This book is not “merely” about culture but, more broadly, about power. I concur with Fernando Coronil’s observation that “power today cannot be analyzed exclusively within the boundaries of the nation-state.”5 It is in a broader, transnational context that we need to analyze the construction, the circulation, and the affirmation of ideas about both cultural heritage and national identity—first, because of the transnational circulation of the objects, and second, because of the international nature of the creation of knowledge about these objects.6 Transnational history is often understood as the study of movements, people, ideas, and processes that bypass or envelope the nation-state, but I believe it can also be very effective in informing the study of the very nation-state it is so often assumed to circumvent.7 Particularly in the case of a newly independent African state, legitimation happened not merely among its own population but also in the arena of international politics and transnational organizations. In the case of the Mobutu regime, I would argue that the manipulation of perceptions of Zaire in a global public sphere became more important than their national construction.
But it is also at this point that the weaknesses of past treatments of transnationalism become clear.8 All too often, the West still plays the role of center, while the rest of the world is relegated to the periphery of transnational processes and histories. The account of Zaire’s postcolonial cultural and museum politics in this book offers a recalibration of transnational approaches by placing Africa in the center, and not at the periphery, of the analysis.
A COUNTRY WITH MANY HISTORIES
Central to this book is the circulation of objects, and their appropriation and reinvention, often for political purposes. The appropriation of the material cultures and objects from other cultures was not a process exclusive to Western collecting and display however, nor was it unique to the colonial and postcolonial eras. Although it is impossible to do the topic full justice here, this section serves as a short introduction to the diversity of cultures and histories in the Congo basin, while also drawing attention to the genealogies of what later becomes defined as Congolese art through a number of examples.9
Most of the Central African societies the Belgians encountered during their conquest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not live in isolation. Trade routes crisscrossed the Congo basin and were engines of cultural exchange and change, connecting to the Indian Ocean world in the East and the Atlantic Ocean world in the West. Central African contact with Europeans started with the arrival of the Portuguese on the Atlantic coast in 1483. The trade that initially drove this contact was in the form of ivory and other goods, although soon the transatlantic slave trade dominated. The contact effected great cultural changes, both locally and globally. Initially driven by the desire of the Kongo king for a spiritual and political transformation that would strengthen his position of power (locally as well as in the realm of Christian kings), Kongo cultures incorporated elements of Portuguese Christianity into Kongo cosmology and political economy, a “tradition of renewal” that started in the Kongo kingdom of the fifteenth century but continued in the many smaller kingdoms, polities, and communities in the region until the nineteenth century.10 This cultural evolution became embedded in the material and artistic cultures of the region. Objects that served as markers of political power, such as swords, were both inspired by European examples and embedded within local cosmologies through the use of iron and the presence of the cross, for example.11 The latter was a common theme in Kongo Christian art because of its dual origins: as the Christian cross, but also as the Kongo cross (or the corresponding diamond), a symbol of the cycle of life and representative of regeneration. It occurred not only in explicitly Christian Kongo art such as crucifixes, but also in healing objects, textiles, and pottery, among other things.12
Joseph Miller has suggested that western Central Africans had “an unquenchable thirst for foreign imports,” which stimulated and reflected their integration into a global, Atlantic economy.13 Imports included textiles, weapons, alcohol, and glass products such as beads and mirrors. Much of the wealth to buy these things was inextricably tied to the slave trade. That same slave trade was also the foundation for the global impact of Kongo (and other African) cultures, as they lived on and were reinvented in the diaspora.14 It also signaled the beginning of European collecting of African-made objects. A market emerged in ivory objects, such as spoons, salt cellars, and decorated horns, made specifically for Europeans. Objects used within Kongo cultures, however, also started making their way to European collections. Regarded as “curios” and representatives of a world considered profoundly different from the European one, they set the stage for a centuries-long European process of representation and reinvention of African cultures and societies through objects.15
While immediate contact with Europeans was limited to the coastal regions, the impact of this contact reverberated far inside the continent, most conspicuously in the form of ever-expanding slave raids, but also in the new material things and foodstuffs traded along well-established trading routes that had stimulated change and exchange in the region for centuries. By 1300 these routes already carried iron, copper, and salt, in return for beads and cowrie shells, linking equatorial Africa to southeastern Africa and eventually to the Indian Ocean world.16 The Atlantic trade added various textiles, weapons, alcohol, and New World foods such as maize and manioc.
This growing economic sphere created and fed upon political and cultural change. The expansion of two of the most important polities of the area, the Luba and, later, Lunda spheres of influence, were tied to the exchanges that took place along these routes.17 Objects, particularly those with a certain prestige, often embodied this “cosmopolitanism” and served the political economy of the power structures in the region. For example, the spread and use of royal Luba insignia, such as carved staffs, stools, ceremonial axes, and bowl figures, demonstrated not only the expansion of Luba power but also the appeal of the objects that physically represented this power. During the height of Luba power (ca. 1700–1860, sometimes referred to as the “age of kings”) neighboring peoples (or “client polities”) readily adapted these insignia as a sign of their incorporation into the Luba “empire,” sometimes receiving them as a form of payment, sometimes copying or emulating them, or commissioning them from Luba artists. Their popularity illustrates the close association that existed between their possession and political legitimacy. Mary Nooter Roberts has demonstrated that these objects’ power rested on their invocation of the interconnection between ruler-ship and cosmology, effectively tying their possessors to supernatural realms of sovereignty.18 Their popularity did not necessarily imply however, that they were on display for all to see. On the contrary, secrecy and limited access enhanced their value.
The eastern edges of the Atlantic world touched the western edge of the Indian Ocean world in what today is eastern Congo. By the nineteenth century, the impact of the Atlantic slave trade and the European presence on the western Central African coast were felt throughout the northern reaches of the Congo basin and as far east as the edge of today’s Katanga region.19 At the same time, communities in the eastern part of the Congo river basin were drawn into connections with Swahili ivory and slave traders from coastal East Africa and the Indian Ocean world. The trade with East Africa mirrored the Atlantic trade in its influence on political, cultural, and economic structures in the region, bringing for example the Swahili language as well as Islam to the region.20
By the time the Belgian king Leopold II set his sights on the area, the Kongo kingdom had long since fragmented and Luba, as well as Lunda, political influence had started to wane. The political landscape that explorers and colonial agents encountered in the east included polities established by Swahili-Arabs or East Africans like Tippu Tip and Msiri. The latter, in particular, straddled both the east- and westward trading routes, allowing Portuguese traders to raid for slaves and ivory in southeastern Congo, while also maintaining ties to the East African coastal economies.21
With Western imperialism came not only territorial conquest and economic exploitation, but also a top-down process of cultural