Royal Museum for Central Africa

Royal Museum for Central Africa
AfricaMuseum

Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika  (Dutch) Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale  (French) Königliches Museum für Zentralafrika  (German)
Frontal view of the Royal Museum for Central Africa's main building from the gardens
Location within Belgium
Established	1898
Location	Tervuren, Belgium
Coordinates	50°49′51″N 4°31′07″E / 50.830889°N 4.518497°E / 50.830889; 4.518497
Type	Ethnography, Natural History and History museum
Director	Guido Gryseels (2001–present)
Public transit access	44 Tram Line
Website	www.africamuseum.be

The Royal Museum for Central Africa or RMCA (Dutch: Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika or KMMA; French: Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale or MRAC; German: Königliches Museum für Zentralafrika or KMZA), also officially known as the AfricaMuseum, is an ethnography and natural history museum situated in Tervuren in Flemish Brabant, Belgium, just outside Brussels. It was built to showcase King Leopold II's Congo Free State in the International Exposition of 1897.

The museum focuses on the Congo, a former Belgian colony. The sphere of interest, however (especially in biological research), extends to the whole Congo River basin, Middle Africa, East Africa, and West Africa, attempting to integrate "Africa" as a whole. Intended originally as a colonial museum, from 1960 onwards it has focused more on ethnography and anthropology. Like most museums, it houses a research department in addition to its public exhibit department. Not all research pertains to Africa (e.g. research on the archaeozoology of Sagalassos, Turkey). Some researchers have strong ties with the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.

In November 2013, the museum closed for extensive renovation work (including the construction of new exhibition space) and re-opened in December 2018 under its new name.^[1]

History[]

Early history[]

After the Congo Free State was recognised by the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, King Leopold II wanted to publicise the civilising mission and the economic opportunities available in his private colony to a wider public, both in Belgium and internationally. After considering other places, the king decided to have a temporary^[2] exhibition in his royal estate in Tervuren, just east of Brussels, in today's province of Flemish Brabant.

When the 1897 International Exposition was held in Brussels, a colonial section was built in Tervuren, connected to the city centre by the monumental Avenue de Tervueren. The Brussels–Tervuren tram line 44 was built at the same time as the original museum by King Leopold II to bring the visitors from the city centre to the colonial exhibition. The colonial section was hosted in the  [fr]. The building was designed by the Belgian architect and the classical gardens by French landscape architect Elie Lainé. In the main hall  [fr] designed a distinctive wooden Art Nouveau structure to evoke a Congolese forest, using Bilinga wood, an African tree. The exhibition displayed ethnographic objects, stuffed animals and Congolese export products (e.g. coffee, cacao and tobacco). In the park, a temporary "Human zoo"—a copy of an African village—was built, in which 60 Congolese people lived for the duration of the exhibition.^[3]

The interior of the original exhibit in the  [fr]

In 1898, the Palace of the Colonies became the Museum of the Congo (French: Musée du Congo, Dutch: Museum van Kongo) and a permanent exhibition was installed.^[3] A decade later, in 1912, a small, similar museum—the  [fr]—was opened in Namur. The museum began to support academic research, but due to the avid collecting of the scientists, the collection soon grew too large for the museum and enlargement was needed. Tervuren, which had become a rich suburb of Brussels, was chosen as the location of the enlarged museum. The new museum started construction in 1904 and was designed by the French architect Charles Girault in neoclassical "palace" architecture, reminiscent of the Petit Palais in Paris, with large gardens extending into the Tervuren Forest (a part of the Sonian Forest). It was officially opened by King Albert I in 1910 and named the Museum of the Belgian Congo (French: Musée du Congo Belge, Dutch: Museum van Belgisch-Kongo).^[4]

The following years saw the consolidation and enlargement of the museum's collections. In 1934, the museum's herbarium was transferred to the National Botanic Garden of Belgium (today's Meise Botanic Garden). In 1952, the adjective "Royal" was added to the museum's name. In preparation for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair (Expo '58) in 1957, a large building was constructed to accommodate African personnel working in the exhibition: the Centre d'Accueil du Personnel Africain (CAPA). In 1960, following the independence of the Congo, the museum's name was changed to its current name: the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Dutch: Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika or KMMA, French: Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale or MRAC, German: Königliches Museum für Zentralafrika or KMZA).^[5]

Renovation[]

The museum's main building during the 2013–18 renovation

By the turn of the millennium, the museum was in need of a thorough renovation. The more than 100-year-old central building was no longer adapted to the needs of a current museum operation. Besides, the permanent exhibition was outdated and its presentation not very critical of the colonial image. A new scenography was thus urgently required.^[1]

A global master plan was drawn up in 2007 for the entire site. The Belgian Buildings Agency entrusted the plan to the Temporary Association Stéphane Beel Architects (TV SBA).^[1] In late 2013, the museum was closed to allow a major renovation of its exhibits and an extension. The Belgian government spent €66 million on the modernisation of the museum. The exhibition area was increased from 6,000 m² (65,000 sq ft) to 11,000 m² (120,000 sq ft),^[1] while presenting fewer pieces; 700 against 1,400 previously (out of a total of 180,000 objects preserved). The additional space allowed contemporary art from Central Africa to be displayed alongside the original colonial exhibits.^[6] Renamed AfricaMuseum, the museum was reopened on 9 December 2018.^[1][2]

Buildings[]

The current Royal Museum for Central Africa complex consists of six buildings. The centrally located main building houses the permanent exhibitions. It was built under Leopold II by the French architect Charles Girault.^[4] The building is 125 metres (410 ft) long and 75 metres (246 ft) wide. The facade is decorated in the style of the neoclassical . On the right (southwest) side of this imposing building is the Executive Pavilion, and on the left (northeast) the Stanley Pavilion, which houses the entire Stanley Archive. The former Palace of the Colonies (now the Palace of Africa) has been transformed into a reception centre, media library and banquet hall.^[7] The Centre d'Accueil du Personnel Africain (CAPA) building, erected in 1957 for the African staff, houses several scientific departments.

Following the museum's complete renovation, the previously scattered archives are now presented in new on-site exhibition spaces. A reception pavilion, newly built in 2016, between the management building and the Palace of Africa, functions as the entrance building. In this building are the ticket offices, cloakrooms, a shop, a restaurant, and a picnic area for children. An underground gallery leads from the reception building into the existing museum building. This space is also used for temporary exhibitions. In the museum's enclosed courtyard, a sunken garden with a light shaft was added, bringing light to this underground level.^[1]

• 

  Palace of the Colonies, Aldophe (1897)

• 

  Main museum building, Girault (1905–10)

• 

  Stanley Pavilion

• 

  Centre d'Accueil du Personnel Africain (CAPA) building (1957)

• 

  New entrance pavilion (2018)

Collections[]

According to the Royal Museum for Central Africa's website,^[8] the collection contains:

• 10,000,000 animals
• 250,000 rock samples
• 120,000 ethnographic objects
• 20,000 maps
• 56,000 wood samples
• 8,000 musical instruments
• 350 archives, including some of Henry Morton Stanley's journals

The herbarium collection of the then-Congo Museum was transferred to that of the National Botanic Garden of Belgium in 1934.

• 

  The interior of the museum, photographed in 2011, shortly before the museum's major renovation

• 

  Ethnographic objects on display in the museum before its restoration

• 

  Diorama of stuffed animals from the museum before its restoration

• 

  King Leopold III's pirogue in the renovated museum

Archives[]

The museum stores archives documenting its own institutional history, as well as archives of private businesses, organisations, and individuals.^[9][10] As of 2018, online finding aids exist for archives of  [fr], musicologist Paul Collaer, geologist  [fr], Francis Dhanis, Félix Fuchs, Cyriaque Gillain, Josué Henry de la Lindi,  [nl], American Richard Mohun, Emmanuel Muller, German explorer Paul Reichard, Albert Sillye, British explorer Henry Morton Stanley, Émile Storms, Alphonse van Gèle, historian Jan Vansina, Auguste Verbeken, historian Benoît Verhaegen, Gustave Vervloet, and railway enterprises Compagnie du chemin de fer du bas-Congo au Katanga and  [fr].^[11]

Research[]

The publicly accessible museum itself only represents 25 percent of the activities which the museum covers.^[1] The scientific departments, which represent the bulk of the museum's academic and research facilities, (together with the main collections) are housed in the  [fr], the Stanley Pavilion and in the CAPA building.

There are 4 departments:

• Department of Cultural Anthropology
  • Ethnography
  • Archaeology and Prehistory
  • Linguistics and Ethnomusicology
  • Anthropology and Ethnohistory
• Department of Geology and Mineralogy
  • General Geology
  • Mineralogy and Petrography
  • Cartography and Photo interpretation
  • Physical and
• Department of Zoology
  • Vertebrates (Ornithology, Ichthyology, Herpetology, Osteology and Mammalogy)
  • Entomology
  • Invertebrates non-insects (Arachnology, Myriapodology, Acarology)
• Department of History and General Scientific Services
  • History of the Colonial Period
  • Contemporary History
  • Agricultural and (Geomorphology, Laboratory of Wood Biology)

The museum also maintains a library of some 130,000 titles.^[12][9]

Controversy[]

The Congo, I presume monument by Tom Frantzen in the museum's gardens

There has been controversy surrounding the Royal Museum for Central Africa. It had been called a museum that "has remained frozen in time"^[2] as it showed how a museum looked like in the mid-20th century. No mention was made of the pillage of resources and atrocities in the Congo Free State, nor during Belgium's larger colonial era.^[2]

The Guardian reported in July 2002 that, after initial outrage by Belgian historians over the popular history book King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild that gives his view of the Congo Free State in what critics called a "tendentious diatribe", the state-funded museum would finance an investigation into Hochschild's allegations. The resulting more modern exhibition The Memory of Congo (February–October 2005) tried to tell the story of the Congo Free State before it became a Belgian colony and a less one-sided view of the Belgian colonial era.^[2] The exhibition was praised by the international press, with French newspaper Le Monde claiming that "the museum has done better than revisit a particularly stormy page in history...[it] has pushed the public to join it in looking into the reality of colonialism."^[13] Hochschild himself had a mixed critique of the renovated museum.^[14]

Gallery[]

Panoramic view of the Royal Museum for Central Africa's main building and gardens

See also[]

• Atrocities in the Congo Free State
• Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO)
• Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference 1889–90
• Brussels Conference Act of 1890
• Archives Africaines of the Belgian SPF Affaires étrangères, Commerce extérieur et Coopération au Développement

References[]

Bibliography[]

Issued by the museum[]

• Verswijver; et al., eds. (1995). Masterpieces from Central Africa.
• Patricia Van Schuylenbergh (1997), La mémoire des Belges en Afrique; Inventaire des archives historiques privées du Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale de 1858 a nos jours (PDF), Inventaire des archives historiques (in French), ISBN 2-87398-006-0
• Toma Muteba Luntumbue & Claire Ponas, ed. (2001). EXITCONGOMUSEUM/Contemporary Art.

About the museum[]

in English

• "Tervueren", Belgium and Holland (15th ed.), Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1910, OCLC 397759 – via Internet Archive, Congo Museum
• Jean Muteba Rahier (2003). "Ghost of Leopold II: The Belgian Royal Museum of Central Africa and Its Dusty Colonialist Exhibition". Research in African Literatures. 34.
• Véronique Bragard (2011). "'Indépendance!': The Belgo-Congolese Dispute in the Tervuren Museum". Human Architecture. ISSN 1540-5699.
• Patrick Hoenig (2014). "Visualizing trauma: the Belgian Museum for Central Africa and its discontents". Postcolonial Studies. Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne. 17. ISSN 1466-1888.

in other languages

• Anne-Marie Bouttiaux (1999). "Des mises en scène de curiosités aux chefs-d'œuvre mis en scène. Le Musée royal de l'Afrique à Tervuren: un siècle de collections". Cahiers d'Études africaines (in French). 39 (155): 595–616. doi:10.3406/cea.1999.1768 – via Persee.fr.
• Maarten Couttenier (2005). Congo Tentoongesteld. Een geschiedenis van de Belgische antropologie en het Museum van Tervuren (1882-1925) (in Dutch). Leuven:  [nl]. OCLC 650023048.
• Maarten Couttenier (2009). "De impact van Congo in het Museum van Belgisch Congo in Tervuren (1897-1946)". In Vincent Viaene (ed.). Congo in België: koloniale cultuur in de metropool (in Dutch). ISBN 9789058677716.

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Royal Museum for Central Africa.

• Official museum site
• Collection etnomusicology
• WorldCat. Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale
• "(Musée du Congo)" – via Europeana.
• Tervuren wiki page on the museum Archived 26 February 2007 at the Wayback Machine
• Mémoires des Rites Populations of Central Africa-in French but excellent pictures of ethnographic material from RMCA Tervuren.
• Flickr Images tagged RMCA
• Albertine Rift Project To access the many excellent pictures Pick a group (bird, butterfly fish) in top menu then go to the taxa list. Click on the species name if a photo is indicated by a camera pic on the right.
• "Retelling the Story" article in Flanders Today
• HathiTrust. Publications issued by Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale; Musée du Congo (some fulltext)

Coordinates: 50°49′51.20″N 4°31′6.59″E / 50.8308889°N 4.5184972°E / 50.8308889; 4.5184972