Musée des civilisations noires

Located in the port area opposite the Grand Théâtre, not far from the ferry terminal for Gorée, the Museum, housed in a large, rounded building reminiscent of the dwellings of the Casamance region in southern Senegal, is one of the world’s most important museums of African history. In the entrance hall, the immense baobab tree, symbolic of the continent, sculpted by the Haitian Eduard Duval-Carrié, welcomes visitors to the 14,000 square metres of exhibition space spread over four levels. It’s a pan-African museum, the realization of the dream of Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, father, along with Martinique’s Aimé Césaire, of the concept of negritude. Senghor first spoke of it in 1966, at the first Festival des Arts Nègres in Dakar, and it took 52 years to complete the project. The exhibition is a journey through time and space, from the skull of Toumaï, a seven-million-year-old hominid discovered in Chad, to the present, with works by contemporary artists such as Malian Abdoulaye Konaté, via centuries of history, with artifacts testifying to the African diaspora in the Americas. Ritual masks, sculptures and statues, not only from Senegal but also from other African countries, bear witness to the effort to construct a narrative that is both unified and multifaceted, with the aim of showing the African continent by finally giving a voice to the protagonists of its history and art.