On Shared Heritage and Its (False) Promises

On December 1, 2013, the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium, closed its doors to allow for a three-year renovation. Several years of planning and preparations preceded this moment, with respect to both the museum building and its projected extensions and to the necessity to develop a new permanent exhibition. The closure of the museum received considerable public attention. Taking the closing events and their press coverage as a starting point, I wish to reflect on the divergence of opinion that exists with respect to what is at stake with the RMCA’s renovation project (Fig. 1). In so doing I will pay particular attention to the evolution in the way the institution’s collections have been framed in the last two decades. My main argument is that parallel to the development of a new critical thinking in the museum, the RMCA has, in line with global developments, jumped on the heritage train in search of a new identity, a new mission, and a particular form of excellence. The ensuing representational practices have political implications that are rarely visible at the surface but nonetheless generate a range of tensions that may pose a threat to the renovation’s overall success. I will conclude by making a plea for how the museum might be turned into a place of effective intercultural dialogue that is capable of sustaining the weight of history. I should specify that my perspective is one of participant observation. The ideas expressed here are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues at the RMCA.

The RMCA’s renovation project took root at the end of the 1990s, when the Belgian Development Cooperation started funding a process to “update and refurbish” the outdated permanent displays. For a variety of reasons these had been left largely unchanged since the late 1950s, when the Congo was still a Belgian colony. The objective was to bring their content more in accordance with both contemporary public policy and scholarship and to turn them into a more effective tool for raising public awareness and promoting dialogue about North-South issues.¹ The initial project led to a number of critical temporary exhibitions in the first decade of the twenty-first century that testified to a growing concern with the history of the collections, issues of cultural property, and demands for more inclusive representations.

The exhibition “ExitCongoMuseum” (2000) for the first time zoomed in on the conditions under which most of the objects were collected in Congo, determined by the social, economic, and political inequalities of colonialism. The exhibition also included a section with contemporary art that was curated by the Congolese artist Toma Luntumbue. “Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era” (2005) for the first time tackled Belgium’s colonial past in an exhibition that was both successful and controversial. The exhibition “Indépendance! Congolese Tell Their Stories of 50 Years of Independence” (2010) told the history of the independence of Congo from the perspective of Congolese. “Kongo across the Waters” (2013) looked at the long history of West Central Africa and traced Kongo contributions to the development of African American cultures in the US South, putting collections of the RMCA for the first time in an Atlantic perspective. Other landmark exhibitions of smaller size included “Headdresses” (2006), which featured the results of an in-depth study of the collecting histories of the exhibited objects, and “Congo Far West” (2011), the first exhibition at the RMCA based on the work of two African artists in residence, the Congolese Sammy Baloji and Patrick Mudekereza.

These exhibitions are the ones that are most often referred to as having charted a new course for the RMCA (Aldrich 2009:151, Hasian and Wood 2010:137, Bragard 2011:94, Hoenig 2014:9, 18, Gryseels 2014:8–10, Ceuppens 2015:89–90, Silverman 2015:633–37). The museum, however, has produced several other temporary exhibitions that seem to have no place in the selective historiography of the institution’s renewal. I will come back to this later.

1 Still from a 3D digital model of the RMCA...