Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture by Sarah Van Beurden (review)

Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture is an important and timely book given French President Emmanuel Macron’s declaration in November 2017 that he was committed to “temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa” (Dagen 2017). Restitution has a history in Africa and one that both politicians and museums would be wise to study. Already in 1973, Mobutu Sese Seko launched a demand before the UN in New York for return of cultural heritage to the Republic of Zaïre (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). In the end, the Zairian leader won the transfer of 1,042 ethnographic and art objects from the Belgian Royal Museum of Central Africa (Tervuren) (p. 123).

In Authentically African, Sarah Van Beurden argues that Belgium began to search for a more humane rationale for colonialism after World War II and began to frame stewardship over the collections at Tervuren as evidence for a paternalistic responsibility for safeguarding an “endangered authenticity” in the Congo itself (p. 24). The Mobutu regime (1965–97) reinvented “tradition” as “national heritage” and adapted “colonial notions of cultural authenticity in the national cultural ideology of authenticité” in order to mold modern political subjects (p. 21). It was now the Zairian state that would assume the mantle of guardianship over culture in the body politic (p. 101). Among the more famous provisions of “authenticité” were laws demanding the adoption of indigenous names for both people and places.

In chapter 1, Van Beurden introduces the vast research and exhibition complex at Tervuren, which opened in 1910 as the “Museum of the Belgian Congo” with the explicit mandate to promote the colony (p. 26). The institution was “the most visible presence of the empire in Belgium and one of the major avenues through which Belgian citizens got to know their colony” (p. 24). Although the collection includes minerals, agricultural products, natural history dioramas, and colonial history displays, Van Beurden concentrates on the ethnographic collections, which by the 1950s were increasing reframed as “art.” She documents the pivotal mediation of the art market in cultivating a concern for “authenticity,” as defined by the production of rural populations in (imagined) isolation from European influences.

Chapter 2 “investigates how the changing ideas about African art impacted ideas about cultural policies in the colony” (p. 61). In 1935, the Belgian Parliament voted to establish a Commission for the Protection of Native Arts and Crafts, and signed legislation in 1939 setting out the terms for the selection and protection of heritage sites. Most importantly, the Commission legitimated the activities of an energetic philanthropic group, Friends of Native Art, based in the colonial capital with filial branches operating in a number of provinces. This group supported a great many initiatives, including the founding of museums and workshops.

The history reported here is available nowhere else and is essential reading. I hope that it will spark a rethinking of twentieth century art history in the Congo. Although few like to admit it, most Congolese sculptures exhibited in museum collections were made during the twentieth century. What was the impact of the Friends’ publications, workshops, and museum formation on the survival and/or disappearance of indigenous artistic practices?

Van Beurden emphasizes the commitment of the Commission and Friends to “tradition” and “authenticity” but I have found that the positions of major players could be complex (Strother 2016: 242–50, 312–13 n. 1–11). For example, Jean Vanden Bossche, director of the Museum of Native Life in Léopoldville (Kinshasa), believed in a “racial soul” but argued that Congolese needed artists who were able to articulate the “Europeanized African culture in formation”—it was “absurd” to “freeze” someone in the past (Vanden Bossche 1955: 37, 39). It is perhaps not surprising that the most conservative member of the Commission seems to have been the Tervuren representative, Frans Olbrechts.

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