Paris to unveil tribal art museum

-- French President Jacques Chirac is due to unveil his legacy to the nation - a 260m euro (£180m) riverside museum in the shadow of Paris' Eiffel Tower.

The museum will display indigenous art from Africa, Asia and Australasia.

It is the first major museum to open in the French capital since the Pompidou Centre in 1977.

But the project has been controversial. It opens as France debates how to heal the scars of its colonial past and accept a multi-ethnic nation.

Critics say the museum does not do enough to explain to visitors the damage done by colonialism to many of those cultures.

The Musee du Quai Branly, on the banks of the River Seine, has been a decade in the making.

It combines angular glass walls with futuristic cubes of bright colour and, outside, a green wall of thick vegetation, suggestive of a forest or a jungle. --