With nearly three hundred objects, L'Afrique des Routes participated in an important trend in scholarship that can be thought of as globalizing the past. Its focus on movement and exchange was timely and the show moved beyond well-known encounters like the trans-Saharan trade, Afro-Portuguese ivories, and European Modernism to emphasize the diversity of contacts and responses across time and geography.
The curators intended to combat the image of a closed and isolated continent and “to write Africa into world history,” according to the opening text panel. To do so, they reframed African histories as a series of exchanges, demonstrating that colonial and contemporary networks were built upon much older patterns of connectivity. The exhibition opened with 3,000-year-old Saharan rock art, grouped with Hausa saddles and gear from the twentieth century on one side and with a photo-mural of a caravan on the other (ca. 1906, although in an unusual omission,...