IFAN Museum of African Arts

The museum's real strength is depth across the West African carving traditions IFAN documented as a research institute before it was ever a public museum - Baga, Senufo, Dogon, Yoruba, We, Fon and Burkinabe material in particular - backed by a reserve collection several times the size of what is on permanent view, rather than a small number of famous single objects.

The building at Place Soweto in Dakar's Plateau district was put up in 1931 in the neo-Sudanese style that colonial administrations across French West Africa favoured for public buildings, and it first served as the seat of the AOF (Afrique Occidentale Francaise) administration rather than as a museum at all. The institution that eventually filled it began five years later: in 1936, under the Popular Front government in Paris, France created the Institut Francais d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), a research body tasked with documenting the peoples, languages, natural history and material culture of its West African colonies. IFAN's first museum object was registered in 1941, and for two decades the collection grew mainly as a research resource for the institute rather than as a public display.

The turning point was 1960, the year of Senegalese independence. When IFAN was transferred into the newly created Cheikh Anta Diop University (then the University of Dakar), the Place Soweto building was converted into a public museum, with the backing of Leopold Senghor, Senegal's first president, himself a poet and a strong advocate for African cultural institutions. The institute itself was renamed the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire at the same period, keeping the IFAN acronym its collections were already known under - which is why, more than sixty years later, the building is still commonly called simply the IFAN museum even though its official name changed again in December 2007, when a presidential decree renamed it after Theodore Andre Monod, the French naturalist who had directed IFAN and spent decades working across the Sahara and West Africa. A second building, a 620-square-metre exhibition hall built onto the original structure in 1991-92 and designed to match its style, gave the museum a dedicated space for temporary shows without disturbing the historic galleries.

The museum's holdings run to roughly 9,700 objects on the last full published inventory, taken in 2005, drawn from more than twenty countries and spanning the geography IFAN once covered as a French West African research institute rather than Senegal alone. Only a fraction, on the order of 300 pieces, is on permanent view in the original 1931 building at any one time; the rest sits in the reserves, organised by material - carved wood, ceramics, worked metal, textiles, leather and basketry - and moves in and out of display as the museum rotates its galleries or lends to touring shows.

What is on the walls and in the cases is heavily weighted toward carved wood: masks from Baga, Senufo, Yoruba, We and Burkinabe traditions, carved royal seats from West African courts, Dogon granary doors, drums and other musical instruments, and figurative sculpture. Alongside the carving sits a smaller but notable holding of prehistoric material - polished stone tools recovered in Senegal, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire - and metalwork and jewellery that trace the trans-Saharan gold trade that connected West Africa to North Africa and the Mediterranean for centuries before European contact. It is, in short, a research collection that happens to be on partial public display, rather than a museum built outward from a fixed set of masterpieces, and that shows in how much of the strongest material sits in storage rather than in the galleries.

Six object types recur across the museum's permanent display and are worth knowing before a visit, because a fifteen-to-thirty-minute walk-through, which is how most visitors on Tripadvisor describe their time in the galleries, is easy to spend on labels rather than on the objects that reward a slower look. A Baga Nimba (D'mba) shoulder mask from coastal Guinea, one of the largest and most recognisable mask forms in the region's sculpture, stands for the Simo society's goddess of fertility and abundance and would originally have been carried on a dancer's shoulders under a full raffia costume. A pair of Bamana Chi Wara antelope headdresses from the Segou region of Mali, danced together as male and female, embody the mythical being Bamana oral tradition credits with teaching people to farm. Carved Dogon granary doors from the Bandiagara region of Mali double as household status symbols and, in the reading given locally, as spiritual protection for the grain stored behind them. Yoruba Gelede masks from Benin were made for a masquerade that honours the spiritual power Yoruba belief attributes to women, particularly female elders. A Fon royal seat from Abomey, in present-day Benin, is a piece of court regalia rather than furniture, reserved for rulers and senior office-holders in the Fon kingdom. And a Senufo bird figure from Cote d'Ivoire, known locally as Sejen or Porpianong, carved with the long curved beak of a ground hornbill and a swollen belly read as pregnancy, was used in the initiation of young men into the Poro society and stood, before that, in the sacred forest reserved for Poro ritual.

The museum's origin is not incidental to how it presents itself today. It began as part of a French colonial research programme, assembling objects from across French West Africa for study by a European institute rather than for the communities that made them, and for decades it displayed that collection largely as ethnographic curiosity rather than as art with its own history and authorship. The current curator, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, an art historian who has written and spoken about exactly that inheritance, has pushed the museum's temporary programme toward projects that put the historic collection into conversation with living artists rather than treating it as a closed archive: a 2022 collaboration with the Nantes Saint-Nazaire school of fine arts, Teg Bet Gestu Gi, paired invited artists with objects from the museum's own holdings, including a Diola horn mask reworked by the artist Herve Youmbi into a new hybrid piece, deliberately reversing the usual direction in which an object is certified as heritage.

The same period has brought a small but symbolically loaded set of returns to the building itself. When the museum reopened in May 2021 after a year-plus pandemic closure, along with lighting and gallery upgrades it took back several works that had been on long-term loan at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, and a stone megalith that had been on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ndiaye was careful, in coverage of the reopening, to describe these as returns rather than formal restitution - the objects had been on loan, not disputed - but he acknowledged the symbolism of African art coming back onto African soil was real regardless of the legal label. The reopening exhibition was built around Amadou-Mahtar Mbow, the Senegalese former UNESCO director whose 1978 appeal for museums to return cultural property to its countries of origin is one of the founding texts of the restitution debate that now surrounds most West African ethnographic collections, including this one's own. The museum also sits inside that wider debate as a stakeholder rather than a bystander: as the older of Dakar's two major art museums (the much larger Musee des Civilisations Noires, a separate institution near the Grand Theatre, opened in 2018 partly to receive future restitutions from French collections), it is itself a body that assembled much of its own holdings during the colonial period the restitution movement is responding to.

The museum publishes its own hours as Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 5pm, closed Mondays and public holidays. Admission is tiered by residency status: 5,000 CFA francs (XOF) for non-resident adults, 2,000 CFA francs for resident adults, and 1,000 CFA francs for children, all published on the museum's own visit page rather than through a third-party ticketing service; there is no indication on the museum's site of an online booking system or of free-admission days. The museum is reachable by Dakar Dem Dikk bus routes 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16 and 23 heading toward Cap Manuel, all of which stop near Place Soweto in the Plateau district, a short walk from the National Assembly.

What a visitor should expect once inside tracks closely with what Tripadvisor reviewers describe: a compact, walkable permanent display in the original 1931 building that most people cover in well under an hour, uneven climate control that can make the rooms warm, and labelling that leans on French with limited English support - reviewers who took a guide report a considerably richer visit than those who went through the galleries alone. The 620-square-metre extension added in 1991-92 runs a separate programme of temporary exhibitions, mostly contemporary African and diaspora art rather than the historic collection, so what else is on when a visitor arrives depends on the museum's current show rather than on the permanent galleries described here.

Visitors consistently value the museum for the authenticity and range of its West African collection and for the character of the historic 1931 building itself, but just as consistently find the visit short and the display tired: most describe covering the permanent galleries in fifteen to thirty minutes, several note poor climate control and heat inside the rooms, thin English-language labelling, and upper floors or rooms closed or under-maintained on the day of their visit. A recurring complaint is that the 5,000 CFA franc non-resident admission fee feels high against what is actually on show.