The Survival of Community Museums in Cameroon

The dilemma of what museums are and what they ought to be in African settings, has continued to sustain scholarly debate for over two decades. Animated by African and western schools of thought, this debate centers three main questions: do African collections actually qualify as museums? Are western-style museums suitable for Africa? Can Africans actually sustain museums on the western model? It is on the sidelines of this debate and attempts to provide responses that hinge concerns of survival for these museums. In Cameroon where the museum institution is fairly young, questions continue to linger as to whether her over thirty collections actually qualify as museums. Ever since the establishment of the nation’s earliest museums in the 1920s, these institutions have indeed survived in precarity owing to a litany of obstacles. In these circumstances, public access has thinned rapidly, outreach and clientele satisfaction have remained elusive and the primary missions of preservation an