Museums In Africa Research Articles

When stories are not the same: power and powerlessness in a Nigerian Museum

ABSTRACT In this paper, we provide an alternative reading to one of the most fundamental claims of the exhibitionary complex, which argues that museums are symbols of power, greatness, wealth, and progress. On the contrary, we adopt Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's (1996) concept of social constructionism and Star & Griesemer's concept of the border object and infrastructure to deconstruct the possibility of the fixity of meaning in Bennett's argument about the exhibitionary complex. We therefore argue that the many museums in Africa are slightly different. Rather than being a symbol of the people's power, wealth, and greatness, they reflect powerlessness and pain, which characterise their history. With histories such as the Transatlantic slave trade and British imperialism, which lasted through the 17th and 19th centuries, we discuss the Badagry Black Heritage Museum as a site not exclusively about power and greatness. The paper concludes that the defining characteristic of museums is their diversity, which offers multiple perspectives on their functionality, significance, and theoretical underpinnings. While Bennett's idea is laudable, there is a need to open up the concept of accommodating the specific features of museums across the world and develop new concepts or ideologies that reflect them.

A Museum of Black Civilizations in the Contemporary World: In conversation with Hamady Bocoum

A Museum of Black Civilizations in the Contemporary World: In conversation with Hamady Bocoum

Alboglossiphonia afroalpina sp. nov. and Alboglossiphonia buniana sp. nov. – two new leech species from Africa and revision of the genus Alboglossiphonia Lukin, 1976 in Africa

Two new leech species from Africa are presented. The position of the eyes, the number of crop caeca and the gonopores separated by two annuli indicate that both belong to the genus Alboglossiphonia. Alboglossiphonia afroalpinasp. nov. differs from the other African species in its elongated body shape, the shape and size of the suckers and above all by the unique spotting on the dorsal side, which is not found in any other species of the genus. Alboglossiphonia afroalpinasp. nov. inhabits the alpine zones of the Mt. Kenya and Mt. Elgon massifs and represents the highest record of a leech in Africa to date, approx 4,500 m above sea level. Alboglossiphonia buniana sp. nov. differs from other species of the genus by its completely fused pairs of eyes, the shape and size of the cranial sucker and the head area and a jagged outer margin. The species is only known from Bunia in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Eleven species of the genus Alboglossiphonia are known from Africa, belonging to different zoogeographical areas. Northwest Africa is home to Alboglossiphonia hyalina (O.F. Müller, 1774) and A. iberica Jueg, 2008 as Palaearctic species. Alboglossiphonia polypompholyx Oosthuizen, Hussein & El-Shimy, 1988, A. disuqi El-Shimy, 1990 and A. levis Gouda, 2010 are restricted to the lower reaches of the Nile in Egypt. Six species exist south of the Sahara: Alboglossiphonia namaquaensis (Augener, 1936), A. disjuncta (Moore, 1939), A. conjugata (Oosthuizen, 1978), A. macrorhyncha (Oosthuizen, 1978) as well as those described here, A. afroalpinasp. nov. and A. bunianasp. nov. The examination of the three syntypes of Alboglossiphonia namaquaensis (Augener, 1936) showed that this species is identical to A. cheili (Oosthuizen 1978) and that the latter must be used as a synonym in future. Historical evidence from the Central Africa Museum in Tervuren (Belgium) from the Sciacchitano Collection and the British Museum of Natural History was examined. The systematic position of Glossiphonia verrucata Sciacchitano, 1939 was also clarified. Almost all species were photographed for the first time, most of them including their holotype. Distribution maps are presented for all species. All African Alboglossiphonia species are compared in terms of their characteristics in tabular form.

Continental Collaboration: Consulting, Institution Building, and Mentoring Across Africa

Continental Collaboration: Consulting, Institution Building, and Mentoring Across Africa

Sahel:Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara

Sahel:Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara

Digital Documentation of Museum Collections for Sustainable Development

Digitalization enhances the impact of museum collections, and it is a global trend for sustainable development. Documentation of museum collections is an essential part of museum development because there is no meaningful museum setting without proper documentation. It is through documentation that museum collections would be understood and appreciated by the audience. Initially, documentation of museum collections can be done through manual procedures. Today, with the advent of digital technology, museums are taking another dimension, paradigm shift from analogue to digital. Different cultural organizations have called upon digital documentation of museum collections to sustain the vital information, accessibility and preservation of collections. People can easily access museums online, secure objects, and go in line with sustainable development. The most crucial part of digital documentation is to manage, administer, record keeping and maintenance. Digital museums are drivers of research, education, creativity, employment, entertainment, economic growth and development. Many museums institutions in Africa and other parts of the world are not digitalized. The paper's objectives are to explore digital documentation, its significance, and what digital tools can be used to digitalize museums. The article adopted content analysis, using a secondary source of data. The sources include textbooks, articles in journals, newspapers, pamphlets etc. All these volumes form the data. The paper finds that digital documentation is important in every human endeavour to ascertain sustainable development, easy connectivity with other social development sectors, and protection against illicit trafficking and other crime against museum objects. The paper recommends that museums in Africa should key into digitalization and employ experts to facilitate museum activities professionally.

Restitution: Paths Toward a Clearing

Restitution: Paths Toward a Clearing

The renovation of paradoxes: decolonising the Africa Museum without restituting DR Congo’s cultural heritage

ABSTRACT This article assesses the extent to which the Africa Museum (AM) decolonised itself according to Sarr and Savoy’s criteria for restitution applied to DR Congo’s cultural heritage. Rather than casting permanent restitution as a single objective, this paper argues that the long-term process consubstantial to the decolonising momentum can break an often-misleading taxonomy down and discern its components as fields of investigation as well as pragmatic steps to rethink the modalities of restitution. The AM’s restructuring of exhibition rooms and epistemes, inventorying, digitisation and provenance studies partly resonate with intermediary restitution practices such as restoration of ethos, recognition of guilt, reparation of broken narratives and reappropriation of knowledge. Nevertheless, the findings of this research show that these initiatives can only be considered as preconditions for restitution – not permanent alternatives designed as retentionist devices – if they are accompanied with a proactive museum diplomacy towards the Musée National de la République Démocratique du Congo (MNRDC).

Ghost Stories

A crucial issue in methodological reflections on African theologies is the question how we can define “African” identity. Since Contextual Theologies first emerged in the early 1970s, it has become clear that the search for cultural identity cannot be pursued independently from the legacies of colonial power/knowledge regimes that continue to shape imaginations of Africa. Starting from a case study of the post/colonial relationship between Belgium and the DRC as it is imagined in the exhibition of the Africa Museum near Brussels, this contribution argues that postcolonial historiographies can have both, de- or recolonizing effects. It also brings theology into the conversation, arguing that core themes in postcolonial historiographies resonate deeply with central motives of the Christian tradition. Based on this interdisciplinary commentary, the article aims to contribute to a framework for conceptualizing post/colonial African identity in the wake of colonial trauma.

Digitality and Decolonization: A Response to Achille Mbembe

AbstractThis article explores questions of decolonization, in part through analyzing Belgium’s Africa Museum. Bernal considers the role of academia and knowledge production, as well as the technological developments that may create new concentrations of power faster than decolonial projects can dismantle established hierarchies. She concludes that decolonization must address material questions of reparations and restitution, and that digital media have been transformative in ways that bring northern models of social existence closer to African ones. Having lived under colonizers, despots, and states of exception, Africans bring important knowledge and experience to twenty-first-century global struggles.

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies edited by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies edited by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere

Artists or Slave Laborers? Performing Uncapturability in Burkinabe Performers’ Labor Rights Struggle in South Korea

This article traces eight performers from Burkina Faso, who in 2014 protested unfair labor practices at the Africa Museum of Original Art in South Korea, where they had been hired to perform. In the process, they demonstrated political and artistic endeavors in live concerts and dance workshops to reclaim both their monetary compensation and their artists’ status. Nevertheless, public and media discourse that followed this nationwide news—no matter how sympathetic—tended to treat the artists’ experiences as merely a failed Korean dream. Using performance studies methodologies and ethnographic methods, this article uses the terms performance and performativity more capaciously to include a range of embodied acts. With this, the article argues that framing the artists’ experiences within the narrative confines of struggling migrant workers fails to capture the complex, often contradictory relationship that they have with acts of performing beyond the existing categories of migrant labor. Furthermore, the sympathetic discourse capitalizes on hypervisibility of blackness, through which the artists’ suffering becomes a spectacle. This article suggests consideration of the concept of uncapturability—the embodiment of which exposes failures of a nationalist and racialized language—as well as existing theoretical frameworks mobilized to understand the interiority of performance and the artists’ work.

The Africa Museum of Tervuren, Belgium: The Reopening of “The Last Colonial Museum in the World”, Issues on Decolonization and Repatriation

The Africa Museum in Tervuren, Brussels, reopened its doors after a closure of five years. What precisely is on view in the refurbished museum? And how do the choices made by the museum relate to wider discussions in anthropology and museology on decolonization and repatriation? In Belgium, it seems, working towards cooperation between all parties involved is far from finished.

Catalog to families, genera, and species of orders Actiniaria and Corallimorpharia(Cnidaria: Anthozoa).

This book inventories all available (and some unavailable) names in the family, genus, and species groups of extant members of orders Actiniaria and Corallimorpharia [cnidarian subclass Hexacorallia (Zoantharia) of class Anthozoa], providing a benchmark of names, their status, and taxon membership. I have attempted to make the compilation complete as of 2010; some names created after 2010 are included. The book is derived from a database I compiled that was available through a website. Most of the book is from the literature that defines taxa and documents their geographic distribution-primarily publications on nomenclature, taxonomy, and biogeography, but also some on ecology, pharmacology, reproductive biology, physiology, etc. of anemones (the common name for these groups); the reference section comprises 845 entries. As for previous anemone catalogs, this contains taxonomic as well as nomenclatural information, the former based on subjective opinion of working biologists, the latter objectively verifiable and unchanging (except by action of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature). Each family-group name, genus-group name, and original combination for species-group names has an entry. The entry contains the bibliographic reference to the publication in which each name was made available. This book contains for Corallimorpharia seven family names (four considered valid [57%]), 20 generic names (10 considered valid [50%] and one unavailable), and 65 species names (46 considered valid [70%]). It contains for Actiniaria 86 family names (50 considered valid [58%] and three unavailable), 447 generic names (264 considered valid [59%] and two unavailable), and 1427 species names (1101 considered valid [77%] and nine unavailable). Type specimens are inventoried from more than 50 natural history museums in Africa, Australia, Europe, New Zealand, and North America, including those with the largest collections of anemones; the geographic sources of specimens that were the bases of new names are identified. I resolve some nomenclatural issues, acting as First Reviser. A few taxonomic opinions are published for the first time. I have been unable to resolve a small number of problematic names having both nomenclatural and taxonomic problems. Molecular phylogenetic analyses are changing assignment of genera to families and species to genera. Systematics may change, but the basics of nomenclature remain unchanged in face of such alterations. All actions are in accord with the principles of nomenclature enunciated in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. These include the type concept, the Principle of Coordination, and the Principle of Priority. Nomenclatural acts include the creation of new replacement names; seven actiniarian generic names and one species name that are junior homonyms but have been treated as valid are replaced and an eighth new genus name is created. I designate type species for two genera. Except for published misspellings, names are rendered correctly according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature; I have altered spelling of some species names to conform to orthographic regulations. I place several species that had been assigned to genera now considered junior synonyms in the genus to which the type species was moved; experts on these anemones should determine whether those generic placements, which follow the nomenclatural rules, are taxonomically appropriate. This inventory can be a useful starting point in assembling the literature and trying to understand the rationale for the creation and use of names for the taxonomic matters yet to be resolved. Some nomenclatural conundra will not be resolved until taxonomic uncertainties are. A taxonomist familiar with the animals needs to ascertain whether the published synonymies are justified. If so, the senior synonym should be used, which, in many instances, will involve determining the proper generic assignment of the species and the correct rendering of the name; if changing the name would be disruptive, retaining the junior name would require an appeal to the Commission (Code Article 23.11).

Towards a New Type of ‘Ethnographic’ Museum in Africa

Towards a New Type of ‘Ethnographic’ Museum in Africa

The art museum in Africa – a utopia desired?

In this paper, I argue that museums in general are utopias, “no-places” in which categorisations of objects can be opened up for destabilisation. Following a discussion of the ways in which the categories “material culture” and “art” are reflected in museums, I argue that once the museum is transposed to Africa, its function as a space in which heritage is maintained through the conservation and preservation is thrown into disarray. I argue further that this is particularly the case with the most utopian of museums, the art museum. I argue that most African nation states do not have national art museums, and offer an argument about why they have museums of “arts and cultures” instead. I end with an analysis of the history and situation of art museums in South Africa and possibilities for alternative ways of conceiving the art museum as an inclusive rather than exclusive space.

A Gulf of Guinea island endemic is a member of a Mediterranean‐centred bird genus

A Gulf of Guinea island endemic is a member of a Mediterranean-centred bird genus GARY VOELKER,* MARTIM MELO & RAURI C. K. BOWIE Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences and Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collections, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA Percy FitzPatrick Institute, DST ⁄NRF Centre of Excellence, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and Department of Integrative Biology, 3101Valley Life Science Building, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Cultural Laws and Museums in Africa

(2006). Cultural Laws and Museums in Africa. Museum International: Vol. 58, No. 1-2, pp. 41-48.

Integrating the Past: Transformation and Renovation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium

The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren is often referred to as one of the last colonial museums in the world. This article provides an overview of the various steps taken in the fundamental transformation process and the plan for renovation of the museum with a view to making it a modern and dynamic Africa museum. For this institution, which is simultaneously a Museum, Research Institute, and Centre of Information Dissemination, a mere change of décor is not sufficient: a fundamental shift in vision, a series of risks, and especially a move towards dialogue and transparency have been part of the process, which has implications that extend far beyond the walls of the museum.

Museums and communities in Africa: facing the new challenges

Established during the colonial era, the majority of museums in Africa were modeled on their European counterparts. The period of Africanization that followed the independence of many African nations witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of Africans receiving higher education and specialized training. Institutions such as museums began to come under the leadership of indigenous Africans but, in most cases, the exhibits and their condition(s) remained the same. Today, African museums face new challenges: how can they become more relevant, both to the local communities they serve and to foreign visitors? How can they attract more visitors, especially from local communities? This article discusses the notion of ‘indigenous’ in an African context. It looks at the development of museums in Africa and their current metamorphosis into dynamic cultural centres that address pertinent social, cultural and even economic issues-in the face of dwindling government funding and increased modernization and globalization. It discusses several museums and how they are meeting these challenges, and how organizations such as AFRICOM (International Council of African Museums) and programmes such as SAMP (African–Swedish Museum Network) are contributing to the positive changes currently taking place.