Museums - Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale

In 1897, Leopold II, the King of Belgium and of the recently founded independent state of Congo, organized the colonial portion of the Universal Exposition and attracted over a million visitors to Tervuren, who came to discover the wealth and culture of the new Belgian colony. In 1904, he began work on an impressive palace to accommodate the new Congo Museum’s holdings, which was inaugurated by his successor in 1910.
The museum’s extraordinary material covers all areas of the social and natural sciences. They come from collecting expeditions, such as those of Maes and Hutereau in 1910, as well as from gifts made by colonial administrators and missionaries as early as 1885. The Department of Ethnography, dedicated to the study of the art anthropology of Africa, currently holds over 180,000 objects. The Department of Ethnomusicology makes some 8,000 musical instruments from Central Africa (the largest collection of its type) available to researchers.
While initially the museum was a showcase for the Belgian colony, it has, since the independence of the Congo, expanded the scope of its collections and exhibitions to include the rest of the African continent through the creation of sections devoted to West and East Africa, and, most recently, North Africa. In 1967, the museum worked out exchanges with the Royal Museums of Art and History and obtained a collection of Amerindian and Oceanic pieces (mostly Melanesian), of which a portion is on permanent display. The museum participates actively in the dissemination of knowledge of the African patrimony and of colonial history. It sponsors a great deal of scientific research.
In 2010, on the 100th anniversary of the museum, a long-awaited new display will be inaugurated. It will focus on Central Africa and offer visitors an opportunity to journey along the Congo River to illustrate the river’s importance as a crossroads of cultures, traditions, and exchange in the heart of the African continent.