Human history is born in the African continent which makes Africa the wellspring from which all of the history of the world flows so it should come as no surprise that Africa is also home to the best artistic forms of expression and the world’s most vibrant and diverse cultures.
Museums of all stripes are institutions in the service of society that research, collect, conserve, interpret, and exhibit tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity, and sustainability and preserve treasures of our cultural heritage. Museums are a great place to start, especially in getting to know a country better but most importantly its history people, and cultural heritage.
Almost all of Africa’s ancient artistic heritage and natural history collections are preserved in European countries: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Vienna, and Belgium. Difficult as it may be to articulate the magnitude of this reality, it is even more difficult to learn how such previous cultural identities were looted and stolen from their birthplace. According to the most commonly cited figures from a 2007 UNESCO forum, 90% to 95% of sub-Saharan cultural artifacts are outside Africa. Experts estimate that 80-90% of Africa’s cultural heritage can be found in European museums or rather in their storage. Statistics compiled by the historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr suggest that hundreds of thousands of artworks are held in the collections of European museums, many of which were created with the intent to show off their countries’ colonial enterprise. Many include works from Benin that were taken during the colonial period and ended up in museums across Europe and North America. At the Africa Museum in Belgium, director Guido Gryseels states, that 85 percent of the museum’s collection comes from the Congo — the site of Belgium’s former colony in Central Africa. The British Museum in London and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris hold around 70,000 pieces.
With all the updates about some European museums returning the looted arts to their rightful countries, the progress has been slow. There is also this bogus argument by some curators about the conditions that fragile objects might be held in, sometimes in countries with unstable and corrupt politics. African governments reject this view, arguing that investments in state-of-the-art museums such as Senegal’s Museum of Black Civilizations or the planned Edo Museum of West African Art in Nigeria prove Africans can safeguard their own cultural artifacts. This is a virulent argument and as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argued, a paternalistic arrogance of the most stunning sort. It does not matter whether Africans or Asians or Latin Americans can take care of the art stolen from them; what matters is that it is theirs.
We, the people of Africa and the diaspora, must stand together and demand the return of our stolen heritage. We must challenge the narrative that says our treasures are safer in foreign hands. We must reclaim our history and tell our own stories. One powerful tool at our disposal is the boycott. We can refuse to visit these museums until they return what they have stolen. We can encourage artists, scholars, and tourists to take their talents and resources elsewhere. A boycott is not just about economic pressure. It is about sending a message. It is about showing the world that we will no longer tolerate the theft of our culture. It is about reclaiming our dignity and our rightful place in the world. Let us stand together and demand justice for Africa’s stolen heritage. Let us send a clear message that the time for colonialism is over. The time for restitution is now.
- Origins Centre Museum Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Centre is a world-renowned facility that showcases the origins of humanity and the evolution of culture in the African continent. The interactive exhibits at Origins Centre take visitors on an extraordinary journey of discovery, which begins with the origins of humankind in Africa and then moves through the development of technology, art, culture and symbolism. The Origins Centre displays evidence of the earliest human art, including a priceless collection of rock art—some of the oldest human art that survives to the present day. The museum also displays some of the earliest human-made tools and technology, some of which are even older than Homo sapiens. Finds such as engraved ostrich eggshell, engraved ochre and marine shell beads suggest that symbolic expression and other innovative behaviors appeared in Africa 100 000 years ago.
2. The National Bardo Museum, Tunisia
The National Bardo Museum is one of the most important museums in the Mediterranean region and the second museum on the continent after the Egyptian Museum of Cairo by the richness of its collections. It traces the history of Tunisia over several millennia and across several civilizations through a wide variety of archaeological pieces.
Housed in an old beylical palace since 1888, it has been the setting for the exhibition of many major works discovered since the beginning of archaeological research in the country. Undoubtedly one of the art museums in Africa that represents every region of the country. Since its collections date back to 40,000 years, it includes the Hermaion of El Guettar—the first temple edified by man to honor the supreme force of the sky. The museum is in an old 19th Century Beylic palace. It contains the largest collection of mosaics in the world. Gallery of Christian baptisteries, Roman sarcophaguses, and large collections of Punic jewels are a few treasures you will find within. The great Tunisian sites classified by UNESCO as part of the world’s virtual pantheon of humanity are:
3. Nigerian National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria
The Nigerian National Museum is a national museum of Nigeria, located in the city of Lagos. Established in 1957 by the English archaeologist Kenneth Murray. The museum has a notable collection of Nigerian art, including pieces of statuary and carvings and archaeological and ethnographic exhibits. Of note is a terra-cotta human head known as the Jemaa Head (c. 900 to 200 BC), part of the Nok culture. The piece is named after Jema’a, the village where it was uncovered. It is located at Onikan, Lagos Island.
The museum has some amazing artifacts, though honestly, the presentation is a little disheveled. The Cycle of Life exhibit explores traditional Nigerian life, from birth to death to the afterlife. Exhibits include a clay Yoruba pot to bury an umbilical cord and an Egungun masquerade costume used for dancing during a chief’s funeral; the voluminous orange cape has sequins, coins, and beads attached. Don’t forget to stop by the museum’s crafts village, where you can buy woodcarvings and more.
4. The Museum of Black Civilizations, known in French as the Musée des Civilisations noires(MCN), Dakar, Senegal
A 150,000-square-foot, circular structure, modeled after the traditional houses of Senegal’s Casamance region. Inside the Museum of Black Civilizations, visitors will find ambitious displays spanning both centuries and continents. The exhibition “Cradle of Humankind,” for instance, looks back to human origins in Africa and features early stone tools. “African Civilizations: Continuous Creation of Humanity” delves into the history of masks and “the traditions of Sufism and Christianity in Africa.” Another exhibition hall, “The Caravan and Caravel,” explores how African communities in the Americas grew out of the slave trade. Among the contemporary artworks to appear in the new museum are pieces by the Cuban artist Elio Rodriguez, South Africa’s Andries Botha, and the Haitian artist Philippe Dodard. The collections, however, are not complete. The MCN has room for some 18,000 artworks.
Another section of the museum features Good As Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women is the first major exhibition of Senegalese gold jewelry to date that focuses on the history of Senegal’s gold, from past to present, and the beauty and complexity of the way Senegalese women use ornament and fashion to present themselves. Rooted in the Wolof concept of sañse (dressing up, looking, and feeling good), Good As Gold examines the production, display, and circulation of gold in Senegal as it celebrates a significant gift of gold jewelry to the National Museum of African Art collection.
5. Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) Benin City, Nigeria
The new EMOWAA draws inspiration from its historical architectural typologies and establishes its own courtyard in the form of a public garden, exhibiting a variety of indigenous flora and a canopy that offers shade – a welcoming green environment suitable for gatherings, ceremonies, and events. The galleries float above the gardens and are articulated by a series of elevated volumes – an inversion of the courtyard typology – within each of which sit pavilions that take their form from fragments of reconstructed historic compounds. These fragments allow the objects themselves to be arranged in their pre-colonial context and offer visitors the opportunity to better understand the true significance of these artifacts within the traditions, political economy, and rituals enshrined within the culture of Benin City.
A new dedicated space, EMOWAA will contain the rich, regal, and sacred objects of Benin’s past, in a way that allows visitors not just the possibility of “looking in” but “looking out” into the visual landscape of imagining the once historic borders of a restored ancient kingdom.
“From an initial glance at the preliminary design concept, one might believe this is a traditional museum but, really, what we are proposing is an undoing of the objectification that has happened in the West through full reconstruction – David Adjaye”
6. The National Museum of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Though it houses many different important collections, this museum is most famously known as being the home of Lucy, a fossilized example of Australopithecus Afarensis, a species of early hominid that lived between 3.9 and 2.9 million years ago. Discovered in the late 1970s, she was named after the song played most frequently at the dig site where she was found, The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” though she also has an Amharic name, Dinkinesh, meaning “you are marvelous.”
Lucy became famous around the world, largely due to the book Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, written by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, who led the team that originally discovered Lucy in Ethiopia. Johanson himself assembled Lucy at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and after a multi-year tour of the United States organized by the Houston Museum of Natural Science, she was returned to Addis Ababa.
Lucy is undoubtedly a huge draw, but the museum has a lot more to offer. Begun as a project of the Institute of Archeology as a way to display its findings, the museum has grown into a full-fledged collector and preserver of the paleo-archeological findings and history of the country. It currently operates four main exhibitions, with only the basement dedicated to African paleontology and archeology.
On the first floor, you’ll find pieces relating to the history of the Ethiopian Empire, including those known to have been owned and used by Haile Selassie, the former emperor. The second floor shows the chronological history of the arts in Ethiopia, beginning with traditional handcrafts, jewelry, and utensils and ending with contemporary fine art. The final exhibition attempts to convey the greatness of the history of the country in a comprehensive ethnographic display.
7. Nairobi National Museum, Nairobi, Kenya
Open every day of the year and located just ten minutes from Nairobi’s center, this museum celebrates Kenya’s rich heritage with an art gallery, as well as beautiful architecture and serene botanical gardens. This is one of the art museums in Africa with a long history. Its establishment dates back to 1910. However, work on the site of the current museum started in 1929. It was previously called the Coryndon Museum in honor of Sir Robert Coryndon, a former Governor of Kenya. However, after attaining independence, the name was changed to the National Museums of Kenya. The museum houses celebrated collections of Kenya’s history of contemporary art, culture, and nature.
8. Zinsou Foundation Museum, Villa Ajavon, Ouidah, Benin
The first museum devoted to African contemporary art to open in sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa, this museum focuses on the preservation of African artistic heritage in the land of its origins. The Zinsou Foundation was created in 2005 to promote African art in Benin. Though its headquarters are in Cotonou where it maintains a modest exhibition space, the museum in Ouidah is a much more ambitious undertaking. Housed in a refurbished mansion, it holds the foundation’s permanent collection of contemporary African art.
Since the museum opened in 2013, it has made great strides in its mission to preserve the artistic heritage of Africa. Though the collection began with what the Zinsou family themselves donated from their own personal collections, its holdings have since grown considerably and feature work in many different mediums. Visitors to the museum will find the normal trappings of personal collections like photography, painting, and drawing, as well as 3D work like sculpture and installation. You’ll also find more ephemeral media as the focal point of events and exhibitions.
The foundation is the brainchild of Marie-Cécile Zinsou, the French-Beninese daughter of the former Prime Minister of Benin, Lionel Zinsou, and the grand-niece of Émile Derlin Zinsou who was briefly the president of independent Dahomey following a military coup in 1967. For Marie-Cécile, being a part of a political family was a huge influence in her decision to create the organization, saying, “I guess I have a sense of duty; I think that’s a feeling you have when you come from a political family. You have a duty towards your country. After having an experience of working with children in an orphanage for two years, I felt that I had to do something and thought my part could be related to education. That’s how we started the museum and the libraries.”
As part of Marie-Cécile’s vision for the museum and the greater foundation to serve as the backbone for comprehensive arts education programs, admission to the museum, exhibition space, and attendance to any of their classes or events is always completely free.
9. The Pretoria Art Museum South Africa
The foundation stone for the Pretoria Art Museum was laid on October 19th, 1962. It was initially created to house the growing art collections in the City Hall. At that time, it had only a small collection of artworks by South African artists. However, with other museums across the nation already doing that, The Pretoria Art Museum wanted to be different. In recent years, the museum pays more attention to contemporary developments in South African arts. This is urban and rural art as well as traditional art. Inasmuch as South African art remains the main focus, wherever possible, the museum acquires sculptures and paintings from famous international artists.
10. The Grand Egyptian Museum Egypt The Grand
Egyptian Museum holds in trust for Egypt and the World a chronological statement for the ancient history of Egypt over the past 7000 years. Neighboring a timeless wonder, the Giza Pyramids, the new museum is to pay homage to eternal Ancient Egyptian monuments, treasures, and history hosting over 100,000 artifacts, about 3500 of which belong to the famous King Tutankhamen.
The design for the Grand Egyptian Museum was reached as a result of an international architectural competition initiated by the Ministry of Culture on January 7th, 2002. The competition was under the patronage of UNESCO and supervised by the UI. The long-awaited grand opening of the new museum is said to be by the last quarter of 2020. With its unique position on the cusp between the past and the present, the Grand Egyptian Museum will lie the repository for ancient artifacts that creates an interactive experience for the visitor; it will build a bridge between the past and the future.
11. Musem de l’Armee AlgiersThe Musem de l’Armee Algiers, Algeria
Located near the famous monument of the capital Makam El Chahid (Monument of Martyrs), in the municipality of El Madania in the wilaya of Algiers. The collections of Musem de l’Armee Algiers: The African Art Museum displays various objects, clothing, weapons, and other unique African Art pieces that belonged to the Algerian fighters of the Numidian era through colonization to the present day. Exceptional items include a Napoleon III sword offered to Emir Abdelkader, the guillotine at Serkadji prison, and the personal belongings of Ali la Pointe. El Madania is a municipality in Algiers Province, Algeria. It is administratively part of Sidi M’Hamed district. Its municipal code is 1603 and its postal code is 16075. It has a population of 51,404 as of the 1998 census, which gives it 15 seats in the PMA.
12.Kigali Genocide Memorial, Kigali, Rwanda
This memorial was built specifically to honor the victims of the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. As their capital Kigali is nearly in the exact center of the country, it’s in an ideal location to serve as a place to reflect on the future of the country and for survivors to remember and pay respects to their loved ones.
The exhibitions are threefold, beginning with the largest, the one that thoroughly documents the atrocities of the 1994 Tutsi genocide. Starting with the pre-colonial history of what is now known as Rwanda, it takes viewers through the premeditated nature of the Rwandan genocide and extolls upon the successes of the opposition. Venture further into the museum to find the Children’s Room, which is dedicated to the memory and the scant remaining stories of the infants and children that lost their lives during this untenable period of Rwandan history.
A huge reason the memorial was conceptualized and constructed was to offer a respectable burial site for the people who were murdered. During and immediately after the genocide, the resultant human remains were either callously thrown into mass graves or left in the open to deteriorate, but a massive effort was launched to collect and reinter these people’s desecrated remains as a part of the memorial. An enormous portion of the memorial’s function today is to act as a dignified burial space for the people whose bodies were desecrated after their death and thereby offering visitors a reputable place to pay their respects.
A tremendous part of the mission of the memorial is to educate visitors about the pressures that led to the Rwandan Genocide as well as the consequences of it. By also including corollaries to other similar acts in history — like the Cambodian Killing Fields or the Holocaust — they aim to prevent future generations from repeating these atrocities in the future.
13. The Museum of Contemporary African Art Al Maaden, Marrakech, Morocco
Delicately navigating its unique position to highlight both Middle Eastern/North African art and Sub-Saharan African art, the Museum of Contemporary African Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Marrakech houses both a permanent collection and rotating exhibitions that aid in exploring this confluence. Housed in a historic neo-Moorish building, this museum is brand new, having opened only in 2018.
Its exhibitions belie particular respect for work across many disciplines, as it’s equally likely to show a painting as it is a work of experimental digital media. The offerings also seem to reveal a drive to display work across a wide range and different types of experience, as you are likely to see work from both someone classically trained and somebody self-taught. Overall, the experience more closely captures both the experience of the layperson to the arts in Africa and the African artist’s relationship to the sometimes disjointed African art market.
In addition to the exhibition space, MACAAL has particularly dedicated itself to arts education evidenced by their offerings as far as instruction and residence. Most ambitiously, it offered a four-day boot camp for emerging African talent within the arts sphere. Created in conjunction with A Million Dots, 20 young professionals were invited to MACAAL campus in January 2020 to participate in training and workshops taught by some of the greats in African fine art, like the aforementioned Marie-Cécile Zinsou, founder of the Zinsou Foundation in Ouidah, and Koyo Kouoh, director and chief curator at the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town.
14. L’Aventure du Sucre, Pamplemousses, Mauritius
Though sugar is now cheap and plentiful, it was once a commodity so sought after that its value in trade was akin to gold or silk. In Mauritius, sugar has long been a lucrative crop and is still cultivated there to this day, using some 85 percent of the country’s arable land. The Dutch were the first colonizers to capitalize on the sugar cane industry in Mauritius as early as the 17th century, but it was the French who transformed this production into a worldwide affair. By investing in infrastructure by producing the nation’s first modern sugar mills, they succeeded in legitimizing the Mauritian sugar trade on a global scale.
L’Aventure du Sucre is a museum dedicated to the complicated colonial history of Mauritius’s sugar industry, built in a former sugar refining facility. Located within the Beau Plan Sugar Estate, the museum is set at the end of a long boulevard flanked with coconut palms and bougainvillea to which the factory is juxtaposed. The vast and industrial interior is softened somewhat by the attractions therein: the lights and screens of the multimedia exhibits that are the backbone of a comprehensive tour.
The museum is also very near the Pamplemousses Botanical Gardens, a 300-year-old attraction featuring some incredible flora and fauna. Visitors can see tortoises and java deer, as well as the always spectacular giant pads of the Victoria water lilies that grow in its many ponds. Since it’s in the area, be sure to pay the gardens a visit as well.
15. Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa
Operating as a public nonprofit, this museum is, in a lot of ways, the backbone of contemporary art on the African continent. Built-in the refurbished Grain Silo Complex at the V&A Waterfront, Zeitz MOCAA has accomplished a great deal in its short history. Opened in 2017, it is the largest museum dedicated to African art of any kind in the entire world, and though it focuses on promoting both established and emerging artists, its laser-pointed focus is almost exclusively on works from the 21st century.
More than just a museum, Zeitz MOCAA acts as a platform for African and African diasporic artists, as well as a mediator and purveyor of arts education and discourse. Also headquartered on its premises is The Center for Art Education and The Center for the Moving Image, both dedicated to promoting their respective disciplines via instruction and display. It is currently curated by the world-renowned Cameroonian-born Koyo Kouoh, the former artistic director of RAW Materials in Dakar, Senegal. She took over the curatorial helm of Zeitz MOCAA in 2018, and much of the museum’s continued success and viability in the world art zeitgeist is directly credited to her leadership.
16. The Cameroon National Museum Cameroon
The origin of this museum dates back to 1930s. However, after the country’s independence, the country’s first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo carried out an extension work on the building. The building only got the status as a museum in 2014 following a prime ministerial decree. There are over 850 artifacts on display in the museum. This collection cuts across the different regions of the country.
Credit: trailblazertravelz