Extract (PDF) - transcript Verlag

2018-06-01 13-50-44 --- Projekt: transcript.anzeigen / Dokument: FAX ID 026f494210191194|(S.

1-

2) VOR4381.p 494210191202

From: Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, Raphael Schwere (eds.)

Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe A New Field for Museum Studies June 2018, 272 p., 34,99 €, ISBN 978-3-8376-4381-7

At a time of major transformations in the conditions and self-conceptions of cultural history and ethnological museums worldwide, it has become increasingly important for these museums to engage in cooperative projects. This book brings together insights and analyses of a wide variety of approaches to museum cooperation from different expert perspectives. Featuring a variety of African and European points of view and providing detailed empirical evidence, it establishes a new field of museological study and provides some suggestions for future museum practice. Thomas Laely holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and specialised in African and Museum Studies. He is the Deputy Head of the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Marc Meyer is a social and cultural anthropologist, currently working as project coordinator and assistant curator at the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Raphael Schwere is a social and cultural anthropologist working on human-animal relations, material culture of disability and museums in the Horn of Africa and East Africa. He is a PhD student and lecturer at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where he works at the Ethnographic Museum. For further information: www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4381-7

© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

2018-06-01 13-50-44 --- Projekt: transcript.anzeigen / Dokument: FAX ID 026f494210191194|(S.

1-

2) VOR4381.p 494210191202

Contents

List of Figures | viii Acknowledgments | xi Preface | xiii Heterodoxy and the Internationalisation and Regionalisation of Museums and Museology | xv

A Foreword by Anthony Shelton | xv Building a Critical Museology in Africa | xxi

A Foreword by Ciraj Rassool | xxi

INTRODUCTION 1 Rethinking Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe Do we need a new paradigm?

Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, Raphael Schwere | 3

PART I: MAPPING THE FIELD – THE HISTORY AND CONTEXT OF MUSEUM COOPERATION BETWEEN AFRICA AND EUROPE 2 Connected by History, Divided by Reality Eliminating Suspicion and Promoting Cooperation between African and European Museums

George Okello Abungu | 25 3 Cooperation between European and African Museums: A Paradigm for Démuséalisation?

Germain Loumpet | 43

PART II: LOCAL COMMUNITIES AND INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS – RELATIONS OF PARTNERSHIP? 4 Shifting Knowledge Boundaries in Museums Museum Objects, Local Communities and Curatorial Shifts in African Museums

Jesmael Mataga | 57

5 Who Shapes the Museum? Exploring the Impact of International Networks on Contemporary East African Museums

Rosalie Hans | 69 6 The Road to Reconciliation Museum Practice, Community Memorials and Collaborations in Uganda

Nelson Adebo Abiti | 83

PART III: ACCESSIBILITY OF COLLECTIONS FROM AFRICA 7 The Junod Collection A new Generation of Cooperation between Europe and Africa

Cynthia Kros and Anneliese Mehnert | 99 8 The Africa Accessioned Network ‘Museum Collections make Connections’ between Europe and Africa: A Case Study of Finland and Namibia

Jeremy Silvester | 111 9 The Hazina Exhibition Challenges and Lessons for International Museum Collaboration

Kiprop Lagat | 129 10 Artworks Abroad Ugandan Art in German Collections

Katrin Peters-Klaphake | 143

PART IV: CRITIQUE AND EVALUATION OF MUSEUM COOPERATION 11 New Considerations in Afro-European Museum Cooperation in Africa The Examples of PREMA and Other Initiatives in Ghana

Kwame Amoah Labi | 165 12 Investigating Museum Development in Africa: From Museum Cooperation to the Appropriation of Praxis

Emery Patrick Effiboley | 179 13 Conservation and Restoration as a Challenge for Museum Cooperation The Case of the Palace Museum in Foumban, Cameroon

Michaela Oberhofer | 195

CONCLUSION 14 What are the Opportunities, Challenges and Modalities for African and European Museum Cooperation?

Cynthia Kros | 215 Index | 229 List of Contributors | 237

List of Figures Figure 1.1:

Craft centre linked to the Museu Nacional de Arte, Maputo, Mozambique, 2013 .......................................................12

Figure 4.1:

A ritual hut erected by a spirit medium at Ntabazikamambo/ Manyanga archaeological site in western Zimbabwe..................59

Figure 4.2:

The Mukwati Walking Stick. Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences. According to the agreement between the NMMZ and the descendants of Mukwati, this artefact must always remain covered with a black ritual cloth. It can only be unwrapped in the presence of a spirit medium and should only be handled by male staff............................................................64

Figure 5.1:

The Abasuba Community Peace Museum seen from its garden......................................................................................70

Figure 5.2:

The Museum of Acholi Art and Culture under construction.......71

Figure 6.1:

Signage in the garden of Aboke Girls’ School.............................89

Figure 6.2:

Mato-oput, Lukodi.......................................................................91

Figure 6.3:

Exhibition poster, Uganda National Museum, 2013....................92

Figure 7.1:

A basket with a lid woven from dried grasses. From the Junod Collection at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa. Accession No: 1/75/11............................99

Figure 7.2:

A letterhead stamp carved from wood. It reads: ‘C.P.21L. MD.*HAJ*’. From the Junod Collection at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa. Accession No: 1/75/52................................................................................103

Figure 7.3:

The divination set, or Bula, found in the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa. Accession No: 1/75/9a-w. Note Junod’s handwriting on some of the pieces...............................................................................107

Figure 8.1:

Mrs Magdalena Kaanante, the curator of Nakambale Museum and Ms Charmaine Tjizezenga of the Museums Association of Namibia examine a pot from the Rautanen collection....................................................................................114

Figure 8.2:

A specimen Ekola from the museum collection at the University of Oulu...............................................................117

Figure 8.3:

Catalogue number 5620 – ‘Piece of Ondonga sacred stone, Oshipapa. The piece is from a meteorite fallen on the Earth in 1883 or 1886. Power stones are believed to symbolise good government, stability and connection with the forefathers’ spirits’.......................................................119

List of Figures  |  ix

Figure 8.4:

The second stone was described in the translation from the FELM catalogue as: Artefact Catalogue number 8248 – ‘Ritual stone from Angola or Namibia, a “rain stone”, may be a kind of stone with the help of which rain could be roused or engendered’...........................................................121

Figure 8.5:

The original Finnish caption for this photograph was simply translated as ‘Native attire’. ....................................................123

Figure 9.1:

The poster publicising the exhibition........................................130

Figure 9.2:

(Left to right) Tony Eccles, Curator of Ethnography, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, UK, Kiprop Lagat and Juma Ondeng, both from the National Museums of Kenya, examining the beadwork collection from East Africa at the British Museum Ethnography Store in Orsman Road, London...............................................................132

Figure 9.3:

A display unit depicting the Hazina exhibition layout...............133

Figure 10.1:

Photograph of an exhibition in the gallery space, ca. 1970. Self-published catalogue..................................................151

Figure 10.2:

Painting by Fabian Kamulu Mpagi, title and year of production unknown. Oil on hardboard, 57.5cm x 46 cm. Collection Klaus Betz................................................................153

Figure 10.3:

Balthazar Sanka, ‘Lady watch your step’. Print 1/10. Jochen Schneider Collection, Weltkulturen Museum Inv. No. 62725..................................................................................155

Figure 12.1:

Two exhibits from the exhibition Femmes, bâtisseurs d’Afrique, which were offered to Benin and presented to the Maison du Brésil at Ouidah.......................................................182

Figure 12.2:

A photographed papyrus representing the pharaoh worshipping the sun...................................................................186

Figure 12.3:

Signs in Porto-Novo (left) and Cotonou (right) illustrating extraversion at work..................................................................189

Figure 13.1:

King Njoya sitting on his beaded throne in front of his palace. The male twin figure holds a glass bottle in his hand, which was replaced when the throne was given as a present to Kaiser Wilhelm II......................................................199

Figure 13.2:

The new throne of Sultan El Hadj Ibrahim Mbombo Njoya was produced in a modern court style by the beadworker Ndam Mama for the Nguon festival 2008.................................202

Figure 13.3:

The New Palace Museum of Bamum Kings (near completion) combines traditional symbols of the Bamum Kingdom with a modern museum architecture.....................................................205

Figures 13.4 and 13.5: This wooden throne is associated with King Nguwuo and was transformed into an ‘ancient-modern object’ after being covered with beads....................................................................208

Acknowledgments

This anthology is one of the outcomes of a cooperation project between three museums in Africa and Europe – the Uganda National Museum in Kampala, the Igongo Cultural Centre in Mbarara (south-west Uganda), and the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. It resulted from a conference of museum scholars and practitioners in December 2016, which aimed at discussing experiences and expertise in museum cooperation between Africa and Europe. The conference was hosted by the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich on behalf of the Swiss Society for African Studies in cooperation with the Swiss Anthropological Association. It was the desire of the conference participants that the results of the meeting shall be further reflected and published. We would like to thank everyone who helped conceptualising and editing this anthology. The volume is the yield of an extensive exchange with the authors of the contributions, so we first are deeply grateful to them – they have been available to support us with their thoughts and comments, and answering our numerous questions time and again. Our particular acknowledgment goes to Cynthia Kros for her thoughtful concluding chapter as well as Ciraj Rassool and Anthony Shelton for their prospective introductory words. Even if some of the presented papers could not be included, we would like to give special thanks to all the conference’s contributors and presenters for their firm engagement with the issues at stake. Marc Bundi, Melanie Boehi, Marie-Eve Celio Scheurer, Zoë Cormack, Fatima Fall, Marie-Angès Gainon-Court, Alexandra Galitzine, Nikki Grout, Winani Kgwatalala, Birthe Pater and Sarah Worden have been setting precedents with their contributions and were strongly pointing the way ahead. We acknowledge the way they have influenced further reflection and eventually the argument of this book – they are essential contributors to the final outcome. We wish to express our great appreciation to the discussants, chairs and facilitators Larissa Förster, Julien Glauser, Clara Himmelheber, Alexis Malefakis, Anne Mayor and Fiona Siegenthaler who gave direction to the debate and provided many valuable insights. While it is invidious to identify individuals, this anthology would not have been possible without the dedication and help of Helen Rana whom we are indebted to for all her editorial input, lingustic fine-tuning and copyediting of the entire volume. We are also thankful to Elisabeth Heseltine who translated Germain Loumpet’s chapter from French into English. Special mention and acknowledgement deserve the very involved audience of the conference as well as many other colleagues and specialists in museum affairs who have inspired us with their reactions and questions, and benevolently accompanied and commented on our publication project. Special thanks go to Mareile Flitsch, Alexis Malefakis, and Thomas Kaiser for their comments and critical advice as well as to Renate Koller, Agnes Kovacs and Adrienne Wegmann for their thorough corrections of all bibliographies. Eventually we would also like to express our heartfelt thanks to the whole Ugandan and Swiss museum cooperation core team, Nelson Abiti, Samuel Bachmann, Daniela Bollinger, Jacqueline Grigo,

xii  |  Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe

Moses Kashure, Amon Mugume, Rose Nkaale Mwanja, Birthe Pater, James Tumusiime and Melanie de Visser, without whom we would not have dealt with this issue in the first place. This publication was kindly supported by the Swiss Society for African Studies SSAS and the Carl Schlettwein Foundation in Basel.

Zurich, March 2018 Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, Raphael Schwere

Preface

In a rapidly-changing world with its incessant flows of commodities, values and people, the awareness of our overall global complexity and entangledness is growing. So is a consciousness of the role that cultural heritage plays in identity building and self-reassurance about the human condition. Museums and collections seem to be gaining momentum globally in this process. The entwined histories of migrating people and objects are displayed as stories about their multiple trajectories from places of origin into European museum collections. Collaborative academic research is urgently needed to understand, document and shape this process. Understood against this background – and referring to a concept put forward by the British anthropologist Paul Basu – European museums host ‘object diasporas’. These urge us to listen to each other and discuss their varying contexts of origin, along with wider concerns around former and modern meanings of collections. Basu’s conceptualisation describes collections as historically-grown remittances of the communities of origin in Western museums, from which there is a duty to collaborate on issues of their exploration, on access to collections, on questions of sovereignty in interpretation – as well as the emerging sensitive suggestion, in certain cases, of restitution – or at least digital repatriation. In December 2016 the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich was honoured to host a pioneering conference on museum cooperation between Africa and Europe. The spirit of its highly-engaged discussions and debates provided a deeply inspiring experience; this volume is one of the conference’s many potential outcomes. I warmly thank all the contributors for their dedication and open-mindedness, as well as the energy they put into finalising their chapters. This anthology is intended to address not only theories around museum cooperation, but especially to foreground, critically discuss and further develop current topics on the issue, as well as developing further projects and the practice of cooperating. The goal of this young – yet generation-spanning movement – and of this volume, is clear and farsighted: to make some first steps towards long-overdue natural, well-funded and sustainable academic collaborations between European and African museums. I hope this volume will help to pave the way!

Mareile Flitsch Director, Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich Zürich, February 2018

Heterodoxy and the Internationalisation and Regionalisation of Museums and Museology A Foreword by Anthony Shelton

Stewardship over cultural and art works can bring together or split different peoples, communities and nations widely apart. While museums and galleries imbue works with their own meaning, objects can also easily be mobilised by alternative and sometimes contested narratives that challenge their significance regardless of whether fixed by Euro-American or African academies and institutions. The indeterminacy between works and meanings is partly what endows them their capacity to act as catalysts for creative thought, but it also imbues them the power to arouse intense passions over their care, display and interpretation. Little surprise, that this intrinsic and unavoidable field of potential tensions often discloses a museum’s own political culture and values and provides telling indications of its conservativism or critical and creative predisposition that can majorly affect its prestige, vitality, relevance and the love or other sentiments its public bestows it. Nelson Abiti’s accounts of the National Museum of Uganda’s commitment to reconciliation, and the work done by similar institutions including the National Museums of Kenya; Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares (founded by Bonfil Batalla) and El Chopo Museum; Italy’s Lampedusa Museum of Migration, and the work of holocaust museums, exemplify museums at their best, which by acknowledging that their fundamental cultural mission exceeds historical and contemporary material culture, become part of a society’s essential institutions. In a newly interconnected digital age, and a neo-liberal world with its proliferate and increasing new and shifting borders caused by current geo-political re-alignments, these wall-less museums also question the applicability of the notion of the contact zone twenty years after it was incorporated into museological literature. Contact zones are today everywhere and are increasingly ambiguous, insecure, indiscriminate and, with internationalised militarisation in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, latently deadly. Collecting long predates European colonization and is not restricted to any one type of civilization. Collections were assembled in fourteenth to seventeenth century Ming China; sixteenth century Aztec Mexico, and in Africa, in the nineteenth century Kalibari trading houses of the Niger Delta described by Nigel Barley (1988); the sixteenth century royal palace of Benin recounted by Joseph Eboreime (2001); the pre-colonial palaces of Bamoun in Foumban and later that which became the Museum of the Bamoun Kings discussed by Germain Loumpet and Michaela Oberhofer, and in pre-colonial Ghana described by Kwame Amoah Labi (all in this volume). Moreover, African mask houses, shrines and groves all contained meaningful object assemblages. While all these examples attest that collecting has long been a global activity, secular museums characterised by their heterogeneous holdings and the systematic typological, material or comparative taxonomies used to order their collections are undoubtedly a uniquely Western invention as are the genres of exhibition they favour. How many exhibitions, for example, have been mounted on Pende masks displayed as art, typological sets, or as part of a larger thematic category, compared to the

xvi  |  Anthony Shelton

dearth of displays on their histories and dynamic innovations including that most intriguing strategy of all described by Strother (1997), of how new forms of Pende masquerades were devised to specifically channel and harness powers against colonial intruders? I know of none, partly because such exhibitions would require deep local historical knowledge, the acknowledgement and valorisation of non-empiricist epistemologies and singular ontologies, and the recognition of the existence of different ocular regimes. However, museums that dare contravene epistemologies, mobilise local histories, and pluralise ways of seeing, as Jesmael Mataga so perceptively argues, become place of unsettlement and destabilisation where everyday categories lose their absolute authority, and meanings are suspended and become relativised as well as interrogated in favour of acclaiming openness to the plurality of human wisdom, ingenuity and intellect – strategies which Jacques Hainard has distinguished as the objective of what he calls a museology of rupture. When everything becomes relativised, museums become the safe places of dialogue and debate, what George Abungu describes as essential to conflict resolution, sensitisation and the propagation of peace, which are needed more than ever in the dangerous world order being politically imposed on us. Only through this epistemological revolution can museums transpose themselves into knowledge repositories, stages for community voices; laboratories and studios in which students can participate in the constant redefinition of culture and identity, and lounges to promote communal dialogue and inclusivity that so many of us rightly think important. The Ugandan and Gaoan scholars, Paul Wangoola (2000) and Claudio Alvares (2001) have proposed the assemblage of multiversities, a counter knowledge institution to that of the Western university model, which seems to me to be well suited to the world’s museums. Wangoola and Alvares argue that the imposition of a universalised empirical, ‘scientific’ knowledge on communities and societies afflicted by colonialism and still marred by coloniality, has disparaged, marginalised and often eradicated Indigenous knowledge systems that once more effectively described and explained the complex and interdependent relations between a region’s natural and cultural habitats than those imposed from outside. The multiversity, they argue, is a project to deconstruct and relativise Western knowledge, while attempting to rescue, revalorise and reapply Indigenous knowledge systems. The multiversity, like museums, therefore protects and disseminates cultural diversity. Once different knowledge systems are equally ranked and valued, they argue, Western knowledge from science to travel writing, need to be deconstructed to reveal their limited epistemological values before being placed, and I would say visualised, exemplified and displayed, next to those from elsewhere. Museums, by employing communities from around the world can reorganise collections to express the multiple ways of perceiving, knowing, interpreting and co-existing on a culturally diverse planet. It is paradoxical that while museology and conservation too often struggle to attain scientific status, and the badge of professionalism it confirms, post-colonial perspectives, and I am particularly thinking here of JeanFrancois Lyotard’s The Post-Modern Condition (1984) and Miriam Clavir’s convincing critique of the practice of conservation in her Preserving What is Valued (2002), demonstrate the conditionality of the metanarratives that collude dominant Western ethical injunctions with scientific method to ascribe them their shaky legitimacy. With their diverse collections and anthropology’s own deconstructivist and critical aspirations, ethnographic museums can become places of heterodoxy where diverse interpretations, opinions and theories, and their inevitable metanarratives, intersect, engage, struggle, ravel and become unravelled

Foreword | xvii

to remind us of the world’s generous and enormous diversity and its value in instilling diplomatic compass and modulating our thoughts, passions and creativities. If successful, anthropological, ethnographic or world culture museums stand a good chance of becoming models for other types of museums and galleries and of providing a new public framework for the humanities. If museums do not yet fully embrace the challenges and heterogeneity to which the contributors to this volume aspire, these essays attest to the continuing journeys many such institutions in Africa and Europe began in the past fifty years and how much more open, adventurous, flexible, and even courageous they have become. Recently, Laura Osorio Sunnucks, a curator in my own museum, has made repeated excursions into dangerous areas of Mexico controlled by drug trafficers, dealt with road blockages and confrontations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous protestors and worked with the families of the forty-three disappeared student teachers from Ayotzinapa to curate the exhibition, Arts of Resistance: Politics and the Past in Latin America (MOA, 2018). Curators elsewhere, like Boris Wastiau and Beka Economopoulos have also been forced to leave the comfort of their offices and libraries to become activists in order to tell contemporary and relevant stories that provide a platform for contentious issues and for marginalised and isolated peoples. Thanks to international organisations museums have undergone global changes. The idea of community collaboration grew independently in different parts of the world. In Mexico, it was championed by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (1983), and in Canada by Michael Ames (1992). Aspects of the history of collaboration in Africa, include the philosophy behind the District Six Museum in South Africa, described by Ciraj Rassool (2006); and in this volume, in Zimbabwe, by Mataga, and in Kenya, by Abungu and Rosalie Hans. Community collaboration, despite the absence of critical evaluation, has become in large parts of the world, a major museum methodology. Similarly, our understanding of colonialism has become more complex. It is insufficient to be aware only of its different historical and cultural variants, policy divergences, and impacts. We need now to focus on its continual legacy as theorised, for example, through Walter Mignolo’s concept of coloniality (2007), and Pablo Gonzalez Cassanova’s formulation of the conditions and effects of internal colonisation (1965), which rescale former external asymmetric power relations responsible for dislocating the distribution, uses and benefits of resources away from local communities, to a focus on internal exploitative mechanisms manipulated by the state. In the cultural arena, this unequal mosaic of internal power relations is expressed in countries like Mexico, Indonesia and Canada, by local and regional museums pursuing repatriations from their own national museums as well as foreign ones. Magnolo’s and Gonzalez’s theoretical frameworks provide alternative ways of interpreting postcolonial relations depending on whether they are seen as determined by ethnicity or by an internationalised, hierarchical class-based system. Nevertheless, museums need to be understood, along with the exhibitionary complexes they institutionalise, as inclusive aspects of what Regina Bendix (2012) defines as ‘heritage regimes’. These include the local and national policy contexts underlying the conceptualisation of heritage which inevitably affect the entirety of a museum’s complex, inflected, and multifaceted relationships. Only at this detailed level of relational analysis can this crucial debate between ethnic and class based determinants of internal and neo-colonial relationships be freed from the polemical assertions that bedevil it.

xviii  |  Anthony Shelton

The fields of museums and museology, through the processes of regionalisation and internationalisation have, as the editors of this volume acknowledge, changed enormously. Demands for greater inclusivity and democratisation; the assertion of Indigenous rights; the change from monocultural to multicultural and intercultural citisenries, and the scholarly critical scrutiny focused on museums during the final three decades of the last century, have transformed many beyond recognition. We still need to deepen that critique to the political histories of their wider heritage regimes, but the time has arrived to begin the work of systematically reconfiguring museums. Change will take different shapes depending on the country and/or region where museums are located, but some general principles are emerging. Internally, outside of Europe, many nation states are culturally disarticulated and governments need to enact better integrated cultural policies. In Canada for example, the majority of citizens outside the southern flange of large conurbations located within a hundred miles of the US border, have limited cultural provisions and few and grossly underfunded museums able to accommodate major exhibitions. National museum legislation is required, as it is elsewhere, to create meaningful cooperation and share resources between national, provincial, local and community museums and Indigenous cultural centres. This network is essential to promote the movement of objects, exhibitions and community based expertise to improve access, inform cultural diversity, educate and realign knowledge and creativity, and disseminate shared values of respect, tolerance and understanding that benefit and ground national or geo-political regional citizenry. Effective international networks need to be developed and stabilised for the same reasons, but they also need to encourage cross-cultural curatorial practices and, because of the increased transparency of museums through social media and the internet, they ought to improve awareness of threats that exhibitions might periodically attract from intolerant internal factions and foreign regimes and their potential effects on curators and sponsors. Culture wars although up to now largely polemical, are becoming increasingly fierce and may, under US, Russian or Turkish irresponsible political leadership, become hot. None of these things can be accomplished without deep, meaningful and effective international cooperation. Museums in the digital age are borderless, and therefore, mutually more accountable. While there are many positive examples of collaborations between European and American museums, and those from Africa, Labi, Oberhofer and Abungu are correct to appeal for greater mutual respect, equality and unanimity in devising and managing shared projects and clarifying mutual assumptions. In Canada, Indigenous communities have emphasised the importance of drafting specific memorandums of understanding with museums, because through conversing, devising, setting parameters, understanding logistics, and confirming ethical protocols and expectations, respect, fairness and understanding become mutually rooted. Soon after I took up my current position at The University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, an institution that has widely employed collaborative methodologies from at least the 1980s, I asked three curators what for them constituted collaboration. The first answered that it involved the role of curator being transformed into that of facilitator to enable the community to independently take responsibility to determine an exhibition’s subject, text, object selection and design; a second curator, opined it involved periodic dialogues with the community to ensure the fidelity of the exhibition with their expectations, and the third, described collaboration as a dialogical process through which culture was generated by the conversations between curators and community repre-

Foreword | xix

sentatives. The first approach corresponds to what Michael Ames called participant action research; the second approach, museologists might equate with a consultative model, and the third might best be defined by what Johannes Fabian would describe as a dialogical approach, but what is important is that each method generates a different genre of exhibition which in large part is conditioned by the community itself. The question I would now ask, thirteen years later is, can we add to these, a fourth category of cooperative ethically motivated curatorial practice represented by Sunnucks, Wastiau and Economopoulos, of the type that has already motivated the works of certain groups of artists? Despite these essential analytical discussions which are so desperately needed, outside of the obfuscations of new intellectual and geo-political realities, and the complexities of an often disarticulated museological landscape, we are fortunate to have at least one imperative and largely shared anchor that can help us navigate these complex issues and, I think assist in their resolution. That is that access to culture is an inalienable right, and museums whose governments are signatories to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are encumbered to seriously apply especially articles eleven, twelve and thirty-one, to their future practices. Article eleven unequivocally states: ‘Indigenous people have the right to practice and revitalise their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestation of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature.’ This, at the very least requires either cultural diversification and changes in the power relations within museums or an object’s restitution to another place where these conditions prevail. Instead of fearing difficult conversations, we might accept instead that this is perhaps a good place from where to agree fundamental philosophies that can help reconfigure the future relationships between our varied and diverse institutions and provide encouragement to compose together a shared vision and purpose, which must inevitably be internationalist. New ways of configuring museums and their collections inevitably lead also to cultural reconciliation.

Anthony Alan Shelton Visiting Research Fellow, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka Director, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology Professor, Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

References Alvares, Claude. 2001. The Original Multiversity Proposal. http://vlal.bol.ucla.edu/multiversity/Right_menu_items/Claude_proposal.htm Ames, Michael. 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes. The Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Barley, Nigel. 1988. Foreheads of the Dead: An Anthropological View of Kalabari Ancestral Screens. Washington D.C.: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution Press.

xx  |  Anthony Shelton

Bendix, Regina. F, Aditya Eggert and Arnika Peselmann (eds.). 2012. Heritage Regimes and the State. Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property, Volume 6. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen. Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. 1983. ‘El Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares.’ Nueva Antropología V(20): 151-155. Clavir, Miriam. 2002. Preserving What is Valued. Museums, Conservation and First Nations. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Eboreime, Joseph. 2001. ‘Recontextualizing the Horniman’s Collection of Benin Bronzes.’ In Re-visions: New Perspectives on the African Collections of the Horniman Museum, edited by Karel Arnaut. London: Horniman Museum. Fabian, Johannes. 1990. Power and Performance. Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial Wisdom and Theatre. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gonzalez Cassanova, Pablo. 1965. ‘Internal Colonialism and National Development.’ Studies in Comparative International Development 1(4): 27-37. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2007. ‘Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking.’ Cultural Studies 21(2-3): 155-167. Rassool, Ciraj. 2006. ‘Making the District Six Museum in Cape Town.’ Museum International 58(1-2): 9-18. Shelton, Anthony. 1997. ‘The Future of Museum Ethnography.’ Journal of Museum Ethnography (9): 33-48. Shelton, Anthony. 2000. ‘Curating African Worlds.’ Journal of Museum Ethnography (12): 5-20. Shelton, Anthony. 2001a. ‘Museums in an Age of Cultural Hybridity Folk.’ The Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society 43: 221-249. Shelton, Anthony. 2001b. ‘Unsettling the Meaning: Critical Museology, Art and Anthropological Discourse.’ In Academic Anthropology and the Museum. Back to the Future, edited by Mary Bouquet. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Shelton, Anthony. 2016. ‘European ethnography and world culture museums.’ Museumskunde 81(1/16): 20-27. Strother, Zoë S. 1997. Inventing Masks. Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Wangoola, Paul. M. 2000. ‘Mpambo, the African Multiversity: A Philosophy to rekindle the African Spirit.’ In Indigenous Knowledge in Global Contexts: Multiple Readings of our World, edited by George Dei, Budd Hall and Dorothy Goldin Rosenberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Building a Critical Museology in Africa A Foreword by Ciraj Rassool

As we continue the work of rethinking the museum on the African continent, we are grateful to the museum scholars, practitioners and activists who gathered in Zurich to deliberate about the histories and cultural politics of connections and cooperative projects between museums in Africa and Europe. The publication of this collection of essays is particularly timely, in the wake of the French president Emmanuel Macron’s important call in November 2017 for the ‘temporary or permanent’ restitution of African artefacts held in European museums. This anthology provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the field of different models of museum connection, as well as the complex biographies of African cultural artefacts held in museums – both in Europe and on the African continent. This is not merely a compilation of case studies, although we are taken on journeys of museums, museum associations, artefacts and cultural practices in societies ranging from Namibia, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Benin, South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. These are also expeditions through models of museum partnerships, sometimes driven by the development discourse, but other times by a new ethics of exchange and reconnection, despite deep inequalities. The articles included contain important debates on critical questions about how to address and repair histories of disconnection between artefacts and society, how to rethink the work of the museum in mediating relations between objects and individuals, and how to reconsider partnerships between African and European museums. These debates speak to the ways in which museum and collecting histories between African and European societies have been fraught with deep contestation and contradiction over the legacies of colonialism and questions of whether African artefacts should be returned to African nations as part of a process of redress. Demands for repatriation have been met by large Western museums with the assertion that they are ‘universal’ museums, caring for collections on behalf of all the world’s people. The search for a middle ground has given rise to projects framed around projects of ‘shared heritage’ and temporary loans of African artefacts to African museums for special exhibitions. In the background of these debates and controversies are the challenges of rethinking the work of the museum in Europe and Africa. In Europe, many ethnographic museums have rebranded themselves as museums of world cultures, with new digitally-enhanced displays, but often with classificatory categories left intact. Nevertheless, in some cases, deeper methodological interrogations have seen the focus shift to museums’ collecting histories and their storage rooms, and to deep engagements with artefacts and artworks by artists in residence. Amidst these contested new directions, the argument has also been advanced for the postethnographic museum, as a way to conceptualise the interrogation of the ethnographic. And in Africa, doubts have been expressed about the future of the ethnographic museum, as a museum form that is steeped in colonial classification, while new approaches such as the living museum, the community museum, and the peace museum have elicited new questions about museums and citizenship, beyond the administration of people and objects.

xxii  |  Ciraj Rassool

In examining these cases and debates, I was taken back to different moments of attempted reconnection that I was able to witness and even participate in. During the 1990s, the Swedish African Museums Programme (SAMP), founded to initiate twinships between Swedish and African museums, also became a forum for colleagues from African museums to meet each other and exchange ideas. What was created as a development initiative by ICOM, working through Sweden and the resources of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), also became a source of stimulation for Swedish museums, whose conventional methods and approaches were challenged by new ideas from African museums about museums and community. Such reversals of the conventional flows of development have almost always been difficult to achieve, especially since expertise has generally been seen to reside with the European partner museums or consultants, with African museums positioned as grateful recipients who are also able to facilitate access to authentic local voices. In addition, the education of African museum professionals has very often been limited to technical aspects, with the intellectual effort of conceptualising and leading museum work seen to be the prerogative of outside consultants. This contradiction between technical training and intellectual education has marked almost all African museum and heritage training and education initiatives, which have often been confined to the technical terms set by international agencies and partners. Some of the most significant initiatives have been the Centre for Heritage Development (CHDA) in Mombasa, Kenya and the School for African Heritage (EPA) based in Porto Novo, Benin. Both had their origins in efforts by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) to enhance the ability of the African heritage community to care for their continent’s rich cultural heritage. Perhaps the most important continental museum development project occurred through the work of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM), established in 1999 as an autonomous, Pan-African NGO that sought to build social, professional and intellectual resources for African museums as generators of culture and agents of cultural cohesion, and to strengthen museum collaboration throughout Africa. While EPA has continued to exist as a largely Francophone and Lusophone centre for training and development, CHDA and AFRICOM were not able to survive the difficulties of donor dependency and the limits of developmental frames. Moreover, the demise of AFRICOM was also caused by the enormous obstacles posed for giving the repatriation of African collections to the African continent a programmatic life. To counteract repatriation, ‘universal’ museums have embarked upon new programmes of African partnerships and training alongside temporary loans of African artefacts for special traveling exhibitions. This might mean that the very donor and foundation resources that should have attended to the strengthening of African agencies of museum and heritage development have instead been redirected to such European-based projects of partnership and development, and have perhaps served to reinforce relations of dependence. The desires for museum autonomy and the creation of African museum leadership rooted in critical museologies and museum debates lay at the centre of the work of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS), founded in Cape Town in 1998 through a partnership between the University of the Western Cape and Robben Island Museum, the first new museum of the post-apartheid South African nation. Over the

Foreword | xxiii

last 20 years, the APMHS has sought to build a core of African museum leaders through a critical, intellectual programme grounded in the cultural politics of museums, rather than merely through technical training in preservation and care. While we need to find the right balance between the technical and the intellectual challenges of museum development, this clearly shows how important it is for African museums to be affirmed as the locus of social theory and critical debate on the major questions of our time. Only then will it be possible to question the tyranny of developmentalism, and to embrace new partnerships with European museums.

Ciraj Rassool Professor of History Director, African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies University of the Western Cape Member of the High Level Advisory Committee on Museums, UNESCO