Authentically African. Sarah Van Beurden
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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,