colonialism. A large majority of the museum institutions on the continent were founded during the colonial era. In French West Africa, the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), based in Dakar and founded in 1936, stood at the head of a system of satellite museums and scientific institutions across the region.30 Many of the museums in former French West Africa today are the survivors of this institutional colonialism. Although the process was less centralized, most of the museums in the former British empire in Africa also have colonial histories. A number of small museums were created at elite schools before World War II, but a wave of “proto-national” museum openings followed between 1948 and 1959, not as a result of a centralized cultural policy, but because of the converging interests of local colonial organizations and administrators with those of African elites.31 The case of the Belgian Congo more closely resembles the process in British West Africa. Despite lobbying for a centralized colonial “politique esthétique” (a “politics of aesthetics”) after World War II, the network of small museums in Congo was the result of initiatives by local colonials, who often came into conflict with the central authority of the Museum of the Belgian Congo near Brussels.
Despite their colonial roots, museum institutions in Africa were not rejected after independence. Their role as nation-building tools suited postcolonial agendas and was often recast in the context of “development” policies.32 However, it comes as no surprise that prominent postcolonial concerns included decolonizing these institutions, and seeking out or creating an African audience. Museum professionals struggled with identifying audiences, seeking out financing, and with the legacy of colonial structures of knowledge in their displays.33 Regional and international organizations like UNESCO, WAMP (West African Museums Programme), AFRICOM (the International Council of African Museums), and ICOM (International Council of Museums) have all played an important role in the supporting the intellectual, institutional, and practical challenges of museum life in postcolonial Africa.34
Scholarship on museums and their histories in sub-Saharan Africa has been shaped by the many practical concerns of museum professionals and generally lacks analytical depth.35 When this scholarship is concerned with the past, it is often—and understandably—with the goal of making a clear break with said past. As a result, there are lots of short explorations of the history of individual museums in sub-Saharan Africa, but no sustained efforts to place them in a broader context.36 This also applies to the history of the museums in Congo, where the little scholarship that exists is concentrated on the museum in Lubumbashi.37
An exception to this lack of critical literature is the cluster of publications of the past decade and a half focused on museums in South Africa. The political changes of the 1990s in South Africa, along with the existence of a significant network of heritage sites and museums, have created the conditions—and the urgent need—for critical investigations of the past, as well as a confrontation of the challenges the present holds.38 The political role of public historical spaces like museums and heritage sites in the construction of national pasts and public memory in South Africa has been laid out, as well as the effort to decolonize these spaces.39 This body of scholarship makes clear that museums in Africa have the potential for being relevant—although certainly not uncontested—participants in the public sphere. While authors challenge current museum institutions in South Africa to critically investigate their role in creating national pasts that supported the hegemony of the Apartheid regime, their scholarship also demonstrates a continued faith in the ability of heritage politics and museums to help effect social change via cultural identity formation.40
While the South African example is partially a result of specific political circumstances, it is also a reflection of a larger shift in the landscape of museum studies. Western museum professionals have become increasingly concerned with the complicity of cultural institutions in colonial structures of knowledge and the legacy of these structures in the shaping of inequalities of today’s globalizing world. They also seek to redeem the museum by making it into a tool for social transformation that reflects postcolonialism.41
The scholarship on South Africa also nicely demonstrates the place of museums in what Tony Bennett calls the “culture complex,” which comprises “a range of sites in which distinctive forms of expertise are deployed in “making culture” as a set of resources for acting on society.” These sites, which include libraries, museums, heritage sites, schools, and so on, but also a range of knowledge practices and disciplines (such as ethnography and art history), are aimed at bringing about “calculated changes in conduct by transforming beliefs, customs, habits, perceptions, etc.” Most of these institutions and disciplines are connected to particular “rationalities of government.”42 In the case of South Africa, this was the Apartheid regime and its racial theories. In the case of the Belgian Congo, ideas about culture, formed in ethnographic and art historical practices and projected to a broader audience in the displays of Tervuren, underwrote and shaped colonial practices.
The work of Bruno Latour, who urged attention to the contexts in which culture is “made,” looms large in the theorizing of the culture complex. Working with a broad interpretation of the laboratory, which includes locations such as the archive, as well as collections, Latour allows us to theorize the museum as a “centre of calculation”—a setting in which new entities are made that are inserted into fields of knowledge.43 Authentically African starts off by tracing how colonial structures of knowledge, developed in and around the museum, intersected with and shaped the nature of Belgian colonial policies, but it departs from Latour and Bennett in its insistence on the “messiness” of the implementation and practice of these bodies of governmental theory. In the political use of the reinvention of cultures we can read the multidimensional and often contradictory nature of historical processes. Neither the creation of knowledge nor the translation of culture “made” in the context of the museum into cultural and social policy are clear-cut processes, proven by both the struggles of the Belgian colonial regime in implementing cultural policies, as well as the limited effect of the Mobutu regime’s almost cynical use of the museum as a political nation-building tool.
The basis for the development of ethnographic scientific information about art and culture in the Museum of the Belgian Congo—its collection—was deeply unscientific in its own creation. The amount of objects acquired via scientific exploration was negligible in comparison with the donations from explorers, colonials, and missionaries and the acquisitions from art dealers and art collectors. The individual motivations to collect material and the knowledge that informed the decision-making process about the selection of objects varied tremendously. Their presence at Tervuren, however, fused this motley group of materials into a unit—“a” collection—and a basis for the creation of knowledge about the objects’ cultures of origin. By contrast, the practices that informed the creation of the collection of the IMNZ in Kinshasa were more systematic and involved far fewer people. It was in the process of knowledge creation and distribution, however, that the latter faltered, hampered by political co-optation and economic realities. The “crowd-sourced” nature of the Tervuren collection worked to its advantage when it came to the public role of the latter, while very few Zairians felt a similar affinity with the museums in their country.
The connection between museums as “critical switchpoints across different networks . . . [which]. . . in ordering the materials they accumulated from diverse points of collection, produced new entities that they then relayed back out to the world as resources” and particular (authoritarian) rationalities of government becomes even more salient in the second part of this book, in which the Zairian government moves to create a museum with the explicit purpose of decolonizing the country’s cultural representation.44 Can such a postcolonial application of the museum as a “technology of power” in central Africa be effective, however, given the deeply compromised nature of the museum as a colonial creation? In order to answer this question, I investigate whether and how the powerful categories of art and authenticity were constructed and used in the postcolonial Zairian context, and how they operated within the museum institute, as well as in the broader context of Zaire’s postcolonial cultural politics.
ARTIFACT/ART
