Archaeology in African museums

African ArchaeologicalReview, VoL 13, No. 3, 1996 Forum for African Archaeology andCulture Archaeology in African Museums C h a p u r u k h a M. Kusimba I Museums curate, document, conserve, and protect the earth's diverse natural and cultural heritage for purposes of educating humankind. Through research, exhibitions, and other activities that stress our common demominators and achievements, museums help us to forge and affirm local ethnic, national and international identities, unity, and pride. To accomplish such diverse goals, museums require dynamic, dedicated, ethical and fairlY well-educated staff. Museums must also be well-funded and should have local, national, and international support systems. This paper discusses the challenges faced by museum professionals in Africa, especiallY archaeologists, as they attempt to unearth, and in some cases reinterpret, Africa's cultural history. KEY WORDS: archaeology; museums; Africa; documentation; research. Museums are essentially teaching institutions that communicate ideas through objects (Oyo, 1994, p. 333). They collect, catalog, preserve, and store cultural and natural materials for scientific research and translation of results to the general lay public (Wilding, 1987; Wandibba, 1989). They mount exhibitions on their premises and organize moving exhibitions. Education officers in museums spread knowledge about cultural and scientific work carried out in the museum. Museums are ideally equipped to fulfill educational responsibilities of scholars to the nonprofessional, nonscientific public and, in particular, to schools. Some museums in the West have a home team of scholars who conduct research and analyze collections. Others are community-based, addressing primarily local and ethnic histories. Museum researchers are often at the center of museum life. Large museums often publish their own archaeological, historical, biological, and other professional journals and offer proIDepartment of Anthropology, Field Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60605. 165 07.63-..03387~'0900~165509.50/0 0 1996 Plenum Publishing Corporation 166 Kusimba fessional training. Most museums have larger collections than they can exhibit. This inability to exhibit large amounts of material is usually solved by changing exhibits, mounting thematic shows, maintaining mobile exhibits, and keeping storerooms open and easily accessible to scholars and interested members of the public. African museums are responsible for curating and protecting the continent's cultural heritage, the oldest of mankind, which extends from the Pliocene to the great pyramids of Egypt, from Olduvai Gorge to the rock churches of Lalibela and the Zimbabwe ruins, to mention but a few. African museums educate, entertain, and forge and affirm a national identity, unity, and pride by stressing the common cultural denominators of an ethnically diverse citizenry. This difficult task is undertaken by underfunded and overstaffed institutions that lack not only the right resources but intellectual stimulation. The diverse functions of museums detailed above require a dynamic and well-trained museum staff. African museums are well aware of this challenge, but few are able to meet it. Indeed, the major concerns of archaeologists working in African museums concern funding and the professionalization of staff. One cannot analyze African museums and their staff outside of their socioeconomic and political-milieu. Global economic decline and the droughts of the 1980s had adverse effects on African economies (e.g., Nafzinger, 1988)..The resulting increases in the cost of basic commodities were not helped by the rapid population increases, rural to urban migrations, rising unemployment, and underemployment. Many African nations were unable to solve the ever increasing economic crises. The IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs, while designed to revitalize the economies, could not be implemented wholesale without paying a heavy social and political price. Consequently, it became difficult to sustain academic effort because many African nations' resources were spent on importing food. In the process, funding for research in educational institutions, including universities and national museums, suffered (Leakey, personal communication, 1994). Many mus.eum professionals have gone to universities to teach, changed professions, or sought employment in the West. On a recent visit to one museum, I found that many junior museum staff were dealing with the rising inflation by skipping lunch find walking to and from work to their residences. On visiting Songo Mnara, an urban center on the southern Tanzanian coast, one of my colleagues found the guides so demoralized that wherever they were supposed to clear the site, they would merely set it on fire. The same technique had been noted at Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania, and Takwa, Kenya. In Kenya, developers have bought prime beach properties and built hotels almost unstopped. Attempts by museum personnel Archaeology in African Museums 167 to preserve the national and cultural environment are d o o m e d to fail due to covert opposition from top political brass (Kusimba, 1993). Several cases of theft reported in African museums in the 1980s are another aspect of the destruction of cultural heritage. Examples include the theft of sacred woodcarvings from Ilobu, Nigeria, collected by UUi Beier in the i950s to set up a village museum here (Oyo, 1994, p. 330), and thefts from the National Museum of D a r e s Salaam, the Zanzibar Museum, and the National Museum of Nigeria, Jos. Theft in African museums exposes their weak infrastructure but, more importantly, undermines their credibility as serious caretakers of our cultural patrimony. During the 1980s, the number of archaeological sites destroyed by looters markedly increased. T h e r e are few archaeological sites in Mali that have not been looted by art dealers and their African connoisseurs. Both friends of Africa and Africans themselves are compelled to find a long-lasting solution to the above problems. My primary concern is to urge African museum professionals to become more actively involved in addressing the above issues. More research on the continent continues to be conducted by university professors, both based both on the continent and outside the continent, and by graduate students rather than by museum professionals. Yet it seems to me that the latter are in a better position to undertake both field- and collection-based research, and they are usually the legal custodians of the cultural heritage. The training of professionals has been a commitment of African nations since independence. Almost every agreement between African nations and Western nations has included an education component destined to train human power. For the last 30 years, many African nations have sent students abroad for further studies. Most African archaeologists have been trained at such universities, yet it seems that their numbers are not reflected in the publication record and their influence on the subject is minimal. According to Peter Garlake, Their [African archaeologists] problems are many. Many.return inhibited by their inexperience in fieldwork in their local conditions. Many face problems of equipment, finance, and transport. Others are swept into purely administrative posts. Many countries suffer from years of civil war. Economies and infrastructures on which any research depends have been wrecked in these and many other countries. Yet even where there has been lavish foreign funding and support to enable the local archaeologists to cooperate in research into the origins of states of the eastern seaboard and its hinterland, the results have been so far negligible. (1990, p. 8)2 2The project referred is the 5-year Swedish Agency for Research and Economic Cooperation (SAREC) funded from 1987 to 1992. Some might argue that this was too early a time to evaluate the project's results (e.g., Duarte, 1993; Matenga, 1993; Pikirayi, 1993). 168 Kusimba Peter Garlake's research experience in Africa has been extensive. His views reflect first-hand impressions formed, defined, refined, and nurtured over the years he has lived and worked in east and central Africa. Presentday political correctness may force one to dismiss his views as colonialist. Garlake may seem right at first but misses some crucial elements. As a museum curator, I can testify that appreciation for one's collections is acquired through constant contact as one collects, catalogs, conserves, researches, and sits back and watches the public appreciation of this work. There are no substitutes or shortcuts to this goal. Put more simply, it takes long periods of apprenticeship for one to become an expert. Mr. Garlake has probably himself found and nurtured several of his African colleagues and taken them through the nuances of doing fieldwork in Africa and appreciating the joy of creating homegrown knowledge. The process of research and the technicalities of publication are painstakingly long. It takes an average of 3 years between submission of a paper and publication. Many major journals are 3 to 4 years behind schedule. Although this is understandably unavoidable, scholars based on the continent may not have access to background reading. Consequently, some give up and stop publishing in international journals altogether. It is true that in the scientific arena, views and findings considered too radical tend to be more critically scrutinized and some are sometimes rejected by peer-review journals; views that turn out to be wrong are too easily published (Begley, 1993, p. 62). Few publishers in Africa will publish a book primarily on archaeology and one has often to resort to writing for a popular or primary- and high-school audience (e.g., Karega-Munene and Wandibba, 1989). On the bright side, the number of indigenous African archaeologists from Cairo to Cape Town is growing and quite impressive (e.g., Okpoko, 1991; van der Merwe, 1991). However, our responsibilities as African scholars are many. All research projects funded should be completed according to schedule and final reports promptly published. We must nurture and support each others' work. This will include prompt review of colleagues' work and maintenance of high standards. It is crucial to develop a work ethic of productive research even in the face of ever mounting economic pressures and financial stress. There are several organizations in place for funding scholarly research in developing countries. Some federal agencies in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Capnada, Japan, South Africa, and others do not bar foreigners from applying for research and institutional support grants. Many African archaeologists trained abroad should be able to exploit some of these opportunities by conducting collaborative research with their Western counterparts. In fact, we should actively initiate programs Archaeology in African Museums 169 and seek out colleagues rather than waiting for them to come to us. The National Geographic project carried out in Ethiopia recently by Ethiopian and American archaeologists is a case in point. The future looks bright for African archaeology for there are far more opportunities for doing research than ever before. There is at present a cadre of professionals based in museums on the continent (Bour, 1993). Many organizations are listening and assisting whenever possible; many wait to be contacted. The EEC, USAID, NORAD, the Ford Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Geographic Society, SIDA, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Development Program have traditionally provided funds and will continue to assist. Wide support exists for supporting serious professionals around the world. Africa's book famine, while serious, is not without solutions. For example, works could be published by computer, bound, and distributed through WAMP, SAfA, ICOM, CICIBA, and other organizations. Collaborative regional research projects save funds and share resources [the Urban Origins Project in Eastern and Southern Africa (SAREC) is an example]. Research grant proposals can include a component to support publication. Research should, as much as possible, be relevant and easily translatable to local needs in order to gain support and understanding of the local communities in whose domain such projects are undertaken. As a consequence, these communities become guardians of archaeological sites rather than mere neighbors. African museums can offer their publications to museums of the West in exchange for free copies of Western museums' publications. This is a practice of many institutions around the world, including the Field Museum. Finally, a component for conservation of finds and archaeological sites should always be included in grant proposals. Contract archaeology is still in its infancy in Africa. Ways and means should be found to legislate for the involvement of archaeological research in all development projects. This may solve the problem of unemployment ahaong archaeologists, provide work for other museum professionals, and subsidize other projects. Financial constraints are a perennial crisis the world over and need not deter professionalism in African scholarship. The willingness to uphold a scholarly tradition of honesty, discipline, patience, hard work, and rigor is the major challenge facing African professionals of the 21st century. Bad and irrelevant museums have no place in 21st-century Africa. African museum professionals are beginning to deal with a more critical and demanding audience, one that expects better services and protection of its cultural heritage for the taxes paid to maintain these institutions. For example, Nigerians and Cameroonians have shown their restlessness and dissatisfaction with museums by aggressively demanding an active role in the display and use of traditional material culture (Oyo, 1994). Museum professionals need 170 Kusimba to be aware that they will be held accountable for loss of the African cultural heritage through theft, looting, and decay, for they alone are entrusted with its protection not only for Africa but for the entire world community. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Ms. Sibel Barut and Dr. Charles Stanish for their comments on an early draft of this paper. REFERENCES Begley, S. (1993). The meaning of junk: What's good science. Newsweek March 22: 62-64. Bour, P. (1993). 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