Art with Fight in It: Discovering that a Statue of a Colonial Officer Is a Power Object from the 1931 Pende Revolt

This article investigates a Kwilu Pende statue of a Belgian colonial officer (Fig. 1) through the combined perspectives of historical events, an unusual wealth of relevant documentation, and technical analysis. Its origin stems from the chance encounter now more than forty years ago by which Herbert Weiss, a political scientist and student of protest movements in the Congo, was able to acquire the work and learn the identity of the subject. More recently, examination by curator Richard Woodward and conservator Kathy Gillis at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts revealed a series of extraordinary channels—carefully planned and executed in the freshly carved green wood. These discoveries prompted further investigation and dialogue by Weiss, Woodward, and Z.S. Strother, a scholar of Pende art history, in wrestling with understanding this unusual work and seizing a rare opportunity to recover a fragment of African art history.

Part I: The Pende Revolt 1931: Oppression, Protest, Survival, and Art

I arrived in the Congo in December 1959 with the task of studying the independence struggle that had begun in earnest early that year. I researched three political parties among the many that existed, but finally focused on the Parti Solidaire Africain (PSA) because its leaders trusted me more than the other parties did and even allowed me to photocopy its files (Weiss and Verhaegen 1963). The PSA was very successful in mobilizing the Pende, the Mbuun, the Mbala and many smaller ethnic groups in the Kwilu District east of Leopoldville/Kinshasa (Weiss 1967). It became a partner in the alliance led by Patrice Lumumba that won the May 1960 elections and formed the first government on the declaration of independence on June 30, 1960.¹ PSA President Antoine Gizenga—a Pende—became Deputy Prime Minister, and Cleophas Kamitatu, the man who had been responsible for the successful mobilization of the Kwilu population, became governor of the huge Leopoldville Province.

Tragic events galloped one after the other immediately after independence was established—the army mutinied, the richest provinces seceded, the UN sent a peacekeeping force and, most important, the Congo became an arena of Cold War competition. The result was the assassination of Lumumba in January 1961 (Gerard and Kuklick 2015) and the expulsion of his allies from leadership positions (CRISP n.d.a). Some joined the new US-supported government, some went into exile (CRISP n.d.a), and of those, some returned just three years later to start a revolution (CRISP n.d.b).

One of the continuities in Pende history is severe oppression, determined protest, devastating defeat, and repeated resilience. Until recently, they were overwhelmingly a rural people. During the independence struggle, the PSA was led by urban elites and mass support naturally came from the rural grass roots. The Pende tendency to protest manifested itself in the fact that followers were often more aggressively opposed to the whole colonial system than their leaders. It is a phenomenon that I called “rural radicalism” (Weiss 1967).² This pattern follows the earlier Pende Revolt of 1931 that is discussed in this article and yielded the remarkable sculpture that is its main focus.

My attention was drawn to the significance that the 1931 Revolt bore for later events while I was conducting field research in the Kwilu in 1966 and 1972. In 1972 a man in Gungu approached me with two interesting Pende figures. Both were old. One was a beautiful female figure (Fig. 2). The other one clearly represented a white man wearing some sort of uniform (Fig. 1). I didn’t have enough cash on me to purchase both so I left the figure of the white man behind, but not before taking a couple of photos and inquiring about its origin. I was told that it represented the white man who was killed in 1931 and that it had been placed in the clan’s house for sacred objects. That was a clear reference to the Pende Revolt...