Inside the Badagry Slave Heritage Museum in Nigeria: A Case Study
It’s a sunny day in Lagos city, riding the popular yellow bus with a crew en route Badagry to visit the Badagry Heritage Museum for the second time in a week.
Knowledge of open practices on galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) is relatively new and low in Nigeria. Our cultural institutions and heritage have remained as an embodiment of physical space. The digital aspects of Open GLAM movement could act as a connector between collections preserved by our cultural institutions and additional audiences. There are many possibilities in the digital world for collaboration with artists and researchers and to provide more visibility to the wider creative world.
The use of digital technology brings shareability and reusability of the contents allowing us to easily distribute and share with the wider world for various purposes.
GLAMs in Nigeria are funded mostly by the government and were built before and after the colonial era with colonial undertones and a lack of optimism. The absence of vibrancy has meant the managers of these cultural heritage sites are in no hurry to introduce reforms and education to advance practices suited for the open society. This has prevented policies and practices of open GLAM to take root and shape to inspire knowledge and new voices. The Badagry museum, symbolic of monuments, artworks that are significant to our heritage, lacks online visibility. This prevents it from existing in the outside world, especially for researchers, historians, or the broader public. Access is one of the most urgent challenges we face here. Covid-19 has exacerbated the barriers to access for GLAMs. Open GLAM practices present fresh ideas and concepts for museums to connect and interact with the people and with the public goods they hold.
As we tell the story of Badagry Museum, we emphasize the mission of cultural heritage institutions which is to provide access to knowledge and culture and an avenue for understanding what people have about themselves and the world. We know this is an opportunity to open the conversation and action on open GLAM practices which emphasizes ‘access’ and ‘open’.
The Badagry Museum
The Black Heritage Museum is in Badagry, Lagos, Nigeria. Badagry town was founded by the refugees from wars with the Fon people of Dahomey; Dahomey was historically referred to as Slave Coast by the Europeans, in 1972. It lies on the north bank of Porto Novo Creek, an inland waterway that connects Lagos, Benin (Porto-Novo); and a road that links Lagos, Ilara, and Porto-Novo ( Federal republic of Nigeria Official Gazette. (2007, May 15). The area is led by a traditional king, Akran De Wheno Aholu Menu- Toyi 1, who is also the permanent vice chairman of obas and chiefs in Lagos State.). The Badagry Museum highlights the horror and injustice of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, whilst also exhibiting the rich histories and cultures of the Badagry people and people across Africa. The proximity of Badagry to the Atlantic Ocean, through a major slave port known as Point of No Return (Gberefu Island) which faces the Atlantic Ocean, makes it a key port for the export of over 500,000 African slaves across the sea during the slave trade era of over 300 years. The Museum has nine galleries that contain artworks, artifacts, paintings, stories, and sculpture that describe the exportation of slaves across the ocean and shows modern reflections on the systems of enslavement.
Challenges to open GLAM
The challenges for GLAMs in Nigeria are all-encompassing. From copyright issues to funding for digitization to enable access, lack of awareness, and the need for advocacy on open GLAM. Our conversation with the staff at Badagry museum has largely identified these overarching challenges while presenting its own unique challenges.
The Badagry museum is on the outskirts of Lagos. Making it hard to reach for people. But the location is perfect sitting on the shores of the Atlantic and housing some of the important original works and history of the slave trade. The remote distance of the museum to other parts of Lagos state, except by water transportation, has proven to hinder people from site visits. In fact, according to the tour guide, 2020/2021 was the most difficult time for the museum with the lowest visits in over 10 years.
Another challenge to promoting open access to the museum is the lack of knowledge about the benefits of digital access, especially the costs of migrating artwork collections online. And although the majority of GLAMs are government-owned, allocating a budget for digitization will be a slow bureaucratic process all through.
Also, GLAMs are unaware of practices that enable digitization at scale and that support GLAMs to publicize the reproductions of their works under various Creative Commons licenses or public domain tools. The idea that a museum is a physical embodiment of the works it contains, remains a key barrier.
There is a major concern for copyright infringement of artworks contained in the museum. The museum restricts tourists from taking photographs of creative works contained in the museum. The tour guide noted that publicizing artworks on the internet would reduce the chances of people coming to the museum. He said, ‘‘our artworks are not on the internet because we want people to visit to get the full experience’’. The copyright law in Nigeria is also a challenge having not been updated since 1999 to serve the digital age. According to the Nigeria Copyright Act of 1970 amended in 1999, the law does not provide exceptions and provisions to enable GLAMs to reuse and distribute public creative collections. This Law is being updated and proposed as the Copyright Act repeal and re-enactment Bill, 2021. The new bill will make provisions such as works being in the public domain already, to not be protected under the copyright act and works under the government which includes public libraries, and where no revenue is derived. This bill is still not passed as a law yet in Nigeria. Although it moves us forward towards access, it still leaves out the broader definition of ‘open GLAM’, which is characterized by sharing, distribution, and access to works in the public domain.
Another challenge to free and open access to digital cultural heritage in Nigeria is awareness. Many cultural institutions in Nigeria are unaware of open practices in promoting access and reuse according to a previous case study on Open GLAMs in Nigeria. Only very few GLAMs in Nigeria have adopted an open content policy — mainly privately-run GLAMs. The GLAM-wikiproject in Nigeria was designed as a means to bring the GLAMs and their public information under the platform. But it has not gone mainstream yet.
These challenges have been a mainstay and constantly feature in conversations on open content and GLAMs. What is lacking is consensus to properly drive policy change and propel management to act on them.
Moving forward…
Increasing the visibility of the collection at the Badagry Museum can be easily achieved online via websites, social media, and using appropriate CC tools and licenses. Using such standardized tools to communicate the copyright status, as well as user permissions for different works, enables search engines to include more multimedia files, including images, from GLAMs into search results. Educators, researchers, artists, and general users that are looking for free images and content will find it valuable to use the openly available content provided by GLAMs. Several GLAMs decided to implement and expand open access policies to better serve the goal to connect and share with their audience. Sharing and distributing information in digital form is becoming the norm. There is a huge cost-benefit to the digitization and ongoing education and awareness are needed to achieve the shift. But the first step is the political will to do the reforms. The proposed Copyright Act 2021 is a step in the right direction.
Several GLAMs are already implementing open GLAM practices to better serve the public. There are interesting case studies of the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands and the Metropolitan Museum of Art on how they implemented open access that brought beneficial corporate partnerships. There are countless case studies of museums around the world increasing efficiency and engagement with the public through digitization. Open access can make the Badagry museum more efficient. Clarifying the rights and reducing permission requests increase efficiency and free up more time for staff to focus on curation.
One of the benefits of open GLAM is the promise to inspire a new generation of art-loving, history-loving people that are champions of the culture and are willing to share, experience, and create knowledge in the process. Digital mediums such as social media and blogs could provide a way to share glimpses of the works at the Badagry museum, offering measurable engagement of impact.
Open access to artifacts and stories contained at the Badagry museum can influence remixable and reusable cultural content that amplifies the stories of the history of slavery and the Slave Coast in Badagry. Open access practices can increase awareness that can inspire collaborations with the creative world. According to Kunle, the resident art curator, ‘‘artists are allowed to collaborate with the museum on terms and conditions provided by the museum’’. The museum is open to collaboration but doesn’t see the values that access to the digital world can bring. According to Andrea Wallace, without any clear standard for “open access” and with complicated national copyright laws to consider, these are difficult conversations that must account for institutional politics and other dynamics. Advocacy is key in driving this agenda (Andrea Wallace: https://openglam.pubpub.org/pub/open-glam-metaphor/release/1).
The resources and knowledge contained within the museum can be translated to local dialects in Nigeria and Africa with digital copies to share the stories. Local and global access to information will make for a resourceful platform for researchers, historians, and educators interested in the Indigenous people of Badagry, slavery routes, and the global Black community. Digital content makes it easy to share with the appropriate CC labels. So, even the revenue from the digital content is amortized collectively as opposed to relying on physical visits.
Copyright knowledge and public domain understanding are important to the success of Badagry museum. There is this fear that open GLAM is about making content available online for free which might infringe on existing copyright. According to Kunle, the resident tour guide, ‘‘We don’t want any of the content here to appear online, a lot of people have approached us asking for collaboration, but we don’t have the rights to the works here. Apart from our own commissioned works, we don’t have the rights from others, which is the problem.’’ The misconception that digital access is only about enabling free resources is something worth educating and advocating for. Applying appropriate labels is important to assigning value to content. For example, Creative Commons license or label collections that enable the public to reuse works, as well as other commercial labels, are good options to explore that give access for public use and increased visibility.
An abundant world through sharing and collaboration.
Finally, we believe that challenges to building a more open, inclusive, and sustainable future for the Badagry museum lie within the premises of open GLAM practices. With Open GLAM, the Badagry museum will open up more to the world of creative collaboration and discovery. A huge opportunity is missed due to a lack of visibility. The Badagry museum has a lot of history to it and will be of interest to the wider public due to its heritage. Educators, researchers, historians, and students can make use of the resources there for knowledge purposes. More awareness and advocacy are needed to drive the museum towards these values.
Charles Ikem is the Cofounder of PolicyLab Africa based in Lagos, Nigeria
