Discourses

Based on their past experiences, South Africans tend to see all human rights violation through the prism of ‘white vs black’. The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre remind that racism is beyond the colour line.

The African cultural infrastructure is presently at a turning point. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, president of the Goethe-Institut, highlights the positive and mutual interest in the urgent questions of postcolonial museum work in his keynote address at the opening of the final international Museum Conversations conference in Windhoek.

Wasteful use of the earth’s resources is a leading cause of environmental disasters, and the wealthy industrialized countries are benefiting from the exploitation of developing countries.

​The restitution debate is creating quite an impact. And yes, it’s essential for it to be held – as publicly and passionately as possible, says Prof. Dr. Wiebke Ahrndt, Director of the Übersee-Museum Bremen.

Is the orally transmitted cultural heritage of Africa in danger? An interview with Abiti Nelson, curator of ethnography and history at the Uganda Museum.

“Not everything good must necessarily come from the West”: The artist Ndidi Dike on the opportunities offered by the African continent – and why we should deal more closely with production conditions.

Decolonisation has become a thing in the European cultural environment. The only question is how sustainable this development is.

The Internet reproduces the historical problems of our society: sexism and colonial patterns. Net activist Nanjira Sambuli fights for technologies against these traditional ideologies.

The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe talks about xenophobia, nationalism, the place of the foreigner, the dangers of “single cultures” and spaces for articulating difference.

Are ethnological museums in the global North simply collections of colonial booty, as some critics have claimed since the end of the 20th century? In response to this accusation, Professor Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University, also demonstrates a different kind of museum work.

The Challenges and Opportunities Ahead – an interview with Nanjira Sambuli: The policy analyst and digital equality advocate spells out the steps necessary for bridging the knowledge gap in the digital age.

Not everyone benefits equally from the internet by a long way: the Global South gets exploited by American and Chinese digital platforms in particular. To rein in this dynamic, affected regions of the world should be able to apply tariffs or prioritise their own economies, experts are demanding.

The art world expected great things from the tenth edition of the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art – the first to be curated by an African woman. But the show refused to produce a simplified and linear narrative of colonialism. 

Western art museums rarely exhibit contemporary, indigenous art. Ethnologist Mona Suhrbier believes that the art world has to rethink how it approaches the unfamiliar.

Quinn Latimer, Editor-in-Chief of documenta 14 Publications, speaks about the South as a learning process, documenta’s public programme taking place in Athens and language as a liberating act.

Germany’s colonial past entails a considerable burden of responsibility that continues to this day. This is evident in debates about ethnological collections, the renaming of streets – and in the question of how to deal with guilt.

“I live in South Africa, in a so-called ‘post-apartheid society’.” A conversation with the curator Gabi Ngcobo about ways to reconsider history and memory.

The Colonial Era is generally considered to have ended in the final years of the past millennium. Though many former colonies are now among the least developed countries, it would be a mistake to blame this state of affairs entirely on Colonialism.