Two-and-a-half years ago, I returned home to South Africa after more than a decade in Europe and North America working as a museum and heritage consultant, and a bruising and short-lived stint as the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (NMAFA).

I came home exhausted; tired of taking on battles that often felt unwinnable. I felt as though I had spent all my time fighting for African visibility and restitution and explaining that we were fully human. I was relieved to be back home. This is where I started my museum career 15 years earlier, setting up some of the new post-apartheid museums during the ambitious period of Thabo Mbeki’s Presidential Legacy Projects. I wanted to see how these public heritage projects and others were faring.

I started with the Kliptown Open Air Museum at the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication in Soweto, celebrating 50 years since the signing of the Freedom Charter in 1955, and the heart of an ambitious urban development and housing project. Between 2004-5, we had spent months and months working on a powerful exhibit with a team of local researchers and artisans. It was abandoned. The Square was also in disrepair, and the area in a worse state than before the “development.”

Disheartened but not discouraged, I continued visiting sites across the country. As I planned my next chapter, I wanted to take stock of the state of museums and heritage institutions, not only in South Africa, but across the continent.

In Groot Marico, in the North West Province, we stumbled on a monument identifying the site where our former president was arrested in 1963 and subsequently imprisoned. An adjacent double-story thatched “visitor center” was empty except for three faded banners featuring Jacob Zuma, Oliver Tambo, and the Freedom Charter, covered in dust and bat poo. Two security guards—the only people on site—knew nothing about the history or significance of the monument.  The monument doesn’t feature on Google or Apple Maps, or at the Groot Marico Visitor Information Centre a few minutes away.

An hour before closing time at the Shaka Memorial & Visitor Centre in Stanger, KwaZulu-Natal, at the actual site of King Shaka’s grave, I convinced a single, bored attendant to reluctantly let the week’s only visitors—my colleagues and I—into a moldy room to watch an outdated video.

Across the street, a new-looking Kwadukuza Museum promised something more. The promises were empty, the place closed. I searched online for basic information about exhibitions, opening hours, etc., but all I could find was a brief article reporting on the requisite official ribbon-cutting ceremony a year earlier. Nothing else.

We visited the Stellenbosch Museum on the high street of Stellenbosch—a very wealthy town of students and Afrikaans billionaires in the Cape Winelands. Initially, we weren’t allowed to enter, as the museum only took cash, and we had none. We managed to talk our way in nonetheless, but most of the building was empty anyway, with some familiar pull-up banners in dark, dusty rooms, definitely not telling the stories of the Khoi and the San who lived in the area for thousands of years before European settlement. Not far away however, the privately run and financed heritage village at Babylonstoren tells its own selective and very chic version of the past. A little further, billionaire Johann Rupert’s impressive car and art collection are given ample space and care.

At the Basotho Cultural Village at the Golden Gate National Park, Free State, we visited the remarkable Basotho huts, each one a snapshot of architecture and interiors from various periods. Immediately adjacent, we noticed 15 or so accommodation rondavels that we were told had been closed since Covid, despite a tender being apparently awarded for their refurbishment three years ago. We chatted with two young artists painting a mural at the visitor center who were deeply invested in their own Basotho heritage. A subsequent call with the manager revealed a place that was predominantly for international tourists and school groups, but came alive during the annual Basotho New Year Celebrations. She was keen to do more.

I spoke to other front-line staff and managers. Too many were like the disinterested attendant we had encountered in Stanger, but a few were eager to engage. They told me about their desire to attract new audiences, but they were stymied not only by a lack of funds, but also, more disturbingly, by inattention from their immediate supervisors, often far away in the provincial or national capitals.

Eager to understand the challenges and to also see how I could support a more sustainable approach, I tried to reach out to heritage, tourism, arts, and culture managers and directors at national and provincial governments, national and provincial parks, and municipal councils. I sent emails, made phone calls, and sent more emails and more phone calls.

Nothing.

Artists, makers, curators, community activists, and heritage enthusiasts from South Africa, but also Ivory Coast, Senegal, Ghana, Togo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and the Seychelles have told me about similar experiences; it is almost impossible to get the attention of the people-in-charge. When it comes to public museums, the door is shut to collaborations, conversations, or solutions.

So, why are the heritage and ancestral knowledge of some people more known, shared, and referenced than others?

Europe is home to half the population of Africa and a fraction of its cultural diversity, and yet it hosts five times the number of World Heritage Sites and forty times as many museums. Western heritage traditions are cited and referenced far more frequently than African ones, with Africa accounting for only a small single-digit share of outputs in most datasets.

The West doesn’t just occupy space and knowledge about itself. The biggest collections of African material culture are in museums in the UK, Europe, and North America. Ironically, even on articles on restitution, non-Africans are 17 times more likely to be published, referenced, or interviewed than Africans.

But as angry as we can be about the colonial pillaging of our cultures, and as much as European powers have hoarded our arts, culture, and heritage, they collect their own tenfold.

Across Europe and North America, there is a layered and supported arts, culture, and heritage ecosystem that continues to ensure generations of cultural producers and researchers are able and willing to keep the arts, cultures, and heritages of the Global North remembered, prolific, and shared. This ecosystem is a dynamic and valued interplay between enabling policies, supported “talent,” an engaged public, diverse funding mechanisms, and effective institutions—such as museums, archives, and libraries.

While I was away, at the helm of one of these institutions, I developed an increased appreciation for their role and their symbolism. In the West, museums are regarded as more trustworthy than researchers and scientists, NGOs generally, various news organizations, and the government. They turn memory into organized, documented knowledge. That knowledge becomes power for those who produce it and those who can access it. Europeans and Americans know this—it’s why the Trump administration is attacking them in the US, and it’s why Europeans fund their cultural sector so well.

So what about our ecosystem?

We don’t need new policies—we have solid policies. We don’t need more talent—we have incredible cultural producers and we have an interested and engaged public. The curse of the post-colonial era in Africa is our struggle to build viable institutions and our seeming lack of patrons (public and private) with a long view on supporting organizations that are responsible for keeping African heritage spaces open and alive.

On the continent, the pace of urban growth is unprecedented: by 2050, the African population living in cities will double. As more people move away from the village, and form relationships with people who are not like them—in person and online—we can no longer rely on regular conversations with the elders or participating in or observing community rituals and events to learn or remember traditional knowledge.

Institutions provide continuity, memory, and resilience across generations and geographies. In a world where knowledge is increasingly produced and sought via AI and its digitized information sources, we, on this incredibly wise and beautiful continent, are in danger of what and how we know being completely omitted not only from the world’s cultural record but also from our own.  Without African institutions to preserve, digitize, defend, and promote our rich cultural legacies and heritages, we risk obsolescence.

At the most basic levels, our public museums and heritage sites are simply not working, and the leaders and managers who are responsible for making them work are failing to do so. We are in a big, scary, deeply unglamorous crisis.

It is hard to mobilize public excitement and interest in making sure that contact details are updated, emails answered, websites maintained, and opening hours honored. It’s almost impossible to find donors and private patrons prepared to fund the kind of long-term institutional culture change that addresses bottlenecks in bureaucratic chains of command, or that helps to fill positions that have been vacant for months and, in some instances, years.

And yet this is what the crisis looks like. It can be measured in bounced messages and unanswered calls. It can be measured in dusty cases, empty galleries, and artists, crafters, and indigenous knowledge producers who stop practicing and teaching because it is easier and more lucrative to work in a call center. The effects of what doesn’t happen when institutions flounder have never been more profound.

When follow-through lags, accountability does too. Poor follow-up is a symptom of broader institutional dysfunction across the heritage landscape. It speaks to a system where procedural rigidity and compliance replace initiative and implementation, and an administrative culture obsessed with avoiding blame rather than achieving impact.

This dysfunction means that stolen sacred and ritual objects and subjects do not return to communities. The dysfunction leads to colonial classifications that still separate craft from art, performance from scholarship, and science from cultural history. The dysfunction means that errors and erasure in documentation—requiring research and community collaboration—do not get rectified; Indigenous knowledge is not collected, produced, digitized, or transmitted; it means new generations of African artists, designers, researchers, gamers, IT developers, marketers or entrepreneurs struggle to find the African knowledge and practices that can both ground them and inspire them.

We are locked in a cycle of short-termism. Short-term festivals, events, and projects that offer ample ribbon-cutting opportunities are supported over the slow, unsexy work of institutional development. The daily disciplines of heritage—community collaboration, research, documentation, digitization, conservation, transmission—require years of investment, technical skill, indigenous knowledge, and strategic planning.

Yet the scant funding that requires a ridiculous amount of time-consuming, irrelevant paperwork to access penalizes anything that extends beyond a single financial year, and rarely allows for salaries, rent, or maintaining physical or digital infrastructure.

An ecosystem is a community of interconnected and interdependent organisms. Each element needs to do its part so that the whole stays healthy. When it comes to safeguarding, stewarding, and producing our cultural heritage of today and tomorrow, we need more than the intent of policies, the imagination of cultural producers, or the participation of communities. We need well-funded, effective, and accountable institutions that get the basics right.

Our institutions should be powered by people and tech that make it easy to find, visit, participate, stay, shop, and learn from heritage places. Our places of culture should seek repeat visitation by seeing heritage as a service and tending to the emotional, spiritual, and physical wellness of individuals and communities. They should be places that are as crowded as the Tate Modern, as followed as the Palace Museum, with African design, meaning, and sensibilities that make us proud.

For this to happen, we need many to recognize and play their part. We need the board members to seek and reward out-of-the-box leadership and effective systems; we need the managers to innovate and collaborate; we need the curators and educators to show and teach indigenous epistemologies and expressions; we need the compliance officer to differentiate between a software license and a digitized recording of a N|uu oral tradition.

We need the person at the door to smile and say welcome; we need the people to show up at the door. We need the corporate donors who look for more than short-term brand recognition; we need the galleries, collectors, and art fairs to support the artist’s archive as much as the artist’s production; we need the foreign institutes to consider reparations as long-term institutional support, not just conferences and artistic exchanges.

We need everyone to care in the way that he, she, or they can—because who we are is important to who he, she, or they are. This is the African arts, culture, and heritage ecosystem the world needs. It can only exist if we build the African institutions to power it forward and secure our place not just in history, but in the present and far into the future.