A mobile museum visits a Botswana
school.
The royal palace museum at Porto
Novo (Benin). |
Plagued by low visitor
attendance, African museums are breaking out of their rigid colonial moulds and courting
local communities
 Since
he started teaching aspiring curators in the early 1980s, Emmanuel Nnakenyi Arinze
has advocated a hands-on approach that even comes with a dress code. “I tell my students
that ‘the African curator does not come to work in a tie because you are going to
be working with your hands, on objects that are dirty, in storage, in galleries or
outside, or with children who will pour ink over you.’ ”
It’s a small detail that nonetheless points towards deeper currents of change running
through African museums as curators and their colleagues seek to define a model that
makes sense for Africans today. The process, initiated in piecemeal fashion in the
1980s, received a galvanizing thrust forward after Mali’s Alpha Oumar Konaré,
the first African to preside the International Council of Museums, sounded the alarm
by declaring in 1991 that “it is time, high time . . . to kill the Western model
of museum in Africa.”
A crisis had been brewing for years. Besides acute cutbacks in financing and training,
excessive bureaucracy and political interference in museum leadership, the most glaring
sign of trouble was simply that African people, just about everywhere, were shunning
their museums. In many cases, they were discarded as “places for tourists or museums
for whites” as Alexis Adandé, director of the West African Museums Programme
puts it.
All museums, even those founded after independence, were forced to address the crisis.
Across the continent, directors have started to shake up their institutions, develop
more outward-looking attitudes and tune into the lives and concerns of local people.
This starts with a novel approach to exhibitions that involves consulting communities
from the outset–not only to spark their interest, but also because they own objects
deemed of higher symbolic value in their eyes than those gathering dust in museum
showcases.
In Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), the local community was asked to bring in old photographs
for display in the local art gallery. “The exhibition proved very popular as it rekindled
past memories of people’s lifestyles,” recalls Francis Musonda, chairman of SADCAMM,
an association which groups museums from the southern Africa region.
In an experimental-style exhibition in Ouidah (Benin) in 1985, families were encouraged
to display objects relating to local festivals and family heritage. The exhibit,
staged with artifacts ranging from portraits and masks to statuettes representing
female divinities–which until then had been passed down within the same families
for several generations–was warmly greeted by the population who for the most part
were viewing these precious pieces for the first time. It created such interest that
a small family museum was eventually opened in the city.
Appealing
to an elite
In Nigeria, Arinze,
who has held a number of prominent positions in the field of museum development,
organized a crowd-drawing exhibition on drums, during which musicians from selected
villages were invited to a city museum to share their know-how and traditions with
visitors. “People in our communities must be part of the process of exhibiting objects
that come from them. We should give them a chance to talk to us about those objects
and how they want to see them shown to a wider audience,” he says. “When an object
is put here in isolation from its true meaning, communities feel distanced from it
and slightly offended.”
All these types of initiatives enhance communities’ pride in their heritage and stimulate
awareness about the value of safeguarding objects, while often shedding new light
on local history. They break the Western stereotype of a museum as a place where
people come to look at objects on display. With some rare exceptions–such as Niamey’s
“arts and crafts” style concept with architectural models linked to the country’s
ethnic groups, parks explaining the country’s fauna and flora, and pavilions presenting
different dress styles and customs–African museums were created to satisfy the curiosity
of an elite, almost to the total exclusion of the locals. Despite post-independence
efforts to make them vehicles for encouraging nationalism and fostering unity, the
fact remains that collections were constituted by foreign powers, and mostly for
their interest alone.
“The great problem for ethnographic-style museums is to think about new ways of using
objects which for the most part have ‘died’,” explains Adandé, referring to
the intricate ‘living’ relationship between an object, such as a mask, and the role
it plays in a given cultural context. In the case of the palace-museum in Abomey
(Benin), artifacts belonging to rulers of the former 17th-century kingdom are brought
out during ritual ceremonies linked to the cult of ancestors. These objects are “charged”
to regain their sacred power, and at the end of the ceremony rendered inanimate,
since a fully charged object cannot be left on show for viewing by the average visitor.
But this type of initiative is not feasible when objects have been collected in one
part of the country for display in another.
But museum directors are still faced with the question of bringing meaning back into
collections constituted during colonial times.“Should these objects be returned to
populations to create local museums or be used for educational purposes, especially
for youth from cities?” asks Adandé.
Shaje’a Tshiluila, president of AFRICOM, a pan-African organization of museums, insists
that the continent’s museums have a critical role to play in valorizing traditional
knowledge that can serve Africa’s development. “If the definition of a museum is
to collect, preserve and transmit, this can be applied to a very broad range of concerns,
from learning about different styles of conflict resolution to identifying the health
practices of different ethnic groups,” she affirms.
Reaching
a youthful audience
Pointing to conflicts
that have torn so many African countries apart in the past decade, Tshiluila insists
on the potential of museums to bring about greater understanding between ethnic groups.
In this regard, Tanzania’s Village Museum has drawn attention well beyond its borders.
In 1994, the museum launched an annual event during which one or two ethnic groups
(out of about 140) show their culture to others. They build or rehabilitate traditional
houses, explain to visitors the purpose of various cultural artifacts used, organize
seminars about their history and culture, and share food and music. Because they
are involved in the event from its inception, communities are given the chance to
reflect upon what they value most about their heritage, and to find the most stimulating
ways of presenting it to others.
The idea of getting messages across can extend to a broad range of concerns, from
health or agriculture techniques to urbanization. In Swaziland for example, curator
Rosemary Andrade has opened up the doors of the national museum to exhibitions on
HIV-Aids prevention, in partnership with local NGOs. On another occasion, noticing
the talents of Mozambican refugees at recycling materials, she staged an exhibition
showcasing their skills, to promote greater tolerance between these recent arrivals
and the locals.
It could be argued that every exhibition is an educational endeavour, but if there
is one audience that museums feel they have to reach, it is children and youth. “Museums
and heritage sites provide an education resource that has been devastatingly underutilized
by teachers, education departments, universities, NGOs and museums themselves,” says
Dammon Rice, head of the Museum Ambassador Programme in South Africa. This initiative
trains young people to teach their peers about museums in the Cape Town area by giving
presentations in schools and running museum tours.
A number of other museums now organize workshops for teachers, who are encouraged
to link issues in the curriculum with collections in the museum. In Benin, the national
heritage school runs training aimed at increasing the ability of museum educators
across the continent to design programmes for schools and local communities.
The Botswana national museum, although created after independence, was among the
first to realize that its prime role was educational. “Even though we started from
scratch when we built our own museum, we realized that we could be doing much more
to let people know that we existed. And we wanted to catch people at an early age,
in primary school,” explains the museum’s director Tickey Pule.
In one of the longest running outreach programmes in Africa, known as the Zebra on
Wheels, staff from the national museum set out once a term with a van filled with
artifacts to organize daylong exhibits in rural schools, along with talks and slideshows
and movies on the country’s environment and cultural heritage. Besides bringing the
museum to the village, the programme exposes children to crafts and customs from
different parts of Botswana, fostering a sense of national pride.
Encouraging children to take pride in their heritage is an investment that curators
know has long-term payoffs. In Zimbabwe, a programme involving school students aims
to limit vandalism around archaeological sites. In Tsodiolo, Botswana, on a site
where there are over 1,000 rock paintings locals are involved in the opening of a
museum and are being trained as guides. They are also sharing with museum professionals
their knowledge of this ancient site, which is up for world heritage status nomination.
A museum
without walls
This process however,
has to be nurtured, especially when it comes to turning sites into cultural attractions.
“It takes a lot of time to strike up a dialogue with communities, especially rural
ones. In fact, it’s always what people don’t say that is important,” says Malagasy
museum director and archaeologist Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa. For the past several
years, he has been working with villagers on a 14th-century fortified site that is
still considered sacred. His aim: to create a “museum without walls or collections”–an
itinerary around the site, the village, the surrounding rice fields and an adjacent
“sacred” forest harbouring rare plant species that have remained untouched for centuries.
He would like to see children from the city visit the site as part of their school
programme, be guided through it by the villagers and encourage the revival of lost
craft techniques.
Given the number of venerated cultural and historical sites around the island–and
throughout Africa–there is potential for this kind of approach to flourish, provided
communities feel they have a hold on the process.“All too often this type of operation
dies off within six months because an outsider turns up with the money, and when
it runs out, the project dies.” Rakotoarisoa cautions against making calculations
based largely on the economic viability of such projects, expressing reticence over
some of the World Bank’s cost-benefit approaches to exploiting cultural heritage.
The risk, he warns, is that culture will only be on show for outsiders–just as it
was when African museums started out.
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