Decolonizing Museums and Imagining the Future of Postcolonial Culture in Francophone North & West Africa

Abstract

This dissertation is a history of the processes of decolonizing and democratizing museums in Francophone Africa between 1950 and 1980. As early as the 1850s, French scholars and imperial authorities founded ethnographic, archaeological, and fine arts museums in their African colonies, which kept artifacts in valorized spaces reserved for elite European audiences while presenting typified representations of African populations. During and after decolonization, a generation of African curators, scholars, artists, and government officials were left to grapple with the colonial legacies of these museums, and to recontextualize them to better reflect postcolonial cultural politics.

Contemporary museum professionals – particularly in Western museums whose collections were assembled through colonial violence – have been engaged in debates about tactics to “decolonize the museum” for the past 10 years. This dissertation argues that strategies leveraged by African museographers half a century ago to transform colonial museums should be considered early, progressive attempts to decolonize the museum. While in some circumstances, these strategies are clearly earlier iterations of contemporary efforts to decolonize collections and exhibitions, other practices highlighted in this dissertation in fact challenge the twenty-first century understanding of what it means to “decolonize the museum.” This dissertation also challenges the perception of the museum as a solely Western institution by highlighting African contributions to museographical programming and exhibition. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates that despite their colonial legacies, these museums played a critical role in the elucidation of post-independence national culture in Senegal, Tunisia, and Algeria.

To make these arguments, I focus on several specific examples: the Musée Théodore Monod d’Art Africain de l’IFAN in Dakar, the Musée du Bardo in Tunis, and the Musée National des Beaux-Arts in Algiers. Through research in institutional, ministerial, and national archives, site visits and oral history interviews, I analyze how each museum created and represented colonial knowledge during the imperial period. Later, I outline how African curators and museum administrators renovated exhibition spaces to counteract ethnographic narratives, designed education programs to democratize elite spaces, and shared knowledge with other African museum practitioners to decrease reliance on European museological concepts and standards.