Authentically African. Sarah Van Beurden
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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