The remote Colombian city of Quibdo was home to the country’s only museum dedicated to the history and culture of Afro-Colombians — until the museum closed its doors last month.

Although nearly a quarter of Colombians identify as either Black or mixed race, the African diaspora and Colombia’s deep roots in the slave trade are conspicuously absent from official narratives about the country’s history. When Muntú Bantú opened in 2009, the museum was wholly unique in a country with one of Latin America’s largest Black populations yet no institutional centers or museums dedicated to their history, culture and heritage. The name is a tribute to the region’s African roots, referencing Bantu, a family of languages spoken across the African continent. According to the museum, Africa’s Bantu diaspora has a strong linguistic and cultural presence in the Chocó region, where it is located.

“Sometimes people enter as one person and exit as someone else,” Sergio Antonio Mosquera, an Afro-Colombian historian and the museum’s founder, told me in Spanish over a shaky WhatsApp connection. 

Visitors would pass through the building’s yellow facade and descend into the bowels of a ship, meant to evoke the transatlantic slave trade, and then be immersed in exhibits about African history and biodiversity, Black achievements in cinema and Afro-Colombian feminism. Some left transformed.