National Museums in Africa

Identity, History and Politics

Raymond Silverman, George Abungu, Peter Probst, Raymond Silverman, George Abungu, Peter Probst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000428728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: African History

National Museums in Africa brings the voices of African museum professionals into dialogue with scholars and, by so doing, is able to consider the state of African national museums from fresh perspectives.

Covering all regions of the continent, the volume's thirteen chapters allow for a deep and nuanced understanding of the intricate interplay between past and present in contemporary Africa. Taking stock of the shifting museum landscape in Africa, with new players like China and South Korea challenging the conditions of cultural exchange, the book demonstrates that national museums are being rediscovered as important sites of political engagement and cultural negotiation. This is the first book to critically examine the roles national museums in Africa have played in the societies in which they are situated, but it is also the first to consider the roles that national museums might play in current debates concerning the restitution and repatriation of cultural patrimony taken from Africa during the colonial era.

Informed by a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, this ground-breaking book will appeal to anyone interested in museums in Africa. It will be particularly useful to scholars and students working in the areas of museum and heritage studies, African studies, anthropology, archaeology, history, art history and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

Visibility, democracy and the national museum network in Morocco

Samir Kafas and Ashley V. Miller

MUSEUM BRIEF

• Name of museum network: National Foundation for Museums (Fondation nationale des musées)
• Date museum network was founded: April 18, 2011
• Governance: Directed by a not-for-profit institution, working on behalf of the state
• Size: Multiple sites, therefore unknown
• Number of museums in network: 14
• Organization of museum (names of departments): Foundation headquarters in Rabat (president, 6 board members, 12 staff members); regional museums (51 staff members, each museum with a curator, an assistant curator, technical assistants, security and janitorial staff)
• Size of collections (number of objects): Over 65,000 (inventory of existing collections currently in progress)
• Nature of collections: Ethnographic, archaeological, modern and contemporary fine arts
• Size of staff (number of employees): 63 (2017)
• Annual budget in USD: $4.5 million (2019)
• Number of visitors per year: 350,000 (2017)

Introduction

This chapter examines a critical moment of transition in Morocco's national museum landscape. While many national museums in African countries are the direct product of nation-building campaigns of the mid-twentieth century, the Moroccan state has only recently acknowledged the symbolic potential of the public museum as a space for communicating ideas about the nation. By royal decree (dahir) of April 18, 2011, King Mohammed VI of Morocco (r. 1999–present) affirmed the creation of a new National Foundation for Museums (Fondation nationale des musées, FNM), a private not-for-profit association that manages 14 public museums, including 3 new museums alongside 11 which were formerly administered by Morocco's Ministry of Culture. Created only three months prior to the king's ratification of a constitutional referendum in July 2011, the FNM is an important initiative put forward to express a new relationship between the Moroccan state and its citizens, one based on the principles of cultural pluralism and democratic participation.

The 2011 referendum endorsed by King Mohammed VI newly defines Morocco as a “united state” with a decentralized territorial organization, designed to ensure the balance and separation of powers as well as the “participative democracy of the citizenry” (Royaume du Maroc 2011a, article 1). Furthermore, it acknowledges the country's plural identities and histories in an unprecedented way, describing a Moroccan national identity “forged through the convergence of its Arab-Islamic, Amazigh, and Saharan-Hassanic components, nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic, and Mediterranean influences” (Royaume du Maroc 2011a, pbml). Echoing these sentiments in his introductory letter for the FNM's website, the foundation's president, Mehdi Qotbi, extols Morocco's cultural diversity and expresses the FNM's commitment to ensuring “the preservation and enrichment of Morocco's patrimony, on the one hand, and the democratization of culture and its accessibility to all of [Morocco's] citizens, on the other” (Qotbi 2017). Through these terms, Morocco's national museum network is slated to become an important site for cultural expression that, importantly, will be financially and ideologically supported by the nation's leaders.

To fully grasp the significance of this recent development, it is important to understand the place of the public museum in Morocco prior to this moment. Inheriting a system of regional museums of ethnography, archaeology and “indigenous arts” established in accordance with the French and Spanish protectorates' preservationist campaigns in Morocco (1912–1956), successive cultural administrations struggled to integrate the country's museums with shifting post-independence notions of national identity and development. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, few public museums had been created and little had changed in the presentation and content of Morocco's colonial-turned-national museums. As we discuss in the first part of this chapter, for many museum professionals and their publics in Morocco, the inadequate infrastructure of the national museum network reflected the state's failure to recognize culture as a public service (Massaia 2013). In 2006, Sakina Rharib, an anthropologist and former director of the Museum of Marrakech, argued that museums continued to occupy a marginal place within Moroccan society due to a “lack of genuine political will to inscribe the museum, and cultural heritage in general, on the plan for a modern and democratic society” (Rharib 2006, 101).

Rharib's commentary points to a central critique leveraged against Morocco's public museums: that they are invisible institutions, both at the level of public policy and public awareness in Morocco. In her study of the place of museums in the postcolonial Moroccan imagination, Katarzyna Pieprzak reveals that local evaluations of Morocco's museums are predominated by narratives of failure and decay and the claim that “on a fundamental level there are no museums in Morocco” (Pieprzak 2010, xiv). In this light, the king's official patronage of the national museum network—alongside a host of programs oriented toward the promotion of arts and culture in Morocco—is itself an important symbolic gesture. Indeed, one of the primary objectives of the FNM is to enhance the presence of the national Moroccan museum network, both domestically and abroad. It proposes to do so through the introduction of major infrastructural changes impacting collections management, training, personnel and funding structures, in combination with an aggressive publicity campaign.

But visibility is not an end in itself. The role that the public museum might play in supporting democracy in Morocco will depend on what the national museum makes visible and, even more, who has the power to control this visibility. In Exhibiting Cultures, Ivan Karp explains that in the public life of museums “[t]he struggle is not only over what is to be represented, but over who will control the means of representing” (Karp 1991, 15). In addressing this problem, we not only examine the museum exhibition as a means of representing but also evaluate how the infrastructure of the museum itself configures access to representation and communicates these processes to the public.

In the second part of the chapter, we consider the relationship between visibility and democracy in the space of the national museum and evaluate the FNM's initial activities according to these interrelated concepts. We conclude with the hypothesis that the primary role of the renovated national museum network in Morocco, as so far conceived by the FNM and its elite supporters, is to represent a cohesive national image based in narratives of democracy, cultural diversity and tolerance rather than to facilitate true democratic access to cultural representation. Participatory democracy in the space of the museum would entail a decentralization of the network's infrastructure and a willingness to support divergent voices and difficult conversations. Such initiatives have so far been overshadowed by the FNM's prioritization of programs supporting Morocco's cultural diplomacy.

The invisible museum? Public museums at the margins (1956–2010)

In 2010, a year before the creation of the FNM, the Ministry of Culture and Communication directed 15 public museums across Morocco (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Public museums related to the Ministry of Culture and Communications, ca. 2010

Museum	City	Date of creation	Type
Dar Batha Museum	Fez	1915	Ethnographic
Oudaïas Museum	Rabat	1915	Ethnographic
Dar Jamai Museum	Meknès	1920	Ethnographic
Museum of the Kasbah	Tanger	1922	Ethno-archaeological
Bab Oqla Museum	Tétouan	1922	Ethnographic
Archaeology Museum	Rabat	1930	Archaeological
Dar Si Saïd Museum	Marrakech	1939	Ethnographic
Archaeology Museum	Tétouan	1939	Archaeological
Archaeology Museum	Larache	1973	Archaeological
Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah Museum	Essaouira	1980	Ethnographic
Ethnographic Museum	Chefchaouen	1985	Ethnographic
Museum of Pottery	Safi	1990	Specialized
Museum of Contemporary Art	Tanger	1990	Specialized
Borj Belqari Museum of Pottery of the Rif and pre-Rif	Meknès	2004	Specialized
Museum of Saharan Arts	Laâyoune	2000	Ethnographic

These state-led regional museums accounted for approximately half of the museums in the country, alongside five public museums directed by other ministerial departments and a fluctuating number of private museums (Tagemouati et al. 2010). The Ministry of Culture and Communication is the most recent iteration of a series of administrations dedicated to the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Regarding national museums in Africa
• 1 Visibility, democracy and the national museum network in Morocco
• 2 The Sudan National Museum and national heritage in Sudan
• 3 National identities and the National Museum of Ethiopia
• 4 National Museums of Kenya: From inception to the post-devolution era
• 5 Collecting obsolete things at the Uganda Museum
• 6 Korea and the New National Museum in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Building a museum, building relations?
• 7 Le Musée des Civilisations Noires: A continuous creation of humanity
• 8 The National Museum of Mali, 1960–present: Protecting and promoting the national cultural heritage
• 9 Le Musée National Boubou Hama du Niger: A return to research
• 10 Giving the National Museum of Ghana a new life
• 11 The Nigerian National Museums and the challenges of national unity and development: The Black Benz and the return of lost treasures
• 12 Toward a critical history of the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe: Rethinking pastness and materiality
• 13 Rethinking the national and the museum at Iziko Museums of South Africa
• Coda: National museums in Africa: A conversation
• Index