Digital Pan African heritage museum launched in Ghana
IN NOVEMBER 2015, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) declared May 5 as African World Heritage Day. IRIE FM is the only media house in Jamaica that consistently acknowledges the day, as far as I can tell. Two Sundays ago, Ka’Bu Ma’at Kheru, revolutionary host of the popular ‘Running African’ show, interviewed Hon Kojo Yankah, founder and executive chairman of Ghana’s Pan African Heritage Museum. He highlighted the fact that a digital version of the museum was going to be launched on African World Heritage Day.
The museum was launched virtually last year on May 5. Construction of the physical building has started and should be completed by August 2023, in time for another significant date. In December 2020, UNESCO proclaimed August 31 as The International Day for People of African Descent. Thanks to Marcus Garvey! That was the date in 1920 on which Garvey’s month-long International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World drew to a close.
While the museum is under construction, digital exhibitions have now been mounted. It’s such a brilliant idea. The first gallery houses “Alkebulan (African) Civilizations”, which documents the long history of the continent. Scholars, including the renowned Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist and politician Cheikh Anta Diop, argue that Alkebulan was the original name of the continent.
There are contending accounts of the source of the name Africa. Several languages have been proposed: Latin, Phoenician, Berber, Egyptian and Arabic. Whatever the origin of the modern name of the continent, there is agreement that the River Nile, the longest in the world at 4,180 miles, remains a powerful force in shaping the civilisations that flourish along its banks.
‘ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE’
The second gallery displays the exhibition ‘Granaries Of Memory (Art for Life’s Sake)’. This conception of art challenges the European notion of ‘art for art’s sake’. It was the 19th century French philosopher Victor Cousin who coined the phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Cousin argued that, “art needs no justification, that it need serve no political, didactic, or other end”.
By contrast, art in traditional African societies is certainly functional. In the Yoruba narrative of origins, Olodumare, the supreme divinity, commissioned the creativity deity, Obatala, to sculpt the first human image from clay. Human beings are conceived as a divinely made work of art. And art is how you live every day. Everything you construct is art: your basket, water pot, spoon, comb, hairstyle, clothes and buildings. Objects both beautiful and terrifying connect the human and spiritual realms. Art isn’t supposed to be locked away in a museum.
Europeans failed to understand the complexity of artistic production in Africa. All they could see was magnificent objects that they envied. They stole artefacts, took them out of context and placed them in their museums. Supposedly civilised Europeans still claim that Africans are savages. Yet they desperately want to hang on to the art made by the uncivilised. They have no respect for the creators, only for their creations.
Take for instance Didier Rykner, a French journalist, art historian and director of La Tribune de L’Art (The Art Tribune). In a 2018 television debate on art repatriation from Europe to Africa, this is what he said: “They became works of art in museums because Europeans said it was art. You know? It’s not, it’s not from Africa; it was not art. It was meant to disappear.” According to Rykner, Africans did not know they were creating art, as he conceived it. And worse, they did not understand the value of their own art until Europeans stole it.
Clearly, Rykner does not know about Yaa Asantewaa, the Ghanaian female warrior who led and won the war against the British governor who tried to steal the Ashanti golden stool. The throne represents the power of the chief. This is art that clearly serves a political end, an idea that Victor Cousin would not understand. His rather limited European conception of art could not take into account the breadth of its function for life’s sake.
SHARED HISTORY
The final exhibition in the digital museum is ‘Panafrican Contemporaneities’. It celebrates the work of today’s African artists on the continent and in the diaspora, showing the family connections that transcend time and space. This exhibition invites us to acknowledge our shared history, despite the colonial narratives that attempt to divide and rule us.
The Kenyan writer, Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o wa Thiong’o, wrote a powerful book, Decolonising The Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. This is what Ngũgı̃’ says: “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe stole art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums; in the twentieth century Europe is stealing the treasures of the mind to enrich their languages and cultures. Africa needs back its economy, its politics, its culture, its languages and all its patriotic writers.” Ngũgı̃’s vision reminds me of Garvey’s prophecy of emancipation from mental slavery.
This is precisely what the Pan African Heritage Museum is designed to accomplish: freeing the mind and taking back what is ours. The tag line of the museum is, “Our own story shapes our future.” That was Hon Kojo Yankah’s central message at the launch: “The project you’ve participated in launching today is a transformational one. We see it as a generational mission to leave a legacy to the youth and coming generations.
“We believe that this world would be a better place if every human being is fed with the truth about themselves: simply, about their heritage. Today, technology allows us to search quicker for information about ourselves and disseminate it like never before. By entering our digital museum and inviting others to do likewise, you are not only adding to your wealth of knowledge about the world. You will be contributing to create a better humanity.”
The digital exhibition and ceremonial launch can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15JahkxMBS8. On the African continent and in the diaspora, we must reclaim our stolen art, as well as the treasures of our mind.