Ukumbusho

Often memory needs to be fixed to an object that can be touched or lifted to the light. Without canvas or paper or something material, even the events that we live through may be difficult to hold.

The paintings are made of reclaimed flour sacks stretched tight and nailed to wood, so that when turned over, the pieces reveal old words across their backs, their provenance the place where bread is baked or burned. Each one is edged in a handmade frame, painted a complementary pink, brown, or pale blue.

Sometimes he signed his work Tshibumba Kanda Matulu. Sometimes Tshibumba K.M. In much of the literature he is referred to simply as Tshibumba or even TKM. In one of many transcribed interviews with anthropologist Johannes Fabian, the artist says, "I tell things through paintings. That is, through painting I show how events happened, right? I don't write but I bring ideas, I show how a certain event happened. In a way, I am producing a monument."

They are small and portable monuments. Most of the paintings measure approximately 15 by 24 inches; they weigh so little it's possible to carry six or seven stacked in one's arms.

How to describe these works of art? They always contain both illustration and text, each painting a representation of a particular moment from the history of the country once called Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), each piece given a detailed title, words written across the blue sky or over the mottled ground. In this way, they can be considered for what they show, for what they say, and for what image and language do together, overlapping.

In the 1970s, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu belonged to a group of artists in the area around Lubumbashi who were known as genre painters and who worked in a figurative style, depicting the landscape, folkloric characters, and traditional scenes of home and family. "[R]epresentations were appreciated," Fabian explains, "because they were required by the nature and purpose of genre paintings: to serve as 'reminders' of past experiences and past predicaments. Ukumbusho, an abstract noun formed from a causative verb, can clumsily but most accurately be translated as 'a quality capable of triggering memories.'" According to Fabian, genre paintings traditionally explore different levels of memory, ukumbusho divided into three categories: the ancestral world, the world of the past, and the world of the present.

Although Tshibumba's style remained recognizably that of a genre painter, his work began to diverge from the conventions of the form, when he conceived of an ambitious project to paint the history of Zaire, a narrative that would include the ancestors then move to the more recent past and finally to the unstable present. While local residents might only purchase three or four paintings at most—severely limiting the opportunity to make a living from one's art, much less to undertake a series of such scope—he realized, through his conversations with Fabian, that visiting academics, businessmen, and diplomats might be likelier to invest in these linked, historical pieces. In Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa, scholar Jan Blommaert writes that Tshibumba's "first contacts with the academics were commercial: they bought paintings that he sold in the street, and they became his best customers. The intellectual engagements came as a side-effect of what was initially, and mainly, a provider-customer relationship. Material interests generated other interests and more profound forms of engagement." But despite this major development in Tshibumba's work, Fabian argues that, as an "artist-historian," the painter remained deeply connected to his aesthetic roots, his genius that "he began as a genre painter, never ceased to be one, and conceived his historical project in constant confrontation with genre painting."

Nearly thirty-five years after we left Africa, my parents give me two paintings; both belong to Tshibumba's Une Histoire du Zaïre. The first one depicts March 8, 1977: the start of Shaba I, when rebels invaded the province of Katanga and outside governments—including the United States—intervened to keep Zaire's military dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, in...