The proposed panel will focus on the former Belgian Congo. It sets out from the premise that decolonisation was so traumatic that everyone - Congolese and Belgians alike - wanted to forget the past. Now, more than forty years on, a desire to remember is emerging. The panel will look at the place private collections occupy in the process of remembering.
Writings on the Congo have focused so much on its horrors that one loses sight of other facets of its past. Another approach to the Congo is long overdue, one that is guided by memory. Recent exhibitions and events world-wide testify to the existence of a strong and growing impulse to remember and to reconfigure the past and to look beyond the horror and colonial barbarity in search of a more balanced memory. Private collections occupy a unique and important place through which the memory of the Congo continues to be preserved. Using specific collections in Belgium, the panel will discuss how, through these collected objects, a culture is created and imagined and a memory constructed. While the primary aim of the panel is to examine the Congo’s distinctive cultural history through these private collections, employing ideas and forms of memory as the pivotal element of that examination, the panel will also address other questions related to collecting such as: classification of objects and social systems; historical and ethical dimensions of collecting; dispossession and cultural obliteration; collecting and features of colonialism.
Is the collector driven by a passion to possess material objects or is he possessed by the passion to collect? In this paper, I address this question by looking at a private collection of some 1,500 African and Africanist paintings. They were brought together by Joris Van Severen, after his return from the Congo. My data are based on an analysis of photographs of the paintings (most of the paintings are not on display but scattered in two private houses, hanging on walls, lying on floors, on stairways etc.) and an interview with Van Severen. I argue that collecting paintings which were either executed during the colonial era or executing in the Africanist style, which originated during the colonial era, allows Van Severen to legitimise his ongoing identification with Belgium's colonisation of the Congo, a much contested period in contemporary Belgian (Flemish) society.
The Africa Museum of Namur (Musée Africain de Namur; MAN) is a regional museum that deals with Belgian colonial history as well as aspects of culture and of natural history in Central Africa (mainly Congo). Since it was founded in 1912 as the Colonial Museum of Namur, it has been run by former colonials most of whom are presently members of the Namur Royal Circle of Africa Veterans. After having changed locations six times and changed names five times, the MAN is currently experiencing a period of consolidation and growth. While (donated) objects are flooding into its collections, the museum progressively extends its activities, and broadens its alliances with civil society organisations, academic institutions, as well as with local and regional authorities. This paper is an attempt to situate the present revival at the conjunction of historical and contemporary dynamics at different (local, regional, national, and international) scales.
The MAN provides a rather typical case of ‘colonial collecting’ as characterised by Breckenridge (1989): combining intimate self-referencing (the objects enable ex-colonials to tour their own pasts and permit others to tour it) with the repatriation of knowledge as well as the wielding of moral and material control of the former colonials over the ex-colony and their experience of it. Moreover, such projects have often been characterised as exercises in selfing/othering and the construction of national identities (Prösler 1998). However, this paper argues that we need to move beyond such characterisations – that MAN is also a site of postcolonial and postnational cultural fabrication. The memory work as well as the heritigization of the Belgian colonial empire (as represented by Leopold II), it is argued, serves to demarcate a site of resistance in the face of regional (Namur, Walloon) marginalisation, national (Belgian) disintegration, and international criticism of the (Belgian) colonial legacy. In sum, MAN is as much about the national and the colonial as it is about ‘glocalisation’ and the postcolonial condition – it is as much about intimately engaging with the erstwhile empire as it is about caressing the new ‘Empire’.
On a recent journey though the internet, searching for the ways in which the myth of the Pygmy lives on in the virtual world, I came across two seemingly trivial details. The first concerned the recent salvaging by the Academic Film Archive of North America of an ethnographic film from the 1930s about a group of Pygmies building a suspension bridge over a crocodile infested river in the Ituri forest. The second related to the Congo-born artist Augie N'Kele who has taken this same act of construction as the inspiration for a sculpture about ingenuity, perseverance and forgotten heritage. In this paper, I use these two modern instantiations of the myth of the Pygmy to discuss the colonial era film industry that grew up around Camp Putnam and Epulu and the complex patternings of imposition, collection, retrieval and display revealed through the resulting visual representations. Though seemingly trivial, the trope of the swinging Pygmy leads us towards an understanding of a continuing Euro-American mythologic process of ethno-genesis that has been transposed onto Africa, collected as truth, and transformed into the knowledge of the Pygmy.
This paper explores the relationships of Anne Eisner Putnam, Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam, and Colin Turnbull to the Mbuti collections at the AMNH and to each other. Two excellent biographies, one by Roy Richard Grinker on Colin Turnbull (2000), and one by Joan Mark on Patrick Putnam (1995), along with Anne Eisner’s autobiography Madami: My Eight Years of Adventure with the Congo Pygmies (Putnam and Keller 1954), give fuller pictures of these personalities and their relationships. Frankland’s (2001) work explores in more detail the phenomenon of tourism among the Pygmies, including the Putnam camp at Epulu. Here I am concerned with the collections that the Putnams and Turnbull made for the AMNH, how they thought about and used these collections, and how the collections themselves came to form part of the representation of the Mbuti and the “Pygmy” in the American imagination.
During the 1870s, quite a number of expeditions (including those by Henry M. Stanley) explored the Congo Basin. Some of their members were equipped with cameras.
Upon their return in Europe, the setting-up of photographic albums proved of paramount importance as a homage gift to fellow-explorers, politicians, and financiers, including King Leopold the Second, of Belgium. While this King deliberately destroyed most archives of the Congo Free State, some Albums did not experience this doom. However, especially when compared with the other images these explorers brought back, they altogether enable an in-depth analysis of the origins, nature, and aims of the visual Congo constructed for, and presented to the European public.
Explorers scrutinized include: Henry M. Stanley, H. Ward, the de Brazza brothers, the Rev. Grenfell, the Rev. Forfeitt-Lawson, the Muellers brothers.
Major documentary sources include those kept at the following institutions: Archives du Palais Royal (Brussels), Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (Brussels-Tervuren), Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence).
How does a collector of Congolese artefacts imagine and construct the Congo if he has never been there? This paper addresses this question by taking the example of one particular collector, Tony Jorissen. For Jorissen, a retired employee of a local bank, collecting has taken on an intellectual as well as an artistic dimension. Each piece constitutes the object of considerable research regarding its aesthetic, ritual and social meaning. An attempt is made to contextualise each piece and to explore it alongside similar pieces from other African countries. The Congolese artefacts Jorissen has collected are carefully displayed in his own house alongside and integrated with Western artefacts, effectively creating an exhibition in the space of daily living. The paper reflects on the image of the Congo that emerges and on the relationship this collector has developed with the Congo.
This paper analyses the ongoing process of renovation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, the former museum for the Belgian Congo. The declared purpose of the process is to 'decolonise' the image of Africa that was created for and shown to the Belgian audience by a museography that has changed little since the post-war period and the independence of Belgian colonies. Designated three years ago, the new director asserts that from now on, the old colonial museum has to deal with today's Africa, and with the African vision of today's Africa, and to acquaint the Belgians with this new reality (see strategic plan and numerous statements in the Belgian and international press). Interviews with some members of the museum staff nevertheless led me to consider the official statements critically and to question the gap between the stated ambitions and the concrete achievements. One thus wonders whether this new positioning might not be a way to avoid seriously considering the colonial past of both the museum and the country. Moreover, one may ask whether the new presentation will display a more accurate image of Africa, or stick to an imaginary vision, the colonial bias being replaced by a projection of desired relations between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The paper focuses on the genesis and evolution of the official statement about the renovation over the past few years, and, from a critical standpoint, deals with the questions mentioned above.