Read on Twitter
The other thing I did in Belgium after the colloquium was over was to visit the Royal Museum for Central Africa, built to showcase the spoils of Leopold II's exploits in Africa.
Based on their web site (e.g. below), I was expecting that it would be a museum of Europeans congratulating themselves on letting the colonies go but otherwise proceeding as if nothing had changed. But my expectations were completely wrong, and I came away really impressed.
The first galleries start with transparency about what the museum used to be and about the process of transforming it; and they include work by Congolose artists that speaks to that process.
They also offer clear explanations of how the collection originally came to be and how acquisitions and research are carried out today.
The museum is also pretty straightforward about the ways in which Belgium devastated the Congo and the relationship between the slave trade and colonialism.
The museum also highlights the ways in which people resisted Belgian colonialism.
There is one gallery where the 19thC statues are protected in situ by law and so there is an explanation of that and a counterpart by a contemporary Congolese artist.
Objects, both contemporary and earlier, are integrated temporally and treated as art rather than craft, which is a really important curatorial move.
A few more examples of Congolese art:
And two more that I really liked:
Because it is in effect, an anthropological museum, there are exhibitions about oral and written language (also ritual, music, and other topics like that).
This looks like a library, but is actually a xylarium, a collection of wood samples that people in positions of imperial and colonial could browse to choose the types of wood they wanted their furniture to be built of. (We have examples of Latin American xylaria in Spain, too.)
In addition to a documentation center and reading room, the museum hosts AfricaTube, a growing digital archive of Congolese (and other African) materials online.
Always ways to improve the presentation of materials like this, but overall I was impressed & walked away thinking of this as a model for how the American Museum of Natural History (among other institutions) might think about revising their presentation of their collections. Fin.
