An essential requirement for objects to make the transition to art was their “authenticity.” Olbrechts used the term to refer to their origin in a rural and traditional precolonial past, untainted by the influence of Western modernism—and thus unattainable for the current African cultures in decline. He believed it was revealed in the sculptural and aesthetic qualities of objects, which, conveniently, also heightened their exhibition value.104 Authenticity was thus not only present in the object but was also projected upon its community of origin and proceeded from “assumptions about temporality, wholeness, and continuity.”105
By giving certain African objects access to the universal and timeless category of art, Western art lovers changed the values attributed to these objects and to their cultures of origin. However, as Sally Price has noted in her exploration of the “universality principle,” the “‘equality’ accorded to non-Westerners (and their art), the implication goes, is not a natural reflection of human equivalence, but rather the result of western benevolence.”106 While the visitors to the art room at Tervuren affirmed their modernity by viewing African material culture as art—an aesthetic experience—Congolese people were denied that same modernity on the basis of their assumed inability to experience that same aesthetic experience.
In France, anxiety about the impact of Western modernity on the colonies had reached its height earlier, during the 1930s, as did a broader acceptance of certain African objects as art. The belief that the déracinement or uprooting of colonized peoples from their lives and values led to problems played into a “new project of recognizing and fostering cultural difference,” visible in the creation of the Musée des Colonies in 1931 and the reshaping of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro as the Musée de l’Homme by Paul Rivet.107 These developments were accompanied by a form of “colonial humanism” in which Leftist thinkers and administrators sought to reform France’s colonial policies.108 Similarly, the gradual integration of Congolese art into the promotion of Belgian colonialism as a valuable resource that needed protecting occurred simultaneously with the discussion about the possibilities of “welfare colonialism.”
ORGANIZED WALKING AS EVOLUTIONARY PRACTICE
Last, we should also take into account the place of the art room in the overall narrative the museum presented to its visitors.109 A visitor touring the museum in the 1950s would first pass through the halls devoted to the natural sciences. By then these included displays on zoology, primatology, entomology, birds, fish, reptiles, nonvertebrates, geology, and mineralogy. Next came the hall devoted to prehistory and (physical) anthropology, from which the visitor “progressed” to ethnography, and then moved on to the new art room. After the Congolese art room, visitors entered the history section and Memorial Hall, both devoted to Belgian colonialism and the first introduction to a historical dimension in the displays about culture. A visit was capped off with the halls devoted to the economic resources of the colony, with displays on mining, wood, and agriculture. These emphasized to the visitor the value of the colony. Obviously embedded in this trajectory was a clear and deep-seated evolutionary hierarchy in which Congolese people were the transition between the natural world and that of civilization and history with the Congo art room as the threshold. The museum scholar Tony Bennett aptly described this spatial organization as “organized walking as evolutionary practice.”110
Throughout the museum, but particularly in and around the ethnographic section, yet another if different throwback to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was present in the form of a series of sculptures representing various Congolese “ethnic groups” by Belgian artists such as Isidore De Rudder, Julien Dillens, and Charles Samuel. Additionally, sculptures around the rotunda depicted themes such as Belgium Bringing Security to Congo, Belgium Bringing Civilization to Congo, and Slavery (by Arsène Matton) and The Colony Awakes in Civilization (by Frans Huygelen). The sculptures, several of which dated back to the 1897 colonial exhibition, portrayed Belgium’s role as the savior and civilizer of Congo, spatially disrupting the ethnography section and negating the more nuanced image of Congo constructed there in the 1950’s.111
FIGURE 1.8. Marble Hall. Congolese ethnography, 1954. CNEPOM 1954.10.20, collection RMCA Tervuren, RMCA Tervuren ©.
FIGURE 1.9. (Left) Paul Wissaert’s The Aniota of Stanley Falls (1913), depicting a leopard man threatening a victim, on the far left; and (right) Julien Dillens’s De Dragers (The carriers) (1897), 1953. HP.1955.96.1061, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo Inforcongo, RMCA Tervuren ©.
Another competing narrative about the value of African cultures and societies was presented in the museum’s section on prehistory and physical anthropology, which included displays on archaeology.112 Despite the ostensible postwar discrediting of so-called “racial science” and hierarchical classification of races, the Tervuren museum was still using skin color, hair, and physical characteristics, particularly of the face and head (such as the form of the lips and skull), as the main characteristics in determining race. The most prominent artifacts in the room were skulls from Congo, lined up to illustrate the “natural difference” of the “melano-African race.”113 The field of physical anthropology was alive with debates over the concept of race in the 1950s and ’60s, but Tervuren’s identification of races through a typology that relied on ideas about racial purity was a leftover from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was becoming fast outdated in a scientific environment moving toward dynamic evolutionism. Until the late 1950s, the room also contained a series of bronze body casts of the bodies of Congolese people, created in 1929 by the artist Arsène Matton from plaster casts he made in 1911 on a trip to Congo. These body casts functioned both as scientific specimens and as pieces of art, serving as a prime example of the exoticizing of the black body in service of the “scientific” mission of the museum. When the room was renovated in the late 1950s, the casts disappeared into storage.114
The room was set up so that the visitor was first introduced to the idea of evolution and the science and techniques of archaeology. Then, and before an overview of prehistoric cultures of the region, came a wall panel illustrating the usefulness of ethnographic research to the archaeologist. This panel created a clear line from the ancient past of Africa to the present. The visitor advanced toward biological anthropology, passing, on the left, a chronological arrangement of the different cultures in the Belgian Congo. Set apart on the right side of the room were a case on Neolithic cultures and another on the progression to the “Bantu iron age.” Thanks to this setup, the panel introducing the science of (biological) anthropology and the “races” of Congo was located right next to the display on Mesolithic cultures in Congo. Although the curators refrained from associating races with civilizations, the spatial proximity of the prehistoric and physical anthropology displays was suggestive. The grouping of the displays on prehistory and physical anthropology, and their positioning as a bridge between the halls on nature and those on culture, framing the ethnographic and art displays, encouraged a racialized understanding of cultural difference.
Determining what the museum defined as history and what shaped the historical narrative presented to the museum audience is crucial for our understanding of how the Belgian audience related to their country’s colonial endeavor. How was Belgian colonialism presented in an era emphasizing modern reform, what place did colonialism have in the Belgian national identity, and what role did it play in the larger narrative the museum presented? The department active in creating historical displays for the museum was that of Political, Moral and Historical Sciences, a somewhat odd description that covered Belgian