Rachel Mariembe writes:
The Musée des Rois Bamoun [ MRB ] is a place of remembrance and sectoral conservation of cultural heritage.
Housing over 10,000 objects, it offers more than 600 years of history in its display of the treasures of the Bamoun kingdom, one of the oldest in sub-Saharan Africa. The museum’s striking architecture is dominated by a two-headed snake at its entrance and a spider perched on top of it.
She discusses the museum’s collection as a framework for studying issues related to the concepts of museum, cultural heritage, conservation, and the restitution of cultural property looted during the colonial period.
She uses an empirico-historical approach based on heritage sciences, which foregrounds a community perspective, to analyze these notions and their practice in society as endogenous mechanisms for collection conservation, perspectives for reconnecting cultural property with communities of origin, and the potential benefits of restitution for inclusive development.
As such, my analysis looks at the specifics of place and, by framing the museum as a place of memory, interrogates how social contexts may modify conservation when considering the restitution of looted cultural property.
