specifically for Europeans. Objects used within Kongo cultures, however, also started making their way to European collections. Regarded as “curios” and representatives of a world considered profoundly different from the European one, they set the stage for a centuries-long European process of representation and reinvention of African cultures and societies through objects.15
While immediate contact with Europeans was limited to the coastal regions, the impact of this contact reverberated far inside the continent, most conspicuously in the form of ever-expanding slave raids, but also in the new material things and foodstuffs traded along well-established trading routes that had stimulated change and exchange in the region for centuries. By 1300 these routes already carried iron, copper, and salt, in return for beads and cowrie shells, linking equatorial Africa to southeastern Africa and eventually to the Indian Ocean world.16 The Atlantic trade added various textiles, weapons, alcohol, and New World foods such as maize and manioc.
This growing economic sphere created and fed upon political and cultural change. The expansion of two of the most important polities of the area, the Luba and, later, Lunda spheres of influence, were tied to the exchanges that took place along these routes.17 Objects, particularly those with a certain prestige, often embodied this “cosmopolitanism” and served the political economy of the power structures in the region. For example, the spread and use of royal Luba insignia, such as carved staffs, stools, ceremonial axes, and bowl figures, demonstrated not only the expansion of Luba power but also the appeal of the objects that physically represented this power. During the height of Luba power (ca. 1700–1860, sometimes referred to as the “age of kings”) neighboring peoples (or “client polities”) readily adapted these insignia as a sign of their incorporation into the Luba “empire,” sometimes receiving them as a form of payment, sometimes copying or emulating them, or commissioning them from Luba artists. Their popularity illustrates the close association that existed between their possession and political legitimacy. Mary Nooter Roberts has demonstrated that these objects’ power rested on their invocation of the interconnection between ruler-ship and cosmology, effectively tying their possessors to supernatural realms of sovereignty.18 Their popularity did not necessarily imply however, that they were on display for all to see. On the contrary, secrecy and limited access enhanced their value.
The eastern edges of the Atlantic world touched the western edge of the Indian Ocean world in what today is eastern Congo. By the nineteenth century, the impact of the Atlantic slave trade and the European presence on the western Central African coast were felt throughout the northern reaches of the Congo basin and as far east as the edge of today’s Katanga region.19 At the same time, communities in the eastern part of the Congo river basin were drawn into connections with Swahili ivory and slave traders from coastal East Africa and the Indian Ocean world. The trade with East Africa mirrored the Atlantic trade in its influence on political, cultural, and economic structures in the region, bringing for example the Swahili language as well as Islam to the region.20
By the time the Belgian king Leopold II set his sights on the area, the Kongo kingdom had long since fragmented and Luba, as well as Lunda, political influence had started to wane. The political landscape that explorers and colonial agents encountered in the east included polities established by Swahili-Arabs or East Africans like Tippu Tip and Msiri. The latter, in particular, straddled both the east- and westward trading routes, allowing Portuguese traders to raid for slaves and ivory in southeastern Congo, while also maintaining ties to the East African coastal economies.21
With Western imperialism came not only territorial conquest and economic exploitation, but also a top-down process of cultural interpretation and reinvention in which the extraction of material cultures, and particularly “art” objects by Europeans, played an important role. This extraction took place during the exploration and conquest of the Congo region in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was institutionalized during the Congo Free State (1885–1908), and expanded under Belgian colonial rule (1908–1960). Chapter 1 will investigate how the desire to control through collection, description, and classification gave shape to the collection of the Museum of the Belgian Congo, and how the latter represented and reinvented Congo for a Belgian audience. The book will then explore the implications and consequences of these representations and reinventions for the Congolese, particularly during the late colonial and postcolonial eras.
The process of the colonial conquest, and later the implementation of colonial rule in Central Africa, profoundly influenced the way in which the “precolonial” has been shaped as a historical category. For example, the belief in the existence of a historical “Luba empire,” reflected “a fundamental misunderstanding of African political economy” based upon a literal interpretation of myths of kingship (which were themselves a tool for the promotion of political power) combined with “a prevailing sense that kingdoms must have existed.”22 A similar process has shaped views of the past of the Kuba of the Kasai region. Impressed by their artistic abilities and the perceived political centralization around the figure of the Kuba king, early visitors as well as later colonial administrators were convinced of the Kuba’s superiority with regard to their neighbors. This reputation contributed to the Kuba king’s survival in a system of indirect rule—although it certainly did not protect the Kuba from brutal exploitation during the colonial regime.23
Any admiration by missionaries, colonial administrators or travelers was usually projected upon the past of these societies, and ethnographic and descriptive accounts of cultural traditions were permeated with narratives of decline that underwrote the colonial logic of cultural guardianship. This decline was often attributed to either the impact of the East African slave trade in the Congo basin (which aligned with the Leopoldian justification of colonialism as an antislavery measure) or to the impact of Western modernity (or rather, the inability of Africans to deal with it in the “right” way and hence their need for colonial guidance). Any romanticized impressions of precolonial kingdoms and empires were thus rendered politically harmless and led at most to proposals for indirect rule.24
Instead of a perspective on the past that recognized long-term processes of cultural change and regional, transcontinental, and global connections, the precolonial African past became a category that locked Africans into an ahistorical and “authentic” past.25 While this process created “authentic cultural traditions” as a defining category for the identity (and identification) of Congolese cultures, it simultaneously closed that category off to contemporary Congolese people by viewing the present through the prism of cultural decline—inventing a present, as much as a past.26 This view legitimized “collecting” by Europeans, as the “salvaging” and safeguarding of Congolese cultures.
V. Y. Mudimbe has located the invention of a static and prehistoric tradition in the “episteme of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” and Johannes Fabian has also implicated more recent anthropological discourses and practices in the construction of “the other” as a “temporal, historical, and political act.”27 This book will demonstrate the late colonial and postcolonial life of these constructions, as well as their continued political relevance.28 In particular, this book investigates the historical construction of the categories of “art” and “authenticity” and demonstrates their use as political tools, both within and outside the museum, first in the context of Belgian colonial rule and later in the context of the postcolonial Mobutist state.
MUSEUMS AND AFRICA, MUSEUMS IN AFRICA
The movement and possession of ethnographic and art objects and collections are historically part of larger political, cultural, and economic projects. A large and growing body of scholarship has demonstrated the connection between the creation of museum collections of non-Western objects, the development of anthropology, and European colonialism.29 We know far less, however, about the creation, development, and politics of museums on the African continent, particularly their postcolonial existence.
The
