The process of the colonial conquest, and later the implementation of colonial rule in Central Africa, profoundly influenced the way in which the “precolonial” has been shaped as a historical category. For example, the belief in the existence of a historical “Luba empire,” reflected “a fundamental misunderstanding of African political economy” based upon a literal interpretation of myths of kingship (which were themselves a tool for the promotion of political power) combined with “a prevailing sense that kingdoms must have existed.”22 A similar process has shaped views of the past of the Kuba of the Kasai region. Impressed by their artistic abilities and the perceived political centralization around the figure of the Kuba king, early visitors as well as later colonial administrators were convinced of the Kuba’s superiority with regard to their neighbors. This reputation contributed to the Kuba king’s survival in a system of indirect rule—although it certainly did not protect the Kuba from brutal exploitation during the colonial regime.23
Any admiration by missionaries, colonial administrators or travelers was usually projected upon the past of these societies, and ethnographic and descriptive accounts of cultural traditions were permeated with narratives of decline that underwrote the colonial logic of cultural guardianship. This decline was often attributed to either the impact of the East African slave trade in the Congo basin (which aligned with the Leopoldian justification of colonialism as an antislavery measure) or to the impact of Western modernity (or rather, the inability of Africans to deal with it in the “right” way and hence their need for colonial guidance). Any romanticized impressions of precolonial kingdoms and empires were thus rendered politically harmless and led at most to proposals for indirect rule.24
Instead of a perspective on the past that recognized long-term processes of cultural change and regional, transcontinental, and global connections, the precolonial African past became a category that locked Africans into an ahistorical and “authentic” past.25 While this process created “authentic cultural traditions” as a defining category for the identity (and identification) of Congolese cultures, it simultaneously closed that category off to contemporary Congolese people by viewing the present through the prism of cultural decline—inventing a present, as much as a past.26 This view legitimized “collecting” by Europeans, as the “salvaging” and safeguarding of Congolese cultures.
V. Y. Mudimbe has located the invention of a static and prehistoric tradition in the “episteme of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” and Johannes Fabian has also implicated more recent anthropological discourses and practices in the construction of “the other” as a “temporal, historical, and political act.”27 This book will demonstrate the late colonial and postcolonial life of these constructions, as well as their continued political relevance.28 In particular, this book investigates the historical construction of the categories of “art” and “authenticity” and demonstrates their use as political tools, both within and outside the museum, first in the context of Belgian colonial rule and later in the context of the postcolonial Mobutist state.
MUSEUMS AND AFRICA, MUSEUMS IN AFRICA
The movement and possession of ethnographic and art objects and collections are historically part of larger political, cultural, and economic projects. A large and growing body of scholarship has demonstrated the connection between the creation of museum collections of non-Western objects, the development of anthropology, and European colonialism.29 We know far less, however, about the creation, development, and politics of museums on the African continent, particularly their postcolonial existence.
The museum landscape in Africa today bears the clear imprint of colonialism. A large majority of the museum institutions on the continent were founded during the colonial era. In French West Africa, the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), based in Dakar and founded in 1936, stood at the head of a system of satellite museums and scientific institutions across the region.30 Many of the museums in former French West Africa today are the survivors of this institutional colonialism. Although the process was less centralized, most of the museums in the former British empire in Africa also have colonial histories. A number of small museums were created at elite schools before World War II, but a wave of “proto-national” museum openings followed between 1948 and 1959, not as a result of a centralized cultural policy, but because of the converging interests of local colonial organizations and administrators with those of African elites.31 The case of the Belgian Congo more closely resembles the process in British West Africa. Despite lobbying for a centralized colonial “politique esthétique” (a “politics of aesthetics”) after World War II, the network of small museums in Congo was the result of initiatives by local colonials, who often came into conflict with the central authority of the Museum of the Belgian Congo near Brussels.
Despite their colonial roots, museum institutions in Africa were not rejected after independence. Their role as nation-building tools suited postcolonial agendas and was often recast in the context of “development” policies.32 However, it comes as no surprise that prominent postcolonial concerns included decolonizing these institutions, and seeking out or creating an African audience. Museum professionals struggled with identifying audiences, seeking out financing, and with the legacy of colonial structures of knowledge in their displays.33 Regional and international organizations like UNESCO, WAMP (West African Museums Programme), AFRICOM (the International Council of African Museums), and ICOM (International Council of Museums) have all played an important role in the supporting the intellectual, institutional, and practical challenges of museum life in postcolonial Africa.34
Scholarship on museums and their histories in sub-Saharan Africa has been shaped by the many practical concerns of museum professionals and generally lacks analytical depth.35 When this scholarship is concerned with the past, it is often—and understandably—with the goal of making a clear break with said past. As a result, there are lots of short explorations of the history of individual museums in sub-Saharan Africa, but no sustained efforts to place them in a broader context.36 This also applies to the history of the museums in Congo, where the little scholarship that exists is concentrated on the museum in Lubumbashi.37
An exception to this lack of critical literature is the cluster of publications of the past decade and a half focused on museums in South Africa. The political changes of the 1990s in South Africa, along with the existence of a significant network of heritage sites and museums, have created the conditions—and the urgent need—for critical investigations of the past, as well as a confrontation of the challenges the present holds.38 The political role of public historical spaces like museums and heritage sites in the construction of national pasts and public memory in South Africa has been laid out, as well as the effort to decolonize these spaces.39 This body of scholarship makes clear that museums in Africa have the potential for being relevant—although certainly not uncontested—participants in the public sphere. While authors challenge current museum institutions in South Africa to critically investigate their role in creating national pasts that supported the hegemony of the Apartheid regime, their scholarship also demonstrates a continued faith in the ability of heritage politics and museums to help effect social change via cultural identity formation.40
While the South African example is partially a result of specific political circumstances, it is also a reflection of a larger shift in the landscape of museum studies. Western museum professionals have become increasingly concerned with the complicity of cultural institutions in colonial structures of knowledge and the legacy of these structures