and the ways in which cultural syncretism (where aspects of different cultures blend to create something new) took place, or where cultural practices were suppressed as a result of the Namibian-Finnish encounter, and how this impacted on people in both Africa and Europe. The development of the ondhelela cloth that is the iconic traditional dress of Oshiwambo-speaking women reflects a cultural fusion between the cloth imported by the missionaries and existing clothing styles. Both the KumbuKumbu and the Liljeblad collections also contain omakola, musical instruments that can no longer be found in northern Namibia. These instruments were important trophies for missionaries, as they could only be used by certain traditional healers (endudu/oonganga) whose practices, the missionaries complained, included homosexual activity (omasenge). This instrument was used during rituals to deal with mental illness, and when traditional healers were graduating to a higher level of recognition. The missionaries suppressed the instrument and condemned the practices that it was associated with as pagan (Mans 1997: 28). In fact, many of the objects that Finnish missionaries obtained from African communities were sent to Europe as tangible evidence of the success of Christianity in displacing previous belief systems. As Namibia is today a strongly Christian society, the possible reconnection with historical artefacts linked to alternative belief systems is likely to stimulate public debate about faiths and values. Africa Accessioned has focused on collections that were defined as ‘ethnographic’, but we are aware that there is potential to develop connections with other Finnish museums which hold objects from Namibia, such as the Military Museum and the Natural History Museum (which has over 1,500 botanical specimens from Namibia donated by Rautanen, Liljeblad and other collectors). One of the most important developments that resulted from the Namibian team’s visit was establishing a framework that will support the implementation of future project partnerships. A three-year Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between the Museums Association of Namibia and the Finnish Museums Association, as a mechanism to help to coordinate projects. Next, this chapter provides examples of three different collections that have been used to generate museological initiatives which will engage Namibian communities with familiar, yet distant, objects and images. Whilst these are the initiatives that we have developed the most, there is considerable potential for further collaborative projects, particularly with reference to the Liljeblad collection at Oulu University. One of the most symbolically important collections viewed by the team was the Martti Rautanen collection in the Museum of Cultures at the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki. Rautanen arrived in northern Namibia in 1870 and spent most of his life there, dying in Olukonda on 19 October 1926. The Museum of Cultures was established in 1893 and opened to the public in 1916. The missionary was known locally in Namibia as Nakambale – literally ‘the one who wears a basket’. This was because the skullcap he often wore was considered to look like a basket (okambale).

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Figure 8.2: A specimen Ekola from the museum collection at the University of Oulu

Photograph: Jeremy Silvester

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Martti Rautanen collected ethnographic objects and plant specimens and recorded some of the earliest meteorological readings from northern Namibia. He sold his collection to the Imperial Alexander University (now the University of Helsinki) in 1892, which transferred it to the National Museum when it opened in 1893. The Rautanen collection consists of 127 artefacts, along with a further 85 objects from other donors. Items of interest include a ‘War Chief’s Amulet’ (Omusindilo), lucky charms for painting protective signs on the body (Omupja), a hunter’s charm (Omizizaakongo) and a special charm to bring luck in obtaining goods (Omuzi oshipeualuala). A total of 67 of these objects were obtained from Canon Hannu Haahti, who was the Deputy Director of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission and who made an inspection tour of northern Namibia from 19 April 1911 to 4 March 1912 (Vilhunen et al. 1995: 161). The Rautanen collection was of particular interest to Ms Kaanante. The team were able to obtain a catalogue of this collection, written in Finnish with an English summary. The Museums Association of Namibia and Nakambale Museum will work with Finnish colleagues to translate the entire catalogue into English (as it draws on contemporary notes about the objects). However, the objective will not be to create a direct translation, since the drawings of the objects contained in the original booklet will be replaced with photographs. Nakambale Museum will also facilitate a workshop with community members where they will provide additional comment and reflection on the objects and the intangible cultural heritage that is associated with them. Furthermore, additional information about important Ndonga heritage sites will be photographed, creating a link between the tangible objects and their cultural landscape. The Rautanen collection will form the basis of a new ‘catalogue’ that will be available in English, Oshiwambo and Finnish. The information will also be used to create a small mobile exhibition. The project will contribute to an ongoing debate in Namibia about the relationship between different belief systems. In addition, the Finnish Mission Museum collection contains a set of very early phonogram recordings (30 discs from the period 1899-1909), which are probably the earliest sound recordings from northern Namibia, although their quality still has to be determined. The collection also includes the furniture from Rautanen’s house (copies of which were made and donated to Nakambale Museum in Namibia when it was established), as well as the contents of his personal library. Research through the Africa Accessioned project is making it clear that it was common practice for many individual collectors’ collections to become dispersed. In Rautanen’s case, for example, most of his meteorological collection was donated to the Berlin Meteorological Department in Germany, whilst his plant specimens were given to the University of Zurich in Switzerland. When the team returned to Namibia, the digital archive that had been compiled by Ms Raili Huopainen, the former Director of KumbuKumbu Museum, was found to be the most useful tool. Enquiries about individual objects in photographs that had been indexed with their catalogue number enabled the National Museum of Finland to translate information about objects of particular interest from its original index card system. Two objects proved to be particularly fascinating, as they seemed to be sacred artefacts.

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The ‘power stones’ of the Aawambo Kingdoms: dialogue and repatriation Since Namibia obtained its independence, two important stones have been returned to the country. The ‘power stone’ (Emanya lomundilo woshilongo) of the Kingdom of Oukwanyama was returned to the Kwanyama Traditional Authority in 1990 and, in 2014, the stone that was part of the regal symbols (omiya dhoshilongo) of Ombalantu was returned to the Mbalantu Traditional Authority (Ashipala 2014). These stones were sacred objects and it was believed that, if they were removed from the kingdom or damaged, serious misfortune would strike the kingdom (Eirola 1992: 49). Figure 8.3: Catalogue number 5620 – ‘Piece of Ondonga sacred stone, Oshipapa. The piece is from a meteorite fallen on the Earth in 1883 or 1886. Power stones are believed to symbolise good government, stability and connection with the forefathers’ spirits’

Photograph: From the collection of FELM. Courtesy of the National Museum of Finland

We were aware of a story which recounted that the Finnish missionary, Martti Rautanen, and a Swiss companion, Dr Hans Schinz, had obtained a piece of the ‘power stone’ from the Kingdom of Ondonga. We had checked with the Schinz collection in Zurich, but no stones were recorded in their catalogue. Now we were able to review the digital archive of the museum which had collated many of the objects obtained by missionaries. Three of the photographs, showing two different stones, were particularly intriguing, as we presumed they were images of the stones from Oukwanyama and Ombalantu that had been previously been returned to Namibia. We requested a translation of the catalogue information about the

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two objects (catalogue numbers 5620 and 8248). When we received the reply, it was clear that these were new objects. We believe strongly that the first object is a piece of the sacred stone of Ondonga. The translation of the catalogue entry reads: This entry matches an incident that is described very clearly in Matti Peltola’s biography of Martti Rautanen, based on his translation of an account found in Rautanen’s own diary: In February 1886, the desire for knowledge gave Rautanen and Dr Schinz a lifethreatening experience. It concerns a stone, which Rautanen calls ‘Oshilongo-Sten’ ‘the stone of the kingdom’. Stones are rare in Ovamboland, so rare that religious reverence was shown to them. In many cases they were probably meteorites, which partly explains the awe. They were never mentioned in public, especially when strangers were present. Martin Rautanen and Dr Schinz had taken a trip to the site of the late King Nembungu’s court, which was to the east of Olukonda, a few hours’ journey in an ox-wagon. Their attention was drawn to an enclosure. When they asked what it was, they were told that there were amulets there used to make rain and it was forbidden to examine them. Rautanen knew that there was a stone inside such an enclosure, but he had also heard of a special stone which was near there. Nambahu, one of the young men from the mission station, said that he knew where it was. He guided Rautanen and Dr Schinz to the place. Part of the stone was visible. Its even surface a few decimetres in extent, rose slightly from the ground. Dr Schinz was in a way disappointed, because the stone was evidently not meteorite, but quartzite. In order to be able to study it closer, he and Rautanen both cut pieces for themselves and then covered the sides of the stone with sand, as it had been before. Before they returned, Rautanen’s attention was drawn to a heap of wood which nobody had taken home, although firewood was scarce. They were wooden posts used for building a stockade. Rautanen studied the place and found out that there had been a house there. They were standing on the site of the court of King Nembungu, a circumcised King who had ruled Ondonga a generation before, perhaps in the 1830s, and had been held in high esteem. Then they returned to Olukonda. (Peltola 2002: 115-116)

The Ndonga historian Hans Namuhuja argued that Omukwaniilwa Nembungu lyaAmatundu was the ruler of Ondonga in the period 1750-1810. Namuhuja also states that Omukwaniilwa Nembungu is remembered as the custodian of iidhila (taboos) and omisindila (rites). The grave site at Oshamba (Linenge) is one of the most significant heritage sites in northern Namibia (Namuhuja 2002: 11; Silvester and Akawa 2010: 69). Lovisa Nampala refers to an interview she conducted with Shilongo Uukule on 17 August 2001, in which it was stated that, during the reign of Omukwaniilwa Nembungu, a meteorite landed near his capital, Linenge, and was adopted as the stone of the kingdom (omulilo gwemanya lyoshilongo). The stone was associated with the art of rain-making. After Nembungu’s death people would still visit Linenge for rain-making purposes and, if this was unsuccessful, they would travel further north to the Kingdom of Evale, which was the place where the most powerful rain-makers were found (Nampala 2006: 55).

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Figure 8.4: The second stone was described in the translation from the FELM catalogue as: Artefact Catalogue number 8248 – ‘Ritual stone from Angola or Namibia, a “rain stone”, may be a kind of stone with the help of which rain could be roused or engendered’

Photograph: From the collection of FELM. Courtesy of the National Museum of Finland

The provenance of this stone is, thus, unclear (‘Angola or Namibia’). One possibility is that it might be the actual stone from Evale. Tatekulu Helao Shityuwete – whose father, Neliudi Shityuwete, was a member of the royal family at Evale – described having seen the stone in the 1930s at a time when Christianisation meant that people were losing faith in their

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leaders’ rain-making powers. If the stone was from Evale, it would also be necessary to find out where the stone was originally located and explain how it had ended up in Finland. The fact that the border with Angola was only finally agreed in 1929 might mean that there was easier access to the kingdom in the early 20th century. It was common for people to move within the region then, as the border was only enforced effectively after the death of the Kwanyama Ohamba Mandume yaNdemufayo in 1917. Whilst Evale was the most powerful rain-making kingdom in the region, it was widely believed that the ancestors of dead kings (ovakwamhungu) were the keepers of the rain (Tonjes 1996:16; Williams 1991: 109, 168). It is clear that a number of the Ovambo Kingdoms (perhaps all of them) held sacred stones and that rain-making was associated with stones that were located at the graves of ancestral, circumcised, kings. Edwin Loeb, for example, states that rain-making is described in OshiNdonga as okusagela kuomvula imenge (to make rain in the grove of the king’s grave). ‘It is said that in Ondonga there were four sacred stones (omamainja) near the grave of a king and that people still go to them to make sacrifices to the spirits that bring rain. Major Hahn informed me that with some natives he sought for these stones but found only one small one; the others, he was told, are underground’ (Loeb 1962: 277). The historian Jason Amauutuwa states that the Uukwambi Kingdom also contained two big round stones: ‘They called these stones ‘rain eggs’ or ‘rain thunderbolts, the eggs of Nuutoni’. The stones were, reportedly, kept at Lino, according to Jason Amakutuwa (Salokoski 2006: 229; Ndalikokule et al. 2010: 7). The description seems to fit object 8248 and the fact that the museum does not seem to have any information about the stone’s origin suggests that it will be difficult to identify conclusively. This section has detailed one example of sacred objects that were ‘lost’ and have been discovered in museum storage rooms. Information about the fragment of stone from Ondonga was forwarded to the Ndonga Traditional Authority and it seems likely that they will ask for it to be returned to their kingdom in future. It is crucial to initiate dialogue with ‘source communities’ (which we should re-vision as `partner communities’ as museums seek to develop new roles as facilitators of communication between the communities they serve, both domestically and internationally). In Namibia, such dialogue may be a positive provocation that can contribute to the contemporary debate about traditional practices and stimulate debate about the role and significance of cultural artefacts today. For example, the Kwanyama ‘power stone’ has featured in plans to develop a community-based museum that will inform the younger generation about the history and culture of their kingdom. The current discussion about the return of the fragment of the Ndonga power stone could lead to a mobile exhibition that would draw on the stories of the stones (and their return), as a way to raise issues that would engage both Namibian and Finnish publics.

Re-captioning the past: digital repatriation and community engagement The third example of cooperative engagement is drawn from the photographic archives of the KumbuKumbu Museum, which were deposited with the National Board of Antiquities. The museum had donated thirty-two framed photographs with original, brief captions in Finnish to Nakambale Museum before it closed. The photographs were used to create a

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new exhibition called Black and White: Early Finnish Missionary Photographs of Northern Namibia, which was shown at a number of venues in Namibia before being mounted as a new, permanent exhibition at Nakambale Museum. Figure 8.5: The original Finnish caption for this photograph was simply translated as ‘Native attire’.

Photograph: Unknown photographer, 1900-1908. From the collection of FELM. Courtesy of the National Museum of Finland

The photographs in the exhibition had been taken in and around the site of Nakamable Museum and the curator worked with the local community and staff at the Museums Association of Namibia to develop new captions for each photograph. For example, one photograph had been captioned ‘Native attire’. The new, extended caption reads: ‘Bead Skirts. Ovambo woman and girls are seen wearing traditional dress, beads (omihanga) and necklaces and with oompole on their knees. The beads were made out of ostrich eggshells. An oshiteta was normally made out of an ox’s stomach or skin. Ovambo woman used different materials to carry their babies – some used the skin of a springbok or a calf, whilst others would try to obtain a sheepskin. The choice depended on their ezimo (clan)’. The captions for the permanent exhibition were all bilingual – in Oshiwambo and English. The photograph was seen as a window onto the culture of the area a hundred years previously, and the new exhibition was opened by the second President of the Republic of Namibia, H.E. Hifikipunye Pohamba. When the team visited Finland, they went to the National Board of Antiquities and were able to establish that there were over 20,000 images from Namibia (indeed, almost as many

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as are currently held in the photographic archive of the National Archives of Namibia). An attempt was made to obtain digital copies of the photographs that had been used in the exhibition at Nakambale. The idea was that a duplicate or similar exhibition could be produced with the new Oshiwambo captions being translated into Finnish, so that the photographs could return as an exhibition to Finland: Finnish photographs with Namibian captions. A more ambitious project for the near future will be to liaise with the National Board of Antiquities to create a more comprehensive catalogue of the earliest missionary photography from northern Namibia.

The potential of ethnographic museums as catalysts for conversation The report from the team that visited Finland contained twenty-five recommendations. Ten of these have already been implemented or are under discussion. The aim is to establish a five-year plan with the Finnish Museums Association in order to implement more of the recommendations over time. We believe that the Finnish initiatives demonstrate the importance of ‘opening up’ collections and the Africa Accessioned Network can, we hope, be a model for ethnographic museums in other countries. Although the project has opened up possibilities, it has also exposed some practical and theoretical challenges and it will be useful to briefly reflect on three of these before returning to the network’s vision. Firstly, early reviews of the records about many artefacts suggest that there is often considerable vagueness about the geographical location from which objects were obtained. Thus, the object biographies have often been less complete than expected, and there is clearly a need for more research on the provenance of objects from Namibia. Secondly, whilst an initial overview of collections can be obtained, undertaking the necessarily detailed analysis of collections requires considerable time and effort. Whilst there is considerable interest from a number of European museums, we face challenges in terms of our capacity in Namibia to make effective and sustainable links with museums or other institutions in rural Namibia. This runs the risk of creating unrealistic expectations on all sides. Finally, the ethnographic gaze carries certain psychological baggage in Namibia’s post-apartheid society. Engaging with objects purely as markers of ethnic identity would be reductive and could obscure histories of trade, cultural exchange and shifting identities. Engaging with the taxonomies of historical European collections must, therefore, also involve a critical interrogation of the labels and categories that were used to define them. The Africa Accessioned Network is an important museological initiative by a ‘coalition of the willing’ that will provide the basis for important conversations between ethnographic museums and partner communities. This dialogue will enable partner communities to provide greater historical insights into the intangible cultural heritage and geographical places which can provide a more comprehensive biography of objects in a collection. More importantly, the collections will be used to forge contemporary links between different places that can provide the basis for other forms of cultural exchange. As many ethnographic collections were formed during the colonial period, these international exchanges will, inevitably, stimulate and inform debates about contemporary political, power and cultural issues.

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Debate will also be provoked within Namibian communities that re-encounter historical cultural artefacts, particularly those associated with ‘pre-Christian’ belief systems. Communities will be encouraged to discuss the reasons why some traditions have endured, whilst others have faded or evolved. The return of objects to Aboriginal communities in Australia has been linked to the revival or strengthening of cultural traditions, and a similar output could arise in Africa. A community’s encounter with an object that has been of ‘academic interest’ can reconnect it to a dynamic culture when ‘to its owners it holds continuing significance, which can be taken up again upon its return to them’ (Bolton 2003: 47). Encounters with historical collections can also provide inspiration to contemporary artists and craft workers (Hernle 2003: 204). The Africa Accessioned Network is not a campaign for the restitution of all African artefacts to the continent, but it inspires debate about the provenance and significance of some objects in museums. We believe the willingness to review collections and address the past that we are encountering can increase cultural dialogue and positive cooperation. While many museums have sought to engage with diasporic African communities in large European cities, much more could still be done to open up channels of communication with Africa. Cultural dialogue will mean moving beyond the paradigm that values this contact purely in terms of the potential input that can be gained from ‘source communities’. European ethnographic museums need to engage with their colonial legacy, but should see dialogue between communities as an opportunity, rather than a threat. In a postcolonial context, European museums with store room collections from Namibia should engage with cultural and museum-making projects in that country and engage with the landscape and intangible cultural heritage that gives meaning to those artefacts. Collections can generate connections. Museums can build bridges rather than barriers and generate dialogue, rather than division, between communities.

References Ames, Michael M. 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Ashipala, Nuusita. 2014. ‘On the Spot – The Return of the Sacred Ritual Stone from Finland.’ New Era, June 13, 2014. https://www.newera.com.na/2014/06/13/spot-returnsacred-ritual-stone-finland/. Bolton, Lissant. 2003. ‘The Object in View: Aborigines, Melanesians, and Museums.’ In Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, edited by Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown, 42–54. London and New York: Routledge. Chikozho, Joshua. 2015. ‘Community Museums in Zimbabwe as a Means of Engagement and Empowerment: Challenges and Prospects.’ In African Museums in the Making: Reflections on the Politics of Material and Public Culture in Zimbabwe, edited by Munyaradzi Mawere, Henry Chiwaura and Thomas Panganayi Thondhlana, 47–77. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG. Eirola, Martti. 1992. The Ovambogefahr: the Ovamboland Reservation in the Making: Political Responses of the Kingdom of Ondonga to the German Colonial Power, 18841910. Rovaniemi: Societas Historica Finlandiae Septentrionalis.

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Herle, Anita. 2003. ‘Objects, Agency and Museums: Continuing Dialogues between the Torres Strait and Cambridge.’ In Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, edited by Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown, 194–207. London and New York: Routledge. Krmpotich, Cara and Laura Peers. 2013. This is our Life: Haida Material Heritage and Changing Museum Practice. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press. Loeb, Edwin M. 1962. ‘In Feudal Africa.’ International Journal of American Linguistics 28, no. 3 (July), Part 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology. Mans, Minette. 1997. Ongoma! Notes on Namibian Musical Instruments: An Introductory Resource Book for Teachers. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan. Miettinen, Kari. 2005. On the Way to Whiteness: Christianization, Conflict and Change in Colonial Ovamboland, 1910-1965. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Mtuleni, Julius and Napandulwe Shiweda. 2011. Onandjowke: The First Hospital in Northern Namibia. Windhoek: Museums Association of Namibia. Nampala, Lovisa T. 2006. ‘Christianisation and Cultural Change in Northern Namibia: A Comparitive Study of the Impact of Christianity on Oukwanyama, Ondonga and Ombalantu, 1870-1971.’ In Aawambo Kingdoms, History and Cultural Change: Perspectives from Northern Namibia, by Lovisa T. Nampala and Vilho Shigwedha, 1-110. Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing. Namuhuja, Hans D. 2002. The Ondonga Royal Kings. Windhoek: Out of Africa Publishers. Ndalikokule, Erica, Barnabus Nauyoma and Jeremy Silvester. 2010. Heritage Hunt Report on Omusati Region. 3rd ed. Windhoek: Museums Association of Namibia and National Heritage Council. Peltola, Matti. 2002. Nakambale: The Life of Dr Martin Rautanen. Translated by Lahja Lehtonen. Helsinki: FELM. Salokoski, Märta. 2006. How Kings are made, How Kingship changes: A Study of Rituals and Ritual Change in Pre-colonial and Colonial Owamboland, Namibia. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Shigwedha, Vilho. 2006. ‘The Pre-Colonial Costumes of the Aawambo: Significant Changes under Colonialism and the Construction of Post-Colonial Identity.’ In Aawambo Kingdoms, History and Cultural Change: Perspectives from Northern Namibia, by Lovisa T. Nampala and Vilho Shigwedha, 111-268. Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing. Silvester, Jeremy and Martha Akawa. 2010. Heritage Hunt Report for Oshikoto Region. Windhoek: Museums Association of Namibia and National Heritage Council. Suomen kansallismuseo. 1983. Martti Rautasen Ambomaan kokoelma Suomen kansallismuseossa = Martti Rautanen’s Ambo Collection at the National Museum of Finland. Helsinki: Museovirasto. Taskinen, Anssi. 2004. Namibiana in Finland II: Inventory of Museum and Photographic Collections Concerning Namibia in Finnish Museums. Joensuu: University of Joensuu. Tönjes, Hermann. [1911] 1996. Ovamboland: Country, People, Mission; with Particular Reference to the Largest Tribe, the Kwanyama. Translated by Peter Reiner. Windhoek: Namibia Scientific Society. Vilhunen, Tuulikki, Tuomo-Juhani Vuorenmaa, Hans von Schantz and Jorma Hinkka. 1995. To the East and South: Missionaries as Photographers. Helsinki: FELM.

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Williams, Frieda-Nela. 1991. Precolonial Communities of Southwestern Africa: a History of Owambo Kingdoms 1600-1920. Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia.

The Hazina Exhibition Challenges and Lessons for International Museum Collaboration Kiprop Lagat

Background The concept of an ‘Africa in Africa’ exhibition was proposed in 2005 during celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of the British Museum (BM), when the British government announced that it had awarded the BM a grant to fund a five-year project celebrating the link between Britain and Africa (Oluoch 2006). Whilst some of the project’s activities would happen in London, it was thought necessary that others should take place within the African continent itself. The project aimed to increase the understanding of the rich diversity and cultural heritage of African countries and their people, and of Africa’s influence on other world cultures. This was to be achieved by showcasing Africa’s art and cultures in exhibitions, performances and conferences, and by offering fellowships and training to Africans with a view to building a sustainable cultural heritage sector in Africa. The British Council (BC) was involved by way of providing an insurance indemnity cover for the collection during the loaning period. It is against this background that the partnership between the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) and, more so, the Hazina exhibition, is contextualised. The exhibition officially opened at the Nairobi Gallery on 31 March 2006 and remained open for one year, until 30 March 2007. The objects displayed were a selection from eastern Africa in general, transcending the three countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Rwanda were also included in the broad geographical notion of eastern Africa offered by the exhibition. The exhibition mainly targeted educational institutions, especially primary and secondary schools, as the themes it explored touched on aspects covered in their syllabi, thus complementing their knowledge of the history of the region. Conversely, these themes had a wider appeal to the public – both East African residents and non-residents – as it gave them an opportunity to learn about the shared historical and cultural heritage of diverse people from the region. The success of this loan exchange was intended to serve as a model for developing future partnerships between museums in the northern and the southern hemispheres. This would not only provide increased physical and intellectual access to collections, but also catalyse the establishment of long-term collaborations of mutual benefit to these institutions in terms of training, lending artefacts, exhibition, conservation and research.

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Figure 9.1: The poster publicising the exhibition

Photograph: Kiprop Lagat

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Partnering and exhibition development Initial steps The first step towards realising this partnership between the two museum institutions – the British Museum and the National Museums of Kenya – was entering into a mutually-collaborative and legally-binding agreement to stage a public exhibition in the city of Nairobi. The British Council – one of the project’s key stakeholders and signatory to the collaboration – arranged cover for the artefacts. This agreement set out the conditions, including the funding modalities, the exhibition venue, the loan duration, packaging and transportation requirements, security, storage prior to and after installation, the training opportunities on offer, the insurance costs and – crucially – the guarantee that the objects would be returned to the UK at the end of the exhibition. It is important to note that the British Council (BC) arranged cover for the artefacts through a UK government indemnity for the duration of the loan period. Having agreed on these key issues, the agreement was signed by Neil McGregor, the Director of the BM; David Green, Director of the BC; and Dr Idle Farah, Director General of the NMK, in February 2005. Constitution of the project team An international exhibition of this magnitude involving numerous stakeholders – including funders and other government agencies – made it necessary for a project team to be established in both countries. In my role as the exhibition’s curator, I was jointly responsible for ensuring that the exhibition was successfully executed, together with the Africa Programme coordinator at the BM. Therefore, we took charge of scheduling the exhibition process, including contract fulfilments, ensuring that key milestones were met, tracking expenditure and reporting to the various funders and partners, as well as overseeing the development of its content. We were supported by a team consisting of conservators, designers, technicians, education and marketing staff. Considering that the two partnering museum institutions were operating in different geographical locations, frequent communication and consensusbuilding was essential for progress and decision-making. Through regular email messages and telephone conversations, we resolved any issues together and ensured that our respective institutions endorsed every policy decision. At the end of the exercise, we observed that this exchange of expertise during the project delivery phase had been mutually beneficial to the staff involved in both institutions: each had learnt something new from the experience. Capacity-building The next phase was to implement the skills transfer component of the project, which entailed me enrolling on an MA degree course at the University of East Anglia. While the university offered the theoretical background to my study, I was placed at the BM to examine the museum’s entire eastern Africa collection in order to ascertain its scope, provenance and documentation status, while leveraging my personal knowledge of the cultures and people of eastern Africa. By the end of the exercise, I had analysed, piece by piece, the entire eastern Africa collection totalling 12,000 objects, 120 of which were selected for the exhibition.

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Figure 9.2: (Left to right) Tony Eccles, Curator of Ethnography, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, UK, Kiprop Lagat and Juma Ondeng, both from the National Museums of Kenya, examining the beadwork collection from East Africa at the British Museum Ethnography Store in Orsman Road, London

Photograph: Catherine Elliot

In addition, an NMK conservator completed a nine-month internship at the Horniman Museum and Gardens to enhance his skills in remedial conservation. Other members of the curatorial team participated in numerous short-term courses and internships at UK institutions during the exhibition period. Whilst no tailor-made capacity-building programmes were offered to the UK staff in Kenya, they became acquainted with the NMK’s institutional processes of exhibition curation, educational activities and conservation. Concept development Having analysed the BM’s East Africa collection, I then identified the common historical and intercultural strands that have entwined these cultures over centuries. Themes which I thought could be illustrated using the collection, and would weave an eastern African narrative of public interest, included: trade and exchange; leadership; spirituality and wellbeing; and contemporary art. These themes were discussed with colleagues at the NMK and the BM and were considered to be representative of the peoples of the eastern African region. From these broad themes, a storyline, complete with sub-themes, was developed and subjected to an interpretation process, to identify which exhibition media should be used, bea-

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ring in mind that the audience would largely be a Kenyan one. Additionally, the marketing teams from both institutions began developing marketing materials for the exhibition. Exhibition design and fabrication The exhibition design followed and this was also done through a consultative process between the two partner institutions and their stakeholders. In designing the exhibition, it was important to ensure that the key message was communicated – the shared historical and cultural linkages between the people of eastern Africa.1 The colour schemes, lighting, audiovisual presentations and the layout of the objects were arranged in such a way that the visitors’ experience would be not only engaging, but also memorable. Figure 9.3: A display unit depicting the Hazina exhibition layout

Photograph: Courtesy of the NMK

Concerted efforts were made to ensure that local expertise and supplies were used to fabricate the display units. We were keen to guarantee that the exhibition development would be sustainable – so that we would not need to rely on imports whenever we wanted to curate a new exhibition. This approach extended to the design and publication of the exhibition catalogue and other publicity-related materials. The legacy of the exhibition was the catalogue, which described and explained the exhibition.

1 Although Africa’s influence on other world cultures was not depicted in this exhibition, it was illustrated through other activities taking place in London, such as lectures, gallery tours and community outreach programmes.

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Publicity campaigns, including two media breakfast briefings, were held in London and Nairobi in November 2005 and January 2006 respectively. In March 2006, a BM team travelled to Nairobi to install the exhibition together with NMK colleagues, in preparation for the launch on 30 March 2006, which was presided over by the Hon. Rashid Shakombo, Kenya’s Minister for National Heritage. The exhibition themes Hazina: Traditions, Trade and Transitions in Eastern Africa focused on the four main themes mentioned above: trade and exchange; leadership; spirituality and wellbeing; and contemporary art. Trade and exchange explored trade routes, goods and changing markets within the region. This theme first examined the robust trading relationships established between the Swahili people on the eastern coast of Africa and other seafaring peoples of the Indian Ocean. The export of materials and commodities – such as ivory, tortoiseshell, rhinoceros horn and copra (dried coconut kernel) – created important links with the Arabian Peninsula, India and China. It also looked at the lively internal barter trade between communities within the Great Lakes region. This caravan trade led to cultural exchanges between groups that had previously had little contact with each other. These new routes produced a mobile population of business people, specialist craftspeople and traders, who helped distribute new forms and commodities including artworks, throughout the entire region (Lagat and Hudson 2006). It was through these trade routes and exchanges that some of Africa’s artefacts ended up inside European museum collections. Leadership discussed the ways through which political power was exercised in traditional societies via two main structures: in centralised states by established hereditary rulers, and in egalitarian communities by senior elders. Ascending to a position of leadership was achieved following a lengthy process of communal and ritual education. Elders’ councils took decisions that affected the wellbeing and order of their entire community. The exhibition’s third focus was on spirituality and wellbeing, especially how people communicated with a ‘Supreme Being’ or creator of the universe through prayer, via their ancestors and through ritual experts such as diviners and medicine men and women. In most traditional communities in eastern Africa, God is called on whenever order in the universe or a community is threatened or disrupted. At such times, people consult specialists or religious experts who use their communication skills to discover the reasons for this imbalance (Mbiti 1991). This section also illustrated rituals which attempted to ensure good health by promoting healing, removing impurities and protecting people, their homes and livelihoods from danger and disease. Finally, the history of, and transitions in, contemporary eastern African art was articulated, starting from the earliest known objects fashioned in this region more than two million years ago, by the flaked-stone tools of Homo habilis (Smithsonian National Museum 2016). On display were works of influential pioneering eastern African artists including Jak Katarikawe and Rosemary Karuga, as well as those of young, upcoming artists such as Jimnah Kimani. The artworks exhibited revealed the influences that have impacted on the eastern African art scene over time.

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Through these themes, as illustrated in this exhibition of unique and rare objects, the extent of pillage of Africa’s cultural heritage became apparent. Consequently, such collaborative exhibitions are important for communities in their countries of origin to gain access to collections held in Western museums, in order to reinforce people’s identities, history and culture. While these themes demonstrate the shared historical and cultural connections between the peoples of eastern Africa, no museum in the region has a collection that could adequately represent these connections. This highlights the need to collaborate with an institution such as the BM, whose collections span the entire eastern Africa region. Outcomes from Hazina The Hazina exhibition generated significant media publicity in Kenya and received positive feedback from the public. All the local daily newspapers printed at least one article about it, a rare feat in contrast with many other cultural exhibitions that have been staged in Nairobi. In fact, it was so popular that people asked if it could be prolonged beyond the initial six months’ loan period, to give the public more time to visit. It is imperative to note that the very fact the exhibition had been staged sent positive signals to the museum fraternity worldwide about collaborative exhibitions. It was a unique and historic partnership, the first of its kind, in which East African objects in European collections were displayed back in Africa. Building on the success of the Hazina exhibition, the partnership was extended to cover new programmes and activities, which I will now describe. The National Museums of Kenya’s ethnographic collection store was renovated using funding from the British Museum’s World Collections Programme, between 2007 and 2009. This storage space had been congested, with a low ceiling and windows that allowed direct sunlight into the store, and it lacked any space where staff and research students could work. In order to improve the condition of this store, the original ceilings were demolished and a new raised ceiling installed, a new shelving system was fitted, the loft space was reboarded, ultra-violet film screens were affixed to the windows, vinyl floor tiles were laid on the floor and a study room-cum-seminar room was created (British Museum n.d). Just like the development of the Hazina exhibition, these activities were jointly undertaken and were accompanied by practical workshops on collection care, preventive conservation and documentation. This project has resulted in better storage, conservation management and research usage of the NMK’s ethnographic collection. Another key outcome was the establishment of the Getty East Africa Programme (GEAP), which aimed to build staff capacities in core museum skills for museums and heritage institutions in three eastern Africa countries: Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. With funding from the Getty Foundation, GEAP developed a portfolio of sustainable and dynamic skills-sharing programmes which addressed the specific challenges facing regional museums (Ondeng 2012: 1). Key features of this programme were its practical hands-on nature, its emphasis on the legacy of imparting core museum skills and on ‘training the trainer’. This entailed selecting one or two staff members from the participating museums to undertake practical hands-on training. They were expected to impart what they had learnt and help increase the number of staff with essential curatorial skills when they returned to their institutions. GEAP offered training on collection care, developing museum exhibitions

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and education programmes. When the programme ended, 71 participants from 18 museums across the East African region had received training. The participants were also supported with materials so that they were equipped to implement small projects in their own museums (Gachihi n.d.). This resulted in new education programmes, improvements to storage facilities, the upgrading of exhibitions and enhancement of staff curatorial capacities in the participating museums, including the Uganda National Museum, the National Museum of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi National Museum, Kisumu Museum, Fort Jesus, Lamu Museum, Kapenguria Museum and the Kitale Museum. Other training opportunities were made available to NMK staff through the BM’s International Training Programme (ITP). These were mainly targeted at staff working in technical areas such as exhibition design, conservation and education programming, as well as curation. Through this training, these employees have improved their expertise to such an extent that they are now able to train other museum staff within the region, including in Uganda and Ethiopia.2 The challenges Whilst museums in the developed world often participate in international loan exhibitions, those in the developing world remain largely excluded. One of the major contributing factors to this situation is the high premiums needed to insure collections that are considered priceless and irreplaceable. In contrast, in the UK, for instance, the British government has established an indemnity scheme that offers an alternative to commercial insurance. This scheme provides cost-free indemnity cover to borrowing institutions for loss or damage to art and cultural objects on loan during transportation to and from the borrowing venue, storage, installation, display and dismantling (Arts Council England n.d). Unfortunately, many African countries, including Kenya, do not have such comprehensive schemes and cannot afford the high commercial insurance premiums. This means that they are excluded from international museum loan exhibition circuits. Restoring African cultural heritage artefacts held in institutions in Europe and North America to their places of origin is one of the most emotive issues, especially for African museum professionals. Those opposed to repatriation assert that, because of poverty, Africa lacks the resources, institutions and expertise required to adequately protect and care for these treasures (Ratha and Kabanda 2015). Additionally, they contend that these objects were collected before the African nation states that exist today were even created, or argue that they belong to the West since they were received as bequests or were bought on the open market. Conversely, the proponents of repatriation have challenged these methods of acquisition, arguing that some artefacts were simply looted, such as the Benin Bronzes, which were seized during the Benin punitive expedition of 1895 (Lindsay 2014: 174). Moreover, others have asserted that African museums have made such significant progress in developing the continent’s heritage institutions that it now has sufficient expertise to manage its own heritage. Rather than siding with any of these arguments, the partnering institutions in Hazina discussed them and agreed that the exhibition would provide a middle

2 Personal communication with Eileen Musundi, Exhibition Designer at the National Museums of Kenya, 15 October 2014.

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ground, by enabling the movement of objects without becoming encumbered by the repatriation debate. It was imperative for the collaboration to become a model of choice for institutions in the West and Africa to replicate, in order to achieve enhanced circulation and access to collections for people in every continent. Furthermore, some of the BM’s senior managers had reservations about the NMK staff’s ability to look after the collections and guarantee the objects’ security during the loan period. NMK directors allayed these fears by assuring their partner that it had one of the most skilled and robust workforce in the region. As well as its scholars, whose backgrounds included museology and anthropology, the technical staff routinely undertook refresher courses locally and abroad. The Programme for Museum Development in Africa (PMDA),3 hosted by the NMK, had offered a Postgraduate Diploma course on the Care and Management of Heritage and Museum Collections between 2002 and 2005, which at least three members of the Cultural Heritage Department had completed. In addition, prior to and during the exhibition period, a number of staff who belonged to the core exhibition team were selected to undertake further short-term skills enhancement training at the BM. It was acknowledged that safeguarding the artefacts from being stolen or vandalised might pose a challenge, so mitigating measures were put in place, such as installing Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras, alarming all the display units and deploying additional gallery and security staff. Thus, the Hazina case study shows that the usual arguments made against restitution and lending objects to African museum institutions are invalid. It demonstrates that it is possible for these kinds of projects to be conceptualised and successfully executed through collaboration. The museum concept The question that was always at the back of my mind whilst conceptualising this project was how we could design an exhibition that would appeal to local people and increase visitor numbers, since the concept of a museum was itself still considered alien to many African communities. Since the Benin-Ghana-Togo meetings for African museum directors in November 1991, there have been ongoing debates about how to define a museum to an African audience. This challenge was best encapsulated by Victor Kazembe from Kola Museum in Zambia, who asked: How do you define a museum in your own language and cultural background? A shrine is a museum (…) the history of my kingdom is a museum (...) the natural landscape and all its constituents is a museum (...) the paintings done by ancient Africans are a museum. (Ouma and Abungu, 2006)

Kazembe’s view is considered to represent the new paradigmatic shift in African museums. This perspective further argues that, ‘Africa’s culture is living and cannot be trapped in the glass cases of “orthodox museums”’ (Ouma & Abungu, 2006); and that the European concept of a museum is no longer relevant. It is against this background that the concept of community museums, as an alternative organisational model, has started to take root in

3 This was replaced by the Centre for Heritage Development in Africa (CHDA), based in Mombasa, in 2005.

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Africa. According to Chikozho (2015, 58), a community museum comprises: ‘a peopleoriented community public institution of the people, by the people for the people, which preserves and promotes cultural cohesion and community development’. Consequently, through activities such as cultural festivals, community and school outreach programmes, cultural talks, traditional skills-sharing fora, herbal medicine centres and community exhibitions, they have become platforms for articulating identities and fostering socio-economic development. These museums’ programmes and activities are developed, prioritised and implemented by the local communities themselves, in line with their aspirations. Whilst keeping these views in mind, I decided to follow the established Western exhibition norms of presenting objects behind glass cases, to ensure their security and aesthetics in terms of presentation. However, public and outreach events such as musical performances, drama and art sessions were incorporated, as part of the interpretation programme to enliven the exhibition. Notwithstanding these challenges and the criticism against the European concept of a museum, the exhibition and accompanying education programme was a huge success, which received many positive reviews from local and international museum practitioners. Hazina undoubtedly offers some lessons to the museum fraternity on how collaborations of this nature not only work, but could generate new horizons that are worth considering.

The lessons learnt International exhibition loans and exchanges This chapter uses the success of the Hazina exhibition to demonstrate that many African museum institutions are ready and able to host international loan exhibitions. There is currently a renaissance in the African cultural heritage sector, as shown by the strengthening of managing cultural heritage to meet the challenges of the 21st century (ICOM 1992). These institutions are secure, and they have developed the experienced staff and infrastructure needed to host major exhibition loans from other museums. In this era of globalisation, it is imperative that museums use their collections and exhibitions to create international connections between people, with the aim of promoting an understanding of world cultures, cultural integration and exchange. As well as including African museums in the international circuit of exhibitions, new approaches to exhibition development suggest that African curators should also be involved in the design of such exhibitions, which could incorporate artefacts from the continent. Their understanding of the influences derived from local cultures and contexts would undoubtedly add new dimensions and understandings of African artefacts and artworks. This would rectify the dominance that foreigners have had for many years, for instance, over the local art scene in East Africa. Similarly, if African curators provided interpretations of African collections held in foreign museums this would generate new information, since museological interests at the time of collection – especially in the 18th and 19th centuries – were different. Then, they were largely collected as objects of curiosity. While the Hazina project was a one-off exhibition, the contacts made during the project have led to my in-

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volvement in interpreting other African collections, such as one at the Brighton and Hove Museum, in the UK. Regional perspectives Another significant new approach that this model of exchange can enable is to introduce regional perspectives to exhibition curation. Collections in national institutions in Africa only represent the cultural heritage of a specific country; they rarely include collections from neighbouring countries. As moves towards economic integration continue to be widely embraced, so regional perspectives should be incorporated into curatorial work by exploring themes and subjects that transcend national borders. Partnerships with Western museums – whose collections range far beyond today’s nation states in Africa – are vital to achieve this. Hazina’s success offers a proven model for institutions within Africa to start interacting with each other to provide this regional perspective and enhance a deeper understanding of cultures across African regions. Training and skills exchange There are still only limited opportunities for museum professionals in Africa to obtain training, as many of the region’s institutions do not offer museology courses at graduate level. Most professionals working in African museums were trained in universities and institutions outside the continent. Only recently – in the last two decades – have two new institutions been established, with support from the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM). These two institutions, the Ecole du Patrimoine Africain (EPA, based in Porto Novo, Benin) and the Centre for Heritage Development in Africa (CHDA, Mombasa), both offer the necessary training and development support services to African heritage institutions. There is need to develop other programmes to augment their theory-based courses, as this would facilitate the transfer of knowledge and skills about hands-on museology. One previous such programme was the Getty East Africa Programme (GEAP), which enabled museum practitioners from East Africa to work with their counterparts from the UK to build their capacities in areas such as exhibition development, conservation and education. Collection ownership and access Considering the sensitivity of the repatriation question, this collaborative exhibition project charted a new frontier that was devoid of confrontation. Perhaps it is time to engender an alternative language of engagement around heritage repatriation. Museums with ‘encyclopaedic’ collections, for instance, need to create new ways to ensure that the cultural objects their institutions hold are made accessible to the global community. It is from this perspective that this collaborative exhibition exchange partnership between the BM and NMK should be understood – as a starting point towards finding a new model of engagement on this very emotive subject.

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Conclusion This chapter has discussed the collaborative exhibition project Hazina: Traditions, Trade and Transitions in Eastern Africa, which was jointly developed between the British Museum and the National Museums of Kenya. As this chapter has discussed, the partnership advocated using exhibition loan exchanges between museums in the West and Africa – or the developed and developing world – as an alternative way to make museum collections around the world more accessible to universal audiences, particularly to visitors in the artefacts’ countries of origin. Furthermore, the chapter described how other long-term collaborations of mutual benefit to these institutions were established after the Hazina exhibition, especially in skills enhancement, exhibition development, collections management, and developing new public and outreach programmes. At the NMK, this curatorial interaction was extended to include support for the development of Nairobi National Museum’s new permanent cultural exhibition, Cycles of Life, which opened to the public in October 2008. At the time of this publication in 2018, this exhibition remains a footprint bearing testimony to the original collaboration. As well as GEAP, the Ford West Africa Programme (FWAP) was also established. This was a Ford Foundation-funded initiative for international skills sharing and exchange that focused on museums in Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The partnership with Ghana, for instance, resulted in a dual exhibition, Fabric of a Nation: Textiles and Identity in Modern Ghana, curated by Ghanaian museum staff in partnership with the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ghanaian independence in 2007. The exhibition featured printed cloths and their design as a media for expressing cultural, social and political identity in contemporary Ghana and was displayed in the UK and Ghana. The UK version of the exhibition subsequently toured six venues in the UK: Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead; Cartwright Hall, Bradford; Eastleigh Museum, Hampshire; Westbury Manor Museum, Fareham; Wardown Park Museum, Luton; and the Horniman Museum, London on various dates between 2008 and 2010. Staging an exhibition of Hazina’s magnitude required vast financial resources. Insurance costs, freight charges, air tickets, constructing the display units and installing new security features at The Nairobi Gallery – alarms and CCTV – were an expensive undertaking. Whereas these costs were borne by the UK government’s grant to the British Museum with support from other collaborators such as The Getty Foundation and the Ford Foundation, funding challenges are likely to impede the development of similar collaborative ventures in the future. It is precisely for this reason that no other exhibition of a similar scale has been carried out between the BM and its partner museums. I am convinced, however, that the 21st century proffers better opportunities for increased access to museum collections globally. This observation is informed by the accelerated processes of globalisation, the advent of new technologies and the formulation of new legal instruments that have permitted greater mobility of collections, professionals, visitors and ideas. The future, thus, lies in partnerships which will sustain and enhance these positive attributes.

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References Arts Council England. n.d. ‘Government Indemnity Scheme’. Accessed February 2, 2018. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/protecting-cultural-objects/government-indemnity-scheme. British Museum. n.d. ‘Africa Programme. Sustainable and dynamic initiatives for exchange and skills sharing.’ Accessed July 1, 2017. http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/ skills-sharing/africa_programme/kenya.aspx. Chikozho, Joshua. 2015. ‘Community museums in Zimbabwe as a means of engagement and empowerment: Challenges and prospects.’ In African Museums in the Making: Reflections on the Politics of Material and Public Culture in Zimbabwe, edited by Mawere Munyaradzi, Henri Chiwaura and Thomas Panganayi Thondhlana,47-78. Mankon Bamenda: Langaa Research and Publishing CIG. Gachihi, Njeri. n.d. ‘Getty East Africa Report, 2011-2014’, submitted to the British Museum. Higgins, Charlotte. 2006. ‘Into Africa: British Museum’s reply to ownership debate.’ The Guardian, April, 13, 2006. Accessed July 1, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2006/apr/13/arts.artsnews/. International Council of Museums (ICOM). 1992. What Museums for Africa? Heritage in the future: proceedings of the Encounters, Benin, Ghana, Togo, November 18-23, 1991. Paris: International Council of Museums. Lagat, Kiprop, and Julie Hudson, eds. 2006. Hazina: traditions, trade and transitions in Eastern Africa. Nairobi: Oakland Media Services. Lindsay, Ivan. 2014. The History of Loot and Stolen Art: from Antiquity until the Present Day. London: Unicorn Press. Mbiti, John. S. 1991. Introduction to African Religion. Nairobi: Heinemann. Oluoch, Fred. 2006. ‘Exhibition mooted to link Africa with UK.’ East African, April 10, 2006. Ondeng, Juma. 2012. ‘Launching the Getty East Africa Programme.’ Newsletter Africa Programme 2 (Spring). Ouma, Elizabeth, and Lorna Abungu. 2006. ‘Hazina: Much ado about repatriation… but what is the real issue?’ Museum Journal, June 2006. Ratha, Dilip, and Patrick Kabanda. 2015. ‘African art needs to come home – and this is why.’ The Guardian, October 21, 2015. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. 2016. ‘Homo habilis.’ Accessed June 28, 2017. http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-habilis/.

Artworks Abroad Ugandan Art in German Collections Katrin Peters-Klaphake The research project African Art History and the Formation of a Modern Aesthetic: African Modernism in institutional art collections related to German collecting activities began in 2015 and will run for a total of four years. The project is an element of the Research in Museums programme funded by the Volkswagen-Stiftung, a German foundation. A core team of six scholars from the Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth, the Makerere Art Gallery/Institute of Heritage Conservation and Restoration (IHCR) at Makerere University in Kampala, and the Weltkulturen Museum (Museum of World Cultures) in Frankfurt am Main is working together to research the entangled histories of the Ugandan fine art collections in those three institutions.1 Furthermore, international junior and senior guest researchers are engaging with specific academic topics and practical museum work. While the scholarly studies centre on art history subjects and questions about museum and collection theories, the practice-based efforts are incorporating the implementation of archival and conservation measures, as well as staff training in these procedures. The objects under study are artworks – mostly paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures – created between the 1960s and 1990s. With regard to the art historical narratives, several perspectives are embedded in each of the collections: those of the artists, those of the collectors or patrons and those of the safeguarding institutions and researchers. This chapter focuses on my own research, examining three interrelated collections: that at Makerere Art Gallery, the Jochen Schneider estate at the Weltkulturen Museum, and the private Klaus Betz collection in Kampala. My main interest lies in exploring and investigating the collections as places which generate historic and contemporary narratives and which are situated at the intersection of the private and public realms. The fact that private and non-professional collectors from Germany made the selections and, thus, readings and validation of the works, creates a specific starting point for this enquiry. Furthermore, integrating the artworks into a German museum collection has led to a number of consequences, for instance the works are seldom known or accessible in their country of origin, along with questions of ownership. On the other hand, they are safely stored and archived for the time being, and available for exhibition and research.

Approaches and activities This collaborative research project started informally with collegial exchanges in the context of our respective individual studies and exhibition activities, which repeatedly brought different people from the three participating institutions together. Early contact between 1 Information about the different activities is on the project website at https://coamoweb.com/

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Makerere Art Gallery and the Weltkulturen Museum had been established many years ago. It materialised, for instance, in the touring Jak Katarikawe retrospective ‘Dreaming in Pictures’ curated by the late Dr Johanna Agthe (former Africa curator at the Weltkulturen Museum). After it opened in Frankfurt in 2001, the show travelled first to the National Museum in Nairobi in 2005, then to Makerere Art Gallery in Kampala in 2006. This itinerant version of the exhibition was much smaller and opened many years later than initially planned (Schmidt 2008). Nevertheless, the fact that the transfer of about 30 original paintings eventually took place was a milestone in exhibition practices between countries in Europe and Africa. Artworks that are part of European collections are hardly ever displayed in their country of origin or anywhere else on the African continent. Sadly, the initiator and driving force behind this initiative, Dr Agthe, did not live to see it happen, as she died in February 2005. A large number of works in this retrospective came from the Jochen Schneider estate, which has been housed in the Weltkulturen Museum since 1998. The exhibition catalogue contains a tribute to Katarikawe’s patron Jochen Schneider (1939-1997), a German engineer who went to Uganda in the late 1960s and lived there until his sudden death during a trip home in 1997 (Agthe and Court 2001: 132). During his time in Kampala he got very involved with the artistic community of the Makerere art school and became a supporter and friend to many artists. He also assisted the school financially and with the acquisition of materials. Over the years, he accumulated a collection of more than 1,000 artworks – mainly paintings, drawings and prints. Schneider supposedly planned to open a gallery in Germany after his retirement and had shipped his collection to Hamburg just before his death. Allegedly, part of the collection had already been destroyed before Dr Agthe stepped in to safeguard the remaining artworks by transferring them into the museum. Apart from about 200 works by Katarikawe, which had been unpacked and inventoried in preparation for the exhibition, most of this large collection remained boxed up in the storage room for years. Makerere art history scholars like Kizito Maria Kasule, George Kyeyune and Angelo Kakande have observed that the Schneider collection to a large extend comprises of pieces that were bought at final year student exhibitions or directly – and illegitimately – from the Makerere Art Gallery collection. When Kasule and Kyeyune wrote their doctoral theses in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they were able to visit the Weltkulturen Museum and access parts of the Schneider estate. The findings from those brief visits and their subsequent mention in the dissertations still inform the very limited knowledge we have about some of those objects and their interpretation and contextualisation at that time. A direct link between the institutions was revived when Clémentine Deliss was appointed director of the Weltkulturen Museum in 2010. As artistic director of the Africa’95 arts festival in London, she had conceived the exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art from Africa, including a section on Uganda and Kenya, which had taken her to Kampala in the early 1990s (Deliss 1995). Several paintings from the Makerere collection were exhibited in London, but only some of them later returned to Kampala. It is known that the late Robert Loder acquired several pieces for his collection. While there is no direct relation between the East Africa portfolio at the Weltkulturen Museum and the Africa’95 event, the personal link between Deliss and some of the Makerere artists made it easy to pick up the conversation that had dried up with the passing of Agthe five years earlier. Our current research project was conceived and developed from the onset as a joint project. Key actors in conceptualising the thematic and methodological approach were Nadine Siegert

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and Katharina Greven from Iwalewahaus, Yvette Mutumba from the Weltkulturen Museum and George Kyeyune and myself representing Makerere. Smooth Nwezi Ugochukwu, now the curator at the Cleveland Museum, USA, also serves as a core member, in the context of his current work producing an art exhibition about the 1980s in Africa. Together, we deliberated and drafted the guiding questions and working modalities for our cooperation in several workshops that took place in all three institutions. Throughout the project, we are maintaining a continuous exchange through workshops at different places and public symposia, to share intermediate results and invite more loosely affiliated scholars to comment and ask questions. At each of the internal meetings, participants submit themes or questions for discussion and prepare presentations on the status of their respective studies. In addition, we have written papers on contextual concerns, specific topics such as digitisation, and methodological issues. Early on, we started collating a glossary that will eventually provide a framework and common understanding of the key terms used in all the papers. Since all the researchers hail from different disciplinary, cultural and language backgrounds, this open, critical discussion of terms and concepts is very meaningful and productive. In practical terms, this joint research is evolving across a variety of activities. Practical archival and inventory training has been pursued at different levels by the Makerere Art Gallery staff, resulting in improved archiving of the objects in storage, including inventory and digitisation. The Weltkulturen Museum grants us full access to the now properly stored collection, including the accompanying documentation. So far, Dr George Kyeyune has completed his first research residency to complement his historic and theoretical book on Ugandan art in the 20th century. Also, Klaus Betz has agreed to open his collection for research. Essentially, opening up these collections of artworks that have been stored away for decades allows for a broader understanding of artistic practices over time, as well as providing insights into the development of individual artists. It enables a new or wider perspective to be taken on an artist’s approach, thematic canon and visual language, which then informs our critical writing in Uganda. Schneider in particular collected portfolios of individual artists that comprise quite a large number of works – often from an early point of the artist’s professional development. The documentation materials in the Schneider estate comprise letters from artists, receipts, exhibition flyers, and notes. Furthermore, Agthe conducted some interviews with artists represented in the collection. However, there is still a lot of basic research to be done, which can only be achieved in collaboration with scholars on the ground in Kampala. On the other hand, also the Makerere Gallery collection has huge gaps in the documentation and information about its contents. By working together and sharing findings, we are generating valuable synergies. This means that all the catalogues of artworks, biographical and contextual information that are gathered during the different stages of inventory in Kampala and Frankfurt are being shared digitally. In both locations, the works are currently being registered, photographed, and their condition reported. Taking into consideration the point that the Makerere collection has an educational origin and mandate, remains closely linked to the art school and, therefore, has a keen interest in the history of its art, it is important that these artworks and findings are also made accessible to the students and lecturers, as well as other scholars and exhibition curators. The Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth is the project coordinator and leading partner in regard to practical museum work exchange and training, since it houses collections and archives, as well as spaces for exhibition, teaching and research. Since the beginning of the project,

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several practice-based exchanges have taken place – mainly between Makerere Art Gallery and Iwalewahaus – to improve the preservation and inventory of the Makerere collection. The gallery administrator Hasifa Mukyala and the graduate student and gallery assistant Matha Kazungu, who are both from Kampala, spent three months at the Iwalewahaus receiving bespoke training in basic conservation measures, condition reporting, inventory writing, object photography, database creation and maintenance. The starting point and purpose of this professional development measure was to adapt and, where necessary, alter archival practices to meet the needs and conditions of Makerere Art Gallery. Together we assessed and discussed the priorities and feasibilities of the procedures that were to be implemented. After an investigation into museum database solutions, we decided not to use professional museum software in the gallery because commercial solutions were too expensive and their servicing difficult, whereas free, open-source software needs advanced IT skills. Adapting this kind of software to fit individual requirements is very time consuming and maintenance can be problematic – especially under the local conditions where suitable hardware is difficult to acquire and internet access not very consistent. It bears a further high risk of becoming useless as soon as the person running it leaves the institution. Therefore, we agreed to use standard software like Word and Excel as well as an analogue paper filing system. We created a structure of spreadsheets, documents, and image files on a digital platform which allows us to easily add items and comments, and enables us to exchange and access the information remotely from different physical locations. The student assistants and junior researchers Siegrun Salmanian and Lara Buchmann spent several periods in Kampala supporting the re-storing and inventorising of works in both the Makerere Art Gallery collection and the Klaus Betz private collection. This groundwork has significantly supported several ongoing research endeavours, including the forthcoming major exhibition curated by Smooth Nwezi Ugochukwu entitled Feedback: Art, Africa and the 1980s – about a decade that is considered to be one of late modernism in Africa.2 On the academic level, scholars from Germany and Uganda are engaging in art historical studies, as well as questions about different approaches to collections and archives in postcolonial times. In her research on ‘A re-inventoried collection’, Yvette Mutumba (internal working paper) examined the existing situation of the Makerere Art Gallery collection, which not only has a history of futile attempts to create consistent documentation, but also encompasses a significant number of works that are actually located outside the gallery’s storage and have not been registered at all. All across the large Makerere University campus there are paintings and sculptures in offices, halls of residences, chapels, hallways, libraries, gardens and roundabouts. Mutumba suggests considering the specific archival situation at Makerere as a space of parallel or alternative narrative – particularly in comparison to the archival order at the Weltkulturen Museum. One of the next research projects is a study visit by Dr Angelo Kakande from Makerere in Frankfurt. He will focus on investigating the Schneider collection in relation to three particular subjects: first, in how far the collection sheds light on the development of the curriculum at Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, second, exploring the issues around art history that arise from the Schneider collection itself, and lastly, the nature of the patron-artist contractual obligations entered into by Schneider and the artists. 2 A brief description about the exhibition is on L’Internationale online (2017).

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Although this chapter focuses on relations between Uganda and Germany, it is worth noting that similar projects are being carried out for example between the Osogbo School of Art in Nigeria and the Ulli Beier estate at the Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth. All projects in the given framework are concerned with the art historical category of African Modernism.

African Modernism The term ‘African Modernism’ – or, rather, its plural ‘Modernisms’ – has been defined by various scholars as a distinct period in African art history, ranging roughly from the 1940s through to the 1980s (Deliss 1995; Hug 1997; Enwezor 2001; Ogbechie 2008; Hassan 2010; Salami and Blackmun Visonà 2013). It was shaped by an imposition of modernity on the African continent that was connected to the colonial experience. As the colonisers promulgated European ideas and cultures to the colonised populaces and made new materials such as acrylic paint, screen-printing and light metals available, artists in the colonies developed artistic practices and expressions that reflected those influences. In this sense, the history of modern art is an entangled one that can only be understood by considering these different encounters from a transcultural perspective. African Modernisms are phenomena that emerged out of modernisation, urbanisation and globalisation, as well as struggles against – and liberation from – colonial powers. The artists’ agency and their artistic production are deeply intertwined with exchanges and aesthetic references at both a local and global scale. The Nigerian art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu describes this in his pivotal essay ‘Modern African Art’: In Africa one can even speak of a range of modernisms specific to the continent’s different countries. In other words, African modernism cannot be broached merely by invoking European modernism, for it is not, as some historians have claimed, simply an African manifestation of twentieth-century European art – even though we will certainly find many instances of artists consciously adopting, adapting, quoting, decomposing, critiquing, and even transgressing European avant-garde strategies, creating work that dramatizes the restless intellectual encounters of artists engaged in a continuously evolving project of subject formation. (OkekeAgulu 2001: 33)

This variety of artistic positions was very broad and would have been influenced by individual artistic strategies, art patrons and collectors, as well as the respective political circumstances (Harney 2004). The artists reacted to their changing environment, whilst still calling on their own cultural background. Thus, cultural memory was not destroyed, but a process of creative adaptation took place that led to a productive interaction between contested local and global systems of representation (Ogbechi 2008).3 Artists like Ernest Mancoba from South Africa, Ben Enwonwu from Nigeria, and Ibrahim El Salahi from Sudan, to name but

3 So far, most research and publications about African Modernism has been led by diaspora scholars in the USA – for example, Hassan’s and Okeke-Agulu’s seminal, ongoing work on the topic (e.g. Hassan 1995, 2010, 2012; Okeke-Agulu 2001, 2006) and the recently-published A Companion to Modern African Art (Salami and Blackmun Visonà 2013).

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a few, have become representative of the discourse on African Modernism (see e.g. Araeen 2010; Ogbechie 2008; Hassan 2012). It is commonly asserted that, in comparison to other – mostly West African countries – Uganda does not have a tradition of figurative art forms. It may be more accurate to state that very little is yet known about earlier forms of visual or figurative art. There are some rock paintings in the eastern part of the country, which have been preserved and researched in recent years.4 Early art or crafts lessons were introduced in missionary schools but, when the Makerere School of Fine Arts was founded in the late 1930s, modern art began evolving on a larger scale. The authenticity and originality and, hence, the relevance of modern art in Uganda has often been regarded somewhat contemptuously by the dominant art historical mainstream and neglected by influential collectors, because of its close historical ties to the art school’s formal education, with all its Western influences. As Sidney Kasfir pointed out in her important text ‘African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow’, in regard to the impossible desire to acquire authentic objects from Africa: [...] one cannot escape the internal contradiction in the working definition of authenticity – namely that it excludes ‘contamination’ (to continue the specimen metaphor) while at the same time requiring it in the form of the collector… A second fiction in the construction of the canon is that no important changes occurred in artistic production during the period of early contact collecting – that is, neither style nor iconography nor the role or position of the artist was affected in any important way by the initial European presence. (Kasfir 1992: 42)

The best-known Ugandan painter is Jak Katarikawe, who comes from a rural area near the Rwandan border and is self-taught. This prolific artist’s works are often the only Ugandan items included – even in collections that focus on East Africa. One reason for his popularity is a notion of authenticity that persists, despite all his contact with, support from and exchanges with, various European patrons and gallerists.5 The concept of authenticity remains a category of validation for traditional art from Africa, and has translated into a tendency for collectors in the global North to prefer autodidactic artists in modern and contemporary art. A famous example is Jean Pigozzi’s large collection of modern and contemporary art from Africa which emphasises works by artists who were not formally trained. However, artists, curators and scholars have repeatedly criticised this neo-colonial aspect of the acquisition policy of Pigozzi and his consultant André Magnin. For instance, the curator Clémentine Deliss refers to conversations with artists in Africa: What they question is the nostalgia inherent in the efforts of French curators and museum administrators, in particular, to search out the ‘primitive’, ‘tribal’, untutored African artist. The most problematic distinction to date rests on a predilection for self-taught artists who, as Jean Pigozzi writes in the catalogue that accompanies Out of Africa, ‘have the internal fire of creation’ and therefore do not need to ‘go to art school or visit the Louvre or the Whitney’. (Deliss 1992: 12)

4 See, for instance, the dissertation ‘Surrogate Surfaces: A contextual interpretive approach to the rock art of Uganda’ by Namono, 2010. 5 For more information on his work and life, see the exhibition catalogue: Bilder aus Träumen = Dreaming in pictures (Agthe and Court 2001).

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A similar mindset shines through Trowell’s approach to the development of modern art in Uganda – although with a particular twist which views the role of art education almost like that of a midwife bringing a genuine African artistic spirit to life. Trowell rejected European modernist movements in the arts and wanted to protect her students from those influences, intending to unlock ‘unspoiled African creativity’ (Trowell 1937; 1952). In his article ‘Modernism and Cultural Politics in East Africa: Cecil Todd’s Drawings of the Uganda Martyrs’, the art historian Sunanda Sanyal asserts that Trowell utterly underestimated the impact of her own intervention. Or, as Kizito states in his commentary on the text: ‘Instead I get an impression of an artist whose intentions were bent on making her students discover their identity through European eyes’ (Sanyal and Kizito 2006). This pedagogy altered drastically with the change in art school leadership in 1958. Trowell’s successor Cecil Todd initiated an educational approach compliant with the Western art academy curriculum and introduced global art history and modern artistic styles. Some artists opposed these new techniques and contents, suggesting that they left no room for African themes and styles, and a number of art students did not even graduate from the school. However, this dichotomy of academically trained versus self-taught artists describes the two extreme ends of the spectrum and does not seem particularly useful for understanding the debates and artistic creations in a society grappling with its fight for independence, quest for identity and postcolonial nation building. It is important to acknowledge that the in-depth analysis of modern art in East Africa is not only an essential chapter of African art history writing, but also contributes to a broader understanding of the entanglements of artistic practices during colonial and postcolonial times. With regard to the collections this project is studying, we assert that various narratives are inscribed in the portfolios, which allow for a critical reading and require a revision of existing discourses.

The collectors, the collected and the collections With the establishment of the Makerere School of Fine Arts, one of the oldest art education institutions on the African continent, in the late 1930s, the Ugandan capital Kampala became the primary destination for artists from the wider region. For the first three decades, the school’s student body and faculty was small and international. Its continuous development into a formally accredited tertiary art education institution progressed in line with the development of the university. Margaret Trowell, a British artist and teacher who had studied at Slade School of Fine Art in London, began giving art classes on Makerere Hill in 1937 and later headed the school until 1958.6 During the 1960s Kampala, and particularly the Makerere University environment, was a hotspot for cultural, political and intellectual de6 Besides Trowell’s own writings on art and art education in East Africa, there are a number of publications dealing with the art school’s early history and Trowell’s activities. These include several dissertations by current art school lecturers, e.g. Kasule 2003; Kyeyune 2003; Kwesiga 2005; Nakazibwe 2005; Kirumira 2008; Kakande 2008; Tumusiime 2010; and Kabiito 2010. Further see Court (1985) for an overview and Sanyal (2000, 2013) and Wolukau-Wanambwa (2014) for a critical analysis of Trowell‘s art education.

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bate. Discussions about Makerere University’s conceptualisation as an ‘African University’ (Sicherman 2005) were lively and controversial.7 Transition – ‘a journal of the arts, culture and society’, founded in 1961 in Kampala by Rajat Neogy – quickly became the leading platform for intellectual reflections and discussions in the independence decade, far beyond the borders of Uganda.8 The Uganda Museum, established under British colonial rule on the basis of an ethnographic collection, engaged actively in the gathering of artefacts and hosted a variety of temporary displays, including art exhibitions.9 State-owned and administered Nommo Gallery, set up under the Uganda National Cultural Centre Act of 1959 and opened in 1964, held art exhibitions but never committed to building a national collection of artworks. All these activities deteriorated slowly but quite lastingly under the oppressive regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote between the late 1960s and mid-1980s. The School of Fine Arts and the gallery at Makerere – which was founded in 1969 – remained open and active, despite massive disruptions throughout the years of political turmoil. The campus became a gathering place for a small community of artists who had not fled the country and some international expatriates. In spite of significant losses during and in the aftermath of this time, the remaining holdings of the Makerere art collection forms the closest to what could be considered a national art collection, and the gallery aims to carry out some of the functions of a small university museum (see Figure 10.1). It was during those difficult years that Schneider and Betz began to collect artworks in Uganda. The American art historian Sidney Kasfir concludes her review of the aforementioned Katarikawe retrospective by asking: ‘Finally, what is it about German culture that has made their museums and citizens, more than those in the United States or other European countries, so interested in documenting and collecting African culture?’ (Kasfir 2002: 77). Hence, she identifies the phenomenon of German collectors and their specific historical background that, as a matter of fact, is not very well researched. The sudden end of the German colonial empire as a consequence of World War I, without a process of decolonisation, has generated a unique historical culture. The memory of decolonisation was situated one – or even two – generations ahead of other European powers, and migration from the colonies occurred only on a marginal scale. Although the notion of a ‘colonial amnesia’ in the post-1945 period needs to be questioned (Schilling 2014), colonial memory only played a peripheral role in the public domain.10 This self-perception as a nation unbur7 Carol Sicherman, who wrote the extensive study ‘Becoming an African University: Makerere, 1922-2000’, (2005) concludes later on in her article ‘Makerere’s Myths, Makerere’s History: A Retrospect’ that, in hindsight, Makerere University can be defined as ‘a university in Africa’, rather than ‘an African university’ (2008: 11). 8 Transition still exists but is now published by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University (Hutchins Center n.d.). 9 On the history of the museum over the years, see Kamuhangire (2004). 10 One of the few exhibitions that dealt with German colonialism was Namibia – Germany. A divided/shared History. Resistance – Violence – Memory in 2004, curated by Clara Himmelheber and Larissa Förster to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of a colonial war in today’s Namibia, in which thousands of Africans were killed (Himmelheber 2014). In 2016 the German Historical Museum in Berlin dedicated a major exhibition to the theme: German Colonialism. Fragments Past and Present. This year (2017) the Kunsthalle in Bremen has also held an exhibiti-

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dened by colonialism must be taken into account when exploring the preoccupations of the private German collectors, who often considered themselves supporters of African artistic movements and political struggles. Even if these collectors did not formulate a particular collecting strategy, certain motivations and preconditions seem to have guided their acquisitions, and undoubtedly informed the composition of their collections. Many collectors assumed the role of cultural translators, seeing themselves not only as collectors but essentially as allies, friends, and promoters of the artists, as their financial backgrounds allowed them to build up their personal collections. While their self-perception as ambassadors for a ‘real’ contemporary Africa is quite a substantial claim, their aesthetic preferences and tastes shaped – and limited – the representation of African Modernism in those collections and, consequently, in exhibitions and publications which refer to them as primary sources. In this sense, the notion of authenticity is layered upon further by being linked to the present, where the underlying desire for a privileged knowledge that elevates a collector to the status of an expert and guardian of value and truth remains prevalent.

Figure 10.1: Photograph of an exhibition in the gallery space, ca. 1970. Selfpublished catalogue

© Makerere Art Gallery

on about its colonial past: Der blinde Fleck. Bremen und die Kunst in der Kolonialzeit (The Blind Spot. Bremen and the Arts in Colonial Times).

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A central aim of our research is to investigate past and new links between different art collections compiled mainly of artists with a history or close links to the Makerere art school. This will be done by reconstructing these collections as networks and by exploring the biographies of selected works. Collections are seen as contradictory tensional and productive spaces that can offer new perspectives on the study of colonial and postcolonial societies (cf. Roque and Wagner 2012). Therefore, we are paying particular attention to the distributed nature of agency linked to these collections, considering not only the diverse individuals involved (i.e. artists, collectors, museum staff), but also the objects and the collections themselves as agents in their own right. The three collections – the one at Makerere Art Gallery/IHCR in Kampala, the Jochen Schneider estate at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, and Klaus Betz’s private collection in Kampala – are primarily comprised of works from the 1960s to the 1990s. The range and character of the two German collections mirror the locations and historical processes in which they took shape: formed by the personalities and practices of the German private collectors who had lived in Uganda for a certain time. In the case of the Schneider estate, the intervention of Dr Agthe and other Weltkulturen Museum staff played an additional role. The Makerere collection is different in several ways – firstly, it was assembled by a group of people with differing agendas and preferences. Hence, there is no traceable collector’s personality embedded in it – instead it reveals various interests of the school’s faculty and leadership over the years. Furthermore, the Makerere collection was evidently a source for the other two, so remains an important frame of reference. Finally, some of its important works are located in other places on the university campus; hence the larger body of the collection features a grown and decentralized structure. Apart from that, it is an active collection in the sense that expansion and acquisition of contemporary works is an ongoing process. The large Schneider collection provides an overview of the artistic production of a whole generation of Makerere artists, often from the early years of their careers, and complements the Makerere collection. In contrast, Klaus Betz built his relatively small collection around works by selected artists from the Makerere community and a substantial number of paintings by the late Geoffrey Mukasa –a very well-known Ugandan painter who trained in India. The Makerere Art Gallery was established to house the growing collection of artworks by faculty and students of the Makerere School of Fine Arts. Today it is the only public collection of modern and contemporary art from eastern Africa in Uganda. Moreover, the Makerere collection represents different discourses within formal art education in Uganda, from colonial times to the present.11 Its documentation of artworks and gallery programming is erratic and fragmented – for instance, in self-published exhibition catalogues or magazines like Roho.12 Early postcolonial so-called ‘Western’ influences not only occurred in the form of patronage from European expatriates in Kampala, but also through artists who travelled abroad to live and study. The renowned Ugandan artist Francis Nnaggenda, for example, studied at the Art Academy in Munich in the 1960s, and the Zambian Makerere art student Henry Tayali became the first African DAAD (German Academic Exchange 11 There are very few works from Trowell’s era in the collection, but her illustrated publications include some images of artworks from that time (e.g. Trowell 1947, 1952). 12 Roho was a beautifully-illustrated journal published by the art school that only appeared twice.

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Service) scholar in 1972 to pursue his Masters’ degree at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Recently, the gallery has been transformed into the Institute of Heritage Conservation and Restoration (IHCR), to increase research on the artworks and their history, and to improve the preservation of the collection. Figure 10.2: Painting by Fabian Kamulu Mpagi, title and year of production unknown. Oil on hardboard, 57.5cm x 46 cm. Collection Klaus Betz

Photograph: Will Boase

The Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, was founded in 1904 and houses a rich diversity of ethnographic objects, a collection of modern and contemporary art from Africa, and a big image archive. In the 1970s, the Weltkulturen Museum began engaging

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with contemporary art practice in Africa. Since 1974, as an initiative of Dr Johanna Agthe, the museum has collected almost 3,000 works by artists from various African countries. A further defining feature is the collection’s four main strands – works from Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and East Africa – acquired on behalf of the museum by German collectors who had differing affiliations with the respective regions. The largest expansion came with the Jochen Schneider collection. Currently, the museum holds a portfolio of around 1,000 artistic works related to the Makerere School of Fine Arts (today the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts) in Kampala. Klaus Betz is a German teacher who went to Uganda in 1978 and has lived there ever since. An amateur wood sculptor himself, he is knowledgeable about visual arts and has a special relation with the artists. He was a friend of Jochen Schneider, with whom he often went on studio visits. Since his financial means were limited, he acquired works rather selectively. There is a considerable overlap in the choice of artists that both Schneider and Betz collected. A large part of Betz’s collection is displayed in his house and framed by himself. His framing is, in itself, expressive and not only reveals his sense of aesthetics but also adds a visual commentary to the work. To give an example: Betz owns an abstract painting by Fabian Kamulu Mpagi (1953-2001), believed to be created in the 1970s. Betz framed the work and entitled it ‘Abstract Figures’. The substantial frame almost overshadows the work, with its two wide layers of heavy mahogany and the gold inlay creating a framed border, which resembles a museum-like form of presentation (see Figure 10.2).

The life of collections and objects The question of the trajectories of individual objects or entire collections is a very sensitive issue. The modalities of sales or transactions carried out in the environment of the art school and gallery were often dubious and are either very poorly documented or not recorded at all. These uncertainties have, for many years, paralysed research activities. This mostly concerns artworks that were bought directly from the final year academic exhibitions at Makerere art school, as well as those from the collection itself. In some cases, there is proof that certain pieces were originally part of the collection, as they still carry stickers from the gallery. Whilst the existence of Makerere collection stickers on the back of an artwork is hard evidence of its provenance, there are many other cases that can only be based on indicators. One example is a print in the Schneider collection by the Tanzanian artist Balthazar Sanka (born in 1940), which was probably created in the early to mid-1960s. This work was published in an undated catalogue introducing the Makerere Art Gallery as an exhibition and collection space. The fact that the gallery opened in 1969 and that the latest artist biographies were recorded in the early 1970s suggests that the publication was produced then. The reproduction of the piece in this catalogue proves that it was part of the gallery collection at the time. Interestingly, today the Makerere collection holds only three of Sanka’s paintings, but none of his prints or drawings, even though they were apparently considered significant at the time. His print, ‘Lady watch your step’, was published in Transition magazine No. 10 in September 1963. Today, the first print of an edition of ten is part of the Schneider estate in Frankfurt – as are five other printworks by him from that period (see Figure 10.3).

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Figure 10.3: Balthazar Sanka, ‘Lady watch your step’. Print 1/10. Jochen Schneider Collection, Weltkulturen Museum Inv. No. 62725

Photograph: Siegrun Salmanian

Even today, the accuracy of cataloguing differs greatly between individual artworks in all three collections, depending on how carefully and comprehensively the artist, the collector

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and the archivist attached information to the work when it was first acquired. In many cases, only very basic information, such as the artist’s name and title – and occasionally the year of production – were registered. This may partly be explained by the inexperience of the artists at the time of production, as they tended not to sign their work or to deliberately conceal its date of production, from the fear that works which were not sold immediately would reduce in sales value. Whereas, in some cases, inventory processes have helped us gather information about individual artworks, many details remain undocumented, especially in relation to the transaction between producer/seller and collector. Referring to documents such as letters, certificates and contracts, our in-depth investigation into the provenance, entry dates and periods of exhibition and ‘hibernation’ in storage rooms will shed a light on single artworks’ biographies. Further, the current research encompasses a thorough reading of relevant publications and brochures. Significantly, from the 1960s to the 1990s, East African Modernism can mainly be traced through exhibition catalogues with small print runs and in non-professional articles. Nevertheless, these grey materials provide insights into the artworks’ visibility, as well as their reception and distribution in different regional, national and international networks. In our detailed examination of some specific artworks, we will extend a biographical approach to the objects themselves, referring to the metaphor of the object biography deriving from seminal works by Kopytoff (1986) and Appadurai (1986). The idea of object biographies builds on the concept of sequences of artefact production and consumption, and highlights how practices of exchange, ownership and use affect the ways that an artefact is understood (Schiffer and Miller 1999). This approach provides a framework with which to explore objects, by reconstructing ‘cultural biographies’, and it has been successfully applied to museum objects (e.g. Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Hoskins 1998; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Jones 2002). Researching the practices of production, trade, display, maintenance, and deposition allows for a better understanding of the dynamic meanings attached to specific artworks. Tracing the biographical trajectories of individual artworks implies recognising their distinctive material qualities. Apart from that, the different institutional backgrounds of the collections today are of great significance: while the Klaus Betz collection is still in private hands, Jochen Schneider’s collection is housed in the Weltkulturen Museum, which had recently repositioned itself as a post-ethnographic museum (Deliss 2013), and the Makerere Art Gallery/IHCR is a university museum and research institute in one of the oldest universities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Collections are commonly perceived as being static, hidden away in the depths of an institution, only sporadically surfacing in the context of exhibitions. Building on recent debates in museum studies, however, our project aims instead to think about collections as processes, which create links and connections that spread across time and space and continue in the present. As Byrne et al. point out, it is impossible to distinguish between the social and material aspects of these complex processes, as collections are ‘simultaneously social and material’ (Byrne et al. 2011, 4). Joan Kron further emphasises that each individual object obtains new and additional meanings by being part of a collection: To qualify as a collection, the items collected must have some similarity and interrelationship. By being part of the collection each piece is transformed from its original function of toy, icon, bowl, picture, whatever, into an object with new

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meaning – a member of an assemblage that is greater than the sum of its parts. (Kron 1983: 193-194)

The analysis of networks that were formed – and are being formed – by the collections is based on considering the collections and the component artworks as important agents that actively form social relationships between artists, art patrons, teachers, traders, collectors, museum staff and visitors.

An intermediate conclusion Since our project is ongoing, only tentative conclusions can be drawn at this point. In the historical perspective of the collecting institutions in Germany, the artworks in focus were mainly seen as documents of contemporary cultural expressions that would allow for an insight and better understanding of social conditions and norms in certain communities. In this respect, it was never the aim to produce or facilitate art writing, which would situate the work in the context of broader art history. After the so-called global turn in 1989, which resulted in a paradigm shift in global art history that critically reflected the dominant position of the European and American narratives in support of art from former peripheral regions of the world, also art collections in ethnographic museums have to be approached from a different perspective. The autonomy of the artist and the work is to be acknowledged and the frame of reference has to take the art historical context into account. This then leads to the question of how to deal with those collections today. Based on the assumption that collections are not static, but constantly evolving, one of our key questions is: how can curatorial processes reflect the network structure of collections, their relevance today and the importance of collaborative approaches in this context? Both of the German institutions, Iwalewahaus and Weltkulturen Museum, have found an experimental answer to this by inviting contemporary artists to engage with their collections, which provides a space for a plurality of narratives and readings.13 Issues around provenance and the illegitimate acquisition of items in the German collections were also mentioned briefly above. Still, as important as the legal questions and implications are, due to the fact that they are very difficult to solve and would require substantial preliminary research, they cannot be covered here. However, it is a step forward that collaborative research is now taking place across the collections, since the design of our project has enabled friendly and results-orientated arrangements. All partnering institutions already benefitted tangibly from this through the sharing and linking of research findings and the joint knowledge generation in the process. As mentioned earlier, some research into

13 Under the directorship of Clémentine Deliss, the Weltkulturen Museum initiated an innovative Experimental Lab project, which focused on interrogating the collections in collaboration with contemporary artists. All of the exhibitions during her tenure included this collaborative approach, from Object Atlas in 2012 to A Labour of Love (2015), co-curated by Yvette Mutumba and Gabi Ncobo in close collaboration with students and artists from South Africa. Similarly, the Iwalewahaus started its residency and research programme Mashup the Archive in 2012, inviting contemporary artists to interact with the collection (Hopkins and Siegert 2017).

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the Makerere collection in particular – but also a selective study of the Schneider collection – has been carried out over the years in the context of art historical writing at Makerere, mostly in regard to specific individual research questions. However, all the previous studies have concentrated on individual objects or artists and have never examined the collection in its entirety or in relation to other collections. By working with a concept of collections as networks and an inclusive research approach our project yields an innovative and productive method of study and knowledge generation. The regular meetings of our participating and affiliated researchers are proving very useful in many ways, as everyone involved is gaining a better understanding of their respective projects. These gatherings offer a space where information and material are exchanged, specific knowledge is shared and literature or image sources recommended. The critical feedback we offer one another helps greatly in clarifying the structures and arguments in our writing. We can often help each other out with specific experiences or knowledge that complements the interpretation and contextualisation of findings that are unclear. The inclusion of junior researchers offers a great learning opportunity and, of course, valuable support for the project itself. Besides the ongoing process of art historical writing, tangible outcomes are emerging from staff training and the improved storage and inventory processes at Makerere Art Gallery as well as the reconstruction of the biographies of individual artworks. Further, many of the questions that have so far come up and continue to arise in the course of the project are of a more general theoretical interest, both in the context of the discourse on African Modernism and of the changing roles and meanings of museum collections in Europe and Africa. The demand for an art museum in Uganda was brought up by a number of stakeholders in the arts and has been publicly discussed for many years14 – but so far, the idea has not materialised. If it ever does, what would be a good and feasible model for a concept? Is the newly opened – and massively supported by yet another German collector, Jochen Zeitz – Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town an answer? Or rather an artist driven privately founded and funded museum outside of the capital Kampala as envisioned by some protagonists in the arts community like the important senior painter and sculptor Ignatius Sserrulyo (born in 1937) or the gallerist and Kampala Art Biennale initiator Daudi Karungi? A first visible result for the Makerere collection – and evidence for its relevance – is that two paintings, by Mathias Kyazze Muwonge and Peter Mulindwa, will be shown in the Feedback exhibition mentioned above, in Germany and the USA.

References Agthe, Johanna, and Elsbeth J. Court. 2001. Bilder aus Träumen/Dreaming in pictures. Frankfurt am Main: Museum der Weltkulturen. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value.’ In The social life of things: Commodities in a cultural perspective, edited by A. Appadurai, 3-63. New York: Cambridge University Press. 14 See for example Wasswa (1991), and Nsimbe (2010).

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Araeen, Rasheed. 2010. ‘Modernity, Modernism and Africa’s Authentic Voice.’ Third Text 24(2): 277-286. Byrne, Sarah, Anne Clarke, Rodney Harrison, and Robin Torrence, eds. 2011. ‘Networks, agents and objects: frameworks for unpacking museum collections.’ In Unpacking the Collection: Museums as Networks of Material and Social agency in the Museum, edited by S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison, and R. Torrence, 3-26. New York: Springer. Court, Elsbeth J. 1985. ‘Margaret Trowell and the Development of Art Education in East Africa.’ Art Education 38(6): 35-41. Deliss, Clémentine. 1992. ‘White Mischief.’ Frieze 7: 12-15. Deliss, Clémentine, ed. 1995. Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa. Paris: Flammarion. Deliss, Clémentine, ed. 2012. Object Atlas: Field work in the museum. Bielefeld: Kerber. Deliss, Clémentine. 2013. ‘Trading perceptions in a post-ethnographic museum.’ Accessed May 17, 2017. http://theatrum-mundi.org/research/trading-perceptions-in-a-post-ethnographic-museum/. Enwezor, Okwui, ed. 2001. The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa. 1945-1994. Munich: Prestel. Gosden Chris, and Yvonne Marshall. 1999. ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects.’ World Archaeology 31(2): 169-178. Harney, Elizabeth. 2004. In Senghor’s Shadow: Art: Politics, and the Avant-garde in Senegal, 1960 - 1995. Durham: Duke University Press. Hassan, Salah. 1995. ‘The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expressions of the Self and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics.’ NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2: 30-74. Hassan, Salah, ed. 2010. African Modernism. A Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 109(3). Durham: Duke University Press. Hassan, Salah. 2012. Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Himmelheber, Clara. 2014. ‘The Exhibition “Namibia-Germany: A Shared/Divided History”. Resistance, Violence, Memory.’ Open Arts Journal, no. 3 (October): 61–71. https://doi.org/10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s13ch. Hopkins, Sam, and Nadine Siegert, eds. 2017. Mashup the archive. Berlin: Revolver Publishing. Hoskins, Janet. 1998. Biographical Objects. London: Routledge. Hug, Alfons. 1997. Die anderen Modernen: Zeitgenössische Kunst aus Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika. Eine Ausstellung des Hauses der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Berlin: Edition Braus. Hutchins Center. n.d. ‘Transition Magazine at the Hutchins Center.’ Accessed February 1, 2018. http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/transition. Jones, Andrew. 2002. Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kabilto, Richard. 2010. Meaning-making in visual culture: the case of integrating Ganda indigenous knowledge with contemporary art practice in Uganda. Helsinki: Aalto University School of Art and Design. Kakande, Angelo. 2008. ‘Contemporary Art in Uganda: A Nexus between Art and Politics.’ PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

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Kamuhangire, Ephraim. 2004. ‘The transformation of the Ugandan cultural heritage sector: challenges and achievements.’ Report for Uganda National Commission for UNESCO, 61-63. Accessed July 19, 2017. http://www.natcomreport.com/uganda4/livre/transformation.html. Kasfir, Sidney. 1992. ‘African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow.’ African Arts 25(2): 41-53, 96-97. Kasfir, Sidney. 2002. ‘Katarikawe Dreaming: Notes on a Retrospective.’ African Arts 35(4): 74-77. Kasule, Kizito M. 2003. ‘The Renaissance of Contemporary Art at Makerere University Art School.’ PhD diss., Makerere University, Kampala. Kirumira, Namubiru R. 2008 ‘The Formation of Contemporary Visual Artists in Africa: Revisiting Residency Programmes.’ PhD diss., Makerere University, Kampala. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. ‘The cultural biography of things: commodification as process.’ In The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, edited by A. Appadurai, 64-91. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kron, Joan. 1983. Home-Psych: The Social Psychology of Home and Decoration. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. Kwesiga, Philip. 2005. ‘Transformation in Arts Education: Production and Use of Art in Uganda.’ PhD diss., Middlesex University, London. Kyeyune, George. 2003. ‘Art in Uganda in the 20th century.’ PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. L’Internationale Online. 2017. ‘Africa’s 1980s: The intersection of art, politics, economics, and the social.’ Accessed February 1, 2018. http://www.internationaleonline.org/opinions/111_africas_1980s_the_intersection_of_art_politics_economics_and_the_social Mutumba, Yvette and Gabi Ngcobo, eds. 2015. A labour of love. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag. Nakazibwe, Venny. 2005. ‘Bark-Cloth of Southern Uganda: A Record of Continuity and Change from the Late Eighteenth Century to the Early Twenty-first Century.’ PhD diss., Middlesex University, London. Namono, Catherine. 2010. ‘Surrogate Surfaces: A Contextual Interpretive Approach to the Rock Art of Uganda.’ PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Nsimbe, John V. 2010. ‘Mujunga pushes for art museum.’ The Observer, 1 September 2010 Ogbechie, Sylvester. 2008. Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Okeke-Agulu, Chika. 2001. ‘Modern African Art.’ In The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movement in Africa, 1945-1994, edited by O. Enwezor, 29-36. Munich: Prestel. Okeke-Agulu, Chika. 2006. ‘The Challenge of the Modern: An Introduction.’ African Arts 39(1): 14-15, 91. Roque, Ricardo and Kim A. Wagner, eds. 2012. Engaging Colonial Knowledge: reading European archives in world history. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Salami, Gitti and Monica B. Visonà, eds. 2013. A Companion to Modern African Art. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Sanyal, Sunanda. 2000. ‘Imaging Art, Making History: Two Generations of Makerere Artists.’ Unpublished PhD diss., Emory University, Atlanta.

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Sanyal, Sunanda K. and Kizio Maria Kasule. 2006. ‘Modernism and Cultural Politics in East Africa: Cecil Todd’s Drawings of the Uganda Martyrs: [With Commentary].’ African Arts 39(1): 50-59, 94. Sanyal, Sunanda K. 2013. ‘“Being Modern”: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the 1960s.’ In A Companion to Modern African Art, edited by G. Salami and Maria B. Visonà, 255-275. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Schiffer, Michael Brian and Andrea Miller. 1999. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication. London: Routledge. Schilling, Britta. 2014. Postcolonial Germany. Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, Wendelin. 2008. ‘“Dreaming in Pictures” – Jak Katarikawe, Uganda. Eine Ausstellung geht nach Ostafrika.’ Journal-Ethnologie.de. Accessed June 22, 2017. http:// www.journal-ethnologie.de/Deutsch/_Medien/Medien_2008_und_2009/Dreaming_in_ Pictures_Jak_Katarikawe_Uganda/index.phtml. Sicherman, Carol. 2005. Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922–2000. Trenton N.J.: Africa World Press. Sicherman, Carol. 2008. ‘Makerere’s Myths, Makerere’s History: A Retrospect.’ JHEA/ RESA 6 (1): 11-39. Trowell, Margaret. 1937. African Arts and Crafts: Their Development in the School. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Trowell, Margaret. 1947. ‘Modern African Art in East Africa.’ Man 47: 1-7. Trowell, Margaret. 1952. Art Teaching in African Schools. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Tumusiime, Amanda. 2010. ‘Art and gender: Imag(in)ing the new woman in contemporary Ugandan art.’ PhD diss., University of South Africa, Pretoria. Wasswa, John B. 1991. ‘Lack of policy threatens our heritage.’ New Vision, April 15, 1991. Wolukau-Wanambwa, Emma. 2014. ‘Margaret Trowell’s School of Art: A Case Study in Colonial Subject Formation.’ In Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung, Experiment, Wissen, edited by S. Stemmler, 101-122. Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag.

PART IV Critique and evaluation of museum cooperation

New Considerations in Afro-European Museum Cooperation in Africa The Examples of PREMA and Other Initiatives in Ghana Kwame Amoah Labi

Introduction This chapter is about the opportunities European and Ghanaian museum cooperation has offered the country, previously called the Gold Coast. These have also given the European partners the chance to contribute to, and participate in, the global development of cultural heritage, and learn from other collections. The chapter begins by suggesting that traditional methods of conservation and displaying important art and regalia existed before museums were introduced to the Gold Coast as a Western innovation. The challenge of how museums can become integrated into the postcolonial cultural and socio-economic life of several African countries is the focus of this chapter, which uses the Prevention in Museums in sub-Saharan Africa (PREMA) project, the Centre for Heritage Development in Africa (CHDA) programme and other examples as the discussion’s primary references. Attempts to address some of the challenges faced by museums at regional level were made by the sub-regional and regional bodies and programmes set up for this purpose, but they were beset with similar problems, and gradually lost their continental character to localised ones. Today there are several collaborative activities taking place in individual museums across African countries, including Ghana, to improve various aspects of museums’ collections and institutional management. Since this seems to be a systemic problem, what new local and continental approaches can be suggested that differ from the entrenched status quo? This chapter discusses and assesses the impact of these initiatives on museums, and offers some recommendations for improving future instances of cooperation. The discussion is structured in five parts. The first section challenges the belief that museums’ colonial legacy is a source of their problems, by asserting that the concept of traditional preservation and display existed in the Gold Coast before museums were established there. The second reviews the historical account of museum development in Ghana, noting the early collaboration with British museums, local expatriates, indigenous people and some government departments. It also discusses efforts within these museums’ first four decades (ca. 1924-1966) to become integrated into the country’s national development agenda. The third part discusses the subsequent downturn of events and questions the colonial legacy argument, considering what can be done to resolve this issue. The next section reviews some practical interventions, which were intended to enhance professional competencies and save museum collections. Finally, I question how sustainable these attempts have been, and make some recommendations for the future. My practical, hands-on approach of using these collaborations to address the conservation problems in several African museums, and my suggestions for the way forward are derived from over twenty-five years working as a curator at a museum in the University of

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Ghana, Legon and other experiences in Ghana, as well as from several African countries through the PREMA and CHDA exchanges. I base my argument on these experiences, since they are the most recent African-European and American museum cooperation projects across the continent. Time, space and other constraints do not allow me to comment on the European perspectives on these cooperations, but I believe that European contributors to this volume will express their own perspectives and challenges.

The colonial legacy hypothesis For several years, some African museum scholars have posited that the current challenging museum situation is partly due to its colonial origins, and its inability to integrate into Africa’s modern culture. However, within the traditions of Ghana, there is a culture of preserving traditional art and regalia. There are office-holders who swear oaths, invoking curses and punishments upon themselves if they should break their rules of office, including protecting those objects that had been handed down to them by their forebears. There are periodical rituals and annual festivals, at which these regalia are inspected, treated or cleaned, spiritually fed, and then displayed. According to Kyerematen (1964, 1) regalia are not only symbolic and aesthetic expressions; they also offer evidence of early history, religion, beliefs, social and political organisation. Regalia reveal the achievements, skills and values of a society. This kind of art, referred to as regalia, may comprise a collection of historically and culturally significant royal artworks used in adornment, in the installation of chiefs or in governance. Kyerematen defines regalia as including a wide range of objects – from the most sacrosanct, such as the Asante Golden Stool – to the near-ludicrous, like an imported siphon. Several other kinds of items used for cultural activities may also be preserved. The many traditional Ghanaian artworks found in museums are the result of such practices, steeped in long-standing beliefs and traditions. These have helped make the objects available to us as part of the global visual heritage found in museums across the world. However, housing all these objects with divergent histories in a single space by people (i.e. museum professionals) who are not related in any way to them has created contentions and philosophical contradictions about how they should be managed. These oppositions are evident in the different levels of commitment to the philosophies and practices of the artefacts’ custodians, in contrast to the Western scientific conservation methods used by museum professionals. There was a need to integrate this novel foreign institution, and the nature of its work, into part of Ghana’s modernisation efforts. This was successfully achieved through legislation, government support and activities to establish museums in Ghana. Fogelman (2008, 19) asserts that African museums were created as elitist and paternalistic institutions, which were alien to indigenous people. She cites this colonial legacy idea as the reason behind the contention of African museum experts, including Adedze (2002), Ardouin (1996), Arinze (1998), Konaré (1983) and others, that African museums have become irrelevant to modernity in the continent. In fact, as Fogelman observes, some African museums have been at the forefront of developing new models – such as eco-museums – which are championed by local communities, as a way to resolve this difficulty. She notes that others have engaged in professional training to reduce their dependence on foreign

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expertise, thereby shifting the debate from the idea of museums as a form of colonial legacy to museums as contemporary institutions situated within Africa’s modern culture and development. Whilst acknowledging these kinds of advances by some African museums and their staff, I contest Fogelman’s (2008) argument that museums are still elitist and paternalistic institutions. Furthermore, the notion that the challenges currently faced by museums in Ghana and other African countries can be broadly explained by the colonial legacy argument needs to be revised. The discussion that follows demonstrates, on the contrary, that the difficulties faced by African museums are not because they are, in essence, foreign institutions. It is because of the histories surrounding the different trajectories of museums in Africa, which need to be carefully investigated.

The museum – a colonial and postcolonial partner working towards Ghana’s modernisation In the 1920s, the idea of a museum was unheard of in West Africa, as the only means of preserving important objects was by custodians within their traditional settings. British colonial officers in the Gold Coast took an interest in their surroundings by collecting geological, archaeological, ethnographic, botanical and other material evidence to enhance their understanding of the place, and to represent the colony – from their own perspectives. The development of museums in Ghana arose out of a colonial/educational collection in Achimota School, which comprised objects that had been excavated during the school’s construction (Achimota Review 1927-1937, 1937), with donations from some British officers. This initiative gradually cultivated an appreciation of museums in the sub-region, since the collection was considered strategically important as both a research resource and to preserve the country’s material culture. Thus, the history of museums in Ghana began as part of the teaching facilities in Achimota School in 1924. This initial collaboration between the Achimota School staff, local expatriates, indigenes and the British Museum subsequently led to the museum becoming strategically positioned within Ghana’s tertiary education system and, later on, as a statutory subvented public institution. The Achimota Review 1927-1937 (1937, 90) and Crinson (2001, 235) discuss the contents of this collection, including the names of British and indigenous donors, while Fogelman (2005, 2008) focuses on the history and impact of Ghana’s past on the museum. A review of the first ten years of the school included discussions with the British Museum about developing a museum out of the original collection, and Hermann Justus Braunholtz – who worked as a curator in the British Museum from 1913 to 1953 – made some useful suggestions supporting the establishment of the museum. Thus, Anglo-Ghanaian cooperation began towards the end of the second decade of the twentieth century. Braunholtz believed strongly that a museum collection of African artefacts could play a role in enhancing social cohesion in the face of rapid change. In fact, Achimota School itself was established in 1924 to produce a new African elite that would be capable of taking over some of the middle-level positions in the colonial bureaucracy. It also aimed to combine the best in English education with all that was worthwhile from the indigenous cultural past (Williams 1962, 86-87). Therefore, setting up the museum was in line with both the school’s founding vision and Braunholtz’s recommendations.

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A collection made of additional objects was brought to Achimota from places described as ‘up country’ – probably from what was then called Asante and the Northern Territories. Wild plants were also collected when the Achimota farm was being laid out between 1925 and 1926. Furthermore, in 1931, some of the local marine life was described by one of the school’s expatriate staff, M. J. Field, while A. P. Brown, the art master, made drawings of some of the marine objects with descriptions. Between 1929 and 1932 the early collection, which consisted primarily of marine and animal items, along with some woody specimens, was sent to the British Museum of Natural History and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, for scientific naming (Achimota Review 1927-1937 1937, 89). The British Museum also assisted in this arrangement, naming several other objects for the Achimota Museum. These early collaborators included Achimota School’s principal, Reverend A. G. Fraser, who was instrumental in establishing the museum and donated a large collection of Ashanti gold weights, as well as several staff members, who contributed samples of pottery and Neolithic instruments found in different parts of the country. The British Museum provided the scientific names for the objects sent to them, whilst local Gold Coast staff from various government departments, including the Agricultural Department and Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, wrote some of the descriptions and confirmed their local names. This early collaboration also included financial assistance. In a 1933 report on a survey of museums in the British Empire, conducted by the Museums Association of Great Britain, an amount of £400 was sourced for the museum from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (Achimota Review 1927-1937 1937, 93). During negotiations about this grant, the donors insisted on the need to engage a qualified curator, to ensure proper accommodation for the collections, and proposed that the local grant to the museum should not be reduced – but, if possible, increased. In response to these demands, Dr Irvine was appointed as the qualified curator, and it was agreed that Achimota School had adequate rooms to house the collection. The grant was divided among the various sections as follows: Anthropology Museum: £150; Science Museum: £150; and Reference Science Books: £100. Regarding the third point, the grant to both the anthropological and science sections was generously increased, even though retrenchment was going on in the school at that time (Achimota Review 1927-1937 1937, 91). According to the Achimota Review, this Carnegie Corporation funding was the first grant ever awarded to a West African museum. Over time, the Achimota museum expanded and diversified its activities to include a botanical nursery which cultivated yams and varieties of cassava. This later became a practice farm, and experiments were carried out there. One of these projects was the Guggisburg Park, now located near the golf club, which was run by the Science Museum (Achimota Review 1927-1937 1937, 92). Plants of particular scientific importance from Akuapem were collected between 1898 and 1902. These were cited as specimens in the Flora of Western Tropical Africa at Kew Gardens, London by Hutchinson and Dalziel (Achimota Review 1927-1937 1937, 90). These examples demonstrate the broad scope of work undertaken during the museum’s beginnings, showing how relevant they were to research and the provision of scientific knowledge in the country. The basis of the Anthropology Museum witnessed further collaboration when Lady Willcocks donated the collection of her husband, Sir James Willcocks, to the Gold Coast Government in 1929. This consisted of drums, state chairs and umbrellas and other histori-

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cal objects, including a large collection of horns and swords, which he had collected during the Asante wars. Other British officers also cooperated by contributing objects including spears, calabashes, photographs and framed watercolours, and some specimens collected as far back as 1896 from the Geological Survey Department (Achimota Review 1927-1937 1937, 93). Some donations from indigenous people are also recorded by Crinson and the Achimota Review. During this early period, the museum work was carried out on a part-time basis by European members of staff during their spare time; and these were assisted by some students during the time allocated for hobbies in the afternoons. The interest of various members of staff accounted for the collection’s steady growth, while there was a gratifying amount of contribution from some indigenes for three to four years. However, very little interest was shown by non-Achimotans, as the Achimota Review noted: ‘At this time there was very little interest in the museum from Africans outside the college, and it was rare for any student to make any contribution’ (Achimota Review 1927-1937 1937, 93). One problem at the time was the danger some traditional works were facing. Crinson (2001, 237) cites Huxley’s report, noting that – whilst Europeans were collecting works that represented the country – Asante gold weights were in danger because they were being melted down by Lebanese pawn brokers for their bullion value. Based on Braunholtz’s recommendation to establish a museum in the Gold Coast, the government allocated funds to the University College of the Gold Coast (now the University of Ghana) in 1951 to set up a museum. The collections from Achimota were donated to the Department of Archaeology in 1953. The then-Director of the National Museum, Prof. A. W. Lawrence, a British expatriate working at the Department of Archaeology, remarked on the importance of the museum in 1954: As we progress in our political and economic life, it is essential that cultural development should go with it (…) by exhibiting good objects; fostering a new sense in the population of this country because of the new nationalism; raising the standards in art schools. (Lawrence 1954)

The museum remained under the university’s control until 1957 (Achimota Review 19271937 1937, 89-93). The Achimota collections were then given to the National Museum in the centre of Accra, which was opened on the eve of Ghana’s independence on 6 March 1957. Only certain objects were selected to form the nucleus of this new national collection, and many of the non-African objects were left at the Archaeology Department. Crinson (2001, 233-235) further elaborates on how the collections were expanded and developed. Braunholtz had earlier proposed one central or national museum in Accra as well as regional museums in Kumasi, Takoradi and Tamale – but, almost sixty years on, only three (Cape Coast, Ho and Bolgatanga) have been realised. In order to consolidate the museum’s place in the emerging independent country, a new law establishing the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) was passed in March 1957, to replace the previous Monuments and Relics Ordinance of 1946, and to legitimise the museum within the socio-cultural development of the new country, Ghana. The law made the museum a subvented public institution, with a board appointed by the government (PRAAD 1969).

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Other museums have been established in Kumasi and Accra, outside those under the GMMB.1 All of these museums have sought, in different ways, to represent Ghanaian history and culture. Because many of these new museums are owned privately or by other institutions, the difficulties experienced by some of Ghana’s museums may not be the same as for others.

The aspirations that became challenges The date strategically chosen to open the National Museum was 5 March 1957, the eve of Ghana’s independence. This marked a break from the past, and the birth of a new nation-state with its own identity. The artefacts on display were intended to champion Ghana’s leading role in pan-Africanism and, by providing space for collections from other African countries, the museum reflected the role Ghana was expected to play in future. The first president, Kwame Nkrumah, launched specific policies on culture which emphasised state support, and created cultural institutions to support this. He encouraged scholarships in art, as outlined in his ‘African genius’ speech (Nkrumah 1963), read at the opening of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. He established a new museum at the Institute of African Studies, to act as a teaching aid for research on Africa and, later on, opened other regional museums. Fuller (2010) and Hess (1999, 2006a, 2006b) are among several scholars who have clearly recounted Nkrumah’s endeavours to use the arts to obtain strategic partners in Ghana’s development. In the early postcolonial era there were several deliberate efforts and policies to develop the arts and culture. Nkrumah understood the positive contribution that arts and museums could make to foster national unity and create a national identity. He took advantage of this and said: ‘The arts in the socio-economic transformation in Ghana was based on their ability to foster unity and harmony among different ethnic groups’ (Botwe-Asamoah 2005, 81). This was because of colonialism’s apparent inability to destroy the rich cultural heritage of African art. Despite the ethnic differences and types of art produced, the colonial masters 1 In the University of Ghana there are three museums: the Museum of the Institute of African Studies, the Archaeology Museum in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, and the Entomological Collection in the Zoology Department. Other museums in Accra include the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra and the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park Museum. In recognition of the importance of culture, a Ghanaian anthropologist, Alexander Kyerematen, opened the first phase of the Prempeh II Jubilee Museum with the support of Otumfuo Agyemang Prempeh II, Asantehene, in 1956. This was dedicated to Asante history and it was intended that an additional gallery would be added on later. In 1995 the Manhyia Palace opened its own museum, with donations from people including traditional leaders. These examples support the view that preserving heritage is not new to Ghanaians, and shows that traditional institutions are also interested in developing museums. There are also the Cape Coast and Elmina Castle Museums and the Kakum Park Exhibition near Cape Coast, and the Ghana Armed Forces Museum in Kumasi. Some other museums in the country are the Elmina Java Museum, Geological Survey Department Museum, Gramophone Records Museum and Research Centre of Ghana, New Juaben Palace Museum and Yaa Asantewaa Museum.

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had not seen any advantage in widening cultural divisions in the colony. There was also evidence of cross-cultural borrowing among different ethnic groups, and Nkrumah saw this as an opportunity to unite Ghanaians. Despite the efforts expended to put a museum management board in place, and Nkrumah’s enthusiasm, policies and actions to promote arts and culture, problems started becoming apparent about twenty years after his overthrow. The lack of subsequent governmental support and the absence of local voices had contributed to a stagnating status quo. Emmanuel Arinze recounts how the museum was expected to have a proactive, positive impact on the country, but said: The people of Ghana have seen many things since the opening of the museum: famine, poverty, and political upheavals for example. But the museum never reacted to these events. Rather than promote new ideas and strategies to meet any form of change, the museum’s board clung to the past, showing little motivation and no clear vision of what they are expected to do nor how to respond to contemporary society. (Arinze 1998, 33)

The actions of subsequent leaders undermined those earlier efforts, which accounts for the various contradictions inherent in the trajectory of Ghana’s museums. Since the National Museum started off as part of a teaching and learning facility and was integrated into the academic facilities of the (then) University College of the Gold Coast, Nkrumah’s enthusiasm and actions made the museum and his cultural policies relevant to Ghana’s early development. The early collaborations were national in character, as they received both institutional and governmental support. The situation changed when Nkrumah was deposed, and subsequent governments brought about a sudden change in attitude and support. Thus, this previously active institution at the forefront of Ghana’s development gradually lost its prominence. By the late 1980s, the museum was facing severe challenges. Owing to the general problems confronting several sub-Saharan museums from the late 1960s to the 1980s, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Conservation of Cultural Property’s (ICCROM) response to the declaration of UNESCO’s World Decade for Cultural Development in the 1980s were a few short courses run between 1984 and 1985. Following this, was an Africa-wide survey of museums, including the Ghana National Museum’s storage area, conducted by ICCROM in 1988. This survey identified two major problems, which both required immediate attention – overcrowding and inaccessibility of the collection in storage. Other, less urgent problems were the inappropriate climate, dust and an insect infestation (Labi 1992, 131).

The ICCROM PREMA interventions and their outcomes This section introduces the single most comprehensive continent-wide intervention by a foreign organisation, ICCROM, in collaboration with English- and French-speaking African countries, which spanned almost two decades. Following the myriad political, attitudinal, financial and technical challenges that had plagued several museums, and the results of the survey, ICCROM launched a training programme called PREMA in 1985, and following the survey in 1988, the first national training course was held in Ghana in 1989, as Labi (1992) explains. This was the beginning of a new, cooperative continent-wide Afro-European and

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American museum endeavour, which aimed to conserve Africa’s moveable heritage. It was different from the previous exchanges and cooperation discussed above, and the subsequent ones that occurred after the collection was handed over to the National Museum. The PREMA national course and subsequent training schemes were technical interventions intended to support museums inside and outside the GMMB to save their collections and bring them up to speed with trends and best practice in conserving heritage. But a critical review of these collaborations reveals that there also needed to be an internal restructuring of administrative structures and management in order to realise the full impact of these investments and make the museums become good partners in sustaining the improvements. ICCROM received support from several international agencies2 to run PREMA – a training programme that also targeted museum directors, professionals and collections. The national courses took a practical, hands-on approach, being designed to meet specific local conservation needs, whilst an international university course provided both practical and theoretical knowledge, as well as a learning experience with established museums. In some instances, participants were taken on study tours to European museums, to further expose them to the wider museum profession and collections. PREMA also provided technical assistance and equipment to museums during the national courses, and funded small projects run by its participants. Over its twenty-one years of activity, it disbursed over five million United States Dollars for this project. It held ten international university courses, ten national/sub-regional courses, nine directors’ seminars, seven review meetings and two workshops, produced five newsletters, and created a network of more than three hundred colleagues in over forty-six African countries. It also trained more than two hundred participants in twenty-two countries, enabled two hundred square metres of museum storage to be built, and ten storage areas to be completely reorganised (Prema n.d.). During the Ghana national course, the entire storage area of the National Museum was rearranged (Labi 1992) and basic conservation equipment was provided in a newly-created laboratory. Some museum staff were also trained to diploma level in Rome, several workshops were held between 1997 and 1998 to improve their technical competencies, and a ninemonth international university course was run at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, for English-speaking African museum professionals.Furthermore, when ending the programme, ICCROM supported African-led local institutions to sustain the benefits of this investment by establishing the École du Patrimoine Africain (EPA) in Porto-Novo, Benin, for French-speaking African countries, and the Centre for Heritage Development in Africa (CHDA) in Mombasa, Kenya, for English-speaking African countries. It was hoped

2 These included UNESCO, the European Union, Agence de la Francophonie (ACCT), Denmark (DANIDA), Finland (FINNIDA), France (Ministère des Affaires étrangères), Italy (Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internationale), Germany (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit), Norway (NORAD), The Netherlands (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Sweden (SIDA), Switzerland (Federal Department of Foreign Affairs), United States of America (USIS), United Kingdom (Department for International Development). Foundations included Foundation Dapper, Foundation Elf, Ford Foundation, Getty Grant Programme, J Paul Getty Trust, Leventis Foundation, and L. J Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation.

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that all the knowledge and experience gained from the programme would be brought to bear in these new, African-led programmes. Regrettably, the English-speaking institution has faced several setbacks, has lost its pan-African regional character, and is now working at a very local level. This has been one of the disappointments of the PREMA programme. ICCROM had sought to address this issue by training professionals to become capable of leading museum management on the continent. CHDA was unable to raise long-term, sustainable funds, develop programmes and activities, or put together a coalition of partnerships, and the English-speaking African museums were unable to share the cost of training their own staff. After ICCROM gradually weaned CHDA off its support, the National Museums and Monuments of Kenya (NMMK) took over responsibility for it. CHDA lost its pan-African character and became merely a local appendage of the national museum – the same thing that had happened to an earlier UNESCO-funded museum training institution, the Regional Training Centre for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Jos, Nigeria (UNESCO 1975). Other sub-regional efforts, such as the West Africa Museums Programme (WAMP) and the continental umbrella body, the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM), have faced similar problems and are barely active. It is thirty years since PREMA was founded, and sixteen years since it wound up. This chapter now considers some key questions following on from these initiatives. What roles have the people trained by PREMA and CHDA played in overcoming the multiple layers and challenges facing the management of their collections? What lessons have been learnt, and have subsequent collaborations and interventions been different? If so, what is the nature of these new relationships, and how successful have they been? If not, what is the way forward? Would the long-term impact of PREMA and other projects be any different if they had been initiated locally, and would their objectives, modalities and challenges have varied? The discussion that follows questions the impact of foreign-instigated museum collaborative projects and interventions vis-à-vis local commitment and sustainability. It proposes a strategic transformation of current arrangements in partnerships and collaborations, seeking to encourage a complete paradigm shift, a rethinking and a debate on local leadership, as well as the role that museums can play in Ghana’s socio-cultural and economic development, and the promotion of shared investments that will reduce the risk of short-term solutions and benefits. I believe that these are all important for ensuring that such collaborations are sustainable and will produce long-term benefits locally and across the continent. Since the PREMA programme ended, there have been several projects and funding grants aiming to support museums in Ghana. For instance, the Institute of African Studies museum received funds from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) to research and mount an exhibition about Akan gold weights, and Aluka3 provided funds to digitise the institute’s collection and mount an exhibition. The Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies has cooperated with the British Museum on several projects. The National Museum has also collaborated with the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), in the Netherlands, 3 Aluka was an initiative of Ithaka founded in 2003, as a non-profit organisation based in New York City and Princeton, New Jersey. Its collection of scholarly interests has been now merged with JSTOR.

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on a project called ‘Object ID’ (see Effiboley in this volume), which sought to produce a photographic documentation system to help combat the illicit trafficking of cultural objects. Between October 2007 and October 2010, the GMMB collaborated with Ricerca e Cooperazione (RC)4 on a project which aimed to build capacity and begin the pilot initiatives for evaluating cultural heritage. In addition, the British Museum has provided training in various museum skills and exhibition production. These, and other cooperative projects, have provided significant short- to medium-term solutions to the conservation needs and development of museums in Ghana.

‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’ syndrome ICCROM raised all the funding for the PREMA programme, defined which expertise and equipment was needed, and led the collaborations. A reorganisation of the storage area was not part of the National Museum’s strategic plan or vision, or featured in their short- to medium-term plans. As a result, there was no immediate budget allocated to it. Neither was its future sustainability and development built into its strategic plan, so it could not receive periodical budgetary support to continue what had been started. Thus, the gains of PREMA and subsequent cooperative projects lost their impact in the long run. Another example of this effect was that, even though the sponsors of ‘Object ID’ were willing to provide financial support for the duration of the project, it collapsed midway because of a software malfunction. The museum was not in a position to replace or upgrade the computer program, so the project was abandoned. Similarly, in other collaborations I became familiar with after PREMA, it was the European partners who raised the funds and guided the projects, while the Ghanaian or African colleagues had to work within their partners’ frameworks and under their direction. In the early years of the Ghana National Museum, the government occasionally provided funding or guaranteed the support for fundraising abroad, as in the Carnegie Corporation example above. However, the government has not committed any financial support for the recent projects or their continuation, even if the money was listed in annual budget proposals. This is the fundamental difference between these new collaborations and the earlier ones – the lack of significant support from the government and local agencies for homegrown initiatives. There is often a lukewarm response to proposals relating to museums and culture, which has meant that museums are unable to build upon the previous projects using African funds.

The need for structural change Whilst this chapter discusses Ghanaian-European cooperation, I believe that the wider debate should focus on internal and national reflections about the place of all museums in Ghana and their future in the country, in order to achieve any kind of long-term sustainability. This discourse should discuss the existing legislation, and consider a review of museums’ legal 4 An Italian NGO managed the funds provided by the Associazione Giovanni Secco Suardo (Italy).

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frameworks, mandates, governance structures and autonomy. This would make them more efficient at responding to the dynamics of contemporary Ghana, by adapting to cultural changes, trends and technology, and by becoming more accountable to the public. Museums must offer opportunities for diverse groups of people and generations in the community to engage with them, through exhibitions, activities and debates. This could include, for example, museum engagement in topical discourses about their contribution to areas of the country’s development, such as the role of the oil and gas industry in the country’s economy and social life and its impact on local communities, the threat of illegal mining on the country’s forests, ecosystem and water bodies, and other things which have impacted on Ghanaian people’s lives. Doing this would increase their chances of partnering with local agencies to finance some of their activities. It is only through such innovative, local collaborative efforts that new initiatives, local partnerships and engagement with the government and public can be stimulated. Long-term strategic planning and a dynamic fundraising drive will be key to achieving sustained partnerships and collaborations. In the financial arrangement this chapter proposes, public/government-owned museums must be urged to raise part of their budget and be allowed to keep a larger percentage – if not all of it – for their operating costs. It is important to introduce Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to track the use of these funds and ensure they are on track with agreed strategic actions, and annual reports must be made public. These structural changes will place the public/government-owned museums in a strategic position to act as better partners and collaborators – not only recipients of support. It is also important for the privately owned museums and others in the public sector to collaborate and partner with the National Museum to build a strong network and voice to advance the course of heritage and the profession and its place in national development.

Lessons learnt and suggestions for the future Museums and civil society must ensure that heritage becomes part of African political parties’ manifestos, and the electorate must then hold governments accountable for upholding their promises. This is a prerequisite for progress, because – without a clearly-formulated vision, policies and support for museums by government – it will be difficult to make these institutions grow. I am convinced that local private museums will be able to attract local interest if they can formulate a vision and a mission, develop a good strategic plan, identify the community’s needs, prioritise these and conceptualise them into projects and activities, by articulating clear objectives, goals, inputs and outcomes, as well as the benefits to the local communities and the country. It is not enough just to have an insular vision and policies along with sporadic government support. There needs to be a leader, or a group of people, who champion the idea of what museums can do, so forming a local museum association would play an important role in advocacy. Beyond this, the notion of museums themselves as repositories of knowledge must be integrated into the educational curricula at all levels and into the country’s socio-economic life. Only when museums have proactively made themselves relevant to local communities and schools and engaged in contemporary and topical debates can they assume a greater role and relevance in the nation.

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Some critical lessons must be learnt from the examples of PREMA, CHDA and the Regional Training Centre for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Jos. All three of these programmes focused on the technical aspects of museum work. PREMA convened a weeklong directors’ seminar that was not sufficient to make any significant changes to the myriad of problems besetting their institutions. Furthermore, this kind of training should identify young, dynamic and talented staff and train them up to become the future leaders and managers of African museums, rather than ageing leaders in the twilight of their careers who may find it difficult to introduce innovative and dynamic ideas for change, and also a strategic change from focusing only on issues like conservation practices and storage management. This change of focus will enable the next generation to become agents of change in the museum sector. I am suggesting a realignment of future collaborations – from one of skills transference to leadership training – which should prevent a recurrence of outcomes from past schemes like those of Jos, WAMP and AFRICOM.

Models for future collaborations In this chapter, I have taken time to dwell on some practical concerns, by citing four major projects (Jos, PREMA, CHDA and WAMP), which entailed extensive collaboration and institutional networks to support museums in Africa but were unable to sustain the objectives. These were separate from individual country collaborations, but my suggestions for future activities are generally applicable to many museums on the continent, and they are critical for ensuring the sustainability of future collaborations. It is my opinion that – without these changes in attitudes, legislation, competencies, training and local funding – the present situation will persist in many cases, even if other new museum partners begin to collaborate. Therefore, museums must situate themselves as being able to make strategic proposals and investments in these kinds of partnerships. Some local institutions in Ghana and elsewhere have provided various sums of money for museum activities, and this needs to be broadened out to attract jointly funded projects with the museums as well as innovative ways of generating funds internally. Single- and multi-donor-funded and cross-cultural and regional projects and activities are all possible areas of collaboration, but it is vital that they are run with renewed leadership and strategies, to avoid repeating the negative outcomes described above. The way forward is through country-led initiatives that are developed using a bottom-up approach and involving all the staff of a museum. These programmes should seek government support and funding, as well as external support for their activities. I advocate partnerships that involve giving all stakeholders equal and joint responsibilities, where leadership and investment are shared. All parties must agree on the parameters and structure of the collaboration together in a transparent manner. There must be clearly-defined protocols on cooperation, particularly where foreign researchers seek permission to conduct research with the GMMB and other institutions. Researchers should be encouraged to involve local scholars and field assistants in their work, and leave copies of their field notes and photographs behind. Local universities must be encouraged to engage museums with their research and teaching and to provide support, develop their culture departments and be more open to innovative ideas about culture.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that the idea of preserving and displaying cultural heritage already existed in Ghana before museums as Western institutions arrived. Through various early collaborative efforts, the first museum grew and became part of the University College of the Gold Coast. However, it has been beset with problems, one of which is the museum’s lethargic attitude and the government’s inconsistent – and mainly financial – support. In summary, the National Museum of Ghana was firmly established during the colonial period and enjoyed initial support during the First Republic, but subsequent governments and national dynamics have paid little attention to it. In discussing these challenges, this chapter has focused on three main points in relation to the National Museum: its diverse collaborations, some of which dated from the 1920s; the challenges the museum has faced, as well as newer sub-regional and pan-African organisations and collaborations, which sought to develop the institution across the continent; and suggestions for change and improvement in the role the museums should play in national development. However, the challenges brought by these joint efforts have impacted on opportunities to undertake advocacy initiatives on shared interests with a common African voice. Some of the collaborations focused on enhancing technical competencies and supporting projects, while others were umbrella organisations for the exchange of ideas, advocacy and networking. However, all of them neglected the aspect of managerial and leadership training for museums. This oversight emerges as a new focus for the future – leadership. The chapter also suggests legislative, administrative and management reforms which could ensure long-term sustainable collaborations. It is up to museums to strategically position themselves to take advantage of these recommendations, by putting their own houses in order, as outlined above. I hope that this general review of the beginnings of museums in Ghana, their development, current challenges, and the support they have received through various collaborations will improve museum work in the country. The lessons learnt from regional museum bodies, along with my recommendations for leadership training, provide a sound basis for museums to enjoy long-term benefits from their future cooperation with international partners, as well as developing local collaborations. Furthermore, my references to other regional museum institutions draw attention to the continental nature of the problems discussed.

References Achimota Review 1927–1937. 1937. Accra: Achimota Press. Adedze, Agbenyega. 2002. ‘Symbols of Triumph: IFAN and the colonial Museum Complex in French West Africa (1938-1960).’ Museum Anthropology 25(2): 50–60. Ardouin, Claude D. 1996. ‘Culture, Museums, and Development in Africa.’ In The Muse of Modernity: Essays on Culture as Development, edited by Philip G. Altbach, and Salah M. Hassan. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 181-208. Arinze, Emmanuel N. 1998. ‘African Museums: The Challenge of Change.’ Museum International 50(1): 31-37.

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Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame. 2005. Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-Cultural Thought and Policies. New York: Routledge. Crinson, Mark. 2001. ‘Nation-Building, Collecting and the Politics of Display: The National Museum of Ghana.’ Journal of the History of Collections 13(2): 231-250. Fogelman, Arianna. 2005. ‘Tradition, Urbanity, and “Colonial Legacy” at the Ghana National Museum.’ Accessed July 21, 2017. https://museumstudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/museumstudies.columbian.gwu.edu/files/downloads/ TraditionUrbanityandColonialLegacyattheGhanaNationalMuseum.pdf. Fogelman, Arianna. 2008. ‘“Colonial Legacy in African Museology: The Case of the Ghana National Museum.’ Museum Anthropology 31(1): 19-27. Fuller, Harcourt. 2010. ‘Symbolic Nationalism during Kwame Nkrumah era in the Gold Coast/Ghana.’ PhD diss., London School of Economics. Konaré, Alpha O. 1983. ‘Towards a new Type of “Ethnographic” Museum in Africa.’ Museum no. 139, vol. 35(3): 146-151. Kyerematen, Alex A. Y. 1964. Panoply of Ghana: Ornamental Art in Ghanaian Tradition and Culture. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Hess, Janet B. 2006a. Art and Architecture in Postcolonial Africa. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc. Hess, Janet B. 2006b. ‘Spectacular Nation: Nkrumahist Art and Resistance Iconography in the Independence Era.’ African Arts 39(1): 16-25. Hess, Janet B. 1999. ‘Imagining Culture: Art and Nationalism in Ghana.’ PhD diss., Cambridge University. Labi, Kwame. A. 1992. ‘Upgrading the Ghana National Museum storage.’ In La conservation préventive ARAAFU Paris, France, 8-9 October, conservation-restauration des biens culturels, 129-136. Lawrence, A. W. 1954 ‘Bankole Timothy’s interview with Professor A. W. Lawrence, Director of the National Museum’, Daily Graphic, 17 March 1954. Nkrumah, Kwame. 1963. Speech delivered at the Opening Ceremony of the Institute of African Studies on 25 October 1963. Prema - Preventive Conservation in Museums of Africa (website). n.d. Accessed August 4, 2017. http://prema.chez.com/prema_gb.htm. Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD). 1969. National Liberation Council Decree, NLCD, 387, 1969, 5-10. Accra. UNESCO. 1975. Report on the Regional Training Centre for the Preservation of Cultural and Natural Heritage at Jos, Nigeria. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0001/000145/014535eb.pdf Williams, C. Kingsley. 1962. Achimota: The Early Years 1924-1948. Accra: Longmans.

Investigating Museum Development in Africa: From Museum Cooperation to the Appropriation of Praxis Emery Patrick Effiboley

Introduction This chapter reviews three collective projects that were carried out between museums in Africa and governmental and non-governmental bodies based in North America and Europe. The first was a cooperative project between the Musée de la Civilisation in Québec and several museums in various African countries. The second was a West African Museum Programme (WAMP) initiative with museums on the African continent. The third project was funded by the Netherlands government to support the Musée Historique d’Abomey in the Republic of Benin. On the basis of these three examples, this contribution demonstrates that there has been no shortage of projects intended to enhance the functioning of African museum institutions, and the quality of their services to audiences over the last sixty years. However, throughout those decades they have lacked a vision about what an African museum is – or should be – in the post-independence era. Finally, this chapter suggests that, if African authorities and museum stakeholders do not fully assume the full remit of their own responsibilities, these kinds of cooperative projects will not bring about sustainable change to the museum sector across the continent.

Problems and sources of analysis A museum is a means of presenting cultural heritage that was passed on to independent African states by their former colonial administrations (Gaugue 1999; Effiboley 20142015). This colonial aspect of museums in Africa is highlighted by Konare (1995): ‘The museum as an institution is inherited from the colonial era, whose main features remain its extraversion and its isolation from the communities it is supposed to serve’. From the 1950s on, the way in which museums have functioned in Africa has remained static– not only in terms of the exhibitions and programmes offered, but also by neglecting to account for the indigenous cultural practices from which the objects and artworks they host derive (Effiboley 2013, 2014-2015). Ultimately, museums today continue to perpetuate the model inherited from Western modernity – one that is clearly out-of-date, given the current views about appropriation and indigenisation. Although this situation is widely accepted, what is less obvious is why and how this is still the case. One reason is that museums have generally only taken the tangible aspect of cultural heritage into account, failing to embrace and document the whole of human endeavour, such as the patrimonialisation of knowledge and know-how (praxis). Changing perspectives in the field of heritage will open up new paths

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of enquiry and conceptualisation of purpose for various types of museums: for example, art museums covering different periods in history and specialised thematic museums, such as those on (tele)communications, philately, transportation, eroticism and religion. Considering the specificity of museums in Africa, how is Euro-African museum cooperation perceived? Why, despite decades of cooperation in the field of museum and cultural heritage, have the image and perception of museums changed so little, if at all? What conditions need to be fulfilled for museums in Africa to change significantly and become no longer seen as appendices of Western modernity and cultural practice? In order to answer these questions, I will analyse the three projects mentioned above and discuss my findings.

Successful museum cooperation in Africa Each of the three projects reviewed had different cooperative frameworks and, even if they are not strictly Euro-African, the questions they raise are similar to such kinds of cooperation. The first is Ingénieuse Afrique, a project initiated by the francophone Musée de la Civilisation in Québec together with several African museums: the Musée Historique d’Abomey and the Alexandre Sènou Adandé Ethnographic Museum in the Republic of Benin; the Museum of the Civilisations of Cote d’Ivoire, the National Museum of Mali; and the Museum of African Art of Dakar in Senegal (Ferera 1996, 5). The second is the workshop Ouidah à travers ses fêtes et ses patrimonies familiaux1 which was organised by the West African Museums Programme (WAMP), a non-governmental organisation that has been supporting museums in Africa for the past thirty years.2 Finally, I will analyse the project which aimed to digitise the Musée Historique d’Abomey’s collections in 2000-2002, with support from governmental cooperation between The Netherlands and the Republic of Benin.3 Whereas the first two projects were based on mounting exhibitions, the third relates to documentation, a key aspect of museum work. However, despite its importance, this project did not reach its conclusion, owing to technical problems (the computer provided for the project broke) and administrative problems (the curator in position when the project started was removed and the project was suspended). The project was neither completed nor evaluated. Consequently, the archives of this project are scattered and the digitisation is unfinished. Before reviewing these projects, it is useful to gain an overview of the partners involved, to highlight what their diversity reveals about the functioning of the African museum sector. What all three projects have in common is the point that they originated outside the African continent and were mostly led by external entities and organisations: the Musée 1 In English: Ouidah through its celebrations and familial heritage. 2 This initiative is fully documented in A. Adandé (1997). 3 I would like to thank Paul Faber, former curator of the Africa Department at the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum who, despite leaving the institution, was able to gather the archives produced before his tenure at the museum. Otherwise, I would not have been able to easily access these archives, either in the museum at Abomey or in the Direction du Patrimoine Culturel in Benin.

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de la Civilisation du Québec and the Tropenmuseum, under the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINBUZA), and the WAMP, a body created by the International African Institute (IAI), which is mainly supported by the American Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. This diversity probably reveals the lack of joint projects among African museums themselves in the absence of a professional umbrella body,4 but also a dearth of interest and attention from African policymakers. The international exhibition project, Ingénieuse Afrique, started with an idea that had emerged in Canada. As Ferera stated in the book which resulted from the project, At the beginning, there was the Museum of Civilisation, a young institution from Quebec which took the initiative to create an exhibition on an aspect of the social and economic life of Africa. On the other side, African museums were interested in an original project and an innovative partnership. (Ferera 1996, 5; author’s translation)

The project evolved as follows. Firstly, there was communication between the partners to define the scope of the project, the communication devices to be used, and the museography training required for the staff involved; then collecting the materials to be exhibited, and designing the exhibition itself as well as its touring route across different countries. The partners involved were all satisfied with the outcomes, to the extent that some have called it ‘an exemplary project’. The Ingénieuse Afrique exhibition was renewed and enlarged for a further staging, Femmes, bâtisseurs d’Afrique and the materials collected for this last exhibition were offered to the city of Ouidah. This was a Canadian initiative where the stakeholders decided to fully involve African partners from the start (Ferera 1996, 5). However, several years have passed since this exhibition and the working relations established among the museum staff on the African continent have not prospered. This is probably because professional museum networks are generally short-lived. Some examples of this brevity are the Museums Association of Tropical Africa (AMAT-MATA), the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) and the Benin branch of the International Council of Museums (COBICOM).5 It might be that an underlying reason for this relates to the way in which people in charge of museums and cultural heritage perceive their work. Above all, the real problem is the perception that African states and policymakers have about this domain. These stakeholders rarely allocate sufficient funds to museums, which impedes their staffing and operations.

4 Thus, we should be advocating collaborations between museums in Africa if we want to build a cohesive continent, as the regional organisations like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA, Union Economique et Monétaire Ouest Africaine) and others are doing. 5 For more details, see Muller (1965, 123); Effiboley (2014-2015, 23-24, 36).

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Figure 12.1: Two exhibits from the exhibition Femmes, bâtisseurs d’Afrique, which were offered to Benin and presented to the Maison du Brésil at Ouidah

Photographs: Emery Patrick Effiboley, 2017

The second project analysed in this chapter is the workshop6 Ouidah à travers ses patrimoines et ses fêtes, which was held from 28 January to 28 February 1995. Organised by the WAMP in partnership with the Direction du Patrimoine Culturel (the state Department of Culture), this workshop brought together museum professionals and scholars from diverse West African countries with several families in Ouidah, who provided information and tangible material attesting to their ancestral heritage, for an experimental exhibition. Explaining the motives behind this initiative, Joseph Adandé wrote: [the] exhibition and the workshop in Ouidah are part of a general policy of museum development in Africa designed by the WAMP. For this organisation, it has become important that African museums today serve as tools of development for the communities they are in, that they listen to their needs, that they take into account their problems and questions, in order to find tentative solutions or at least stimulate common thought. (J. Adandé 1997, 43; author’s translation)

This exhibition was an opportunity to display and document family heritage, restore those objects which were in poor condition, and show the collected, previously unknown material to the general public.

6 This project was developed with the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Service and local sponsors like Maersk Bénin, Sobebra and CimBénin. For more information, read Joseph Adandé (1997, 42-49).

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The third project attempted to assist with digitising the collections of Benin’s Musée Historique d’Abomey, with support from bilateral cooperation between the Netherlands and Benin. Entitled Object ID7, the project was designed to be implemented in phases, which would be delivered as training sessions. The first phase of training was offered to the museum staff on 14-17 November 2000, on Windows 98 and Microsoft Access 97, using a computer which was made available for the training. The second phase was provided on 27 November to 8 December 2000, by two Dutch specialists who taught participants about digitising museum collections. The following year, the museum staff were given a workshop led by Carel van Leeuwen and Maurice van der Hoff in order to refresh their computer and digitisation skills. Carel van Leeuwen (2001) mentioned in his report issued one year later that few objects had actually been registered and digitised. After the training given to the museum at Abomey, the plan had been to extend this digitisation to other public museums, such as the History Museum of Ouidah, the Alexandre Sènou Adandé Ethnographic Museum and the Museum of Honmè Palace in Porto-Novo. But, due to several challenges, including maintaining the material, insufficient staff, and a sudden change of museum directors, the project was never completed. Consequently, the anticipated Dutch cooperation that was intended to ameliorate some other problems in the museum sector never transpired. This meant that a series of proposed outcomes, such as providing training in ethnomusicology and documenting traditional musical instruments, support for thematic brochures on the museums, a CD-ROM edition of the Royal Tropical Institute’s collection and a project of editing a new and revised version of the brochure did not materialise (Rapport 2000). Ever since the country lost this significant partner, which had been supporting the cultural sector, museums in Benin have not been able to secure another partner with an equally high level of interest. Neither has the government managed to secure ad hoc funds for the museum sector.8

Analysis of obstacles to sustaining outcomes on a long-term basis Following the overview of the three projects, this section analyses the findings that can be drawn from these museum cooperation experiences. First of all, it is important to note that all three projects achieved their main goal, which was to bring together partners from different backgrounds and, sometimes, different museological cultures, in order to reach a final result. The first project, Ingénieuse Afrique enabled 7 Object ID was a project between The Netherlands and fourteen non-European countries, such as Benin, Ghana, Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia. During the conference in Zurich from which this book arises, a Ghanaian colleague, Kwame Labi (see Labi in this volume), remarked that many projects – including this one – are usually initiated without consulting the partner museums in Africa. By doing this, they do not necessarily take into account the urgent needs of these museums. However, through the description of Ingénieuse Afrique, it is evident that this project was less ready-made, since the idea came from Canada but the African partners contributed substantially to its conception and implementation. 8 About the funding of museums, see Effiboley (2015).

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a collection of artefacts and artworks from different places and countries to be displayed in the Ecopole (ENDA Tiers-Monde) museum in Dakar, Senegal (Ferera 1996, 3). The other two projects did not result in institutionalised outcomes or the renewal of museum praxis, but did produce strong and policy-based community involvement.9 In other words, the workshop at Ouidah was a real success in terms of local families’ participation through their involvement and the objects they lent to the project. These objects have a unique heuristic value that questions the history of the city, as Joseph Adandé wrote: The Yoruba families lent a set of materials of Ifa divination. These objects show how Europeans at the Bight of Benin tried to adapt the vessels commissioned by African traditional rulers, sometimes providing earthenware models of ritual objects that are usually clay. The Tchiakpè family for instance gave, through these objects, an example of possible changes endured by the servants of the local authorities from a period to another. (Adandé 1997, 46; author’s translation)

The pieces, which had never been publicly displayed before, are comparable to what the Musée de la Compagnie des Indes of Lorient in France calls ‘objets métissés’ on its website – that is, items that were ‘designed for Europeans in the zones where European commercial companies were active’ (Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, n.d.; author’s translation). However, in the case of Ouidah, it was the Europeans who manufactured objects for their African interlocutors. This demonstrates another side of African agency – Africans’ capacity to initiate things for themselves, which is not usually emphasised in Western scholarship (Effiboley 2014-2015). Owing to the difficulty of choosing the objects for the exhibition in Ouidah, several families’ contributions were not selected by the committee, and one visitor even regretted the ‘elitist’ nature of the exhibition (J. Adandé 1997, 47). Nevertheless, those families expressed their willingness to be part of a similar project in the future (J. Adandé 1997, 47). In response to that interest, Joseph Adandé wrote enthusiastically: ‘Without any doubt, it will happen soon’. This optimistic prediction became true through another exhibition – an initiative by the Porto-Novo-based School of African Heritage (EPA) that presented a show entitled Aguda: itineraries and identities, with the same mode of community participation,10 from 28 November 2001 to 28 February 2002. Afro-Brazilian communities from Ouidah, Cotonou, Agoué and Porto-Novo contributed substantially to that production, providing various objects and household goods, and the exhibition was successful. The issue that arose, however, was that the Ministry of Culture did not manage to maintain the relationship between a museum and its communities that had been inspired by the WAMP. This practice of connecting museums to communities has gradually been dying out ever since.

9 I have previously discussed the issue of community involvement in museums, see Effiboley (2005). The analysis given in that article needs to be enhanced and updated. 10 This exhibition was organised in the context of an international conference, Aspects du patrimoine afro-brésilien dans le golfe du Bénin, which took place at the Maison internationale de la culture in Porto-Novo on 26-30 November 2001 and brought scholars together from several countries in Africa, Europe and the Americas.

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When considering why this welcome opportunity to enliven African museums failed, the complex family heritage at stake becomes evident. Perceiving this complexity, Joseph Adandé asked what kind of history can be written with these types of objects: This exhibition raises many issues, among which the most important are related to history as a discipline. The exhibition curator was confronted with a type of story one can write or tell with objects in such conditions. There are still chronological gaps in our knowledge. (J. Adandé 1997, 46; author’s translation)

Is it the difficulty in confronting the complexity of family heritage that discourages the Direction du Patrimoine Culturel and prevents it from promoting this kind of relationship between museums and families? Ouidah is well-known as a cosmopolitan city, with conflicting memories at stake. Or does the failure to sustain a relationship with communities stem from the lack of political will and vision that prevents the government from paving the way for museums and cultural heritage in the country to demonstrate their social relevance? In today’s global village where people are revisiting knowledge constructed in the modern, colonial and postcolonial periods, when Frantz Fanon’s (1963) seminal book, The Wretched of the Earth, is re-read with nostalgia, it is no longer possible to rely on one linear and agreed-upon (true) history. Some French-speaking historians call this new approach an ‘histoire connectée’ (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2013) – that is, a connected history which has multiple perspectives, since every historical discourse reflects the specific positionality of its bearer. As an African proverb states: ‘Until lions have their own historians, the history of hunting will be told by hunters’. So, if Africa lacks its own historians, it is now high time for Africans to revisit the history of their continent which has, so far, been told from other people’s viewpoints. It is time to challenge the mainstream history of the continent from different angles and perspectives, in order to deconstruct the master narrative and highlight convergences and specificities of its diverse (or diversified) cultures. What needs to be questioned is not just the perception of decision-makers in the political sphere, but more broadly the issue of how African leaders perceive museums and their contents – including, to a certain extent – their perception of all Western modernity heritage on the continent. When a new sovereign accedes to the throne, they frequently impact on many domains, in particular the arts and culture of their country. One example from Ancient Egypt involves the pharaoh Amenophite IV. When he came to power, Amenophite IV induced a sort of revolution in the pantheon that transpired equally in the arts. Ernest Gombrich states that the portraits that he ordered, due to their newness, shocked the Egyptians of his time. In them, nothing remained apart from their stiff dignity and the solemnity of the ancient pharaohs. He had himself represented with his spouse Nefertiti caressing his children under a beneficial sun. (Gombrich 2006, 59; author’s translation)

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Figure 12.2: A photographed papyrus representing the pharaoh worshipping the sun

Photograph: Emery Patrick Effiboley, 2017

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Less far back in the past, the rulers of Dànxòmɛ11 Kingdom, from today’s Republic of Benin, had also made their mark on the arts, as Mercier and Lombard observed: The king Agadja [1714-1724] was the first to have the idea of reserving a large part of the artworks produced by certain artisans for his own use and started ordering the manufacture of the thrones and special seats for his ministers. (Mercier and Lombard 1959, 24; author’s translation)

Another ruler whose actions had a noticeable impact on the cultural history of the kingdom of Dànxòmɛ was Agonglo (1797-1818). He was the first king to ask local artists to draw celebrated episodes from history on coloured material and sew them onto monochrome clothes (Mercier and Lombard 1959, 26). Today, these professions still exist and are an important feature of the workshops currently running at the site of Abomey’s palaces, where the Musée Historique is situated today. This example helps to explain the influence that political decisions have on the development of a country’s arts and cultural sector. Another example whose legacy remains, but which is not mentioned in the relevant literature, is that of President Léopold Sédar Senghor. During the first Festival mondial des arts nègres in Dakar in 1966, he launched (the concept of) the ‘Musée dynamique’ – a museum that displayed a temporary exhibition of artworks from several countries in Africa. In doing so, he established a tradition that has since been adopted by French presidents (Effiboley 2014-2015). This museum was closed, and the building transferred to the judiciary administration under Abdou Diouf’s presidency in the mid-1980s. In today’s Republic of Benin, it is difficult to identify any distinctive government policy action in the field of the arts and culture that has made a structural difference. No past president dared to visit a museum or open an exhibition at the height of their prestige. None established a new museum to house the artworks they considered to be the country’s most valuable. For the ten years that former President Thomas Boni Yayi was in power (20062016), he always arranged a trip outside the country so that he would not be there to celebrate or give a public speech on 10 January, the day devoted to traditional religions in Benin. Research into archives and the local press indicates that President Emile Derlin Zinsou, in office for just under a year (1968-1969), was the only one who dared to interact publicly in such a setting, during the December 1968’s Djahouhou ceremonies12 in Abomey. Not only did he attend, but he also agreed to be carried like the kings of Dànxòmɛ in a hammock, an image which was captured by the press. His reasons for doing this are uncertain, though – it might have been to attract public attention in the hope of benefitting from it electorally later on, since voters would know the circumstances under which he came to power. However, this interaction – that could be perceived as an attempt to gain sympathy – did not prevent him from being overthrown in a military coup in December 1969. But he 11 Dànxòmɛ was the original name (as transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet) of the kingdom which was conquered by the French army in 1893 and from which the colony of Dahomey was created, by the decree dated 22 June 1894, published in the Journal officiel de la Colonie du Dahomey et dépendances (1894). 12 The Djahouhou is a special royal ceremony that takes place in Abomey, with libations performed to honour their ancestors.

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seems to be the only president to have performed this kind of interaction with Benin’s traditions publicly. Few other past presidents have given any kind of symbolic gesture, except for President Nicephore Soglo, who established the celebration of traditional religions on 10 January every year, as a way to counter-balance the apparent hegemony of Christianity and Islam. Apart from the president, who can set policies about culture and traditions, it is often the case that the minister in charge of the Department of Arts and Culture, which includes museums, does not set foot in a museum for their entire term of office.13 It is difficult to ascertain how political leaders and administrative authorities perceive museums, or any governmental project designed and implemented permanently in the sector. These authorities are probably victims of the colonial mindset, which avoided engaging publicly with the cultural heritage landscape. This state of affairs might explain what those scholars reflecting on postcolonial studies (e.g. Mignolo 2002; Grosfoguel 2011; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Wenzel, 2017) call the ‘concept of coloniality’. Clarifying this concept, Ama Biney wrote that ‘it remains a reconfigured form of domination, control and exploitation of the rest of the world in authority, economics, knowledge, subjectivity, gender, sexuality and nature by the countries of the North over the countries of the South’ (Biney 2016, 3). This state of being, which I have translated from the French word ‘colonialité’ (Effiboley 2014-2015), means thinking almost like a French person. For instance, if an individual’s mind is set – I mean, if they are educated – in the French language, they will think, behave and consume in relation to the mental structures of that language. The same is true for those Africans who speak English, Portuguese or Spanish. As a result, this mindset establishes a kind of mental distance – which I originally called a ‘distance mentale’ in French (Effiboley 2017) – from other Africans on the continent. Thus, they are victims of extraversion and, ultimately, they become strangers to one another. They ignore each other. They do not trust each other and cannot collaborate on a long-term basis, in order to accomplish significant projects. They are, in a way, divided. They almost feel obliged to refer to their former colonial masters as intermediaries for brokering inter-African relationships. The current structures that are embedded in commercial and global interactions aggravate the situation even more – as shown by the fact that it costs less to make a telephone call from Africa to the West than between countries in Africa.14 These kinds of things maintain a mental distance between populations on the continent.

13 I am not suggesting that ministers should actually work in a museum – but that, if they have the political power they are entitled to, including access to funds, they should have the means to get things done and change the state of affairs in the sector. 14 While a phone call from Benin to France, the USA or Canada costs an average of one CFA franc per second from the country’s telephone companies, calls from Benin to Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and Burkina Faso cost double that. More astonishingly, a call from Benin to neighbouring Nigeria is even more expensive. These figures are taken from an advertising campaign run by the telephone company Moov in December 2016 along the big roads of the main cities. This company and its rivals – South African MTN and Nigerian Glo – are earning billions of CFA francs while the national provider, Libercom, has been deliberately left to wither away. On 21 June 2017, the government of Benin decided to put an end to this lethargy by dissolving the company altogether.

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Figure 12.3: Signs in Porto-Novo (left) and Cotonou (right) illustrating extraversion at work

Photographs: Emery Patrick Effiboley, 2017

When President Patrice Talon was inaugurated in April 2016, there was some hope that he would reverse these trends, but this optimism may turn out to be misplaced. Instead of empowering the government’s administrative structures, he has chosen to establish agencies that are mostly responsible to the president himself. The National Agency for the Promotion of the Heritage and Tourism (ANPT), in charge of the cultural heritage sector, is accountable solely to the president. There are two problems with this management strategy: firstly, it offers no support to other, already-existing bodies and, secondly, it means that its longevity is at risk, as the agency might disappear once the president leaves office. This looks like a hidden form of privatisation that will hinder institutional empowerment and human resources. Meanwhile, the state-owned museums lack personnel15 and funds, and some of their collections are either in poor condition or incompletely documented (Effiboley 2015). These circumstances render museums unable to sustain the knowledge and know-how acquired during cooperative projects. A good example of this is the computer that stopped working in Abomey, meaning that the project to digitise its collections has never been resumed. All of these issues together make it vital for a policy for arts and cultural affairs to be devised in Benin, which would enable the effective protection of cultural heritage and, more importantly, education in cultural heritage.16 The educational programmes taught in secondary

15 The cultural sector suffered the most from the Structural Adjustment Programme which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank prescribed to the government of the Republic of Benin from 1986 to the late 1990s. Amongst other measures, they demanded cutting the number of civil servants by half and prohibited the recruitment of new staff. This state of affairs has prevented the transmission of praxis. After dismantling many countries’ economies in the Global South, these institutions apologised in an article (Ostry, Loungani and Furceri 2016). 16 Nevertheless, I admit that the real problem in our formerly-colonised countries is that we do not have fully inclusive policies. I mean, first and foremost, a health policy that gives everyone access to treatment and medication in the case of illness; an education policy that embraces all domains of

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schools up until the early 2000s barely addressed African arts and heritage, and only the history syllabus for Third Form pupils included a lesson on African art history. Even that lesson was so advanced that none of the teachers could teach it, as many of those I interviewed – who are now retired – explained. It is, therefore, understandable that citizens who have not been sufficiently exposed to African art and heritage cannot defend it with the necessary vigour and conviction. In this context of general ignorance about art and heritage, the best hope is to design and implement education policies that will prioritise comprehensive teaching in these areas. This is one of the key conditions needed to produce future citizens who understand the value of culture and will become its future managers, patrons, promoters, critics and publics. But the problem is whether we still are in an era of voluntaristic public policies at a moment when nation-states are becoming increasingly privatised.17 The accountability of the ever-weakening public authorities is one issue, but it is also extremely important that people working in the cultural heritage sector become aware of their own responsibility as ‘keepers of the temple’ – heritage guardians – who should rebuke the authorities where there is oversight, carelessness and, sometimes, amnesia. They should also make sure that good practices become the norm in this sector. Clearly, this is not possible without a strong associative life for professionals in the museum and heritage sector. The Benin Committee of the International Council of Museums (COBICOM), constructively played this guardianship role in the past decades, but has now fallen into lethargy. Nevertheless, one should not point all the blame at the COBICOM. The situation of professional associations across the whole continent is not much different. From the Museum Association of Tropical Africa (MATA/AMTA) in the 1960s to the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) – which closed its doors in Nairobi, Kenya in 2015 (Effiboley 2014-2015) – the problems have always been the same: lack of personnel, lack of funds to run the museums, absence of a clear policy and low levels of involvement in professional membership bodies. However, it will be difficult to reverse, or even curb, the declining trend in empowering cultural heritage and museums in Africa18 unless an in-depth awareness about cultural activities (not only the Westernised education system); and a national production policy to enable the active population to contribute to the wealth of the whole community, a kind of distributive justice. These are the main steps needed to achieve cohesive countries where everybody can expect to feel at ease. 17 In the Netherlands in the 1990s, the Deltaplan was an exemplary museum policy which was recognised internationally but has been dismantled because of economic austerity since the beginning of the 2010s. The African collections, assembled during the era of conquest and colonialism, are being sold off, regardless of the ethics that bind museums worldwide (Franck 2013). 18 From this perspective, it would be interesting, for instance, to include a compulsory module on African studies for all students in African universities, especially the Francophone ones – from mathematics, physics and other related disciplines, to social and human sciences – to help them acquire this historical and patrimonial awareness. This kind of consciousness enabled Zeblon Velakazi, professor of theoretical physics at the University of the Witwatersrand, to link his research to measurement techniques in Ancient Egypt, in his inaugural lecture on 29 May 2016 (Velakazi 2016). In order to understand the reappropriation and repackaging of knowledge and become aware of how the West created its hegemony, see Jacques Attali (1982).

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heritage is taught at primary and secondary schools and augmented by university degree programmes and in other professional settings. That is why it is so important to reinforce the contents of educational programmes about African arts and heritage and, more generally, about African indigenous knowledge and cultures. To achieve this, it is essential to generate a convergence of thoughts and actions among teachers at all levels of education, on the one hand, along with robust collaboration between the government education and culture departments, on the other.

Conclusion and a way forward To conclude, this chapter has shown that, despite the short-term success of individual cooperation projects, an appropriation of good praxis and the long-term institutionalisation of results are both needed to create a lasting, beneficial impact on the museum sector in Africa. The projects discussed demonstrate how key stakeholders were unable to fully embrace their roles or assume their responsibilities, and how policymakers failed in their duties. Thus, it is extremely important that the knowledge gained through initiatives like this must be transferred to public policies. If this does not happen, future similar cooperation projects will continue to be incomplete or ineffective. In the case of Ingénieuse Afrique, the project’s outcome was turned into a new ecomuseum in Dakar, Senegal – a positive, long-term effect. This has enriched the museum field in Dakar and in Africa more widely, with a museum resulting from an international collaborative endeavour. This kind of initiative sometimes suffers from the lack of a sense of national rootedness. In the case of the Ouidah workshop, the organisers should have capitalised on the excitement it created among local families, to enable follow-up activities such as creating a community centre for the town, establishing a community involvement policy and, maybe, even expanding such a policy to the national level. The project to digitise the collections in Abomey ground to a halt before it could be completed. The unfinished character of that project shows how far cooperation projects in the museum and cultural heritage sector depend on a widespread awareness of the practical value of cultural heritage. This awareness will serve as a stimulus to all parties involved in the development of cultural heritage: a more demanding civil society, professionals who take the full remit of their responsibilities more seriously, public authorities who are more dedicated to the sector, and potential patrons who will start viewing museums and culture as a good field to invest in, to increase their individual prestige and political influence. These patrons will be able to contribute their valuable wealth to institutions in Africa.19 Without these concerted efforts and willingness, museum cooperation projects will be, at best, short-term successes and, at worse, a complete waste of time, and the international

19 For the time being, African patrons continue to be very generous towards major museums abroad. For instance, the London-based Tate Gallery has received support from wealthy Nigerians in recent years, while museums in their home country often suffer from a lack of funds (Effiboley 20142015). In Benin, Lionel Zinsou has set up a foundation, but this initiative is part of a French policy which created similar organisations in France (see Institut Montaigne 2002). No wealthy Beninese who has made their fortune locally provides such support on the ground in their home country.

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partners will not be able to do anything to salvage institutions and allow them to flourish in the long-term.

References Adandé, Alexis, ed. 1997. West African Museums Programme (WAMP) Bulletin, no. 7. Adandé, Joseph. 1997. ‘Ouidah à travers ses fêtes et patrimoines familiaux.’ West African Museums Programme (WAMP) Bulletin, no. 7: 42–49. Attali, Jacques. 1982. Histoires du temps. Paris: Fayard. Biney, Ama. 2016. ‘Unveiling White Supremacy in the Academy.’ Pambazuka News, April 24, 2016. http://www.pambazuka.org/node/94375. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. 2013. Préface de Nouvelle histoire des colonisations européennes (XIXe-XXe siècles): Sociétés, cultures, politiques, v–vi. Edited by Amaury Lorin, and Christelle Taraud. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Effiboley, Emery P. 2005. ‘Alexandre Sènou Adandé Museum and the Intangible Heritage: Some Ethical Points for Community Involvement.’ Abhandlungen und Berichte der Staatlichen Ethnographischen Sammlungen Sachsen 52:79–90. Effiboley, Emery P. 2013. ‘Les béninois et leurs musées: Étude ethno-historique.’ Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. Effiboley, Emery P. 2014–2015. ‘Les musées africains de la fin du XIXe siècle à nos jours: Des apparats de la modernité occidentale.’ Afrika Zamani, nos. 22 & 23: 19–40. Effiboley, Emery P. 2015. ‘Financement des musées béninois : De l’illusoire générateur de revenus à la ‘lisibilisation’ d’une dépense publique.’ Unpublished manuscript. Effiboley, Emery P. 2016a. ‘Politique culturelle au Bénin entre héritage historique, parenthèse coloniale et au-delà.’ Unpublished manuscript. Effiboley, Emery P. 2016b. ‘Decolonizing African Museums: What does it mean?’ Paper presented at the international conference Decolonizing the University in Africa, held at the University of South Africa, Pretoria, 17–18 August. Effiboley, Emery P. 2017. ‘Regard de l’autre, distance mentale et reconnexion à nousmêmes.’ Paper presented at the international scientific conference Mitöhouindo, le Vodoun comme la première force de résistance des Africains réduits en esclavage transatlantique à Dangbo, Bénin, 25–30 May. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Ferera, Lisette, éd. 1996. Vers une muséologie sans frontières: L’expérience d’Ingénieuse Afrique. Québec: Musée de la Civilisation. Franck, Chandra. 2013. The Politics of Selling African Art Mostly Collected During Colonial Era to Private Collectors (in the Netherlands). Accessed May 21, 2016. http://africasacountry.com/2013/02/african-art-for-sale/. Gaugue, Anne. 1999. ‘Musées et colonisation en Afrique tropicale.’ Cahiers d’Études Africaines 39(155–156): 727–745. Gombrich, Ernst H. 2006. Histoire de l’art. Édition de poche. Paris: Phaidon.

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Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2011. ‘Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.’ Transmodernity 1 (1). Accessed March 20, 2016. www.escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq. Institut Montaigne. 2002. 25 propositions pour développer les fondations en France. Paris: Institut Montaigne. Journal officiel de la Colonie du Dahomey et dépendances. 1894. August 1, 1894. Konare, Alpha O. 1995. ‘The Creation and Survival of Local Museums.’ In Museums and the Community in West Africa, edited by Claude Daniel Ardouin, and Emmanuel Arinze, 5–10. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press; London: James Currey. Kuyvenhoven, Fransje, ed. 2001. Topics: Developments in Dutch Museum Policy. Amsterdam: Insituut Collectie Nederland. Leeuwen, Carel van. 2001. Rapport sur la révision de l’introduction de Object ID au musée historique d’Abomey. Amsterdam: KIT, Archives du Tropenmuseum. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2007. ‘On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.’ Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 240–270. Mercier, Paul et Jacques Lombard. 1959. Guide du Musée d’Abomey. [Porto-Novo?]: IFAN. Mignolo, Walter D. 2002. ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.’ South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (Winter): 57–96. Muller, J. C. 1965. ‘Centre de formation de techniciens des musées en Afrique, Jos (Nigeria).’ Museum 18, no. 3: 123–125. Musée de la Compagnie des Indes. n.d. ‘Collections: Mobilier et objets d’art.’ Accessed August 6, 2016. http://musee.lorient.fr/collections/mobilier-et-objets-dart/. Ostry, Jonathan D., Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri. 2016. ‘Neoliberalism: Oversold?’ Finance and Development 53, no. 2 (June): 38–41. Rapport de la première phase du projet, Object ID, Abomey. 2000. Amsterdam: Archives du Tropenmuseum. Velakazy, Zeblon. 2016. ‘Understanding Complexity: A Study of Nuclear Matter Under Extreme Conditions.’ Inaugural lecture, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, May 25. Wenzel, Jennifer. 2017. ‘Decolonization.’ In A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, edited by Imre Szeman, Sarah Blacker, and Justin Sully, 449–464. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

Conservation and Restoration as a Challenge for Museum Cooperation The Case of the Palace Museum in Foumban, Cameroon1 Michaela Oberhofer

Several years ago, a cooperative project on conservation and restoration was launched between two museums in Cameroon and Switzerland. The Palace Museum2 in Foumban had evolved from the centuries-old royal collection of the Bamum Kingdom. Parts of this royal treasure had become accessible to the public as early as the 1920s. In contrast, the Museum Rietberg in Zurich was founded much later, in 1952. Unlike ethnographic museums, the Rietberg was conceived as a museum for the arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. The African section contains a few items from Bamum.3 This cooperation between two museums with such widely divergent collection histories came about as a result of their collaboration on the international exhibition Cameroon – Art of the Kings, which opened at Museum Rietberg in 2008. Ever since discussions began about the repositioning of ethnographic museums in the 1990s (Förster 2013; Karp and Lavine 1991), European and American museums with collections from Africa and beyond have increasingly begun to identify themselves as ‘contact zones’ (Clifford 1997; Pratt 1992), striving for dialogue and partnership on an equal footing with concerned communities in the countries of origin. This change in thinking has also led international museums, foundations and cultural institutions to increase their commitment to African museums, especially in former colonies. The global interest in cooperation has coincided with local and national patrimonialisation processes in countries like Cameroon. Over the last fifteen years, the Grassfields of Cameroon have been the scene of a ‘growing cultural activism’ (Bargna 2016: 21) and a revalorisation of its own cultural heritage. This process of musealisation4 and festivalisation has been accompanied by an increasing need for preservation and restoration in Cameroonian museums. This chapter will discuss the methods and objectives of the cooperative project on conservation and restoration between the Palace Museum and the Museum Rietberg. Over the

1 I would like to thank Valentin Boissonas, Christraud Geary and Marko Scholze for their comments on this chapter. 2 Recently, the Palace Museum was re-named the Nouveau Musée du Palais des Rois Bamoun. 3 The Bamum collection at the Museum Rietberg comprises twenty objects. The most significant items include the figure of a courtier (RAF 726), which came into the possession of Eduard von der Heydt in 1931 via Charles Ratton and Paul Eluard, as well as a bead-embroidered buffalo mask (2014.260) and a royal stool (2016.207), both of which were gifts from King Njoya to the missionary Martin Göhring. 4 See Loumpet in this volume, for a more detailed account of musealisation and demusealisation in Cameroon.

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course of this joint project, the similarities and differences between local and international concepts of repair and restoration became apparent. I will argue that Western notions of museum, restoration and authenticity are not useful as exclusive points of reference in museum cooperation. From a postcolonial viewpoint, I understand collaboration to mean ‘dialogue which does not involve a gestural accommodation of the subaltern part for its eventual assimilation within the dominant whole, but refers to a conscious, methodological co-production and co-interpretation’ (Schorch and Kahanu 2015: 112). To achieve this kind of collaboration between equal partners, it is important to conceptualise and realise cooperation projects not only from a Western museum perspective, but to consider the processes of transformation and appropriation of these concepts in African museums, as well as local ideas and practices of repair, conservation and restoration.

Processes of musealisation and patrimonialisation Collecting is not a Western prerogative or a result of colonial influence (Bargna 2016). In many parts of the Cameroon Grassfields, a tradition of collecting objects as symbols of the king’s power, wealth, and reputation already existed in precolonial times. The Bamum Kingdom, founded in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, has always preserved royal regalia, ritual objects, tributes from subjects, gifts from neighbouring kings, and war trophies. From the late 1920s onwards, the Palace Museum emerged as one of the earliest museum-like institutions in Africa which granted partial public access to a royal collection. Famous as an innovative and strategic leader of the Bamum, King Ibrahim Njoya (c. 1872-1933) decided to display parts of the royal treasury as a reaction to conflicts with the French administration and his opponent Mosé Yeyap, a Christian colonial interpreter, who had opened a museum containing secret palace objects in 1926. Thus, King Njoya established his own museum to regain control over the kingdom’s visual domain.5 From the beginning, the museum was characterised by tensions between Western exhibition principles (accessibility, display and protection of objects) and local concepts of preserving memory and history. It has been described as a ‘living museum’ in the sense that the ‘things of the palace’, such as thrones, masks and musical instruments, are taken out of the museum and used in ceremonies and during visits by honourable guests (Geary 1984). In the last fifteen years, numerous new museums have sprung up all over Cameroon, especially in the Grassfields (see Assombang 1990; Fubah 2016a, 2016b; Galitzine-Loumpet 2013). This process of musealisation reflects an increased appreciation of the country’s cultural heritage on a regional and national level. Nevertheless, in most of the museums – whether older or more recent – the infrastructural and financial situation is critical, due to a shortage of private and public funding in the cultural sector. Without international donors or public support, the limited earnings from entrance fees are not sufficient to cover staff salaries and operating costs. Moreover, museums in Cameroon face the constant challenge of conditions inimical to conservation, such as extreme variations in temperature and humidity, dust, and damage caused by pests like insects, lizards and rodents. Against this back5 For the history of the Palace Museum and the role of Mosé Yeyap and his Musée des arts et traditions Bamoun, see Dell (2013); Fine (2016); Geary (1984, 2011) and Galitzine-Loumpet (2016).

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ground, cooperative projects on conservation and restoration like that between the Palace Museum and the Museum Rietberg are all the more important. In addition to the dynamics of musealisation, Cameroon is also experiencing a revitalisation of traditions in the form of modern festivals. The Nguon feast in Foumban, for example, used to be celebrated when subjects paid tribute to their king. The French colonial administration banned the Nguon in 1924 in an attempt to weaken the position of King Ibrahim Njoya, who was sent into exile in 1931, where he died two years later. During the reign of his son, Sultan El Hadj Seidou Njimoluh (1902-1992), the feast was revived and held sporadically.6 When His Majesty Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya ascended to the throne in 1992, he revitalised the Nguon feast, while altering its shape and meaning. Now regularly celebrated every two years, the present-day Nguon festival is not only a symbol of Bamum history and royal power, but has gained importance on a national and international level. In its modernised version, it displays a syncretistic mixture of neo-traditions, including Islamic religious rituals, as well as modern elements like the Miss Nguon beauty pageant and a soccer tournament. The presentation of ‘rites and traditions’ and ‘dances and cultures’ has been retained as an important part of the festival. To enable participants to perform their own cultural heritage, various ‘traditional’ objects are taken out of the Palace Museum to display and use in public. These objects are not only used at the Nguon festival, but also at other Bamum and Islamic ceremonies, as well as at significant receptions and celebrations.7 The intensive use of items from this ‘living museum’ during public events, on top of the age of the collection – parts of which date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – has accelerated wear and tear on the objects, so restoration has become an issue of increasing urgency. Hence, the joint project with the Museum Rietberg aims to improve the conditions for conserving and restoring the unique historical collection held in the Foumban Palace Museum.

Museum cooperation within a ‘living museum’ The idea of a cooperative project between the Museum Rietberg in Zurich and the Palace Museum in Foumban was hatched in the wake of the international exhibition Cameroon – Art of the Kings in Zurich in 2008. To prepare that exhibition, the then curator of the Rietberg’s African collection, Lorenz Homberger, worked closely with counterparts at the Palace Museum. In the end, two loan items from Foumban were displayed in Zurich and the ruling sultan, El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya, was invited to the opening along with his entourage. During his visit to Zurich, the differences between international and Bamum concepts of museums and the materiality of objects became apparent. The highlight of the exhibition was the Mandu Yenu throne from the Ethnographic Museum Berlin, which King Njoya, the grandfather of the ruling sultan, had given as a gift to the German Kaiser Wilhelm 6 During his reign, the Nguon was documented in 1958, 1963, 1976 and 1985 (Galitzine-Loumpet 2016: 76). 7 In August 2017, for example, the ruling sultan celebrated the twenty-fifth jubilee of his accession. The necessary insignia from the museum’s collection, such as the fragile feathered costume which his father had worn at his coronation, were used for his re-enthronement.

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II in 1908. Whereas critical postcolonial voices had advocated a restitution of the throne, the sultan refuted these demands at the press conference, saying: ‘A present is a present (un cadeau est un cadeau)!’ Nevertheless, the ruling sultan asserted his rights by seating himself on his forefathers’ throne during the press conference, a gesture which may be interpreted as the temporary reappropriation of a royal symbol of power which contradicted the conservational rules of conduct in Western museums. The sultan applied the Bamum concept of the ‘living museum’ to a museum exhibit in Europe, thereby demonstrating its original purpose of representing royal authority and the tradition of gift exchange in the Grassfields. After the two museums had agreed that a great number of objects in the Palace Museum were damaged and needed repair, a joint restoration project was launched in 2010 under the patronage of Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya.8 In the first phase of the project, a single object was selected for conservation: a nineteenth-century leopard stool covered with beads (rü mfo), which had been used at public ceremonies by Njapundunke, the mother of King Njoya (Homberger 2011). Damage to the stool is already apparent in historical photographs from 1935: the cloth which the beads were stitched onto was partly torn and beads were missing in several places. Thus, the objective was ‘the substantial conservation and stabilisation of the object’ (Czerwinske, Bretschneider, and Göckeritz 2010: 7; author’s translation). In Foumban, three conservators from Germany and Switzerland cleaned the stool and secured its fabric covering, as well as the damaged strings of beads. During the course of these activities they discovered that the wooden core of the seat was broken, so they carefully glued it back together. In their work, the conservators applied the international ICOM ‘code of ethics’ of conservation and restoration, which requires that an object should be stabilised and any modifications should be clearly identifiable. After completing this conservation, they recommended that ‘the stool (…) should not be used as furniture (…) and should not be exposed to direct sunlight’ (Czerwinske, Bretschneider, and Göckeritz 2010: 10; author’s translation). But the international standards of conservation contradict the cultural practice of a ‘living museum’. Accordingly, the freshly-conserved throne was used by one of the sultan’s older sisters at the Nguon festivals in 2012 and 2014, after which it once again showed minor signs of wear and tear, such as strings of beads that had come loose. Additionally, the interventions that had been performed to Western standards – leaving some damage visible – did not meet the Palace Museum’s aesthetic criteria for restoration work which, to this day, is carried out by local craftsmen who often use ancient materials and traditional methods. Their goal is not so much to stabilise an object’s current condition, but to restore its aesthetic and ritual value.

Local repair, conservation and restoration practices In the material culture of Africa, the repair and recuperation of objects has always been a matter of great significance.9 With the exception of ephemeral objects, damaged artefacts 8 We are very grateful that the joint project was financed through public funding (the Swiss Federal Office of Culture BAK) and a generous private sponsor. 9 On this hitherto neglected topic, see Speranza (2007).

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are repaired for economic, affective or religious reasons; some (or parts) of them are subsequently reused. The repairs represent a creative intervention as part of the object’s biography, which not only extends its usable lifespan, but may also alter its symbolic significance. The aim is to restore its everyday or ritual functionality and efficacy. Figure 13.1: King Njoya sitting on his beaded throne in front of his palace. The male twin figure holds a glass bottle in his hand, which was replaced when the throne was given as a present to Kaiser Wilhelm II

Photograph: Hans von Ramsay, Foumban, 1902 © GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, No. PhMAf 5098

The Palace Museum in Foumban had a long tradition of collecting and displaying objects from its royal heritage, as well as a long tradition of repair, conservation and restoration.10 For example, the Bamum people use traditional techniques to combat pest infestation as a preventive conservation measure for the royal treasury, as well as for ritual and everyday objects outside the palace. The Shüpamom language of the Bamum has two different terms for repair and restoration.11 The word injushe, which translates as ‘restore the condition (remettre en bon état)’, is used when something is cracked or perforated and needs to be 10 While ‘repair’ tends to be used in the context of returning an everyday article to a functional state, ‘restoration’ denotes the more professional process of recovering an object’s symbolic aesthetic, prestigious or religious value (Roulon-Doko 2007). 11 Interview with Njimoluh Nsangu Ayouba on 6 July 2017 in Foumban.

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reassembled. The term inapshe applies not only to cracked or perforated objects, but also to those that are crushed or crumpled. In both cases, the aim is to ‘beautify’ the damaged object and to restore both its functionality and its symbolic, ritual and aesthetic value. One of the first documented restorations of a ‘thing of the palace’ involves the famous Mandu Yenu beaded throne, which was a gift from King Njoya to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1908 and which is now one of the masterpieces in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin (see Figure 13.1). When the first colonial officers and traders arrived in Bamum in 1902, Hans von Ramsay took one of the earliest known photographs of King Njoya sitting on the beaded throne he had inherited from his father Nsangu. The publication of this photo in the popular magazine Globus (1905, 88:272) marked the beginning of what the director of the department for Africa and Oceania at the Berlin museum, Felix von Luschan, described as the ‘hunt for the original’ (Luschan 1905). With the support of the German colonial officer Hans Glauning, von Luschan was anxious to secure the throne for the Berlin museum at all costs. Under this pressure from the museum and the colonial authorities, King Njoya had originally intended to present Kaiser Wilhelm II with a copy of his father’s throne. However, since the copy could not be completed in time, Njoya gave away the original throne and kept the new version, originally destined for the foreigners, for himself.12 At first the Germans regarded the Bamum throne merely as an ethnographic record and a colonial trophy, neglecting its aesthetic value: I take the liberty of doubting whether the chair is really as valuable as it is held to be. While the carvings at its foot – serpents and small human figures – are undoubtedly very well executed, the main figures are roughly done. When [N]joya showed me the chair, one of these figures even held a newly purchased beer bottle in its hand. (Glauning 1906 in Geary and Njoya 1985: 180; author’s translation)

The glass bottle had been placed upside-down into the short, beaded drinking horn held in the male twin figure’s hand. Since it was new and not of local manufacture, the bottle was perceived as intrusive in terms of the contemporary Western concept of authenticity. From the perspective of the Bamum, however, European imports like glass beads, mirrors, velvet fabrics and even glass bottles were rare and prestigious luxury objects worth integrating into the repertoire of court art. Moreover, both the horn and the bottle symbolised the socially and ritually significant practice of drinking alcohol (Geary 1983: 49). Before the throne was handed over to the Germans, the bottle was removed in Foumban and replaced with a beaded drinking horn. While the colour and decoration are typical of bead embroideries of that time, the form of the new horn resembles the long, thin glass bottle. As Geary’s (1983: 50) comparison of historical photographs shows, other parts of the throne were restored as well: missing or damaged beads and cowrie shells were replaced and some areas (such as the Mpelet cap of the male figure and the face of the right-hand guard) were re-embroidered with beads. These local interventions were in accordance with former European ideas of restoration, which entailed a process of returning an object or building to 12 This action remains the subject of debate about colonial pressure, African agency, the authenticity of artefacts and demands for restitution. On the throne’s contested history, see GalitzineLoumpet (2007); Geary (1981, 1983, 1996, 2011); Geary and Njoya (1985); Njiassé Njoya (1994); Oberhofer (2012); and Stelzig (2006).

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an earlier state, deemed to be ‘original’.13 They also reflect the Bamum practice of repeatedly augmenting and supplementing an object during its useful life to maintain its aesthetics, ritual efficacy and functionality.

A shift in the Bamum court style In the nineteenth century, the Bamum king had artistic monopoly over local craftsmen and the forms and materials they used, which led to the development of a Bamum court style. Originally this court style typically used a balanced colour scheme with blue, white and red beads, elaborate carvings and the decorative use of royal symbols. During the 1920s, however, there was a change in royal taste and patronage which resulted in a general shift in the Bamum court style (Geary 1981: 38ff.). This was partly driven by new religious ideas in Bamum society. After developing their own syncretistic belief system, King Njoya and some of the Bamum elite converted to Islam. At the same time – and probably as a consequence of this conversion – older art forms and artistic styles went out of fashion (Fine 2016: 57). Additionally, traditional structures in the palace were dissolved in the course of altercations with the French colonial administration.14 In a mixture of innovative spirit and resignation, King Njoya prompted reforms to loosen the royal monopoly over craftsmen (Njoya 1952). The court’s prerogative to use certain materials and forms alone was abolished, allowing craftsmen in the Rue des Artisans to begin working for the Western market. As a result of this increased artistic freedom and the liberalisation of the arts, new styles and artistic genres emerged. The colour palette was expanded to include vivid light colours, decorative motifs were combined with greater freedom, and carvings became more ornate and, even, baroque. This greater artistic freedom can be observed not only in the production of new objects, but also in the context of restoration work. One early example from the 1930s is the Mandu Yenu in the palace, made approximately between 1908 and 1911 for King Njoya after he had gifted his father’s throne to the German Kaiser. The comparison of historical pictures by Christraud Geary (1981: 38) reveals that the bead covering over the female twin figure was originally monochrome. In the early 1930s, that bead embroidery was replaced with a diamond pattern in bright yellow and blue. ‘A bead embroiderer restored this throne around 1935, which accounts for the extremely vivid colour scheme: multicolouredness is typical of newer bead-embroidered objects’ (Geary 1983: 57). While the ‘four heads/four heads’ (gbatu gbatu) motif is typical of the nineteenth century, the multicoloured scheme, no longer limited to hues of blue, white or red, is similar to the style of beaded objects from the early twentieth century. These innovations in style are also evident in the new version of Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya’s Mandu Yenu throne, which was made for the 2008 Nguon festival by the beadworker Ndam Mama – a member of the Menyam group (see Figure 13.2).

13 The Mandu Yenu was also restored in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin later on. For example, defects were filled with new beads and the surface was thoroughly cleaned (Oberhofer 2010: 82). 14 On the role of his Christian antagonist Mosé Yeyap in the abolition of the royal monopoly on the arts, see Fine (2016).

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Figure 13.2: The new throne of Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya was produced in a modern court style by the beadworker Ndam Mama for the Nguon festival 2008

Photograph: Michaela Oberhofer, Foumban, 2015

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The craftsmen who specialised in beadwork and embroidery were subjugated and integrated into the Bamum Kingdom during its expansion under King Mbuombuo (c. 1820-1830). Nowadays, Sultan Njoya commissions Ndam Mama to create all the palace’s important beadwork projects. While this new throne retains the iconographic characteristics of a beaded Mandu Yenu, i.e. the throne form with twin figures and footstool, the sultan wanted its design to stand out and be ‘exceptional’ compared to other thrones.15 To meet these requirements, Ndam Mama used conspicuously colourful and shiny beads, which he arranged in new patterns, such as vertical stripes. Another innovation is the beaded lettering on the edge of the seat which depicts the sultan’s title in Bamum script. Ndam Mama was inspired by the Bamum Scripts and Archive Project that was taking place at the same time as when he was working at the palace.16 The carvings, too, exhibit iconographical originalities, for example in the twin figures’ accessories (more common head coverings instead of the prestigious Mpelet hats). The carvings at the base of the seat and on the front of the footstool are also unusual. This is the first Mandu Yenu to feature the motif of the double gong in addition to the two-headed snake. To please the sultan as patron, the craftsmen added some small brass emblems on the front of the footstool depicting a spider, a two-headed snake and a double gong – three important symbols of the history and the kings of Bamum.17 The combination and extensive use of these three motifs appear to be a hallmark of the current sultan’s reign. As the official palace logo, this triad has come to dominate the kingdom’s official iconography. Even the architecture of the new Palace Museum is a naturalistic representation of the two-headed snake and the spider, while the sultan’s entrance to the new museum takes the form of a brass arch shaped like a double gong (see Figure 13.3).

Seeking international status for the Palace Museum From the 1980s on, the Palace Museum began adopting Western museum practices as a result of outsiders evaluating the items it contained as art objects (Geary 1996: 295). During the reign of Sultan El Hadj Seidou Njimoluh, a UNESCO-funded project was launched to transfer the objects from the old, much smaller museum building on the left side of the royal court to the second floor of the newly-renovated palace building (Bosserdet 1985). When Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya succeeded to the throne after his father’s death in 1992, the musealisation process gained a new dimension that left its mark on the institution’s conservation and restoration practices. On the sultan’s instructions, the Bamum archaeolo15 Interviews with Ndam Mama in Foumban, 17 April 2015 and 6 July 2017. 16 The Bamum Scripts and Archive Project not only preserved written manuscripts, but also encouraged the community to learn the Bamum script. 17 The two-headed snake is the most important symbol of royalty in Bamum, referring to the war on two fronts waged by King Mbuombuo against the BaPu’ and the Bunka (Njiassé Njoya 1994: 8). The spider plays a role in divination and symbolises wisdom (Geary 1984: 101). The double gong is regarded today as a symbol of the fatherland and an appeal to rally together; additionally, the gong is an important royal emblem, as it is played on special occasions by the king (Geary 1984: 130).

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gist and anthropologist Germain Loumpet redesigned the museum, in collaboration with the anthropologist Alexandra Galitzine-Loumpet, in 1995-1996. The museum layout was given a thematic and chronological structure, didactical texts as well as historical photographs were added. In compliance with the international documentation and conservation standards of the time, the objects were cleaned, treated against insects, photographed and inventoried. The windows were painted out or equipped with vertical blinds as protection from the sun. For the first time, too, glass cases were incorporated into the exhibition to display selected items. However, after twenty years with no refurbishment, the exhibition and the collection are in poor condition today, because of the difficult climatic and infrastructural conditions mentioned above. Until this museum redesign in the 1990s, isolated restoration projects on specific items, including objects and textiles decorated with beads or cowrie shells, were undertaken both by museum employees and by specialist craftsmen. A typical example of the restoration work carried out at this time is one of the three tu moafonyam dance masks in the form of a female face, created in the nineteenth-century Bamum court style. Their restoration comprised replacing some missing bead embroidery at the ears and on the hat. The beadworker chose to use dark blue glass beads, but highlighted a decorative triangle on the hat with white beads. This was intended to reconstruct the object’s (presumed) original state; unlike in modern restorations, however, the reconstruction retained the colours of the nineteenthcentury court style. In recent years, the process of musealisation to conform with international museum standards has accelerated, as illustrated by the gigantic new museum building with its spectacular architecture (see Figure 13.3). The presence of Bamum collections in many major ethnographical museums worldwide, and loans and invitations to various exhibitions in Europe and the USA18 demonstrate to Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya the international significance of the Bamum and their art. The ruling sultan is, therefore, situating the new museum both globally – within current discourse about patrimonialisation, and locally – in the Bamum tradition of ‘inscription de l’art dans l’espace public’ (Délégation Internationale aux Projets Royaux Bamoun, n.d.), even going so far as to compare the new building with the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and the Pyramids (Mbouombouo et al. n.d.). The new museum, which is being built to meet today’s international museum standards, features three exhibition levels as well as a large conference hall, a store room, restoration workshops, offices, a shop and a restaurant. Modern building materials such as concrete, tiles and metal are combined with traditional royal symbols in the form of the spider, the two-headed snake and the double gong.

18 In recent years, highlights include the invitation to Zurich as well as the sultan’s participation at the launch of the Trônes en majesté exhibition at the Palace of Versailles in 2011.

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Figure 13.3: The New Palace Museum of Bamum Kings (near completion) combines traditional symbols of the Bamum Kingdom with a modern museum architecture

Photograph: Valentin Boissonnas, Foumban, 2017

However, this appropriation of international ideas and techniques and their integration into the kingdom’s visual culture can also be observed in the fields of conservation and restoration. Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya’s visits to European museums have prompted him not only to have the most important palace artefacts – like the thrones – cleaned, but also to protect them from dust with plastic sheeting and place them on raised plinths to prevent flooding. Moreover, the sultan has commissioned Ndam Mama to restore one of the oldest thrones. This object, featuring a single female figure holding a vessel in her hand, was dated by Christraud Geary (1981: 34) to the mid-nineteenth century (in the reign of Nguwuo, c. 1850-1870), on the basis of written colonial sources and stylistic criteria. However, the palace assigns it to the reign of King Mbuombuo (c. 1820-1830). Although a few minor repairs (e.g. on the arm of the carved figure, where larger, dark blue beads were used) bear witness to an earlier restoration phase, the throne had been in poor condition for a long time and the wooden construction and the beaded ornamentation severely damaged. Some years ago, Ndam Mama performed restoration work on this piece in the style ancien, which he defines as the use of old materials (if possible, reusing old glass beads, cowrie shells and textiles) and techniques (affixing with embroidery rather than glue). Nevertheless, his clearly visible interventions changed the throne’s overall appearance, since the repairs were made with shiny beads in red and, for the first time, also in green. The edge of the chair is divided into two transverse strips of green and red, a simple pattern not previously found in Mandu Yenus. This new range of colours and a greater artistic freedom in the use of decorative patterns reflect the general shift in the Bamum court style. However, these new colours are also being used because it is difficult to find old beads – which can be very expensive – on the market at all. Additionally, both Ndam Mama’s original art and his restoration work reveal

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his fondness for vertical stripes, enlarged patterns, monochrome planes, and almond-shaped eyes that almost appear blind. In the interpretation and evaluation of this restoration work, international museum standards are in conflict with local ideas about aesthetics and musealisation. Mediating between these divergent concepts has proved to be one of the key challenges of our museum cooperation.

Mediating between divergent concepts of restoration and conservation Based on the experiences and lessons from the first visit, the second phase of our cooperative project focused on capacity building and knowledge transfer on the basis of an intensive exchange between the two museums. In June and July 2017, a workshop on preventive conservation and restoration was held at the Palace Museum in Foumban. In addition to the author, the instructors included Thierry Jacot, a specialist in preventive conservation, the conservator and restorer Valentin Boissonnas – both also lecturers at the Haute École Arc in Neuchâtel – and the Cameroonian archaeologist and anthropologist Germain Loumpet. In consultation with the museum director, Oumarou Nchare, the following subjects were selected for lectures and practical exercises: preventive conservation measures in the old and new building; risk assessment and precautionary measures; handling and transport of objects; treatment of infested artefacts; inventory and documentation (condition reports); the principles of conserving and restoring objects and their impact on cultural values; exhibition design (display cases, mounts). Along with the museum staff and the new building’s designer, local craftsmen were invited, along with students from the Institut des Beaux Arts in Foumban. This workshop was received with great interest by all involved, since the imminent move into the new building presents a major challenge for the museum. Discussions on conservation and restoration during and after the workshop revealed several lines of conflict between the proponents of local and international museum standards, and between the younger and older generations. In the view of older museum employees and the craftsmen entrusted with the work, restoration was deemed successful if an object was restored to its original state and the damage was no longer visible. Restoration work that did not conform to the old techniques and materials was unanimously disparaged. For example, the museum stopped using one craftsman for restoration work after he had used plastic beads from India instead of glass ones and had affixed them with glue rather than embroidering them into place. The participants also had contrasting attitudes to changes in motifs and iconography. The older museum employees criticised the younger beadworker Ndam Mama for introducing new patterns and motifs while working on the thrones. Ndam Mama, however, argued that he had done this at the sultan’s express wish for a new, eye-catching aesthetic. Director Oumarou Nchare held that it was the ritual around it that was crucial for an object’s efficacy, irrespective of the restoration work done on it. The students of the Institut des Beaux Arts, part of the university in Dschang, argued the opposite, championing current international ‘ethical standards’ of conservation and restoration and condemning all interventions that were not limited to stabilising and preserving an artefact’s current condition. While they perceived the conservation work done on the throne by the German/Swiss team as positive, they were critical of the recent restoration work completed by local specialists at the museum.

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Our workshop was concerned not only with knowledge transfer and capacity building, but also with mediating between the different ideas and the concepts they imply. Without making value judgements about either viewpoint, the Swiss conservators and restorers called for the following criteria to be used in future restoration work: all interventions, whether to stabilise an object’s current condition or to repair defects, must be as reversible as possible. In the case of beadwork, this can be ensured by using the old technique of embroidery on supporting textile. Additionally, the condition of each object must be documented before and after intervention in photographs and in written form, to allow its history to be reconstructed. Against this background, documentation (numbering, inventory, condition reports) emerged as an important theme of the workshop. It also showed that it is beneficial for cooperative projects of all kinds not only to document the contradictions between international standards and local practices, but also to take into account the cultural ideas and concepts in which museums are embedded.

Between authenticity and modernisation Applying Western concepts of restoration or authenticity is problematic when assessing interventions on objects in the Palace Museum. The best example is the transformation of a former wooden throne with a female figure holding a calabash in her hands. The French colonial inventory of 1941 lists this item as an ‘incomplete throne which King Njoya commissioned to be carved in imitation of King Nguwuo’s throne’ (Geary 1981: 36). Today, however, this Mandu Yenu is referred to by museum staff as King Nguwuo’s original throne. The carvings were left incomplete and originally the throne was not covered with beads, but was painted in dark blue and white. The wooden throne was considerably altered in the intervening years (see Figures 13.4 and 13.5). At Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya’s request, the beadworker Ndam Mama covered the entire wooden core with brightly-coloured beads a few years ago. He asserts that he chose all the motifs and colours, but adhered to the style ancien in all other respects. The carving represents the royal court style from the beginning of the twentieth century, while the brighter range of colours and the greater artistic freedom of ornamentation are typical of the more modern style. Moreover, it displays Ndam Mama’s personal signature in features such as the vertical stripes and the slightly almond-shaped eyes. These alterations are subject to different interpretations and evaluations. In a conversation with several museum employees19 a consensus emerged that, despite the changes, the object was still the throne of Nguwuo, albeit ‘transformed into an ancient-modern object’. The museum director, Oumarou Nchare, regarded the new beaded cover as merely an outer skin which, like the plastic wrapping on the other thrones, served to protect the interior of the object. For him, the ritual dimension was more important than its outward appearance for the object’s efficacy. This transformation of the wooden throne has created a merged entity which has a unique blend of old and new elements.

19 Interview with Ayiwoud Issofa, Nchare Oumarou, Ndam Maman and Njimoluh Nsangu Ayouba, 4 July 2017.

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Figures 13.4 and 13.5: This wooden throne is associated with King Nguwuo and was transformed into an ‘ancient-modern object’ after being covered with beads

Photographs: Christraud Geary, Foumban, 1984 (left); Valentin Boissonnas, Foumban, 2017 (right)

Another issue that could be raised is whether this ‘transformed’ object is still authentic – and who defines what authentic means (Kasfir 1992). The much-criticised criteria used for authentication in the West were built on the assumption that ‘native’ craftsman used traditional materials to produce ‘authentic’ objects for ‘traditional rites’ by local societies. The transformed throne meets all these criteria. Moreover, it is only through this transformation that the throne could be completed as an object for use in ceremonies and feasts. But many collectors and museum curators of African art would consider that the transformation has stripped the artefact of its status as an authentic African artwork because from the Western collectors’ perspective, another important criterion of authenticity is an item’s age. Only objects ascribed to precolonial times are regarded as authentic, since these ‘antiquities’ – in the eyes of the collectors – have not been ‘spoiled’ or ‘contaminated’ through foreign contacts and modern influences. Applying this criterion to the transformed throne is difficult, since it is partly old, partly new. Additionally, the throne, with its new beaded covering, no longer conforms to the concept of an anonymous, static ‘tribal style’ which the West associates with authenticity. The

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object’s transformation reveals not only changes in Bamum court style since the beginning of the twentieth century, but also the individual signature of the beadworker Ndam Mama. Therefore, although it is possible to apply Western criteria to objects in the Palace Museum, I would argue that this is not helpful for understanding the cultural concepts underlying local processes of restoring and transforming objects in Foumban. For example, although the antiquity of an African artwork is highly valued in the West as a primary marker of authenticity, it is not of great importance to the Bamum people. Instead, an object is evaluated according to whether it belongs to the royal treasury or not, and whether it is activated in rites, regardless of its actual age. This applies to the things of the palace, but not to other categories of objects made in Foumban. Since the early twentieth century, carvers and blacksmiths in Foumban’s Rue des Artisans have been producing objects targeted at the Western art market.20 As early as the 1930s, local craftsmen were applying different strategies to meet Western collectors’ demand for authentic artefacts. One important strategy was ‘to fashion new objects for sale in self-consciously antiquated – one could say historicist – styles’ (Fine 2016: 56). The collection in the Palace Museum follows a diametrically opposite logic, in that old objects are transformed by reworking them in a new modern style. One obvious reason for this is that the museum items are not intended for sale to Western customers, so do not need to appeal to Western tastes. Instead, they embody different levels of meaning within Bamum culture and are treated according to the aesthetic and ritual concepts of the palace. This leads us to the importance of the king (traditionally called fon or mfon) as a cultural innovator. A fon in the Grassfields of Cameroon has always played multiple roles – as a religious leader, politician, businessman, and moderniser (Rowlands 2009: 162). One important role of the Bamum fon is to appropriate and control all possible resources and power from the outside world and bring them into the kingdom (Rowlands 2009: 153ff). In former times, this included conquered people as well as foreign ideas and concepts. Hence, the ‘job’ of the fon, according to Rowlands, was also to adopt the Western concept of museums. At the same time, this concept was locally appropriated in the form of a ‘living museum’, in which the exhibits would be used in local ceremonies.

Conclusion The mingling of local and global or internal and external elements is an long-standing strategy in the Bamum Kingdom’s visual art, and can also be applied to the new museum building in Foumban. Like his predecessors, the ruling sultan has engaged in a ‘new heritage policy’ (Galitzine-Loumpet 2016: 78) and created a monumental new architectural work. Inspired by spectacular buildings abroad, he has opted to employ modern museum standards and materials for construction, whilst the appearance of the new museum is characterised by its use of traditional royal symbols like the spider and the two-headed snake. As a cultural innovator and moderniser, Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya has increasingly ‘monumentalised patrimony’ (Galitzine-Loumpet 2016: 78) in an attempt to control the political and cultural imagination of royal history and royal heritage. 20 On the art market, see Dell (2013); Fine (2016) and Forni (2017).

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I argue that the modernising aspect of the fon’s role also applies to the practice of conservation and restoration. Here, as in other spheres, the king as patron orders and controls restoration work. But his aim is not to stabilise an object in its existing state and freeze it in time, as international conservation standards strive to do. Rather, the concept behind the fon’s restorative practices is to modernise and update these traditional artefacts through the use of fresh colours and new patterns, in line with contemporary court style. Thus, the restoration practices themselves become a symbol of the Bamum king’s innovative strength and modernity. As this chapter has shown, restorative practices are neither a Western prerogative nor the consequence of colonial domination. The Palace Museum in Foumban has a long tradition of repair, conservation and restoration. Local practices can converge with, but also occasionally contradict, Western ideas about museums, authenticity, and ethical codes of restoration. Therefore, international cooperative museum projects should not only aim to identify divergent practices, but also to understand the cultural concepts which these practices reflect. At the Palace Museum, the recent process of patrimonialisation, festivalisation and musealisation have all led to an increased number of conservational and restorative interventions. In the sense of a restorative shift, the Bamum king as innovator is controlling these restorations, by fashioning the visual essence of the Bamum Kingdom in a new modern style.

References Assombang, R. 1990. ‘Museums and African Identity: The Museum in Cameroon – a Critique.’ West African Journal of Archaeology 20:188–198. Bargna, Ivan. 2016. ‘Collecting Practices in Bandjoun, Cameroon: Thinking about Collecting as a Research Paradigm.’ African Arts 49, no. 2 (Summer): 20–37. Bosserdet, Jean. 1985. ‘Au palais des sultans à Fumban.’ Unpublished report, UNESCO Paris. Accessed January 6, 2018. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0006/000653/065344fo. pdf. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Czerwinske, Petra, Karin Bretschneider, and Stefanie Göckeritz. 2010. ‘Dokumentation über die Restaurierung des Leopardenhockers aus dem Palastmuseum in Fumban.’ Unpublished document, Museum Rietberg Zurich. Délégation Internationale aux Projets Royaux Bamoun. n.d. Projet de construction du Musée des Rois Bamoun: Mécénat et parrainage. Accessed January 8, 2018. http://de. calameo.com/read/001136666b5d72984409a. Dell, Simon. 2013. ‘Yeyap’s Resources: Representation and the Arts of the Bamum in Cameroon and France, 1902-1935.’ In World Art and the Legacies of Colonial Violence, edited by Daniel J. Rycroft, 31–58. Burlington: Ashgate. Fine, Jonathan. 2016. ‘Selling Authenticity in the Bamum Kingdom in 1929–1930.’ African Arts 49, no. 2 (Summer): 54–67. Förster, Larissa. 2013. ‘Öffentliche Kulturinstitution, international Forschungsstätte und postkoloniale Kontaktzone: Was ist ethno am ethnologischen Museum?’ In Ethnologie

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im 21. Jahrhundert, Thomas Bierschenk, Matthias Krings, and Carola Lentz (Hg.), 189– 210. Berlin: Reimer. Forni, Silvia. 2017. ‘Visual Diplomacy: Art Circulation and Iconoclashes in the Kingdom of Bamum.’ In The Inbetweenness of Things: Materializing, Mediation and Movement between Worlds, edited by Paul Basu, 149–168. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fubah, Mathias A. 2016a. ‘Views about modern Museums in the Palaces of the Western Grassfields, Cameroon.’ International Journal of African Renaissance Studies 11, no. 1: 84–102. Fubah, Mathias A. 2016b. ‘Museums in the Palaces of the Cameroon Grassfields: Concerns about Accessibility and Sustainability.’ HSRC Policy Brief 10 (March): 1–4. Galitzine-Loumpet, Alexandra. 2007. ‘Objets en exil: Les temporalités parallèles du trône du roi Bamoun Njoya (Ouest Cameroun).’ Actes du colloque international, Temporalités de l’exil, Université de Montréal, Canada, 15–17 Février. Accessed January 6, 2018. www.poexil.umontreal.ca/events/colloquetemp/actes/Alexandra.pdf. Galitzine-Loumpet, Alexandra. 2013. ‘E-matériel: De la virtualisation du patrimoine au musée-signe; Exemples du Cameroun et du Gabon.’ Ethnologies 35, no. 2: 77–100. Galitzine-Loumpet, Alexandra. 2016. ‘Reconsidering Patrimonialization in the Bamun Kingdom: Heritage, Image, and Politics from 1906 to the Present.’ African Arts 49, no. 2 (Summer): 68–81. Geary, Christraud. 1981. ‘Bamum Thrones and Stools.’ African Arts 14, no. 4 (August): 32–43, 87–88. Geary, Christraud. 1983. ‘Bamum Two-Figure Thrones: Additional Evidence.’ African Arts 16, no. 4 (August): 46–53, 86–87. Geary, Christraud. 1984. Les choses du palais: Catalogue du Musée du Palais Bamoum à Foumban (Cameroun). Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. Geary, Christraud. 1996. ‘Art, politics, and the transformation of meaning: Bamum art in the twentieth century.’ In African Material Culture, edited by Mary Jo Arnoldi, Christraud M. Geary, and Kris L. Hardin, 283–307. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Geary, Christraud. 2011. Bamum. Milan: Five Continents Editions. Geary, Christraud, and Adamou N. Njoya. 1985. Mandou Yénou: Photographies du pays Bamoum, royaume ouest-africain, 1902–1915. München: Trickster. Glauning, Hans. 1906. Letter to Felix von Luschan, 24 March 1906, Archive of the Ethnological Museum Berlin. Globus. 1905. ‘Bamum: Mit 2 Abbildungen nach Aufnahmen von Hauptmann Ramsay.’ Globus 88, no. 17, November 2: 272–273. Homberger, Lorenz. 2011. ‘Operation “Leopardenthron”.’ A4 – Magazin für aussereuropäische Kunst und Kultur 12 (1): 76–79. Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kasfir, Sidney L. 1992. ‘African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow.’ African Arts 25, no. 2 (April): 41–53, 96–97. Luschan, Felix von. 1905. Letter to Hans Glauning, 15 December 1905, 115/06, Archive of the Ethnological Museum Berlin.

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Mbouombouo, Youssouf, Mohamed Ibrahim Lamare, Adamou Montie, Ahmed Njutapvoui, and Jeugo Moustapha Npoutoum. n.d. ‘Quoi de neuf dans le monde touristique à Foumban?’ Unpublished manuscript. Njiassé Njoya, Aboubakar. 1994. ‘The Mandu Yenu in the Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin.’ Baessler-Archiv, n.s., 42: 1–24. Njoya, Ibrahim. 1952. Histoire et coutumes des Bamum. Traduction du Pasteur Henri Martin. [Douala]: Institut français d’Afrique noire. Oberhofer, Michaela. 2010. ‘Die Wiederentdeckung und Reinterpretation einer verloren geglaubten Afrika-Sammlung aus Bamum (Kamerun).’ Mitteilungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 31:73–88. Oberhofer, Michaela. 2012. ‘The Appropriation of the Other: Following a Royal Throne from Bamum to Berlin.’ Special issue, DiARTgonale, Jaman 1:32–39. Accessed January 8, 2018. https://issuu.com/enoughroomforspace/docs/jaman_-_diartgonale__1_erfors/33. Pratt, Mary L. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Roulon-Doko, Paulette. 2007. ‘Les mots de la réparation.’ In Objets blessés: La réparation en Afrique, edited by Gaetano Speranza, 19–23. Milan: 5 Continents; Paris: Musée du quai Branly. Rowlands, Michael. 2009. ‘Africa on Display: Curating Postcolonial Pasts in the Cameroon Grassfields.’ In Postcolonial Archaeologies in Africa, edited by Peter R. Schmidt, 149– 162. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Schorch, Philipp, and Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu. 2015. ‘Anthropology’s Interlocutors: Hawai’i speaking back to Ethnographic Museums in Europe.’ Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 9, no. 1: 110–113. Speranza, Gaetano, ed. 2007. Objets blessés: La réparation en Afrique. Milan: 5 Continents; Paris: Musée du quai Branly. Stelzig, Christine. 2006. ‘“Africa is a Sphinx – Once she’s taken hold of you, she won’t let go so easily”: The Officer and Collector Hans Glauning.’ Tribus 55:155–200.

Conclusion

What are the Opportunities, Challenges and Modalities for African and European Museum Cooperation? Cynthia Kros

More than just a walking stick Almost all the chapters in this volume have assessed either single instances or more sustained periods of cooperation between museums in southern, East and West Africa and European institutions. Jesmael Mataga’s chapter is something of an exception since it does not examine a specific case of African-European cooperation, but his account of the Mukwati walking stick that was taken to Europe by British army officer Robert Baden-Powell vividly embodies a number of this book’s key themes. Principally, they concern the ways in which the museum as an institution, its practices and assumptions about what benefits its publics should derive from it, have been compelled to change – or at least consider changing – in recent decades in the wake of African decolonisation. Some years after Zimbabwe’s independence, the Mukwati walking stick was repatriated, subsequently acquiring a new life that simultaneously enabled it to establish connections with its indigenous past and to command respect from the curatorial staff at the museum where Mataga worked. Although the museum has become its official custodian, the descendants of Mukwati, who was a spiritual leader during the Chimurenga struggle against the British South Africa Company in the late 19th century, are now allowed to take the stick out occasionally for use in ceremonials. The rest of the time it is kept covered and, in keeping with modern interpretations of taboos, away from handling by the female curators. The walking stick, like many thousands of objects manufactured in Africa before or during the colonial period, travelled unwillingly to Europe. On its return, it did not settle peaceably into a glass case in what James Clifford (2003: 36) amusingly characterised as the archetypal ‘stodgy’ museum, before he had begun to conceive of museums in more dynamic ways. Indeed, the walking stick would probably have confirmed the more optimistic outlook Clifford says he developed over the course of his professional life because, as Mataga shows, it clearly ‘unsettled’ not just museum practices, but also the very notion of what a museum is and what its functions are. Even having travelled the vast distance back to its homeland after decades of exile, the walking stick refused to accept the museum as its ‘final destination’, a stance Clifford (2003: 35) would undoubtedly have commended. Referring to collections once described as ethnographic being moved into other categories or the different kinds of institutions that he was observing at the end of the 1990s, Clifford (2003: 35) remarked that it would be more accurate to think of museums as temporary ‘way stations’. He employed this metaphor to emphasise the constant movement, reconfigurations and reappropriations that are characteristic of the contemporary museum landscape. Constant dynamism and shifting relations were integral to Clifford’s concept of the ‘contact zone’ (Clifford 1997), which is now indelibly associated, in the museum context,

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with his name (see the Introduction).This concept is cited by several authors in this collection, who use it as a way of evaluating the success of the cooperative projects they have examined. But some scholars have reservations about adopting it because they feel it is still too firmly rooted in metropolitan perspectives and institutions.

The museum and the colonial project Clifford (1988), among others (for example, Bennett 2004), showed how ethnographic museums played an integral role in colonial conquest as well as in European national projects. In this volume, George Abungu refers to the ill-gotten gains from extensive looting and the bagging of war trophies which make up a substantial part of collections in European ethnographic museums, also alluding to the shameful history of collecting human remains at the beginning of the 20th century, as documented in the South African case by Martin Legassick and Ciraj Rassool (2000). Kwame Amoah Labi’s very nuanced and meticulous account in this volume, beginning with the Achimota School in the early 1920s, shows how the museum in what was then the Gold Coast also assisted colonial officials themselves to gain an understanding of their colonial subjects. Labi’s chapter is a judicious reminder that colonial intellectuals and scientists did not simply ship in European assumptions and ideas about Africa that had taken root in debates or theories expounded abroad, but formed and reshaped them over time in their encounters with Africans and, often, prolonged exposure to indigenous systems and ways of making knowledge (cf. also Clifford 1997 and 2003). Cynthia Kros and Anneliese Mehnert’s chapter, informed by Patrick Harries’ (2007) pioneering work, makes a similar point in relation to the Swiss missionary-scientist Henri-Alexandre Junod and his working relationships with African experts – particularly in the fields of entomology and divination. Germain Loumpet offers an extremely compelling image of museums in Mali and Cameroon, which captures the nature of the perverse entanglement involved in the making of colonial ethnography. Loumpet writes that, through displays of ‘tribal’ objects, Africans saw reflections that were ‘retrograde images of themselves’. As a consequence of these extremely convoluted forms of knowledge-making, it is immensely challenging to attempt to unmake or re-represent them. When Jeremy Silvester, author of the chapter on the Africa Accessioned Network, visited the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich with a colleague who had grown up near Olukonda in Namibia, he was shocked to see objects in display cabinets collected by the Swiss botanist Hans Schinz from the same area of northern Namibia which his colleague hailed from. It was a sight that evoked Michael Ames’ (1992) notorious image of the ‘cannibalistic’ museum for Silvester. One might have thought that this kind of cannibalism was a shaky foundation upon which to try to build cooperative projects between European and African museums. Indeed, as Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer and Raphael Schwere observe in the Introduction, it is no easy task to implement cooperation in the long shadow of a tenacious colonialism that has still not quite breathed its last. Most of the chapters testify, in some measure, to the truth of this disquieting observation. Despite some notable attempts, according to Laely, Meyer and Schwere, there are few sources to turn to for information on, or theory about, the best routes to effective and sustai-

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nable cooperation between African museums and European institutions. Although there is some extant literature on cooperative projects, much of it only considers a narrow range of institutions, and it is often more descriptive than analytical, neglecting the pertinent debates in museology that might shed light on the flaws of, for example, foundational principles that have been formulated, sometimes too hurriedly or without consideration, for the difficult conditions which the African partners labour under. Perhaps partly due to scholarly oversight – but more probably owing to the variability and contingency of local circumstances, ranging from unpredictable changes of regimes to malfunctioning hardware (cf. Effiboley) – there is a lack of new paradigms available which could serve as a sound theoretical base for this kind of cooperation.

Contact zone? Clifford’s contact zone concept continues to appeal because it seems to open up a space for meaningful cultural encounters, despite the profound damage wrought by colonialism. His inspiration, as is probably well known, came from observing how the Tlingit elders at the Portland Art Museum used objects from the Rasmussen collection around which to weave marvellous, but heart-rending stories about their memories of dispossession and its lasting impact, and to appeal to the sympathetic curators there to let their voices be heard. Clifford was excited by the diffusion of the hermeneutic power he thought he was witnessing, as the curators began to sense that they needed to radically modify their views about what the objects represented – having evaluated them before this encounter primarily in terms of aesthetic principles. He avers that this compelled the Portland staff to reconsider how to display objects from the Rasmussen collection, as well as others in the museum with the same sort of provenance, so as to retain the trust of the Tlingit elders and the original custodians of those other collections. In the scene in the Portland Art Museum’s basement evoked by Clifford (1997), the Rasmussen objects underwent a profound shift in meaning and significance, as did the Mukwati walking stick discussed at the beginning of this chapter. It had been attached for many years to the history of a ‘great [English] man’ (Mataga in this volume) where, no doubt, it was regarded as an exotic curiosity, but on its homecoming the stick acquired, or perhaps re-acquired, spiritual properties associated with a legendary resistance movement. Several authors in this anthology (Lagat, Abiti and Silvester) argue that there is a need to understand the spiritual implications of museum representation, in several senses. Religious beliefs or affiliations may contribute to, or exacerbate, local conflicts, as Nelson Abiti suggests in his sensitive account of memorial practices in northern Uganda. Some authors also alert us to the spirituality of certain material artefacts, like the sacred stones from southwestern Africa that Silvester discusses, or the Mukwati walking stick itself, which have long languished in foreign museums, either sorely neglected or having had a one-dimensional ethnographic role imposed on them. Abungu remarks appositely in his chapter that ‘what is sacred in one part of the world can be a mere object of curiosity to another’. In contrast, Rosalie Hans cites Robin Boast’s (2011) critique in suggesting that Clifford’s contact zone concept needs to be loosened up and decentred, to make it appropriate as an aspirational goal for cooperation between African and European museums in the present.

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Clifford would probably have countered (cf. Clifford 2003) that his initial idea was intended to be flexible enough even to make allowance for the kind of contestation and dissonance to which Hans alludes in her chapter on museums in Kenya and Uganda. He would probably maintain that it was never intended to describe merely some kind of physical space set aside within a well-resourced metropolitan museum like the Portland Art Museum for vigorous discussions between groups of visitors from different backgrounds. In an interview, Clifford (2003) readily conceded that the concept of the ‘contact zone’ had come from Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation – a point that several authors in this volume remark upon. Not that he had ever concealed his source. In fact, in his original proposition about the contact zone, Clifford (1997) quoted Pratt directly, to impress on the reader some of the finer details of what is, after all, a fairly complex concept. In particular, he intended it to include the sense that, while it was important to recognise the impact of power relations and hierarchies operating within a ‘zone’ in which groups of people once separated by vast distances of geography and outlook were brought together, it was still possible for ‘multidirectional processes’ to operate. By this, he meant that such encounters should not be envisaged only in terms of the ‘cultural dominance’ imposed by those who were more powerful on passive subjects who had been rendered helpless, and so were unable to respond in any effective way (Clifford 2003: 34). Whether he paid sufficient attention to what he acknowledged (Clifford 1997: 192) were ‘radically asymmetrical relations of power’ is, however, debatable. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that, through collaborations between museums, international foundations, educational programmes and heritage agencies, contact zones can even be located within global networks – what Clifford (2003, 34), drawing on Pratt’s conceptual precedent, would call a ‘relational ensemble’. In fact, Hans’ chapter clearly shows how the ostensibly remote museums she discusses have found themselves operating, for better or worse – often the latter – within such an ‘ensemble’. It seems that there is often a lack of understanding of what it is like for curators, museum professionals and their communities struggling, as they are in Hans’ study, against the odds in impecunious financial circumstances in regions of East Africa that are far from any substantial metropolis. She shows, for example, how the Abasuba Community Peace Museum on Mfangano Island in Kenya ultimately became the victim of an international developmental agenda, which had dictated that it should be orientated to what turned out to be a poorly-conceptualised tourist market, with deleterious results. The building materials used for the museum were selected according to a sentimental criterion based on ‘cultural’ integrity rather than for their ability to withstand the elements without regular, expensive maintenance. Nonetheless, Hans also asserts the potential agency of local stakeholders, despite their precarious circumstances and being faced with inimical foreign agendas. Several other chapters in this anthology provide case studies of successful local initiatives – although these are often limited or subject to reversals of fortune. For instance, Silvester describes the initial impact of local lobbying efforts to initiate a mapping project so that museums in four participating southern African countries can gain a sense of where artefacts taken from their places of origin to Finland, Germany, Sweden or the United Kingdom are currently housed.

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Visibility of agendas Clifford (2003) maintains that contact zones serve to make the aesthetic, historical and political agendas of all the participants visible, and this is very well illustrated in this book. Often, what the zone of contact does, is bring to light – in quite dramatic ways – the very different ideas that Africans and Europeans have about the purpose and functions of material objects and, accordingly, about the most appropriate ways of conserving, restoring and exhibiting them. It would be wrong, or at least simplistic, to subscribe unthinkingly to the common notion that Labi refers to in this volume that the museum is invariably an alien institution that was introduced into Africa by Europeans and consequently, at independence, passed into the hands of an indifferent public who were, at best, its reluctant heirs (cf. also Abungu’s chapter). George Abungu points to the particular attitude still exemplified by several museums in Western Europe today, which is bolstered by the extent and geographical range of their collections, allowing them to adopt what he argues is an illusionary and increasingly untenable claim to universalism. But the notion of preserving special objects and putting them on public display is not unique to Western Europe. In his chapter, Emery Patrick Effiboley describes how the Benin King Agadja reserved artworks that had been produced for his own use, as well as ordering the manufacture of thrones and special seats for his ministers, as long ago as the early 18th century. Similarly, in Cameroon, according to Michaela Oberhofer in her chapter, there is evidence of rulers collecting art objects at least as far back as the 16th century. The Palace Museum in Foumban was based around the royal collection of the Bamum kingdom, which was several centuries old (cf. also Labi on practices in what became the Gold Coast). Oberhofer and Loumpet both argue persuasively that the Bamum King Ibrahim Njoya had established a specific practice in the mid-1920s. Evidently, he opened some of the palace collections up to the public as a deliberate way to counteract conflict with the French administration and rivalry from the Christian colonial interpreter Mosé Yeyap, who had already opened a museum displaying what he claimed were secret palace objects. Njoya and his incumbent successor were both fully aware of the importance of controlling the ‘visual sense and imagination’ of their subjects, as Oberhofer evocatively phrases it. In one sense, the foundations for later cooperation with Zurich’s Rietberg Museum in 2008 were laid at the beginning of the last century but, in another, it could be argued that there were also unmistakable inklings of the conflict – or at least the dissonance of curatorial perspectives – that would emerge. When Sultan Njoya travelled to Zurich in 2008 to visit the Rietberg Museum exhibition where objects loaned from Fumban were on display, he took his idea of a living museum with him, with unpredictable results. Not only did he insist on sitting on the famous Mandu Yenu throne, which had been loaned for the exhibition from the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin but, perhaps more surprisingly, he also refused to entertain the calls being made for its repatriation. His refusal, articulated at a press conference convened at the time, was based on the grounds that the throne had been a gift from his grandfather to Kaiser Wilhelm II. It seems that for the sultan, the role it had played in reinforcing diplomatic relations made a call for repatriation sound ungracious – which he expressed in his blunt rejoinder that a ‘gift was a gift’. It may be assumed that he was objecting to the throne being reduced to the status of a mere object which had been drained of the social relations that gave it meaning.

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Meanwhile, objects including masks, thrones and musical instruments were regularly taken out of the Fumban Palace Museum whenever they were needed for ceremonial purposes – a practice which proved to be anathema to the Swiss and German conservators who travelled to Cameroon a couple of years after the Rietberg exhibition in order to repair a 19th century leopard stool that had been used in public ceremonies by King Njoya’s mother Njapundunke. The conservators’ explicit instructions that the stool should be kept out of direct sunlight and should not be used were deliberately flouted because they made no sense in terms of the stool’s ritual significance. For the sultan, objects in the Palace Museum that had been damaged or were worn out needed to be repaired in order to restore their aesthetic beauty and, hence, their ritual efficacy (cf. also Loumpet in this volume).

Authenticity? The conflict of perspectives described by Oberhofer also raises the issue of ‘authenticity’, which is tackled by several of this book’s contributors, who point out that there may be widely divergent understandings of what this means, which are difficult to reconcile. In her chapter on Ugandan art in German Museum collections, Katrin Peters-Klaphake provides a damning assessment of what European attachment to a particular definition of ‘authenticity’ reveals. Drawing on robust evidence from her case study, she notes that ‘authenticity’ is likely to serve as a synonym for ‘unchanging’ or ‘uncontaminated’, in an entirely compatible way with the old ethnographic concepts referred to above, which relegated Africans to a pristine and, in some ways, enviable state – especially for jaded Europeans. However, this view also presupposed that Africans were unable to engage with modernity on their own terms. Peters-Klaphake quotes curator Clémentine Deliss (1992), who exposes the European insistence on ‘authenticity’ as nothing more than a nostalgic effort to discover and entrench the ‘primitive’ and the ‘tribal’. Thus, as Peters-Klaphake argues, ‘authenticity’ becomes a problematic ‘category of validation’ for African art, often privileging work that is produced by autodidactic artists who use a style perceived as traditional over others. The category of ‘authenticity’ may well exclude works by Africans who are judged to be engaging with ‘European’ genres or with aspects of modernity. It is worth drawing attention to what Peters-Klaphake says, by way of elaborating on the importance of establishing the character of African Modernism – or modernisms – since she points out the necessity of conceiving of them as plural. In her chapter, she presents some results from a research project that began in 2015, funded by the Volkswagen-Stiftung, in which scholars from the Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth, the Makerere Art Gallery attached to Makerere University in Kampala and the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main are researching the histories of the Ugandan Fine Art collections in all three institutions. She asks what we can learn by studying these collections in a dynamic way – understanding that they are both part of, and constitute networks of, artists, patrons, teachers, traders, collectors, museum staff and visitors – as well as through constructing the biographies of the objects contained in them. The theoretical inspiration for this aspect of the project is derived from Appadurai (1986) and Kopytoff (1986). The results seem to be enlightening, despite the gaps in documentation, somewhat chaotic organisation, and the unsurprising silences around some dubious transactions involved in creating the collections.

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Through drawing out the artistic practices of each era in the Makerere Art School’s life and those of individual artists, the scholars involved in the project are beginning to provide answers about what forms African modernisms take. Peters-Klaphake selects an incisive comment from the Nigerian artist and curator Chika Okeke-Agulu, who is emphatic that ‘African modernism cannot be broached merely by invoking European modernism’, evoking beautifully the ‘restless intellectual encounters of artists’ with the world and manifestations of modernity elsewhere.

The zeal to patrimonialise After independence, when national museums were established in many African countries, the challenge was often perceived to be how to represent the new nation’s ‘culture’ and history as a unified entity. Loumpet, in this volume, cites a wonderful piece of polemic from the Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU) Cultural Charter for Africa in the decade after most African countries had gained their independence. This declared that culture was a ‘force of our victorious resistance to imperialist blackmail’, highlighting how great the expectations of ‘culture’ were, and foreshadowing why they were almost certainly bound to be disappointed. What generally happened was that the single narrative of nationalist history lost its power to rally the nation. Nationalist history proved unequal to the task of stitching the different parts of the putative new nations together.1 When disillusionment with the new order set in, eulogies and monuments to those leaders of the anti-colonial struggle who were now installed in senior government posts became less persuasive. Abungu detects ‘vestiges of colonial interest’ in the way that stories that did not conform to the nationalist narrative were sidelined, while Labi points to the long-term failure of Kwame Nkrumah’s invocation of ‘African genius’ to encourage harmony among different ‘ethnic’ groups in Ghana. In his chapter, Effiboley describes some notable successes achieved through cooperative projects between museums in the Republic of Benin and European institutions, before lamenting the breakdown of others, for example a project that began by digitising collections at the Museum of Abomey and was supposed to extend to other museums in the country. However, the Dutch partners appeared to lose interest in this project because of its persistent logistical and maintenance problems. Effiboley detects a degree of indifference on the part of the Beninese government, which he considers responsible for the perennial funding deficits suffered by museums and heritage projects. He further notes that a manifestly popular programme concerning family history in the city of Ouidah did not reach its potential because of a lack of money and official support. Effiboley wonders whether the indifference he observes may be attributed to an unwillingness to deal with conflictual memories, or the persistence of a colonial ‘mindset’ associated with the concept of a museum, which makes government ministers hesitant to even step inside such institutions.

1 See Lagat’s chapter in this volume, in which he presents the Hazina exhibition at the National Museums of Kenya as a deliberate attempt to evade a nationalist narrative – and see below for further discussion of Lagat’s chapter.

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In his chapter, Loumpet is more emphatic about the reasons why the cooperative projects he describes in Mali have failed, seeing the vacant museum building in Sikasso as tangible proof of what he calls démuséalisation – the collapse of a museum project because it offended feelings of ‘ethnic’ ownership of heritage in the region, as well as ‘ethnic’ possessiveness in relation to the founding heroes of the anti-colonial struggle. Loumpet diagnoses the cause of démuséalisation as the failure to come to terms with identity conflicts that were created during the colonial and neocolonial periods. Continuing with his own theme of neocolonialism, Abungu observes scathingly that African museums have often entrenched or even extended the power of the post-independence elite, for example the apparently petty, but ultimately significant discretionary power over who is authorised to issue research permits for local heritage sites. He observes that the control of museums over surrounding heritage sites has been more curtailed in Francophone than in Anglophone Africa, but notes that deference to the research interests of the old colonial power is still evident in the former. In areas like northern Uganda where brutal civil war had raged, making an outright mockery of the idea of a single nationalist narrative so often embedded in official memorials, there was, of necessity, a shift to a different kind of commemorative project. It somehow had to deal with the fact that differentiating perpetrators from victims was often a problematic and uncertain endeavour. As Abiti’s chapter exemplifies, commemoration in this area of Uganda has recently tended to take the form of enactment or performance, suggesting to him a phenomenon observed by social anthropologist Paul Connerton (1989), that might be paraphrased as the term ‘bodily memory’. It might be concluded that, even though aspirations towards creating a unified nation or people have not been entirely discredited, the idea that museums could help to attain this may have been. Abiti, writing from an explicitly personal vantage point located within the ‘memoryscape’ he is sketching, provides a fascinating account of how old myths might be revived, to inspire people to look beyond current animosity for traces of ancient unity – for example, that of the Luo brothers who fell out with one another spectacularly. The zeal to ‘patrimonialise’ (a French word that is indispensable, but clumsily rendered in English) may be observed in several different contexts. Essentially, it means a process through which local people and institutions claim and attach value to heritage that they see themselves having inherited from their ancestors. In Oberhofer’s Cameroonian case study, the zeal to patrominialise appears to have come from Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya and, besides the revival of an annual festival, takes an unabashedly monumental form. The new palace museum, which has been designed by anthropologists and archaeologists in consultation with the sultan, seeks to combine the old and the new, by constructing the royal symbols of a double-headed snake and a spider in conspicuously modern materials. The sultan has expressed his ambition to create a monument that will rival not only the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, but even the Ancient Pyramids. One of the motifs running through Oberhofer’s contribution is that – from the beginning of the early 20th century at least – the Bamum rulers have been attempting to control their subjects’ political and cultural imagination through a calculated display of ritual objects and symbolism. But the patrimonialising impulse is also visible in a rather different way, in the creation of community museums or projects, as Abiti’s and Hans’ chapters demonstrate. These projects show few signs of monumental ambition in the architectural sense, but the hopes

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that they might be able to restore unity and heal unimaginably ghastly wounds caused by civil war are no less consequential. The way that ‘culture’ worked in the old ethnographic museums was by tying people to specific groups or ‘tribes’, often according to designations wrought by anthropologists and linguists with colonial connections. African groups were divided on the basis of putative distinctions from one another that were rigid and impermeable. African societies were ‘dehistoricised’, since they were defined according to the colonial imperative, which insisted that they should be depicted as the repositories of timeless ‘cultures’, rather than as exhibiting the signs of dynamic change and adaptation characteristic of modern social formations (cf. Lagat in this volume, citing Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016). Abungu, making the point that these kinds of ideologically-expedient colonial representations emphasised long-term stasis and immutability, observes that consequently Africans were portrayed as if they were ‘stuck in the past’. Interestingly, Labi maintains that elite education in the colonial Gold Coast’s Achimota School sought to combine English education with the best of indigenous culture – certainly an intention that was widely replicated in other areas of British-controlled Africa – but which, for all its apparently progressive outlook, usually tended to reduce local practices and knowledge to invariable ‘tribal’ principles and inflexible beliefs. It might, therefore, seem ironical, given the colonial connotations referred to above, that the idea of culture is being enthusiastically resuscitated today by local stakeholders. Some examples of this are given in Hans’ and Abiti’s chapters, as well as in Loumpet’s account of what he calls an ‘auto-muséalisation’ project among the Baka in the Dja Faunal Reserve in eastern Cameroon. In the light of the Ugandan Traditional Rulers (Restitution of Assets and Properties) Act 1993 that restored the functions of cultural and traditional leaders and institutions after their earlier abolition, Abiti describes how traditional Acholi leaders began to perform the rituals of stepping on eggs to welcome and cleanse returning fighters in 2006. It was this kind of local initiative that gave the Uganda (National) Museum the idea of documenting and preserving histories and cultural sites that had been associated with the conflict, and developing links with Acholi leaders and local authorities. Abiti highlights the complex questions that arose concerning the treatment of ‘painful’ heritage associated with the civil war, and how the museum managed its relationship with the community whilst preparing for the Road to Reconciliation exhibition, hosted by the National Museum in partnership with the Norwegian Directorate of Cultural Heritage. In his chapter, Loumpet offers a brief description of the Baka New Patrons project in Cameroon, in which participants endeavoured to create symbolic works in order to change the prejudiced perceptions of them that have become more acute as the formerly-nomadic Baka have made a transition to a semi-sedentary lifestyle. All of these projects seem to fit Abungu’s description of a ‘mental revolution’, since they involve the metaphorical destruction of museum walls to allow communities meaningful access to their formerly-protected inner sanctums, which he attributes to widespread calls for decolonisation and the positive responses to them witnessed in Africa. It might be observed that the concept of ‘culture’ in all these cases is proving quite malleable, as it always is in reality. It is being consciously refashioned to provide the basis for healing and reconciliation rituals that are performed in proximity to the museum so that former deadly enemies, perpetrators and victims can live at peace with one another, or so that hurtful prejudices may be productively addressed. In these kinds of contexts, UNESCO-like

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declarations which treat culture as something fragile or endangered and, therefore, in need of constant surveillance and global protection orders to survive sound over-protective and, predictably, their consequences may be stifling or experienced as oppressive. Laely, Meyer and Schwere introduction to this volume, as well as Hans in her chapter, connect paternalistic statements about the necessity of protecting vulnerable cultures to what they regard warily as the development paradigm. Consequently, they are under few illusions about its fundamental intentions. In highlighting the amorphous nature of definitions of ‘culture’, such as UNESCO’s term ‘intangible cultural heritage’, Hans also remarks that young people are being pressurised into feeling responsible for transmitting ‘their culture’ to the next generation. Her impatience with this view is evident. Her observations reveal that the youth do not need any moral coercion to appreciate their ‘culture’. What they may be resisting, though, is the perception that it is mandatory to choose between their ‘culture’ – defined in quite superficial ways – and what they see, and are attracted to, as the modern. Hans suggests that these are not such starkly contrasting alternatives, and that it might be more productive for global and local heritage bodies to revise their conception of culture as something that is necessarily endangered by, or inherently antithetical to, modernisation.

Educating museum professionals Abungu provides a salient reminder that there were not many African museum professionals in the past. Foundational subjects such as palaeontology, archaeology, botany and anthropology were not accessible to African scholars under colonialism and – as if there could be any doubt – Abungu emphasises that such restrictions were entirely intentional. In his chapter, Abungu mentions the significant contributions made by Sweden through the Swedish African Museums Programme (SAMP), while pointing out its shortcomings, including the concentration of management in the hands of a single person and the restriction of funding to one source, noting that it excluded large parts of the African continent (cf. other educational initiatives described by Abungu in this volume). Educational programmes for African museum professionals are usually funded by international programmes or grants from universities abroad. Several of the contributors in this volume pose questions about the content of programmes like the Getty East Africa Programme, which mostly aim to transfer skills, questioning the implications of using institutions such as the British Museum as the ‘model for good museum practice’, as the Getty programme did. Hans suggests that one reason why the development of new concepts for museums in Africa is impeded could be because this kind of training is not entirely appropriate for museums in East Africa. Kiprop Lagat offers an interesting model in his chapter about the exhibition held at the Nairobi Gallery of the National Museums of Kenya in 2006, Hazina: Traditions, Trade and Transitions in Eastern Africa, which was a collaboration between the British Museum, National Museums of Kenya and the British Council. As part of the exhibition preparations, Lagat travelled to the British Museum, where he was able to examine the entire east African collection. He brought his own knowledge to bear, which differed in several cases from that of the permanent curators. The Hazina curators, in a considered turn away from

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the impulses that produced museums in 19th century Europe, sought deliberately to break from a nation-state grand narrative, replacing it with exhibition narratives about trade and exchange that wove a much larger narrative of East Africa as a whole. Labi’s chapter is less optimistic than Lagat’s. Labi follows the fortunes of some training programmes in Anglo-, Franco- and Lusophone Africa, notably the training programme known as Prevention in Museums in Sub-Saharan Africa (PREMA), which was launched at the end of the 1980s by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Conservation of Cultural Property (ICCROM). He concludes that, despite the massive scope and impact of PREMA, neither it, nor programmes that followed it, have succeeded in maintaining a continental thrust. None seem sustainable in the long term, bedevilled as they are by a lack of funding or support from governments and local agencies.

Opportunities, challenges and modalities? This conclusion cannot encompass all the rich details and subtle arguments made by the authors in this anthology. For reasons of space it is necessarily schematic, probing only one or two of the many searing issues that have been raised. One of these is translation, introduced by Silvester’s discussion of the inadequacy, or even impossibility, of literal translation – an observation that must surely be relevant to all the case studies reviewed in this book and is worthy of a volume of its own. As we reach the end of this book, it is tempting to ask whether we are in a position to start drawing up a list of lessons learned about the ‘opportunities, challenges and modalities’ of international cooperation – following on from the conference held at the Ethnographic Museum in Zurich at the end of 2016. Certainly – as Laely, Meyer and Schwere observe in their introduction – it is relatively simple to enumerate what should not be done. Most obvious perhaps, are the dangers of what Abungu in his chapter calls developing an ‘overdependence on foreign resources’ – or even on individuals, as in the case he documents of SAMP. The shadows of European hegemony still prove hard to banish and Laely, Meyer and Schwere warn that Clifford’s concept of the contact zone should not be wielded as a pretext to disguise it. Although this conclusion began by referring to Mataga’s contribution on the Mukwati walking stick, the vexed question of repatriation is not addressed at any length in the present volume. Abungu points to the arguments Europeans often make against repatriation and their fear that objects loaned back to the African continent whence they originated may not be returned. The return of the Mukwati walking stick to Zimbabwe is an instance of repatriation that seems difficult to replicate on a larger scale. The success of the Hazina exhibition that Lagat recounts in his chapter could be used, he maintains, to argue that African institutions are able to look after materials, or at least host exhibitions on an international circuit, despite European scepticism. But he also warns that even temporary loans of pieces residing in establishments like the British Museum to institutions in their places of origin in Africa can be prohibitively expensive, just in terms of insurance premiums. Lagat shows that Hazina was an exception because it had substantial funding and, arguably, because it suited the British Museum’s agenda, coinciding with its 250th anniversary.

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In summary, we would stress the importance of: accurately locating the source of decision-making within the contact zone; taking steps to increase local agency, which is almost always deficient in some respects; recognising the role of the community – which is sometimes fractious and divided; not making costly design mistakes in a deluded bid to attract tourists; making loan arrangements more feasible and insurance premiums more affordable; using simpler software that does not demand a high level of expertise; and finally and, perhaps most importantly, adjusting the very concept of what a ‘museum’ is. Several of the chapters in this volume reveal, in no uncertain terms, that the ideas about conservation, restoration and exhibition principles established in Western Europe are not always viable or appropriate for museums in Africa. Furthermore, notions of culture that are framed by global heritage agencies are often informed by a developmentalist agenda that, while trying to make ‘culture’ an agent for change, also insists on its commodification, thus paradoxically limiting its opportunities for adaptation and modernisation. The European attachment to ‘authenticity’ often lays down a number of conditions that reduce African artworks and artefacts to the anonymity and conformity of ‘tribalism’ that has always plagued them, relegating them to a past without history and individual agency. Loumpet introduces a disturbingly pessimistic note in this regard with his concept of démuséalisation, foregrounding some discomfiting examples of national museums that are foundering, either on assertions of aggressive ‘ethnic’ ownership, as in the case of Mali’s Sikasso, or the deliberately nebulous agenda pursued by the Museum of Civilisations in Dschang in Cameroon, which was financed by the French Nantes Pays de Loire and the European Union, with scant regard paid to provenance or history. What has happened to Léopold Senghor’s initiative, the Musée Dynamique, launched with the assistance of the Swiss ethnologist Jean Gabus during the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar, referred to by Effiboley and – more tangentially – by Loumpet, which ended up existing for no more than a decade? Senghor’s example was not followed by his successors and there has been a notable avoidance of the ‘cultural heritage terrain’ in the areas that Effiboley and Loumpet write about. Effiboley considers this is because people are too consumed by the colonial ‘mindset’, which includes the damaging ideology of ethnicity, observing with regret that Africans have distanced themselves from one another. Loumpet’s chapter sensitises us to the dangers of a ‘national’ museum finding itself in the middle of an ethnic ‘duel’, or trying to provide a nationalist narrative by disregarding provenance and history and catering to recidivist notions of the exotic. Labi comes to similar conclusions in his chapter, observing that once-promising initiatives like PREMA have not been sustained and their ‘pan-African’ character has been lost. All these chapters reveal that museums in Africa have not found the voice to successfully engage in contemporary discourses in ways that would attract much-needed support from government and local agencies. Not much is said in this anthology about the impact or representation of the movement of Africans across the continent (with the notable exception of Lagat’s discussion of the Hazina exhibition) – or indeed of the African diaspora in Europe – but perhaps it is fitting, nonetheless, to end with Abungu’s resounding plea for museum professionals to recognise that everybody is an African – even new arrivals from elsewhere – and that one of the museum’s primary aims should be ‘soothing the souls of those lost in space and from home’.

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References Ames, Michael M. 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.’ In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, Tony. 2004. Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums and Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge. Boast, Robin. 2011. ‘Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone revisited.’ Museum Anthropology 34, no. 1 (Spring): 56–70. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James. 2003. On the Edges of Anthropology (Interviews). Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deliss, Clémentine. 1992. ‘White Mischief.’ Frieze 7: 12-15. Hamilton, Carolyn, and Nessa Leibhammer, eds. 2016. Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Harries, Patrick. 2007. Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa. Oxford: James Currey . Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.’ In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Legassick, Martin, and Ciraj Rassool. 2000. Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Museums and the Trade in Human Remains 1907-1917. Cape Town: South African Museum; Kimberley: McGregor Museum.

Index

Symbols #Rhodesmustfall 61

A Abasuba Community Peace Museum (ACPM) 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 80, 218 Abungu, George 13, 14, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 35, 104, 106, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226 Achimota School 167, 168, 216, 223 Adandé, Joseph 182, 184, 185 Adedze, Agbenyega 166, 177 Africa African Art History 143 African Unity (AU) Cultural Charter 44, 221 east(ern) 69, 73, 76, 79, 84, 102, 109, 129, 131–135, 138, 139, 141, 144, 148, 149, 152, 154, 159, 161, 218, 224, 225, 227 English-speaking Africa 32, 35 French-speaking Africa 28, 32, 35, 43, 52 Lusophone Africa 225 South Africa Republic of 32, 99, 104 South(ern) 30, 32, 40, 58, 63, 66, 76, 80, 95, 99–101, 104, 105, 109–110, 147, 154, 157, 161, 192, 215 West(ern) 10, 19, 20, 21, 39, 70, 79, 140, 167, 173, 177, 193, 215 Africa Accessioned project 15, 16, 118 African Modernism 143, 147, 148, 151, 156, 158, 159, 220 Agthe, Johanna 144, 145, 148, 152, 154 Alexandre Sènou Adandé Ethnographic Museum, Benin 180, 183 Amin, Idi 150 ancestral relics 63 apartheid 30, 94, 100, 104, 108, 124 appropriation of praxis/practice 28, 29, 30, 47, 179, 191, 196, 205 archaeology 25, 26, 27, 49, 59, 224 Ardouin, Claude Daniel 10, 17, 70, 166, 193 Arinze, Emmanuel 10, 17, 70, 79, 166, 171, 193

authenticity 148, 151, 196, 200, 207, 208, 209, 210, 220, 226

B Baden-Powell, Robert 63, 64, 68, 215 Bamoun / Bamun / Bamum kingdom/king 48, 49, 195, 196, 203, 205, 209, 210 Museum of Art and Tradition 239 Palace Museum, Fumban, Cameroon 18 Bastenier, Albert 47 Basu, Paul xiii, 75, 80, 211 Bell, Sir Hesketh, British Special Commissioner 43 Benin 40, 136, 137, 139, 141, 172, 179–184, 187–192, 219, 221 Benin Committee of the International Council of Museums (COBICOM) 190 Benjamin, Walter 48 Betz, Klaus 143, 145, 146, 150, 152, 153, 154, 156 Biney, Ama 188 Boast, Robin 7, 18, 73, 217 Bosserdet, Jean 48, 49, 203 Botswana 28, 112, 113 Bourdieu, Pierre 74 Braunholtz, Hermann Justus 167, 169 British Council 129, 131, 224 British Museum 25, 35, 36, 37, 76, 84, 112, 113, 129, 131, 132, 135, 140, 141, 167, 168, 173, 174, 224, 225 British Museum Africa Programme (BMAP) 76 British Museum East Africa collection 132 British South Africa Company (BSAC) 58 build capacity/capacity building 174, 207

C cabinets of curiosity 25 Cameroon 43–50, 53, 67, 195, 196, 197, 209, 210, 211, 212, 216, 219, 220, 223, 226 grasslands/grassfields 18, 195, 209 Canada 32, 112, 181, 183, 188, 211 Cape Coast Museum 170

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Centre for Heritage Development in Africa (CHDA) 35, 76, 137, 165, 172 Chiefdoms Route / route des chefferies 47 Chimurenga struggle against the British South Africa Company 215 Cleveland Museum 145 Clifford, James 7, 15, 73, 101, 105, 108, 195, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219 collection accessible / accessibility / access to xiii, 13, 105, 129, 135, 137 Schneider 144, 146, 152–154, 158 colonial experience 147 imposition of modernity 147 legacy argument 165, 167 legacy/hangover 57, 62, 125, 165, 166, 167 post- 33, 45, 58, 61, 62, 65, 125, 146, 149, 152, 165, 167, 170, 185, 188, 196, 198 critique 4 studies 193 colonialism 61, 73, 100, 104, 106, 108, 111, 150, 151, 170, 190, 216, 217, 224 coloniality 60, 61, 188 community / communities -based 69, 72, 111, 122 engagement / participation 35, 93, 122 imagined 46 leaders 85, 89 local 15, 63, 65, 71, 86, 87, 123 memorial 84, 86, 87, 88 of origin 135 of provenance 7 conflict resolution 29, 71, 83, 85, 91 connected history 185 Connerton, Paul 222 conservation 33, 35, 48, 49, 73, 129, 132, 135, 136, 139, 143, 146, 165, 166, 172, 174, 176, 178, 195, 196–199, 203–206, 210, 226 restoration 143, 153, 195, 239, 240 contact zone 73–74, 79, 105, 108, 215–217, 225–226 Côte d’Ivoire / Ivory Coast 28, 188 Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda 72, 77, 80 cultural heritage 32, 47, 48, 51, 58, 77, 78, 79, 83–85, 88, 92, 93, 111, 112, 118, 124, 125, 129, 135, 136, 138, 139, 160, 165, 170, 174, 177, 179–181, 185, 188–191, 195, 196, 197, 224, 226

culture and development 74, 77, 79, 167

D decoloniality /decolonisation / decolonising 5, 17, 33, 60, 61, 62, 68, 100, 101, 104, 108, 109, 110, 150, 215, 223 Deliss, Clémentine 144, 147, 148, 156, 157, 220 démuséalisation 43 development cooperation 6, 14 diaspora 44, 147, 226 digitisation 28, 100, 104, 105, 108, 145, 180, 183 District Six Museum, Cape Town 29, 40, 70 Dubé, Philippe 44

E East Africa/East African 69, 73–74, 76, 79, 84, 102, 109, 132, 135, 138–139, 139, 141, 144, 148–149, 154, 159, 161, 218, 224–225, 227 Ecole Patrimoine Africaine (EPA), Porto Novo, Benin 35 Ecopole (ENDA Tiers-Monde) Museum, Dakar, Senegal 184 Elgin Marbles 33 Elmina Java Museum 170 El Salahi, Ibrahim 147 Enwonwu, Ben 147, 160 essentialisation 10 Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich 3, 4, 111, 216 Ethnographic Museum, Berlin 197, 219 Ethnography 71, 112, 113, 132, 227 European modernity 58, 60 Union / EU 38, 45–47, 72, 172, 226 European modernism 149, 221 exhibition Africa’95 144 A Labour of Love 157 Cameroon - Art of the Kings 195, 197 Cycles of Life 140 Dreaming in Pictures 144, 161 Fabric of a Nation: Textiles and Identity in Modern Ghana 140 Feedback: Art, Africa and the 1980s 146 Femmes, Bâtisseurs d’Afrique 181, 182

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Flora of Western Tropical Africa 168 German colonialism. Fragments past and present 150 Hazina exhibition 129, 133, 135, 138, 140, 221, 225, 226 Ingénieuse Afrique 180, 181, 183, 191, 192 Khoisan 30 Namibia-Germany. A divided/shared history. Resistance - violence memory in 2004 150 Object Atlas 157, 159 Road to Reconciliation 91, 223 Seven Stories about Modern Art from Africa 144 The Blind Spot. Bremen and the Arts in Colonial Times 151

F Fanon, Frantz 185 festival festivalisation 195, 210 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres / World Festival of Black Arts, Dakar 11, 187, 226 Nguon 197, 201, 202 Field, M. J. 168 Fogelman, Arianna 166, 167, 178 Ford Foundation 140, 172, 182 Fort Jesus Museum, Kenya 36 Fraser, A. G. 168 Fumban, Cameroon 219, 220 fundraising 174, 175 funds/funding 32, 34, 36, 37, 72, 75, 76, 100, 104, 113, 131, 135, 140, 168, 169, 173–176, 181, 183, 188–191, 196, 198, 221, 224–225

G Galitzine-Loumpet, Alexandra 49, 52, 204 Gaugue, Anne 43, 52, 179, 192 Geary, Christraud 195, 196, 200, 201, 203, 205, 207, 208 Geological Survey Department Museum 170 Germany 32, 48, 112, 113, 118, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 153, 157–159, 161, 172, 198, 218 Getty East Africa Programme (GEAP) 135, 139 Getty Foundation 76, 135, 140

Ghana Armed Forces Museum, Kumasi 170 National Museum 171, 174, 178 Gombrich, Ernest 185 Gramophone Records Museum 170 Greece 25, 33 Greven, Katharina 145

H Hamilton, Carolyn 62, 66, 100, 102, 106, 223 Harries, Patrick 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 216 Heldal, Inger 36, 85, 89 heritage and development 74, 75 clubs 77 concept of heritage 30 cultural heritage 36, 39, 66, 67, 77, 81–85, 91, 93, 95, 137, 173, 176, 223 heritagisation/heritagism 43 industry 9 policy 11, 209 tangible/intangible 51, 77, 78, 112, 118, 124, 125, 224 turn 11 World Heritage 39, 67 Hers, François 50, 51 Hess, Janet 170, 178 Himmelheber, Clara xi, 150 History Museum, Ouidah, Benin 183 human remains 29, 30, 33, 216

I ICCROM, International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, Rome 45, 67, 69, 76, 139, 171–174, 225 Igongo Cultural Centre, Mbarara, Uganda xi, 4, 237 illegitimate/illegal acquisition 144, 157 immigration/migration 5, 38, 150 Ingénieuse Afrique project 180–184, 191, 192 Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) 10 internally displaced people’s camp 72 International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) 45, 69, 139

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Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 173, 176, 181, 190 Council of Museums (ICOM) 33, 34, 37–40, 39, 69, 72, 73, 78, 112, 113, 138, 141, 198 Code of Ethics of Conservation and Restoration 39 networks / global networks 69, 70, 72, 74, 79, 156, 218 Iziko Museums, Cape Town 39

J Junod, Henri-Alexandre 16, 99–109, 216

K Kaiser Wilhelm II 197, 199, 200, 219 Kakande, Angelo 144, 146, 149 Kasfir, Sidney 148, 150, 208 Kasule, Kizito Maria 144, 149 Katarikawe, Jak 134, 144, 148, 150, 161 Katcha, Kinsey 10 Kenya 28, 29, 32, 35, 36, 39, 41, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 129, 131, 132, 134–136, 140, 144, 172, 173, 190, 218, 221, 224 kigango/vigango 30 King Ibrahim Njoya/King Njoya 48, 195–201, 207, 219, 220 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 26, 91, 93 knowledge 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 36, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65, 84, 87, 100, 100–107, 112, 120, 129, 131, 139, 144, 151, 157–159, 168, 172, 173, 175, 179, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 207, 216, 223–224 laboratories of 27 making 216 Konare, Omar 33 Kunsthalle, Bremen 150 Kyerematen, Alex Atta Yaw 166, 170 Kyeyune, George 144, 145, 149

L leadership 37, 85, 132, 134, 149, 152, 173, 176–177 Legassick, Martin 30, 216 Leibhammer, Nessa 62, 66, 100, 102, 106, 109, 110, 223, 227

loans 138, 204, 225 Loder, Robert 144 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) 71, 87, 90, 95 Loumpet, Germain 43, 49, 50, 204, 206, 216 Louvre, Paris 25

M Macron, Emmanuel / Ouagadougou discourse 5 Makerere University Institute of Heritage Conservation and Restoration (IHCR) 240 Makerere Art Gallery 144–147, 151, 152, 154, 156, 158, 220 Mali 28, 31, 45, 46, 180, 216, 222, 226 Mancoba, Ernest 147 Mandu Yenu throne 197, 201, 219 Manhyia Palace museum 170 Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts 146, 154 material culture 27, 49, 61–63, 65, 70, 111, 112, 167, 198 material/immaterial heritage 126 memorial / memory 36, 49–51, 83–93, 95, 147, 150, 196, 217, 222 memoryscape 222 Mignolo, Walter xvii, 60, 188 Migration Museum, Lampedusa, Italy 38 missionary/missionaries 25, 28, 58, 99–102, 106, 108, 111, 115–117, 116, 119, 124, 148, 195, 216 Modest, Wayne 75, 80 monuments / memorials 28, 58–61, 84–88, 91, 92, 94, 221, 222 Mozambique 12, 100 Mukwati (walking) stick 63, 215, 217, 225 multiculturalism 26 multi-perspectivity 17 Munjeri, Dawson 62, 67 muséalisation / musealisation 44, 45, 50, 51, 195–197, 203, 204, 206, 210, 223 museumification 65 Musée de la Civilisation, Québec 179, 180 Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Lorient, France 184, 193 Musée Dynamique 226 Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (MRAC) / Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium 28, 62

Index | 233

Museum Africa 76 Alexandre Sènou Adandé Ethnographic Museum, Benin 180, 183 Association of Great Britain 168 Association of Tropical Africa (AMATMATA) 181 colonial 57 institution 5 legacy 62, 125, 165, 166, 167 community 70, 93, 115, 138 contemporary 215 Elmina Java 170 European 34, 134 Fort Jesus 36 Geological Survey Department 170 Gramophone Records 170 History Museum, Ouidah, Benin 183 inherited from the colonial era 65, 179 Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) 10 Kisumu 36, 136 Kitale 36, 136 Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park Museum, Accra 170 living 50, 196, 197, 198, 209, 219 museumification 65 Museum of Human Sciences (ZMHS) 58 national 45–47, 49, 72, 76, 169, 173 New Juaben Palace Museum 170 of Acholi Art and Culture (MAAC) 71, 77 of African Art of Dakar, Senegal 180 of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of South Africa 99 of Civilisations, Dschang, Cameroon 47, 226 of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town 158 of Honmè Palace, Porto-Novo, Benin 183 of Science and Technology, Accra 170 of the Civilisations, Cote d’Ivoire 180 of World Cultures 143 of World Cultures, Gothenburg 26 origins 25 Palace Museum, Foumban, Cameroon 195 Prempeh II Jubilee Museum 170 Queen Victoria Memorial Museum (QVMM) 58 regalia 10, 17, 48, 165, 166, 196, 238 Rhodesian 58 Rietberg, Zurich 49, 195, 197, 210

Robben Island xxii, 29, 40 Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren, Belgium 62 Tate Gallery, London 191 Te Papa Tongarewa Museum, New Zealand 26 traditional 26, 45, 86 Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam 62 Weltkulturen Museum/Museum of World Cultures Frankfurt am Main 143 Yaa Asantewaa 170 Mutumba, Yvette 145, 146, 157

N Nairobi Gallery 129, 140, 224 National Museum 136, 140 Namibia 30, 111–119, 120, 120–126, 121, 150, 159, 216 National Museum and Monuments of Kenya (NMMK) 173 and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ) 58, 63 Botswana 8 Cameroon 45 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania 34 Mali 28, 180 of African Art xix of Kenya (NMK) 16, 29, 76, 129 of World Culture in Gothenburg 6 Uganda 36, 83–93, 136 nation-building 10 Nchare, Oumaru 206, 207 Nigeria Osogbo School of Art 147 Nkrumah, Kwame 170, 171, 178, 221 Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park Museum, Accra 170 Nok terracotta 31 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 72, 76, 77–79, 174 Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage (NDCH) 83–85

O Obasanjo, Olusegun 31 object Asante gold weights 169

234  |  Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe

as symbols 196 biographies 124, 156 Object ID project 174, 183, 193 objects/artworks/artefact trajectories 154, 156 Obote, Milton 150 Okeke-Agulu, Chika 147, 221 Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) 173 Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU) 221

P Palace Museum, Foumban, Cameroon 170, 195–199, 203, 205, 206–210, 219, 220 Nouveau Musée du Palais des Rois Bamoun 195 participation community 10, 84, 184 participatory turn 7, 8, 14 patrimonialisation 45–47, 50, 51, 179, 195, 196, 204, 210 of knowledge 179 patronage 27, 152, 198, 201 Peace Corps 32 Peterson, Derek 5, 9, 10, 17, 93 Pigozzi, Jean 148 pluri-vocality 17 positionality 185 postcolonial studies 188 post-conflict cultural landscapes 93 post-ethnographic museum 156, 159 Pratt, Mary Louise 7, 15, 73, 74, 195, 218 preserving/preservation 45, 65, 67–69, 79, 139, 166, 167, 170, 171, 173, 176–178, 196, 206, 219, 223, 225 Prevention in Museums in sub-Saharan Africa (PREMA) 225 Prince Claus Fund 72, 73 provenance collection 30 research 5

R Ramsay, Hans von 199, 200 Rassool, Ciraj xi, xvii, xxi, xxiii, 13, 21, 29, 30, 40, 70, 92, 93, 95, 216, 227 Reconciliation 83, 88, 90–95, 223 Regional Training Centre for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, Jos, Nigeria 173, 176

repatriation 57, 119, 122, 136, 137, 139, 141, 219, 225 Research Centre of Ghana 170 restitution 33, 125, 137, 198, 200 restoration 44, 48, 195, 195–201, 203–207, 210, 226 restoration of Revered African Sites 63, 66 Reynolds-Kaye, Jennifer 61 Rockefeller Foundation 182 Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew 168 Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren, Belgium 62 Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), The Netherlands 173 Runnel, Pille 28

S Sanka, Balthazar 154, 155 Schneider, Jochen 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 152–155, 158 Second Boer War 63 Sédar Senghor, Léopold 11, 17, 187, 226 Shelton, Anthony xi, xv, xix, 7, 90 Siegert, Nadine 144, 157, 159 skills enhancement 137, 140 Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC 39, 79, 193, 211 Sokoto Empire 47 South Africa 32, 40, 58, 63, 76, 80, 95, 99–101, 104, 105, 108, 109, 110, 147, 154, 157, 161, 192, 215 Structural Adjustment Programme 189 Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya 197, 198, 201–203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 222 Sultan El Hadj Seidou Njimoluh 203 sustainable/sustainability 36, 37, 45, 74, 76, 77, 124, 129, 133, 135, 165, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 216, 225 Swedish-African Museum Programme (SAMP) 7 Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) xxii Switzerland 99, 101, 104, 111, 118, 172, 195, 198

T Tate Gallery, London 191 Te Papa Tongarewa Museum, New Zealand 26

Index | 235

of Cape Town 61, 94 of Ghana Archaeology Museum 170 Entomological Collection 170

Todd, Cecil 149, 161 traditional art/regalia/artworks 48, 148, 165, 166, 196 traditional preservation/display 165 tradition of collecting 196, 199 training 32, 34–37, 45, 49, 76, 104, 129, 131, 135–137, 139, 143, 145, 146, 158, 166, 171–174, 176, 177, 181, 183, 224, 225 Tribalat, Michèle 44 Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam 62 Trowell, Margaret 146, 149, 154, 159, 161 Trust for African Rock Art 71, 72, 75, 80

V

U

W

Uganda 28, 36, 43, 69–72, 74–93, 129, 135–136, 144–153, 158–161, 217–218, 222, 222–223 Community Museum Association (UCOMA) 72, 78, 79, 81 Cross-Cultural Foundation of 72, 77, 80 culture policy 2006 90 Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities 84 museums and monuments policy 237 National Museum, Kampala 36, 83–93, 136 Northern Uganda 36, 71, 77, 83–89, 92, 94, 217, 222 Ugochukwu, Smooth Nwezi 145, 146 United Kingdom 63, 172, 218 / Great Britain 168 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 32, 41, 44, 45, 48, 51, 53, 69, 72, 73, 74–78, 81, 160, 171–173, 178, 203, 210, 223, 224 Convention for the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage 44 United States of America (USA) 32, 36, 44, 145, 147, 158, 172, 188, 204 University of Bayreuth 143, 220 Iwalewahaus 143, 220

Wacquant, Loïc 75 Weltkulturen Museum/Museum of World Cultures Frankfurt am Main 143 West Africa Museums Programme (WAMP) 173, 176, 179–182, 184, 192 west(ern) Cameroon 18, 47 Western modernity 60, 179, 180, 185 World Bank 189 world (cultural) heritage 32, 39, 47, 48, 51, 58, 67, 77, 78, 79, 83–85, 88, 92, 93, 111, 112, 118, 124, 125, 129, 135, 136, 138, 139, 160, 165, 170, 174, 177, 179–181, 185, 188–191, 195, 196, 197, 224, 226 World Decade for Cultural Development — UNESCO 6, 171

Volkswagen-Stiftung 143, 220 Research in Museums programme 143 von Luschan, Felix 200, 211 VVOB - Education for Development, Belgium 35

Y Yeyap, Mosé 196, 201, 219

Z Zimbabwe 28, 32, 40, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66–68, 112, 113, 125, 141, 215, 225 Museum of Human Sciences (ZMHS) 58 zone of contact 73–77, 78, 79, 219

List of Contributors

Nelson Adebo Abiti Nelson Adebo Abiti is the curator of ethnography at the Uganda National Museum. He holds an MA from the University of East Anglia (2015), received his Bachelor’s degree from Makerere University (2003) and studied for a Diploma in Museums and Heritage Studies at the University of Western Cape, South Africa. From 2010 to 2013, Abiti headed a team of Uganda National Museum staff and Norwegian partners, who collaborated with several communities in northern Uganda to preserve and present the regional memory and, thereby, promote peace and reconciliation following a long civil war. The result of this cooperation was an exhibition entitled Road to Reconciliation. Currently, Abiti is working with the committee that revises Uganda’s museums and monuments policy and legislation, and is a core team member of the Uganda National Museum, Igongo Cultural Centre and Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich cooperation project, which is jointly curating exhibitions in Uganda and Switzerland. George Okello Abungu George Okello Abungu is a Cambridge-trained archaeologist and former Director-General of the National Museums of Kenya. He is the founding Chairman of Africa 2009, the International Standing Committee on the Traffic in Illicit Antiquities, and of the Centre for Heritage Development in Africa. He is a recipient of the distinction of ‘Passeur du Patrimoine’ from l’Ecole du Patrimoine Africain, 2009, Lifetime Achievement in Defense of Art by the Association for Research into Crime against Art (ARCA), 2012 and Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the Government of France in 2012. He has been an advisor to the Global Heritage Fund, USA, Vice President ICOM, and was Kenya’s Representative to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, and Vice-President of its Bureau (2004–2009). Abungu is a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Stellenbosch South Africa among others. Emery Patrick Effiboley Emery Patrick Effiboley studied history at University d’Abomey-Calavi (Republic of Benin), earned a Master of Arts degree in Museology from Amsterdam University of the Arts (The Netherlands) and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense (France) with a dissertation entitled, Les Béninois et leurs musées: etude ethnohistorique. He furthered his research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (South Africa), where he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 20142016. Currently, Effiboley is an Assistant Professor at University d’Abomey-Calavi, where he teaches Art History in the Department of History and Archaeology. Rosalie Hans Rosalie Hans is doing her doctoral research at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom. She is investigating the emergence of contem-

238  |  Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe

porary museums in eastern Africa and the ways in which different stakeholders influence these museum developments. Hans completed her field research in Kenya and Uganda in 2016. Rosalie received her Master’s degree in Museum Studies from University College London in 2009. Since then, her experiences as a museum professional have included positions at the Museu Nacional de Arte in Mozambique, the National Museum in Sierra Leone and the Horniman Museum and the British Museum Africa Programme in the United Kingdom. Cynthia Kros Cynthia Kros is a historian and heritage specialist who holds a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). She taught in the History Department at Wits for 18 years before moving to the School of Arts at the same institution where she headed the Department of Arts, Culture and Heritage Management. Kros has published many articles in the fields of education and heritage. In 2010 her book based on her doctoral thesis entitled The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education was published. Currently, Kros is a research associate at the History Workshop at Wits University. Kwame Amoah Labi Kwame Amoah Labi is art historian at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, where he teaches African art history and coordinates the section for media and visual art’s research and day to day administrative activities. He has published research on Akan regalia, Fante asafo, and art studies in Kenya and Ghana. His current research interests are modern and contemporary art, colonial and early postcolonial architecture in Ghana. Thomas Laely Thomas Laely is Deputy Director of the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, since 2010 and a cultural anthropologist by training with a focus on museology, political anthropology and African studies. In previous years he was active in international arts promotion, 1994 – 2010, establishing and directing the International Department of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. Currently, Laely is concerned with issues of the history and perspectives of ethnological museums, particularly the possibilities of cooperation with cultural history museums in Africa. Kiprop Lagat Kiprop Lagat is Director of Culture in Kenya’s Ministry of Sports, Culture and the Arts. He is a former Assistant Director of the Nairobi National Museum and has worked as the Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Cultural Heritage at the National Museums of Kenya between 1997 and 2015. He has researched and written about processes of memorialisation, museum studies and pastoralism in eastern Africa. Lagat received his PhD from the University of East Anglia in 2015. Germain Loumpet Germain Loumpet has a doctorate in archaeology and anthropology from the University of Paris I Pantheon–Sorbonne (1987) and is a specialist in heritage (museology and art history).

List of Contributors  |  239

Loumpet has been involved in academic teaching and organisation (establishing the Department of Art and Archaeology at the University of Yaoundé) and government administration (First Technical Officer, Ministry of Culture, Cameroon, 1995-1999). He designed and directed the project to create a national museum between 1992 and 2001 and founded or restructured several museums, both in Cameroon (the Royal Museum and the Museum of Bamoun Art and Tradition in Foumban and the Tandeng Muna Museum in Yaoundé) and elsewhere in Africa (acting as an expert on the European Development Fund programme for two regional museums in Mali, in Sikasso and Djenné). He has also served as an expert for European museums and for private collections in Africa and Europe. Loumpet was an Elected Member of the Executive Council of ICCROM (International Centre for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Properties, Rome, Italy) and has been a visiting professor at several international institutions: the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, 2000), Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA, 2005), Getty Research Institute and Getty Museum (Los Angeles, USA, 2008) and Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (Paris, 2012). Jesmael Mataga Jesmael Mataga is Associate Professor of Heritage Studies at Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley, South Africa. His research interests are in heritage management, community heritage, intangible heritage and cultural diversity. He worked as a curator with the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe before teaching at the University of Zimbabwe and the National University of Lesotho. He is currently at Sol Plaatje University in South Africa. Anneliese Mehnert Anneliese Mehnert is assistant curator and researcher at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of South Africa. She completed her Masters in Heritage at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2014. She has been involved in many aspects of the museum world including research, archiving, collections management, digitisation and database management, and is a board member of ICOM-SA. Marc Meyer Marc Meyer is currently working as a project coordinator and assistant curator at the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich. He obtained his Master of Arts in Social Sciences at the University of Zurich in 2016 after studying social and cultural anthropology, as well as geography. His areas of interest include museology, ethnomusicology, heritage studies, and economic as well as political anthropology. Michaela Oberhofer Michaela Oberhofer is curator for Africa and Oceania at Museum Rietberg in Zurich and is responsible for the cooperative project on conservation and restoration with the Palace Museum in Fumban (Cameroon). She has curated several exhibitions on the Bamum and Benin kingdom in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and worked on the Frobenius collection in the GRASSI Museum in Leipzig. Her PhD in Anthropology was based on long-term research about identity and ethnicity in Burkina Faso.

240  |  Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe

Katrin Peters-Klaphake Katrin Peters-Klaphake is curator and researcher at Makerere Art Gallery/Institute for Heritage Conservation and Restoration (IHCR), Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. She is currently core member of the research team on African Art History and the Formation of a Modern Aesthetic, a collaborative project between Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth; Makerere Art Gallery/IHCR, Makerere University; and the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt. Raphael Schwere Raphael Schwere is a PhD student in social and cultural anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. His research interest are museums and museum cooperation, material culture of disability, and human-animal relations in the Horn of Africa and East Africa. Currently, Schwere is working on Uganda’s cow milk and Somaliland’s camel meat cultures and economies. He is also a lecturer and assistant curator at the University of Zurich where he works for the Ethnographic Museum. Jeremy Silvester Jeremy Silvester has worked as the Manager of the Museums Association of Namibia (MAN) since 2005. He was previously a Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Namibia for eight years and has a PhD in African History from SOAS (University of London). Since 2013, he has chaired an informal network called Africa Accessioned. Recent publications include co-authoring The Heritage Handbook (2011), Consuming Culture: The Market for Cultural Tourism in Namibia (2012), Marketing for Namibian Museums (2014), Exhibition Design and Planning for Namibian Museums (2015) and Finland and Namibia: Museum Collections Make Connections (2015). As a historian, he has most recently, edited two volumes on Namibia’s liberation struggle: Re-viewing Resistance in Namibian History (2015) and Resistance on the Banks of the Kavango River (2016).

Cultural Management / Museum Ann Davis, Kerstin Smeds (eds.)

Visiting the Visitor An Enquiry Into the Visitor Business in Museums 2016, 250 p., pb., numerous ill. 39,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3289-7 E-Book PDF: 39,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3289-1

Carmen Mörsch, Angeli Sachs, Thomas Sieber (eds.)

Contemporary Curating and Museum Education 2016, 316 p., pb., numerous ill. 39,99 E (DE), 978-3-8376-3080-0 E-Book PDF: 39,99 E (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3080-4

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!