African and European museum directors pledge to cooperate at Dakar conference

Museum administrators from 38 international locations in Africa and Europe agreed to “construct a standard future” and strengthen cooperation together with joint travelling exhibitions in a declaration adopted at a convention on the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar, Senegal, final week.

Sixty museum administrators from 28 African international locations together with Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria and Uganda, and ten European international locations together with Belgium, France, Germany and the UK pledged to “mobilise our efforts to doc, protect and reinterpret with the communities, collections in Africa and Europe and make them out there to the general public by means of digitisation, analysis, training and exhibitions.”

The three-day convention was envisaged as the muse of a community spanning each continents and was deliberate in September final yr throughout the opening of the ultimate sections of the Humboldt Discussion board in Berlin. Areas for future cooperation embody restitution, digitisation of collections, analysis, training and exhibitions, in response to an announcement issued by Berlin’s Prussian Cultural Heritage Basis, one of many initiators of the convention.

“A community was born in Dakar; a discussion board permitting museums and companions to forge a shared future,” says Hamady Bocoum, the director of the Museum of Black Civilisations. It was, he says, “a giant step ahead, with a protracted and thrilling street forward of us to foster mutual understanding.”

Different backers of the convention had been the Dutch Ministry of Training, Tradition and Science, the Humboldt Discussion board Basis, the Goethe Institute and the Institut Francais in Senegal.