1The exhibition Desconstruir o Colonialismo, Descolonizar o Imaginário. O Colonialismo em África: Mitos e Realidades (Deconstructing Colonialism, Decolonising Imaginaries. Colonialism in Africa: Myths and Realities), on view since 29 October 2024 at the Museu Nacional de Etnologia, aims to reassess Portuguese colonial ideology and its manifestations in Africa. It opens new possibilities for addressing the legacies of colonialism, bringing to the forefront a discussion about colonial legacies in the museum space, in memory studies and post-memory. It involves formerly colonized communities, Afro-descendants, curators and cultural institutions, as well as the wider Portuguese public. The exhibition proposes a critical reinterpretation of Portuguese colonialism as a historical system of domination and violence, highlighting the production of imaginaries that persist to this day. Desconstruir o Colonialismo therefore suggests an exercise: to deconstruct imperial ideology by confronting entrenched and constructed myths and narratives within the Portuguese context and revisiting official histories and symbolic colonial representations that persist in museum and public spaces.

2At the same time, the exhibition reflects on the need to consider historical positioning through open, participatory, and collaborative processes. Although the exhibition operates within an institutional framework and, consequently, adopts a less audacious scope, it still suggests a space for critiquing the forms of knowledge production and memory in contemporary Portuguese society.

3The exhibition is structured around two core thematic sections. One includes large-scale panels positioned at eye level and above, featuring dense texts and images that provide historical analysis of Portuguese colonialism in Africa (fig. 1).

© Nuno Silas

4The second section of the exhibition seeks to present art as a means of witnessing and reinstating African cultural perspectives within knowledge systems, while also interrogating the realities of colonial violence and historical misrepresentations. It creates an opportunity to reexamine historical narratives. However, simply referencing decolonial discourse is insufficient; for such engagement to be meaningful, the display itself must disrupt colonial epistemologies.

5The exhibition was organized by the Centro de Estudos sobre África e Desenvolvimento (Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão, Universidade de Lisboa) and the Museu Nacional de Etnologia, curated by the historian Isabel Castro Henriques, and co-curated by Inocência Mata, Joana Pereira Leite, João Moreira da Silva, Luca Fazzini, and Mariana Castro Henriques.

6The exhibition was part of the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of 25 April 1974, marking one of the Revolution's most significant consequences: the decolonisation of African territories.

7One of the exhibition's goals is to challenge contemporary representations of colonialism. To do so, the curators critically analyse pre-established histories of colonialism and integrate historical documents, large-format texts, photographs, objects, and artifacts belonging to African culture and artistic expression. Furthermore, it seeks to question the stereotypes embedded in the Portuguese collective imagination, encouraging critical engagement with the colonial legacy present in African and European societies, as a way of retelling history and opening paths for the reparation and transmission of the memory of colonialism and its structures of oppression.

8Simultaneously, held at the Museu Nacional de Etnologia, an institution whose collections include a significant number of objects acquired in Africa during the colonial period, the exhibition seeks to problematise the museum itself as a colonial site where historical modes of display were constituted.

9Since the beginning of this century, the history of colonialism and imperialism in African contexts and their intersection with museum collections and display practice has become an increasingly prominent field of study for scholars worldwide (Wood 2000; Kingdon 2019). In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in rethinking colonial collections. However, comparatively little scholarship has addressed colonial collections originating from Portuguese territories in Africa. Yet, Portuguese colonialism in Africa remains visible in public spaces, in museums, and even in Portuguese identity narratives. Countries such as Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, as well as their diasporic communities have a considerable portion of their cultural heritage held in Portuguese museum collections. Indeed, debates concerning racism, discrimination, and segregation have gained prominence in the Portuguese context and abroad, including in former colonies. In recent years, scholars and activists have begun to engage actively with these issues, exploring questions of decolonisation and reparation.

10Several fundamental questions, however, arise: are exhibitions such as this one, organised at the Museu Nacional de Etnologia, stimulating reparation and a critical approach to the colonial past, or do they merely represent another means of instrumentalising it without effecting significant change? Who is curating them? How? Which audiences do they address, and who stands to benefit from them?

11Marília Xavier Cury offers a pertinent perspective in the article “Política de Gestão de Coleções: Museu universitário, Curadoria Indígena e Processo Colaborativo” (2020). Cury proposes the idea of “indigenous curation” as a contribution to the reconfiguration of museum practices today. This framework provides a useful lens through which to critically assess the Lisbon exhibition particularly regarding the activation of collaborative processes between museums, universities, and communities. The curatorial team of Desconstruir o Colonialismo acknowledges the importance of engaging with diverse identities and communities during the exhibition's conception and realisation, to foster collaboration and historical reparation.

12However, despite the participation of historians and academics from African contexts and communities connected to the exhibited artifacts, the exhibition would have benefited from more inclusive involvement of curators and activists, particularly those engaged in decolonial practices in Africa and Portugal, among other places. The curatorial approach also evidences limited dialogue with communities directly affected by colonialism, that might have enabled more radical interventions, generating possibilities for repair and experimentation. For instance, collaborations with Afro-descendant associations in Portugal, artists, researchers, curators from former Portuguese colonies, and migrant community collectives could have introduced counter-narratives, alternative display strategies, and forms of shared authorship.

13Reparation for colonial crimes entails the practice of social justice in the present; encompassing societal responsibility and care. In Portugal, debates surrounding historical reparation and the decolonisation of museums generate tensions between these institutions and their relationships with Portuguese economic, political, and social structures. In fact, an effective process of reparation requires a multifaceted structure and multiple intersections. It includes historical justice, the reframing of power and representation, community participation, and ethical curatorial practices.

14Nevertheless, the exhibition is a starting point for colonial reparations in the Portuguese context. It centres on the history of Portuguese colonial power in Africa during the nineteenth century and seeks to deepen understanding of the cultural and political ideologies behind the construction of the Portuguese imagination.

15The exhibition comprises selected African objects from the museum’s collection alongside extended texts elucidating the history of colonialism. The selected objects also address the decontextualisation of African legacies in the museum and seek to recover untold narratives about contemporary Africa, in dialogue with works by contemporary artists such as Lívio de Morais, Hilaire Balu Kuyangiko, and Mónica de Miranda. These artists were invited to create a dialogic narrative alongside the ethnographic artefacts and contribute to discussions on reparations and the deconstruction of colonial imaginaries. Moreover, the artists’ interventions offer an effective means of approaching the colonial past from the present and trace the roots of racism embedded in Portuguese colonialism. The selected histories, including that of forced African labour, reinforce a plurality of perspectives on Portuguese colonialism and contribute to reshaping how we understand the colonial past.

16However, the visitor's experience and engagement with the subject matter would have benefited from a more considered and expansive selection of objects and visual elements. The exhibition's discourse is predominantly text-based and, in several instances, ethnographic artefacts function primarily as illustrations of the curatorial argument rather than as active agents in meaning-making (fig. 2). As for the works by the aforementioned contemporary artists, these are not clearly mobilised to produce counter-narratives or effect a decolonial intervention in the museum, thereby relegating the artists’ contributions to a peripheral role.

© Nuno Silas

17Despite some limitations, the curatorial team of Desconstruir o Colonialismo proposed a space for critical knowledge production and discussion, reflecting the concerns of the post-colonial condition. The exhibition confronts historical invisibility, bringing to light objects that had long remained confined to museum storehouses. It seeks to raise awareness of the need to rethink colonial collections and to question the future of museums. In doing so, it explores ways to reorganise and repatriate objects, proposing a process of recontextualisation that respects history and cultural memory whilst promoting a more inclusive and decolonised narrative.

18The process of historical reparation may thus begin with the acknowledgement of history and past injustices, fostering a space of representation and self-representation within the museum.

19The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (Henriques 2024), now in its second edition, which brings together contributions by various authors. These contributions address different dimensions of Portuguese colonialism in Africa, questioning dominant historical narratives and proposing alternative readings of its cultural and political legacy. The catalogue constitutes a significant component of the project, providing a platform for reflection and theoretical engagement with topics such as the construction of the colonial imaginary, structures of power and representation, and contemporary processes of revisiting colonial history.