Congolese History and the Politics of Culture
IN OCTOBER of 1973, donning his trademark leopard-skin hat, Zairian leader Mobutu Sese Seko appeared before the UN in New York and in a booming voice deplored the “systematic pillage” of his country’s valuable cultural heritage by Western powers. Just as he had led a campaign to nationalize the recently independent country’s mineral resources, Mobutu imagined Zaire’s cultural heritage as a resource to be protected and “nationalized” in its own right. His demand for the restitution of “authentic” and valuable museum objects laid bare not only the cultural, but also the economic and political value of art objects to the Mobutu regime.
How did these specific objects and collections become defined as cultural and national heritage for Zaire? The answers to these questions do not lie only in changing ideas about the nature and value of African art. We may also find them in the construction of cultural authenticity and heritage as well as in the institutional and organizational politics of the cultural economies of both colonial and postcolonial Congo.
Authentically African traces a transnational process of cultural reinvention from the colonial into the postcolonial era and demonstrates its role in the construction first of Congo’s and later of Zaire’s cultural and political economies.1 In pursuing this project I have identified a common set of strategies that legitimate political power through the stewardship of cultural heritage. Collectively I will refer to these as cultural guardianship. I argue that cultural guardianship, particularly in the late colonial era, became a justification for Belgium’s colonial presence in Congo, a development that had an impact on ideas about political legitimacy far beyond the colonial era. We may trace the development of this theory of cultural guardianship through the definition, representation, collection, and possession of Congolese art and ethnographic material. Visible also in debates over cultural restitution and the creation of a postcolonial museum institute in Zaire, it complicates our understanding of the extensive process of decolonization. More broadly, the book analyzes the reinvention of traditional cultures as national heritage, as well as world heritage, in order to explore the cultural politics of the Mobutu regime and its claim on cultural guardianship in the construction of hegemony—nationally, but also internationally.
As Benedict Anderson has theorized, the creation of national identities required both forgetting and remembering; and in the creation of collections, the direction of research agendas, and the construction of displays, museums do quite a lot of both.2 As this book shows, museums were a primary battleground for different and competing epistemic discourses regarding authenticity, and they were active participants in the decolonization process and the formation of the postcolonial nation of Zaire. Their collections were sites of debate over the nature of the colonial past and the definition of the postcolonial future as well as important pawns in the struggle over cultural guardianship. In this book, I use museums, the people connected to them, the politics that surround them, and the messages they shaped, as a “prism upon the field of cultural production,” as well as on the broader field of cultural politics.3 They are simultaneously symbolic representations of the state and microcosms that are at times the location of contradiction and contestation. They are an avenue through which we can explore the construction of ideas about cultural authenticity, as well as the political life of these ideas. Two museums in particular will be central to the history in this book. The first is the former Museum of the Belgian Congo, now named the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), but often called “Tervuren,” after its location in a Brussels suburb.4 The second is the Institute of National Museums in Congo, founded between 1969 and 1971 through a collaboration between the RMCA and the presidential office in Zaire.
This book is not “merely” about culture but, more broadly, about power. I concur with Fernando Coronil’s observation that “power today cannot be analyzed exclusively within the boundaries of the nation-state.”5 It is in a broader, transnational context that we need to analyze the construction, the circulation, and the affirmation of ideas about both cultural heritage and national identity—first, because of the transnational circulation of the objects, and second, because of the international nature of the creation of knowledge about these objects.6 Transnational history is often understood as the study of movements, people, ideas, and processes that bypass or envelope the nation-state, but I believe it can also be very effective in informing the study of the very nation-state it is so often assumed to circumvent.7 Particularly in the case of a newly independent African state, legitimation happened not merely among its own population but also in the arena of international politics and transnational organizations. In the case of the Mobutu regime, I would argue that the manipulation of perceptions of Zaire in a global public sphere became more important than their national construction.
But it is also at this point that the weaknesses of past treatments of transnationalism become clear.8 All too often, the West still plays the role of center, while the rest of the world is relegated to the periphery of transnational processes and histories. The account of Zaire’s postcolonial cultural and museum politics in this book offers a recalibration of transnational approaches by placing Africa in the center, and not at the periphery, of the analysis.
A COUNTRY WITH MANY HISTORIES
Central to this book is the circulation of objects, and their appropriation and reinvention, often for political purposes. The appropriation of the material cultures and objects from other cultures was not a process exclusive to Western collecting and display however, nor was it unique to the colonial and postcolonial eras. Although it is impossible to do the topic full justice here, this section serves as a short introduction to the diversity of cultures and histories in the Congo basin, while also drawing attention to the genealogies of what later becomes defined as Congolese art through a number of examples.9
Most of the Central African societies the Belgians encountered during their conquest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not live in isolation. Trade routes crisscrossed the Congo basin and were engines of cultural exchange and change, connecting to the Indian Ocean world in the East and the Atlantic Ocean world in the West. Central African contact with Europeans started with the arrival of the Portuguese on the Atlantic coast in 1483. The trade that initially drove this contact was in the form of ivory and other goods, although soon the transatlantic slave trade dominated. The contact effected great cultural changes, both locally and globally. Initially driven by the desire of the Kongo king for a spiritual and political transformation that would strengthen his position of power (locally as well as in the realm of Christian kings), Kongo cultures incorporated elements of Portuguese Christianity into Kongo cosmology and political economy, a “tradition of renewal” that started in the Kongo kingdom of the fifteenth century but continued in the many smaller kingdoms, polities, and communities in the region until the nineteenth century.10 This cultural evolution became embedded in the material and artistic cultures of the region. Objects that served as markers of political power, such as swords, were both inspired by European examples and embedded within local cosmologies through the use of iron and the presence of the cross, for example.11 The latter was a common theme in Kongo Christian art because of its dual origins: as the Christian cross, but also as the Kongo cross (or the corresponding diamond), a symbol of the cycle of life and representative of regeneration. It occurred not only in explicitly Christian Kongo art such as crucifixes, but also in healing objects, textiles, and pottery, among other things.12
Joseph Miller has suggested that western Central Africans had “an unquenchable thirst for foreign imports,” which stimulated and reflected their integration into a global, Atlantic economy.13 Imports included textiles, weapons, alcohol, and glass products such as beads and mirrors. Much of the wealth to buy these things was inextricably tied to the slave trade. That same slave trade was also the foundation for the global impact of Kongo (and other African) cultures, as they lived on and were reinvented in the diaspora.14 It also signaled the beginning of European collecting of African-made
