African Art, African Museums

Abstract

Museum Island in Berlin is famous for the bust of Nefertiti (collected from Egypt), the Pergamon altar (dated 160 BCE, from Asia Minor), the second century BCE market gate (also taken from Asia Minor, and rebuilt in the museum), as well as African objects such as Ife heads, Luba headrests, and so it contin ues. Sipping cocktails at a reception in one of the Berlin museums a few years ago, I, as a South African museum director, was sharply reprimanded by a German academic. Why? She stated that African museums were not representative of their own heritage because they did not show or own the treasures of their past. I was dumbstruck at the insensitivity of this comment in an environment where the evidence of European colonial plunder was before our very eyes. I was reminded of this incident last year when I attended the opening of the Quai Branly Museum, whose displays have been debated and discussed at length. In African Arts (vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 1, 4, 6, 8-9,91-2), Elizabeth Har ney gave a thorough exposition of the problems highlighted by this museum with particular ref erence to its representation of the Other, which at times left a nasty taste when interrogating the circumstances of how objects from Africa, Oce ania, and the Americas came to be collected. We look upon these collecting processes with hindsight and realize how many countries have lost their heritage. As I sit writing this First Word with my crystal ball at my side, I see another South African twenty years from now doing the same, but the text will be titled something like Call for Repatriation to South Africa of Artworks Made in the Twenty-first Century. This future writer may have a sense of dija vu remembering the twenty-first century and its (continued on page 4)