conservation regime that fueled Zaire’s discourse on national cultural sovereignty and as a fundamental aspect of the legitimation of postcolonial political power.
The two following chapters turn to the cultural and political roles of the IMNZ within Zaire and to its efforts to reclaim the representation and the creation of knowledge about traditional cultures through a decolonization of institutional practices and collection and research activities, as well as exhibition practices. The chapters explain why the IMNZ largely failed in creating a domestic role or audience and how its struggles and decline can be located in the ultimate inability of the Mobutu regime to control the creation of a cultural narrative for the postcolonial nation.
The final chapter lays out the transnational context in which these processes of cultural reinvention took place. Through the history of four exhibitions of Congolese art and culture that traveled the United States, I argue that it was on an international level that Zaire most successfully came to project a reclaimed cultural guardianship. By analyzing how heritage and African authenticity were displayed and interpreted abroad, this chapter demonstrates that the remaking of postcolonial cultural representations was not a process limited to national actors and audiences.
Finally, a word on sources. The research for this book was conducted mostly in Belgium and Congo, with one long term and another short term stay in the DRC (and more specifically in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi) in 2006 and again in 2011. Very little of the current scholarship on Congolese colonial history incorporates Flemish language sources, which represents a serious blind spot this study aims to correct by using both primary sources and a relevant body of secondary literature written in Dutch.
Although the Belgian participation in this history is fairly well documented in terms of archival material, the side of this story that mattered most to me, the Congolese perspective, was much harder to research. Colonial propensities for classification and the resulting archives that are “cultural agents for ‘fact’ production” have made their mark on the production of the colonial past, but these structures of knowledge have also had repercussions for the way in which postcolonial histories are constructed.80 The zeal with which the former colonial power continued to document its interactions with the former colony outweighs the extent to which the Mobutu regime was concerned with doing the same. In recent decades, Congo has also justifiably had other priorities than safeguarding archival material. The result is the fragmentation of the archival material relating to the colonial period and the Mobutu years. The national archives in Kinshasa do not have much material that was useful to the topic of this book, while the archives of the museums in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi have both suffered from plundering and neglect. In Lubumbashi, UN soldiers occupied the museum building during the Katanga Secession in the early 1960s, while the museum offices in Kinshasa suffered during the unrest of the 1990s. After much searching, I was able to collect some archival and photographic material, mostly from cupboards and filing cabinets around the museum offices in Kinshasa, but gaps persist. Interviews, conducted both in Congo and Belgium, were an important source of information for me, although I have been attentive to the impact of nostalgia and current-day conflicts and problems in the museums, as well as the impact of people’s political reinvention since the Mobutu years, upon their memories.
1
The Value of Culture
Congolese Art and Belgian Colonialism
FOR MOST of the colonial period, the Museum of the Belgian Congo was the most visible presence of the empire in Belgium and one of the a major avenues through which Belgian citizens got to know their colony. Its neoclassical and marble halls filled with its zoological, mineralogical, and man-made “wonders” represented the colony. During the 1950s, the museum received between 141,800 and 197,859 visitors a year, the equivalent of up to 2.3 percent of the Belgian population. This made it one of the most visited museums in Belgium.1
This chapter lays out how representations of Congolese cultures were produced and projected at the museum, and the ways in which these intersected with and helped shape colonial ideologies. The process whereby Belgium became the custodian of a large museum collection of Congolese material is explored, and the chapter explains how a fragmented and varied process of collection was translated into seemingly coherent images of Congolese culture and bodies of knowledge.
I argue that the very guardianship of the museum’s collections became integrated into late colonial justifications for Belgium’s colonial presence in the Congo. This relied on two processes: the production of new values and meanings for African objects as art and the accompanying construction of Congolese cultural authenticity as endangered. This meant that Congolese art, eventually transformed into an exceptional resource with cultural and economic value, came to have its place in the mise en valeur narrative about the colony presented to the museum audience.2 The “endangered authenticity” projected upon the communities that originally produced these objects also provided an extra justification for Belgium’s continued presence in the Congo: the protection and guardianship of “traditional” cultures.
THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL MUSEUM AND THE CHANGING FACE OF COLONIALISM
Scientific exploration and the origins of the Belgian Congo are inextricably connected. Masking his imperial ambitions as scientific interests, Leopold II in 1876 organized the International Geographic Conference, where the Association Internationale Africaine (International African Association—AIA) was created, ostensibly to promote the exploration of the African continent. Simultaneously, Leopold II hired Henry Morton Stanley, a Polish-American newspaper reporter turned explorer, to explore the Congo River basin and secure allegiance from local leaders in order to thwart other European interests in the region. Having deftly manipulated those interests, Leopold II succeeded in securing recognition as the sovereign of the Congo Free State at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. From then on, the area was essentially the private property of Leopold II, although representatives of the Congo Free State would not bring the entire area under their control until early in the twentieth century.3
Although Leopold II firmly believed in the area’s economic promise, he was not able to tap Congo’s resources until the allocation of exploitation rights to a number of regional concessionary companies, as well as to the “Royal Domain,” which remained directly under Leopold’s control. The representatives of these companies (which included the Anglo-Belgian Rubber Company and the Société Anversoise) and state agents in the Royal Domain received commissions on the amount of product (initially ivory, but eventually mostly rubber) they extracted.4 With no state regulatory controls, this arrangement led to widespread abuses at the expense of the local population while generating great wealth for the Congo Free State and its monarch.5
The creation of the Museum of the Belgian Congo was deeply intertwined with the colonial project of Leopold II. As early as the 1880s, the Belgian king seized on the potential of colonial exhibitions for the promotion of empire. These exhibitions served two purposes. On the one hand, they were intended to stimulate Belgian (and international) interest in the commercial opportunities of the area.6 To that end, extractive products such as ivory, tropical woods, and rubber as well as agricultural products such as cotton, coffee, and cacao were most prominently displayed. Displays on the natural sciences emphasized the diversity of fauna and flora, while geological maps and displays emphasized potential mineral resources. Aside from attracting investors and businesses to Congo, the other goal of these exhibitions was to convince the general Belgian population of the value of having a colony. While economic potential was certainly important in this respect, the organizers of these colonial exhibitions also emphasized the civilizing work there was to be done in the colony, organizing and displaying ethnographic material to this purpose.
For
