scramble for Africa was accompanied by a “scramble for African art,” as Enid Schildkrout and Curtis Keim have so succinctly put it.45 Large numbers of ethnographic artifacts flowed into Europe, finding a home in several newly established museums and feeding the development of anthropology as a science. Taking the “concrete and palpable presence of a thing to attest to the reality which we have made it signify” was a fundamental aspect of Western imperialism.46 Having started out as mere curios, these objects became artifacts of science, players in the construction of narratives about the “civilizing mission,” and eventually art and the embodiment of wealth—both financial and cultural.
This shift from artifact to art, chronicled in this book, was reflected in museums displays. The curatorial approaches to displays vacillated between what I describe as “aesthetic” and “ethnographic” (or “anthropological”) approaches. In an aesthetic approach the objects are presented as works of art, exemplified by their physical isolation and an emphasis on their formal qualities.47 Ethnographic or anthropological displays, on the other hand, use objects to teach museum visitors about a culture, so the objects are usually displayed in a way that attempts to tell the visitor something about the relationship between various objects, their function, and their use or symbolism. In reality, however, museum displays are rarely as clear-cut as these theoretical points of reference might lead us to believe: art displays are sometimes accompanied by photos of the objects in situ, for example, or ethnographic exhibitions might highlight the aesthetic qualities of objects.48
The art/artifact binary is by no means stable. Museum objects are canvases upon which many values were projected: financial or economic, cultural, and political. These different interpretations and values are not necessarily stable, nor did they exist in isolation from one another. On the contrary, they function as “regimes of value.”49 Throughout the book, I use “cultural value” to refer to the capacity of an object to represent “high culture” or “civilization.” Central to the cultural value of an object is its “authenticity,” in addition to its (Western) aesthetic value. These objects, whether they are interpreted as art objects (constructed as aesthetically appealing to the [Western] eye and consequently possessing a high “cultural value”) or as ethnographic artifacts (with less importance as representatives of “high” culture, yet relevant as the representatives of a society and as objects in the scientific study of a society), also have an economic or financial value—that is, a value as commodities that can be traded.50
The twentieth century witnessed a progressive broadening of the category of African art. Aided by the primitivist modernists’ interest in African art, Central and West African sculptural objects in particular were increasingly collected and displayed as art objects.51 From the very first colonial exhibitions in Belgium, there were individual objects that were described as “art” rather than as ethnographic elements. A systematic scientific approach to these objects grew only slowly, however, and remained fragmented until Frans Olbrechts, who went on to become director of the Tervuren museum, developed a complete system of classification that canonized Congolese art and embedded it in the bodies of art historical and anthropological knowledge. The implementation of this classification in the displays at Tervuren in the 1950s—particularly in the form of a new art room—represented the culmination of this trend but was also symbolic of the increased attention accorded to culture among colonial organizations and in colonial policies. The cultural capital created through the institutionalization of the reinvention of certain Congolese artifacts as art in Tervuren became fuel for both colonial and postcolonial constructions of political legitimacy. It was this ontological shift, and the epistemological changes that followed in its wake, that led to the reimagination of colonialism as a form of cultural guardianship motivated by the protection and preservation of native cultures, a political construction that reemerged in the cultural politics of the Mobutu regime.
THE INVENTION OF AUTHENTICITY AND THE CULTURAL LEGITIMATION OF THE COLONIAL STATE
A recurring topic in this book is the political nature of the invention and use of “cultural authenticity.” Its varying application to objects and people reveal how and why museum employees—but also government officials, politicians, and audiences at large—valued culture. As Sidney Kasfir explains, ideas about the authenticity of African art are based on a series of flawed assumptions about “traditional society” as precolonial, isolated, and homogenous, and about the artist as “bound by tradition” and “controlled by larger forces than himself.”52 By investigating the processes through which authenticity was constructed and how, along with the category of “art,” it was deployed, I seek to demonstrate the role of cultural (re)invention in the political projects of colonialism and postcolonialism.
“Indigenous” cultural authenticity became a useful concept in early colonial collecting of African material culture. In the process of removing material from its context, the projection of authenticity onto the objects served to legitimize the removal of an object as an act of salvaging. Crucial to the construction of cultural authenticity was the anxiety regarding “dying” traditional cultures that accompanied modernity’s changes. The belief in their impending disappearance—essentially their existence as a past—was a prerequisite for their authenticity.53
The curators at the Museum of the Belgian Congo made the salvaging of authentic culture into a scientific undertaking, whereby the creation of expert knowledge and the development of a canon of Congolese art became key elements for the recognition of authenticity. The gradual emergence of a comprehensive system of classification accorded objects value and located authenticity, depending on how objects compared to, and fit in with, other objects in the collection. Becoming even further removed from their original context, authenticity and value were now also defined in the way objects were displayed. The museum, and the art historical canon generated by scholars such as Frans Olbrechts, became authenticity-generating “machines,” constructed as worlds of reference and classification that trumped the cultural context of Congolese societies. They also promoted the subsequent constructions of “traditional” Congolese cultures, and their need for protection, to a broader audience.
Another context in which authenticity played a crucial role was the art market. African art dealers—quite often collectors themselves—contributed significantly to the projection of authenticity upon Congolese cultures. African art trader Henri Kamer described it as follows: “An authentic African piece is by definition a sculpture executed by an artist of a primitive tribe and destined for the use of this tribe in a ritual or functional way. Never lucrative.”54 Art dealers and collectors often establish authenticity on the basis of the physical appearance of an object, looking for evidence of use in the patina, and by locating it in the classifications and canons constructed by scholars. Gradually the (Western) provenance—in the form of a genealogy of Western ownership—of an object became equally important in establishing value and authenticity, a trend also noticeable in the ways in which museums valued their collections. The growing importance of this kind of genealogy denied postcolonial Zairian collecting, like that of the IMNZ, access to a significant repository of authenticity, now located in the West. Through this process of identification, dealers and collectors constructed themselves as experts and connoisseurs, members of an elite with access to an exclusive knowledge—a knowledge that helped develop the canon as a scientific framework.55 An object’s authenticity also increased its commercial value and, ultimately, its commodification—a process clearly demonstrated in the growing market for African art in Europe and the United States. European colonialism, its networks enabling the movement of these objects from (in this case) Africa to the West, formed a crucial part of the story.56
The importance of cultural authenticity lies not merely in how it was defined but in the political implications of that definition. Parallel with the construction of an endangered Congolese cultural authenticity emerged the construction of the explorer, collector, museum director, and by extension the colonial state they represented, as the saviors and protectors of said Congolese culture. The political ramifications of these cultural constructions go beyond the museum
