

On 29th of November 2019, the Afrika Museum will open a new semi-permanent exhibition. This exhibition is part of reframing the museums’ vision on how to represent Africa, its peoples, cultures and histories, in relation to the Netherlands, and Europe more broadly. The intention of this new exhibition is to move beyond the limited and limiting tradition of ethnographic displays in order to develop more complex ways for presenting the history and contemporary realities of the very diverse African continent.
As part of the development of the new exhibition, we are aware of the “impossibility” of such an ambition. Indeed, the museum has had a long, even failed history, of such representational practices, mired in a broader discursive and representational economy that presented Africa through an Eurocentric lens and positioned Africans, their religion and ritual practices as if in need of civilisation – the civilising mission. On this account, Africa and its people were at worst ‘primitive’, ‘backwards’, ‘a place of darkness’, and at its best ‘underdeveloped’ and in need of salvation. Unfortunately, this remains a stubborn imaginary of Africa that still exists today.
As a former missionary museum, the Afrika Museum has been part of this representational economy. Embedded in a complex overlap between Christianity and colonialism, it can be seen as a tool for the civilising mission. For some, it was a forerunner in representing Africa beyond the ‘savage slot’, while for others it could not escape this representational structure.
This opening comes in the wake of decades long critique of the negative imaginary of Africa and Africans in the West. This critique has not limited itself to (ethnographic) museums, but emerged from diverse literary, artistic, academic and (political) activist circles. There has also been a profound growth in attention for art and other creative practices from Africa and the Diaspora, leading to new biennales, galleries, museums, and other platforms. This also coincides with similar growth in practices of “self-writing” from authors, curators, scholars and designers from the continent itself, that, following Felwine Sarr, might be interpreted as the repositioning of Africa ‘in the world on its own initiative and on the basis of a vision that reflects its own specific particularities.’
Acknowledging the museum’s history:
Together with artists, designers, writers, scholars and curators from Africa and the Diaspora, we will grapple with this long history of representing Africa, foregrounding the critical work currently being done globally to rethink how to represent Africa. We see this workshop as part of our ongoing attempt to reorganise our own museum away from representational certainty, and towards a new kind of institution and institutional practices, in relation to Africa.