Dakar, Senegal, is the bustling center of Francophone West Africa. For more than 500 years, it thrived as a cultural and trading hub without resorting to gimmicky, artificial attractions. That began to change in 2006, when then-President Abdoulaye Wade commissioned a state-owned North Korean company to build the African Renaissance Monument, a 160-foot-tall statue of a muscular, scantily-clad man holding a woman and child, on a hill on the western coast of Dakar. Wade is gone now, but the statue lives on, towering over the otherwise pleasantly non-monumental city.
Late last year, Dakar saw the opening of another ready-made landmark built by a foreign dictatorship: the Museum of Black Civilizations. In theory, the museum was long overdue. As a definitive center of black culture located on African territory, it is both a practical and symbolic means for Africans to reclaim their cultural patrimony after centuries of foreign oppression. But the museum offers visitors little sense of this higher mission. The architecture, the handiwork of Chinese state designers, is a huge part of the reason why. Beijing chipped in a reported $34 million for the project, and it shows.
From the outside, the museum is a colonnaded tan cylinder surrounded by a concrete sea of nothingness. Inside, it is a forbidding labyrinth. Modern museums, such as the New Museum and the Whitney in New York, often make use of high-ceilinged and windowless galleries; the trick is to funnel in just enough natural light to save visitors from feeling like they’re in a basement or warehouse. Yet the Dakar museum is downright sepulchral, filled with spaces so grimly impersonal that they hardly feel like they were built for human beings, never mind art.
The museum’s inhumanity is especially evident if one wanders into Dakar’s nearby Plateau district, which is as lively and engrossing as just about anywhere on Earth. Further north is the wonderful Village des Arts, a rustic and endlessly fascinating collection of several hundred studios clustered around a small but impressive gallery of the tenants’ best work. It is art that deepens, rather than interrupts, one’s enthrallment with the surrounding environment. Visitors to the central gallery can view, say, the riotously colorful abstract canvases of Dakar’s Serge Mienandi and feel as if they’re seeing something that they couldn’t find anywhere else.
In the Museum of Black Civilizations, by contrast, one looks at the gaping corridors or the white skylight of the mostly empty atrium and feels unsettled and out of place. A cluster of excellent bronze heads from Benin, or two huge galleries of contemporary Afro-Cuban art, don’t distract from the Mandarin paneling or signage in nearly every room. It was hard for me to walk through an exhibit of Chinese masks on the second floor, perhaps intended to evoke a sublime cow mask from Cameroon one level below and likely included because of the building’s funders, and not recall China’s persecution of its Muslim Uighur population, who share a religion with over 95% of Senegalese.
When I visited in early August, much of the museum was still empty. It will eventually be filled, and it may one day live up to its promise. But, for now, it is a reminder of how difficult it is to command a major cultural institution into existence, especially when doing so means relying on foreign patrons who neither care about, nor understand, what they’re building. That the museum was intended to be an assertion of African independence from foreign control is a particularly bitter irony.
A few thousand miles to the south, in Cape Town, South Africa, lies a different waste of potential. Since its opening in late 2017, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa has been a must-see for visitors to the city. Architecturally, the museum is a triumph, perhaps the masterpiece of British designer Thomas Heatherwick. It is housed inside the shell of a former grain silo. Yet many of the original structure’s elements remain exposed in the interior, most notably, the sweeping rounded edges of the silos themselves, which were cut away to form the building’s atrium. When I visited in April, the atrium housed a five-story found aluminum sculpture by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, while the galleries hosted an outstanding survey of contemporary art from neighboring Zimbabwe.
The institution cannot be counted as a success yet. On the day I visited, hardly anyone was there. Standing on the museum’s roof deck, near the entrance to the $1,000-a-night Silo Hotel, I could see the Cape Town waterfront, home to some of the most expensive commercial real estate on the African continent. Only a few miles away were the squatter camps and shanty towns of the Cape Flats. Like the museum in Dakar, the Zeitz is incongruous with its broader surroundings and largely irrelevant to them, a distant shiny object with only a vague sense of a larger purpose.
This year in Senegal, the rains were slow in arriving. Farmers wondered whether they could save their crops, and there was a palpable nervousness even in Dakar. A few months after I left Cape Town, the army was called in to pacify out-of-control gangs in the Cape Flats. Hunger and violence don’t render art museums a wasteful luxury; arguably, they make them even more urgently necessary. But Africa’s two most notable recent museums aren’t yet making the case as effectively as they need to be. One is a foreign dictatorship’s cynical soft power play; the other, a glittering island of opulence with a boutique hotel slapped on top. Both are jarring contrasts to their host societies, reflective of the tastes, demands, and spending habits of non-Africans.
Bridging the gulf between these institutions and their immediate contexts might prove difficult. Luckily, their tasks are too important for failure to be an option.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet Magazine.
