look at museum politics can offer a window into the wider cultural politics in the colony. How did a museum function in a colonial environment? Were its views on Congolese cultures different from those in the metropole? Was there such a thing as a local (Congolese) audience? Were the views promoted by museums in the colony at odds with the views on culture and authenticity promoted by the metropole? In other words, was value assigned differently in the colony?
During the immediate postwar period, the Museum of Indigenous Life was located in the former Stanley Hotel in downtown Leopoldville, one of the many locations it occupied during its existence. The installation of the material and its contextualization had become both more elaborate and more professionalized since the 1930s. At the entrance to the museum was a map of the colony displaying regions represented by aspects of the material culture. Portraits of the Belgian king Leopold III and the governor-general of the colony, Pierre Ryckmans, flanked the map. The map highlighted art from the western part of the country, largely ignoring the Katanga and the east-central region. A journalist reviewing the museum in 1946 assumed that “industrial development has obviously not been favorable to the progress of indigenous art” in the Katanga region. More likely, the map’s emphasis was in part the result of more intense collecting in regions closer to the museum. The division in territorial coverage between the museums in Leopoldville and Elisabethville also mirrored the political distance between the administrative capital of the colony and the economic capital.
FIGURE 2.2. Musée de la Vie Indigène, 1946. HP.1955.106.241, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo J. Costa (Inforcongo), RMCA Tervuren ©.
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