government. With the exception of the latter, many of these objects were “souvenirs of contact,” ranging from objects produced explicitly for sale to colonials and travelers to “authentic” artifacts created for local use.39 The trophies of conquest, typical of the earlier stages of exploration and conquest, were replaced by trophies of hunting, including tusks, animal skins, and local weapons. In all of these cases, collecting was a form of practical memory creation.40 The personal collections of these men (and occasionally women) would years or decades later often end up in the Tervuren storerooms and displays, donated either by the former colonials themselves or by their families. This practice illustrates how much Belgian colonials and their families thought of the Museum of the Belgian Congo as “their” museum: it held the material traces of many personal histories, but re-created these as part of a larger, national patrimony.
FIGURE 1.1. In Émile Storms’s home, with Lusinga’s statue centrally displayed, 1929. HP.1931.653.1, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo G. Hotz.
Missionary congregations were not far behind the explorers and representatives of the AIA. Émile Storms, in fact, was recalled from Congo and replaced by Catholic missionaries after the Berlin conference.41 In the long run, missionary congregations became one of the core pillars of Leopold’s, and later Belgium’s, colonial empire. Given their widespread presence, it should come as no surprise that some missionaries became important collectors, often in the context of a broader engagement with and sometimes admiration for African cultures. (Chapter 2 demonstrates that missionary engagement with Congolese material cultures was not limited to collecting but extended to the production of arts and crafts in the colony, particularly through art schools and artisanal craft programs.)
Although it is difficult to generalize, Boris Wastiau has concluded that collecting by missionaries was initially more focused on African religious and spiritual life, leading to the collection of a substantial amount of masks and statues.42 Sometimes this material was removed in an attempt to eradicate “barbarous” local practices, but many missionaries also collected for personal purposes—simply out of admiration for the material or out of a scientific interest in the societies they were living among. Large amounts of the material ultimately ended up in missionary collections: some of it still belongs to the same congregations today. In comparison with how much material was collected by missionaries, little ended up at Tervuren. Our sample of the 250 “masterpieces” of the RMCA confirms this suspicion: only 13 of the 250 objects were collected by missionaries.
One missionary who became an ethnographer as well as a collector was Father Leo Bittremieux, a missionary of Scheut who lived among the Mayombe in the Lower Congo region from 1907 until his death in 1946. He set out to collect almost immediately after his arrival, sending thirteen crates of “fetishes” to the Catholic University of Leuven, encouraged to do so by the young ethnology professor Eduard de Jonghe.43 Bittremieux published widely on the language and culture of the Mayombe in the decades that followed, and he continued to gather material. Some of his collection he sent to his family, some to the congregation’s small Musée des Fétiches in Kangu, but some of it ended up in Tervuren as well. From 1911 on, the colonial administration sent the missionary station in Kangu where Bittremieux lived an annual budget to collect and buy ethnographic material for the Congo museum in Tervuren. The collecting was not necessarily done by the missionaries themselves. Archival material reveals the role of one of the congregation’s Congolese employees, Aloïs Tembo, in the production of information about Yombe culture and about the objects gathered at the missionary station.44
Minkisi were a particular target for the missionaries. Referred to as fétiches in the early twentieth century, minkisi were vessels for a substance that could be activated for healing or in the case of a conflict. Their most common form in museums and collections was as statues with the substance embedded within them, although they took many different shapes, including simple containers.45 Their association with a different system of beliefs meant missionaries preferred to have the custom of the minkisi eradicated. Sometimes the Congolese participated in the destruction or discarding of these objects. Several of the minkisi collected by the Kangu mission post were brought there by the population either after conversion or after local changes in political leadership prompted the removal of a certain type of minkisi.46
FIGURE 1.2. A collection of minkisi brought to the Kangu mission post by the surrounding population, 1902. Photo Book Scheut. Courtesy of repro KADOC-KULeuven.
Missionaries like Bittremieux were important to Tervuren not only because they collected but for the wealth of knowledge they gathered about the people among whom they lived, feeding the development of ethnography and anthropology.47 The museum began to recruit and educate missionaries in order to have a network of collaborators in the field, so although they might be underrepresented as donors of objects, they made important contributions in information gathering and knowledge production for the museum.48
Like missionaries and other colonials, those involved with museum-organized scientific missions were a heterogeneous and international group, and their scientific frame of reference changed dramatically over the years. Early scientific missions are almost impossible to distinguish from the conquest of the area. Many of the early military expeditions were in fact accompanied by scientists. This intertwined relationship of conquest and early scientific exploration only underlines the inseparable nature of the scientific and colonial projects.49 In the same vein, many of the men that are now considered as the earliest ethnographers, like Emil Torday, were intimately tied to the economic exploitation of the area. Torday, a Hungarian collecting for the British Museum, was working for the Belgian Compagnie du Kasai, which organized the infamous rubber collection. Conquest, control, exploitation, and classification went hand in hand.50 There was also a keen sense of competition with the scientific expeditions set up by other countries as they rushed to collect as much material as possible, fueled by the belief that collecting salvaged a dying form of cultural authenticity.51
From the outset, the colonial museum in Tervuren also positioned itself as the center of scientific activity connected to the colony, and ethnographic collecting was added to the responsibilities of the museum’s staff. Despite this mandate, ethnographic expeditions by the staff were rare. Joseph Maes, who led the ethnography department from 1910 until 1946 only traveled to Congo once, in 1913–14. Convinced he was in a race with time to salvage the remnants of a precolonial Congo, Maes prioritized collecting over the gathering of ethnographic information and the careful recording of contextual information about the objects he took. In roughly a year he visited 120 locations and collected 1,293 objects!52 Maes’s successor, Albert Maesen, also made only one collection trip, from 1952–55, although he made sure collaborators of the museum (Jan Vansina and Daniel Biebuyck among them) also collected for the ethnographic department. In theory, ethnographers were more concerned with documenting pieces and selecting objects that were “authentic” or in use by the communities they visited. In practice, this was not always the case. For example, one of the Luba masks collected by Maesen in Congo in 1953, which became one of the museum’s “masterpieces,” was bought at a colonial fair, not collected in situ.53 The influence of the museum’s staff on the shape of the collection did go beyond their own collecting efforts, however. Their contacts with colonials and missionaries in the field was extensive, and they actively directed some of the collecting performed by these collaborators.
The museum’s collection was also shaped by material that passed through the commercial market in African art or was sold by private collectors. Of our sample of 250 objects, 96 were bought by the museum, and at least 45 of the total number of objects were at one point part of the collection of
