The museum opened in 1960, two years after independence, as part of a deliberate cultural program. The same government that founded it also made Les Ballets Africains — founded in Paris in 1952, then adopted as Guinea's national ensemble at independence — and the national broadcaster, Radio Guinée, into pillars of the new state, championing traditional folklore as an expression of the new nation. But this was a contradictory patronage. Between 1959 and 1984 the state established Islam as the official religion and confiscated almost all religious art across the country. A museum built to celebrate Guinea's traditional arts existed alongside a policy that stripped many of those arts from the hands of the people who made and used them. Much of what the museum might have held was lost before it could ever be displayed.

Step into the courtyard and the colonial era stares back in stone. Statues moved here over the years represent the figures who shaped, and seized, this corner of West Africa. There is Almamy Samori Ture, the Mandinka leader who built an empire and fought the French for years before his capture. There is Aimé Olivier de Sanderval, the French adventurer who gave the district its name, alongside Governor Noël Ballay, the physician Victor Le Moal, and Monseigneur Raymond René Lérouge, the latter carved surrounded by musicians and a fishing family. The courtyard's railings are decorated, oddly, with colonial pith helmets, and the cafeteria hut wears a giant helmet of its own, a strange and slightly mocking tribute to the colonizers whose monuments now share the yard with the African king who resisted them.

After the 1984 coup, the restrictions on indigenous religion lifted, and the museum, its oldest pieces long vanished, found a quieter second life. It became a gathering place for Conakry's small artistic community, hosting conferences in the early 1990s and, in later years, sheltering working artists in its rooms. By 2016 the painter Papus kept his studio here. One restored wing owes its survival to support from the Embassy of Japan. A masonry arch built in 1896 stands by the entrance, and artists sometimes hang their canvases on it. The surviving display, masks and musical instruments from across Guinea's regions, beside a model of the country's varied houses, is small. But in a building so marked by loss, it is also a quiet act of holding on.