The difficult job of decolonising the continent’s museums
Iwrite these words amid the hubbub of hundreds of enthusiastic delegates, gathered at the District Six Museum’s Homecoming Centre for Reimagining Heritage, Archives and Museums: Today/Tomorrow. This conference, or rather
“convening ” (which implies a less academic and more capacious programme), is an initiative by the French Institute of SA and the embassy of France.
An impressive event, bringing together participants from many countries and from across the culture and heritage sector, it aims to be more than a talkshop — moving “from conversation to action”, as one of the session subtitles puts it. In her opening address, curatorial committee member Ngaire Blankenberg welcomed those in attendance with the acknowledgment that “we are under no illusion that this convening will fix everything”, but she also affirmed that
“silence is complicity”.
In particular, Blankenberg foregrounded silence about the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza: the silence of Holocaust museums and other institutions dedicated to remembering the Shoah under the slogan, “Never again”. She thus emphasised the urgency of the matters at hand. Our individual and collective memories of the past directly affect how humans are treated in the present.
By making these geopolitical connections explicit, Blankenberg ensured that undercurrents of transnational and diplomatic tension would not remain awkwardly unspoken — though in the case of Israel-Palestine, France’s official stance on Israel (which has been ambiguous in recent months) was spared from direct critique. But Blankenberg nonetheless asserted, “We are not naive.” That is to say, while recognising France’s contribution to the restitution of African heritage, the invited speakers would not be letting France off lightly for its colonial atrocities.
French ambassador David Martinon positioned the convening as emerging broadly from the efforts of President Emmanuel Macron to lead the restitution process. Indeed, France has allocated significant resources, energy and expertise towards this project — a reckoning with the colonial past but also with French identity in the 21st century.
Ciraj Rassool, director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western Cape, articulated some of the fault lines that emerge when this conversation is located in SA.
Apart from a few high-profile cases, like that of Saartjie Baartman, the French focus is understandably on francophone Africa; what does this mean for the rest of the continent? Germany has started to identify and return human remains stolen from its colonies in South West Africa (now Namibia) and East Africa (Tanzania). Britain, easily the greatest perpetrator of imperial horrors, has been slow to act on its museums’ dubious holdings.
Moreover, Rassool pointed out, restorative justice is still disabled by the structural limitations of European museum practices and their related bureaucratic procedures.
Human remains, cultural artefacts, art works and sacred items are all “objectified ”, but they are separated in terms of collection categories, which affects both the conceptualisation and the practice of restitution.
African museums and cultural institutions have mostly been created in this European image; much of the burden of the gathering at the Homecoming Centre is, therefore, to think of new ways — or perhaps recall old ways — of “doing heritage”. To borrow Rassool ’ s phrasing, “Restitution will be fruitless without the epistemic decolonisation of museums themselves.”
While this wide-ranging discussion is global in scope, seeking to reframe the relationship between Africa and Europe, between South and North, it inevitably returns to local examples: the SA government ’“s disinvestment from arts and cultural heritage”; the pros and cons of statefunded entities generally; the rights and wrongs of private ownership; the necessity of philanthropy; and the compromises or biases that attend it.
Albie Sachs took the audience on an oratorical tour across SA, to half a dozen public heritage sites and museums, candidly rating them, recalling their founding visions, celebrating those that have been sustained and — in too many cases — noting where things have gone wrong.
Sachs raised a challenge that would haunt much of the subsequent discussion: how do heritage practitioners ensure that their projects actually serve the communities whose heritage they seek to protect?
For Blankenberg and her curatorial colleagues, there is a prior, existential question to be answered: “Who are collections really for?” It is a surprisingly difficult question for archivists and cultural activists alike to answer.
AFRICAN CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS HAVE MOSTLY BEEN CREATED IN THIS EUROPEAN IMAGE