Museum of civilisations · Senegal
Museum of Black Civilisations, Dakar
The Museum of Black Civilisations (Musée des civilisations noires) opened in Dakar on 6 December 2018, more than fifty years after President Léopold Sédar Senghor first proposed it. A circular building of about 14,000 square metres opposite the Grand Théâtre, it tells the story of Black cultures in Africa and the diaspora, shows returned objects, and hosts much of the Dakar Biennale.
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Senghor's idea
In 1966 Dakar hosted the first World Festival of Black Arts, and Senegal's president, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, used it to announce a museum devoted to the civilisations of Black Africa and its diaspora. The idea waited half a century. The building was finally paid for by China — reported figures range from about 30 to 35 million dollars — and the museum was inaugurated by President Macky Sall on 6 December 2018. Its first director was the archaeologist Hamady Bocoum, of Cheikh Anta Diop University.
The building
The museum is a large round building on four floors, with about 14,000 square metres of space and room for some 18,000 works. Reviews describe its form as inspired by the impluvium houses of Casamance, in southern Senegal, whose inward-sloping roofs gather rainwater into a central basin; some also see an echo of the curved walls of Great Zimbabwe. The light comes in from above, as it does into the courtyard of an impluvium house. It stands opposite the Grand Théâtre, at the edge of Dakar's administrative and business centre.
What to see
The museum has no fixed permanent display: its director at the opening, Hamady Bocoum, set it up as a series of themed halls with changing exhibitions. The first, Civilisations africaines : création continue de l'humanité (African civilisations: the continuing creation of humanity), argued that Africa is the cradle of humanity and of many of its techniques; at the inauguration visitors saw a cast of the skull of Toumaï, one of the oldest known hominins, and an ancient iron-smelting furnace — Bocoum has argued that Africans were working iron by about 2,500 BC. A great metal baobab by the Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, L'Arbre de l'humanité, rises through the building's floors. Exhibitions change, so check what is on view.
The museum has also become the home of returned objects. A sabre attributed to the nineteenth-century leader El Hadj Omar Tall, brought to France by the colonial general Louis Archinard, was shown from the opening on loan; in November 2019 the French prime minister, Édouard Philippe, handed it to President Sall in Dakar, and a French law later transferred its ownership. For the museum's sixth anniversary, an exhibition, Demoon dikkaat – Les Restitués, was devoted to returned works and the debate about them.
The Dakar Biennale
The museum has become the main home of Dak'Art, the biennale of contemporary African art. In 2024 it hosted most of the exhibitions, including the pavilions of the guest countries; the 2026 edition, with Morad Montazami as artistic director, was launched there and runs from 19 November to 19 December 2026. In 2022 it showed Picasso à Dakar 1972–2022, fifty years after a Picasso exhibition in Dakar in 1972.
Visiting
Check opening hours locally. Dakar's older collection of West African masks and objects is at the Théodore Monod Museum, and the École de Dakar page tells the story of the painters of Senghor's time. For other museums across the continent, see where to see African art.