Museums in Postcolonial Europe

Dominic Thomas, Dominic Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317987741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The history of European nation-building and identity formation is inextricably connected with museums, and the role they play in displaying the acquired spoils and glorious symbols of geopolitical power in order to mobilize public support for expansionist ventures. This book examines the contemporary debate surrounding the museum in postcolonial Europe.

Although there is no consensus on the European colonial experience, the process of decolonization in Europe has involved an examination of the museum's place, and ethnic minorities and immigrants have insisted upon improved representation in the genealogies of European nation-states. Museological practices have been subjected to greater scrutiny in light of these political and social transformations. In addition to the refurbishment and restructuring of colonial-era museums, new spaces have also been inaugurated to highlight the contemporary importance of museums in postcolonial Europe, as well as the significance of incorporating the perspective of postcolonial European populations into these spaces.

This book includes contributions from leading experts in their fields and represents a comparative trans-historical and transcolonial examination which contextualises and reinterpretates to the legacies and experiences of European museums.

This book was published as a special issue of Africa and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

Colonial museums in a postcolonial Europe

Robert Aldrich

Department of History, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

Colonialists made great efforts to mark cities with signs of empire, the monuments that commemorated battles lost and won, the ministries from which imperial power reached to the moving frontiers of the known world, churches enshrining the relics of martyrs to the faith, the remains of colonial exhibitions. Particularly potent among these imperial creations were museums that exhibited empire. This article explores the metamorphosis of museums in London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam from the colonial to the postcolonial era, the way in which their immediate transformation mirrors disquiet about the heritage of imperialism, and the fashion in which subsequent changes testify to a rediscovery of the legacy of empire. The examples comprise several of the major colonialist institutions, though many other colonialist collections and displays existed. With decolonisation, in some cases, objects and displays once designated as colonial simply melded into general collections. The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, alongside new initiatives such as the Quai Branly Museum and Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration in France, have naturally found themselves at the forefront of important debates. The challenge facing the inheritors of colonial museums and collections comes from assessing the legacy of the past and establishing its connection with contemporary postcolonial communities.

Visitors to Europe's grand old imperial capitals can find many reminders of colonial days and the imperial sunset. In London, Canada House and South Africa House, built for the offices of the settler dominions, bracket Trafalgar Square, with Australia House not far away, while a postcolonial statue of Nehru stands guard outside the Raj-era India House. In Lisbon, travellers may take a quaint tram along the Tagus River to Belém to discover the fortress tower that guided navigators off towards their distant destinations, the Jerónimos monastery built with profits from the Indies standing in the Praça do Império facing a statue of Vasco Da Gama, a colonial botanical garden decorated with busts of ‘natives’ and a Chinese gateway, a grandiose monument to the explorers built for a 1940 exhibition of the Lusophone world, and a monument – an arch left un-triumphantly open at the top – for soldiers killed fighting in Africa against nationalists in the wars of decolonisation. In Amsterdam's Oosterpark and Paris's Luxembourg Gardens, tourists and local residents can pause before memorials to the enslaved and their emancipation. From Brussels to Berlin, from Copenhagen to Madrid, buildings and monuments scattered across the landscape bear witness to empires past, modern parallels to the now ruined vestiges of imperium in Rome, whose emperors bequeathed arches and columns to later memorialists, just as they left the ideas of conquest and rule to the proconsuls of new empires.¹

Colonialists made great efforts to mark cities with signs of empire, the plaques and statues that sanctified great men (but only rarely great colonial women), the monuments that commemorated battles lost and won, the ministries from which imperial power reached to the moving frontiers of the known world, churches enshrining the relics of martyrs to the faith, the remains of colonial exhibitions. Particularly potent among these imperial creations were museums that exhibited empire. Empire-building and museum-building went hand in hand, as naturalists accompanying missions of exploration returned with exotica that filled Enlightenment cabinets of curiosities, collections become so vast that museums rose to house them.² Natural history museums from the 1700s onwards displayed specimens of flora and fauna, and of arts and crafts, often with mummies and skulls and other bits and pieces of human bodies. Conquest brought booty: the British Museum gained treasures ranging from the Indian diamonds to the bronzes of Benin, and the Louvre in the early 1800s created galleries for objects souvenired by Napoleon in Egypt. A passion for jungles and deserts, bustling ports and verdant islands filled art galleries with paintings of the Levant, the Orient and Oceania. Museums of ethnography opened – in Paris, in the 1870s, for instance – to chronicle the lives of ‘primitive’ folk and strange cultures. Relatively few museums lack some material trace of Europe's engagement with the wider world, even if only a length of silk or a set of china acquired on the other side of the world.³

Museums expressly founded for the purpose of promoting colonialism eventually took pride of place in showing off the colonies. Their builders, backers and curators intended them to proclaim the merits of empire, to win over a not always enthusiastic public about the benefits of colonial adventures that cost many lives and much money, to advance the mission to civilise the ‘savages’ and develop the resources over which colonial flags flew, to educate the public about the obscure corners of greater Britain or la plus grande France, to stimulate imperial vocations. In each of the colonising countries, which included almost all the great powers and some minor ones as well, explicitly colonialist museums and institutes proudly engaged in propaganda for the empire; they blended politics with aesthetics, and education with entertainment. Though seldom able to rival the older and often larger art museums, colonial museums multiplied and survived right through the era of colonialism.⁴ Yet when the colonial flags were lowered, what was to become of museums that lost their very reason for being?

This article looks at some of these museums – in London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam – and their metamorphosis from the colonial to the postcolonial, the way in which their immediate transformation mirrors disquiet about the heritage of imperialism, and the fashion in which subsequent changes testify to a rediscovery of the legacy of empire.⁵ The examples comprise several of the major colonialist institutions, though many other colonialist collections and displays existed. With decolonisation, in some cases, objects and displays once designated as colonial simply melded into general collections. Many of the smaller and provincial colonial museums established in the early 1900s quietly shut their doors. A few old-style museums with intimate colonial connections, notably the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, have gracefully maintained their old galleries, serving not only as collections of ethnographic objects but museums of collecting and museography

Building colonial museums

The creation of the specifically colonial museums in Brussels, London, Amsterdam and Paris, opened from the 1880s to the 1930s, combined state initiatives with private efforts by colonial lobbies. In London, Brussels and Paris, museum-building followed successful colonial exhibitions with lasting displays of empire, and the hope that such displays, like the empires themselves, would be permanent – a poem composed for the opening of London's Imperial Institute vaunted the ‘Empire of a Thousand Years’. The museums symbolically brought the empire to national capitals, and made imperial capitals out of national capitals. Architects constructed grandiose buildings in an effort to give colonialism appropriate status to the other cultural endeavours embodied in concert halls, national libraries and the other museums of major cities. The ornamentation and décor displayed motifs drawn from the colonial empires, often accompanied by allegorical figures representing the merits of colonialism. Authorities chose significant sites: the collection of museums and educational institutions in London's South Kensington, a royal domain outside Brussels, a location in central Amsterdam and a neighbourhood targeted for redevelopment in eastern Paris. Royal (or, in the case of France, presidential) patronage provided benediction, and colonial officers, administrators and settlers made donations of works that they had collected. Each museum, though laying out the objects of ‘traditional’ and ‘primitive’ societies in its showcases, hoped to be modern: to show off the achievements of colonial powers and the arrival of ‘civilization’ in the colonies. Each museum devoted most of its attention to the colonies of that particular country, rarely venturing beyond but attempting to show (in the words of the British institution) ‘the Empire under one roof’. The museums all developed numerous auxiliary activities, ranging from lecture and film series to scientific experimentation; indeed, in London and Amsterdam, they took the name of ‘institutes’ rather than ‘museums’. Scientific work to explore and develop colonial resources formed an important part of the activities (except, perhaps, in Paris).⁶ Each museum built on a tradition of exhibitions of exotic and colonial objects, but now with an explicitly colonialist brief.

Avowedly colonial museums were by no means the first collections or displays of art from the empires conquered and consolidated from the eighteenth century onwards. The British Museum possessed Pacific objets d'art collected by Captain Cook, and East Indian works acquired by Sir Stamford Raffles during his tenure as lieutenant-governor of Java. Sir George Grey, governor of New Zealand, presented the Bloomsbury museum with works from Oceania in the 1850s, and the widow of a governor of Ceylon donated items from that island. In 1872, the British Museum bought at auction the largest collection of Indian sculpture in Britain, holdings put together by General Charles Stuart, who had served in the East India Company. The family of Charles Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, presented objects from his realm. These, however, constituted items for an art and history museum; though the pieces had a colonial connection, as curators were well aware at the time and later critics would underline, the British Museum was not a colonial museum (Francis 1975; Mack 1999).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the East India Company had opened to the public its collection of Indian art and antiquities, which was transferred temporarily to the India Office after the demise of the Company. The Crystal Palace put more Indian and colonial artefacts on show, and vast numbers of other items entering public collections created a need for other museums for a Victorian public much taken with exhibitions, fairs and similar displays. In response, the South Kensington Museum was set up in 1857, and some of the collections of the British Museum and the India Office moved into the new institution, which concentrated on decorative arts. The intention, according to Tim Barringer, remained didactic: ‘central to the intentions of its founders was the idea of promoting good design among both producers and consumers’ (Barringer 1998, p. 14). European and non-European decorative arts were on show, including items ranging from a plaster cast of Trajan's column (‘significantly, one of the great monuments of Imperial Rome, often seen as a parallel to the British empire’, according to Barringer 1998, p. 17) and casts of Indian carvings, gateways, monuments and other wonders. Indian objects were central to the South Kensington Museum and housed in a designated building, though other extra-European works were added, including the royal regalia of the Abyssinian King Theodore, taken by the British in a military campaign in 1867, and objects seized from the Ashanti in the early 1870s. The South Kensington Museum, renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899 and still housed in buildings constructed in 1909, became a panorama of the empire, what Barringer calls a ‘three-dimensional imperial archive’ and ‘the most spectacular repository of the material culture of empire’ (Barringer 1998, p. 11, 27).

In 1886, the success of the British Colonial and Indian Exhibition inspired the Prince of Wales to spearhead an effort to establish an Imperial Institute, the cornerstone laid to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887. Six years later, the monarch opened its massive home in South Kensington; designed by Thomas Collcutt, the buildings sported a tower, domes and gables, in a hotchpotch of Romanesque, Renaissance and Byzantine styles, with some more exotic contrivances, meant to suggest the architectural wealth of Britain and the empire. Strictly speaking, the Imperial Institute was not primarily a museum, but was intended to be a centre for the empire in London. Its scientific laboratories pursued agricultural and mineralogical research targeted at increased colonial production; a library and series of public lectures provided information on the empire. Offices housed such societies as the Women's Emigration Association and the Colonial Nursing Association; meeting rooms, dining rooms and a billiard room offered space to visiting colonials and colonialists (Golant 1984; MacKenzie 1986; Sheppard 1975; Crinson 1999; Barringer 1998).

According to John MacKenzie, for its first 40 years, the Institute was an ‘almost complete failure’ (p. 122), the ‘mausoleum of imperial hopes’ (p. 122) attracting little enthusiasm. Among its other activities, the ‘colonial exhibits were dreary and failed to stimulate the interest of the public’ (MacKenzie 1986, p. 127). The First World War breathed new life into the Institute, as it found a role in wartime propaganda. In the inter-war years, it wound down scientific work to concentrate almost entirely on propaganda, discovering a new medium in cinema – documentaries and travelogues succeeded in drawing in visitors, including school groups. MacKenzie notes that ‘steps were taken to brighten the galleries, to provide livelier exhibits, in particular dioramas of imperial economic activity’ (1986, p. 133) cloves in Zanzibar, tin in Malaya, etc., joined by displays on such topics as ‘A trip down the Irrawaddy’ and ‘Round Barbados’. Though still a minor museum among the wealth of galleries in London, and only one of a large cohort of imperial associations, the Institute had established its place, and again played a part in imperial and wartime propaganda, in particular, through a series of in-house and extra-mural lectures, often illustrated with slides or film, that attracted hundreds of thousands of auditors around Britain in the early 1940s.

Across the Channel, one of the oldest purpose-built colonial museums stands in a park in the Brussels suburb of Tervuren, the Royal Museum of Central Africa (as it is now called), built by King Leopold II to display his and Belgium's empire. An exhibition on the Congo provided its genesis. It was held on the site of the palace (which had burned down in 1867) of Leopold's sister Charlotte, who had gone insane after the execution of her husband, the would-be Mexican emperor Maximilian. Like many subsequent exhibitions, and a few prototypes held previously, the Tervuren fair was filled with artefacts such as ivory statues (testifying to the Congo's prosperous ivory trade) and ethnographic art, alongside tapestries portraying Civilisation and Barbarity, the Family and Polygamy, Religion and Idolatry, and Liberty and Slavery. Flora and fauna were on display inside the Palais des Colonies, and four ‘African villages’ (with over 200 Congolese) welcomed visitors outside (Wynants 1997; Cornelis 2000; Bouttiaux 1999).

The king inaugurated a permanent colonial museum in the old exhibition building in Tervuren in 1898. Charles Girault, architect of the Petit Palais in Paris, meanwhile designed a more commodious African museum – plans for smaller museums devoted to China and Japan (where Leopold hoped to find footholds) came to nought – which King Albert opened in 1910 shortly after Leopold's death. As in other colonial museums in Europe, the enormous building was (and is) charged with colonial motifs. A marble floor pattern in the entry reproduces the star emblem of the Congo Free State. Above tower emblematic statues of Africans, and there was an allegory of ‘Belgium bringing civilisation to the colonies’. A wall engraving bore a quotation from Albert: ‘For a people imbued with justice, the colonising mission can be nothing but a mission of advanced civilization’. Maps showed the extent of Belgium's colonial estate, and a later honour roll commemorated colonial administrato...