A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo

6. The Rise of a Colonial Macabre

143 6 · TheRiseofaColonialMacabre I saw him immediately as headless, as becomes him; but what to do with this cumbersome and doubting head? —André Masson, on Acephalus We have not yet finished with Lusinga’s head. Émile Storms’s reasons for taking it may seem as obvious to readers nowadays as they may have been to the lieutenant and those in Europe to whom he explained his efforts through his various reports and letters: Bwana Boma was simply trying to put an end to a “sanguinary potentate” and so establish peace and order for the good of all. Why not take Lusinga’s head? In so doing, Storms could match brutality with brutality and hope to establish his authority among people whom he found to be bloodthirsty, while participating in the “scientific” mission of the IAA asurgedbythesecretarygeneralhimself.1 AfterhisreturntoBrussels,Bwana Boma would submit Lusinga’s skull to the scrutiny of metropolitan physical anthropologists, and that would be that. There was more at stake than such obvious ends, however, and furthermore, surely unbeknownst to the lieutenant , the taking of Lusinga’s head touched upon far more esoteric levels of reckoning for at least some Tabwa of his time. Inchapter9weshallconsiderhowLusingamighthavebeenburiedhadhe not met his demise so abruptly in the hands of Storms’s assassins. Ironically enough, the elaborate rituals that Lusinga and Kansabala—his perpetual 144 · Remembering the Dismembered “mother’s brother”—adopted according to what they understood of and adapted from eastern Luba and related paradigms for noble behavior included ritualdecapitationafterdeathandthevenerationofskulls,butforverydifferent purposes than the fates suffered by Lusinga and his severed head. As we shall see, these matters are compelling evidence of “cosmologies in the making” or what James Fernandez calls “the fabulation of culture,” as Lusinga sought to legitimize his newfound “royalty” on the one hand, and as European scientists established a sense of “Africa” from evidence such as Lusinga’s skull on the other.2 A further dimension of the making of Congolese cultural histories is howTabwapreservationofskullsdifferedfromthekeepingofancestralfigures like the famous one seized from Lusinga’s village by the men of Bwana Boma thatnowresidesintheRoyalMuseumofCentralAfricainTervuren,Belgium. Andinconcludingthisbook,Lusinga’smagnificentsculpturewillbecompared toawatercolorportraitofÉmileStormsasameansofteasingoutfurtherindicationofthe “contrapuntalperspectives” ofthecolonial moment.3 The “Social Life” of Lusinga’s Skull Naturalhistorymuseumsoftenconservevastholdingsofhumanremains,usually collected by archeologists in parts of the world other than their own, or among people different from those with whom such scientists, museum staff, and visitors would most readily identify. One has only to ponder the vast holdingsofAmericanIndianskeletalmaterialsbymuseumsacrosstheUnitedStates to get the point.4 It is hard to know what is “natural” about such institutions, otherthantheirtendencytonaturalizeassertionsandrelationshipsforideologicalpurposes ,butthisisahoaryandongoingstory.5 Frommanypointsofview, including what might be glossed as a Tabwa one, such museums are bizarre places indeed, for it is easy to understand them as haunted by the rancorous powers of the unburied. Nor is anything but an odd anthropomorphism clarified by late nineteenth-century Belgian assertions—as metaphorical as they presumably were meant to be—that contemporary museums were moribund places and “graveyards” with “deathly presentation[s] of objects.” Even more gruesomely, in the words of the sociologist Cyrille Van Overbergh, Belgian museums of his time “resemble[d] some huge body whose limbs are randomly spread, each performing its own function in isolation, with no connection to the heart or the brain: so many lifeless beings, hence the impression of a cemetery .”6 AsStephanPalmiésuggestswithregardtoaCubancounterpart,through The Rise of a Colonial Macabre · 145 similar collecting the Museo Antropológico of Havana “had turned into a giant nganga” or medicinal bundle of Kongolese inflection, “animated by the enslaved remains of the powerful dead. Conjuring science out of violated bodies had become a republican drum of affliction.” In other words, governmental (“republican”) authorities in Cuba have had recourse to skeletons in museum closets, perhaps to tell new tales of integrative purpose, perhaps to deflectattentionfromhistoriestheywouldratherbeforgotten.HereJohannes Fabian’s caveat comes to mind, about “how much we stand to lose when we forget that Africa remembers.”7 In1964theRoyalMuseumofCentralAfricatransferred650humanskulls obtainedbyvariousmeansduringcolonizationoftheCongofromitscollections totheDepartmentofPaleontologyattheRoyalInstituteofNaturalSciencesin Brussels.8 Among them is Lusinga’s, listed as number 151.9 The crania of Tabwa chiefs“Maribou”(Malibu)and“Mpampa”(Kapampa)arealsointhecollection, having been obtained by Storms after battles fought on his behalf but in which he himself was not directly involved. Details of these encounters are very sketchy,butitseemsthatsomeofBwanaBoma’smenwereengagedina“theater of war” more than 100 kilometers south of Lubanda and that the effrontery of Malibu’s boast that “I have vanquished the Arabs and the Wangwana, and the whitemenarenomoreterriblethanthey—Iwillkillallofyou!”ledtohisspeedy demise.AsStormscommentedinhisdiary,“PeopleknowthatIhavetakenafew chiefs’headsinmycollection,anditinspiresbloodyhorror[unesaintehorreur]. They say...