Repairing Cultural and Museum Cooperation between Cameroon and Europe

Abstract

How can we recreate conditions for a relationship based on reciprocity and mutuality between Europe and Africa? How do we repair this relationship? Beginning with these questions, this contribution analyses museum and cultural cooperation between Cameroon and Europe from the 1960s to the present day. Building on Kwame Nkrumah’s and Ade Ajayi’s concepts of decolonization and “Reparation” (with a capital R) on the one hand, and Aimé Césaire’s and Philipp Schorch and Noelle Kahanu’s concepts of cooperation on the other, the chapter interrogates legal and institutional mechanisms of this cultural cooperation such as the formal agreements on which it is based, as well as participating institutions and their impact in Cameroon today. By addressing museums as one of the many legacies of (post)colonial relations between Cameroon and Europe, the chapter aims to contribute to the debate on the future of the colonial legacy in Cameroon.