Nation-building, collecting and the politics of display: The National Museum, Ghana

The historical formation and contemporary state of the collections and displays at the National Museum Ghana are examined here in relation to the emergence of the nation-state during and after colonial rule in West Africa. The collections were largely made up of objects donated by colonial administrators, given by traditional rulers or excavated by professional archaeologists. With independence an inevitability, a National Museum was planned with the aim, for colonial museologists, of fostering a sense of national identity in the face of the destabilizing effects of modernity. Inside its domed Modernist building, the Museum's displays have had an ambivalent and changing relation to the cultural project of nation-building. The museum became entangled with both its colonial past and with the ideology of Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party, that accompanied it into independence. Nevertheless the collections themselves remain open to a number of different and sometimes contradictory readings. © Oxford University Press 2001.