Authentically African. Sarah Van Beurden
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and which condemned many of these “new” African states as weak, incoherent, and failing in comparison with their Western counterparts.
In the case of Congo, the scholarship is dominated by a focus on political and military events taking place between roughly 1955 and 1965.64 The first Congo Crisis, associated with the Katangese Secession and the regional conflicts of the early 1960s, is generally described as part of the process of decolonization. This means that Mobutu’s second coup in 1965 is often seen as the end of the era of decolonization and the beginning of the postcolonial state in Congo.65 This book questions that periodization, argues that independence was more a beginning than an end for the process of decolonization, and advocates for an examination of the history of the Mobutist state through the lens of decolonization.66
Since colonialism consisted of far more than political and economic dominance, so did African interpretations and expectations of decolonization. Often overlooked in the histories of decolonization in Africa are the ways in which cultural sovereignty was imagined and demanded. As this book argues, cultural guardianship came to play an important role in the justification for (late) colonialism, a point made clear in Belgium’s defense of its possession of large museum collections of Congolese art and artifacts, even after Congo’s political independence. As a consequence, Congolese expectations of independence were also shaped by the desire to reclaim the resources necessary to give shape to cultural sovereignty.
As Ngũgũ wa Thiong’o writes, “To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.”67 An important part of this cultural identity relies on the past, which in the case of Congo was created as “authentic traditional culture” by the modernist imagination of Belgian colonial rule, a cultural category from which change and modernity itself were scrubbed. In the Belgian Congo, the preservation of this “tradition” was also conceived as part of the colonial project, particularly by the 1950s. This was implemented via initiatives for the protection and preservation of the production of “traditional” arts and crafts (the “present” past) in the colony, but also in the ownership and preservation of the collection of the Tervuren museum in Belgium. In this process, “traditional” cultures, and particularly the objects that had been recast as art, were reinvented as heritage.
A product of “ways of valuing the past that arose in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe and [. . .] bolstered by nationalism and populism” as well as by Western obsession with identity (both collective and individual), heritage was projected upon non-Western cultures within the context of colonialism and shaped by colonial collecting and displaying practices.68 This had practical consequences: in the European context, the museum, as a place of preservation, had become an important tool in the “activation” of heritage into instruments of nation formation and solidification. Zoe Strother recently observed that if “heritage is culture conceived as property, it is also property obtained through legally determined rights of succession.”69 As such, it should come as no surprise that the ownership of these collections became the subject of debate in the process of decolonization; after all, Belgian rhetoric about Congo was rife with references to the colony as its “maturing child.”
With the European nation-state as a model, the newly independent country sought to create itself as the guardian of its own cultural heritage. Possession of cultural heritage would enable the postcolonial state to construct a cultural legitimacy that underwrote its political legitimacy.70 The historical role of cultural heritage in the African process of decolonization has received little attention to date: most studies of demands for restitution focus on more recent examples, the protection of the heritage of indigenous peoples in the west, or the development of international regulations.71 Recently, African art historians have carefully started exploring heritage as a reflexive, historical concept, open to African interpretations.72 As the embodiment of (imagined) identities and cultures, as well as their pasts, heritage ties the immaterial to the material, a (usable) past to a present, and “having culture” to the possession of cultural artifacts (or “cultural property”), often in the form of monuments, historical sites, landscapes, and museum collections.73 In this book, I am concerned with how the reinvention of “traditional” art as national heritage was used as a political tool, and how preservation was imagined as a necessary road toward the creation of a new national heritage in the form of modern art.
An important role in the world of heritage is reserved for international regulations and conventions, and for UNESCO in particular. International regulations for dealing with the return and protection of cultural property took shape in the aftermath of World War II. These regulations soon became problematic in the face of intensifying decolonization struggles around the world. In combination with the increased tendency to regard African museum collections in the West as heritage, the demands from newly independent or decolonizing countries for the return of what was now by definition their national heritage created considerable pressure on Western cultural institutions.
By the 1970s there was a veritable international conservation regime for the protection of national heritage rights. Walking a tightrope between acknowledging the importance of national heritage and a commitment to preservation, the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property helped nation-states protect the cultural heritage within their borders against illegal removal but refrained from applying the regulations retroactively, sidestepping the matter of material removed during colonial occupations.74
Decolonization may have pushed the reinvention of museum collections like the ones at Tervuren as national heritage, but a competing heritage discourse with universalizing tendencies also emerged. This cast the material as the world’s or mankind’s heritage.75 Not unlike the reinvention of African artifacts as art, the invention of world heritage provided Western museums faced with restitution claims with arguments to keep their collections.76 Usually, preservation claims trumped (and trump) restitution claims. Thus, the international conservation regime, although ostensibly concerned with restitution claims, often worked to the disadvantage of newly independent countries.
“RECOURS À L’AUTHENTICITÉ”: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE MOBUTU REGIME
The campaign for the restitution of the collections of the Museum of the Belgian Congo cast the postcolonial Zairian state as the appropriate guardian for the country’s cultural heritage. This fit in with a broader cultural campaign undertaken by the Mobutu regime. The “Recours à l’authenticité” (“recourse” or “resort” to authenticity) campaign, which reached its height in the early 1970s, was ostensibly aimed at a reinvigoration of Zairian culture, inspired by precolonial, “traditional” culture. It incorporated the antimodernism of colonial interpretations of Congolese traditional cultural authenticity into the construction of an African cultural modernity—in the guise of tradition. Composed of a wide range of initiatives—from the “Zairization” of people’s names, to the renaming of the country, its river, and its cities, to the staging of elaborate cultural manifestations, and the creation of national ethnographic and art collections at the museum institute in Kinshasa—it was set up in opposition to the “inauthentic” nature of the colonial era. Paradoxically, this campaign for cultural authenticity relied heavily on the colonial construction of Congolese authenticity but couched the latter in anticolonial terms by promoting it as a part of a process of decolonization.
As the colonial history of the invention of Congolese cultural authenticity demonstrates, the concept had a political use: it legitimized intervention and “protection” by an authoritarian state. Yet despite its cynical application to legitimize an authoritarian postcolonial state, it also had an intellectual appeal that connected it to a pan-African tradition. It is in part this ambiguous nature of Mobutu’s authenticity politics that make it an interesting historical phenomenon.77
While some of the broader traits of the authenticity campaign are explored in this book, the focus is on the way in which it shaped Congolese postcolonial museum politics and the ways in which the latter were a reflection of (often failed) attempts to decolonize the categories of art and cultural authenticity via collecting practices and the creation of displays and knowledge. This investigation