Initially, they were installed in Storms’s house as war trophies and curios, elements in Storms’s self-representation as an explorer and his quest for social relevance in Brussels society. After Storms’s death in 1918, his widow held on to the objects, which had become relics of her husband’s “brief moment of glory in the Congo,” but eventually she donated them, along with personal memorabilia of Storms’s years in Central Africa.35 From illustrations of his personal history, the objects now evolved into the building blocks for the representation of a larger imperial project. Storms’s personal memorabilia found their place in the museum’s displays on the history of the Belgian colony, and the Tabwa and Luba objects long on display in Storms’s living room now became part of the ethnographic and art displays at Tervuren. While Storms’s role was memorialized in the historical displays of the museum, his collection also helped shape the image of Congolese cultures presented to the museum-going audience.
Overall, the material collected by colonials, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was badly documented; information about use and exact origin were rarely recorded. To remedy this situation, guidelines for the collection of material started appearing in manuals for colonials and visitors to Congo. The Tervuren museum, in collaboration with the Congo Free State, also distributed questionnaires to colonial officials, though few responded.36 Eventually, an introduction to African ethnography, often taught by Tervuren staff, was included in the course load at the colonial university in Antwerp, greatly improving Tervuren’s ability to create a network among the newer generations of colonial officials.37
Gradually, with the expansion of the colonial state, and particularly after the Belgian state took over the Congo Free State, a wider array of colonials became involved in the collection of ethnographic (and other) material in Congo. This group included colonial administrators and officers in the colonial army, but also engineers, doctors, teachers, and plantation and business owners.38 Not only was this group very diverse, the kind of material they acquired varied greatly according to their reasons for collecting and the conditions in which they obtained material. For example, some of the objects were the result of a commercial exchange or of a gift exchange, while others were the result of judicial requisitions by the colonial government. With the exception of the latter, many of these objects were “souvenirs of contact,” ranging from objects produced explicitly for sale to colonials and travelers to “authentic” artifacts created for local use.39 The trophies of conquest, typical of the earlier stages of exploration and conquest, were replaced by trophies of hunting, including tusks, animal skins, and local weapons. In all of these cases, collecting was a form of practical memory creation.40 The personal collections of these men (and occasionally women) would years or decades later often end up in the Tervuren storerooms and displays, donated either by the former colonials themselves or by their families. This practice illustrates how much Belgian colonials and their families thought of the Museum of the Belgian Congo as “their” museum: it held the material traces of many personal histories, but re-created these as part of a larger, national patrimony.
FIGURE 1.1. In Émile Storms’s home, with Lusinga’s statue centrally displayed, 1929. HP.1931.653.1, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo G. Hotz.
Missionary congregations were not far behind the explorers and representatives of the AIA. Émile Storms, in fact, was recalled from Congo and replaced by Catholic missionaries after the Berlin conference.41 In the long run, missionary congregations became one of the core pillars of Leopold’s, and later Belgium’s, colonial empire. Given their widespread presence, it should come as no surprise that some missionaries became important collectors, often in the context of a broader engagement with and sometimes admiration for African cultures. (Chapter 2 demonstrates that missionary engagement with Congolese material cultures was not limited to collecting but extended to the production of arts and crafts in the colony, particularly through art schools and artisanal craft programs.)
Although it is difficult to generalize, Boris Wastiau has concluded that collecting by missionaries was initially more focused on African religious and spiritual life, leading to the collection of a substantial amount of masks and statues.42 Sometimes this material was removed in an attempt to eradicate “barbarous” local practices, but many missionaries also collected for personal purposes—simply out of admiration for the material or out of a scientific interest in the societies they were living among. Large amounts of the material ultimately ended up in missionary collections: some of it still belongs to the same congregations today. In comparison with how much material was collected by missionaries, little ended up at Tervuren. Our sample of the 250 “masterpieces” of the RMCA confirms this suspicion: only 13 of the 250 objects were collected by missionaries.
One missionary who became an ethnographer as well as a collector was Father Leo Bittremieux, a missionary of Scheut who lived among the Mayombe in the Lower Congo region from 1907 until his death in 1946. He set out to collect almost immediately after his arrival, sending thirteen crates of “fetishes” to the Catholic University of Leuven, encouraged to do so by the young ethnology professor Eduard de Jonghe.43 Bittremieux published widely on the language and culture of the Mayombe in the decades that followed, and he continued to gather material. Some of his collection he sent to his family, some to the congregation’s small Musée des Fétiches in Kangu, but some of it ended up in Tervuren as well. From 1911 on, the colonial administration sent the missionary station in Kangu where Bittremieux lived an annual budget to collect and buy ethnographic material for the Congo museum in Tervuren. The collecting was not necessarily done by the missionaries themselves. Archival material reveals the role of one of the congregation’s Congolese employees, Aloïs Tembo, in the production of information about Yombe culture and about the objects gathered at the missionary station.44
Minkisi were a particular target for the missionaries. Referred to as fétiches in the early twentieth century, minkisi were vessels for a substance that could be activated for healing or in the case of a conflict. Their most common form in museums and collections was as statues with the substance embedded within them, although they took many different shapes, including simple containers.45 Their association with a different system of beliefs meant missionaries preferred to have the custom of the minkisi eradicated. Sometimes the Congolese participated in the destruction or discarding of these objects. Several of the minkisi collected by the Kangu mission post were brought there by the population either after conversion or after local changes in political leadership prompted the removal of a certain type of minkisi.46
FIGURE 1.2. A collection of minkisi brought to the Kangu mission post by the surrounding population, 1902. Photo Book Scheut. Courtesy of repro KADOC-KULeuven.
Missionaries like Bittremieux were important to Tervuren not only because they collected but for the wealth of knowledge they gathered about the people among whom they lived, feeding the development of ethnography and anthropology.47 The museum began to recruit and educate missionaries in order to have a network of collaborators in the field, so although they might be underrepresented as donors of objects, they made important contributions in information gathering and knowledge production for the museum.48
Like missionaries and other colonials, those involved with museum-organized scientific missions were a heterogeneous