Rotterdam’s Wereldmuseum is considering selling its entire collection of African artefacts to raise tens of millions of euros, the Volkskrant reports on Tuesday.

The paper says the museum hopes to raise €60m with the sale of parts of its collection to focus on Asian art. The cash raised would be used to secure the museum’s future in the light of government cuts.
But experts at the country’s other leading folk art museums say they will never be able to raise enough money to buy the works. Instead, they argue, the collection will be broken up and sold to traders, irreversibly damaging the nation’s cultural inheritance.

Mayor
Museum bosses have now urged Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb to reject the sale plan. Rotterdam city council owns the collection.
The government wants museums to raise at least 17.5% of their funding themselves, and the Wereldmuseum is already 40% self-financing.
‘But that could soon be different. We cannot sit back and do nothing, we have to prepare for a difficult future,’ the museum’s director Stanley Bremer told the paper.