Museums, not mausoleums!
by Mae-ling Jovenes Lokko
Ghanaian architect Joe Addo founded the Ai-D series in September 2010 as a subset initiative of ArchiAfrika, a non-governmental organization promoting African design and urbanism, for which he serves as chairman. Initially Ai-D served as a platform to discuss architecture and the impact and work of Ghanaian architects. By its fourth discussion, the nature of architectural discourse and the interest of a growing audience encouraged its organizers to broaden the scope and themes of the series beyond architecture.
Almost a year after its inception, it is fitting that the Ai-D Salon turns its attention to arguably Ghana’s most important cultural platform, the National Museum of Arts.
The aim of the discussion was to firstly create awareness about the National Museum itself and secondly address the need to make this
institution the collective ‘heart and soul’ of many individual efforts happening within a growing, dynamic yet disjointed arts scene. The carefully-assembled panel was composed of three key members from the Ghana Monuments and Museums Board and the Ghanaian government, two of Ghana’s most prominent private art collectors, a worldrenowned Ghana-based artist and a prominent Ghanaian architect based overseas. In bringing their perspectives as insideroutsider, private-public, local global and the greys in-between, each expressed dire reasons for the museum’s revitalization and more importantly, hinted at the ways in which this reshaping might manifest. The discussion was moderated by Joe Addo and Nat Amarteifio whose work in their respective fields have been underlined by an emphasis on the role of culture and contex in Ghana’s development. David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates began the evening’s discussion by recounting his morning visit to the National Museum and its extensive collection of 25, 000 prized objects. Since the Museum’s founding in 1924, the museum has amassed an impressive collection of objects from Ghana and Africa, of which only one-sixth of this collection is actually on display. For Adjaye, he value and expanse of what he saw hidden in storage and under dusty cloths embodied a rare treasure, a collection that overshadowed even that of the highly anticipated National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington DC for which his firm won the design competition in 2009. In linking this collection to the wider African Diaspora and the world, Kofi Setordji, the Ghanaian artist and sculptor posited that Ghanaians and Africans needed to look no further than the museum to define Ghana’s point of reference to the world. “The collection in our National Museum is the first place in which slavery as a form of globalization was recorded,” describes Kofi Setordji. A few of these objects including a fourteenth century metal sculpture of a chief’s court, a 4-foot elephant’s ivory tusk and various paintings depicting iconic Ghanaian scenes and styles were on-display as testimony to the variety and quality of the their collection. On March 5, 1957, the National Museum itself was founded in line with Nkrumah’s vision of
unity—one that constructed both a national and pan-African identity. Hon. Fritz Baffour, the chairman of the Museum Board, narrated a few examples of how the museum’s ethnographic and archaeological objects, paintings, sculptures, textiles and various instruments within the Museum’s collection pertain to unique stories of the Ga, Fante, Ashanti and various ethnic groups within Ghana. However much as these objects remain archives and evidence of our histories, each of the panelists stressed the need for the continuation of preservation and conversation to continue today. The Ghana Monuments and Museums Board (GMMB) Director, Mr. Acheampong, attested that the last time something was added to the collection at the National Museum was in 1989. As a consequence, the change and developments within our culture and identity remain unrecorded and unarticulated to us. Moreover Seth Dei advocates this lapse in ournational narrative as partly due to a political culture that sees history as beginning with each new political citing and not as a part of continuum. “The Ghana we have is something that reached its peak in the 10th century”, describes Hon. J.S Annan, “we took the name and we tried create a new reality. This is something that is still in progress. But how do we continue to co-create a Ghana?”
For Frances Ademola, Ghana’s revered owner of Ghana’s first art gallery The Loom,this practice of co-creation begins with the idea of creating “museums and not mausoleums”. Recounting her visit to the National Museum as a ‘spy’ she places the responsibility squarely in the hands of the museum’s personnel who serve as front-liners, interacting and engaging with the museum’s visitors and children on a daily basis. Hon J. S. Annan responds to this challenge with the task of finding and instilling passion once again in those that safeguard our heritage. “We must nurture and support the passion of the curator; those people who cant stop wishing to inspire you to different heights, or get into the soul of the exhibition. In Ghana this form of passion you find with the creator of the art expires once the artist has exhibited their work. It is then left there and their works gather dust,” he says. “Beyond a building is more than its structure, we need to educate people about the ideas, practices and stories about that place,” responds Fritz Baffour. Through his experience from working on the Museum’s Board, he affirms that Ghana has a lot trained people who are not involved with the museum itself. A nostalgic Mr. Dei described the period in1960s filled with competent scholars who wrote about these collections and whose works were subsequently widely read and studied by others, no longer exists. Therefore a gaping hole exists where these ‘middlemen’ once stood; ensuing a fragmented creative industry and public. As Ghana’s largest collector of Ghanaian contemporary art, Mr. Dei, hopes to culminate his
role as co-creator one day by donating a private collection to a Museum of Modern Ghanaian Art. In the
spirit of community participation, Seth urged the audience to see art collection as a small step in ‘co-creating’ while Kofi Setordji encouraged individuals to volunteer an hour a week to work at the National Museum.
The follow-up initiative to the Ai-Diaspora discussion is another program to be hosted at the National Museum of Arts at which the ‘Friends of the Museum’ will be launched. Through this, goals such as the
renovation and extension of the museum will be realized as well as the introduction of programs that encourage community-participation and interaction within and beyond the walls of the museum. Perhaps as a Seth Dei points out, this will be a step in realizing that museums and the act of co-creating occurs not only in buildings, but in everything we do.
