art historians have carefully started exploring heritage as a reflexive, historical concept, open to African interpretations.72 As the embodiment of (imagined) identities and cultures, as well as their pasts, heritage ties the immaterial to the material, a (usable) past to a present, and “having culture” to the possession of cultural artifacts (or “cultural property”), often in the form of monuments, historical sites, landscapes, and museum collections.73 In this book, I am concerned with how the reinvention of “traditional” art as national heritage was used as a political tool, and how preservation was imagined as a necessary road toward the creation of a new national heritage in the form of modern art.
An important role in the world of heritage is reserved for international regulations and conventions, and for UNESCO in particular. International regulations for dealing with the return and protection of cultural property took shape in the aftermath of World War II. These regulations soon became problematic in the face of intensifying decolonization struggles around the world. In combination with the increased tendency to regard African museum collections in the West as heritage, the demands from newly independent or decolonizing countries for the return of what was now by definition their national heritage created considerable pressure on Western cultural institutions.
By the 1970s there was a veritable international conservation regime for the protection of national heritage rights. Walking a tightrope between acknowledging the importance of national heritage and a commitment to preservation, the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property helped nation-states protect the cultural heritage within their borders against illegal removal but refrained from applying the regulations retroactively, sidestepping the matter of material removed during colonial occupations.74
Decolonization may have pushed the reinvention of museum collections like the ones at Tervuren as national heritage, but a competing heritage discourse with universalizing tendencies also emerged. This cast the material as the world’s or mankind’s heritage.75 Not unlike the reinvention of African artifacts as art, the invention of world heritage provided Western museums faced with restitution claims with arguments to keep their collections.76 Usually, preservation claims trumped (and trump) restitution claims. Thus, the international conservation regime, although ostensibly concerned with restitution claims, often worked to the disadvantage of newly independent countries.
“RECOURS À L’AUTHENTICITÉ”: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE MOBUTU REGIME
The campaign for the restitution of the collections of the Museum of the Belgian Congo cast the postcolonial Zairian state as the appropriate guardian for the country’s cultural heritage. This fit in with a broader cultural campaign undertaken by the Mobutu regime. The “Recours à l’authenticité” (“recourse” or “resort” to authenticity) campaign, which reached its height in the early 1970s, was ostensibly aimed at a reinvigoration of Zairian culture, inspired by precolonial, “traditional” culture. It incorporated the antimodernism of colonial interpretations of Congolese traditional cultural authenticity into the construction of an African cultural modernity—in the guise of tradition. Composed of a wide range of initiatives—from the “Zairization” of people’s names, to the renaming of the country, its river, and its cities, to the staging of elaborate cultural manifestations, and the creation of national ethnographic and art collections at the museum institute in Kinshasa—it was set up in opposition to the “inauthentic” nature of the colonial era. Paradoxically, this campaign for cultural authenticity relied heavily on the colonial construction of Congolese authenticity but couched the latter in anticolonial terms by promoting it as a part of a process of decolonization.
As the colonial history of the invention of Congolese cultural authenticity demonstrates, the concept had a political use: it legitimized intervention and “protection” by an authoritarian state. Yet despite its cynical application to legitimize an authoritarian postcolonial state, it also had an intellectual appeal that connected it to a pan-African tradition. It is in part this ambiguous nature of Mobutu’s authenticity politics that make it an interesting historical phenomenon.77
While some of the broader traits of the authenticity campaign are explored in this book, the focus is on the way in which it shaped Congolese postcolonial museum politics and the ways in which the latter were a reflection of (often failed) attempts to decolonize the categories of art and cultural authenticity via collecting practices and the creation of displays and knowledge. This investigation reveals the internal tensions of the authenticity campaign: how its justifications of authoritarianism and the increasing emphasis on the figure of Mobutu as the political and cultural center of the nation eventually trumped the intellectual attraction of its cultural nationalism.
In the Idea of Africa, the Congolese philosopher and writer V. Y. Mudimbe characterized the Mobutist doctrines as “a discursive drama [that] claims to be the sign of a social reality” which instead muzzled reality.78 The history of the Zairian Institute for National Museums and the Zairian demands for cultural restitution in this book confirm that “looking like a state,” which in this case meant projecting the appearance of cultural guardianship, ultimately was more important to the Mobutu regime than the creation of a real cultural infrastructure for the country’s citizens.79 This is clear from the decline in funding and support for the IMNZ by the mid-1970s. Despite these circumstances, however, the museum institute did continue to function successfully as a representative of the Zairian state on an international level.
It is in the international dimension, in fact, that we have to look for the most effective political use of Zaire’s traditional arts and postcolonial museum politics—and of the authenticity politics in general. Buoyed by a booming market in traditional African art, the Zairian museum institute managed to, if not replace, at least match the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa as an organizer of international exhibitions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The most important and effective of those took place in North America and promoted an image of the Zairian state—and by extension the Mobutu regime—as the representative and guardian of the country’s cultural heritage.
THE NARRATIVE OF THE BOOK
The book follows the colonial creation of cultural guardianship of Congo and the postcolonial struggle over the cultural sovereignty this guardianship represented. Chapter 1 tells the story of the creation of the collection of the Museum of the Belgian Congo and the adaptation of its displays to the reinvention of certain Congolese objects as art objects. It explains how this development was part and parcel of a changing interpretation of colonial guardianship, which now incorporated the protection of “authentic” Congolese heritage into the justification for its colonial presence. Chapter 2 juxtaposes the transformation of ethnographic objects into art, described in the first chapter, with the shifting definitions of “indigenous art” and cultural authenticity that were at work in the colonial environment. Policy agendas for the protection and preservation of artistic and artisanal cultures reveal the close association between economic, political, and cultural motivations for the controlled reinvigoration of a Congolese arts and crafts scene. These motivations also demonstrate how a colonial state envisioned engineering social conformity through cultural control, a trend that continued during the Mobutu regime.
The third chapter uses the story of the eventual return of a number of objects from the former Museum of the Belgian Congo to Zaire to provide a new narrative of the history of Congo’s decolonization as a struggle over cultural heritage that took place in both a national and an international setting. The reinvention of Congolese traditional art as national heritage and the adaptation of colonial notions of cultural authenticity in the national cultural ideology of authenticité by the Mobutu regime, served as tools for the creation of Zaire as a postcolonial geopolitical space. In the process, cultural
