By way of context: One of the privileges of an interning stint at the African Museum is the unlimited access it grants to a much mythologised place I have always been fascinated and enchanted by (even as I learned more about its rather sinister past and associations). Hopefully this, and the fact of having moved from a position of looking at culture to “doing” culture, should provide ample food for thought, with which to nourish and sustain this much neglected little blog, over the coming months.
It’s been 50 years since the Congo gained its independence from Belgium. A milestone the museum has decided to mark on a jubilant, celebratory note, with a series of exhibitions of the central one “Independence!”, is a cursory but colourful look back over those 50 years.
Visiting it however, left me with rather mixed feelings. Trying to put my finger on a way of articulating how I felt about it, I decided to search for inspiration by apprehending the reaction of the visitors who’d preceded me, by means of a leaf through the guestbook. Therein I found surprisingly strong words of indignation and outrage from a number of English speaking visitors. While I can’t recall the exact formulations, damning words like “tr
uth”, “genocide”, “8 million dead”, “shameful”, and “atrocities” were some that stuck in my mind. My initial reaction, in defence of the expo, if not the museum, was that such harsh criticism was unfair, that such details did not strictly belong in an exhibition chronicling the independence of the Congo from just a few years prior to 1960 up until the present day. That these belonged elsewhere.
I did enjoy the abstract and artistic quality of the expo, which contained lots of artworks, poems, music, artefacts and references to cultural and social movements. The problem is, when it comes to delicate issues where questions of politics and moral responsibility are being deliberately kept at arm’s length, the line between what is benignly allegorical and what is insidiously euphemistic, becomes a tricky one to place.
And it’s certainly not that there is nothing to read in the expo. In fact the volume of text – contained largely in reproductions of newspaper articles from around 1960, as well as a great deal of detail about historical events leading up to independence – is somewhat overwhelming.
It’s been 50 years since the Congo gained its independence from Belgium. A milestone the museum has decided to mark on a jubilant, celebratory note, with a series of exhibitions of the central one “Independence!”, is a cursory but colourful look back over those 50 years.
Visiting it however, left me with rather mixed feelings. Trying to put my finger on a way of articulating how I felt about it, I decided to search for inspiration by apprehending the reaction of the visitors who’d preceded me, by means of a leaf through the guestbook. Therein I found surprisingly strong words of indignation and outrage from a number of English speaking visitors. While I can’t recall the exact formulations, damning words like “tr
uth”, “genocide”, “8 million dead”, “shameful”, and “atrocities” were some that stuck in my mind. My initial reaction, in defence of the expo, if not the museum, was that such harsh criticism was unfair, that such details did not strictly belong in an exhibition chronicling the independence of the Congo from just a few years prior to 1960 up until the present day. That these belonged elsewhere.I did enjoy the abstract and artistic quality of the expo, which contained lots of artworks, poems, music, artefacts and references to cultural and social movements. The problem is, when it comes to delicate issues where questions of politics and moral responsibility are being deliberately kept at arm’s length, the line between what is benignly allegorical and what is insidiously euphemistic, becomes a tricky one to place.
And it’s certainly not that there is nothing to read in the expo. In fact the volume of text – contained largely in reproductions of newspaper articles from around 1960, as well as a great deal of detail about historical events leading up to independence – is somewhat overwhelming.
The main problem, as I identified it, is that there is very little in the way of concrete or coherent explanations of two key processes following independence.
Firstly, the process of “hollowing out” of the state after colonialism, the dynamics and logics (such as corruption, nepotism and clientelism) accounting for the extent of economic collapse in the years that followed, due to a systematised policy of extraction under Mobutu on such a scale that it has been described as “kleptocracy” – rule by thieves. It is illustrated with paintings and caricatures, where African politicians are portrayed as predatory animals, but the words explaining it in black and white are missing. The artworks are illustrations to a story that, if you don’t have it in mind already, the museum is not going to tell you, and as a result are essentially of artistic value rather than also being complements to a narrative elucidating history, which would have provided a far fuller explanation.
Firstly, the process of “hollowing out” of the state after colonialism, the dynamics and logics (such as corruption, nepotism and clientelism) accounting for the extent of economic collapse in the years that followed, due to a systematised policy of extraction under Mobutu on such a scale that it has been described as “kleptocracy” – rule by thieves. It is illustrated with paintings and caricatures, where African politicians are portrayed as predatory animals, but the words explaining it in black and white are missing. The artworks are illustrations to a story that, if you don’t have it in mind already, the museum is not going to tell you, and as a result are essentially of artistic value rather than also being complements to a narrative elucidating history, which would have provided a far fuller explanation.
Secondly, another delicate issue ignored almost totally is the situation of considerable instability, violence and unrest currently affecting areas of the Congo. There is no attempt to give a coherent explanation of the roots of the ethnic tensions, which ties into the woes of a number of other countries such as Rwanda, and making the link would have been helpful, not to say important.
Both of these are serious missed opportunities. But not only that, leaving them out means that one leaves the expo feeling as if a crucial piece of the puzzle, or part of the story has been missed out. At the end of the expo we are faced with a series of testimonies from second generation Congolese immigrants living in Belgium, young adults who express their qualms or inability to “celebrate” the anniversary of independence in light of the ongoing misery in terms of poverty and conflict still plaguing the Congo. But the museum, with its colourful displays and collages of upbeat, celebratory headlines, has not explained to us why this is so. The dissonance, the incongruity is striking and irreconcilable, and as a result the expo just doesn’t quite make sense. The story it is trying to tell doesn’t hold up.
So why leave out a clear and neutral full description of historical events, containing the details needed to make sense of how the story ends? Maybe because someone with a degree of forethought worked out that to explain the mess the Congo is in today requires an explanation of the mess Mobutu made, which in turn requires an explanation of the logics of colonialism of which he was the inheritor. And this is where we get back to all that unfortunate genocide business.
Such is the nature of the postcolonial condition: it is pervasive, and no aspect of Congolese society, culture, or recent history can be meaningfully explained without reference to it. This is the intractable problem which this place just can’t seem to escape.
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