first word
Is Repatriation Inevitable?
by Allen F. Roberts
Debates about repatriation of human remains
and significant cultural materials to their com-
munities of origin, including objects deemed
“art” following culturally determined assess-
ments, have raged for many years. One need
only consider how the “madness” of returning
the famed fifth-century bce “Elgin Marbles,” as
they are known in the UK after the man who
purloined them from the Acropolis in the early
nineteenth century, is debated as an issue of
contemporary politics in Britain, as has been
the case for generations (Trend 2018). Yet there
seems a sudden acceleration of such conver-
sations with regard to sub-Saharan holdings
(par exemple., Scher 2018).
Perhaps most notable has been French
President Emmanuel Macron’s November 2017
declaration at the University of Ouagadou-
gou that within the next five years, “condi-
tions should be met for a return of African
patrimony to Africa.” This position was found
“surprising to many” in France, Le Monde
reported. In March 2018, President Macron
named Bénédicte Savoy, an historian of French
arts, and Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese econo-
mist, novelist, and theorist of Afro futurism, à
produce a plan to this effect before the end of
2018.1 Such news was well received in former
French colonies like the Republic of Bénin,
where calls have long been made for return of
important sculptures and other artifacts seized
during colonial conquest in the 1890s. Presi-
dent Macron has promised to see to changing
the legislation that has long considered such
works the inalienable property of the French
Republic.2
Equally well-heralded initiatives are
underway concerning loot from the Punit ive
Expedition of 1897 to what is now south-
western Nigeria, including the famed Benin
Bronzes held at the British Museum and other
Allen F. Roberts is Professor of World
Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA and a
member of the UCLA African Arts edito-
rial board. His most recent book, A Dance
of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial
Hegemony in the Congo (2013, Indiana
University Press), won the Arnold Rubin
Outstanding Publications Award
depuis
ACASA for Best African Arts Book 2011–
2013. aroberts@arts.ucla.edu
1 This figure, invested by the matrilineal
ancestors of the Tabwa chief Lusinga lwa
Ng’ombe of what would become the Congo,
was seized by mercenaries of the military
officer Émile Storms in early December, 1884,
and brought home with him to Belgium.
Through the sculpture, Lusinga still has stories
to tell, as during a visit to Los Angeles for the
Shaping Power exhibition of 2013 at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art.
Photo: courtesy LACMA
institutions across Europe and the Americas.
In an interview with The Guardian, Afri-
canist art historian John Picton captures the
conundrum:
The moral case is indisputable. Those antiquities
were lifted from Benin City and you can argue
that they ought to go back. On the other hand, le
rival story is that it is part of world history and
you do not want to take away African antiquity
from somewhere like the museums in Paris or
London because that leaves Africa without its
proper record of antiquity …
… presumably with regard to inclusion in
encyclopedic histories composed for largely
non-African audiences. “Concerns about se-
curity were … foremost in the minds of Euro-
pean institutions,” Picton continues, and “there
has to be a recognition perhaps that things
are on long-term loan from Nigeria” (Quinn
2017).3 Who gets to decide what constitutes
“security” is haunted by ongoing colonial
notions of African “incompetence” and refusal
to recognize that if, by some measures, certain
African museums are “insecure” because
treasures have been stolen and sold from their
reserves, Africans are usually not the ones
purchasing them or whose countries show
disinterest in establishing bilateral agreements
to prohibit such commerce.4
That such complexities have been readily
ignored is a function of broader neocolonial
strategies and colonial amnesia—the forgetting
of inconvenient pasts.5 Nonetheless, ça com-
mence à bouger un peu—things are beginning
to “shake” just a bit and in unexpected ways, comme
attested by the denouement from the following
case study from Belgium and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. The case itself suggests
how politically and culturally complicated
repatriation can—and, peut-être, should—be.
LUSINGA IN LOS ANGELES
Lusinga lwa Ng’ombe visited Los Angeles
dans 2013,6 despite the fact that this Congolese
warlord was decapitated in 1884 by assassins
dispatched by the Belgian military officer
Émile Storms. A majestic wooden figure of
Lusinga (figue. 1), seized by Storms’s merce-
naries and transported to Belgium where it is
now understood to be among the “treasures”
of the Royal Museum for Central Africa
(RMCA), is invested with ancestral spirits
of the chief and his matrilineage. When the
sculpture was displayed in an exhibition at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art entitled
Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the
Royal Museum for Central Africa, Lusinga was
present as well.7
Sculpture and related performance practices
played instrumental roles in the formation
and expansion of important central African
polities. En effet, the efficacies of such works
of art shaped power, even as they were shaped
by power.8 Such an active sense of artistic
engagement with people’s purposes informed
the composition and design of the LACMA
exhibition. The juxtapositions of objects on
display further suggest ways that museum
exhibitions can be curated so that ambiguities
of who “owns” what are given full play, et
no one has the last word—as, en effet, neither
Lusinga nor Storms did, peut, or will.
D'abord, a beheading. The event occurred on
Décembre 4, 1884, and has been articulated
ever since through competing Congolese
and Belgian histories attuned to particular
audiences and political goals (A.F. Roberts
2013). Two protagonists engaged in a deadly
pas-de-deux driven by immense ambition, comme
each man violently strove to establish hege-
mony along the southwestern shores of Lake
Tanganyika in what is now the DRC: Lusinga
lwa Ng’ombe, deemed a “sanguinary potentate”
by the British explorer Joseph Thomson after
visiting the chief in 1879 because of Lusinga’s
ruthless slaving for the east African trade;
and Émile Storms, belligerent commander
of the fourth International African Associa-
tion expedition and founder of an outpost at
Mpala near Lusinga’s redoubt.9 The IAA’s overt
mandate was to promote scientific knowledge
VOL. 52, NON. 1 SPRING 2019 arts africains | 1
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while helping to suppress slavery. Lusinga and
Storms were bound for confrontation, et
Lusinga lost his head.
Storms did develop IAA scientific aims,
and as he scheduled, mapped, traded, et
collected, he broached Belgian colonization
of time, place, valeur, and Nature itself. Il
also initiated changes in social organization
still perceptible in the mid-1970s at Mpala.10
Yet despite its lofty public goals, the IAA was
a front for the imperialist maneuvering of
Léopold II, King of the Belgians. Storms had
a covert directive to strike off westward from
Mpala to join Henry Morton Stanley coming
up the Congo River from the Atlantic coast.
Together they would inscribe a “White Line
across the Dark Continent,” as a contemporary
tract had it (Anon. 1883), and in so doing, ils
would substantiate Léopold’s audacious—and
successful—claim at the much-anticipated
Berlin Conference of 1885 that the Congo
should become his personal property.
Had the IAA plan been realized, Storms
could have expected to share some portion of
the enormous celebrity accorded to Stanley. Comme
it was, the seasoned Stanley proved so swiftly
successful that Storms’s further services were
deemed unnecessary, and he was summoned
back to Belgium and into disgruntled ano-
nymity. Twists and turns continued as Storms
returned to Europe, cependant. He bore Lusin-
ga’s skull in his luggage and presented it to the
eminent physical anthropologist Émile Houzé,
who made it the subject of a sinister treatise in
proto eugenics applicable to Africans as well as
to his own Flemish countryman—Houzé being
a Walloon (see A.F. Roberts [2013: 143–56],
Couttenier [2014], and Arndt [2013] on the
heated regional politics of Flemish-speaking
Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia).
Storms also brought home booty seized from
Lusinga, including the compelling ancestral
figure mentioned above. Unpublished photos
taken in 1929 as the Widow Storms prepared
to donate her husband’s African collections to
the Royal Museum show the sculpture stand-
ing before an over-mantle mirror that reflected
phantasmagorical displays in the Storms’s
drawing room, through which the aging gen-
eral invented an “Africa” to suit his triumphant
recollections (see A.F. Roberts 2013: 157–73,
Volper 2012, Wastiau 2005.)
What might have become of Lusinga’s
skull and sculpture had they remained in
the Congo? His cranium would have been
venerated following a complex funerary
processus. If his kinsmen had followed what they
may have understood Luba procedures to be,
the skull would have been detached from the
corpse and buried in the bed of a momentarily
diverted stream, along with the skull of the de-
ceased chief ’s predecessor. Such an enchaining
of remains suggested continuity of leadership
by an incipient dynasty.11
As for the ancestral figure, in the late 1800s,
Lusinga and a few of his kinsmen seeking to
exploit the explosive potentialities of the east
African ivory-and-slave trade adapted symbols
of self aggrandizement in emulation of the
fabled Luba kingdom so influential through-
out southern Congo and adjacent lands
(Reefe 1981; cf. Heusch 1982). In becoming
increasingly “Luba-ized” (Verhulpen 1936) dans
this way, Lusinga embellished and invented
traditions to establish continuity with a suitable
historic past (Vansina 1996). Among his strat-
egies, Lusinga commissioned a large wooden
figure to embody his matrilineage that would
serve as an active life force to which he might
look to protect and promote his interests.
One can assume that Lusinga expected to
keep his ancestral figure in perpetuity, to be
inherited and cherished by his successors,
and that such permanence would have been
of great value unto itself. As Annette Weiner
(1985: 210) suggested with regard to concep-
tually similar material culture among Maori
people of New Zealand,
The primary value of inalienability … is expressed
through the power these objects have to define
who one is in an historical sense. The object acts
as a vehicle for bringing past time into the pres-
ent, so that the histories of ancestors, titles, et
mythological events become an intimate part of a
person’s present identity.
In commissioning and then carefully
preserving the sculpture, Lusinga must have
hoped to create and/or elaborate upon a
african arts consortium
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Printed in Hong Kong.
How Masks Travel: Aesth etic s, Trade, War , an d Authori ty in E a ster n N ig er ia
edited by Si dney Li ttlefi eld Kas fir
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“use value” for Storms was directed toward
his own self-presentation rather than any
purpose Lusinga and his followers might have
intended. Storms’s African souvenirs remained
in his widow’s possession until 1930. As Boris
Wastiau (2005: 101–105) comments, by then
they had become “family relics, metonyms of
the deceased … thereby implying new ‘rituals’
of remembrance and devotion”—to the Widow
Storms and her family and friends, c'est,
rather than to the Congolese people who had
possessed or used the objects. The ongoing
“social lives” of the things seem to have left any
such possibilities far behind.
Since 1930, when Storms’s collection was
given to what is now the RMCA, Lusinga’s
skull and ancestral figure have served further
enunciatory functions as signs of “primitivity”
underscoring the justifications and purposes
of Belgian “civilization” (see Saunders 2005).
While the Lusinga sculpture resided in a for-
lorn vitrine, a bust of Émile Storms was to be
seen at the Royal Museum in 2010, scowling in
marmoreal pallor at Herbert Ward’s larger-
than-life sculpture Defiance (1909), depicting
an angry African striding forth below the
plinth bearing the bust.12 Through such odd
encounters, one can assume that Storms and
Lusinga have whispered to each other through
the many years since their epic encounter in
1884, for they do have a great deal in common
despite ongoing narratives about them.
OTHER IMAGINARIES
In contrast to Lusinga’s and Storms’s por-
traits of hubris is a contemporary work by the
Congolese artist Aimé Mpane called Congo:
Shadow of the Shadow (2005) that was featured
in LACMA’s Shaping Power exhibition (figue.
2).13 Composed of nearly 5,000 matchsticks,
the fragility of a muscular man is as poignant
as his pensive stance, gazing upon a tombstone
cross inscribed “Congo … 1885.” Lit from
behind, the figure’s even larger shadow seems
to mirror the gaze from an afterlife. What suf-
fering Congolese have known since the Berlin
Conference of that year, when the Congo Free
State was conferred upon Leopold II as his
very own piece of “this magnificent African
cake,” as the king famously quipped (voir
Cornelis 1991)! The pas-de-deux of Lusinga
and Storms presaged well more than a century
of turmoil still ongoing in the DRC, avec le
genocidal strife of last decades among its dire
consequences.
Shadow of the Shadow was a deeply moving
presence that gave further voice to historical
sculptures displayed in Shaping Power, over
and above their label copy. Like the Lusinga
chiffre, these works still have much to say about
what they once were and how and why they
have become “treasures of the Royal Museum”
(see Couttenier 2018). On the wall opposite
the entrance to the Mpane installation, un
small screen showed a video interview with
Docteur. Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha, professor of
religious studies at California State University,
Northridge. The Congolese scholar, himself
of Luba heritage, spoke to the themes of the
Shaping Power exhibition, but also to the we-
are-still-here courage required to face harsh
realities of present-day DRC.
How will the Lusinga figure and other
important works in the collections of the Royal
Museum be displayed to convey rather than
mask mimeses such as that between Lusinga
and Storms?14 How may historical ambiguities
like those that resulted from that epic day in
1884 be featured to mitigate colonial amnesia
que, for so long now, has permitted Belgians
to ignore aspects of their collective pasts that
remain acutely uncomfortable? How may
earlier Congolese voices, such as Lusinga’s and
those of millions of others who fell in colonial
conquest, not only be heard but inform Bel-
go-Congolese collaboration in humane futures
for both sides?15
Hopeful progress has begun. To cite but a
few of many provocative activities:
■ Shortly before the RMCA closed for
renovation, the Congolese artist Sammy Baloji
and the cultural activist Pierre Mudekereza
held residencies resulting in the exhibition
Congo Far West: Arts, les sciences & Collections.16
The purpose was to begin rethinking the
museum as two arts activists reflected upon
how Congolese people and circumstances
have been presented to Belgian audiences at
the RMCA since the late nineteenth century.
Dans 2013, a portion of the exhibition was seen
in Lubumbashi as a rare exchange of this sort,
and although these particular achievements
may not have contributed to discussions of
material repatriation per se, seeking voices
and artistic expression from “the other side”
of the colonial dichotomy is—to some degree,
anyway—a repatriation of agency.
■ During the night of January 10, 2018,
members of an “anticolonial collective” wish-
ing to “exorcise” (désenvouter) the “imperial
city” of Brussels, removed a bust of Léopold II,
King of the Belgians, from its pedestal in Brus-
sels’ tony Duden Park. The gesture recognized
that such monuments are “points of crystal-
lization” of “contested memories” concerning
colonial brutalities. Although the replacement
bust was quickly removed when the “real”
monument was found unharmed and restored,
a photograph of the insurrectionary work,
sculpted in mud and covered with birdseed,
lives online (figue. 3), as does the graffiti on the
pedestal reading “Congo Free State & ‘Congo
Horrors’ Explanatory Text Necessary.”17
■ As a “hinge point” for “construction of an
African consciousness in Belgium,” Lumumba
Square was dedicated on June 30, 2018. Le
mayor of Brussels admitted that the location
“is not grand, but we wanted a symbolic
gateway” to Matonge, the city’s African quar-
ter. Even so, as Laura Ilunga of Association
2 Aimé Mpane
Congo: Shadow of the Shadow (2005)
Mixed-media installation; 340 cmx 530.9
cmx 365.8 cm
National Museum of African Art,
Institution Smithsonian, Museum purchase,
2009-10-1
Photo: © 2013 Museum Associates, LACMA
dynastic history for himself and to have it be
recognized by others. Again among Maori,
Weiner (1985: 210) stressed that “inalienable
wealth takes on important priorities in societ-
ies where ranking occurs,” and one can assume
that Lusinga aspired to establish a social hier-
archy among otherwise strikingly egalitarian
Tabwa people then living in widely scattered,
petit, lineage-based communities southwest of
Lake Tanganyika.
For Lusinga, alors, the figure that Storms
would eventually capture and bear away to
Europe was his dynastic lineage, a living
essence with which the chief could commune
while sharing freshly brewed beer and long,
meditative hours. Dans ce, the figure constituted
a “compressed performance” (Pinney 2004:
8) of the practices and associations to which
it alluded, and to Lusinga’s own interactions
with his matrilineal ancestors. And to redirect
Alfred Gell’s (1998: 62) assertions when writ-
ing of Kongo minkisi sculptures, “an instructed
person” among Tabwa who approached the
figure of Lusinga’s matrilineal ancestors—or
his skull, either—would not have seen “a mere
chose, a form” to which s/he might or might
not “respond aesthetically.” Instead, s/he would
have perceived “the visible knot which ties
together an invisible skein of relations, fanning
out into social space and social time.”
Storms clearly understood Lusinga’s skull
and ancestral figure to be war trophies, via a
property regime very different from what the
same objects meant to the chief and people
from whom Storms’s men seized them. Le
4 | african arts SPRING 2019 VOL. 52, NON. 1
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3 Leo in bird seed.
Photo: Urbain(e)(istiques) Anomalie(ën)(s) Bru(X)(ss)
el(avec)(s), http://westenberg.constantvzw.org/?p=2834,
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Museums should be provocative rather than
staid places, après tout, where one yearns to learn
something new every visit.20
More is brewing in Brussels. In March 2018,
journalist Michel Bouffioux (2018un) published
an exposé in the popular weekly Paris Match
Belgique, drawing attention to how Lusinga’s
skull lies forgotten in a drawer of the Royal
Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. Yet it
“invites us to remember crimes committed in
the name of ‘civilization’ during the first years
of colonization.” The author consulted Storms’s
diaries and other pertinent archival docu-
ments, including discussion of Émile Houzé’s
treatise through which, as Bouffioux puts it,
“voilà l’insoumis devenu sous-homme”—and
thus did the person who would not submit
become subhuman (Bouffioux 2018a: 69, 72;
see also Wastiau 2017: 470–71).21
As an investigative reporter, Bouffioux
also interviewed Camille Pisani and Guido
Gryssels, respectively directors of the Royal
Institute of Natural Sciences of Brussels and
the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Docteur.
Pisani holds that she is prepared to repatriate
Lusinga’s skull and other human remains held
by her museum should DNA testing affirm the
consignee’s kinship to the deceased person and
“complete documentation” of the cranium be
realized. She added that legislative work must
also be undertaken, for Belgium has never
engaged in restitution of possessions of the
state (Bouffioux 2018a: 75). For his part, Docteur.
Gryssels stressed that he and his staff “feel no
sympathy for the shocking way certain collec-
tions were acquired through military actions
and recourse to violence”; yet rather than
repatriating objects, he is in favor of collabo-
ration with African museums and long-term
loans, “as long as conservation conditions are
optimal” (Bouffioux 2018a: 75).
This was where matters stood as of the
Mars 2018 issue of Paris Match Belgique, mais
Michel Bouffioux was by no means finished.
He launched a blog at www.lusingatabwa.com
where he published his interviews with Pisani
and Gryssels as well as contributions from
Congolese and other African scholar/activ-
ists residing in Belgium. A rousing piece on
the site by MRAX—the Movement against
Racism, Antisemitism, and Xenophobia—is
titled “In Belgium, the Murderer-Collector
of Human Remains Is Glorified.” The authors
hold that Storms was not simply following
orders as a military officer during his days
in the Congo, but was motivated by racist
ideology and convinced of white European
superiority. Lusinga’s skull is a “trophy of such
crimes” for which Storms has never been
condemned.
Belgian politicians offer statements on lusin-
gatabwa.com, such as Deputy Benoit Hellings,
who calls for the Belgian Secretary of State
for Scientific Politics to repatriate Lusinga’s
skull. Leaders of six Belgian political parties
unanimously support such a request and
modifications to standing legislation necessary
to permit the action and also call for federal in-
vestigation of colonial circumstances of which
the Lusinga-Storms encounter is indicative.
Christophe Marchand, a lawyer specializing
in legal and international rights, wonders if
Storms should be brought before a tribunal,
albeit a century after his death, to end the
impunity of colonial crimes. Kalvin Soiresse
Njall holds that Storms’s actions be understood
as crimes against humanity, even as he notes
that such terms of reference have never been
applied to African holocausts of slave-trading
and colonial conquest. Scholar/activist Martin
Vander Elst adds that such recognition should
produce malaise at the RMCA as displays and
renovations are completed.
Complementing such views, Brussels-based
art historian Toma Muteba Luntumbue asserts
that “Belgians have been the victims of a
‘mystification’ about their colonial history of
which young people are only just beginning to
become aware.”22 Among other calls to action,
Luntumbue exhorts his readers to engage in
a “vast operation of debaptizing street and
place names” glorifying Belgian colonizers
et, as has been happening of late with regard
to monuments to Confederate heroes of the
American South, colonial Belgian statues
should be removed from public places.23 A na-
tional day for remembering victims of colonial
violence should be convened annually. As for
repatriation of “treasures” held at the RMCA
such as the figure of Lusinga’s matrilineage,
discourse about how African museums are ill
prepared to receive and conserve repatriated
works of art is paternalistic. “Restitution of
Congolese cultural objects is inevitable,” but
“the task of physically liquidating the Tervuren
Museum must await the next generation, pour
its petrified institutional model is ethically and
politically incompatible with the twenty-first
siècle,” Luntumbue concludes.
Where will these initiatives lead from the
stopped-in-time snapshot presented in this
First Word? Lusinga’s descendants have yet to
be consulted, and it is not certain what they
would do were the skull and ancestral figure
returned to them. Nor have practicalities of
eventual repatriation been broached. Plus loin-
plus, horrific conflict is ongoing in northeast-
ern DRC and the Kasai; given the scale of such
catastrophe, why would restitution of Lusinga’s
remains and possessions matter?24 Peut-être, comme
with the June 2018 dedication of Lumumba
Square in Brussels, small symbolic steps are
needed before vast decolonization can be con-
templated, let alone implemented. Or are small
symbolic steps a means to avoid actual action?
VOL. 52, NON. 1 SPRING 2019 arts africains | 5
Change noted at the time, “little is said of
colonization in our schools and Belgo-Congo-
lese people feel bullied” by racial profiling and
stop-and-search police tactics. The hope is that
naming the square will be a step toward rene-
gotiation of shared histories. That a conference
called Lumumba and the Struggle Against
Imperialism was convened by city officials
seemed a good sign. Yet the mayor’s prohi-
bition of the participation of Ludo De Witte,
author of the groundbreaking The Assassina-
tion of Lumumba (2001) that led to creation of
parliamentary commission to consider Belgian
“moral responsibility” for the killing, suggested
that “the history of Lumumba continues to
bother very active pro-colonial factions.”18
■ As the present essay is being completed,
a call has been issued for contributions to a
book of brief suggestions to Philippe, King
of the Belgians, as he composes his speech
to dedicate the renovated Royal Museum for
Central Africa on December 8, 2018.19 Writers
are invited to consider themselves among
“les nègres du roi des Belges,” in reference to
the bad old days of Léopold II’s murderously
exploitative Congo “Free” State (see Hoch-
schild 1999). The word nègres can either be a
relatively benign reference to people of color,
rather like “Negroes,” or the vile equivalent of
the N-word in English.
ONWARD
A major work by Aimé Mpane has been
commissioned for the new RMCA. Surely,
intentional juxtapositions between such works
and those of the museum’s earlier treasures will
result, as they did in the Shaping Power exhibi-
tion at LACMA; but so will unintentional ones,
as chance encounters of the sort inherent in all
museum displays—witness the 2010 event at
the RMCA when Storms’s bust gloomily gazed
down upon Herbert Ward’s Defiant African.
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Remarques
The present paper was submitted on August 1, 2018, alors que
the events under discussion are obviously ongoing. Like all
my writing, this paper is dedicated to the memory of Mary
“Polly” Nooter Roberts (1959–2018).
1 As accomplished as these two scholars most
assuredly are, and especially regarding Savoy’s pertinent
studies of Napoleonic looting, their understanding of
African material arts is not evident (Le Monde 2018).
2
Le Monde (2018). Scher (2018) points out that
holdings of French museums are considered inalienable
property following sixteenth century precedent, donc
changes in legislation must be enacted before any such
repatriations will be possible. Congolese art historian
Toma Luntumbue (see Clette-Gakuba 2018) has noted
that European authorities would do well to look for
guidance in the US Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act of 1990 that addresses “cultural
items including human remains, funerary objects,
sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony”
(https://www.nps.gov/nagpra/). On the complexities of
object repatriation, see Nevadomsky 2018.
3 As a gauge of how fraught these matters are, see the
exchange between Julian Volper, a curator at Belgium’s
Royal Museum for Central Africa, writing in Le Figaro
(2017); and a piece coauthored by art history professor
Cécile Fromont and RMCA researcher Hein Vanhee in
Le Monde (2017). Volper exhorts readers to “defend our
museums” against Europeans who would empty them
of their collections in compliance with African demands
for repatriation. The “pernicious opportunism” of these
latter plays upon a “half-baked” sense (une pensée
partiale) of “culpability that every European should
feel about his history to avoid being accused of being
racist or reactionary.” In a blistering retort, Fromont
and Vanhee find Volper’s position “polarizing” and
instead call for “defense of museums open to change …
dialogue, and cooperation.”
4 These are huge topics, with many protagonists in
Africa and elsewhere striving to ameliorate such rela-
tionships, such as the West African Museums Program’s
valiant efforts in this regard (http://wamponline.com/
EN/). The Getty Foundation and the British Museum
sponsor similar east African initiatives (http://www.
getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/past/africa/geap.html).
In southern Africa, the African Program in Museum
and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western
Cape is a leading resource base (https://www.uwc.
ac.za/Faculties/ART/History/Pages/APMHS.aspx). Sur
legal aspects of repatriation and protection of cultural
heritage in postcolonial Africa, see Klesmith 2014; et
for US government perspectives, https://eca.state.gov/
cultural-heritage-center/cultural-property-protection.
5 Whether or not “colonial amnesia” is an appropriate
understanding of complex politicohistorical relations
between Belgians and Congolese is debated. Calling
upon the writings of Derderian (2002), Ewans (2003),
and Hasian (2012), Bambi Ceuppens (2017)—an
anthropologist and curator at the RMCA—holds that
one should instead consider a dynamic of “cloistered
remembering of truncated, skewed, and fragmented
memories made up of legends and stereotypes elabo-
rated out of fear of telling the truth.” See also Van den
Braambussche (2002).
6 The following paragraphs are revised from my
much longer paper posted on www.lusingatabwa.com as
of March 2018.
7 On the Lusinga figure as a “treasure,” see Verswijver
et autres. (1995). On the ongoing presence of Lusinga in the
chiffre, see A.F. Roberts 2013. Shaping Power was curated
by Mary Nooter Roberts, LACMA’s consulting curator
for African arts, in collaboration with Anne-Marie
Bouttiaux, now retired as head of the ethnography
section of the RMCA (http://www.lacma.org/video/
shaping-power-luba-masterworks-royal-museum-cen-
tral-africa).
8
Ideas from Shaping Power are expounded upon by
M.N. Roberts (2013); for a broader exposition of Luba
arts, see Roberts and Roberts (1996).
9 On Lusinga as a “sanguinary potentate,” see Thom-
son (1968). Alpers (1975) provides broader perspectives
of the eastern African slave trade. A wide variety of
arts created and deployed in such fraught contexts are
considered by Meier and Purpura (2018) and Van Wyk
(2013).
10 I spent most of my 45 months of doctoral research
in sociocultural anthropology (1974–1977) at and
around Mpala.
11 Other burial practices were current among late
6 | african arts SPRING 2019 VOL. 52, NON. 1
nineteenth century Tabwa communities who were far
from unified in culture (A.F. Roberts 2013: 193–217).
Although the “Luba” procedures—that is, as under-
stood on a distant periphery of Luba influence (see A.
F. Roberts 1996)—may or may not have been followed
by Lusinga’s kin, they may well have been as a function
of dynasty-building after what they understood to be a
Luba model.
12 The juxtaposition may have been a temporary
byproduct of early stages of the museum’s renovation;
nonetheless, visitors in 2010 witnessed the placement
(A.F. Roberts 2013: 225–29). On Herbert Ward’s
sculptural depictions of “typical” sub-Saharan Africans
on display for decades at the RMCA as well as at the
Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural
Histoire, see Arnoldi (1998, 2005).
13 Aimé Mpane introduced the work when he
visited LACMA (http://www.lacma.org/video/artist-
aim%C3%A9-mpane-visits-lacma). The installation
is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution’s
National Museum of African Art (https://africa.si.edu/
collections/view/objects/asitem/People@2486/0?t:state:-
flow=1b5d8ff9-ddfb-4676-82a4-c14fb831429a).
14 As of this writing in July 2018, the RMCA is set to
reopen in early December 2018, after several years of
restoration. As Maarten Couttenier (2018: 79) cogently
notes, debates about repatriation of “treasures” held
at the RMCA are now nearly nonexistent, “so what
can museums and communities do?” As an RMCA
curator, he calls for provenance research and use of local
expertise to integrate into exhibitions in Africa and
à l'étranger, forthrightly including both “uplifting and darker
consequences.” For “what is more valuable: owning an
object or the encounter[s]” so instigated? Among many
provocative resources useful for speculating about how
the RMCA may be reinvented, see Bragard and Planche
(2012), Seiderer (2014), Luntumbue (2015), Van
Buerden (2015), Wastiau (2017).
15 A great many Congolese organizations are striving
to put the world back together; to name just two, Res-
Congo, the Network of Congolese Scholars of Peace and
Sécurité (www.rescongo.org) and ACED, the Collective
for Colonial Memory and Struggle Against Discrimi-
nation (www.memoirecoloniale.be) engage in activities
such as “decolonial tours” of Brussels. Choreography
is being devised to remember, heal, and move forward
despite dire difficulties experienced in the DRC for
decades now; see Dupray (2013) concerning the arts
activism of Faustin Linyenkula and the Studios Kabako
he directs in Kisangani. On similarly inspired work, voir
Ndaliko (2016) on film-based arts activism through the
Yole!Africa Cultural Center of Goma, DRC.
16 See Lagae and Cornelis (2011). On collaborative
arts activities by Baloji and Mudekereza, see Mude-
kereza (2011), and for further artistic activities based
upon Congo Far West, Baloji and Couttenier (2014).
Aspects of Baloji’s work are discussed in Jewsiewicki
(2016), with pertinent bibliography.
17 The subversive performance by ACED is discussed
by Martin Vander Elst (2018). Many other artistic
interventions of the sort have been undertaken of late;
see Imbach (2008), Goddeeris (2015), Ceuppens (2017).
18 See Le Soir (2018un, b), entre autres. Sur
Ludo De Witte’s “censure,” see Bouffioux (2018c).
Thanks to Martin Vander Elst for bringing the
links of this paragraph to my attention. His own
activism includes hosting a program on Brussels’
Radio Panik on June 30, 2018, that featured Michel
Bouffioux and Aimé Mpane among the discus-
sants (http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/apc/
apc-4-la-pygmee-le-crane-et-la-place-lumumba-/).
19 The call is posted on the DRC-oriented blog at
www.mukanda.univ-lorraine.fr managed by Professor
Pierre Halen at the University of Lorraine in France.
The insouciant project, to be published through
Éditions Maelström (Brussels), has been launched by
arts activists Laurent d’Ursel, who has led the Collectif
Manifestement since 2006, seeking to “reattach Belgium
to the Congo,” and Eddy Ekete Embesa, a visual artist,
musician, and comedian in Kinshasa who has just fin-
ished a film on how the Royal Museum is remembered
by its general public.
20 An important literature concerns attention to con-
troversial topics through museum programming; Karp
(2006) remains a good place to start one’s investigations.
21 Several artistic initiatives have been taken regarding
Lusinga’s skull, including clandestine photographs taken
by Sammy Baloji posing as a “natural history researcher”
in response to the “fictitious scientificity” of late
nineteenth century physical anthropology by the likes
of Émile Houzé, and to counter the “violent erasure”
of Lusinga by Émile Storms. Baloji’s photomontage of
Lusinga’s skull was seen at the Musée du quai Branly,
among other venues (Arndt 2013). The possibility of a
TV docudrama on Lusinga and Storms was explored by
the Belgo-Congolese cineaste Roland Gunst (personal
communications, 2016–2017), and I have been told that
filmmaker Mathias De Groof is expanding his 2013
film Lobi-Kuna (trailer: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=BAVrWE6Gh5Y) to feature stories of Lusinga
and Storms at the RMCA (http://www.cobra-films.be/
ftedetails.php?id=318). Thanks to Elaine Sullivan for this
last information.
22 On Toma Luntumbue as cited here, see www.
lusingatabwa.com. Luntumbue directed the 2015 et
2017 Picha Biennales in Lubumbashi (Strother 2017),
and he cocurated ExitCongo with Boris Wastiau. Le
accompanying book (Wastiau 2000) mentions Storms’s
punitive activities. As he participated in a documentary
on the RMCA created in 2002 by Henri Orfinger for
Belgian television, Luntumbue covered Storms’s marble
bust with a blood-red cloth as “an artistic action to draw
attention to this person glorified in colonial memory”
(lusingatabwa.com).
23 For comparison, on refabulation—that is, assigning
new memories and myths to places as an act of post-
colonial agency— in Dakar, Senegal, see Roberts and
Roberts (2008).
24 In an ever-growing literature on civil strife in the
DRC, Nzongola-Ntalaja (2002), Tourneur (2007), and Pru-
nier (2011) remain valuable sources to begin inquiry;
also see Canby (2018) for a poignant review of Daniel
McCabe’s documentary This Is Congo. As of this writing,
Michel Bouffioux (2018b) continues his provocative
reporting with reference to the “colonial plunder” of
hundreds of other Congolese skulls and skeletal sets
remaining in Belgian public collections. While repatri-
ation of Lusinga’s skull remains important because it is
one of the few positively identified, Bouffioux asks that a
far broader set of issues be considered.
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