Two walks: with public relations officer Nadia Nsayi through the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren and with content director Wayne Modest through the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam.
Modest:
‘The façade must go. It is shameful to display these riches without acknowledging their colonial plundering.’
‘In the current discussion about restitution, objects are sometimes so dominated by the European question of whether they were stolen that their beauty and significance are relegated to the background. A few of our partners in the country of origin said: stop calling our objects colonial objects. That is why we put meaning first.’
Modest prefers not to use the term ‘looted art’. ‘We find that term too simplistic and too restrictive. We have 18,000 objects in our collection that we believe may have been looted. To call them looted art means ignoring all the other items, between those 18,000 and the total of 450,000 pieces. That is why we prefer to talk about “object collection during colonisation”. This allows us to discuss the significance of an object.’
Nsayi:
‘The exhibition room labelled ‘Unparalleled Art’ barely mentions the origin of the masterpieces. Only function and aesthetics matter.’ She points to the Nkisi Nkonde power statue, an “object” that had a living meaning in Congo: ‘Stolen at the end of the nineteenth century in the Boma region by the Belgian trader Alexander Delcommune from King Ne Kuko. Nkisi statues protected the village. If you take that away, you rob a community of its soul. It’s like taking away our statues of Mary.
‘This controversial looted art was stored in the museum basement for a long time, was brought upstairs when the museum reopened in 2018, was displayed in the temporary exhibition Rethinking Collections in 2024, and is now back here among the rest as if nothing had happened.’
Nkisi Kondo, AfricaMuseum
© Jos van Beurden
Nsayi finds the name change of the museum into AfricaMuseum in Tervuren problematic. “Why was this colonial museum renamed AfricaMuseum in 2018? It should be a museum about the colonial past and its impact on today. It is not a museum about Africa, but about the former Belgian colonial territories of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda. A showcase not only of looted artworks, but also a large collection of wood samples and a mineral cabinet, to show what could be obtained. There was not only cultural plunder, but also natural plunder.
