Senegalese
Conceived in the 1960s, shortly after independence, Senegal’s new Museum of Black Civilisations has finally been completed
Dakar, with its weathered skin of stone, is a city in a hurry. In the past few years this scruffily elegant Atlantic port city, which shuns the brutal hustle of Lagos or Johannesburg, has been reimagining itself. Modest skyscrapers, barricaded hotels, strange statues and a distant new airport are markers of Senegal’s transformation.
On a fenced-off plot of land wedged between the docks and a military complex, near the work-in-progress terminus for a new 55km regional express link to the airport, is a large, circular building. Located opposite the Grand National Theatre, the fourstorey structure is officially called the Museum of Black Civilisations, or MCN (from its official French name, Musée des Civilisations Noires).
The new museum, which was inaugurated by Senegal’s president, Macky Sall, earlier this month, is the culmination of a decades-old mission by politicians to build a museum to honour black achievement. That it took so long is part of Dakar’s charm: this is a city slowly in a hurry.
History is central to the content of MCN. Take the dominant indigo tones of Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté’s labour-intensive draperies, currently on view alongside works by contemporary and long-forgotten artists. The indigo colours draw on a millennium-old Malian history of dyeing and fabric know-how.
Fittingly, Konaté, who in 2004 founded the Balla Fasséké Kouyaté Conservatory in Bamako to preserve and teach local craft practices, was honoured with Senegal’s National Order of the Lion. The president bestowed the award, which recognises distinguished contributions, during MCN’S opening.
But celebrating Konaté’s achievements, and those of the other artists in the new museum, is only a small aspect of MCN’S function. Principally, the museum is a symbol. And it is as symbol that it is most vulnerable.
Two months before MCN opened, its director, archaeologist Hamady Bocoum, spoke to a small group of art historians and writers about his ambitions. Early into his translated talk Bocoum dismissed as moribund Dakar’s Ifan Museum of African Arts, a storied institution founded in 1938.
“No one in Senegal goes to the ethnographic museum,” said Bocoum.
He said that MCN would not replicate Ifan’s displays, which include compelling painted animal masks from Guinea-bissau, nor would it try to outdo the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, which houses 70000 objects from sub-saharan Africa.
“We are trying to find our own way,” said Bocoum. “It will not be a museum of the black in the fighting sense of the word, but rather a museum that will put black culture in its right place.”
The new museum will not have any permanent displays. Contemporary art, ancient rock paintings and Egyptian objects are of equal interest to its director, who was assisted for the opening by curator Babacar M’bow. Formerly a director of North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, M’bow was dismissed for sexual harassment in 2016.
In a sharp rebuke of the scholarship under discussion at organiser Koyo Kouoh’s symposium in MCN in September, Bocoum dismissed the mostly votive artefacts at the centre of current restitution debates as of secondary interest and “meaningless”.
“Africa is not a museum of nostalgia, and we will present facts that formulate our mutual future,” he said.
Bocoum spoke about seeing the newly revamped Royal Museum for Central Africa outside Brussels, which houses 180 000 ethnographic items from King Leopold II’S avaricious plunder of Congo. He also mentioned French President Emmanuel Macron’s November 2017 statement in Burkina Faso about kick-starting a process of returning colonial plunder.