Musée des Civilisations de Côte d'Ivoire

The Musée des Civilisations de Côte d'Ivoire on Boulevard Carde in Plateau traces its origins to 1942, when it was founded as a regional branch of the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN) to collect and study the material culture of the peoples living within the colony's borders. It became the national museum of independent Côte d'Ivoire after 1960 and was substantially reorganized and expanded in the 1970s-80s under Ivorian curators seeking to present the country's cultures on their own terms rather than through a colonial ethnographic lens. The permanent collection numbers in the tens of thousands of objects and includes carved wooden masks and statuary from the Dan, Senufo, Baoulé, We and Gouro peoples, gold-weight figures and royal regalia associated with the Akan chieftaincies of the east, and textiles, pottery and musical instruments drawn from across the country's roughly sixty ethnic groups. Notable holdings include ceremonial masks used in Dan and We initiation and funerary rites, and a collection of Baoulé goldwork tied to the courts of Akan rulers who migrated into the region in the eighteenth century. The museum is organized broadly by region and ethnic group rather than strict chronology, walking visitors through the material culture of Côte d'Ivoire's savanna north, forest center and coastal south in turn. The building itself is a mid-twentieth-century structure adapted for museum use rather than purpose-built, and the collection has suffered periods of neglect and looting risk during the country's political instability of 1999-2011, prompting UNESCO-supported conservation and inventory efforts in the years since to stabilize and catalogue the holdings. Restoration work has focused on climate control and object conservation rather than architectural renovation, and the museum continues to operate as the country's principal repository of pre-colonial and colonial-era Ivorian material culture.