Time      Person Speaking,             Dialogue

00:01:09               Voice over          

The Royal Museum of Central Africa. For decades, generations of young Belgians visited this museum, which claimed to lead them through a discovery of the country, Congo Kinshasa. In 2013, it closed its doors to begin the first major renovation in its history. For over a century, this museum was a totem to the glory of the civilising work of King Leopold II. Will it be able at last to break down the taboos and recount the darkest pages of the Congo history? For almost a century, the museum depicted the congolese as primitives. Will it manage to demolish these deeply rooted, subconscious stereotypes? During the colonial period, the museum appropriated of the congolese masks and statues.  Is it time to return them? The new museum offers a new perspective of Africa and to a critical view of colonial history. Will it uncover the ghosts of our past? Reconcile the memories of Belgium and those of  Congo?

 

 

 

00:02:56              

Bambi Ceuppens             

If you're talking about Belgium's colonial history,this museum automatically comes to mind. I don't think that in France, Holland,Portugal or Great Britain there is one building that symbolises the colonial past so well. I believe our building is pretty unique in that sense.

 

00:03:17               Voice over           Since the dawn of time, societies have been organised around ancestor cults. In Belgium, the Tervuren Museum would become the totem of a whole nation. A temple to the memory of Leopold II. A collective imagination developed around the museum, based on prejudices and clichés.

 

00:03:40               Voice over archive           50 years ago Congo was basically as it was when Stanley left it: 3,800,000 km² of mountains and plains. Yesterday it was still a savage country, today... All the Belgian Empire builders, many of whom sleep in African soil, having given it their blood... A race difficult to understand, who shy away, who hide... Cannibalism and slavery have disappeared. They have truly become leopard-men, disappearing into the bush, concealing themselves on the outskirts of the villages that they punish.

00:04:17               Guide Gryseels I came here as a child. I grew up in Alsemberg, a village about 20 kilo from here. I often came here with my parents. My parents would take me with them on a Sunday afternoon to this museum. If you would ask me what I remember about Africa from my visits to the museum, then it would be one word: fear. I remember seeing the Congolese, their spears and shields at the ready, the dangerous snakes... I was scared of Africa. When I came to work here in Tervuren and saw that the exhibition was exactly the same as the one I'd seen as a child, it was clear to me that we would have to ring the changes.

00:05:17               Voice over           Under its veneer, the museum long maintained the myth that Belgians went to Africa for philanthropic ends. Namely, to free the indigenous people from Arab-Muslim slavery. But that was only partly true.

 

In the mid-19th century, the major European nations – led by France, Great Britain, Portugal and Germany – colonised the African continent. Leopold II wanted his share, and set his sights on central Africa. But the Belgian parliament opposed his plans.

 

00:06:24               Mathieu Zana Etambala To the Belgian government, Congo was his plaything. Let him busy himself with that, then he won't interfere with politics at home in Belgium.

 

00:06:41               Voice over           The abolition of slavery was a pretext to mask Leopold’s true motives: laying hands on the Congo’s ivory and rubber.

 

Entrusted to an army of mercenaries, the civilising mission soon turned into a bloody escapade: massacres, fire, beheadings. Some of Leopold’s men used any means available to sack the villages.

 

Today, the heroes of the conquest occupy pride of place in the museum. An enormous stela honours the 1508 Belgians who died in Congo. But not a single plaque for their African victims.

 

The museum houses a collection of 120,000 of the most valuable and rare pieces in the world. A collection built up gradually in the colonial era. Behind the simple and carefully classified wooden statues, there sometimes lies a history of plunder, violence and crime.

 

The Tabwa statue is one of the best examples. The history of this acquisition began in 1884 in south-eastern Congo, in Mpala, near Lake Tanganyika. A young officer in the army of Leopold II, Emile Storms was tasked with conquering the region. During a punitive expedition, Storms ordered the beheading of Chief Lusinga, involved in the slave trade, and took the statue with him. Storms seized a sacred object, a symbol of strength and power to the Tabwa people. The chief had ordered it made in his likeness to mark the start of his reign and confirm his authority over his rivals. Emile Storms took it back to Belgium along with the skull of Chief Lusinga. For nearly 50 years, the statue would be enthroned, like a hunting trophy, in Storms’ living room. Only after his death in 1918 did his wife donate it to the museum. The Tabwa statue is considered one of the masterpieces of the museum’s collection.

 

King Leopold’s strategy paid off. In 1885, at the Berlin Conference, the great European colonial powers divided up Africa. Leopold II became the sole owner of the Congo Free State. Outside its context, the Nkisi Nkondi is silent. But this wooden statue conceals a sacred object that served to protect the communities of the Lower Congo. The acquisition of the Nkisi began at the mouth of the Congo River, in the village of Boma. After a conflict with the local kings, a Belgian commercial agent, Alexander Delcommune, expropriated their object.

00:10:54               Sarah van Beurden          From the moment that he expropriated the Nkisi Nkondi as spoils of war, the local chieftain reacted, saying: We want it returned. It is important to us. Right from the start, they asked for it to be returned to the local community. He refused to do that.

00:11:20               Voice over           Delcommune was well aware of the power attributed to the statue. He saw it as much more than war booty.

00:11:29               Julien Volper      The purpose of these large statues covered in strips and metal tips, is in fact for use as protection. These objects were used in important rituals, the objective being to protect a community. They were not for personal protection but for an entity, a village or a region.

 

00:11:49               Professor Henry Bundjoko Banyata          You could go to the officiant and say: I want to protect my whole community. He would reply: I accept that you want to protect your community. However, take a blade or a nail, lick it, say the following, place the nail there, and your community is protected.

00:12:10               Voice over           For years, Delcommune would use this Nkisi Nkondi to protect himself against theft.

 

00:12:19               Sarah van Beurden          Because it was a statue that had both a religious and a political importance at the local level. The object was said to have certain powers. That certainly had something to do with the fact that he was so interested in the statue and seized it for himself.

 

00:12:41               Voice over           When he returned to Belgium in 1883, Delcommune took the statue with him, and the museum acquired it in 1912.

 

The museum has long kept silent about the crimes and abuses by the agents of Leopold II, for the simple reason that the very institution served to promote the king’s actions in Africa.

 

00:13:13               Sarah van Beurden          In the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century there was an upward trend for organising major exhibitions and World Exhibitions. Very often the World Exhibitions had large sections devoted to colonial empires.

 

00:13:33               Voice over           The foundation of the museum was an extension of the Universal Exhibition held in Brussels in 1897. It was a massive public relations effort in which the king showed off the many treasures brought from Congo. He had 267 Congolese people brought over by boat and installed behind the fences of a reconstructed village. A ‘human zoo’ meant to indulge the curiosity of the spectators.

 

00:14:19               Mathieu Zana Etambala The aim was to show people how much work there was still to do in the Congo. The people there are primitive people, they are barbarians, and it is our mission to evangelize them, to civilize them and so on.

 

0:14:38  Sarah van Beurden          If you have a colonial project, you need colonials. You need people to organize a reliable administration. The Belgians have always been rather conservative in these matters. Back then it was said: Belgians care most about their sons and their money. They were in two minds whether to go there and to invest there, hence these important exhibitions.

 

00:15:08               Maarten Couttenier        There were more than a million visitors. There were only 6 million Belgians at that time... It must have had an enormous impact on the colonial propaganda.

 

00:15:19               Voice over           In the summer of 1897, a cold snap descended on Belgium. Seven Congolese from the human zoo died as a result of a flu epidemic. It was in this period that the cinema was born. Very soon, the new cameras were used to show Belgians images of Congo.

00:15:51               Screen text         Trip to Congo

00:16:41               Voice over           The king’s business in Congo flourished, as trade in ivory and the exploitation of raw materials such as rubber yielded enormous profits. Thanks to this ‘heavenly manna’, the king built a museum devoted entirely to himself and his work in Congo. No fewer than 50 trades and 120 workers laboured full time over 5 years on the majestic edifice. The marble was imported from Greece, the wrought-iron doors from New York, and the wood from Canada. To leave no doubt that he was the sole master of the site, the king had his initials carved 45 times on the building’s walls. With this museum he was sending a message to all of Europe that the King of the Belgians was now a power to be reckoned with.

 

00:18:21               Maarten Couttenier        It had cost a fortune, something that wouldn't be possible nowadays. That was only possible thanks to the cheap labour he had in Congo. They were atrociously exploited, but it resulted in massive profits for him. It would otherwise have been possible.

 

00:18:41               Voice over           At the turn of the 20th century, the mask fell. The humanistic façade and false pretext of philanthropy crumbled. The slavery that the king had claimed to abolish was transformed, on the rubber plantations, into forced labour. To avoid wasting munitions, soldiers were to cut off the hands of the fallen and present them as proof. But this method would give rise to abuses. The atrocities were met with unprecedented indignation by the international community.

 

In 1908, Leopold II gave Congo to Belgium. As fate would have it, he would never see the completion of his museum. The king died a month before it opened. The day after the funeral, the press reported that during the funeral procession, spectators shouted: “Leopold II, murderer of the Congo”.

 

By annexing Congo, Belgium inherited the museum, which it named Museum of the Belgian Congo. After four months of national mourning, Albert I inaugurated the building on 30 April 1910. It stands as an enormous, beautiful totem that Belgium gave itself. A totem that played its part in composing a national narrative intended to unite the country around powerful symbols. Belgium, a country barely 80 years old, saw the museum as a way to forge a historical imagination to be shared by all its citizens.

00:20:47               Bambi Ceuppens              Museums are in fact a product of the nineteenth century, you might even say of 19th century nationalism. Its starting point is the idea of the nation as a supposed or imaginary community. That means people who will never meet one another, who do not know each other, yet feel there is a bond between them. To create this solidarity, to create the feeling of a single community, you need a story. And what you say in that story, or rather what you don't say, is just as important as what you do say. If you want to tell a nationalistic story, for example about Belgium, you're not going to begin by talking about conflicts between Flemings and Walloons, are you? You'll try to emphasize what they have in common rather than what can separate them. This means that you always work selectively when creating the story of the nation state that you wish to tell. The same goes for the museums that were created within the context of that 19th century nationalism.

00:22:17               Voice over           At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was in crisis, marked by unprecedented social, political and economic upheavals. In that context of civilisational unrest, Sigmund Freud published his key work Totem and Taboo. In it, Freud made a connection between the human psyche, the way so-called “primitive” tribes functioned, and modern civilisation. He sought to show how all social structures are based on the same psychoanalytical foundation, the same prohibitions and the same archaic symbols.

 

By labelling Africa as ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’, the museum offered the young country of Belgium a fantastical vision of the origins of humanity.

 

By assimilating the people of Congo with primitive societies, the museum presented itself as a sort of time machine. African cultures were presented as vestiges of prehistoric times, as if they were a testimony from the infancy of humankind in distant ages. Africans were relegated to the bottom of the ladder of civilisations, with Europeans enthroned at its summit.

00:24:05               Benoît de l'Estoile            So classifying others is also a way of speaking about the self. The self is often in fact present in these museums. They are made by European museographs and are mainly visited by Europeans, and are a way of presenting others

in a European manner.

 

00:24:32               Voice over           With the appearance of the first ethnographic documentation, an imaginary filled with clichés and stereotypes took form.

 

00:24:47               Voice over archive           Dancing, a frenetic haunting rhythm which stirs the whole of Africa, is how the black man prefers to express himself, translating his emotions.

 

The tam-tam, to a frenetic, insistent rhythm, the never-ending tam-tam, bewitching like a drug. This is the other Congo, savage and scorching, which the white man still has not penetrated completely. The primitive society that still submits to fetish-men, witchcraft, to the powers of evil and ritual dances.

00:25:45               Voice over           Yet, far from the primitives imagined by Belgians, the people of Congo lived in complex, hierarchical societies. We can see this from the history of the royal Ndop statues.

 

The statues come from the land of Kuba, a prestigious empire founded in central Congo in the 15th century. The Kuba kings had statues made in their likeness to mark their reign. The objects were a sign of power and renown.

00:26:25               Professor Henry Bundjoko Banyata          You must consider the sacred aspect. In the Kuba tribe, the king is like a spirit. Even when you take the Ndop to the Kubas, the Kubas do not regard the Ndop as a statue. They see it as a reincarnation of the king who created the object. The object has become sacred. It is as if the king himself was present.

 

00:26:54               Voice over           Because of their prejudices, Europeans saw the statues merely as objects of sorcery, fetishes.

 

These statues were targeted by missionaries who wanted to convert Africans to Christianity. If the fetishes were not destroyed by missionaries, a number were taken back to Belgium and sometimes given to the museum.

 

Among them is the Njinda. Originally, this cultic object served to protect the Pende community. But to the European evangelisers, the Njinda was a demon to be fought.

 

The history of the acquisition of the Njinda goes back to 1931 in southern Congo, in the palm nut plantations operated by the oil producers of the Belgian Congo. Men, women and children were conscripted for forced labour on the plantations. The colonial State deducted a tax from even their meagre earnings. The population rebelled and an administrator was killed.

 

00:28:19               Julien Volper      As regards the Djinda during this troubled period of revolt, you should realise that several of the leaders of this revolt were important in the association of what we now know as the Djinda sect. During this revolt, the Djinda's role is no longer one of anti-witchcraft, but will be considered as an anti-white fetish. A fetish that will tell them how to fight the Europeans and with how many.

 

00:28:51               Voice over           The colonial administration repressed the rebellion with bloodshed. The Pende chiefs were tried and executed.

 

But the missionaries considered the true guilt lay elsewhere. The religious blamed the Njinda, which they accused of sowing chaos among the population. They seized the statuette and gave it to the museum. The museum’s storage is overflowing with artefacts brought back by Belgians during the colonial occupation. But confiscation was not the only way of growing the collection.

 

00:29:35               Sarah van Beurden          However, the largest part of the ethnographic collection came to the museum in different ways. A lot of them were donations from former colonials. Another large part was collected for the museum, but not by the museum. The museum encouraged both colonial officers to donate objects, as well as colonials who had settled there and of course missionaries. Over time this became quite an organised system. Questionnaires were sent out regarding specific objects they were interested in, asking about the context in which they were found to ascertain the origins of the objects. So the colonial community became involved in collecting the objects.

00:30:29               Voice over           In 1910, a scientific institute was opened at the museum. Its task was to gather a mass of data about central Africa. For more than a century, it has identified and classified those data, drawing up an encyclopaedic overview of everything to do with Congo. An exhaustive inventory of the flora, fauna and objects without equivalent anywhere in the world.

 

00:30:57               Benoît de l'Estoile            The museum is often thought of as a microcosm, a universe in miniature. Starting from a few objects that have been brought here, this universe will be evoked.

00:31:19               Voice over           Behind the scenes, researchers are listing all the objects in the museum. Each item is measured, analysed, labelled, numbered and given a document file. The documents were organised and arranged into ethnic groups. Naming, classifying and ordering in a hierarchy was the way for scientists to represent and dominate Congo. The ethnic groups became the main criterion for classifying the objects. In so doing, Belgians were merely projecting on Africa their own obsessions with identity.

 

00:32:09               Maarten Couttenier        When you recreate something it will always remain a representation. You cannot take the reality of Congo, however hard you try, and bring it back with you to Belgium. You can only reconstruct it.

00:32:27               Voice over           In Africa, the mask represented a particular world and had its own life. Every mask had its unique way of moving, dancing, singing. Far from belonging to a single ethnic group, masks were sometimes lent or traded between different communities. An old mask was sometimes redesigned, patched up or abandoned in favour of a more attractive one.

 

What stories can be told by these objects in this museum which, for a century, was used to justify colonialism? How can their history enlighten our understanding of the present?

 

00:33:36               Bambi Ceuppens              Should we start now, in the 21st century, armed with the objects that were collected from the 19th century, or should we first of all try to tell a story? A story that surpasses the objects, or at least tries to integrate other elements that are not revealed by these objects.

 

00:34:03               Voice over           As the country prepared to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Belgian Congo, the rhetoric about colonisation remained unchanged.

 

00:34:15               Screen text archive          The F.B.I Indigenous

Well-being Foundation presents

“The Bush Evolves”

00:34:26               Voice over archives         What Europeans do in the overseas territories, is sometimes maligned. However, there are many plus points. We've introduced hygiene to groups of humans who seemed not to have advanced since the iron or bronze age. We have brought material comforts to those living in the forests or the savannah. This is what the white presence in Africa has achieved.

 

50 years ago, Leopold II's work was taken over by Belgium. Order prevails, administration and justice are in place. The colony will be able to be economically sound.

 

We have to put unusable traditions behind us, rethink Congolese housing, draw up innumerable plans, and try out new things. We must build a new world.

 

Seated at table now with cutlery and even a tablecloth. This is unheard of for these girls.

 

The black man models his dress sense on the white man's.

 

Traditional Congo, primitive and fascinating, is fading. By gaining ground, modern industry supplies a new physiognomy, harsher, yet more familiar.

 

Hundreds of villagers have left for the urban centres, where there's money to be earned and pleasure to be had.

 

The young black's dream is slowly coming true. His education and knowledge improve constantly. We might not give them real engines yet, but these run just like them.

 

00:36:38               Voice over           On 4 January 1959, King Baudouin promised Congo its independence. A page was turned both for Africa and for the museum. With independence, the Congo Museum was rebaptised the Royal Museum of Central Africa, and sought a reason for its existence in a world that had disappeared. Africa was seeking to reappropriate its history and to make its culture and arts the launch pad for its emancipation.

 

00:37:14               Voice over archive           The opening of the first World Negro Arts festival at Dakar. President Senghor talks of the black continent's contribution to the world. The world's black writers and artists from Duke Ellington to Marpessa Dawn and Katherine Dunham met at the Senegalese capital to celebrate today's cultural awareness of Africa.

00:37:38               Sarah van Beurden          In the context of African decolonisation throughout the whole African continent, culture and cultural identity become very important. They play an essential role in the projection of independence and uniqueness. This is considered something that has to be wrested from the former colonial rulers.

00:38:07               Voice over           Zaire was part of that movement. With his desire to return to its authentic African identity and to rid itself of western domination, Mobutu demanded that the Museum return works of art.

 

On 29 March 1976, the museum officially returned to the Kinshasa museum one of its three Ndop statues. The return of this piece marked the beginning of a collaboration between Belgium and Zaire. Between 1976 and 1982, the Royal Museum of Central Africa donated 160 pieces to the Zaire museum. But the collaboration between the two countries would not last long.

 

00:39:02               Guido Gryseels The museum of Tervuren sent back 176 pieces to Congo, and 600 back to Rwanda. The objects are still there in Rwanda, also in the museum, but in Congo most of the pieces were stolen a few years afterwards. They were exported illegally and at present are to be found among art-dealers or in private collections.

 

00:39:27               Voice over           Unable to address the impact of decolonisation on the story it told, the museum became a sort of fossilised object.

 

It stood as a palace of colonial memory frozen in time, a storehouse of souvenirs from a bygone era where Belgium believed it was spreading civilisation in Africa.

 

For children of the African diaspora, a visit to Tervuren was nevertheless a form of aggression. The museum struck them as a kind of Congo Park for Belgians, reducing Africa to its supposed savagery and its history to primitive traditions.

 

00:40:26               Bambi Ceuppens              I think that it's impossible to imagine that there would be a museum in Belgium on the history of woman, that would be completely mounted by men without a single woman being involved in the creation of the exhibition or the narrative that would be told in the exhibition and so on.

 

00:40:55               Voice over           The hoped-for change came in 2001, with the appointment of a new director, who would make renovation his priority.

00:41:05               Guido Gryseels The renovation basically took shape from within the museum itself, although in recent years there has been a change in mentality both on a political and external level. More and more, the Independent State of Congo is being called into question and colonialism itself is also being questioned. There is also today's problem with a multicultural society, of racism and of people from African origin who find it difficult to find work or proper housing. Does it have something to do with a number of Europeans who feel superior towards Africans? These issues are now very clearly on the table. I have to admit that we, as a museum, played our own particular role.

00:41:58               Voice over           More than a mere refurbishment of the building, the museum seeks to become the first colonial museum in the world to face its origins head on. To do so would take a spiritual revolution and a redeployment of its collections so as to resonate with the big debates of today. A museum on Africa and on the history of colonialism, certainly, but for whom? For what reason? And how?

 

00:43:01               Bambi Ceuppens              Visiting a museum is similar to giving a lesson: the principal is not what people know at the end of it, but the sort of questions they ask. "That is interesting." "I would like to know more about that." "I had never really looked at it that way." "I'd never thought about it before", and so on. So, in fact... in my mind visiting a museum is not simply an end of something, but also a beginning of something else.

00:43:52               Voice over           In time, the museum has, paradoxically, become a place for the preservation and conservation of Congolese heritage, in opposition to its commercialisation. But isn’t it time to address the question of returning its artworks to Congo?

 

00:44:20               Sarah van Beurden          One important reason why restitution is somewhat of a controversial matter, lies in the word restitution itself. Restitution is something you do to make good for something. You acknowledge that you have made a mistake and make a restitution. So, for the European museums to go along with this idea of restitution, under the term restitution, means that you acknowledge... ...that you concede mistakes were made in the colonial past.

00:44:54               Julien Volper      For me, these objects are part of the history of Belgium, and also a part of Europe's history. In the same way that the Garden of Earthly Delights, the painting on a panel by Hieronymus Bosch housed at the Prado, is also part of the history of Spain. Why is this painting that has nothing to do with Spain in the Prado? Because at a certain moment, Belgium, which didn't exist as Belgium at that time, was invaded and occupied by the Spanish, and became part of the Kingdom of Spain. And that becomes part of the history of the objects.

00:45:38               Professor Paul Bakua-Lufu Badibanga      But we are focusing on the acquisitions of the Royal Museum of Africa, because of the methods used in acquiring objects, which were, shall we say, not altogether as they should have been. I already told you that the missionaries sometimes tricked the people. They'd say that they were going to burn the fetishes. But they didn't burn them. They simply brought them back to Europe. Then there were the territorial agents who would sometimes snatch the objects they thought were very valuable and bring them back to Europe, and so on. Of course a great number of the objects were acquired in a proper manner, in a way legally. However, in the case of a certain number of objects there are problems as regards their acquisition.

00:46:37               Guido Gryseels It's not easy. Even if I wished to offer restitution tomorrow, this has to be approved by the Belgian state: the federal parliament, the Walloon parliament, the Flemish parliament, the Brussels and the German parliaments. That would take a few years. The moral ownership of the pieces lies of course back in Congo. It is at the origin of the objects. We are simply their keeper, the guardians of their heritage. But that discussion goes far beyond museum matters. What always strikes me when I hear people talking about restitution, is that it always concerns the pieces in museums from the public sector. However, there are many pieces in private collections, and one could ask oneself how they got to be there.

00:47:45               Voice over           How will the museum respond if a request for return were made by a community or village?

 

00:48:03               Baku Kapita Alphonse    He took the fetish and took it with him to Europe. And now it's in a museum in your country. So this is all that I have to remind me of my grandfather.

 

This is my grandfather in the middle. He was the one who ruled the kingdom. Mr Delcommune took everything and had it shipped to Europe. It belongs to and is cherished by my family. We have to recuperate the fetish and bring it back here. Because, as he was just saying, it belongs to us. It has to be here where it belongs, so that it can used as our ancestors once used it.

 

00:49:17               Professor Henry Bundjoko Banyata          I believe that if these objects would be returned to their villages of origin, it would send a strong message. The people in those villages who handled those objects, the people who made them, are they still there? The objects have to be returned in good condition so that they be used again. But there is the risk of them falling into the wrong hands, people who would try to steal the objects and sell them elsewhere. That would be a double loss as well as having done all that work for nothing.

00:49:56               Voice over           While awaiting the resolution of the cultural dispute between Belgium and Congo, the museum plans to launch additional partnerships in Africa. At the heart of Dakar, the future Museum of Black Civilizations, aimed at making African art known around the world, may well be the first such partner.

 

00:50:42               Hamady Bocoum              In my mind, circulating the people's heritage is important for museums, for Africa, for the diaspora, for everyone. For example, here at this museum, we look forward to welcoming exhibitions that introduce us to different peoples. We can't sit and contemplate our navels. We want to learn about others. We no longer want to be regarded as objects of curiosity.

 

00:51:18               Voice over           Black people were long an object of curiosity for Europeans, an anthropological reality that fed erroneous and racist images of Africa.

00:51:35               Guido Gryseels For most Belgian children, their first experience of Africa is in this museum. For generations, this museum has been a reflection of the superiority of the whites over the blacks. Obviously this has contributed to the problems of a multicultural society and to today's all too present problems. The major renovation work has gone a lot further than simply putting together another permanent exhibition. It is a change of mindset, it is a cultural transformation of the way we think, the way we see Africa, the way we do research, and of the way we enter into dialogue.

 

00:52:24               Voice over           Becoming a centre for discussions of Africa today, while revisiting the colonial past, is the ambition of the museum now renamed the Africa Museum. Will the museum be able to rise to this challenge?