Forms of Wonderment: the History and Collections of the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Z.S. Strother

Forms of Wonderment The History and Collections of the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal Edited by Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers and Ineke Eisenburger

Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, 2002. 2 vols. 614 pp., 734 color & 62 b/w photos, 9 maps. EUR 100 hardcover, slipcase.

Museums (or perhaps curators?) are showing signs of restlessness with the public's limited expectations for the collection catalogue, long conceptualized as a photo album of "masterpieces" with notes on provenance and function. In contrast, Pamela McClusky, in Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back (2002), presents the African collection at the Seattle Art Museum through a series of personalized case histories that fold reception into the biographies of the object. In See the Music, Hear the Dance: Rethinking African Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Frederick Lamp considers the museum object as a "fragment" and attempts to "reconstruct the original artistic context," giving special consideration to performance. (1) Now the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal, The Netherlands, has issued a deluxe, large format, two-volume set, which is designed "not ... to be a catalogue" (p. 7), though it illustrates more than 850 objects in its collection.

Eschewing a focus on "hidden treasures," the text interweaves six chapters on "key museum collections" with articles on a variety of theoretical and practical museum topics. The design is complex. Each volume opens and closes with a teaser of historical photographs from the museum's archive. The learned museological and collection essays are punctuated by visual "interludes" devoted to the arts of tobacco, gold, metal, weapons, beadwork, headgear, amulets, staffs, and musical instruments. Four of these sections include a single fold out sheet. Pulling out one of these sheets (27" wide) is like opening one of the drawers in the cabinets on display at the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford): the sheer variety of forms is captivating. Architectural historian Vincent Scully used to say that "art is what we treat as art." In this case, photographing pipes or beads or amulets at near or actual full size creates an aura around the objects that forces serious appraisal.

The second half of each volume illustrates a generous selection of objects from the collection. Volume 1 is dedicated to West Africa (including Cameroon); volume 2, to Central, East, and Southern Africa. Clearly, this rich publication is intended to transform the institution's image as a small feisty museum, "the little engine that could," into that of a major player in the representation of Africa in Europe.

The Afrika Museum began in 1954 as a mission museum sponsored by the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Holy Spirit (known as Spiritans). Although it still maintains warm relations with the congregation, it has evolved into an independent institution that receives significant subsidies from the Dutch state. Early in its career, the museum opened an "African village" with buildings taken over from the 1958 Brussels World Fair (p. 12). This feature proved so popular that the institution built three new African "villages" and opened an official "Outdoor Museum" in 1987. Among the public, the Afrika Museum is unquestionably now best known for such irresistible sights as a Beninois stilt village or Dogon hamlet nestled into verdant Dutch parkland. Among Central Africanists, the museum was also a famed repository for a world-class collection from Angola, both Congos, and Cabinda. This publication makes clear that the Afrika Museum also sponsors a serious conservation program, an almost untouched photographic archive, and a collection of surprising breadth and depth, including works of contemporary artists of Africa and its Diaspora.

Among the collection essays, Hans Witte and Anja Veirman give magisterial overviews of the arts and conceptual universe of the Yoruba and Senufo. Both essays are highly recommended for course readers. Annemieke Van Damme-Linseele presents fresh interpretative material based on fieldwork in 1990-91 among the Nkanu of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers offers a helpful descriptive overview of the visual culture of East Africa, drawing heavily on important collections made by Spiritan missionaries in the former Tanganyika. The strength of Grootaers's essay lies in his evocation of the intercultural relationships embedded in the objects. In another essay, Grootaers draws on his own long experience with the Zande to historicize a people made famous (and timeless) by the publication of E. Evans-Pritchard's much-cited Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande in 1937.

Grootaers's careful historicizing of his subject highlights by contrast the only real flaw in this publication: the absence of dates in the labels. While it is true that dates like "late 19th century" often serve no more than a modernist fiction of precolonial origins, even the use of an acquisition date works against the myth of timeless Africa. Also, the date of collection often provides an important historical marker, since many African objects were intended to enjoy a fixed life span. (2) In the case of Witte's essay on the Yoruba, I was reminded of a cynic who murmured recently at a conference: "When will Yoruba specialists tell us how many Yoruba actually honor the orisha today? Ten percent?" I hope that in his catalogue devoted to the Yoruba collection, Witte will tell us something (however briefly) of the impact of millions of Muslims and Christians on the arts and worldview of the Yoruba.