Authentically African. Sarah Van Beurden
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politicians, and audiences at large—valued culture. As Sidney Kasfir explains, ideas about the authenticity of African art are based on a series of flawed assumptions about “traditional society” as precolonial, isolated, and homogenous, and about the artist as “bound by tradition” and “controlled by larger forces than himself.”52 By investigating the processes through which authenticity was constructed and how, along with the category of “art,” it was deployed, I seek to demonstrate the role of cultural (re)invention in the political projects of colonialism and postcolonialism.
“Indigenous” cultural authenticity became a useful concept in early colonial collecting of African material culture. In the process of removing material from its context, the projection of authenticity onto the objects served to legitimize the removal of an object as an act of salvaging. Crucial to the construction of cultural authenticity was the anxiety regarding “dying” traditional cultures that accompanied modernity’s changes. The belief in their impending disappearance—essentially their existence as a past—was a prerequisite for their authenticity.53
The curators at the Museum of the Belgian Congo made the salvaging of authentic culture into a scientific undertaking, whereby the creation of expert knowledge and the development of a canon of Congolese art became key elements for the recognition of authenticity. The gradual emergence of a comprehensive system of classification accorded objects value and located authenticity, depending on how objects compared to, and fit in with, other objects in the collection. Becoming even further removed from their original context, authenticity and value were now also defined in the way objects were displayed. The museum, and the art historical canon generated by scholars such as Frans Olbrechts, became authenticity-generating “machines,” constructed as worlds of reference and classification that trumped the cultural context of Congolese societies. They also promoted the subsequent constructions of “traditional” Congolese cultures, and their need for protection, to a broader audience.
Another context in which authenticity played a crucial role was the art market. African art dealers—quite often collectors themselves—contributed significantly to the projection of authenticity upon Congolese cultures. African art trader Henri Kamer described it as follows: “An authentic African piece is by definition a sculpture executed by an artist of a primitive tribe and destined for the use of this tribe in a ritual or functional way. Never lucrative.”54 Art dealers and collectors often establish authenticity on the basis of the physical appearance of an object, looking for evidence of use in the patina, and by locating it in the classifications and canons constructed by scholars. Gradually the (Western) provenance—in the form of a genealogy of Western ownership—of an object became equally important in establishing value and authenticity, a trend also noticeable in the ways in which museums valued their collections. The growing importance of this kind of genealogy denied postcolonial Zairian collecting, like that of the IMNZ, access to a significant repository of authenticity, now located in the West. Through this process of identification, dealers and collectors constructed themselves as experts and connoisseurs, members of an elite with access to an exclusive knowledge—a knowledge that helped develop the canon as a scientific framework.55 An object’s authenticity also increased its commercial value and, ultimately, its commodification—a process clearly demonstrated in the growing market for African art in Europe and the United States. European colonialism, its networks enabling the movement of these objects from (in this case) Africa to the West, formed a crucial part of the story.56
The importance of cultural authenticity lies not merely in how it was defined but in the political implications of that definition. Parallel with the construction of an endangered Congolese cultural authenticity emerged the construction of the explorer, collector, museum director, and by extension the colonial state they represented, as the saviors and protectors of said Congolese culture. The political ramifications of these cultural constructions go beyond the museum and the art market: they legitimized colonial organizations and the colonial state as creators of policies to save “traditional” Congolese cultures. Until World War II these were based upon an interpretation of colonialism as a “civilizing mission,” but by the postwar period, a broader interpretation of Belgian colonialism as “welfare colonialism” intersected with the maturation of a scientific discourse about Congolese art that emphasized the value of the latter as a resource—one that not only could generate financial value but that could also serve to reinvigorate Congolese cultures.
Of course, “the categories of the beautiful, the cultural and the authentic have changed and are changing,” as James Clifford points out.57 The category of Congolese art (and “Primitive” art more broadly) evolved toward a canon and was framed increasingly with reference to objects in Western collections, while authenticity proved a malleable category that existed in the eye of the (Western) beholder. Not only did these categories evolve, they were also open to manipulation and co-optation. Christopher Steiner has illustrated how “authenticity” was captured by art traders in the Ivory Coast who reproduced the physical markers of “authentic” traditional art in order to create objects with significant market value.58 The creation of “authentic” art objects for sale to a Western audience was not uncommon in Congo either. In some cases, the canon—in the shape of art books—helped shape the “authenticity” of “fake” pieces.59
The constructed nature of categories such as “art” and “authenticity” illustrates how disparate categories of value projected upon traditional African art objects operate in concert with one another. An object’s economic value rises with its cultural value, but economic value can also create an aura of cultural value.60 In their economic and cultural values resides another dimension as well, of course: the political. In their re-creation as art, and in their embodiment of authentic Congolese culture, Congolese objects became a resource to be protected and an element in the construction of colonial justifications for the presence of the Belgian colonial state as a cultural guardian of an “authentic” Congo.
The role accorded to material culture and art in the representation of cultural authenticity in the colonial era transformed the collections of the Museum of the Belgian Congo into subjects of political negotiation. Acquiring cultural guardianship—not only in terms of the possession of cultural heritage but also in terms of cultural practices—was understood as a way of acquiring authenticity, and hence legitimacy, by the Mobutu regime. This book traces three of the avenues through which this process took place: the demand for cultural restitution in the process of decolonization; the creation of a museum institute in Zaire in order to generate a national repository of precolonial traditional culture; and the broader authenticity politics of the Mobutu regime.
CULTURAL HERITAGE AND THE POLITICS OF DECOLONIZATION
The Congolese struggle for independence and its immediate aftermath have the dubious honor of being one of the most famous moments in the African struggle for independence. From Lumumba’s speech on independence day in June of 1960, in which he painted a picture of Belgian colonialism as one of abuse and exploitation, to the violence of the postindependence conflicts and secessions, the murder of Lumumba, and the involvement of the United Nations, the struggles around Congolese independence came to stand for the history of African decolonization at large. The contours of this well-known history have limited our understanding of the process of decolonization in Congo, however. Using the history of Congolese demands for postcolonial cultural restitution, this book investigates the process of decolonization as a “drama of competing visions” and proposes two major shifts in the approach to the history of Congo’s decolonization: a thematic and periodization shift away from the history of the political and military events of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in favor of studying the debates over cultural sovereignty that took place from the late colonial era until the 1980s.61
The dominant construction of the category of decolonization emerged in the West in the face of anticolonial struggles and was organized around Western governmental frameworks, shaping not only the processes of decolonization but also the historical view of that process.62 Consequently, the scholarship emerging from the former colonizer as well as later nationalist histories define decolonization as a moment of rupture, in which new and sovereign nation-states were (or should have been) created.63 Far too often, the moment of political independence