Congolese cultures. Until World War II these were based upon an interpretation of colonialism as a “civilizing mission,” but by the postwar period, a broader interpretation of Belgian colonialism as “welfare colonialism” intersected with the maturation of a scientific discourse about Congolese art that emphasized the value of the latter as a resource—one that not only could generate financial value but that could also serve to reinvigorate Congolese cultures.
Of course, “the categories of the beautiful, the cultural and the authentic have changed and are changing,” as James Clifford points out.57 The category of Congolese art (and “Primitive” art more broadly) evolved toward a canon and was framed increasingly with reference to objects in Western collections, while authenticity proved a malleable category that existed in the eye of the (Western) beholder. Not only did these categories evolve, they were also open to manipulation and co-optation. Christopher Steiner has illustrated how “authenticity” was captured by art traders in the Ivory Coast who reproduced the physical markers of “authentic” traditional art in order to create objects with significant market value.58 The creation of “authentic” art objects for sale to a Western audience was not uncommon in Congo either. In some cases, the canon—in the shape of art books—helped shape the “authenticity” of “fake” pieces.59
The constructed nature of categories such as “art” and “authenticity” illustrates how disparate categories of value projected upon traditional African art objects operate in concert with one another. An object’s economic value rises with its cultural value, but economic value can also create an aura of cultural value.60 In their economic and cultural values resides another dimension as well, of course: the political. In their re-creation as art, and in their embodiment of authentic Congolese culture, Congolese objects became a resource to be protected and an element in the construction of colonial justifications for the presence of the Belgian colonial state as a cultural guardian of an “authentic” Congo.
The role accorded to material culture and art in the representation of cultural authenticity in the colonial era transformed the collections of the Museum of the Belgian Congo into subjects of political negotiation. Acquiring cultural guardianship—not only in terms of the possession of cultural heritage but also in terms of cultural practices—was understood as a way of acquiring authenticity, and hence legitimacy, by the Mobutu regime. This book traces three of the avenues through which this process took place: the demand for cultural restitution in the process of decolonization; the creation of a museum institute in Zaire in order to generate a national repository of precolonial traditional culture; and the broader authenticity politics of the Mobutu regime.
CULTURAL HERITAGE AND THE POLITICS OF DECOLONIZATION
The Congolese struggle for independence and its immediate aftermath have the dubious honor of being one of the most famous moments in the African struggle for independence. From Lumumba’s speech on independence day in June of 1960, in which he painted a picture of Belgian colonialism as one of abuse and exploitation, to the violence of the postindependence conflicts and secessions, the murder of Lumumba, and the involvement of the United Nations, the struggles around Congolese independence came to stand for the history of African decolonization at large. The contours of this well-known history have limited our understanding of the process of decolonization in Congo, however. Using the history of Congolese demands for postcolonial cultural restitution, this book investigates the process of decolonization as a “drama of competing visions” and proposes two major shifts in the approach to the history of Congo’s decolonization: a thematic and periodization shift away from the history of the political and military events of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in favor of studying the debates over cultural sovereignty that took place from the late colonial era until the 1980s.61
The dominant construction of the category of decolonization emerged in the West in the face of anticolonial struggles and was organized around Western governmental frameworks, shaping not only the processes of decolonization but also the historical view of that process.62 Consequently, the scholarship emerging from the former colonizer as well as later nationalist histories define decolonization as a moment of rupture, in which new and sovereign nation-states were (or should have been) created.63 Far too often, the moment of political independence is portrayed as the end of a process. This approach set up the “failed states” narrative which emerged in the 1990s and which condemned many of these “new” African states as weak, incoherent, and failing in comparison with their Western counterparts.
In the case of Congo, the scholarship is dominated by a focus on political and military events taking place between roughly 1955 and 1965.64 The first Congo Crisis, associated with the Katangese Secession and the regional conflicts of the early 1960s, is generally described as part of the process of decolonization. This means that Mobutu’s second coup in 1965 is often seen as the end of the era of decolonization and the beginning of the postcolonial state in Congo.65 This book questions that periodization, argues that independence was more a beginning than an end for the process of decolonization, and advocates for an examination of the history of the Mobutist state through the lens of decolonization.66
Since colonialism consisted of far more than political and economic dominance, so did African interpretations and expectations of decolonization. Often overlooked in the histories of decolonization in Africa are the ways in which cultural sovereignty was imagined and demanded. As this book argues, cultural guardianship came to play an important role in the justification for (late) colonialism, a point made clear in Belgium’s defense of its possession of large museum collections of Congolese art and artifacts, even after Congo’s political independence. As a consequence, Congolese expectations of independence were also shaped by the desire to reclaim the resources necessary to give shape to cultural sovereignty.
As Ngũgũ wa Thiong’o writes, “To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.”67 An important part of this cultural identity relies on the past, which in the case of Congo was created as “authentic traditional culture” by the modernist imagination of Belgian colonial rule, a cultural category from which change and modernity itself were scrubbed. In the Belgian Congo, the preservation of this “tradition” was also conceived as part of the colonial project, particularly by the 1950s. This was implemented via initiatives for the protection and preservation of the production of “traditional” arts and crafts (the “present” past) in the colony, but also in the ownership and preservation of the collection of the Tervuren museum in Belgium. In this process, “traditional” cultures, and particularly the objects that had been recast as art, were reinvented as heritage.
A product of “ways of valuing the past that arose in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe and [. . .] bolstered by nationalism and populism” as well as by Western obsession with identity (both collective and individual), heritage was projected upon non-Western cultures within the context of colonialism and shaped by colonial collecting and displaying practices.68 This had practical consequences: in the European context, the museum, as a place of preservation, had become an important tool in the “activation” of heritage into instruments of nation formation and solidification. Zoe Strother recently observed that if “heritage is culture conceived as property, it is also property obtained through legally determined rights of succession.”69 As such, it should come as no surprise that the ownership of these collections became the subject of debate in the process of decolonization; after all, Belgian rhetoric about Congo was rife with references to the colony as its “maturing child.”
With the European nation-state as a model, the newly independent country sought to create itself as the guardian of its own cultural heritage. Possession of cultural heritage would enable the postcolonial state to construct a cultural legitimacy that underwrote its political legitimacy.70 The historical role of cultural heritage in the African process of decolonization has received little attention to date: most studies of demands for restitution focus on more recent examples, the protection of the heritage of indigenous
