While its ownership is singular—the museum owns the collection—its composition was multiauthored and contained a variety of processes. This diversity is muted in the museum life of the objects. In the case of the Museum of the Belgian Congo’s collection, a great number of people, most of whom were not affiliated with the museum, contributed to its collection. Not only were their motivations for gathering material very diverse, so were the practices and contexts of collecting and the pathways by which their objects arrived at the museum. As Anthony Shelton writes: “Collections are built on individual histories; histories that mediate the self and its specific historical and cultural milieu.” These individual histories were shaped into a unified collection that came to represent the culture(s) of the colony to a significant part of the Belgian population.24
The term collecting carries a deceptive innocence that can obfuscate a variety of ways of obtaining material. In a colonial context, some of this “collecting” was part and parcel of the violence of the early conquest, even when it came in the guise of scientific interest, while other forms of collecting were much closer to existing patterns of trade and exchange of commodities. This chaos around collecting and documenting runs counter to the museum’s (theoretical) Enlightenment roots as a place for systematic organization and classification and lays bare the haphazard origins of colonial ethnography as a discipline. With regard to Tervuren, these circumstances created the selective and fragmented nature of the collection that would form the basis for representations of the colony’s cultures to the metropolitan audience.25
Currently, the ethnographic collection of Tervuren holds about 125,000 objects, about 85 percent of which come from Central Africa. Between its founding after the colonial exhibition of 1897 and the opening of the museum building in 1910, it had gathered a collection of about 30,000 pieces.26 It is difficult to be more precise about the rate of growth of the collection because, to this day, the museum does not possess an exact breakdown of the origins of its ethnographic collection.27 It is, however, possible to give an overview of the origins of a sample of 250 of the museum’s “treasures.” This snapshot is based on the 1995 exhibition Treasures from the Africa Museum Tervuren and can serve as a window onto the collection as a whole.28 I analyzed the available data on these 250 objects to discover how the objects were obtained by the museum, by whom they were originally collected, and when they were collected or registered. Of the 250 objects, 99 were gifts, 96 were bought, and 11 were collected by the museum staff in Congo.29 Ninety-one of the “treasures” were originally collected by colonials and 13 by missionaries. It is also interesting to note here that at least 45 of the objects were at some point part of a well-known collector’s collection.
Based upon the available but incomplete information, 29 of the objects were collected before the twentieth century, while no collection dates were mentioned after independence. For the objects that only had a date of registration connected to them, the numbers are pretty steady for the first half of the twentieth century with about 10 to 15 per decade. Not many of the objects (20) were registered after independence.30
The people involved with providing the museum with ethnographic materials can be roughly divided into four (overlapping) groups: colonials, explorers and scientists, missionaries, and last, art collectors and art dealers. From the earliest contact between Portuguese sailors and the Kongo peoples in the fifteenth century, the collection and appropriation of African objects (and vice versa) had been part of the relationship between both parties. The advent of late nineteenth-century European colonialism in Africa, however, greatly accelerated Western acquisition of African material culture and considerably broadened the area from which these objects were removed to include the interior of the continent. It is difficult to do justice to people’s diverse motivations for collecting objects in Congo, whether they were doing so for personal, professional, political, economic, or religious purposes. What we can do, however, is follow these varied motivations as they became subsumed into increasingly comprehensive systems of knowledge that organized the collection and its displays.
The group that was among the first to start collecting ethnographic material in Congo were the colonial officers and soldiers in service of the AIA and, later, of Leopold II’s Congo Free State. As Maarten Couttenier has noted, in the exploration and later conquest of Congo, “military conflicts and the acquisition of material culture went hand in hand.”31 These acquisitions were not merely the result of the private initiative of these men, however. They also gathered material upon the request of King Leopold II, who tasked them with the collection of material that could be used in various colonial expositions in Belgium.32 So while the objects (which also included human remains, particularly skulls) were sometimes the spoils of war or the trophies of conquest, and other times the result of an exchange of goods and gifts, they were also, from the very beginning, promotional material for the empire.
One colonial officer who collected for colonial exhibitions, but whose personal collection also eventually ended up at Tervuren, was Émile Storms. Storms was a commander of the AIA, set up by Leopold II ostensibly to promote scientific knowledge about Central Africa. The very nature of the AIA as a scientific organization involved with colonial conquest illustrates how closely the gathering of knowledge (and things) was related to the imperial project.33 Storms spent the years between 1882 and 1885 near the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika, where he created a colonial post and collected, measured, mapped, and documented the fauna, flora, geography, and culture of the region, but also where he defeated local Tabwa leader Lusinga, an event that ended the latter’s life. Storms traveled home with a collection of ethnographic material for the colonial section of the 1885 world exhibition in Antwerp, but also with Lusinga’s skull and several objects he obtained from the Tabwa and other Luba peoples for his personal collection. Allen Roberts has told the story of Storms and Lusinga’s confrontation and illustrated how the objects Storms removed after his victory were de- and recontextualized multiple times.34
Initially, they were installed in Storms’s house as war trophies and curios, elements in Storms’s self-representation as an explorer and his quest for social relevance in Brussels society. After Storms’s death in 1918, his widow held on to the objects, which had become relics of her husband’s “brief moment of glory in the Congo,” but eventually she donated them, along with personal memorabilia of Storms’s years in Central Africa.35 From illustrations of his personal history, the objects now evolved into the building blocks for the representation of a larger imperial project. Storms’s personal memorabilia found their place in the museum’s displays on the history of the Belgian colony, and the Tabwa and Luba objects long on display in Storms’s living room now became part of the ethnographic and art displays at Tervuren. While Storms’s role was memorialized in the historical displays of the museum, his collection also helped shape the image of Congolese cultures presented to the museum-going audience.
Overall, the material collected by colonials, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was badly documented; information about use and exact origin were rarely recorded. To remedy this situation, guidelines for the collection of material started appearing in manuals for colonials and visitors to Congo. The Tervuren museum, in collaboration with the Congo Free State, also distributed questionnaires to colonial officials, though few responded.36 Eventually, an introduction to African ethnography, often taught by Tervuren staff, was included in the course load at the colonial university in Antwerp, greatly improving Tervuren’s ability to create a network among the newer generations of colonial officials.37
Gradually, with the expansion of the colonial state, and particularly after the Belgian state took over the Congo Free State, a wider array of colonials became involved in the collection of ethnographic (and other) material in Congo. This group included colonial administrators and officers in the colonial army, but also engineers, doctors, teachers, and plantation and business owners.38 Not only was this group very diverse, the kind of material they acquired varied greatly according to their reasons for collecting and the conditions in which they obtained material. For example, some of the objects were the result of a commercial exchange or of a gift exchange, while
