The scholarship on South Africa also nicely demonstrates the place of museums in what Tony Bennett calls the “culture complex,” which comprises “a range of sites in which distinctive forms of expertise are deployed in “making culture” as a set of resources for acting on society.” These sites, which include libraries, museums, heritage sites, schools, and so on, but also a range of knowledge practices and disciplines (such as ethnography and art history), are aimed at bringing about “calculated changes in conduct by transforming beliefs, customs, habits, perceptions, etc.” Most of these institutions and disciplines are connected to particular “rationalities of government.”42 In the case of South Africa, this was the Apartheid regime and its racial theories. In the case of the Belgian Congo, ideas about culture, formed in ethnographic and art historical practices and projected to a broader audience in the displays of Tervuren, underwrote and shaped colonial practices.
The work of Bruno Latour, who urged attention to the contexts in which culture is “made,” looms large in the theorizing of the culture complex. Working with a broad interpretation of the laboratory, which includes locations such as the archive, as well as collections, Latour allows us to theorize the museum as a “centre of calculation”—a setting in which new entities are made that are inserted into fields of knowledge.43 Authentically African starts off by tracing how colonial structures of knowledge, developed in and around the museum, intersected with and shaped the nature of Belgian colonial policies, but it departs from Latour and Bennett in its insistence on the “messiness” of the implementation and practice of these bodies of governmental theory. In the political use of the reinvention of cultures we can read the multidimensional and often contradictory nature of historical processes. Neither the creation of knowledge nor the translation of culture “made” in the context of the museum into cultural and social policy are clear-cut processes, proven by both the struggles of the Belgian colonial regime in implementing cultural policies, as well as the limited effect of the Mobutu regime’s almost cynical use of the museum as a political nation-building tool.
The basis for the development of ethnographic scientific information about art and culture in the Museum of the Belgian Congo—its collection—was deeply unscientific in its own creation. The amount of objects acquired via scientific exploration was negligible in comparison with the donations from explorers, colonials, and missionaries and the acquisitions from art dealers and art collectors. The individual motivations to collect material and the knowledge that informed the decision-making process about the selection of objects varied tremendously. Their presence at Tervuren, however, fused this motley group of materials into a unit—“a” collection—and a basis for the creation of knowledge about the objects’ cultures of origin. By contrast, the practices that informed the creation of the collection of the IMNZ in Kinshasa were more systematic and involved far fewer people. It was in the process of knowledge creation and distribution, however, that the latter faltered, hampered by political co-optation and economic realities. The “crowd-sourced” nature of the Tervuren collection worked to its advantage when it came to the public role of the latter, while very few Zairians felt a similar affinity with the museums in their country.
The connection between museums as “critical switchpoints across different networks . . . [which]. . . in ordering the materials they accumulated from diverse points of collection, produced new entities that they then relayed back out to the world as resources” and particular (authoritarian) rationalities of government becomes even more salient in the second part of this book, in which the Zairian government moves to create a museum with the explicit purpose of decolonizing the country’s cultural representation.44 Can such a postcolonial application of the museum as a “technology of power” in central Africa be effective, however, given the deeply compromised nature of the museum as a colonial creation? In order to answer this question, I investigate whether and how the powerful categories of art and authenticity were constructed and used in the postcolonial Zairian context, and how they operated within the museum institute, as well as in the broader context of Zaire’s postcolonial cultural politics.
ARTIFACT/ART AND THE CREATION OF VALUE
The scramble for Africa was accompanied by a “scramble for African art,” as Enid Schildkrout and Curtis Keim have so succinctly put it.45 Large numbers of ethnographic artifacts flowed into Europe, finding a home in several newly established museums and feeding the development of anthropology as a science. Taking the “concrete and palpable presence of a thing to attest to the reality which we have made it signify” was a fundamental aspect of Western imperialism.46 Having started out as mere curios, these objects became artifacts of science, players in the construction of narratives about the “civilizing mission,” and eventually art and the embodiment of wealth—both financial and cultural.
This shift from artifact to art, chronicled in this book, was reflected in museums displays. The curatorial approaches to displays vacillated between what I describe as “aesthetic” and “ethnographic” (or “anthropological”) approaches. In an aesthetic approach the objects are presented as works of art, exemplified by their physical isolation and an emphasis on their formal qualities.47 Ethnographic or anthropological displays, on the other hand, use objects to teach museum visitors about a culture, so the objects are usually displayed in a way that attempts to tell the visitor something about the relationship between various objects, their function, and their use or symbolism. In reality, however, museum displays are rarely as clear-cut as these theoretical points of reference might lead us to believe: art displays are sometimes accompanied by photos of the objects in situ, for example, or ethnographic exhibitions might highlight the aesthetic qualities of objects.48
The art/artifact binary is by no means stable. Museum objects are canvases upon which many values were projected: financial or economic, cultural, and political. These different interpretations and values are not necessarily stable, nor did they exist in isolation from one another. On the contrary, they function as “regimes of value.”49 Throughout the book, I use “cultural value” to refer to the capacity of an object to represent “high culture” or “civilization.” Central to the cultural value of an object is its “authenticity,” in addition to its (Western) aesthetic value. These objects, whether they are interpreted as art objects (constructed as aesthetically appealing to the [Western] eye and consequently possessing a high “cultural value”) or as ethnographic artifacts (with less importance as representatives of “high” culture, yet relevant as the representatives of a society and as objects in the scientific study of a society), also have an economic or financial value—that is, a value as commodities that can be traded.50
The twentieth century witnessed a progressive broadening of the category of African art. Aided by the primitivist modernists’ interest in African art, Central and West African sculptural objects in particular were increasingly collected and displayed as art objects.51 From the very first colonial exhibitions in Belgium, there were individual objects that were described as “art” rather than as ethnographic elements. A systematic scientific approach to these objects grew only slowly, however, and remained fragmented until Frans Olbrechts, who went on to become director of the Tervuren museum, developed a complete system of classification that canonized Congolese art and embedded it in the bodies of art historical and anthropological knowledge. The implementation of this classification in the displays at Tervuren in the 1950s—particularly in the form of a new art room—represented the culmination of this trend but was also symbolic of the increased attention accorded to culture among colonial organizations and in colonial policies. The cultural capital created through the institutionalization of the reinvention of certain Congolese artifacts as art in Tervuren became fuel for both colonial and postcolonial constructions of political legitimacy. It was this ontological shift, and the epistemological changes that followed in its wake, that led to the reimagination of colonialism as a form of cultural guardianship motivated by the protection and preservation of native cultures, a political construction that reemerged in the cultural politics of the Mobutu regime.
THE INVENTION OF AUTHENTICITY AND THE CULTURAL LEGITIMATION OF THE COLONIAL STATE
A recurring topic in this book is the political nature of the invention and use of “cultural