Popular African Painting As Social Drama in The Western Media: The Case of Zaire

Popular African Painting As Social Drama in The Western Media Cheri Samba. le Grand Marche. mDJournal of Contemporary African Art· Spring 1996 The Case of Zaire T.K.Biaya n epresentations such as images, are created from the knowledge .nand ways of thinking current in a society; they serve functions, moving from place to place and transforming themselves. They also bear a certain kind of ethnocentrism. Ifnecessary, they institute their own markets, drawing artists, researchers, and audiences. Today, they are largely circulated by the media; films, television, museums, and art exhibitions remain the best distributors of images of Others. The "Africa Explores" (1991) exhibiton in New York, following the "Magiciens de la Terre" (1989) exhibition in Paris, placed side by side the popular Zairean artists, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu and Cheri Samba without suspecting that it was placing together two kinds of recognition, two encounters, and two images/ representations of the same thing. Thanks to the exhibition, the history of contemporary popular Zairean painting became redefined so as to begin in 1926 with Tshelantendu and continue through to Cheri Samba in 1991. The media the exhibition put on the western market, in addition to the exhibition itself, and the catalogue, consisted of three postcards and a publicity journal composed of Tshibumba's painting La Mort Historique de LumumbalThe Historic Death of Lumumba and Cheri Samba's Lutte Contre les Moustiquesl Fight Against the Mosquitoes. These paintings, which had already been made available to the public by the film Maitres des Rues (Voices from Zaire, 1988) and the magazine, Aetuel (1990), would be taken up again by other media, like Le Monde Diplomatique (1992-1994). Then, perhaps naively, no one suspected the epistemology under which the paintings were being framed both as popular art and as representations ofAfrica, analyzed accordingly as Zairean history and popular culture. Popular painting became a representation of social drama. The wire supplying the current for this artistic production and its reproduction in contemporary media remains a colonial knowledge, with its many faces, expressions, and places. It should be noted here that the works of Tshelantendu and Lubaki are yet to be published. The vision of B. Jewsiewicki, which posits the analogy of Cheri Samba - after the fashion of Gauguin, the real modern savage - as a "real Maori" instituting an anthropology of the west, is opposed to the vision that we find in an archaeology of Zairean popular culture. This archaelogy shows instead that Cheri Samba, playing in Tintin au Congo (Herg, 1974), prolonged the myth of the "civilizing mission;' while Tshibumba Kanda developed a vision opposed to that of Cheri Samba, in defending original African culture. Reinterpreting his own paintings, La Mort de Lumpungu and Simba ya Bulaya, Tshibumba contradicts Herg's colonial film by praising the anti-colonial resistance of Chief Songya Lumpungu and denouncing white colonialist cannibalism - "mutumbula", "Simba ya Bulaya" or "mundele-ngulu". Despite this divergence, Tshibumba and Cheri Samba are profoundly implicated in the colonial mode, through the representations they purvey and in their roles as actors or historians which their patrons impose upon them, in turn cutting them off from the popular art movement led by their compatriots. Illustrative ofthis is the film Maitres des Rues, which opens with Cheri Samba perched on a balcony. The artist descends towards the market, evoking the national television's image of Mobutu, the "Messie of Zaire;' descending from the clouds. Ironically, it presents, fifty years later, the image of Tintin setting off for adventures in the Congo/Zaire. This young reporter, getting on board a train , finds himself on the departure track surrounded by a group of journalists and curious Belgians. Arriving in Zaire, he gets off the train amidst a crowd of jubilant "natives." The departure and arrival tracks serve here as the "grand marche" (big market), and the image ofthe artist's deployment from the balcony to this public square - delivered by the camera - corresponds to the path ofthe boat. Just like Tintin's arrival at his destination, Cheri Samba advances towards the discovery of a contemporary Zaire in crisis. The commentary accompanying these first images evokes Conrad's works and those of National Geographic Society's Zaire Boat Journey (1991), and shows...