In the Idea of Africa, the Congolese philosopher and writer V. Y. Mudimbe characterized the Mobutist doctrines as “a discursive drama [that] claims to be the sign of a social reality” which instead muzzled reality.78 The history of the Zairian Institute for National Museums and the Zairian demands for cultural restitution in this book confirm that “looking like a state,” which in this case meant projecting the appearance of cultural guardianship, ultimately was more important to the Mobutu regime than the creation of a real cultural infrastructure for the country’s citizens.79 This is clear from the decline in funding and support for the IMNZ by the mid-1970s. Despite these circumstances, however, the museum institute did continue to function successfully as a representative of the Zairian state on an international level.
It is in the international dimension, in fact, that we have to look for the most effective political use of Zaire’s traditional arts and postcolonial museum politics—and of the authenticity politics in general. Buoyed by a booming market in traditional African art, the Zairian museum institute managed to, if not replace, at least match the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa as an organizer of international exhibitions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The most important and effective of those took place in North America and promoted an image of the Zairian state—and by extension the Mobutu regime—as the representative and guardian of the country’s cultural heritage.
THE NARRATIVE OF THE BOOK
The book follows the colonial creation of cultural guardianship of Congo and the postcolonial struggle over the cultural sovereignty this guardianship represented. Chapter 1 tells the story of the creation of the collection of the Museum of the Belgian Congo and the adaptation of its displays to the reinvention of certain Congolese objects as art objects. It explains how this development was part and parcel of a changing interpretation of colonial guardianship, which now incorporated the protection of “authentic” Congolese heritage into the justification for its colonial presence. Chapter 2 juxtaposes the transformation of ethnographic objects into art, described in the first chapter, with the shifting definitions of “indigenous art” and cultural authenticity that were at work in the colonial environment. Policy agendas for the protection and preservation of artistic and artisanal cultures reveal the close association between economic, political, and cultural motivations for the controlled reinvigoration of a Congolese arts and crafts scene. These motivations also demonstrate how a colonial state envisioned engineering social conformity through cultural control, a trend that continued during the Mobutu regime.
The third chapter uses the story of the eventual return of a number of objects from the former Museum of the Belgian Congo to Zaire to provide a new narrative of the history of Congo’s decolonization as a struggle over cultural heritage that took place in both a national and an international setting. The reinvention of Congolese traditional art as national heritage and the adaptation of colonial notions of cultural authenticity in the national cultural ideology of authenticité by the Mobutu regime, served as tools for the creation of Zaire as a postcolonial geopolitical space. In the process, cultural authenticity emerged as the currency of an international conservation regime that fueled Zaire’s discourse on national cultural sovereignty and as a fundamental aspect of the legitimation of postcolonial political power.
The two following chapters turn to the cultural and political roles of the IMNZ within Zaire and to its efforts to reclaim the representation and the creation of knowledge about traditional cultures through a decolonization of institutional practices and collection and research activities, as well as exhibition practices. The chapters explain why the IMNZ largely failed in creating a domestic role or audience and how its struggles and decline can be located in the ultimate inability of the Mobutu regime to control the creation of a cultural narrative for the postcolonial nation.
The final chapter lays out the transnational context in which these processes of cultural reinvention took place. Through the history of four exhibitions of Congolese art and culture that traveled the United States, I argue that it was on an international level that Zaire most successfully came to project a reclaimed cultural guardianship. By analyzing how heritage and African authenticity were displayed and interpreted abroad, this chapter demonstrates that the remaking of postcolonial cultural representations was not a process limited to national actors and audiences.
Finally, a word on sources. The research for this book was conducted mostly in Belgium and Congo, with one long term and another short term stay in the DRC (and more specifically in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi) in 2006 and again in 2011. Very little of the current scholarship on Congolese colonial history incorporates Flemish language sources, which represents a serious blind spot this study aims to correct by using both primary sources and a relevant body of secondary literature written in Dutch.
Although the Belgian participation in this history is fairly well documented in terms of archival material, the side of this story that mattered most to me, the Congolese perspective, was much harder to research. Colonial propensities for classification and the resulting archives that are “cultural agents for ‘fact’ production” have made their mark on the production of the colonial past, but these structures of knowledge have also had repercussions for the way in which postcolonial histories are constructed.80 The zeal with which the former colonial power continued to document its interactions with the former colony outweighs the extent to which the Mobutu regime was concerned with doing the same. In recent decades, Congo has also justifiably had other priorities than safeguarding archival material. The result is the fragmentation of the archival material relating to the colonial period and the Mobutu years. The national archives in Kinshasa do not have much material that was useful to the topic of this book, while the archives of the museums in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi have both suffered from plundering and neglect. In Lubumbashi, UN soldiers occupied the museum building during the Katanga Secession in the early 1960s, while the museum offices in Kinshasa suffered during the unrest of the 1990s. After much searching, I was able to collect some archival and photographic material, mostly from cupboards and filing cabinets around the museum offices in Kinshasa, but gaps persist. Interviews, conducted both in Congo and Belgium, were an important source of information for me, although I have been attentive to the impact of nostalgia and current-day conflicts and problems in the museums, as well as the impact of people’s political reinvention since the Mobutu years, upon their memories.
1
The Value of Culture
Congolese Art and Belgian Colonialism
FOR MOST of the colonial period, the Museum of the Belgian Congo was the most visible presence of the empire in Belgium and one of the a major avenues through which Belgian citizens got to know their colony. Its neoclassical and marble halls filled with its zoological, mineralogical, and man-made “wonders” represented the colony. During the 1950s, the museum received between 141,800 and 197,859 visitors a year, the equivalent of up to 2.3 percent of the Belgian population. This made it one of the most visited museums in Belgium.1
This chapter lays out how representations of Congolese cultures were produced and projected at the museum, and the ways in which these intersected with and helped shape colonial ideologies. The process whereby Belgium became the custodian of a large museum collection of Congolese material is explored, and the chapter explains how a fragmented and varied process of collection was translated into seemingly coherent images of Congolese culture and bodies of knowledge.
I argue that the very guardianship of the museum’s collections became integrated into late colonial justifications for Belgium’s colonial presence in the Congo. This relied on two processes: the production of