Authentically African. Sarah Van Beurden
the war, it also made considerable contributions to the Allied effort in the form of raw materials, especially uranium (most famously including the uranium used in the American atomic bombs dropped on Japan). Increased awareness of the great economic value of the colony’s resources invigorated the Belgian state’s desire to “modernize” the colonial system and increase its hegemony in relation to the powerful companies and missions.
The Belgian state also hoped that a “different” kind of colonial regime, which, in theory, applied some of the principles of the Belgian welfare state, would undermine any nascent independence movements. Belgian belief in its “welfare colonialism” remained strong, which explains why many Belgians were caught completely off guard by events in the colony in 1959.17 Of course, postwar modifications to colonial regimes were not unique to Belgium. Both France and Great Britain attempted to sustain their empires in Africa by implementing limited reforms with the goal of placating the colonies’ increasing demands for participation in the political, social, and economic life.18 The impact of Belgium’s “welfare colonialism” was limited and did not alter the political structures in the colony. Instead, the colonial government believed that social reforms aimed at diminishing the racial segregation between the colonizers and their subjects in daily life and promoting a class of évolués (“evolved” colonial subjects) would be sufficient to ensure the allegiance of the Congolese population.19 Additionally, increased construction of urban and transportation infrastructure and the limited introduction of social welfare benefits for the small class of Congolese wage earners sought to develop the loyalties of urban populations.20 These efforts, however, ignored the rural underdevelopment that defined the communities in which most Congolese people lived.21
Crucial to selling this renewed colonial vigor to the Belgian population was the idea of mise en valeur, or the value the colony’s exploitation could generate for the mother country.22 As it had before, the Museum of the Belgian Congo played a prominent role in the promotion of the promise of the colony to Belgians. As I will argue next, in the postwar era and particularly in the 1950s, the changing status of Congolese art, expressed in the museum’s promotion and display, moved it closer to the status of resource. The museum promoted the exceptional nature and value of Congolese material culture, converting artifacts of ethnography into art historical treasures. Belgium came to see itself as the guardian not only of the colony’s mineral resources but also of the cultural authenticity of its “traditional” cultures, the protection of which was embodied by the museum.
COLONIAL COLLECTING AND THE ORIGINS OF THE TERVUREN ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTION
“Any collection promises totality,” Susan Steward has written. This totality is achieved by the “temporal diremption,” or the erasure of temporal dimensions, and the “imposition of a frame” or narrative.23 Museums often present their ethnographic collections as comprehensive units, obscuring not only the diverse origins of the objects but also the diversity of the collection process. While its ownership is singular—the museum owns the collection—its composition was multiauthored and contained a variety of processes. This diversity is muted in the museum life of the objects. In the case of the Museum of the Belgian Congo’s collection, a great number of people, most of whom were not affiliated with the museum, contributed to its collection. Not only were their motivations for gathering material very diverse, so were the practices and contexts of collecting and the pathways by which their objects arrived at the museum. As Anthony Shelton writes: “Collections are built on individual histories; histories that mediate the self and its specific historical and cultural milieu.” These individual histories were shaped into a unified collection that came to represent the culture(s) of the colony to a significant part of the Belgian population.24
The term collecting carries a deceptive innocence that can obfuscate a variety of ways of obtaining material. In a colonial context, some of this “collecting” was part and parcel of the violence of the early conquest, even when it came in the guise of scientific interest, while other forms of collecting were much closer to existing patterns of trade and exchange of commodities. This chaos around collecting and documenting runs counter to the museum’s (theoretical) Enlightenment roots as a place for systematic organization and classification and lays bare the haphazard origins of colonial ethnography as a discipline. With regard to Tervuren, these circumstances created the selective and fragmented nature of the collection that would form the basis for representations of the colony’s cultures to the metropolitan audience.25
Currently, the ethnographic collection of Tervuren holds about 125,000 objects, about 85 percent of which come from Central Africa. Between its founding after the colonial exhibition of 1897 and the opening of the museum building in 1910, it had gathered a collection of about 30,000 pieces.26 It is difficult to be more precise about the rate of growth of the collection because, to this day, the museum does not possess an exact breakdown of the origins of its ethnographic collection.27 It is, however, possible to give an overview of the origins of a sample of 250 of the museum’s “treasures.” This snapshot is based on the 1995 exhibition Treasures from the Africa Museum Tervuren and can serve as a window onto the collection as a whole.28 I analyzed the available data on these 250 objects to discover how the objects were obtained by the museum, by whom they were originally collected, and when they were collected or registered. Of the 250 objects, 99 were gifts, 96 were bought, and 11 were collected by the museum staff in Congo.29 Ninety-one of the “treasures” were originally collected by colonials and 13 by missionaries. It is also interesting to note here that at least 45 of the objects were at some point part of a well-known collector’s collection.
Based upon the available but incomplete information, 29 of the objects were collected before the twentieth century, while no collection dates were mentioned after independence. For the objects that only had a date of registration connected to them, the numbers are pretty steady for the first half of the twentieth century with about 10 to 15 per decade. Not many of the objects (20) were registered after independence.30
The people involved with providing the museum with ethnographic materials can be roughly divided into four (overlapping) groups: colonials, explorers and scientists, missionaries, and last, art collectors and art dealers. From the earliest contact between Portuguese sailors and the Kongo peoples in the fifteenth century, the collection and appropriation of African objects (and vice versa) had been part of the relationship between both parties. The advent of late nineteenth-century European colonialism in Africa, however, greatly accelerated Western acquisition of African material culture and considerably broadened the area from which these objects were removed to include the interior of the continent. It is difficult to do justice to people’s diverse motivations for collecting objects in Congo, whether they were doing so for personal, professional, political, economic, or religious purposes. What we can do, however, is follow these varied motivations as they became subsumed into increasingly comprehensive systems of knowledge that organized the collection and its displays.
The group that was among the first to start collecting ethnographic material in Congo were the colonial officers and soldiers in service of the AIA and, later, of Leopold II’s Congo Free State. As Maarten Couttenier has noted, in the exploration and later conquest of Congo, “military conflicts and the acquisition of material culture went hand in hand.”31 These acquisitions were not merely the result of the private initiative of these men, however. They also gathered material upon the request of King Leopold II, who tasked them with the collection of material that could be used in various colonial expositions in Belgium.32 So while the objects (which also included human remains, particularly skulls) were sometimes the spoils of war or the trophies of conquest, and other times the result of an exchange of goods and gifts, they were also, from the very beginning, promotional material for the empire.
One colonial officer who collected for colonial exhibitions, but whose personal collection also eventually ended up at Tervuren, was Émile Storms. Storms was a commander of the AIA, set up by Leopold II ostensibly to promote scientific knowledge about Central Africa. The very nature of the AIA as a scientific organization involved with colonial conquest illustrates how closely the gathering of knowledge (and things) was related to the imperial project.33 Storms spent the years between 1882