Vital to the history of peace museums is the opportunity to “bring to light complicated and largely unknown or ignored peace histories.” Today, peace museums represent a diverse spectrum of themes and associations with peace globally. In 2020, the directory of Museums for Peace Worldwide itemized 302 peace museums and related organizations. Peace museums are rarely associated with culture or with traditions of peace. Africa, however, offers a counter-story to the dominant approach of Western, Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese peace museums that emphasize the impacts and dangers of war. This chapter focuses on a series of small but significant Indigenous peace museums—flourishing in Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan—that emphasize reconciliation and peacekeeping.
The African Community Peace Museum Programme (CPMP) began three decades ago with Dr. Sultan Somjee, a Satpanth Ismaili born in Kenya, working in the 1990s as a head ethnographer at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK). Somjee and his assistants were researching the African humanist philosophy of Utu toward mitigation and peacekeeping as an alternative approach to Western-imposed methods. Their study prompted a re-discovery and revitalization of traditional African peace values and associated heritage traditions in the form of community peace museums and peace tree sites.
Each peace museum is distinctive to a specific Indigenous group and simulates their particular style of a traditional house. Inside, peace material culture is exhibited, used as a teaching collection and utilized for ceremonial purposes. Peace trees are planted around the museum as a living environmental gallery, a reminder of peace heritage. The museums are overseen by local elder board members who meet under the shade of the peace trees to discuss disagreements and negotiations, as is their ancient tradition. Curators collect, research, and document peacemaking materials, oral traditions, and environmental symbols such as peace trees. These trees also have medicinal and healing properties, so are closely associated with physical and mental health and peace. The community peace museums keep the oral and visual traditions of African peace wisdom alive in villages and across eastern parts of the continent. They provide a contrary narrative to the prevalent media depictions of essentializing Africans embroiled in violence erupting between nation-states and ethnicities.
The multicausal factors of conflict in Africa include the historical and contemporary political tensions between some ethnicities, ongoing impact of cultural oppression and brutality during colonialism, sovereignty and residual government colonization structures, lack of economic and natural resources, disputes between Indigenous cultural traditions and religions, and climate change intensifying the scarcity of arable land, water, and food. While these factors parallel struggles in other parts of the world, the numbers and severity of disputes in Africa have continued to escalate over the past forty years.
One significant response to these challenges is the development of Indigenous peace museums based on cultural peace heritage traditions. It is important to note, cultural diversity characterizes the African continent, with over 2,100 languages by some estimates and 3,000 different ethnic groups, which contributes to a range of peacekeeping traditions. As well, people practice traditional religions specific to their ethnic groups, such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and other religions, sometimes creating syncretic beliefs and practices. The curators act as peacemakers and environmental activists to reconcile discord between human beings and prevent the destruction of the natural world. The resilient community peace museum movement raises the possibilities of reviving cultural heritage to bring peace and reconciliation to communities in conflict, particularly in Africa, but can be applied elsewhere in the world.