The fathers have canceled the lease. As a result, the annual financing of 1.7 million from the government will stop after 2024.
The parties disagree on how to showcase the rich and diverse African culture. The NMvW, which arose after the merger of the Africa Museum with the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam) and the Museum of Ethnology (Leiden), aims to paint a more ‘representative’ picture of Africa. For example, the tenant finds the simulated villages in the outside area of the museum no longer appropriate for the large and dynamic cities in Africa and wanted to devise a new plan for this.
The museum in Berg en Dal, which attracted 60,000 to 70,000 visitors a year before the corona crisis, opened in 1958. The Fathers of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit had taken masks, statues, tombstones and other objects with them on their missions in Tanzania. Outside the museum, they recreated, among other things, a Kusasi housing estate from Ghana and an encampment of Baka pygmies from Cameroon.
The NMvW, which has been furnishing the museum since 2014, would like to adapt these recreated villages. Investments were made in exhibitions, such as about the Black Lives Matter movement and photographer Jimmy Nelson, who photographs indigenous peoples in danger of disappearing. The fathers are dissatisfied that the permanent collection is gradually shifting to the background. ‘The villages give a picture of what the fathers encountered at the time,’ says Carel Verdonschot, advisor to the fathers. ‘A culture so rich, Europeans had no idea at the time.’
The more than twenty fathers are now elderly and live together in an apartment complex in Gennep. To finance their care, a number of statues from the collection were sold a few years ago. They hope that the museum can get a new start through an external lender.
At the end of 2020, five African activists stole a grave statue from the museum in protest, after which they were sentenced to a fine of 250 euros. Mwazulu Diyabanza of the action group Unité Dignité Courage, then said to de Volkskrant: ‘Our campaign was not aimed at stealing anything. We wanted to symbolically liberate the statue and then return it to the Africa Museum.’
In 2019, then-director Stijn Schoonderwoerd said that the Africa Museum would return works of art that were looted in colonial times to the countries of origin. According to Verdonschot, it is impossible that there is looted art among them. ‘All objects were bought or given as gifts by the fathers, including embassies and religious groups.’