Hoarding Chimpanzees: Place and Scientific Collections in the Postcolonial Anthropocene

The geographical place of collections and their rightful ownership is explored and complicated in histories of colonial art collections. This scholarship foregrounds the political context of resources moving between the Global South and the Global North and examines how postcolonial countries in the second half of the twentieth century advanced claims about national ownership amid a universalizing discourse.9 Sarah Van Beurden has documented the political nature of how Belgian museum directors framed threats to Congolese art and artifacts – colonial era, racist arguments that African people cannot care for precious objects and closely related claims after independence that valuable art is not safe in certain (decolonized) parts of the world. Art collections productively parallel scientific collections like laboratory chimpanzees, collections whose value relied heavily on affective power and subjective appreciation. While Central African art was to be appreciated and conserved in Belgian museums, Central African chimpanzees were to be best protected and scientifically utilized in US laboratories. At the time of the Pan paniscus Project, its planners had few concrete uses for chimpanzees in mind, focusing instead on bolstering American scientific holdings. Described by Van Beuden, director of Royal Museum of Central Africa Lucien Cahen defended keeping Congolese art in Belgium after Congolese independence, as he “pointed out the universal scientific value of the collections as they existed” and “cast doubt on the newly independent country’s ability to safeguard the valuable collections of art.”10 Although museum directors and scientists appealed to universal value and global heritage, such valuable collections needed to exist somewhere in space. Where valued art and ecological specimens are concentrated as collections show us a particular geography of safety imagined in the postcolonial Anthropocene.11