Читать книгу Authentically African - Sarah Van Beurden - Страница 14

2

Guardians of Heritage

A Politique Esthétique and the Museum as a “Laboratory of Native Policy”

IN A 1955 article on the modest Museum of Indigenous Life in the Congolese capital Leopoldville, the museum’s director, Jean Vanden Bossche, enthusiastically described the museum as “a laboratory of native policy.”¹ On the one hand, he hoped its displays might inspire and educate Congolese artisans, remedying the perceived decline in authentic traditional arts and crafts. On the other hand, perhaps museum visits could serve as a “civilizing ritual” and shape a modern Congolese subject.² Through exposure to the sciences of ethnography and art history, a growing urban population would learn to value indigenous cultures as their country’s heritage and would develop a “pure gaze,” becoming modern subjects in the process.³

This chapter investigates how the changing ideas about African art impacted ideas about cultural policies in the colony, and how Belgian cultural guardianship was exercised in the colony.⁴ More specifically, it traces the activities of a set of metropolitan and Congo-based organizations active in the promotion of Congolese arts and crafts as well as the organization of workshops, art schools, and museums in the colony.⁵ What role did developing ideas about African art, heritage, the role of museums, sustainable and traditional artisanal production, and the growing influence of Western art education play in attempts to reinvent and control Congolese “traditional” cultures in the colony? Was cultural authenticity interpreted differently with regard to artistic life in the colony than it was in the halls of Tervuren? How was Congolese material culture collected and displayed in the museums in the colony, and how did they differ from metropolitan museums? By analyzing Belgian interpretations of Congolese cultures as a political project, I trace changes in the Belgian colonial regime during the 1950s and rising tensions between the colonial government in Belgium and cultural organizations and Catholic congregations involved with the organization of “indigenous” education in the colony. Although the archival material has been profoundly shaped by the colonial project, I attempt to trace how Congolese leaders, artisans, and artists responded to the various colonial initiatives aimed at the organization of artistic life. This exploration of the introduction of ideas about cultural authenticity and heritage to the colonial scene will shed light on the nature and content of postcolonial culture explored in the following chapters.

The chapter first sketches the creation of a framework for cultural politics with regard to art and crafts in the colony during the 1930s, but it focuses mostly on the most active period, from 1945 until 1959. It was during these years that artistic (associated with the creation of art) and artisanal (associated with the creation of crafts) life in Congo was most actively subject to interference and control by the colonial government and a number of colonial organizations. By exploring the cultural, political, social, and economic motivations for the formulation of colonial cultural politics, as well as the attempts to translate these into practice, this chapter establishes the connections between the worlds of politics and culture. The opposing views on the potential function of art schools, artisanal workshops, and museum spaces and collections that arose—including attempts to steer cultural initiatives from the metropole and debates around the definition and value of art versus artisanat or crafts—reveal the complex impulses at work in concerns over the conservation of traditional cultures in the colony.

The art/artifact binary at play in the reinvention of the displays in Tervuren was more unstable in the context of the cultural politics in the colony because of the close proximity between contexts in which artisanal production took place, and the contexts in which objects were put on display. The art/artifact binary masked objects’ identities as commodities—a result, in part, of the ontological fallacies of the categories of “authenticity” and “art” employed by colonial representatives.⁶ These reflect the contradictory nature of imperialist modernity itself, which relied heavily on the construction of the antimodern. The latter could be read into discourses about the “primitive other,” but also into the “authenticity” of that other which “functioned as the critical opposite to modernity’s fragmented world.”⁷ By appropriating the material culture of the “other” into the discourse about colonial modernism—but also into the colony’s cultural economy—the colonizer created the circumstances necessary to sustain the colonial system This process, I will argue, was particularly important to the construction of cultural guardianship that marked Belgian late-colonial politics.

The category of “crafts” or artisanat was much more often invoked than “art” was by those interested and involved in artistic life in the colony. As a concept, “crafts” fits neither the art nor the ethnographic artifact category. Although they were commodities, crafts could be aesthetically valued and their production was associated with the artistic sphere. Although threatened by commercialization, they were connected to pre-modern, “authentic” life.⁸ Interestingly, it was not uncommon for the Belgians in this chapter to believe that the re-emergence of a “true art” could be coaxed out of the artisanal scene, under the proper Western supervision.

THE EMERGENCE OF COLONIAL CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE 1930s

In the 1930s, institutional frameworks and organizations emerged that dealt specifically with arts and crafts in the colony. One of the most important of these was the Commission for the Protection of Indigenous Arts and Crafts (Commission pour la Protection des Arts et Métiers Indigènes, COPAMI), created by the colonial ministry. Its official task was “to study and research all matters related to the protection, re-creation and advancement of indigenous arts and crafts [and] make suggestions on the subject to the minister of Colonies.”⁹ The commission resided in Belgium, and its members were a mix of former high-level colonial administrators, artists, academics (mostly museum curators and art historians), former missionaries to the Congo, and staff from the colonial office in Brussels. COPAMI’s role was only advisory, and it tended to function as a lobby. Its unofficial influence was at times considerable because of its members’ social positions and backgrounds. It was the hope and ambition of the founding members of COPAMI that, eventually, a department of arts and crafts, or even a department of fine arts, could be institutionalized within the colonial government.¹⁰ The driving force behind COPAMI was Gaston-Denys Périer (1895–1962), an employee of the Ministry of Colonies in Brussels with a great admiration for avant-garde artists such as Apollinaire and Picasso, who stirred his interest in African art, in which he discovered the “irresistible draw” of Africa, the “soul of a faraway and unrecognized humanity.”¹¹ Despite his progressive opinions on the artistic culture of Congolese subjects, his views were firmly entrenched, as he was himself, in the colonial project; he believed in the value of the protection and development of cultural life in the Congo as a part of Belgium’s mission.¹²

By the mid-1930s such ideas were increasingly popular. A more inclusive and long-term understanding of the responsibilities of the Belgian state as a colonial power was gaining ground. The interest in these matters also grew among the colonials, the number of which increased slowly with the growth of the colonial system in the colony. A number of the new arrivals had become increasingly concerned with the state of local traditional cultures and their perceived decline with exposure to the West.¹³ By founding the Friends of Indigenous Art (Amis de l’Art Indigène, or AAI), a group of these colonials aspired to create museums in the colony in the interest of preserving traditions and inspiring Congolese artisans to produce “authentic” material. Organized into regional committees, of which the Leopoldville and Katanga branches were the most active, AAI was less centralized than COPAMI, but as opposed to the latter, it was based in the colony itself, far from Brussels, the center of power in colonial politics.

Despite overlapping interests, COPAMI and AAI had a tense relationship that was an expression of the general tension that existed between the colonial government in Brussels and its representatives in Congo. The members of COPAMI thought many AAI members were loose cannons who lacked an academic understanding of the situations in which they worked. This deeply offended many AAI members, who felt their hands-on knowledge was far more relevant than COPAMI members allowed. Another significant difference between the two organizations was that AAI included some Congolese members while COPAMI had none, since its members deemed “few Congolese qualified owing to a lack of education in ‘artistic life.’”¹⁴

In the first few years of its existence, COPAMI focused on lobbying the government for new legislation to protect the “sites, monuments and indigenous arts” of the colony. Signed into law in 1939, the legislation provided the legal framework for the selection and protection of an official heritage that included archaeological sites, buildings and monuments, and, theoretically, museum collections.¹⁵ Although the legislation was largely aimed at protecting sites and monuments from the early colonial era, COPAMI used it as a starting point, creating an ambitious agenda that included initiatives to protect the remnants of past artistic traditions in the colony, the centralization of the sale of artisanal crafts, the organization of artisans into workshops and cooperatives, and the protection of environments conducive to high-quality artisanal production. In addition, it aspired to evaluate all existing art education in the colony.¹⁶

AAI branches around the colony created small museums with mostly ethnographic and some archeological collections. One of those was the Musée de la Vie Indigène (MVI) or Museum of Indigenous Life, in Leopoldville, which first opened its doors on March 14, 1936. The product of the efforts of the artist and author Jeanne Maquet-Tombu and Adrien Vanden Bossche, with the support of the local government and UTexLéo (one of the largest textile companies in Leopoldville), the MVI included an exhibition space, a library, a museum shop, and a workshop for educating artisans.¹⁷ The seven thousand objects that filled the museum’s storerooms and displays were largely collected by the handful of individuals associated with its creation, although donations from colonial administrators returning to the capital from their posts in the interior soon formed an important contribution.¹⁸

Governor-General Pierre Ryckmans expected the Congolese to be “deeply grateful for our conservation of the vestiges of their past life.”¹⁹ “The talented Negro will be guided to the museum in order to look for inspiration,” the AAI hoped.²⁰ Clearly, the AAI not only envisioned educating both Belgians and Congolese in the value of traditional culture but also hoped the Congolese population would one day thank them for their conservation efforts.

The various rooms were organized according to colonial administrative units with some level of ethnic divisions. Shelves were brimming with ranks of statues and more utilitarian material such as pots, knives, and weapons. The only objects that were more or less consistently grouped together were of Kuba origin. No distinction was made between material of an ethnographic, archaeological, or artistic nature, nor was there any indication of the materials’ function or elaboration on the items’ historical or ethnic background.²¹

The Museum of Indigenous Life was not the only museum in the colony by the 1930s. In addition to a number of missionary collections on display and small, often short-lived museum initiatives by regional AAI branches, there was also the Leopold II museum in Elisabethville, the capital of the Katanga mining region.²² The museum had its origin in the personal collection of archeological material of Francis Cabu, an employee of the National Institute for Agronomical Studies and Research, in Katanga. At first he opened up his living room as an exposition space, but soon the collection began a long journey through a variety of locales and gradually included more than prehistoric and archaeological artifacts.²³ Colonial officials brought the museum artifacts from their respective administrative units. The legal authorities in Elisabethville also donated the “fetishes and medicinal objects” they confiscated during raids on “sects” prohibited by the colonial government.²⁴ Although it amassed a decent collection of ethnographic material, the museum’s strengths remained its archaeological and geological collections. As such, it was not the center of activism for the preservation of indigenous art that the MVI in Leopoldville was.

A POLITIQUE ESTHÉTIQUE: AN AGENDA FOR CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE COLONY

While World War II froze the incipient activities of COPAMI and the AAI, it accelerated the Belgian government’s desire for change and modernization in the colony, a trend that was accompanied by an increased concern about the state of Congolese traditional cultures, their artistic heritage, and their artisanal production. Pierre Ryckmans, governor-general of the Belgian Congo since 1934, stressed the importance of separating the government system from the interests of the big colonial companies. In 1946 he openly opposed those companies’ practice of exporting their profits. The 1949 ten-year plan for economic and social development in Congo proposed the use of government funds to modernize the economy, which translated into an increased presence of the state at all levels of life. In reality most of the attention went to economic development, but the growing presence of the state translated into increased control over various aspects of the lives of colonial subjects, felt not only in social policies but in the cultural domain as well.²⁵ Some colonial administrators became convinced that knowledge of “traditional societies” could be seen as “applicable knowledge” in the service of modernization and development.²⁶

While the colonial state expanded its presence, anxieties about the impact of modernization and Western society and culture on “traditional” African societies increased. The expanding expatriate population, which reached 109,457 people in 1958, 86,736 (or 79.2 percent) of whom were Belgians, observing the growing migration toward colonial cities, became increasingly worried about the disappearance of “authentic” rural communities and their traditions. This resonated with the metropolitan community’s growing intellectual and aesthetic interest in African art.²⁷

While the goal of expanding the colonial system was an increased mise en valeur of the colony, Belgian nostalgia for an imagined Congolese past with “authentic” traditional communities grew in tandem with the colonial state. In her interviews with former Belgian colonials, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour noticed their preference for “the bush,” which they saw as the real Congo. While they downplayed the destructiveness of the colonial system, they lamented the changes occurring in rural societies. Dembour notes that many of her interviewees displayed a striking lack of awareness about the origin of these changes.²⁸ Defined as “imperialist nostalgia” by Renato Rosaldo, this admiration for a traditional way of life was not new. Admiration for the “noble savage” went back centuries, going hand in hand with the image of the “primitive savage.”²⁹ The romanticization of rural and preindustrial life translated into a desire for local, handmade, and “authentic” objects, in which these qualities were supposedly embedded. This perspective was compounded with a view of colonized peoples as part of a previous stage in the evolution of human development. Ultimately, the goal of the “civilizing” process was to lift such peoples out of the past and into a future in which they would be manufacturers and consumers. But by placing such emphasis on cultural authenticity, colonialism denied colonized Africans a place in a political, cultural and social modernity.³⁰

The activities of COPAMI and AAI reveal how these growing anxieties about modernity in the colony focused on the demise of artisanal and artistic production in the colony, and how the solution to these was located in the creation of an institutional complex that included workshops, art schools, and museums. COPAMI members decided that the right course of action was to draw up a politique esthéthique (“politics of aesthetics”), a central manifesto for cultural action by the colonial state. The commission members all envisioned a clear split between a past, when the masterpieces of Tervuren were produced, and the present, which was their sole area of concern. The possibility that contemporary Congolese societies were capable of producing pieces equal in quality to those in Tervuren was largely dismissed. What was understood to be under discussion may be more accurately described as artisanal production: arts and crafts or artisanat, the “minor” arts.

While the mise en valeur of the art collection at Tervuren revolved around the exceptional nature of the pieces and the artistic value that translated itself into economic and financial value, like other resources of the colony, the valorization of artistic traditions in the colony itself lay with artisanal production, which represented the connection between the rich artistic past and a modern future with a crafts industry rooted in tradition. “Authentic” arts and crafts, however, were considered to be in decline, a consequence of the disappearance of traditional identities and ways of life and a sign of a changing, destabilizing society. As Adrien Vanden Bossche, the first director of the MVI, wrote, “The works of indigenous artists are no longer supported by the complex ideology that generated them in the past. The suppression of certain customs and superstitions inherent in primitive life results in a certain disinterest in the making of artistic oeuvres.”³¹ While, in an earlier phase of the colonizing process, local art and crafts had been seen as inferior to Western products and representative of the savagery of the Africans, many of these same objects (particularly sculptures and textiles) were now viewed as a potential source for disciplined and industrious craftsmanship, as part of the civilizing process.³²

On the face of things, colonial modernization was the culprit for the decline. However, the Belgians reasoned, it was rather the inability of the Congolese to deal with modern developments, allowing themselves to be seduced by the money offered by Western art dealers both for their “ancestral” art and for artisanal production, that caused the problem. From this perspective, it was the financial incentive that impaired the ability of communities to hold onto their older and more beautiful objects. Attracted to the tools and materials of modernity, artisans also lost the ability to work with traditional techniques, thereby undermining their ability to produce authentic work. The Belgians believed the loss of these traditional techniques reflected a loss of traditional identity, which was the real issue and was feared to have political consequences.

The increased commercialization of the arts and crafts market also worried the members of COPAMI and AAI. They feared that artisans overly concerned with earning money—in order to participate in the modern colonial economy—were susceptible to Europeanization, and therefore deterioration, either because they would adapt their products to the wishes and tastes of the foreign buyers or because they would neglect quality in favor of quantity in order to maximize profits. Clearly, however, it was not the rising popularity of Congolese crafts as consumption products (or “colonial kitsch,” as Jean-Luc Vellut has called it) that was the problem for COPAMI and AAI, but the fact that they believed a growing market in crafts needed to be controlled by the colonial state and its representatives in order to maintain the “authentic” character of artisanal production.³³ This authenticity rested with “traditional” modes of production and “traditional” materials, assumed to lead to a more sustained development of artisanal production and of a rural artisanal class.

COPAMI and AAI’s view of rural life ignored the pressures and difficulties faced by large parts of the Congolese population in the 1950s. There was considerable pressure from forced cultivation and crop rotation systems, an insistence on restructuring rural communities around nuclear families, and an increased dependence on a monetary economy.³⁴ The extension of systems of compulsory cultivation left little room for subsistence farming and had dire effects on the quality of rural life in the colony, destabilizing communities and encouraging migration to cities. As the social structures of rural communities disappeared, the colonial state attempted to stabilize rural life and production with a series of economic initiatives. Among them was the attempt to create a peasant class (or paysannat) through a system of land division by family as well as crop requirements. These initiatives reflected the colonial administration’s desire for social and population control.³⁵ The reinvigoration of craftsmanship and an artisanal class was seen as a way to promote indigenous peasantry and family and village life, allowing for a productive rural class without the social instability that came with migration and urbanization.

Another source of concern for COPAMI was the role of Western-style art education in the colony. It was feared it would lead not only to “inauthentic” and inferior crafts but also to inauthentic modern art, diverting Congolese students’ attention from their “true” heritage and identity. By the early to mid-1950s, however, a number of COPAMI and AAI members, such as museum director Jean Vanden Bossche (who succeeded his father Adrien as director of the MVI) and artist and scholar Jeanne Maquet-Tombu, became more open to the development of a modern or “living” art.³⁶

The majority of the works considered modern were the products of students in one or more of the emerging art schools in the colony.³⁷ These included the Academy of St. Luc in Leopoldville, led by Marc Wallenda, a brother of the congregation of Christian Schools, and the Academy of Popular Arts in Elisabethville, led by Pierre Romain-Desfossés. Wallenda encouraged the development of traditional craftsmanship, but many of his students ended up adopting an idealized realism.³⁸ Romain-Desfossés, a French painter, was opposed to the teaching of Western art history and techniques to Congolese students, worried that it would impede their creativity and jeopardize the authenticity of their work.³⁹ He founded his Workshop for Indigenous Arts, commonly referred to as “Le Hangar” (The Warehouse), as a space for crafts and more decorative arts. However, his students were not limited to the more traditional, artisanal sculptural work, and he ended up renaming the workshop the Academy of Popular Arts. This change in nomenclature reflected his widening understanding of traditional crafts, while demonstrating that he had not abandoned his interpretation of Congolese cultural authenticity.⁴⁰

Upon Romain-Desfossés’s death, his workshop merged with the Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts in Elisabethville, founded by Laurent Moonens in 1951, an institution that admitted both black and white students.⁴¹ Moonens acknowledged the possibility of a contemporary art production but thought it useless and even damaging to teach Western art history to young Congolese students. His fear was that such instruction would be akin to “giving them a heavy artistic past that is not theirs and would distance them from their own inspiration.” Instead, they should “find an African style.”⁴² Moonens believed that the survival of artistic traditions depended on a rational organization of production under the guidance of colonial representatives or missionary congregations. This supervision would ensure that sales would not drive the “immediate needs” of producers and would thus prevent a deterioration of quality. For Moonens, these immediate needs were not rational economic needs, but a lack of impulse control and an irrational desire to obtain quick money on the part of the Congolese. As he put it, “We cannot lose sight of the fact that the black is a large child and needs help in order to make a decent living of his artistic production”⁴³

Despite the hesitant acceptance of newer artistic forms of expression, most advocates for these developments argued that they must be guided by Western teachers and artists. Those same teachers, however, should refrain from teaching Western art history or techniques in order to prevent that knowledge from contaminating Congolese art. (Wallenda was regularly under fire for introducing his students to Western traditions and techniques.) This argument merely transferred the desire for authenticity in traditional artisanal techniques to a desire for a similar authenticity in modern works—untainted by the West and grounded in some form of “Africanness” inspired by “traditional” life and art. In short, the kind of modernity that was tolerated in art production combined Western stewardship with roots in African techniques, forms, and content.

On the other side of this debate was a sizable group of COPAMI members who steered clear of promoting anything but traditional artisanal production, convinced that it alone could reconnect the Congolese to their ancestral art. They emphasized restoring “traditional” cultural patronage—interpreted to be the village chiefs—although the latter were also succumbing to “cars instead of art.”⁴⁴ The COPAMI member and painter Robert Verly believed that “reinstating, in the measure to which the colonial politics permits, the authority of traditional chiefs” would be the best way to preserve traditional art production. Verly argued it was in the regions where traditional authority persisted that a royal art still thrived.⁴⁵ This remark—a clear reference to the Kuba region, where the Kuba king had been incorporated into the colonial system as an indirect ruler—highlights Verly’s belief in the power of the Congolese themselves, albeit only those communities under centralized rule, to reinvigorate and protect their cultures.

The longing for “traditional”—and, therefore, rural—societies in the face of the destabilizing forces of urbanization and change brought on by colonial modernities led to a deeply conservative and antimodern reaction from a considerable part of the colonial establishment. The attachment to the idea of “family” or “home” industries was one that projected on the colony the nostalgia in many European societies for preindustrial and rural life.⁴⁶ To describe the fear of decline as mere nostalgia, however, would be to miss an important political motivator behind colonial cultural politics. A rerooting of Congolese population in a traditional form of rural life was seen as an antidote against Westernization and its supposed fellow traveler, political awakening.⁴⁷ Many COPAMI and AAI members, however, saw themselves as a progressive response against the iconoclasm perpetrated against native cultures by missionaries in their zeal for conversion and the destructive side effects of colonial modernization.

After years of discussion, in 1954 COPAMI finally approved the politique esthétique. The document sidestepped the problem of defining indigenous art, since despite years of exhaustive discussions commission members could not arrive at a uniform definition. Although the document consistently used the term art, the practical guidelines reinforce the impression from the debates that the commission’s actual concern was artisanal production, or the minor arts.

The document acknowledged that forms of expression could change when inspiration changed, but it stipulated that guidance was necessary to ensure that traditional sources of inspiration were replaced by the right alternatives and that the “social and collective character of its production was maintained as much as possible.” This meant that artistic education should start with “negro-African classicism,” and that Western art history should be introduced only under teachers’ careful guidance. Conversely, it was important for the Western art teacher to immerse himself in the study of traditional indigenous art in order to “penetrate the black soul and aim to let it bloom freely.” With unique exceptions, pushing artists to create “great art” would prove unsuccessful. The commission, as a result, recommended a focus on a lower level of education, mirroring the educational policies of the colonial state at large.⁴⁸

Jackson Lears, in his study of antimodernism in American culture, argued that it was more than mere nostalgia or escapism and often “coexisted with enthusiasm for material progress.”⁴⁹ The same can be said of the conservationist agenda of COPAMI and AAI. The professed goal of Belgian colonialism was the modernization and civilization of the colony, but many in the colonial apparatus became uneasy about the impact of colonial modernity on the social and political fabric of traditional, rural life. The ambivalence inherent in this mission is clear in the political and social undertones of the conservationist agenda of COPAMI and AAI and the attempts by their members in the 1940s and ’50s to come to terms with change while containing it within a framework of “Africanness.” The tension between the identities of artisanal objects as commodities and as repositories of authentic traditions could only be resolved in the creation of an artisanal industry under the guidance of the colonial power, guarding the authenticity of the environment, artisans, and objects. This would not only create the industriousness desired for “civilizing” the Congolese people but also guard them against the potential social and political effects of modernity.

PRODUCING ARTISANAL AUTHENTICITY

Having published the manifesto, COPAMI moved on to the “renovation and the promotions of progress” of Congolese arts and crafts. This entailed the study and organization of the situation “on the ground,” in particular with reference to the already existing art schools, workshops, artisan’s cooperatives, and museums. Although COPAMI would have preferred to create a new structure for the cultural sector in the colony, this was beyond its power. Its politique esthétique, after all, carried no legal weight. The Belgian government had no interest in investing that amount of effort and money into Congolese artistic and artisanal life, so COPAMI worked on a smaller scale, and its members lobbied individual government officials relentlessly.

Even before the final version of the politique esthétique was approved by the Belgian government, COPAMI members started preparing for its practical application. Their plan included four major elements: (1) extending the application of the 1939 legislation for the protection of Congolese patrimony to the protection and classification of Congolese indigenous arts in the colony; (2) a reorganization of the existing museums in the colony into a centralized system; (3) the organization and control of artistic education in a way that promoted “the artistic sensibility of the race”; and (4) the creation of artisanal workshops, cooperatives, and sales venues in order to create a modern artisanal class that was rooted in rural traditions.⁵⁰ Since these latter institutions already existed in Congo, COPAMI was in reality concerned with their centralization and control.

Both AAI and COPAMI advocated the organization of artisanal cooperatives and workshops, led by Belgians, where artisans could refine their techniques, obtain materials at advantageous prices, and sell their products. Cooperatives had first appeared in the agricultural sector in the 1920s, when producers of commodities such as milk, palm oil, and coffee began to organize to process, transport, and sell their produce collectively. Eventually, a 1949 government decree established such cooperatives as legal entities under the supervision of the colonial administration, but the government was simply regulating a preexisting phenomenon.⁵¹ Although government support for and organization of the cooperatives were motivated by a desire to create a rural Congolese middle class, the cooperatives remained a marginal phenomenon when compared with the large-scale compulsory cultivation and European plantations.⁵²

The proposed artisanal cooperatives and workshops would not only centralize and organize the sale of production in a way that allowed the artisan to earn a living, they would also allow the colonizer to exert “quality control.” By giving space to artisans to develop as a viable economic class, they would counteract the perceived disappearance of artistic customs and traditions, especially since the preferred setting for these workshops would be in areas away from the larger colonial centers.

In 1952–53 former AAI and current COPAMI member Jeanne Maquet-Tombu toured the Leopoldville and Kikwit areas in search of existing initiatives that could either serve as models for the workshops or else be incorporated into a centralized system. Among the sites she visited were a ceramics workshop run by Jacques Laloux in Leopoldville; a weaving and basket-making operation run by the Apostolic Annunciade sisters of Heverlee in Totshi, southeast of Kikwit in the Bandundu region; a sculpture workshop at the mission of Kahemba, south of Kikwit near the border with Angola, that had sent material to both Belgium and the United States; and a workshop of raffia textiles, also known as Kuba cloth or Kasai “velours” or velvets, in the mission of the Annunciade Sisters near Nsheng. Maquet-Tombu found some of these initiatives useful. Almost all of the missionaries reported encouraging the use of traditional techniques in craft production, although the sisters in Nsheng complained that “their girls” were more interested in trying out new things. The fact that missionary congregations had created most of these initiatives was no coincidence. The Catholic Church was a tremendously powerful participant in Belgian colonialism and had a de facto monopoly on education in the colony. For COPAMI, however, the creation of workshops independent of missionary congregations and connected directly to the colonial administration was preferable.⁵³

The information collected by Maquet-Tombu, in line with the guidelines laid down in the politique esthétique, led to the formulation of concrete plans. COPAMI, in collaboration and consultation with the Ministry of Colonies, created a blueprint for Ateliers Sociaux d’Art Indigène (ASAI), Community Workshops for Indigenous Art. Gathering artisans into these workshops would allow them to make money and work in their “original environments,” thus providing an educational and social service while stimulating the “regeneration of communities.” These workshops—created primarily in environments that were “rich in tradition,” contradicting the commission’s professed interest in reinvigorating artisanal traditions in the entire colony—could also connect to trading posts and sales venues created and run by the colonial government or by museums in the colony and even abroad.⁵⁴ The crafts produced in the ASAI would receive a stamp that certified their authenticity in terms of quality and origin.⁵⁵ The curator of the MVI was a strong advocate of recording the name and biography of the artist as well.⁵⁶

In possessing the stamp that would authenticate objects, the colonial state would be the arbiter and proprietor of authenticity, allowing the colony to capitalize on the growing market for artisanal crafts production. Unfortunately, as Viviane Baeke has pointed out, the obsession with authentic artistic traditions had the ironic side effect of creating artisanal environments that undermined precisely those aspects of craft production that interested those concerned with authenticity.⁵⁷

COPAMI’s interest in containing and controlling the sale of crafts indicates the extent to which the sale of souvenirs and crafts had become a significant business. The popularity of these objects was the result of the confluence of two developments. On one hand, the growing colonial community and the increase in tourism in the 1950s generated a market for the sale of arts and crafts. On the other hand, the booming African art market encouraged craftsmen and artists to produce pieces that they hoped would meet the standards of “authentic” art. Desiring to emulate art collectors, people wanted to obtain similar representatives of African “authenticity,” but at a lower price. Not only did the yearning for local and handmade objects reflect the buyer’s desire for “cultural capital,” it was also a symptom of the commodification, romanticization, and fetishization of preindustrial, traditional societies by modern Westerners.⁵⁸ The case of the Kuba is a well-documented example. Active art and craft traders since the very beginning of colonial contact in Central Africa, by the 1950s it was a well-developed part of the local economy. Both Kuba and Luba people sold to traders, but also directly to visitors along the railroad that ran to the south of Kuba land.⁵⁹

The growing Western consumption of African crafts gave rise to the category of “tourist art.”⁶⁰ The ambivalence at the heart of this trade was the desire of the buyer to acquire an authentic representative of “native” culture, while the production of these objects was suspected of devaluing artistic traditions because of their commercial power, thus undermining the desirable “authenticity.” Most of the work on African tourist or “airport” art focuses on the postcolonial era, but the attempts of COPAMI and the colonial administration to regulate commercial crafts production in the 1950s demonstrate the viability of the category of “tourist art” during the colonial era as well. Attempts at producing and controlling its authenticity demonstrate both its economic and cultural power and the social and political anxieties wrapped up in a potential loss of authenticity.

While Bennetta Jules-Rosette’s research on tourist art in the late 1970s and early 1980s led her to the conclusion that “ethnicity is a cultural particular that is generally disguised or muted . . . [or employed] in order to reference a cultural whole that stands for the idyllic past,” John and Jean Comaroff have expanded upon the postcolonial commodification of African objects on the strength of an (admittedly abstracted) ethnic association.⁶¹ The history of Congo’s cultural economy shows us, however, that the process of ethno-commodification the Comaroffs describe in the context of the neoliberal political economy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was predated by the homogenization and commercial use of “indigenous” cultural traditions in service of a growing cultural economy in the late colonial era. Ethnic references, especially Luba, Kuba, or Mangbetu, were present in that cultural economy, but the overall impression that COPAMI and AAI members cultivated was an abstract “traditional” identity in which regional differences were acknowledged but not much engaged. Regional identities were desirable as a basis for marketability and authentication, but the cultural identity of the category of products overall was imagined as “Bantou,” “Black,” or “Congolese.”

In 1956 the Ministry of Colonies followed COPAMI’s recommendations and created two workshops: one in Tshikapa, under the leadership of Robert Verly, and the other in Paulis, led by Lina Praet. This time, the language used by both the commission members and the government indicated a consensus with regard to the art versus artisanship question by defining the target as the artisanat d’art, or art craftsmanship, elevating it above the mere production of souvenirs, but still grounding it in craftsmanship. The workshops were to allow artisans to affirm their work’s “active cultural and social value.” The ministry emphasized that the workshops should be, above all, in service of the traditional community and the “prestige of the old cultures.”⁶² It is likely that Tshikapa was chosen because it was within reach of several traditional cultures rich in artistic traditions, such as Chokwe, Pende, Luba, and Lulua. It was also the location of the Forminière company, which exploited the rich diamond fields in the area.⁶³ The Paulis (today named Isiro) area was probably chosen because of its proximity to the Mangbetu people, another group famous for its art and considered one of the “classic” Congolese cultures. Clearly the workshops were established in places where it would be easy to capitalize on existing traditions. This strategy demonstrated the preference for the mise en valeur of artisanship over an activation or regeneration of cultural production in underdeveloped regions.

FIGURE 2.1. Robert Verly in one of the Tshikapa workshops, 1957. HP.1957.1.747, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo C. Lamote (Inforcongo), RMCA Tervuren ©.

In 1957 a delegation of COPAMI members toured the colony for six weeks to get an overview of existing art and artisanal initiatives. While Maquet-Tombu, during her journey of the early 1950s, had reported on the art production organized by Congolese communities themselves, the 1957 delegation chose instead to visit workshops, museums, art schools, and other initiatives organized by Westerners (mostly Belgians). They devoted special attention to the Ateliers Sociaux d’Art Indigène, created the previous year. By that time Verly had set up a network of twelve workshops in and around Tshikapa. His efforts garnered praise from the delegation for stimulating the “creative spirit” and instigating the “return to a purity of forms” among “his” artisans. Praet had only been working for six months, but she had succeeded in establishing a series of workshops around Paulis, some of which already possessed commissions to send material to the 1958 world exposition in Brussels. Both she and Verly recruited artisans and artists, gave them a space in which to work, provided them with basic materials, and attracted young Congolese apprentices. Praet’s approach was somewhat different from Verly’s: she attracted the artisans to local centers under the assumption that they would provide the strongest presence of traditional leadership, while Verly maintained his workshops in more rural areas.⁶⁴

COPAMI did not succeed in allying all the artisanal workshops scattered around the colony—far from it. The majority of workshops and schools remained unaffiliated with the colonial administration. Some of these unaffiliated groups had to adhere to a certain set of standards because they received subsidies from the government, but many others were independent. Among the subsidized were the Sisters of Charity in Kikombo and the artisanal school at the mission in Gandajika in the eastern Kasai region. Among the independent workshops that drew the commission’s attention was the one created in Leopoldville by the businessman Maurice Alhadeff.⁶⁵ Of Greek origin but an American citizen, Alhadeff contracted with artisan and artists, provided them with materials and a wage, and took whatever they produced in return, hoping for a financial reward for his investment. He sponsored the work of painters, potters, and ivory sculptors. Leopoldville’s AAI and the visiting COPAMI members were not very happy with his approach, which they considered to be too intrusive in the artistic process and too heavily dependent on his own personal taste.⁶⁶

A particular source of frustration for COPAMI was its inability to establish control over art and artisanal production among the Kuba. As one of the most, if not the most, admired form of Congolese art in the West, its “protection” was of prime importance. Mweka, a regional center in the Kuba region, possessed a cooperative for arts and crafts in which the local administration was involved. It had been created at the request of both the Kuba king and the many sculptors who produced pieces for sale at the railroad that passed just south of Kuba country. The sheer number of objects had a negative effect on the sales price, and the creation of the cooperative allowed a minimum price to be established. COPAMI and the AAI, however, felt that the quality of the work being sold by the Mweka cooperative was too low.

Also in the area was the artisanal school of the Josephite congregation in Nseng, which received subsidies from the colonial government.⁶⁷ Fathers Antonin D’Haenens and Cyprianus focused on traditional Kuba motifs in wood and ivory carving. COPAMI felt that the fathers’ influence was “too modernizing” and encouraged too much serial copying. The supposed copying was a particular problem for the commission, since it was rumored to be done straight from the illustrations in Emil Torday’s and T. A. Joyce’s works on Kuba art.⁶⁸ Elizabeth Cameron confirms that “the arrival of the Flemish priests imbued with European ideas of preserving heritage . . . forced the Kuba themselves to move to new production and profoundly changed the meaning of the ndop, making it export art.”⁶⁹

COPAMI was worried that the school might develop a separate trading post through which they would be able to dominate the artisanal sales of the region.⁷⁰ The Kuba king, who was allied with the school, pressured it to hire a Kuba sculptor, Jules Lyeen (son of the former king), in order to have more influence over production. The school, as a result, became something of a “joint venture,” as the Kuba historian Jan Vansina put it, effectively locking out COPAMI interference.⁷¹Clearly, the struggle to gain control over the landscape of workshops, sales initiatives, and art schools was an uphill battle.⁷² COPAMI repeatedly ran up against the strong and powerful presence of missionary congregations and schools. Although the commission’s relationship with these was not always negative, COPAMI preferred to see stronger state control of the artistic landscape.⁷³

The Catholic monopoly on education in the colony wasn’t broken until 1958, and little was accomplished in the two years before independence in 1960. In the end, COPAMI never achieved the creation of a fully implemented system of regulation and control and had to satisfy itself with a few directly controlled workshops and constant negotiations with local colonials—be they administrators, company officials, or missionaries—who often resented the meddling from the metropole. Artisanal workshops and art schools, however, were not the only focus of concern for COPAMI and AAI members. Museums devoted to Congolese life and cultures were also accorded place in both organizations’ plans for the protection and revival of artistic and artisanal life in the colony.

MUSEUMS IN THE COLONY: A “LABORATORY OF NATIVE POLICY” OR THE DREAM OF A CONGOLESE TERVUREN?

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, a number of museums popped up in the colony during the 1930s. They were all the result of either private initiatives, the collection of artifacts by missionaries, or efforts by AAI branches. In addition to the Museum of Indigenous Life, created by the AAI in Leopoldville, the capital also had a museum of prehistory and a museum of geology. There were two ethnographic museums run by missionary congregations in the Mayombe region, one in Lunda territory and one intermittently under colonial administration in Mweka; geology museums in Jadotville and Bukavu; and of course the Leopold II Museum in Elisabethville, which focused on prehistory and geology.⁷⁴ Other ethnographic museums existed, at some point, in Stanleyville, Coquilhatville, Lwiro, and Mushenge.⁷⁵ Of all of these ventures, the MVI was the one that drew the most attention from Brussels, and was the most active in the promotion of Congolese cultures.

The colonial administration’s increased attention to the artistic life of the colony after World War II created difficulties for local cultural institutions. While Brussels was pushing for centralization and for more control over existing museums, the colonials were torn between maintaining their independence in the face of pressure from Brussels and securing enough funding from the colonial administration to continue operations. These divided interests bred tense relationships, especially between the AAI in Leopoldville and COPAMI in Brussels, and between COPAMI and the Leopold II Museum in Elisabethville.

A closer look at museum politics can offer a window into the wider cultural politics in the colony. How did a museum function in a colonial environment? Were its views on Congolese cultures different from those in the metropole? Was there such a thing as a local (Congolese) audience? Were the views promoted by museums in the colony at odds with the views on culture and authenticity promoted by the metropole? In other words, was value assigned differently in the colony?

During the immediate postwar period, the Museum of Indigenous Life was located in the former Stanley Hotel in downtown Leopoldville, one of the many locations it occupied during its existence. The installation of the material and its contextualization had become both more elaborate and more professionalized since the 1930s. At the entrance to the museum was a map of the colony displaying regions represented by aspects of the material culture. Portraits of the Belgian king Leopold III and the governor-general of the colony, Pierre Ryckmans, flanked the map. The map highlighted art from the western part of the country, largely ignoring the Katanga and the east-central region. A journalist reviewing the museum in 1946 assumed that “industrial development has obviously not been favorable to the progress of indigenous art” in the Katanga region. More likely, the map’s emphasis was in part the result of more intense collecting in regions closer to the museum. The division in territorial coverage between the museums in Leopoldville and Elisabethville also mirrored the political distance between the administrative capital of the colony and the economic capital.

FIGURE 2.2. Musée de la Vie Indigène, 1946. HP.1955.106.241, collection RMCA Tervuren; photo J. Costa (Inforcongo), RMCA Tervuren ©.