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The Value of Culture

Congolese Art and Belgian Colonialism

FOR MOST of the colonial period, the Museum of the Belgian Congo was the most visible presence of the empire in Belgium and one of the a major avenues through which Belgian citizens got to know their colony. Its neoclassical and marble halls filled with its zoological, mineralogical, and man-made “wonders” represented the colony. During the 1950s, the museum received between 141,800 and 197,859 visitors a year, the equivalent of up to 2.3 percent of the Belgian population. This made it one of the most visited museums in Belgium.¹

This chapter lays out how representations of Congolese cultures were produced and projected at the museum, and the ways in which these intersected with and helped shape colonial ideologies. The process whereby Belgium became the custodian of a large museum collection of Congolese material is explored, and the chapter explains how a fragmented and varied process of collection was translated into seemingly coherent images of Congolese culture and bodies of knowledge.

I argue that the very guardianship of the museum’s collections became integrated into late colonial justifications for Belgium’s colonial presence in the Congo. This relied on two processes: the production of new values and meanings for African objects as art and the accompanying construction of Congolese cultural authenticity as endangered. This meant that Congolese art, eventually transformed into an exceptional resource with cultural and economic value, came to have its place in the mise en valeur narrative about the colony presented to the museum audience.² The “endangered authenticity” projected upon the communities that originally produced these objects also provided an extra justification for Belgium’s continued presence in the Congo: the protection and guardianship of “traditional” cultures.

THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL MUSEUM AND THE CHANGING FACE OF COLONIALISM

Scientific exploration and the origins of the Belgian Congo are inextricably connected. Masking his imperial ambitions as scientific interests, Leopold II in 1876 organized the International Geographic Conference, where the Association Internationale Africaine (International African Association—AIA) was created, ostensibly to promote the exploration of the African continent. Simultaneously, Leopold II hired Henry Morton Stanley, a Polish-American newspaper reporter turned explorer, to explore the Congo River basin and secure allegiance from local leaders in order to thwart other European interests in the region. Having deftly manipulated those interests, Leopold II succeeded in securing recognition as the sovereign of the Congo Free State at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. From then on, the area was essentially the private property of Leopold II, although representatives of the Congo Free State would not bring the entire area under their control until early in the twentieth century.³

Although Leopold II firmly believed in the area’s economic promise, he was not able to tap Congo’s resources until the allocation of exploitation rights to a number of regional concessionary companies, as well as to the “Royal Domain,” which remained directly under Leopold’s control. The representatives of these companies (which included the Anglo-Belgian Rubber Company and the Société Anversoise) and state agents in the Royal Domain received commissions on the amount of product (initially ivory, but eventually mostly rubber) they extracted.⁴ With no state regulatory controls, this arrangement led to widespread abuses at the expense of the local population while generating great wealth for the Congo Free State and its monarch.⁵

The creation of the Museum of the Belgian Congo was deeply intertwined with the colonial project of Leopold II. As early as the 1880s, the Belgian king seized on the potential of colonial exhibitions for the promotion of empire. These exhibitions served two purposes. On the one hand, they were intended to stimulate Belgian (and international) interest in the commercial opportunities of the area.⁶ To that end, extractive products such as ivory, tropical woods, and rubber as well as agricultural products such as cotton, coffee, and cacao were most prominently displayed. Displays on the natural sciences emphasized the diversity of fauna and flora, while geological maps and displays emphasized potential mineral resources. Aside from attracting investors and businesses to Congo, the other goal of these exhibitions was to convince the general Belgian population of the value of having a colony. While economic potential was certainly important in this respect, the organizers of these colonial exhibitions also emphasized the civilizing work there was to be done in the colony, organizing and displaying ethnographic material to this purpose.

For the international exhibition of 1897 Leopold II opened a “Palais des Colonies” in the royal park in Tervuren, near Brussels.⁷ The success of the exposition (1.2 million visitors in six months) led to its becoming a permanent exhibition in 1898, and soon plans were drawn up to construct a real museum building. Leopold II envisioned a park, or a “small Versailles,” with a museum, spaces for the exhibition of Asian art (another region on which he had set his imperial ambitions), extensive gardens, and an international school. The design of the new museum was entrusted to the Parisian architect Charles Girauld, and construction began in 1906, although the elaborate scale of the project was reduced to the building of a museum.⁸

From the beginning, the museum’s mission was “to ensure the promotion of the colony, to spread knowledge about all its aspects and to encourage vocations for colonial careers.”⁹ The Belgian population had historically been apprehensive with regard to its king’s colonial undertakings and worried about “their sons and their cents.”¹⁰ Whatever the degree of nationalism among Belgians, in most cases it did not extend to a willingness to travel to Central Africa or even to contribute financially to that adventure.

Tervuren’s founding between 1897 and 1910 came late when compared to the first generation of ethnographic museums, founded beginning in the 1840s, but it coincided with the wave of new and renewed museums of ethnography opening across Europe in the late nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries. The creation of these museums was often driven by anthropologists’ desire to elevate their discipline and to create spaces with both an academic and a broader educational purpose.¹¹ Tervuren, however, was not intended as a museum of anthropology or ethnography but rather as a museum for the promotion of colonialism. Empires and museums shared close ties throughout Europe, but this founding purpose and oversight by the Ministry of Colonies set the museum of Tervuren apart.

While Leopold II promoted the idea of empire to the Belgian population, growing international critiques of the abusive system of rubber exploitation threatened Leopoldian rule in Central Africa. Spurred by protests from some of the Protestant missionaries, British accusations regarding the abuses began circulating widely in 1904. The widespread attention and international hostility generated by E. D. Morel’s Congo Reform Association and the damning Congo report of British consul Roger Casement made the existing arrangement untenable for the monarch. As a result, the Belgian government—although not without internal debate—took over the colony, and its museum, in 1908.¹²

By the time the newly designed museum building opened in 1910, the colony—and its promotion—had become a matter for the Belgian state.¹³ Little had changed, however, in the Belgian population’s lack of interest in the colony, and the Museum of the Belgian Congo would become one of the most important tools in combating this indifference. A visitor to the museum in 1910 would first circulate through natural science displays before entering the halls housing the ethnographic material, followed by an area devoted to history that included a section on “political and moral sciences,” documenting the influence of the West, and Belgium in particular, in the Congo. The visit finished with a tour of displays emphasizing the colony’s potential to generate income for its colonizer. A visit was intended to induce wonder at the riches of the colony, and pride at the role of Belgium as a “civilizer.”

Meanwhile, the Belgian state attempted to create a new kind of colonial system in Congo that would distance it from Leopoldian absolutism in the eyes of the international community, but even with an expanded colonial administration and colonial reforms, forced labor practices and violent suppression of African resistance persisted. The numbers of (Catholic) missionaries, civil servants, and entrepreneurs grew steadily, particularly after World War I.¹⁴ The Belgian colonial system rested on three “pillars”: the colonial companies; the (Catholic) missionary congregations, responsible for the “civilization” of the Congolese population, which in practice meant a monopoly on the religious, educational, and health systems in the colony; and the colonial administration, backed up by the Force Publique, or colonial army. The economic sector expanded and diversified after 1908—a cash crop economy developed, but the exploitation of the colony’s mineral resources, including gold, copper, and diamonds, was central, and it relied on large-scale regional migration for its labor force.¹⁵

The colonial state’s indigenous politics were characterized by “prescriptive, administrative and judicial regulation of conduct [of the Congolese population] developed along with other forms of social engineering” that targeted things like hygiene, housing, and infrastructure development. The territory was divided into administrative territories and districts with civil servants assigned to each, but there were also efforts to integrate some of the local power structures into the colonial system. For example, local “chiefs” (known as chefs médaillés) amenable to the colonial power system were appointed by the colonial regime. Given their role as facilitators of colonial power, they did not always enjoy the respect of the population.¹⁶

The need for reform of the colonial system, overly reliant on large corporations and missionary groups, was apparent by the late 1930s, but World War II was the real catalyst for change. Not only was Congo the only “free” Belgian territory during the war, it also made considerable contributions to the Allied effort in the form of raw materials, especially uranium (most famously including the uranium used in the American atomic bombs dropped on Japan). Increased awareness of the great economic value of the colony’s resources invigorated the Belgian state’s desire to “modernize” the colonial system and increase its hegemony in relation to the powerful companies and missions.

The Belgian state also hoped that a “different” kind of colonial regime, which, in theory, applied some of the principles of the Belgian welfare state, would undermine any nascent independence movements. Belgian belief in its “welfare colonialism” remained strong, which explains why many Belgians were caught completely off guard by events in the colony in 1959.¹⁷ Of course, postwar modifications to colonial regimes were not unique to Belgium. Both France and Great Britain attempted to sustain their empires in Africa by implementing limited reforms with the goal of placating the colonies’ increasing demands for participation in the political, social, and economic life.¹⁸ The impact of Belgium’s “welfare colonialism” was limited and did not alter the political structures in the colony. Instead, the colonial government believed that social reforms aimed at diminishing the racial segregation between the colonizers and their subjects in daily life and promoting a class of évolués (“evolved” colonial subjects) would be sufficient to ensure the allegiance of the Congolese population.¹⁹ Additionally, increased construction of urban and transportation infrastructure and the limited introduction of social welfare benefits for the small class of Congolese wage earners sought to develop the loyalties of urban populations.²⁰ These efforts, however, ignored the rural underdevelopment that defined the communities in which most Congolese people lived.²¹

Crucial to selling this renewed colonial vigor to the Belgian population was the idea of mise en valeur, or the value the colony’s exploitation could generate for the mother country.²² As it had before, the Museum of the Belgian Congo played a prominent role in the promotion of the promise of the colony to Belgians. As I will argue next, in the postwar era and particularly in the 1950s, the changing status of Congolese art, expressed in the museum’s promotion and display, moved it closer to the status of resource. The museum promoted the exceptional nature and value of Congolese material culture, converting artifacts of ethnography into art historical treasures. Belgium came to see itself as the guardian not only of the colony’s mineral resources but also of the cultural authenticity of its “traditional” cultures, the protection of which was embodied by the museum.

COLONIAL COLLECTING AND THE ORIGINS OF THE TERVUREN ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTION

“Any collection promises totality,” Susan Steward has written. This totality is achieved by the “temporal diremption,” or the erasure of temporal dimensions, and the “imposition of a frame” or narrative.²³ Museums often present their ethnographic collections as comprehensive units, obscuring not only the diverse origins of the objects but also the diversity of the collection process. While its ownership is singular—the museum owns the collection—its composition was multiauthored and contained a variety of processes. This diversity is muted in the museum life of the objects. In the case of the Museum of the Belgian Congo’s collection, a great number of people, most of whom were not affiliated with the museum, contributed to its collection. Not only were their motivations for gathering material very diverse, so were the practices and contexts of collecting and the pathways by which their objects arrived at the museum. As Anthony Shelton writes: “Collections are built on individual histories; histories that mediate the self and its specific historical and cultural milieu.” These individual histories were shaped into a unified collection that came to represent the culture(s) of the colony to a significant part of the Belgian population.²⁴

The term collecting carries a deceptive innocence that can obfuscate a variety of ways of obtaining material. In a colonial context, some of this “collecting” was part and parcel of the violence of the early conquest, even when it came in the guise of scientific interest, while other forms of collecting were much closer to existing patterns of trade and exchange of commodities. This chaos around collecting and documenting runs counter to the museum’s (theoretical) Enlightenment roots as a place for systematic organization and classification and lays bare the haphazard origins of colonial ethnography as a discipline. With regard to Tervuren, these circumstances created the selective and fragmented nature of the collection that would form the basis for representations of the colony’s cultures to the metropolitan audience.²⁵

Currently, the ethnographic collection of Tervuren holds about 125,000 objects, about 85 percent of which come from Central Africa. Between its founding after the colonial exhibition of 1897 and the opening of the museum building in 1910, it had gathered a collection of about 30,000 pieces.²⁶ It is difficult to be more precise about the rate of growth of the collection because, to this day, the museum does not possess an exact breakdown of the origins of its ethnographic collection.²⁷ It is, however, possible to give an overview of the origins of a sample of 250 of the museum’s “treasures.” This snapshot is based on the 1995 exhibition Treasures from the Africa Museum Tervuren and can serve as a window onto the collection as a whole.²⁸ I analyzed the available data on these 250 objects to discover how the objects were obtained by the museum, by whom they were originally collected, and when they were collected or registered. Of the 250 objects, 99 were gifts, 96 were bought, and 11 were collected by the museum staff in Congo.²⁹ Ninety-one of the “treasures” were originally collected by colonials and 13 by missionaries. It is also interesting to note here that at least 45 of the objects were at some point part of a well-known collector’s collection.

Based upon the available but incomplete information, 29 of the objects were collected before the twentieth century, while no collection dates were mentioned after independence. For the objects that only had a date of registration connected to them, the numbers are pretty steady for the first half of the twentieth century with about 10 to 15 per decade. Not many of the objects (20) were registered after independence.³⁰

The people involved with providing the museum with ethnographic materials can be roughly divided into four (overlapping) groups: colonials, explorers and scientists, missionaries, and last, art collectors and art dealers. From the earliest contact between Portuguese sailors and the Kongo peoples in the fifteenth century, the collection and appropriation of African objects (and vice versa) had been part of the relationship between both parties. The advent of late nineteenth-century European colonialism in Africa, however, greatly accelerated Western acquisition of African material culture and considerably broadened the area from which these objects were removed to include the interior of the continent. It is difficult to do justice to people’s diverse motivations for collecting objects in Congo, whether they were doing so for personal, professional, political, economic, or religious purposes. What we can do, however, is follow these varied motivations as they became subsumed into increasingly comprehensive systems of knowledge that organized the collection and its displays.

The group that was among the first to start collecting ethnographic material in Congo were the colonial officers and soldiers in service of the AIA and, later, of Leopold II’s Congo Free State. As Maarten Couttenier has noted, in the exploration and later conquest of Congo, “military conflicts and the acquisition of material culture went hand in hand.”³¹ These acquisitions were not merely the result of the private initiative of these men, however. They also gathered material upon the request of King Leopold II, who tasked them with the collection of material that could be used in various colonial expositions in Belgium.³² So while the objects (which also included human remains, particularly skulls) were sometimes the spoils of war or the trophies of conquest, and other times the result of an exchange of goods and gifts, they were also, from the very beginning, promotional material for the empire.

One colonial officer who collected for colonial exhibitions, but whose personal collection also eventually ended up at Tervuren, was Émile Storms. Storms was a commander of the AIA, set up by Leopold II ostensibly to promote scientific knowledge about Central Africa. The very nature of the AIA as a scientific organization involved with colonial conquest illustrates how closely the gathering of knowledge (and things) was related to the imperial project.³³ Storms spent the years between 1882 and 1885 near the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika, where he created a colonial post and collected, measured, mapped, and documented the fauna, flora, geography, and culture of the region, but also where he defeated local Tabwa leader Lusinga, an event that ended the latter’s life. Storms traveled home with a collection of ethnographic material for the colonial section of the 1885 world exhibition in Antwerp, but also with Lusinga’s skull and several objects he obtained from the Tabwa and other Luba peoples for his personal collection. Allen Roberts has told the story of Storms and Lusinga’s confrontation and illustrated how the objects Storms removed after his victory were de- and recontextualized multiple times.³⁴

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 and international group, and their scientific frame of reference changed dramatically over the years. Early scientific missions are almost impossible to distinguish from the conquest of the area. Many of the early military expeditions were in fact accompanied by scientists. This intertwined relationship of conquest and early scientific exploration only underlines the inseparable nature of the scientific and colonial projects.⁴⁹ In the same vein, many of the men that are now considered as the earliest ethnographers, like Emil Torday, were intimately tied to the economic exploitation of the area. Torday, a Hungarian collecting for the British Museum, was working for the Belgian Compagnie du Kasai, which organized the infamous rubber collection. Conquest, control, exploitation, and classification went hand in hand.⁵⁰ There was also a keen sense of competition with the scientific expeditions set up by other countries as they rushed to collect as much material as possible, fueled by the belief that collecting salvaged a dying form of cultural authenticity.⁵¹

From the outset, the colonial museum in Tervuren also positioned itself as the center of scientific activity connected to the colony, and ethnographic collecting was added to the responsibilities of the museum’s staff. Despite this mandate, ethnographic expeditions by the staff were rare. Joseph Maes, who led the ethnography department from 1910 until 1946 only traveled to Congo once, in 1913–14. Convinced he was in a race with time to salvage the remnants of a precolonial Congo, Maes prioritized collecting over the gathering of ethnographic information and the careful recording of contextual information about the objects he took. In roughly a year he visited 120 locations and collected 1,293 objects!⁵² Maes’s successor, Albert Maesen, also made only one collection trip, from 1952–55, although he made sure collaborators of the museum (Jan Vansina and Daniel Biebuyck among them) also collected for the ethnographic department. In theory, ethnographers were more concerned with documenting pieces and selecting objects that were “authentic” or in use by the communities they visited. In practice, this was not always the case. For example, one of the Luba masks collected by Maesen in Congo in 1953, which became one of the museum’s “masterpieces,” was bought at a colonial fair, not collected in situ.⁵³ The influence of the museum’s staff on the shape of the collection did go beyond their own collecting efforts, however. Their contacts with colonials and missionaries in the field was extensive, and they actively directed some of the collecting performed by these collaborators.

The museum’s collection was also shaped by material that passed through the commercial market in African art or was sold by private collectors. Of our sample of 250 objects, 96 were bought by the museum, and at least 45 of the total number of objects were at one point part of the collection of a well-known collector. These objects were already valuable commodities before they reached the storerooms and displays of the museum, although the participation of the museum in the art market and its display of the objects stimulated their commodification. Another factor that explains the disproportionate number of “masterpieces” that passed through the hands of collectors or art dealers is that collectors, especially those of early generations, were mostly interested in undamaged figurative objects that displayed symmetry and showed no trace of Western influence.⁵⁴ This preference helped shape the body of objects available in the West and consequently impacted the way the canon of Congolese art was theorized.

The market for African art in Belgium coalesced somewhat later than in other European countries, but it quickly became an important European center. Although African objects had circulated in Belgium since the late nineteenth century, their introduction as art began in the 1920s.⁵⁵ The interest in these objects grew steadily in the 1930s, stimulated by a community of collectors and dealers of African art. Initially the circle of collectors was composed mostly of members of the upper classes, some of whom had business interests in Congo, while others (like Émile Storms) had participated in the early conquest. Although the exorbitant prices for “primitive” art were still a thing of the future, a commercial space took shape in which collectors and dealers, both foreign and Belgian, circulated. Belgium’s growing importance as a center for the trade in African art proceeded on the strength of objects brought back by returning colonials.⁵⁶ In the next decades, the circles of the collectors would widen and include many collectors who had never set foot in Congo, blurring the line between collectors and dealers. The names of well-known collectors and dealers—Jeanne Walschot, Henry Pareyn, and the painter Willy Mestach, to name a few—have since become connected to the objects formerly in their possession, creating a new history and provenance for the objects, reinventing them as Western commodities and as symbols of both cultural capital and wealth.

FIGURE 1.3. Art collector Jeanne Walschot, ca. 1940. HP.2014.3.1, collection RMCA Tervuren.

Frans Olbrechts, who took up the reins of Tervuren in 1946, made the museum an active participant in the art market. He tried to compensate for the limitations of the museum’s own collecting by searching for material in Europe, spending many hours consulting retired missionaries, old colonial officials, and antique and art traders in Brussels, Antwerp, and Paris. This “extraordinary activity displayed by the Director of the Museum in the tracing of material” was responsible for the “steady growth of our collections,” ethnography curator Albert Maesen commented in 1956.⁵⁷ But the relationship between the museum and private dealers and collectors was complicated. On the one hand, collectors and dealers were often competitors in the acquisition of desirable pieces. On the other hand, they also donated many pieces to the museum’s collection. Museums can also have a tremendous impact on the value of privately owned objects by including them in temporary exhibitions, strengthening their status as authentic and valuable pieces. This ambiguous relationship made contacts with dealers and collectors an intricate balancing act.⁵⁸

As this overview of the origins of Tervuren’s ethnographic collection demonstrates, it was composed of objects selected for very different reasons, by different people, and at different times. Their collection reinvented these objects as trophies of war, souvenirs, and artifacts of science and created around them classes of consumption, connoisseurship, and science. What united almost all acts of collection was their interpretation as actions of salvage.⁵⁹ From collecting explorers in the late nineteenth century to connoisseurs buying objects from art dealers in the 1950s, a sense of urgency was shared. The objects were seen as the remnants of older, vaguely precolonial African cultures that were in decline, partly as a result of the impact of Western modernity. This story of decline not only justified the acts of collection and Western guardianship of the objects but also framed the vision of the colonial state as the cultural guardian of the “authentic” cultures of colony.⁶⁰ There was a deep ambiguity at the heart of these acts of salvage. Colonial modernity was both the threat from which collectors sought to safeguard these “authentic” cultures and the source of their authority to rescue and properly value the objects that represented this cultural authenticity. As we shall see in the next chapter, this ambiguity was resolved by blaming Congolese subjects for their inability to handle the impact of modernity correctly.

FROM ARTIFACT TO ART: CHANGING PARADIGMS OF INTERPRETATION

If objects are the raw material for the creation of collections, collections are the raw materials for the creation of museum displays. The latter are given meaning through changing paradigms of interpretation, some more coherent than others. The result, in the case of African material culture, has been an increasing divide between ethnography and art classifications, including a growing construction of canonicity. Although this was not an entirely linear development, a trend is detectable toward a comprehensive system of classification in which the category of art objects expanded and the objects themselves increased in value.

Sharon Macdonald has aptly described the position of the museum as the “nexus between cultural production and consumption.”⁶¹ The employees of the Museum of the Belgian Congo created an image of Congo for consumption by Belgian citizens and international visitors, staging the empire through the display of objects from Congolese cultures. The meaning attributed to these objects shifted over time, and the overall message of the narrative also underwent subtle, but significant, shifts. The place of art as a valuable resource grew significantly, and an integrated interpretive framework evolved in which Congo was created as a unit. This transformation of certain objects from artifact to art, a process that reached completion toward the 1950s, reconciled and aligned the political and economic narratives about mise en valeur with cultural narratives of justification for the Belgian colonial presence.

A decontextualization of the objects started with their removal from their cultures of origin, followed by a journey of recontextualization and interpretation.⁶² Although personal sympathies and tastes always played a role in this process, competing structures of knowledge and classification profoundly impacted the way in which objects were regarded and the way in which they were represented and displayed to the public at the Museum of the Belgian Congo. These knowledge systems—from evolutionism, to diffusionism, to the development of an art historical canon—changed significantly over the years. So while collectors helped author the museum by providing it with objects, curators played an important role in the orchestration of the material. The meaning they created was derived in large part from the way the material was ordered, the relationship suggested between objects, and how different displays related to each other.

Ideas about evolution made a strong impact upon the museum’s employees in the early years. African culture was interpreted as an early phase in human development, which aligned with the promotion of the “civilizing” mission of colonialism. Maarten Couttenier has argued that in Belgium, theories of physical anthropology gradually evolved into an interest in a colonial ethnography with a focus on material culture. This shift toward colonial ethnography helped establish the importance of scientific research at the Museum of the Belgian Congo, where objects were organized and classified to serve as a basis for research that facilitated the emergence of a cultural evolutionism dissociated from the methods and aims of early physical anthropology.⁶³

The first iterations of the displays at Tervuren were at the 1897 colonial exhibition in the Palais des Colonies. The emphasis of the exhibition was on the economic potential of the colony and on the need for a civilizing mission. Weapons were a prominent part of the displays, arranged according to type and fanned out on the walls. The seeds of more scientific classification schemes were present, though, in the combination of a geographic approach with a thematic one. The result for the visitor was a “journey” through Congo.⁶⁴ The Congolese were present outside in an “African village,” while inside their presence was embodied by large sculptures depicting Africans made by European artists.⁶⁵ A separate room, the Salle d’Honneur, functioned as an art room, but mostly displayed work created by Western artists inspired by materials and cultures of the colony. Congolese material—Kuba textiles from the Kasai, knives and other weapons, objects made out of ivory, and a smattering of statues that included a Kuba royal ndop statue and other “fetiches”—served mostly to emphasize the lack of civilizational development in Congo versus the artistic achievements of Western artists.⁶⁶

FIGURE 1.4. Colonial Exposition 1897, salle d’honneur. HP.1971.28.1–12, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo Alexandre.

The museum born out of this colonial exhibition that opened in the same space a year later kept many of the displays and was divided into four sections: botany, zoology, geology and mineralogy, and anthropology and ethnography. In 1910 these were rearranged into political economy, natural sciences, ethnography, “moral and political sciences” (with the history of colonization and civilizational projects), and photography and “vulgarization.” The space devoted to the promotion of economic resources continued to dominate, although the ethnography displays were also expanded.

Joseph Maes, the museum’s first curator of ethnography from 1910 until 1946, was deeply influenced by the then new theory of diffusionism, which posited that cultures, rather than all following the same linear evolution, developed through the adaptation of practices or material culture from others. He attributed anything he understood as an innovation or superior development to influence from outside Congo, even going so far as suggesting influence from Egyptian cultures.⁶⁷ In the 1920s Maes reinstalled and extended the ethnographic displays, organizing them thematically in a taxonomy that ranged from “native crafts,” musical instruments, burial and death rites, “fetishes” and sculptures, food and agriculture, to hygiene and beautifying products. This choice to organize the displays thematically instead of regionally or ethnically was a critical step in creating the impression that Congo consisted of one overarching “native” culture.⁶⁸

The transition of select “primitive” artifacts into art at Tervuren followed a somewhat twisted path. A group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals began, as elsewhere, taking an interest in so-called “primitive art” because of the sculptural and aesthetic qualities of the objects. Compared to other European countries, in Belgium this phase started rather late and was limited to a small group of people. This trend was thus not immediately reflected in the displays of the Tervuren museum. As we’ve seen, the 1897 colonial exhibition included a number of Congolese objects in its art room, but they were not necessarily accorded the same respect European art works were. The first director of the museum, de Hauleville, spoke of the “repugnant and obscene character” of the nudity of the Congolese statues and did not regard them as art. Although Maes did not agree with his director’s opinion that the statues needed covering up, his motivation for displaying them as they were came from his desire to demonstrate the “immense extent of the civilizatory task that awaited the colonizer.”⁶⁹

However, by 1936 the museum did possess a room of “indigenous art.”⁷⁰ Its displays were densely packed with objects, and we know from the 1936 guidebook to the museum that the arrangement of objects in the indigenous art room was rather haphazard: the objects were partially grouped by type (weapons, decorated ceramics, wooden stools, musical instruments, etc.) and partially by region or group (sometimes by geographic area, other times by “tribal” names). Most prominent were objects from the Luba and the Kuba communities. Minimal identification was presented in the displays themselves, and the guidebook offered little more, adding descriptions such as “decorated baton,” “wooden chairs,” “shields.” In the more elaborate descriptions of the centrally displayed Luba and Kuba objects, the guidebook mustered more enthusiasm, pointing out the “beautiful collection of seats and dignitary objects” and the “exceptionally beautiful wooden Balubamask.”⁷¹ These descriptions indicate an aesthetic appreciation of several of the objects on display but lacked a scholarly, systematic approach.

The only object displayed in isolation, emphasizing its singularity, is the Kuba royal statue (or ndop). From the first moments of contact between Westerners and the Kuba of the Kasai, foreigners were impressed with the political centralization of the Kuba and with their decorative and artistic traditions. In combination with ideas about the possible racial superiority of the Kuba, ethnographers, missionaries, and later museum curators and colonial agents went in search of Kuba “art.” This explains why the ndop was so centrally displayed in Tervuren in the 1930s; it was one of the most desired objects (there were only a limited number of “authentic” ndops) and had made the transition to “art object” much earlier than objects from other cultures in the Congo.⁷²

The development of anthropology as a science, scholarship on Congolese art, and the displays at Tervuren underwent significant changes under the leadership of Frans Olbrechts. One of the central figures in the twentieth-century history of ideas regarding Congolese culture, Olbrechts was director of the Museum of the Belgian Congo from 1947 until his death in 1958. His art historical work on African material cultures placed aesthetic appreciation in a scientific frame, demarcating styles and, by extension cultures, while moving away from a strictly ethnographic approach. Originally a student of Flemish folklore, Olbrechts’s scholarship underwent a significant transformation under the influence of Franz Boas when he obtained a postdoctoral position in the anthropology department at Columbia University in 1925. Boas’s belief in racial equality, his use of a concept of culture that was inclusive and democratic, and his openness to reading objects in terms of the criteria of their producers all marked his sharp divergence from the evolutionism still dominating ethnography at the time, as did his attention to the role of the individual artist and the creative process in non-Western societies. His student Melville Herskovits applied a Boasian approach to the study of Africa, and Olbrechts brought it to bear on the study of Congolese culture and, in particular, art.⁷³

FIGURE 1.5. Indigenous art room, ca. 1937. Note the centrally displayed Kuba royal statue, or ndop. HP.2002.1.18, collection RMCA Tervuren; ed. Thill-Nels.

Upon his return to Belgium, Olbrechts made a definitive turn toward the study of Congolese cultures when he curated a large Congolese art exhibit for the city of Antwerp in 1937–38.⁷⁴ Adriaan Claerhout, later a curator of the ethnological museum in Antwerp, described the exhibition as a “laboratory experiment [in which] Olbrechts reduced the spectacle to the advantage of the main goal, namely testing the stylistic method [he was developing].”⁷⁵ Despite Olbrechts’s attention to the role that the objects had in their societies of origin—or their “social function”—the main focus was on the presentation of the pieces as objects of art that could be classified, through an analysis of their characteristics, into geographically circumscribed stylistic zones inspired by Boas’s culture zones.⁷⁶

Plastiek van Kongo (Congolese Sculpture), Olbrechts’s book based upon the work he did for the Antwerp exhibition, helped open the field of art history to the study of pieces of African material culture as art. Contrary to the scholarly production of previous scholars of Congolese ethnography, whose work was more fragmentary, the book presented a sweeping objective: a complete system of classification for Congolese art.⁷⁷ Olbrechts identified four large “culture areas” (with substyles) in Congo: the Lower Congo region, the Kuba region, the Luba region, and the Northern region.⁷⁸ Subsequent scholars have corrected, deepened, and elaborated upon Olbrechts’s stylistic classification, but it continues to serve as a point of reference for students of Congolese art.⁷⁹

FIGURE 1.6. Map of style areas, 1946. Olbrechts, Plastiek van Kongo, 38.

Although Olbrechts’s experience with Boasian anthropology shaped Congolese Sculpture, he was also profoundly influenced by the methodology of Western art history. His system of classification was inspired by the method developed by Giovanni Morelli, a nineteenth-century scholar of Renaissance art. Based on a meticulous dissection of the form of the artwork—today mostly referred to as the practice of connoisseurship—pieces of art could be inserted in a larger developmental scheme.⁸⁰ Olbrechts used this method to undermine the traditional classification that placed African cultures at the bottom of an evolutionary scale of civilizations. The application of a method developed and reserved for Western art to African sculpture elevated the stature of these pieces as art, but it also carried implications for the image of the producing cultures. While certain African artifacts had long been regarded as art, Olbrechts redefined that status as one grounded in the development and refinement of the cultures that produced them. The combination of Boas’s influence and an art historical methodology also led Olbrechts to pay special attention to the individual artist within African culture, identifying a specific workshop responsible for a series of Luba sculptures, specifically stools, known as the “Long Face Style of Buli.”⁸¹

Olbrechts’s approach was certainly not without problems, as several generations of scholars have pointed out. For example, Congolese Sculpture was not based on fieldwork, which helps to explain why the stylistic analysis was much more profound than the anthropological analysis of the sculptures’ function.⁸² The choice to include only sculptures, and to leave aside any two-dimensional art, also severely restricted his analysis, as did his limited use of masks.⁸³

Olbrechts constructed the Western museum professional and academic as the savior of the remnants of a culture in decline. He distinguished two phases in the production of African art: the “classic” (or precolonial) and modern eras.⁸⁴ He attributed the bulk of the material from the “classic” period to the creative genius of the African communities that produced the objects, explicitly arguing against those Westerners who attributed African art forms to foreign influences because they “consider[ed] these indigenous people primitives without art.”⁸⁵ He argued that colonialism brought an influx of style elements, techniques, and tools that led to such profound changes in the production of art that it effectively stopped being African. The implication was that through the recognition and valuation of academics, the “classic” material could be identified and protected in places like Tervuren.

Congolese Sculpture displayed a clear connection between the organization of knowledge and the organization of the colonial space and its subjects. Olbrechts’s project was shaped by the geopolitical space of the colony, a space he also helped solidify and naturalize. Projecting style areas on a map of Congo created the impression of delineated identities that fell within the boundaries of the state of Congo. Olbrechts of course acknowledged that some of the stylistic areas he described crossed the borders of Congo, but he understood those to lie outside the boundaries of his work. Congo, delineated by colonial boundaries, emerged as an unquestioned cultural unit in this presentation.

The areas delineated and defined by their artistic styles often paralleled the areas of the major ethnic groups, as they were identified by the Belgians, making the scholar complicit in the colonial tradition of invented and imposed identities.⁸⁶ That the major ethnic groups (Luba, Kuba, and the Mangbetu of the Northeast, for example) were exactly those that were popular with early collectors and thus strongly represented in the collections in Belgium only strengthened these categories. In relying heavily on private collections for his research, Olbrechts transferred these collectors’ preferences into delineations of Congolese cultural communities, reducing groups who varied according to language, customs, and political organization to a taxonomy based on isolated elements of material culture production.⁸⁷

Olbrechts’s 1930s scholarship was part of a slow global evolution that redefined certain objects in African museum collections from artifact to art. By changing the methodology and giving a scientific foundation to the aesthetic impulse to redefine these objects as art, Olbrechts opened space for a discourse in which certain Africans could be seen as having “culture,” although he located its production mainly in the past. This reemphasized the older, conflicted, image of African societies as both the site of decline and the reflection of an authentic African culture rooted in the past. Although individual African cultures, through their art, were worthy of admiration and not merely underdeveloped backwaters, their worth, as Olbrechts defined it, was locked into their “traditional” lifestyles.⁸⁸ The promotion of the idea of Congo as a “world populated with endangered authenticities,” to use James Clifford’s words, diverted attention from Congolese claims for political identity and presence.⁸⁹

CONGOLESE MASTERPIECES AT TERVUREN, 1946–60

In 1946 Olbrechts accepted the position of director of the Museum of the Belgian Congo, which he occupied until his death in 1958. How did the changing image of Congolese cultures, as constructed by Olbrechts in his scholarship, translate onto the theater of the museum in a period of, at least discursively, colonial reform? How and where did colonial propaganda meet scientific innovation? How did visions of the past translate into a message for the present and the future?

A renovation of the ethnographic displays took place between 1952 and spring 1958 (officially opened in 1959). Unfortunately, there is limited information available about the changes. An updated series of guidebooks was published in 1959, but they did not include the ethnography section, and photographic evidence from this time period is very sparse.⁹⁰ In 1960 Congo-Tervuren, the museum’s periodical, reported that the displays were now “more rationally organized. The two main galleries are filled with objects: the first one in an ideological and functional order, the second by ethnic group, and a third gallery called “hall of art” holds certain chosen pieces.”⁹¹

By indicating the need for a “rationalization” of the displays, the museum clearly sought to reject Joseph Maes’s organization of the exhibits as outmoded and disassociate the department from his legacy. (Maes lost his position in 1946, accused of collaboration with the Germans. He was replaced by Obrechts’s student Albert Maesen.)⁹² In reality, however, it is likely that the setup of the two first rooms—in “ideological and functional order,” focusing on the ways in which objects were used—was not that different from Maes’s thematic organization. Significantly, Olbrechts’s “style areas” were already being interpreted as “ethnic groups” in the museum displays.⁹³

The third room, the “hall of art,” was developed by Olbrechts not long after his arrival at the museum.⁹⁴ Despite his resistance to a mere “aesthetic approach” in Congolese Sculpture, he clearly advocated a view of African culture that elevated a portion of its their material culture to the category of art—objects that could be universally appreciated because of their intrinsic beauty. This did not mean, however, that these objects should be completely removed from their cultural contexts. The combination of the three different display taxonomies—by function, ethnicity, and aesthetic criteria—affirmed this belief in proper contextualization. At the same time, however, Olbrechts developed the selection and promotion of a number of objects as the museum’s “masterpieces.”

In 1952 Olbrechts put together a small book, Quelques chefs-d’oeuvre de l’art africain des collections du Musée Royal du Congo Belge, Tervuren (Some masterpieces of African Art from the Collections of the Royal Museum of Belgian Congo, Tervuren) comprising twenty-four pictures that were also sold separately as postcards in the museum’s store.⁹⁵ He created the booklet in response to ever-increasing demands from visitors, artists, students, and collectors for images of the museum’s most beautiful pieces, affirming the wider acceptance of the aesthetic approach. The booklet demonstrates the increasingly important role of the museum’s “art” objects in the overall image of the colony presented in the museum, and hence in the promotion of the colonial empire.

Olbrechts’s selection of pieces revealed his biases: they were almost all figurative wooden sculptures, all from the southern part of the country, with a heavy emphasis on Kuba and Luba art. In contrast to the extensive background information provided in Congolese Sculpture, the explanations accompanying the pictures in this booklet were kept to a minimum, with only a brief identification of the object (such as “chief’s seat” or “statue of woman”) and the “tribe” of origin. In some cases Olbrechts added an extra line about the style (such as the “Buli style”) or the person depicted (in the case of the royal Kuba statues).

The decision to focus on a limited number of objects, stripped of their context, represented a culmination of the trend whereby certain pieces of African material culture migrated from the status of artifact to the status of art. This “art-culture system,” “a system of thinking in which a binary opposition—in this case “art” and “artifact”—generates a field of meanings,” as James Clifford described it, reinvented African objects as singular, universally beautiful, and “authentic.”⁹⁶ Olbrechts’s use of the concept of “masterpiece” shows his ambitions for the status and place of African art objects in the museum. Traditionally used in Western art to refer to the most skillful and beautiful pieces, the term implies a creation that rises above the general level of production of art. In the context of African art, and in particular at Tervuren, the concept of the masterpiece functioned in a number of ways. While elevating the culture of origin to the level of an art-producing civilization, it simultaneously removed the objects from that cultural background and made them symbolic of the collection itself—in this case, the museum of Tervuren.⁹⁷ Their recognition as masterpieces was situated entirely in the West and appropriated them for Western collectors and museums. Locating masterpieces among the African objects stimulated the cultural, but also the financial, value of both these objects and of others like them, benefiting mostly collectors and dealers of African art and stimulating their continued circulation.

Arjun Appadurai has described this process as the “aesthetics of decontexualization,” a process of “diversion” of the regular flow of commodities whereby the value of things increases by placing them in an unlikely context.⁹⁸ The heightened profile of certain sculptural objects, raised by scholarship and display, increased their economic value. This commodification contributed to the objects’ redefinition as another exceptional resource for the colony, in turn supporting the idea of Congo as an exceptional place and justifying the welfare colonialism of the Belgian state. As with many other colonial resources, the financial value generated by the exchange of similar pieces by art dealers remained in Western hands.

The term “masterpiece” refers explicitly to the creator of a piece, the artist. While acknowledging the (unconscious) creative genius within African culture, applying the term to an African object accentuated the absence of information about the creator of the object. So while the singularity of the object increases, and with it the potential respect for its culture of origin, the individuality of the African artist remains a void. Sally Price characterized this approach: “Any work outside the ‘Great Traditions’ must have been produced by an unnamed figure who represents community and whose craftsmanship represents the dictates of its age-old traditions.”⁹⁹ Arguably, the void is filled either by the scholar or the collector responsible for “discovering” the piece, or by the museum institution functioning as the “guardian” of the object. Removed from their original context and only vaguely identified, the masterpieces become “signs” for the museum that possesses them, muting them as signifiers of another culture. Any reassessment of the “primitivism” of African cultures in a favorable light is redirected to the role of the museum—and, by extension, the colonial state—as a guardian of the material.

Along with the promotion of certain choice pieces from the museum’s collection as “masterpieces,” the museum also reinstalled the art room. The idea of an art room was not in itself a new concept for the museum, as we’ve seen above. There were significant differences, however, between the older displays of Congolese art and the new art room. The new “Congo art room” contained a much smaller selection of objects in a modernist setting with a much more spacious arrangement against a white backdrop.¹⁰⁰ Most ceramics and series of weapons and shields had disappeared. Instead, a careful selection of objects, each occupying a place in Olbrechts’s stylistic classification, was presented in a spacious, well-lit, simple setting designed to bring out the aesthetic qualities of the objects themselves, although some contextual information was provided.¹⁰¹ The display was organized by style area and substyles, as delineated by Olbrechts’s scholarship. Each style area was accompanied by a short introduction of the characteristics of each style. In figure 1.7 we see part of the display on the Luba on the left and in the second and third cases from the right. Also visible are a large Kongo statue, one vitrine of Kuba objects, and one vitrine devoted to the less-defined northern styles (to the far right). The functional descriptions of the objects were reduced to a bare minimum. In the case of the Luba, for example, the two cases to the left are accompanied by the description “Chief’s insignia; seats, arrow holder, scepters and ax.” By minimizing references to the objects’ function, elaborated upon in the ethnographic displays, Olbrechts created room for the visitor to focus on the appearance of the objects in a setting that encouraged admiration. This technique represented a change from the 1936 art room, where references to function were omitted entirely and display cases were crowded.

There was a noticeable difference between Olbrechts’s scholarship, however, and the installation of the Congo art room. In the museum display, the contextualization of the pieces has to take a back seat to their display as art objects, illustrating the different demands placed upon the scholar versus the museum professional. The latter, while also respecting the museum’s scientific identity and ensuring that the displays reflect the current state of scholarship, is forced to make decisions about the amount of contextualizing information that can be included in a display and to decide how to integrate the displays into the overall narrative of the museum.

Most of the visitors to the museum probably had very limited knowledge of the various cultures in Congo. The lack of a printed guide to the ethnographic and art room before 1967 meant that, despite the presence of a large ethnographic map above the door, the diversity of cultures might have blended together into a more homogenized image (after all, the art room was named the Congo Art room).¹⁰² Nonetheless, the message, both visual and written, about the ability of Congolese people to produce true “Art” was likely to make an impression. An audience used to visiting Western art museums would have interpreted the limited availability of information and labels as an expression of the value of the pieces. The presentation of the pieces also affirmed their autonomy and singularity.¹⁰³

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 1.9. (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 activities in the colony. The curator, Marcel Luwel, like his colleagues in ethnography, believed his role was to assist in the modernization of the museum and to provide museum goers with more scientifically and historically founded information on the displays in the history halls.¹¹⁵

The focus of many of the historical exhibitions was on the explorers of Central Africa, Stanley in particular, and the early generation of Belgian military officials. This was clearly visible in the way the Memorial Hall was organized. The space was named after a monumental plaque engraved with the names of Belgians who had died on African soil before 1908. The hall was adorned with a series of military flags commemorating the military conquest and organization of the colony, covering both the period of the Congo Free State under Leopold II and the post-1908 period, when Congo became a colony of the Belgian state. Both the name of the space—Memorial Hall—and the exhibits themselves show the importance of remembrance in the way history was conceptualized. The museum goer was invited to participate by visiting the room, effectively sharing in a ritual that defined their citizenship as imperial.

“History” in Congo started with the arrival of the Portuguese in 1483, the visitor was told. In the middle of the central history hall was a reproduction of the padrão, or commemorative pillar, erected by Diogo Cão to commemorate his arrival on the Congolese coast. The surrounding display cases told a chronological story of the European presence in Congo. Starting with the relations between Portugal and the kingdom of Kongo, the bulk of the material referred to the political, administrative, and military reign of Leopold II and, later, the Belgian state in central Africa. The only artifacts produced by African people in the history displays were the metal crucifixes attributed to the Kongo kingdom. Central to this colonial story were the military victories against the so-called Arabized slave traders, the abuse of which Leopold II claimed to be freeing the Congolese from. Museum goers could thus admire the heroic efforts and humanistic intentions of Leopold II and his colonizing efforts.¹¹⁶

In 1958 the fifty-year anniversary of the takeover of the colony by the Belgian state was commemorated with a special exhibition. The political significance of this exhibit at this moment in time is not to be underestimated, since rumblings about Congolese independence had started to surface both in Congo and in Belgium. Tervuren proceeded with an exhibition that celebrated not only the fifty years the Belgian state had been responsible for the colony but also the earlier reign by Leopold II. The official opening speech by the minister of colonies did not mention the current situation in the colony but focused instead on the heroics of Leopold II and his collaborators. The exhibition closed on January 4 1959, the very day political violence broke out in Congo’s capital.¹¹⁷

FIGURE 1.11. Visit of the Yaka king to the Tervuren museum, 1959. HP.1959.28.860, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo R. Stalin (Inforcongo), RMCA Tervuren ©.

. . .

JUSTIFICATION OF the continued presence of Belgium in Africa depended not only on economic, but also on cultural politics that created an image of the colony as exceptional and valuable, a process in which the museum played a central role. In the 1950s Tervuren’s message about the mise en valeur of Congo suggested not only exceptional natural and economic resources but also exceptional and rich cultural resources in the form of art. The history of the ethnography and art displays at the museum shows very clearly how the meaning attributed to the objects on display changed over time, as did the image of Congolese cultures. Olbrechts’s administration was marked by the definitive shift of certain objects from the realm of ethnography to the realm of art. The Congo art room in the museum gave shape to the contours of what came to be considered valuable Congolese cultural heritage. These pieces became the prime carriers of cultural authenticity, defined as untouched, of the past, and traditional.

While a Congolese heritage was given shape in the halls of Tervuren, a Belgian heritage was also created. In the history displays, the struggle for Central Africa was presented as part of the past of the Belgian people, while their present and future were suggested in the displays of the many resources and riches, now including art, of the colony.¹¹⁸ The museum and its collections came to stand for the colony, were an essential part of Belgian heritage, and eventually served as a monument to Belgian colonialism itself.¹¹⁹ The rebirth of certain objects as art allowed for a shift in the interpretation of the “civilizing mission,” in which African material culture previously was used to underwrite the necessity of European colonialism to lift African societies out of primitiveness. Although they were still used to justify the colonial project, it was their preservation that now required the role of the Belgian state as a protector of “traditional” African cultures, and hence, as a cultural guardian.

One wonders about the—admittedly very few—Congolese visitors to the museum. On a number of occasions during the 1950s, mostly during the World Exposition of 1958, Congolese évolués visited the museum in Tervuren. What were their thoughts as they were guided through the halls of the monumental and rather pompous building promoting Congo as a natural unit and praising its riches, but undermining any regard for the lives of its subjects? The following chapter will explore how the contradictions between the colonial regime’s desire to advance and “civilize” on the one hand, and to protect and save African cultures on the other hand, played out in the cultural politics of the colony itself.

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