The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA). Photo by Laurence Livermore//flickr.cc(by-nc-nd).
I was recently part of a small delegation of historians from the University of Bristol involved in a trip to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels. The purpose of the visit was to consider the ways that imperialism and its legacies have been approached in the museum, and the difficulties of publicly engaging with this divisive history. We were also reflecting on the sad story of Bristol’s British Empire and Commonwealth Museum that ran from 2002 until 2008, a story which continues because of some ongoing controversies. Following its closure, the large collection amassed by the Museum’s staff was acquired by Bristol City Council, who have a huge quantity of archival material to sort through, as well as artefacts to preserve. How should these materials, originally acquired to be part of the country’s only collection dedicated to the history of empire, be integrated in to Bristol’s existing collections? How should these imperial objects be displayed in museums in, and largely about, Bristol? These are some difficult questions, and at Bristol University we have been running some events to spark ideas. But the elephant in the room is how should empire be remembered in Britain – particularly since some in the media pinpointed the reason behind the museum’s decline as a general British distaste for remembering the colonial past. Our trip to Brussels was to see how this bigger problem had been dealt with in a different post-Imperial context.
The Museum for Central Africa is housed in, to say the least, a grand building and it is situated in some dramatic grounds. Commissioned by Leopold II with money from his personal colony, the Congo Free State, with help from the Belgian tax-payers, it was founded in 1898 as the Congo Museum. The current buildings were constructed between 1904 and 1909. The intention was to showcase the supposed development of the colony to the Belgian public. Re-branded as the Museum for Central Africa in 1960s, following Congolese independence, the function of the museum has changed. It now sees its role as fostering greater public interest in the continent and facilitating scientific and humanities research involving scholarly partnerships between Europe and Africa. On our tour we got a sneak, behind-the-scenes insight into the incredible resources they have to achieve this. We had a privileged glimpse at a small fraction of their huge collection of Congolese masks and icons, and visited the archive of explorer Henry Morton Stanley (we got to see his luggage and rifle – I can’t think of more appropriate symbolic relics). The Museum is now going through another phase of renovation and the Museum’s management are again rethinking its role. Its imperial baggage is, in theory at least, gradually being shed. But despite these shifts and re-inventions, the imperial origins of the building continue to cast a long shadow.
