Authentically African. Sarah Van Beurden
The Museum of Indigenous Life was not the only museum in the colony by the 1930s. In addition to a number of missionary collections on display and small, often short-lived museum initiatives by regional AAI branches, there was also the Leopold II museum in Elisabethville, the capital of the Katanga mining region.22 The museum had its origin in the personal collection of archeological material of Francis Cabu, an employee of the National Institute for Agronomical Studies and Research, in Katanga. At first he opened up his living room as an exposition space, but soon the collection began a long journey through a variety of locales and gradually included more than prehistoric and archaeological artifacts.23 Colonial officials brought the museum artifacts from their respective administrative units. The legal authorities in Elisabethville also donated the “fetishes and medicinal objects” they confiscated during raids on “sects” prohibited by the colonial government.24 Although it amassed a decent collection of ethnographic material, the museum’s strengths remained its archaeological and geological collections. As such, it was not the center of activism for the preservation of indigenous art that the MVI in Leopoldville was.
A POLITIQUE ESTHÉTIQUE: AN AGENDA FOR CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE COLONY
While World War II froze the incipient activities of COPAMI and the AAI, it accelerated the Belgian government’s desire for change and modernization in the colony, a trend that was accompanied by an increased concern about the state of Congolese traditional cultures, their artistic heritage, and their artisanal production. Pierre Ryckmans, governor-general of the Belgian Congo since 1934, stressed the importance of separating the government system from the interests of the big colonial companies. In 1946 he openly opposed those companies’ practice of exporting their profits. The 1949 ten-year plan for economic and social development in Congo proposed the use of government funds to modernize the economy, which translated into an increased presence of the state at all levels of life. In reality most of the attention went to economic development, but the growing presence of the state translated into increased control over various aspects of the lives of colonial subjects, felt not only in social policies but in the cultural domain as well.25 Some colonial administrators became convinced that knowledge of “traditional societies” could be seen as “applicable knowledge” in the service of modernization and development.26
While the colonial state expanded its presence, anxieties about the impact of modernization and Western society and culture on “traditional” African societies increased. The expanding expatriate population, which reached 109,457 people in 1958, 86,736 (or 79.2 percent) of whom were Belgians, observing the growing migration toward colonial cities, became increasingly worried about the disappearance of “authentic” rural communities and their traditions. This resonated with the metropolitan community’s growing intellectual and aesthetic interest in African art.27
While the goal of expanding the colonial system was an increased mise en valeur of the colony, Belgian nostalgia for an imagined Congolese past with “authentic” traditional communities grew in tandem with the colonial state. In her interviews with former Belgian colonials, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour noticed their preference for “the bush,” which they saw as the real Congo. While they downplayed the destructiveness of the colonial system, they lamented the changes occurring in rural societies. Dembour notes that many of her interviewees displayed a striking lack of awareness about the origin of these changes.28 Defined as “imperialist nostalgia” by Renato Rosaldo, this admiration for a traditional way of life was not new. Admiration for the “noble savage” went back centuries, going hand in hand with the image of the “primitive savage.”29 The romanticization of rural and preindustrial life translated into a desire for local, handmade, and “authentic” objects, in which these qualities were supposedly embedded. This perspective was compounded with a view of colonized peoples as part of a previous stage in the evolution of human development. Ultimately, the goal of the “civilizing” process was to lift such peoples out of the past and into a future in which they would be manufacturers and consumers. But by placing such emphasis on cultural authenticity, colonialism denied colonized Africans a place in a political, cultural and social modernity.30
The activities of COPAMI and AAI reveal how these growing anxieties about modernity in the colony focused on the demise of artisanal and artistic production in the colony, and how the solution to these was located in the creation of an institutional complex that included workshops, art schools, and museums. COPAMI members decided that the right course of action was to draw up a politique esthéthique (“politics of aesthetics”), a central manifesto for cultural action by the colonial state. The commission members all envisioned a clear split between a past, when the masterpieces of Tervuren were produced, and the present, which was their sole area of concern. The possibility that contemporary Congolese societies were capable of producing pieces equal in quality to those in Tervuren was largely dismissed. What was understood to be under discussion may be more accurately described as artisanal production: arts and crafts or artisanat, the “minor” arts.
While the mise en valeur of the art collection at Tervuren revolved around the exceptional nature of the pieces and the artistic value that translated itself into economic and financial value, like other resources of the colony, the valorization of artistic traditions in the colony itself lay with artisanal production, which represented the connection between the rich artistic past and a modern future with a crafts industry rooted in tradition. “Authentic” arts and crafts, however, were considered to be in decline, a consequence of the disappearance of traditional identities and ways of life and a sign of a changing, destabilizing society. As Adrien Vanden Bossche, the first director of the MVI, wrote, “The works of indigenous artists are no longer supported by the complex ideology that generated them in the past. The suppression of certain customs and superstitions inherent in primitive life results in a certain disinterest in the making of artistic oeuvres.”31 While, in an earlier phase of the colonizing process, local art and crafts had been seen as inferior to Western products and representative of the savagery of the Africans, many of these same objects (particularly sculptures and textiles) were now viewed as a potential source for disciplined and industrious craftsmanship, as part of the civilizing process.32
On the face of things, colonial modernization was the culprit for the decline. However, the Belgians reasoned, it was rather the inability of the Congolese to deal with modern developments, allowing themselves to be seduced by the money offered by Western art dealers both for their “ancestral” art and for artisanal production, that caused the problem. From this perspective, it was the financial incentive that impaired the ability of communities to hold onto their older and more beautiful objects. Attracted to the tools and materials of modernity, artisans also lost the ability to work with traditional techniques, thereby undermining their ability to produce authentic work. The Belgians believed the loss of these traditional techniques reflected a loss of traditional identity, which was the real issue and was feared to have political consequences.
The increased commercialization of the arts and crafts market also worried the members of COPAMI and AAI. They feared that artisans overly concerned with earning money—in order to participate in the modern colonial economy—were susceptible to Europeanization, and therefore deterioration, either because they would adapt their products to the wishes and tastes of the foreign buyers or because they would neglect quality in favor of quantity in order to maximize profits. Clearly, however, it was not the rising popularity of Congolese crafts as consumption products (or “colonial kitsch,” as Jean-Luc Vellut has called it) that was the problem for COPAMI and AAI, but the fact that they believed a growing market in crafts needed to be controlled by the colonial state and its representatives in order to maintain the “authentic” character of artisanal production.33 This authenticity rested with “traditional” modes of production and “traditional” materials, assumed to lead to a more sustained development of artisanal production and of a rural artisanal class.
COPAMI and AAI’s view of rural life ignored the pressures and difficulties faced by large parts of the Congolese population in the 1950s. There was considerable pressure from forced cultivation and crop rotation systems, an insistence on restructuring rural communities around nuclear families, and an increased dependence on a monetary economy.34