Leaving Ruins
Explorations of Present Pasts by Sammy Baloji,
Freddy Tsimba, and Steve Bandoma
Bogumil Jewsiewicki
translated from the French by Allen F. Roberts
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
If art is where the greatest ruins are,
Our art is in those ruins we became
(Walcott 1962:13)1
Reference to the poetic work of Derek Walcott
helps explain the particular attention of three
Congolese artists directed to material and moral
ruins that bear witness to traumatic experience.
Walcott (1992) inscribes violence at the heart
of Antillean heritage: “Decimation from the
Arawak downwards is the blasted root of Antillean history.” Since
the Atlantic and East African slave trades and perhaps before,
violence and its management have been at the heart of collective
memories of societies of the present-day Democratic Republic
of the Congo (DRC). The societies of Congo and of Walcott’s
Antilles share an ambiguous attitude toward the colonial/slave
pasado. While history is written from others’ perspectives, experi-
ence is inscribed in imagination and carried by heritage. Wal-
cott rejects the distinction between imagination and collective
memory, and when he writes that “every island is an effort of
memory” (1992), he stresses the necessity of memory’s perma-
nent effects. Walcott only insists upon the (relative) absence of
ruins to underscore the strange nature of history, “which looked
over the shoulder of the engraver and, más tarde, the photographer.
History can alter the eye and the moving hand to conform a view
of itself.” As he would add, “the history of the world, by which of
course we mean Europe, is a record of intertribal lacerations, de
ethnic cleansings.” Such a gaze has chosen ruins as evidence of
the presence/absence of history.2
Walcott opposes art to history in a “process of the making of
poetry, or what should be called not its ‘making’ but its remak-
En g, the fragmented memory…. Art is this restoration of our
shattered history.” In his famous phrasing, “Break a vase, y
the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love
which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue
that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape.” In place of
the ruins and heroes designated by the gaze of history, he contin-
ues, “I see cabbage palms moving their fronds at sunrise, [y] I
think they are reciting Perse…. At least islands not written about
but writing themselves!" (Walcoltt 1998:78).3 The voice of the
poet “Perse,” having preceded Walcott to the Nobel Prize in Lit-
erature, “make[s] out of these foresters and fishermen heraldic
hombres!" (Walcott 1987:217). It is the artist, entonces, who reveals to the
world the experience and patrimony ignored by history: "El
past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on
the forehead of the past…. The process of poetry is one of exca-
vation and of self-discovery.” Seen from the ruins recognized
by a local imaginary, “Caribbean literature is not evolving but
already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the
traveler or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture.”4
Baloji, Bandoma, and Tsimba—all three artists born after the
independence of what is now the Democratic Republic of the
Congo—have only indirect understanding of the colonial past,
and yet it is the past of their “modernity.” They carry in their her-
itage its incorporated experience and question the history that
does not belong to them because it was written from the gaze
of elsewhere and refers to the generations of their fathers and
grandfathers. The ruins that this gaze designates are not theirs,
insofar as the last half-century has left no such experiences that
might stand as ruins in future.5 The vestiges of the DRC’s Sec-
ond Republic (1965–1990), during which their fathers were dis-
missed as nothing but “squatters” in their own land, are only
sterile ghosts even as their fathers will never become ances-
tores. Eso es, their past is no longer relevant, and their memory,
6 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
1 Sammy Baloji
Ruins of the house near Lubumbashi where
Lumumba was detained (2010)
Digital image
Photo: courtesy of the artist
2 Sammy Baloji
Untitled, from Kolwezi series (2013)
Digital image
Photo: courtesy of the artist
without pertinence to present-day life, obstructs any immediate
future, for the Apocalypse is the horizon of collective attention
now. In its shadow, imaginary escape to somewhere else can only
be a destructive rage fed by exasperation with the nostalgia of
the fathers. As Jacques Kimpozo wrote in the Kinshasa newspa-
per Le Phare of May 13, 2014, “kept at a distance from modern
infrastructures (highways, hydroelectric dams, plants produc-
ing potable water, ports, airports, hospitals, escuelas, the market);
technological progress in agriculture, animal husbandry, y
fishing; new technologies of information and communication;
job markets; the banking system; etc., [gente] have only two
pathways to escape what they consider ‘hell’: come to Kinshasa
and increase the ranks of the unemployed, or cross borders.”
And yet daily life is only chaotic when viewed from outside.
To take control of one’s becoming, one must recognize ruins
as evidence of a past from which memory opens to a future.
Like Walcott (1962:13), who refuses to take as his own “the
ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts,” Baloji reconfig-
ures the ruins of mining industries and photographic images
bequeathed by the colonial gaze, Bandoma fragments images
pretending to depict Kongo culture as found in art history
books, and Tsimba draws up ruins of yesterday’s communal liv-
En g. As “the stripped man is driven back to that self-astonish-
En g, elemental force, his mind, … art is this restoration of our
shattered bodies” (Walcott 1962). Following steps as though
they were Walcott’s, Baloji and Tsimba not only replace old
metaphors by new ones but their shared purpose is the recon-
struction of the world by replacing what is missing in today’s
DRC (Ismond 2001).
COMING TO TERMS WITH RUINS BY CHOOSING ONE’S OWN
Sammy Baloji was born in Lubumbashi in 1978, and now
composes photomontages that confront images from here and
now—the ruins of modernity—with others from the time of the
now-disavowed ancestors of local urban citizenry. The past that
these images re-presents can be that of the days of colonial con-
quest, the time of migrant workers whose labor founded indus-
trial modernity in the Congo, or the Second Republic when
Mobutu Sese Seko was at his dictatorial height. Baloji’s recent
photomontages juxtapose indecent opulence with the lives in
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 7
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
.
F
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
3 Sammy Baloji,
Untitled (2009)
Digital image
Photo: courtesy of the artist
ruin of those who are the survivors of postcolonial modernity, como
well as their descendants. His camera also matches a local pres-
ent with calendar and advertisements images from China, como
simulacra of the global (c.f. Baudrillard 1995).
Freddy Bienvenu Tsimba Mavambu, born in Kinshasa in 1967,
creates sculptural assemblages from detritus abandoned in the
roads of the capital or from empty cartridges collected on battle-
fields of recent civil strife.6 He holds that the street has been his
true school, that blacksmiths who taught him to forge and weld
are his masters, and that it is his duty to give witness through his
art to how life has been brutally extinguished.7
Born in Kinshasa in 1981, Steve Bandoma composes his hyper-
reality through assemblages of scraps of magazine illustrations,
drawings, and advertisements that he tears up. He then super-
imposes the fragments, recomposes them, and so repairs a
world that, lacking any sense, does not deserve to be seen as it is.
Because there is no real, ruins of representation can only serve to
create simulacra.8
SAMMY BALOJI: BRINGING FORTH ANOTHER TIME
TO QUESTION THE PRESENT
Sammy Baloji’s photomontages demonstrate the evolution of
a process of displacement of that which is pending, to an ethi-
cal evaluation and an aesthetic of shared representations of actu-
ality. To borrow a term from Michel de Certeau (1984), Baloji’s
works offer propres—that is, places of departure from which tac-
tics can be imagined and the future imagined. The confronta-
tion of images, most but not all photographic, offers Baloji the
possibility to make visible the tragic consequences of rupture
between presents and their pasts through the misappropriation
of industrial modernity as patrimony. Built by a first generation
of Congolese laborers and then left to successive generations,
this patrimony has not been transmitted. The rupture that has
resulted denies ancestral status to the fathers’ generation. En el
order of generational succession, salaried labor (kazi in Swahili)
more than kinship has created social relations.9 In identifying the
evils that afflict society, Baloji works like a local healer (nganga)
presenting the living with their responsibilities and indicat-
ing to them the path of their personal and collective “welfare.”
In the manner of his society—industrial, then postindustrial—
of Katangan mining, Baloji delves into the imaginaries of pre-
colonial cultures, of Christianity, and of a modernity originating
in colonialism. Modern visual culture is the medium through
which he approaches social modes of transmitting knowledge,
evaluating social justice, and determining individual destinies.
His artistic and technical means are derived from globalized cul-
tura, and he considers himself to be a contemporary artist with-
out reference to particular culture or nation. Sin embargo, el
realities captured by Baloji’s camera, their ethical evaluation and
the aesthetics through which he places them in his montages, son
all local.
Baloji’s approach gives evidence to the transformation of reali-
ties and collective imaginaries of Katanga. Today well known,
his Likasi and Mémoire series interrogate the consequences of
a break with the past when social bonds were built more upon
transmission of access to salaried employment than upon
inscription within clan or ethnic ensembles organized through
kinship. A decade after accomplishing these works, the social
imaginary of Congolese people and the artistic undertakings of
Sammy Baloji have abandoned the ruins of industries that have
turned their backs on any such history. Having now become
“antiquities,” these vestiges of industrial patrimony accentuate
the tragic character of the present and the failure of the fathers to
pass on their achievement of social status through wage-earning
employment.
Several works by Baloji return to the out-of-date status of per-
sonages of this earlier generation by superimposition of their
portraits and photographs or drawings realized during the colo-
nial period. Through analogy to the simulacrum of the “eth-
nographic type,” imprisoning real persons in the conventions
of an exoticizing gaze (piscina 1997), people of the generation of
the fathers are further imprisoned by making of them museum
8 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
.
F
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
4 Colonie belge, signed Kyungu wa K., C. 1989.
Collection MRAC Tervuren, Fonds B. Jewsiewicki,
# 818
Photo: Bogumil Jewsiewicki
objects—indeed, artifacts. Baloji’s photograph of the place where
Lumumba was held just before his execution, taken in 2010 para
Autographe ABP of London, is a culminating point (Higo. 1).10
Upon a background of wooded savanna and next to the ruins of
a house razed to the soil, an old man with grey hair stands before
the viewer. Wearing an old suit too large for his wizened body,
he struggles to recover the lost dignity of a well-dressed person,
but dusty rubber boots in the place of shoes betray him. In his
hand he holds a small reddish-yellow bottle of a popular carbon-
ated drink. His placement in the image and the colors suggest an
equivalence with the ruined building behind the man—that all
that remains of the modernity promised by Lumumba are rubble
topped by a crude cross of cement and shoddy commodities like
the soda pop that the grizzled gentleman holds in his hand.
The gaze of Sammy Baloji follows the imaginary of ordinary
Congolese. Without being able to find issue from the ruins of
the past, they have recently turned toward a different present
than their own. Pictures copied from tourist agency catalogs
have joined those of illustrated calendars and notices for soccer
teams in replacing the works of local painters that used to deco-
rate the homes of salaried and other upwardly mobile Katangans
(see Jewsiewicki 2013). These fragments of mass global culture,
printed in China for the Congolese market, nourish dreams of
escape toward places where modernity seems accessible (Higo. 2).
This last while, Sammy Baloji has consecrated particular atten-
tion to such vehicles of an imaginary that snatches at a present
that cannot be fully grasped, and their presence in his photo-
montages suggests the place held by archival images (Higo. 3).
En otra parte, in a discussion of his Mémoires series, I have pre-
sented my understanding of Sammy Baloji’s vision of domesti-
cated industrial modernity in colonial contexts now lost to the
postcolony.11 For the workers and their families, industrial mod-
ernization has been replaced by trials and traumas. Yet these
challenges have served as a springboard from which to regain
dignidad. As is manifest in urban painting from Katanga, social
memory insists on the necessity of triumphing over death and
humiliation if one is to domesticate modernity. Between 1910
y 1970, two generations of laborers built the mining industry
and urban society of Katanga. Three pictorial representations
organize the work of such memory—the great chimney and slag
heap of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (as the principle
Katangan copper mine, located in Lubumbashi itself), the genre
painting (Fabian 1974, Fabian and Szombati-Fabian 1980) called
Colonie belge that depicts Congolese physical abuse at the hands
of authorities (Higo. 4), and workers operating heavy equipment;
and these give sense to the relationships of man and machine
and among miners themselves when faced with new social and
political hierarchies.12 The dictum “work is hard, death is near”
(kazi nguvu, lufu karibu in Katangan Swahili) underscores cap-
tions beneath images of miners. Work (kazi) and death (lufu)
form a dyad. One labors at risk of one’s life, but work mastered
by man procures him a place in modernity. During the 1990s, el
mining industry fell to ruins and modernity deserted Katanga.
Deprived of salaried employment, society and the industrial
landscape were thereafter haunted by the phantom of kazi. Incluso
as the fathers no longer managed their machines, their sons were
reduced to digging with pickaxes through the detritus of slag
heaps to tear out a few kilograms of low-quality minerals, gain-
ing a man enough to eat once a day, a lo sumo.
The camera and the computer explore these ruins to give
evidence to such dire dramas. Baloji excavates the palimpsest
of memories, looking for a new life to render the past able to
engender a future. His eye is informed by Katangan experience,
his camera seizes its realities. The intensity of Baloji’s gaze brings
global attention to particular local details. The universal surges
from the world of contemporary media within a local frame
of imagination to which earlier Katangan urban painting once
gave access. To return to this new present some phantom of the
salaried work that has deserted society, and to find in the ruins
of modernity a different future, Sammy Baloji attaches archival
images of the work of laborers in the past (Higo. 5–6). Cuando el
confronts their bodies with the ruins of machines, he confirms
the convictions of his generation that the fathers are to blame
for not transmitting modernity to them, for not honoring the
memory of those who, brought to Katanga as the “slaves” of
Europeans, made themselves into wage-earning miners. Ellos,
more than the whites with their technology and capital, estafa-
structed the modernity that they might have left to their sons.
Having failed to pass on this boon to succeeding generations,
these fathers have severed transmission of urban heritage. Balo-
ji’s photomontages (Grau 2004, Ades 1999, Zervigon 2012) give
the grandfathers new presence and repair this rupture. After dis-
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 9
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
F
/
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
tinguishing between the “true” past and the present, the images propose the means to
redress such loss.
Comparison between photographs of machines or abandoned buildings that no lon-
ger serve any functions and the nudes of Baloji’s series “Bodies and Masks” helps us to
understand his work as a portraitist of life at its most raw—naked life.13 In central African
performance arts, an active mask is always worn by a person, even when those attending
the performance feign ignorance of this reality. Such a mask gives presence—and there-
delantero (re)presents—a spirit or an ancestor that is otherwise absent. Sammy Baloji’s pho-
tographic project takes an opposite tack. Baloji accentuates evidence by photographing
what the eye sees rather than what social conventions might hold (Higo. 7). In this way,
the naked body of a person wearing a mask
imposes itself rather than being effaced.
The nudity creates malaise for the specta-
tor and emphasizes the effects of unveiling.
When masks emerge in a performance,
the energy of a mask and of the spirit to
which it gives presence is made actual by
the body of the person wearing it.14 The
portraits (masks) of machines or build-
ings that are no longer functional because
they lack the work (kazi) of absent min-
ers underscore the failure of modernity. A
machine without a man using it to affect
work is nothing but an abandoned mask
(Higo. 4).15 Portraits of masks of industrial
ruins direct one’s gaze to penetrate the sur-
face of Baloji’s photomontages, and lead the
viewer to cross the strata of his palimpsests.
The organization of these images through
the aesthetic of an imaginary from the
mining society of Katanga is immediately
5 Sammy Baloji
Worker, from Mémoire series (2006)
Digital image
Photo: courtesy of the artist
6 Sammy Baloji
Workers, from Mémoire series (2006)
Digital image
Photo: courtesy of the artist
10 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
F
/
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
apparent to anyone familiar with the urban paintings of the same
región (Jewsiewicki 2013). As he uses archival photographs, Baloji
firmly positions himself in the historical mode of restituting the
pasado, and he works with the factual, but the sense of each scene
that he composes with people displaced from their time to Baloji’s
own can only be understood as a doubled representation (Higo. 3).
Restitution of the meanings of experience, thanks to a framework
of collective imaginaries, permits readings of what appearances
signify socially. The work of memory between the frame of social
imagination and the significance of appearances transforms the
naked body into a social being.16 Industrial landscapes portrayed
as masks of modernity speak to an incapacity to assure the avail-
ability of kazi.
Let us consider two of Baloji’s photomontages. At the center
of the first (Higo. 5) is a worker wearing a tattered, sleeveless shirt
with light and dark stripes like that of the prisoner in the popular
urban painting Colonie belge. With a double chain locked around
his neck, he folds his muscled arms passively in front of him as
he hauntingly stares at the viewer. His gaze is belligerent as well
as tragic—a gaze one would expect from the hero of Luba/Lunda
epics who has returned home (cultura) after having overcome
the most challenging forces of other worlds. Behind him is a des-
olation of abandoned buildings, flooded factory roads, masks of
grimacing metal, and empty rails leading nowhere. No train, No
one else in sight. This migrant worker, brought to the mines a
slave of the Europeans and their machines, accuses his descen-
dants of not knowing how to transmit the heritage of his tribula-
ciones. The chain signifying his bondage refers us back to urban
paintings depicting the abuse of porters during colonial times, como
well as to late nineteenth century caravans of enslaved Congolese
heading into exile and oblivion (see Jewsiewicki 2013).
In a second montage (Higo. 6), we see four naked men in the
foreground.17 Such an image would be offensive to Congolese
viewers, for the nudity of the men would recall humiliation like
that of the prisoner in the Colonie belge painting, whose naked
buttocks are being scourged in public through a punishment
so common that it stood for the colony itself. Exposure of the
nudity of an adult man is an insult to his dignity and profoundly
demeaning. The colonial penalty of whipping was physically
painful but above all mortifying because a man’s pants were
pulled down publicly. People remember this act of debasement
by the State, especially because the spastic movements of the
body after each stroke made it seem as though, in public view,
he were fornicating with the Earth. It is impossible to know
si, in Congolese urban culture, this prescription of male
nudity follows the Old Testament, where Ham—understood as
the biblical ancestor of black people—was cursed for not hav-
ing covered the naked body of his father, or rather follows pre-
Christian principles.18 The two works return us to the naked
bearer of a mask in the Corps et masques series. Fragmented in
découpage, the original caption remains visible on the four men’s
bodies. Such writing attests to the “authenticity” of the image
even as it suggests the inscription by the State upon its “pos-
sessions.” In the Colonie belge painting (Higo. 4), the man’s jersey
striped in yellow and black as well as the bleeding stripes of the
whip left on his buttocks reproduce the colors of the Belgian flag,
indicating to whom this man “belongs.” Returning to Baloji’s
photomontage, on the right behind the men, one can perceive
the ghost of a conveyor that used to carry the dross of the facil-
ity’s immense smelters to the summit of the vast slag heap. A
the left rise the entrails of an industrial building beside which
a chimney emits no smoke or steam. The platform on the slag-
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 11
ochre is also the color of the large entry door of trucks, con un
smaller door beside it for passengers that is of the same hue. A
star of five points surmounts this ensemble, seemingly giving
but also preventing access to the installations of the Zhong Hang
Mining Company of Kolwezi. De nuevo, what lies behind these
doors photographed by Baloji, hell or heaven?19
FREDDY TSIMBA: BRINGING (RE)BIRTH TO THE RUINS
OF COMMUNAL LIVING
With a diploma in hand from the Fine Arts Academy of Kin-
shasa, Freddy Tsimba went to “the school of the road,” as he puts
él, for real life pulses there. He undertook a long apprenticeship
with artisans of metal and fire who, according to Tsimba, possess
and produce cultural continuities. He was born and raised in
Kinshasa, and his parents are Kongo from Manyanga. Sin
questioning this social inscription, Tsimba feels especially close
to his maternal grandmother, Kolo Nsunda, whose “cosmopol-
itan” experience and knowledge of the Congo he stressed. On
the “official” web page of Freddy Tsimba (http://freddytsimba.
wordpress.com/) under the rubric of “media: photos” his grand-
mother can be seen holding a great-grandchild (her ndoyi—
namesake) in her arms as the only other person depicted. Este
virtual identification with his grandmother inscribes Tsimba in
time and lineage. It is not without interest to note that he is the
only one of the three artists under discussion here who claims
generational continuity in such a clear-cut way. Sin embargo, él
refers to the generations of his mother rather than to those of
his father or maternal uncles. Let us note the strong presence in
his creation of the woman/mother, menos, it seems to me, porque
his ethnic milieu is matrilineal than because, preoccupied with
human life, he celebrates its source.20
The organization of Tsimba’s “Portraits” on his web page takes
on a specific sense when confronted with the image/performance
captured by video. En 2010, during an exhibition of African art at
the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels, Freddy Tsimba was followed
by a videographer, as were others who had been invited. Looking
at an nkisi figure and being surprised by it, he exclaimed, “That,
that came from my village. Imaginar!”21 The sculptor seemed to
be in the presence of a mirror held to his own work by a Kongo
artifact created more than a century earlier. Tsimba was seeing
a figurative nkisi having the form of human being for the first
tiempo, and in effect, for generations none like it had been made.22
In Kinshasa, no art museum is presently open to the public.
From his only visit to “the village,” when he was six years old,
Tsimba remembers a dance performance and being deathly
asustado, in his childish way, of an enormous fish caught in the
Congo River. Let us complete these anecdotal comments with
remarks about the narrative structure of Tsimba’s transformation
from a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts to a sculptor who
feels himself descended from masterful Kongo blacksmiths and
who expresses human suffering by cutting and weaving together
scrap metal using a blow torch (Higo. 8).
Two significant images come to his mind when Tsimba reflects
upon his foundational moments: crossing a water course and
the arrival of a messenger. Tsimba decided to become an artist
following the intervention of a friend of one of his sisters. Hav-
ing seen his drawings in the sand, the friend told Tsimba to do
7 Sammy Baloji
From Corps et masque series (2009)
Digital image
Photo: courtesy of the artist
conveyor to the right is striped in black and yellow, recalling the
jersey of the prisoner of Colonie belge, while the iron scaffold-
ing is painted red ochre like the color of dried blood, pero también
like central African laterite soil. Red ochre is also the color of
the tarpaulins deployed in the mining industry that, when worn
afuera, were transformed into siding and roofs for miner’s dwell-
ings. Red ochre is therefore the color of the daily work of this
lost modernity, as well as the color of the earth within which
riches are sought. The color serves as the background of images
evoking studio photography that conferred the statute of mod-
ern persons to urban people throughout the twentieth century.
In his Kolwezi series (Baloji 2014), several portraits are realized
with the “canvas” of red ochre tarp as their reference. The per-
sons whose clothing is as miserable as their places in life adopt
poses as though they were in a photographic studio. These pos-
tures and gazes captured by the camera defy the destitution the
decor suggests. In the same series, Baloji sets a photo of urban
Congolese homes whose roofs are made of red ochre tarp against
a Chinese advertisement that decorated one of these habitations
(Higo. 2). In this picture, one can see a sky-blue swimming pool
in the middle of an impeccable green lawn. Is this the hell of the
present versus the unattainable paradise of an elsewhere? Red
12 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
.
F
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
8 Freddy Tsimba, 2010, artist at work, 2010
Photo: Pascal Maitre, with permission
9 Freddy Tsimba
Sur l’autre rive de la vie (2010)
Metal installation, 600 cm x 200 cm x 200 cm
Photo: courtesy of the artist
rather than an nguza prophet, but like them, he creates objects
of power permitting him to open a space of healing and recreate
social order. His actions answer the articulation between Kongo
cultural specificity and the Christian universalism of “nguzism”
prophecy. No matter whether one of Tsimba’s sculptures or an
nkisi, the intensity of any so powerful an object has universal
reach and import.
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
.
F
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 13
the same on paper. On the basis of the resulting work, he was
admitted to the Fine Arts Academy. Más tarde, having completed
his apprenticeship with blacksmiths, Tsimba decided to col-
lect spent ammunition cartridges in Kisangani, then a theater
of armed combat. Telling of his trip, he emphasizes crossing the
Congo River at Kisangani and then being imprisoned. He recov-
ered his liberty when he melted the cartridges and cast a cook-
ing pot from them, thereby transforming an instrument of death
into something supporting life. Such stories that inscribe the
choices of life or an artistic career in frames of social memory
affirm that an exceptional destiny awaiting him would not put
his social identity in question. Becoming an artist has not meant
that Freddy Tsimba has ceased being a Kinois (inhabitant of Kin-
shasa), nor being Kongo, sin embargo.
In the Kongo imaginary, water is the place inhabited by the
dead and other spirits. To cross the watery frontier between the
world of the living and that of the dead signifies being blessed by
wisdom held by the ancestors. They are the only ones who can
simultaneously know the past, present, and future. Water and
its crossing therefore occupy important places in Tsimba’s work,
such as his Waiting for the Last Boat, To Leave Without Return
(a pirogue made of spoons and forks floating on water traced
by munition cartridges and skulls in cast metal), or The Other
Side of Life (Higo. 9). In the Protestant dogma that Tsimba follows,
crossing the Red Sea constitutes the passage from enslavement to
the Promised Land, and the messenger (as played by the friend
of Tsimba’s sister) indicates election by God as confirmed or des-
tined. Family life in Kongo communities and Protestant faith
have given Tsimba familiarity with two cultural memories. Él
draws inspiration from the aesthetic and techniques of Kongo
healing as well as Protestant practice. From the eighteenth-cen-
tury Kimpa Vita (of whom Tsimba has composed a sculpture) a
Simon Kimbangu in 1921, numerous Christian prophets (nguza)
have appeared in Kongo country to heal society and to take
full possession of the modernity of each époque (Janzen 1979,
2013; Thornton 1998; Mboukou 2010). Freddy Tsimba is an artist
the most powerful nkisi bundles.24 An nkisi is made and used to
resolve particular problems and constitutes a field of incessant
experimentation. Anything found not to work is abandoned,
and something new is added or created in its place. While some
minkisi have little importance beyond their direct purposes, oth-
ers are famous, invested with potent powers, and are directed to
maintaining law and order. Following Kongo thinking, when it
acts, an nkisi is at the center of a theatrical ensemble of songs,
dances, and norms of comportment. Memories of past actions
of the sort are revived by social tensions, adding to the com-
munity’s excitement. A great nkisi nkondi (MacGaffey and Jan-
zen 1974, MacGaffey 1991) should be frightening. A través de
accumulation of ingredients unknown to all but the nganga who
composed the nkisi’s bundles, and by pieces of iron nailed into
its body, such a figure intrigues and disquiets. The public knew
when an important nkisi was created by an nganga following an
extraordinary revelation. Through processes of fabrication, un
nkisi is inhabited by spirits if they received proper recognition.
Already in the nineteenth century, minkisi were understood by
attentive observers to be archives of memory. With reference
to the nkisi nkondi from the Wellcome Collection of the Fowler
Museum at UCLA, Allen Roberts25 considers such minkisi to
be archives of peoples’ intentions that give a full measure of
mi nkisi’s capacity to reconnect people’s past experiences with
their expectations.
In commenting on the creation of his works, Freddy Tsimba
states that they come “from a certain vision of existence—things
with which one has lived, that one has used, that one has discarded
and that are then recuperated to give them a new life.”26 Again,
closer to Sammy Baloji’s urban milieu in Katanga, Tabwa include
in protective bundles ingredients referring to specific events.
Many such ingredients are then combined in a bundle called “a lit-
tle world” that anticipates and protects one from similar events, o
their figurative extensions. Por ejemplo, a piece of tree root upon
which someone has tripped is used to prevent interruption of pur-
What Wyatt MacGaffey has written about minkisi (pl. of nkisi
in the Kongo language) can be extended to the cultural gene-
alogy of Tsimba’s sculptures.23 An nganga—that is, a healer and
practitioner operating minkisi—uses a sculpture or other sort
of container to hold ingredients derived from animals, miner-
como, and plants, as well as artifacts of human circumstances. En
Congo, creating nkisi power objects is a widely spread cultural
práctica. Por ejemplo, closer to Sammy Baloji’s home, relics of
human experience (called vizimba by Tabwa) such as a frag-
ment of a blind man’s stick or a piece of bone from someone exe-
cuted for homicide (even when only attempted) are essential to
10 Freddy Tsimba
Drawing
Pencil on paper; 22 cm x 28 cm
Photo: Cédrick Nzolo Ngambu, with permission.
11 Freddy Tsimba
Au delà de l’espoir (2010)
Metal and wood; 250 cm x 120 cm x 180 cm
Photo: courtesy of the artist
14 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
F
/
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
.
F
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
pose.27 In an nkisi, each piece of metal from which a sculpture is
formed conserves its identity and is witness to a past of which it
is a ruin (see MacGaffey 2013). Each used cartridge carries a his-
conservador, and the place where it was collected also possesses an iden-
tity. Juntos, such references offer evidence of the escape, injury,
or death of someone, and gathered together, Tsimba asserts, auto-
tridges reflect the indifference of those who fabricated and sold
the munitions for profit without worrying about their eventual
usos. Bearing the tragic histories of the Congo, Tsimba’s sculptures
formed from spent cartridges also refer to the suffering of indi-
viduals and offer opportunities to listen to the histories of each
person living where they have been gathered. Similarmente, the metal
spoons and forks that are no longer useful because they are broken
and are picked up in roadside detritus—with no municipal trash
collection in Kinshasa—give witness to the hunger of those who
no longer use them, Tsimba adds. In his installations, a bicycle
that is beyond repair, part of a locally crafted wheelchair, a push-
cart too broken for further use, all reflect an incapacity to protect
broken lives. A soldier’s old boots, picked up in the road, ques-
tion the future of the man who once wore them. Is he dead, did
he flee the army to join rebel forces, did he refuse to kill others
and cast aside his uniform? As he speaks of his first installation in
1999 (Higo. 10), Art and Peace, which was prepared for one of the
rare exhibitions organized in Kinshasa by a government agency,
Tsimba explained the circumstances of acquiring each element
of the composition and justified its place in the global economy
of meaning.28 His sculptures are often positioned in performative
ensembles, and their dramatized histories call audience members
to join the performance and so assume roles among the actors.
As with minkisi, Tsimba’s sculptures offer invisible knots of social
relaciones, for each element is witness to a local person or event.
Al mismo tiempo, the media of modern art permit Tsimba to give
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
12 Freddy Tsimba
Rape (2009)
Metal and fabric; 227 cm x 202
cm x 202 cm
Photo: courtesy of the artist
13 Freddy Tsimba
Paradoxe Conjugal (2010)
Metal; 250 cm x 126 xm x
100 cm
Photo: Cédrick Nzolo Ngambu,
by permission
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 15
written, “the Kongo ‘tradition of renewal’ is often an appeal for
the restoration of public morality and order.” Visual references to
the Pietà and to sharing the suffering of others further transport
Tsimba’s sculpture to the redemption of all humanity. Placed in
a public context, these phemba/Pietàs demand a remaking of the
world through their moral authority.
Nowadays in urban Congo, a woman is the principal support
of the family, but also the first victim of warfare, as suggested
by two of Tsimba’s installations that have rape as their subject
(Higo. 12). The works are particularly dramatic, and include not
only pieces of cloth and the use of color but—unusual to Tsim-
ba’s oeuvre—construction of a frame supporting and contain-
ing the female figure and the soldier, identified by the bandoleer
across his back. The man is otherwise naked, while the woman
is draped with a piece of cloth—perhaps to preserve her dignity
that this aggression would destroy?
In Conjugal Paradox (Higo. 13), a grand female figure that is naked
and headless is made from worn-out cutlery soldered together.
In her arms, lifted to the sky, she holds a human figure without
a head, while at her feet is a basket of chikwanga—bundles of fer-
mented and mashed manioc wrapped in leaves that are a common
food of Kinshasa’s poor. As a wandering vendor, she has replaced
the man who can no longer support his urban family. As a school
boy from Kinshasa described in his comment to me about a draw-
ing he made in 2000, it is painful “to see people suffer in a land so
rich in minerals and agriculture, seeing a mother who leaves early
in the morning with her child to sell bread.”
Another sculpture that has yet to be exhibited (Higo. 14) returns
to the theme of the phemba/Pietà. The body of a naked, headless
woman, again made from discarded silverware, holds between
her spread legs a human youngster whose body is composed of
used cartridges and whose face is a mask of cast metal. Across the
woman’s legs rests a pestle of the sort used to pound the grain of
daily staples, while the mortar for this task is positioned against
the legs of the child. To the right of the figure are two skulls
(meant to be monkey, or human?) made from poured metal, como
well as the casting of a locally crafted bomb that Tsimba brought
to Kinshasa from Brazzaville. The way the woman’s legs are
spread and her body is posed suggests exposure of her genitals.
For those who know urban Congolese culture, two challenges
are announced by such nudity—insult and moral condemna-
ción, but also the menace unleashed by the powers of sorcery.
The message is clear: the days of this society are numbered, justo
as the fuse of the bomb awaits lighting. Women who nourish
(clothed) give birth to soldier children (naked spent cartridges),
while mortars pulverize the skulls of babies. This veritable great
nkisi combines the dramatization of its combined elements and
destructive forces ready for release. To oblige the nkisi to deploy
all its powers, an nganga could insult the figure’s spirit by expos-
ing himself to it. To unclothe oneself in public is also the ulti-
mate argument of a woman caught up in dispute. Taking off one’s
cloth is an aggressive gesture (see MacGaffey 2000:248, 106).
During the June 2, 1966, public execution (in front of a gather-
ing of about 300,000 gente) of four politicians known today as
the Pentecostal Martyrs in what was a foundational event of the
Congo’s Second Republic (see Ndaywel 1998:647), some women
related to the victims are said to have removed their clothing
14 Freddy Tsimba
Untitled (2008)
Metal and wood; 108 cm x 80 cm x 93 cm
Photo: courtesy of the artist
universal reach to Kongo cultural particularities, and so to address
himself to publics of world scale. “I exploit the expressions of peo-
por ejemplo,” Tsimba holds, eso es, “what happens to them or to me, y yo
try to translate these in my works…. This reflects my vision of the
world, or rather the evolution of the world as I would wish it—a
world without suffering.”29 Several of the human figures that he
calls “silhouettes” are headless, as beings without particular identi-
ties that can therefore stand for all humans.
In several versions of Beyond Hope, a female figure made from
unusually large spent cartridges welded together with a blow-
torch holds a child of cast metal on her knees, between her legs, o
in her arms (Higo. 11). Two cultural memories contribute to these
creations and inform their reception. They may make one think
of the Michelangelo’s Pietà, but they especially evoke the phemba
(pfemba) figures of Mayombe people of the Kongo cultural com-
complejo. En este caso, the infant of the sculpture represents the spir-
its of the mother’s deceased children. For Ma yombe, phemba
figures perpetuate memories of the great social authority once
held by women chiefs.30 The motif of a woman and her child also
appears in Kongo funerary sculptures realized in steatite, called
mintadi, that were placed on graves until well into the twentieth
siglo. With phemba, reference to the spirits of lost children
and the authority of women is meant to awaken consciences and
reestablish social order. As John Janzen (2013:137) has recently
16 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
F
/
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
(Gérard-Libois 1967:443) to gain the attention of then Colonel,
later President Mobutu. Two decades earlier and several hun-
dred kilometers to the west, the following scene took place: “As
the brigadier wanted to flog her husband, the woman lifted her
skirts…. The senior chief called upon the village chief to seclude
this woman, saying that it was shameful to him and his village
that she had shown her privates in public” (Herrero 2013:609).
Space does not permit me to pursue the detailed analysis of
objects discussed above, but let us notice that the aesthetic
effects aim to produce a moral questioning leading to politi-
cal processes that would interrogate relations of power. De
the start, such an artistic approach reassembles fragments of
the real, fragments of human lives carrying their own histories.
Let us recall that each piece of metal driven into the body of an
nkisi ntadi31 is evidence of an action undertaken at the request
of someone and holds a particular history/memory in the com-
munity. A wish, a curse, a request addressed to the ancestors, todo
were pronounced as shards of metal were hammered into the
nkisi’s body, and any given piece of metal could be withdrawn
to reverse an awaited outcome. Such practices must be in mind
when questioning Tsimba’s use of recycled materials as “ruins.”
Kongo cultural memory influences the totality of his oeuvre, pero
in Roman Catholicism, as well as many other religions, práctica
of votive objects must also be brought to mind, especially in the
Kongo region, where Christian cultural elements already had
spread widely in seventeenth century. As in the case of the pro-
hibition of the public nudity of a man, it is impossible to separate
moral and religious foundations of such practice.
In Tsimba’s The Guardians of Memory, two masks or faces
made of cast metal are attached to busts made from spent car-
tridges. In their disposition, the cartridge shells evoke the “nails”
of an nkisi ntadi. The composition leads one to think of the fig-
ures of couples representing the children of a priest who has
initiated them to the Lemba Society.32 These minkisi reflecting
alliances were created north of the Congo River from at least
the seventeenth century, where Lemba is still active. If such
works are rare, the representation of a couple decorates bracelets
(nlunga) that are much more widely spread and worn by Lemba
adepts their whole lives. Lemba is also found in the Atlantic
diaspora, and its importance to preservation of Kongo thera-
peutic knowledge accentuates the impression of commonalities
between the sculpture of Tsimba and the Lemba couple.
Freddy Tsimba sometimes takes as his point of departure an
event in society, a problem for which resolution is the condition
of survival, or sometimes his own personal experience for which
he feels there is universal import. The choice of what has hap-
pened reveals a disequilibrium, an injustice, and then imposes a
search for solutions. Tsimba assigns himself the task of fabricat-
ing means of healing.33 The Refugees of Makolobo, Center Closed,
Dream Open, or again, Centre fermé, Rêve ouvert (Higo. 15), are all
part of this project. Tsimba thereby renders in the present the
massacre of Makobolo on Christmas Eve 1999, or how he was
once briefly detained by authorities at the Brussels airport of
Zaventem.34
Before shifting our attention away from the sculpture of Freddy
Tsimba, let us say a few words about his House of Machetes (Higo.
16). This installation marks the beginning of his search to create
a work capable of addressing itself to everyone, no matter the
cultural context, but based upon the ways that an nkisi is com-
posed and set into action. Constructing House of Machetes acti-
vates a profound link between the artist’s personal memory (él
speaks of the first machete he saw as a child, which was made
in China), global commercial networks (he went to China to
purchase machetes for this project and so “withdraw them from
commerce”), and the contradictory Congolese uses of machetes
in the past and now, to clear a field but also to hack someone to
death. The symbolism of the number of machetes used is sig-
nificant, for Tsimba sometimes says one thousand, as a number
that recalls the millennialism common to life in Kinshasa, y
sometimes 999—three nines, each the number of months of a
el embarazo. The form of the construction is also important, para
“the house,” as Tsimba has written (2012:45), “is intimacy, secu-
rity, procreation. But here the house has become a pathway, es
the violence of the everyday.”
15 Freddy Tsimba
Centre fermé, Rêve ouvert (2013)
Metal and plastic bags installation; 18 figures,
dimensions variable
Photo: Cédrick Nzolo Ngambu, by permission
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 17
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
F
/
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
House of Machetes was assembled in Kinshasa to the knowledge
and view of passersby. Welding the machetes, one to another, ren-
dered them inoffensive and became a kind of ritual process. El
completed work was transported to and exhibited in the public
marketplace. The choice of this location evokes the ancient roles
of the market, for the most important moment of the four-day
Kongo week was the market placed under the protection of a pow-
erful chief and of a great nkisi, guaranteeing peace and respect for
the agreements and alliances realized there. Public reactions to
House of Machetes when it was erected at the Liberty Market in
the Masina Commune of Kinshasa make one think of the com-
portments of those awaiting for an nkisi to take action. The initial
surprise and discomfort aroused by something holding spiritual
powers gives way to a sense of the presence of the spirit. Such feel-
ings seem to seize the body of a young man. The spirit leads him
to swear that the machete will never again serve to kill, that the
“house” will be respected, and peace preserved.35
STEVE BANDOMA: HYPERREALITIES OF COLLAGE
Tsimba (born in 1967) and Baloji (born in 1978) both came
into a world during periods of DRC’s Second Republic (1965–
1990) that offered some expectation of (potencial) stability. En
contrast, Bandoma, born in 1981, spent his early years in uncer-
tain times of interminable, wrenching change. As opposed to the
modest social milieux of Tsimba, whose father was a function-
ary of the state, and of Baloji, whose father is a Protestant pas-
tor and former financial director of a local Congolese enterprise,
Bandoma is the son of a politician who has several times served
as a minister in Congolese governments of transition. Tsimba’s
parents are of Kongo ethnicity, as is Bandoma’s mother, while his
father is Mungala and Gbaka. All three families are Protestants,
which is a minority faith in the Congo. Tsimba grew up speak-
ing the Kongo language as well as Lingala, and the young Baloji
spoke Swahili even though Tshiluba of Kasai Province is the eth-
nicity and language of his parents. In Bandoma’s family home,
Lingala and French are spoken. His mother holds a secondary-
school diploma and has a professional career, while his father
has studied in Europe.
Baloji and Tsimba—even if the latter holds a degree in Fine
Arts—explain that their training has been through apprentice-
ship of the sort that characterizes urban painters and photog-
raphers in the DRC. Bandoma, por otro lado, stresses his
formal education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa and
then in both South Africa and Europe, where he has studied
multimedia contemporary arts. If Baloji and Tsimba emphasize
their relationships with Congolese urban culture, Bandoma
forefronts his experience in artistic collectives of Kinshasa and
Ciudad del Cabo. In his maternal family, an uncle and several sisters
produce world music, his mother has recently begun paint-
En g, and all now live in France. Western popular culture has
been very present in Bandoma’s home, and the young man had
a television set in his room, a desktop computer by the time
he was fourteen, and shortly thereafter access to the Internet.
Iglesias was his favorite vocalist, and Tintin and the Bible his
favorite things to read.
Sin embargo, alone among the three artists, Bandoma remem-
bers having been fascinated by a popular painting of Mami Wata
hanging in his home and by seeing other works from the repertoire
of urban arts—Colonie belge and Inkale among them.36 Already at
the Academy of Fine Arts of Kinshasa, Bandoma’s painting was
“surrealist but in reality a collage that didn’t know it,” as he says.37
Given the “academism” of this institution, his interest in collage
must have been inspired by the urban culture of Kinshasa as an
assemblage never ceasing to change. Bandoma recalls that his first
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
F
/
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
18 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
16 Freddy Tsimba
Maison machette (2012)
Metal, madera, and straw; 272 cm x 450 cm x 352 cm
Photo: Cédrick Nzolo Ngambu, by permission
encounter with precolonial African art (which he still calls “art
nègre”)38 through pictures in the textbooks used in his art history
and humanities classes that fascinated him. He made several vis-
its to his parents’ villages, but he only remembers that his mater-
nal grandfather told him he had once slept in a bed belonging to
Simon Kimbangu and predicted that Bandoma would become an
artist. Bandoma’s knowledge of Kongo culture mostly comes from
books, by his own admission.39
En breve, Steve Bandoma comes from a different generation
y, through his parents, from a different social class than either
Baloji or Tsimba. He does not seem to have shared with them the
social experiences of the 1990s and 2000s. In contrast to them,
from childhood Bandoma’s relationship to the society of Kin-
shasa, and the DRC more broadly, has been mediated by televi-
sión, French popular music, and the Internet. In the footsteps of
the modern prophet Simon Kimbangu, his maternal family was
more interested in the modern world than village “tradition.”
The same can be said of Bandoma’s father. In this way, Bandoma’s
view of the Congo is refracted by a global prism, and the tools
he has found there have served to recompose images of Kongo
culture initially encountered through “art nègre” as simulacra.
En primer lugar, Bandoma shatters these images, transforming them
into ruins through a brutal injection of global culture mostly
borrowed from the visual universe of advertising. I do not
believe that this is a matter of chance or a facility motivated by
the imaginary of mass commodification; on the contrary, Steve
Bandoma proceeds to violent confrontations of simulacra, nota-
bly Kongo culture taken uniquely as “art” versus mass consump-
ción. His plan surely constitutes a search for the possibility of
reversing points of view dominating his identity as an artist who
is both Congolese and Kongo.40
Upon return from South Africa, Bandoma began composing
thematic series of several dozen collages on paper. Constructed
for the most part over the course of a year, they were eventually
enriched by later additions. At the heart of each series, several
collages bear the same title as a sort of subtheme, without neces-
sarily being conceived to be presented together. While the title of
a series is almost always in English, the names of subseries and
additions are usually in French. En 2011, Por ejemplo, in the series
called Vanity we find several Crucifixions, and in Lost Tribe, sub-
titles are Hommages aux ancêtres, Trésor oublié, Choc des cultures,
and the like. En 2012 he added Mental Slavery and Identity, pero también
Le civilisé. While previously each collage was an autonomous work
no matter its references to a series, después 2012 certain ones were
conceived to be displayed together. Bandoma seems to produce
with an eye to exhibitions, but he sells individual pieces nonethe-
menos. These ensembles share central visual elements: a dog with two
heads inspired by a kind of Kongo nkisi (as in Bandoma’s Lucky
Dog); a human figure also reflecting an nkisi (Dolor), sometimes
in a series (Lost Tribe); someone donning a mask and wearing
a jersey that recalls the prisoner in the urban painting Colonie
belge (Enculturation in the Lost Tribe series). One finds the same
approach in the series Itch, this time as constructed around an
egg. If he draws in ink in Baby-Boomer Progenitors, in Crash the
eggs are crushed and their shells are glued to the paper. Bandoma
seems to be putting in question, not an artifact of representation
but the materiality of everyday objects.
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
17 Steve Bandoma
Métamorphose (2012), from Lost Tribe series
Acrylic on wood; 70 cm x 20 cm x 20 cm
Photo: courtesy of the artist
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
It is impossible to know if, in executing these works, Ban-
doma is influenced by a cultural memory of Western reflection
upon simulacra and representation of the real—as in Lewis Car-
roll, Jorge Louis Borges, or Oscar Wilde—or if he is inspired by
the shocks of encountering simulacra of Kongo culture in “art
nègre” that satisfy needs through advertising and contemporary
Kinoise society—as a hyperreality in its own right. Following
Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, I understand this latter term
to refer to representation of the real transformed, edited, y
re-presented to the point that the simulacrum imposes itself in
place of truth to the extent that the latter ceases to exist. The arti-
fact constructed in this way has no further relationships to other
sorts of reality, as Baudrillard (1995) has stressed.
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 19
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
.
F
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
18 Steve Bandoma
Enculturation (2012), incorporating
(l–r, top–bottom) Woyo/Kongo, Dan,
Pende, Pende, Songye, Admirador, y
Chokwe masks
Collage on paper; each panel 100 cm
X 37.5 cm
Photo: courtesy of the artist
20 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
Recientemente, Bandoma has realized three-dimensional installa-
tions and several sculptures. He has entitled Metamorphose (en
his Lost Tribe series) an nkisi presented like a museum artifact,
although it is painted entirely white (Higo. 17). An installation
on a great checkerboard unites commercial plush toys with fig-
ures inspired by precolonial Congolese arts is called Qui perd
gagne—He Who Loses Gains. Things from one Congolese culture
or another are represented across the images of “art nègre,” as
Bandoma strips any aura of “primitivism” from a museum arti-
fact or an object from a collection by painting it white and sug-
gesting an equivalence with playthings whose only value is that
accorded to them by commerce. Such objects have no particular
qualities other than their conversion to money, and if they refer
to any power, it is uniquely this.
Techniques of collage link Bandoma to the patrimony of mod-
ernism, beginning with Braque and Picasso, permitting him to
reexamine the relationship between painting and sculpture and
so between representation in two and three dimensions.41 In
each medium that Bandoma mobilizes, he lends characteristics
of another. In a collage, he incorporates constitutive elements of
an nkisi and seeks the visual impressions of a three-dimensional
object, photomontage, or collage.
Two ensembles of collages from 2012 lend themselves to anal-
ysis, Enculturation and Acculturation, which are composed of
seven and three works, respectivamente. In the first of these, Ban-
doma has conceived the works together, while in the second
each image is presented separately. Wearing a shirt of horizontal
gray stripes, the personages depicted in his Enculturation polyp-
tyque (Higo. 18) wear seven different masks. From left to right the
masks are based upon Woyo/Kongo, Dan, Pende, and Pende
de nuevo; and then below, the three from left to right are Songye,
Admirador, and Chokwe.42 Another mask evokes Satan, and then comes
a face with an Afro, followed by another with a twisted visage
borrowed from Bandoma’s collage Mental Slavery. On the chest
of each figure is the logo of a modish designer or enterprise,
with one the Nazi flag. Con una excepcion, the personages have
only one leg, and wears a man’s or woman’s shoe cut from a fash-
ion magazine. The arms, either entire or in disintegration, end,
again with a single exception, in separate hands, most of which
are white, with one black and another that of a skeleton. Estos
figures combine traits borrowed from the “art nègre” that Ban-
doma knows from catalogs and books, with a sense of the sapeur
dandies of Kinshasa who construct themselves from appropria-
tions of Western modes.43 The appearance of these bodies recalls
the flogged prisoner of the Colonie belge painting, but also the
performers of Pende and other masquerades (c.f. Strother 1999).
The conclusion that imposes itself is that a person is only an arti-
fice constructed by bouts of borrowing, a simulacrum, a cuckoo’s
egg in a nest of reality.
In the collages called Acculturation (Higo. 19), a figure inspired
by an nkisi from “art nègre” is limned in diluted sepia ink. Estafa-
trary to the impression of someone from the past or the per-
sonage of a souvenir suggested by the evanescent traits of the
sepia tone, a blue eye and active arms emerging from the fig-
ure are altogether alive. Women’s hands—European or perhaps
Indian—emerge from the body and hold nails as though these
have been removed from the “nkisi.” Only a closed fist seems
to be that of an African body. In the stomach of the figure, en
the location where certain minkisi hold mirrors and medicinal
bundles, a television screen is embedded that depicts the signal
of needed adjustments. One is reminded of somewhat similar
depictions by Trigo Piula called Matema de 1984 and Ta Télé,
(Vogel and Ebong 1991:176): “The painting is a warning, a moral
lección, a public statement. And the painter is a preacher exhort-
ing his people to examine their values.” Male genitals are clearly
depicted in Bandoma’s Acculturation, and the left hand holds a
broken object and is raised in an nkisi’s gesture of power. Porque
“foreign” hands have removed the nails one might associated
with an nkisi, there are no further memories of the operations
and interventions of spirits or ancestors. The television screen
and “foreign” hands suggest that these recollections have been
replaced by mass global culture.
19 Steve Bandoma
Acculturation (2012)
Collage on paper; 105 cm x 75 cm
Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida,
Gainesville; Museum Purchase, funds provided by
the David A. Cofrin Acquisition Endowment.
Photo: Randy Batista Photography, courtesy of the
Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 21
Another suite of collages entitled Mérites du roi Léopold II in
the Crime series presents a personage vaguely inspired by the
contours of an nkisi but bearing the head of the Belgian mon-
arch. In one version, his right foot is placed upon the head of
Patrice Lumumba (Higo. 20), and in another arms hug the head
of Mobutu Sese Seko. These heads are cut from printed images,
evoking official portraits of a history book. Cut out from maga-
zine illustrations or from printed advertisement, hands of Euro-
pean women emerge from “Leopold’s” shoulders. Are these
meant to evoke the nails driven into an nkisi to perpetuate mem-
ories of wishes and curses but now pushed out by those hands?
Have these hands pulled out nails and local people’s memories
with them, to be replaced by dreams/nightmares borrowed from
global culture? The figure, whose arms recall those an nkisi, bears
a portable phone at the waist; in another collage it is replaced
by a switchblade knife. These objects and the hands appear to
be digitally copied from advertisements. Will the modern past
of the Congo be restricted to its “father” Léopold, through his
personal possession of the Congo Free State (1885–1908), y para
his successors, Lumumba or Mobutu? Modernity would have
been the heritage of Lumumba, while Mobutu was bequeathed
Léopold’s brutality. Veritable simulacra of the Congo, these two
collages present themselves as true despite having no correspon-
dence with reality, since the reality they pretend to re-present
has never existed or exists no longer. In a review of Kongo across
the Waters, Allen F. Roberts (2014:6) described Bandoma’s nkisi
figures as “updated so that what were once tangible entreaties
and votives become collages of hands, wanting and grasping in
response to today’s consumerism and political demands.”
In the manner of the protagonist of Borges’s The Circular
Ruins (1997), the present for Congolese corresponds to a circu-
larity of representation. From Baloji to Bandoma, entonces, the circle
is closed. For the former, the materiality of ruins of the past will
permit transformation of the present as simulacra of life in the
future. For the latter, the past is only simulacra, and indeed, tiene
it ever existed? Its ruins are only representations.
FROM ART ONCE CALLED “WITCHCRAFT”:
MAKING OBJECTS OF POWER
I went from being an artist who makes things,
to an artist who makes things happen.
Jeremy Deller (Thompson 2012:front matter)
In Congolese society, artists give themselves the task of medi-
ation between local social theories and theories of art following
Western tradition, so as to make visible and sensible that which
otherwise remains obscure. Here one may recall a remark by
David Gordon (2012:202) that “a theory of power that emerges
from ancient history engages with colonial and neocolonial
modernities, and insists on the visible inspirations of our actions.”
Despite their evident differences, these theories share an empha-
sis on objects possessing strong powers that are both visual and
memorable. The capacities of such objects fabricated by special-
ists transcend time, espacio, and cultural contexts. As Wyatt Mac-
Gaffey (2013) has suggested, Kongo “theory” and art theory both
enable us to see what otherwise we could not and to feel that we
understand obscure creative drives. In a place and context, mem-
22 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
/
F
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
20 Steve Bandoma
Mérites du roi Léopold II (2012), from Crimes series
Collage on paper; 105 cm x 75 cm
Photo: courtesy of the artist
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
ory incorporated into an object counts even more, as does that
activated by the object’s diverse composing parts. En otra parte, privi-
leged reception is visual. Once detached from social context, el
lieu de mémoire of an anthropomorphic nkisi—sometimes called
a “fetish”—is thereafter an object of “art nègre.”44 The aesthetic
aspects depend upon social efficacy, and the simulacrum is real,
following the path taken by Steve Bandoma.
Baloji and Tsimba, each in his own way, proceed by the recom-
position of shards of society, pieces of time and space, and frag-
ments collected after the heat of battle. The artists select and
use them to compose ruins of themselves that society can then
appropriate. It is outward from the Congo, from an event, un
experiencia, that they call out to and address the world. Su
universal quality, whether ethical or aesthetic, rests upon the
conviction that no human can remain indifferent to human suf-
fering (c.f. Sontag 2002, Batchen et al. 2012). Echoing Hannah
Arendt more than half a century ago, their attention to suffering
is derived from their belief that the evil wrought by man consti-
tutes the central problem of contemporary humanity. Their Prot-
estant upbringing is certainly not foreign to the sentiment that
recognizing evil is the path to redemption. They share with most
Congolese the Christ-like conviction that their collective descent
into hell will save humanity.45 As with the great Mangaaka nkisi
now in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of
Arte (see MacGaffey 2013:176), the imposing presence of such
works demands response from viewers. And as V.Y. Mudimbe
(1991:278) has reflected, “the objective of [su] work is to gather
together the art, the past, and the dreams of a community for a
better future.”
Bogumil Jewsiewicki taught at Lovanium University, DRC, y
National University of Zaire from 1968 a 1976 before moving to Laval
Universidad, Québec, Canada. Before his retirement in 2009 he held the
Laval University research chair in Comparative History of Memory. Desde
the early 1990s, he has worked on Congolese collective memory and urban
cultura, especially visual culture, and was named ASA Distinguished Afri-
canist in 2006. He has curated exhibits of Congolese urban paintings and
photography (1999 y 2010 at Museum for African Art, Nueva York, y
2001, Museum fur Volkerkunde, Viena). He recently summarized his
research on Congo visual culture in “A Century of Painting in the Congo:
Image, Memoria, Experience, and Knowledge” in A Companion to Mod-
ern African Art, ed. Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visona (John
wiley, 2013). Bogumil.Koss@hist.ulaval.ca
Notas
Without the assistance of Sammy Baloji, Steve Ban-
doma, and Freddy Tsimba, who answered my questions
so graciously, and without the generous help of Bénédicte
Meiers, Said Abbas Ahamed, Hein Vanhee, and Bambi
Ceuppens, I would never have been able to assemble the
necessary information to write the present paper. Susan
Cooksey and Alioune Sow were kind enough to invite me
to the University of Florida to present talks on Sammy
Baloji’s and Freddy Tsimba’s work. Several colleagues
generously read and commented upon an initial text
from which the present paper is drawn, and thanks are
extended to Jean-Loup Amselle, Johannes Fabian, Peter
Geschiere, Wyatt MacGaffey, Allen F. Roberts, and Jan
Vansina. Allen F. Roberts was not only so generous as
to translate from French original but he also provided
most insightful comments and rectifications for which
I am very grateful. Needless to say, all remaining errors
are mine.
1
Más tarde, he wrote “Art is History’s nostalgia” (Wal-
cott 1992a:xlv, ii). It is pertinent to recall that Walcott is
also a painter.
2
“The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over
landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins apart
from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.”
Walcott’s (1962:12) refusal of imposed heritage coincides
with the rejection of history as disregard, borrowing
Ann Stroler’s (2009) term. As Walcott said in his 1992
Nobel address, “It is not that History is obliterated by
this sunrise. It is there in Antillean geography, en el
vegetation itself. The sea sighs with the drowned from
the Middle Passage, the butchery of its aborigines,
Carib and Arawak and Taino, bleeds in the scarlet of the
immortal, and even the actions of surf on sand cannot
erase the African memory, or the lances of cane as a
green prison where indentured Asians, the ancestors of
Felicity, are still serving time.”
3
“Perse” refers to Aléxis Saint-Léger Léger, born in
Guadeloupe and Nobel Laureate of Literature in 1960.
4 Walcott (2007:123) wonders “how to choose/
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?” and
convokes the Homeric tradition (Omeros) así como el
“sound like a rumour without any echo of History.” As
he states, “the intensity of the particular is what makes it
general” Walcott (2001:135).
5 The sentiment of wanting to retreat from ruins
is shared with other Congolese artists. As the choreog-
rapher/arts-activist Faustin Linyekula asserts, “There
are people crazy enough to believe obstinately in the
celebration of beauty, despite the somersaults of his-
conservador, guerras, revolutions, [y] regimes. To hope that the
derisory nature of art can face up to the enormity of the
hideousness of life. To dare dream that the indepen-
dence of thought, free arbitration, and personal initia-
tive can push against this pile of ruins” (Studios Kabako
in Kisangani, homepage, http://www.kabako.org/,
accessed March 10, 2014); for a discussion of Linyekula’s
work in the pages of this journal, see also Dupray 2013.
twentieth century during the “scientific expedition” led
by Charles Lemaire.
14
I am indebted to Allen Roberts for helping me
6 Tsimba describes the creation of his first
sculpture in 1999 in these terms: “I paced around all of
Kinshasa on foot, looking for materials. I collected dis-
carded military boots that were in abundance, helmets
with holes in them, shovels without handles, clocks
without hands, and I returned to my workshop”; email
comunicación, Enero 20, 2014.
7
8
Email exchange with Tsimba, Enero 21, 2013.
It is not possible to broach here the important
question of the relationship between urban material cul-
tura, and especially urban painting, and the creations of
these artists. Only Steve Bandoma, as will be discussed
abajo, speaks explicitly of urban paintings displayed in
his family house. Sin embargo, the influence of aesthet-
ics is palpable in the photography of Sammy Baloji, y
particularly in his series called Mémoire. The relation-
ship to the past probably constitutes the major differ-
ence in the work of urban painters and the creations of
the three artists discussed here. On the place of the past
in Congolese urban culture, see Fabian 1978, 1996.
9
See Fabian 1973, Dibwe dia Mwembu and Jews-
iewicki 2004. This interdependence between individual
identity and the nature of the work he does is not spe-
cific to Congolese colonial modernity. In the Katanga
mining region, these modalities are particular to the
creation of a sort of workers’ bourgeoisie constituted
by salaried employees of grand enterprises (Dibwe
dia Mwembu and Jewsiewicki 2004). As Martin Filler
(2014:14) has recently written, “personal identity often
derives more from professional pursuits than private
maters, would be that we are where we work.”
10 Sammy Baloji is presently creating a new series,
untitled as of this writing, through the confrontation
and cohabitation of photographs in the album of a
European hunter of trophy animals who explored Kivu
a century ago, and the press photos of Christian Mvano,
a young journalist from Kivu. Congolese people appear
in these new works like trophies of war caught between
armies and armed factions, and MONUC (los unidos
Nations Mission to the Congo). These forces occupy the
mediating place of early explorers, to Baloji’s thinking.
This new initiative asks for its own detailed analysis
impossible here.
11
Jewsiewicki 2010, 2010a, 2011. Baloji is an art-
ist whose international status has been confirmed by
several distinctions: the Prince Claus Award (2008),
the Spiegel Prize (2012), a Rolex Art Initiative Protégé
(2014–2015), and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015).
12 On urban painting and collective imagination in
the Congo, see Jewsiewicki 2003, 2008, 2008a, 2013.
13
In Baloji and Couttenier (2014), Maarten Cout-
teier takes a similar angle regarding Baloji’s photo-
montages of images of Katanga taken at the turn of the
find a short but nevertheless acceptable formula making
sense of a very complex and diverse situation. Concern-
ing the process by which a mask gives witnesses to spirit
presence, the nature of the relationship between the mask
and the person wearing it is hotly debated by scholars.
It is not possible to develop here another per-
15
spective presented in a series of portraits by Baloji that
depict Lusinga’s skull. Reference may be made to the
brilliant analysis of Allen Roberts (2013) and to the text
of Lotte Arndt (2013). This latter considers two series
by Baloji, Aller et retour and Passages. The first includes
photographs of the skull of a chief from present-day
North Katanga named Lusinga that was brought to
Belgium by Émile Storms, a military officer working
for King Leopold’s International African Association
who was responsible for Lusinga’s assassination and
decapitation. Lusinga’s skull is now in the collections of
the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural History. In Baloji’s
second series, photos of a collection of skulls, dating to
the nineteenth century and conserved at the Guimet
Museum of Lyon, are counterposed to images of the
interior of the Fourvières Basilica, also in Lyon.
16
[Translator’s Note: On “the work of memory”
and the making of contemporary African histories, ver
Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe 1993.]
17 The original photograph was taken of mining
recruits during a medical examination. Note the position-
ing of their bodies and that of the mask-bearer of Fig. 3.
18 Por ejemplo, in Kongo culture, when a chief
falls down, those with him fall to the ground as well, a
avoid seeing his genitals. In a similar way, when a great
nkisi sculpture of the sort that is anthropomorphic and
bears great powers, falls to earth, so do those around it
(MacGaffey 1991:136). From the 1970s to the 1990s, el
Colonie belge painting was widely spread across urban
Congo in a way that makes Kongo examples relevant
even if the region is far away from Katanga.
19 This may seem a rhetorical question, cual
would contradict a piece in the Kinshasa newspaper Le
Phare of May 14, 2014 that holds that the Congolese is
“someone in eternal need, ready to seek happiness, incluso
in hell.” [Translator’s Note: for an overview of recent
Chinese business ventures in the Congo like the Zhong
Hang Mining Company of Kolwezi as well as through-
out Africa, see French 2015.]
20 Tsimba’s obsession with life should not be
surprising in an artist who is morally engaged in a
society in which, in less than two decades, entre
five and six million Congolese have perished from civil
wars and foreign interventions—roughly one citizen in
six. Even though the western part of the country has
been less involved in these conflicts than the East has
estado, Tsimba expresses national solidarity rather than
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 23
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
F
/
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
a regional or ethnic one, without even saying that his
mother was born in Bukavu in eastern Congo, dónde
his maternal grandfather was stationed on the eve of
Independence as a soldier in the Force publique (el
colonial army).
21 From “Visionary Africa,” a thirteen-minute
BOZAR broadcast of 2010. Thanks to Kathleen Louw
for sharing a copy of this with me when the video was
no longer available via YouTube, and to Bambi Ceup-
pens for putting me in contact with Ms. Louw. Freddy
Tsimba is far from the only artist to allude to ancient
arte. “I found in these ancient masterpieces emotional
appeal and satisfaction,” the Ghanaian sculptor Oku
Ampofo declared in 1949 (cited in Vogel 1991:195).
En cambio, it is the spontaneous character of Tsimba’s rec-
ognition that strikes one, and the fact of finding a face
for this cultural memory that had always been there,
despite being unknown.
22
[Translator’s Note: For recent field research on
“traditional” arts of Kongo people, see Martínez-Ruiz
2013.]
las Ntimasiemi and Raffi Aghekian (2013).
36 The synoptic volumes on Mami Wata edited
by Henry Drewal (2008a, 2008b) give a sense of the
richness of this theme; on Mami Wata in the DRC, o
Mamba Mutu as she is sometimes known, see my text
in this same collection (Jewsiewicki 2008a, 2008b) y
another text coauthored with Sammy Baloji (Baloji and
Jewsiewicki 2012).
37 Email exchange with the artist, Febrero 10, 2014.
38
In the early twentieth century, “art nègre” was
a common term to designate art objects brought from
África, The more general term “primitive art” included
art objects from the Pacific islands and both phrases
were used by some through the twentieth century. A
recent controversy related to the new art museum in
París, Musée du quai Branly (Precio 2007), demonstrated
how difficult it is to get rid of terms like “primitive”
while talking about non-European art. In French, el
substantive and the adjective nègre can be both jocular
and inflammatory, and the same is true for “primitive,"
although to a lesser extent.
23 See MacGaffey 2013:176–77. We have thousands
39
[Translator’s Note: Simon Kimbangu (1887–1951)
of pages of firsthand descriptions of minkisi in Kongo
culture written in the Kongo language at the turn of
the twentieth century by mission teachers who were
themselves Kongo. Wyatt MacGaffey has made several
magisterial analyses of these materials; see MacGaffey
1991, 1993, 2000, and MacGaffey and Janzen 1974.
24 Allen F. Roberts, personal communication.
25 Allen F. Roberts, personal communication.
26 Email exchange with the artist on January 20,
2014. Wyatt MacGaffey (2013) stresses that the sacred
character of an nkisi is derived from its relationship
with a particular event it evokes.
27 Allen F. Roberts, personal communication; c.f.
Roberts 1996.
28 No photograph of the installation is known
to exist, and only the artist’s sketch remains (Tsimba
2012:43). The work of Freddy Tsimba is presented in the
film Mavambu by Rosine Mbakam and Mirkjo Popo-
vitch (2011). Mavambu, the plural of divambu, medio
“the point where roads branch from one another” in the
Kongo language, and is Tsimba’s second name.
29 Email exchange with artist, Enero 24, 2014.
30 Phemba figures have also inspired the Congo-
lese sculptor from Brazzaville Trigo Piula; uno, called
Matema (1984), was published in Vogel and Ebong
1991:228. On the phemba genre of Mayombe sculpture,
see Lehuard 1976, Janzen 1978.
31 Minkisi of differing form and function bear
different names. Thompson (1983) describes Kongo
minkisi in detail. Marie-Claude Dupré (1975) attempted
an effort of classification based on Laman’s third volume
(Laman 1962). Sin embargo, MacGaffey (1991:6) consid-
ers that “It is a mistake to classify minkisi exactly, desde
no mechanism existed to produce or enforce taxonomic
orthopraxy. … [oh]ften enough the same name was
applied to minkisi of differing form and function.”
32 On Lemba, see Janzen 1982, Janzen and Janzen
1990.
33 As John Janzen (2013:136–37) has stated,
“minkisi addressed dilemmas of civil collapse, epidemic
enfermedad, and population decline … to restore authority
and ties to ancestors.” And again, “major minkisi repre-
sented innovations, reinterpretations, in the tradition of
drawing strength from society, the earth and the powers
within them.”
34
[Translator’s Note: the massacre of Makobolo, a
town near the city of Uvira along the shores of Lake Tan-
ganyika in east-central DRC, was undertaken by Rwanda-
inflenced rebels during the chaotic years of Laurant
Kabila’s rule as President of the Republic; see Fisher 1999.]
35 Building the House of Machetes and its exhibi-
tion were filmed as part of Kinshasa mboka te by Doug-
24 | african arts SPRING 2016 VOL. 49, NO. 1
was a Kongo prophet understood by his otherwise
Protestant devotees to be a special messenger of Jesus
Christ. He was persecuted by authorities of the Belgian
Congo and died in prison after thirty years of incarcera-
ción. Such martyrdom only increased his popularity,
and Kimbanguism now has several million followers
and is recognized by the World Council of Churches.
See one of the movement’s websites, http://www.jccesk.
com; c.f. M’Bokolo and Sabakinu 2014.]
40 Still, to follow Gilles Deleuze (1995:299), el
simulacra of Bandoma’s collages are “those systems in
which different is related to different by means of dif-
ference itself. What is essential is that we find in these
systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance.”
41 For recent writing on collage, see Busch,
Klanten, and Hellige 2013; McLeod and Kuenzli 2011;
Klanten, Hellige, and Gallagher 2011; and Dogancay and
taylor 2008.
42 I wish to thank Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen
F. Roberts for identification of originals. [Translator’s
Nota: A polyptyque usually refers to an ensemble of
early painted panels depicting Christian saints and
escenas, such as that of the Carolingian church of St.
Gernain in Neuillay; see www.le.ac.uk/hi/polyptyques/
neuillay/site.html.]
43
[Translator’s Note: Sapeurs are those who prac-
tice le SAPE, the acronym of La Société des Ambian-
ceurs de des Personnes Élégantes, that rose in Congo/
Brazzaville during the colonial period but that was
reignited by hugely popular Kinshasa-based vocalists of
the 1960s like Papa Wemba. See Gondola 1999.].
44 A lieu de mémoire is a place or realm of mem-
ory; see Nora 1996–1998; regarding art and memory in
the Congo, see M.N. Roberts 1996.
45 Already in the 1970s, the “politician” Patrice
Lumumba was portrayed in Katangan urban paintings
as a Congolese Jesus Christ (see Jewsiewicki 1999).
Since the 1990s, Christian churches have multiplied
in which Lumumba is understood as a prophet who
will assure the redemption of the world. As I have
written elsewhere, such constructions offer a sense of
suffering to ordinary Congolese, and preserve their
dignidad. Whether through Lumumba or Kimbangu (ver
M’Bokolo and Sabakinu 2014), they offer themselves in
sacrifice to save humanity.
References cited
Ades, Dawn. 1999. Photomontage. Londres: Thames and
Hudson.
Arndt, Lotte. 2013. “Vestiges of Oblivion: Sammy Baloji’s
Works on Skulls in European Museum Collections.”
darkmatter Journal: In the ruins of imperial culture 11,
“Afterlives,” www.darkmatter101.org, accessed March
20, 2014.
Baloji, Sammy. 2014. Mémoire/Kolwezi. Bruselas: Afri-
calia Editions.
Baloji, Sammy, and Bogumil Jewsiewicki. 2012.
“Mami wata et mamba muntu: sirène médiatrice dans
l’imaginaire collectif congolais.” In Femmes médiatri-
ces et ambivalentes: Mythes et imaginaires, ed. Anna
Caiozzo and Nathalie Ernoult, páginas. 107-dieciséis. París:
Armand Colin.
Baloji, Sammy, and Maarten Couttenier. 2014. "El
Charles Lemaire Expedition Revisited: Sammy Baloji
as a Portraitist of Present Humans in Congo Far West.”
African Arts 47 (1):66–81.
Batchen, Geoffrey, Mick Gidley, Nancy Miller, and Jay
Prosser, eds. 2012. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in
Crisis. Londres: Reaktion Books.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann
Arbor: Prensa de la Universidad de Michigan.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1997. “The Circular Ruins.” In Laby-
rinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, páginas. 45–50.
Nueva York: New Directions.
Busch, David, Robert Klanten, and Hendrik Hellige,
eds. 2013. The Art of Collage: Contemporary Collage in
Modern Art. Berlina: Gestalten.
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life.
berkeley: University of California Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Difference and Repetition, Nuevo
york: Columbia University Press.
Dibwe dia Mwembu, Donatien, and Bogumil Jewsie-
wicki, eds. 2004. Le travail hier et aujourd’hui. Mémoires
de Lubumbashi, París: L’Harmattan.
Dogancay, Burhan, and Brandon Taylor, eds. 2008.
Urban Walls: A Generation of Collage in Europe and
America. Nueva York: Hudson Hills.
Drewal, Henry John, ed. 2008a. Mami Wata: Arts for
Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas. Los Angeles:
UCLA Fowler Museum.
_______, ed. 2008b. Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata
and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Dupray, Virginie. 2013. “Kisangani: A Chronicle of
Return.” African Arts 46 (1):14–19.
Dupre, Marie-Claude. 1975. “Le système des forces nkisi
d’après le troisième volume de K. Laman.” Africa 45
(1):12–28.
Fabian, Johannes. 1973. “Kazi: Conceptualizations of
Labor in a Charismatic Movement among Swahili-
Speaking Workers.” Cahiers d’études africaines 13
(50):293–325.
_______. 1974. “Genres in an Emerging Tradition: Un
Anthropological Approach to Religious Communica-
tion.” In Changing Perspectives in the Scientific Study
of Religion, ed. Allan W. Eister, páginas. 249–72. Nueva York:
wiley.
_______. 1978. “Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and
Conjectures.” Africa 48:315–34.
_______. 1996. Remembering the Present: Painting and
Popular History in Zaire. berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
Fabian, Johannes, and Ilona Szombati-Fabian. 1980. “Folk
Art from an Anthropological Perspective.” In Perspectives
on American Folk Art, ed. Ian M.G. Quimby and Scott T.
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
F
/
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
Swank, páginas. 247–92. Nueva York: W.W. norton.
Filler, Martín. 2014. “The Road to the Zombie Office.”
New York Review of Books, Junio 19, páginas. 14-dieciséis.
Pescador, Ian. 1999. “500 Are Massacred in Congo, Mis-
sionaries Report.” New York Times, Enero 6.
Francés, Howard. 2015. China’s Second Continent: How a
Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa.
Nueva York: Vintage.
Gérard-Libois, Jean. 1967. Congo 1966. Bruselas: CRISP\
INEP.
Gondola, Didier. 1999. “Dream and Drama: The Search
for Elegance among Congolese Youth.” African Studies
Revisar 42 (1):23–48.
gordon, David. 2012. Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Cen-
tral African History. Atenas: Ohio University Press.
Grau, Olivier. 2004. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immer-
sión. Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON prensa.
Ismond, patricia. 2001. Abandoning Dead Metaphors:
The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry. Kings-
tonelada: University of the West Indies Press.
Janzen, John. 1978. “Les Phemba du Mayombe” [revisar].
African Arts 11 (2):88–89.
_______. 1979. “Deep Thought: Structure and Inten-
tion in Kongo Prophetism, 1910–1921.” Social Research
46:106–39.
_______. 1982. Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction
in Africa and the New World. Nueva York: Garland.
_______. 2013. “Renewal and Reinterpretation in
Kongo Religion.” In Kongo Across the Waters, ed. Susan
Cooksey, Robin Poynor, and Hein Vanhee, páginas. 131–42.
Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
Janzen, John, and Reinhild Kauenhoven Janzen. 1990.
“The Art of Lemba in Lower Zaire,” Iowa Studies in
African Art 3:93–118.
Jewsiewicki, Bogumil. 1999. A Congo Chronicle: Patrice
Lumumba in Urban Art. Nueva York: Museum for Afri-
can Art.
_______. 2003. Mami wata: La peinture urbaine au
Congo. París: Gallimard.
_______. 2008a. “Mami Wata/Mamba Muntu Paintings
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” In Sacred
Waters: Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and
the Diaspora, H.J. Drewal, páginas. 127–34. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
_______. 2008b. “Congolese Mami Wata: The Charm
and Delusion of Modernity.” In Mami Wata: Arts for
Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas, ed. H.J. Dre-
wal, páginas. 125–42. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum.
_______. 2010. The Beautiful Time: Photography by
Sammy Baloji. Nueva York: Museum for African Art.
_______. 2010a.“Se souvenir pour bâtir un monde mei-
lleur: photographies de Sammy Baloji.” In Lubumbashi
1910-2010. Mémoire d’une ville industrielle. Ukumbusho
wa mukini wa komponi, ed. Bogumil Jewsiewicki,
Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu, and Rosario Giordano,
páginas. 139–59. París: Harmattan.
_______. 2011. “Photographie de l’absence. Sammy
Baloji et les paysages industriels sinistrés de Lubum-
bashi.” L’Homme 198–199:89–104.
_______. 2013. “A Century of Painting in the Congo:
Image, Memoria, Experience, and Knowledge.” In A
Companion to Modern African Art, ed. Gitti Salami
and Monica Blackmun Visona, páginas. 330–46. Nueva York:
wiley.
Jewsiewicki, Bogumil, and V.Y. Mudimbe. 1993. “Afri-
cans’ Memories and Contemporary History of Africa.”
Special issue “History Making in Africa,” ed. Jewsie-
wicki and Mudimbe. History and Theory 32 (4):1–11.
Klanten, Roberto, Hendrik Hellige, and James Gallagher,
eds. 2011. Cutting Edges: Contemporary Collage. Berlina:
Gestalten.
Laman, Karl. 1962. The Kongo. 3 vols. Uppsala: Almqvist
and Wiksells.
Lehuard, Pablo. 1976. Les phemba du Mayombe. Les
figures sculptées dites phemba du Mayombe. Bruselas:
Kegan Paul.
Martinez-Ruiz, Barbaro. 2013. Kongo Graphic Writing
and Other Narratives of the Sign. Filadelfia: Temple
Prensa universitaria.
MacGaffey, Wyatt. 1991. Art and Healing of the Bakongo,
Commented by Themselves: Minkisi from the Laman Col-
lection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
_______. 1993. “The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo
Minkisi.” In Astonishment and Power, ed. Wyatt Mac-
Gaffey and Michael D. harris, páginas. 21–103. Washington,
corriente continua: Smithsonian Institution Press.
_______. 2000. Kongo Political Culture: The Concep-
tual Challenge of the Particular. Bloomington: Indiana
Prensa universitaria.
_______. 2013. “Meaning and Aesthetics in Kongo Art.”
In Kongo Across the Waters, ed. Susan Cooksey, Robin
Poynor, and Hein Vanhee, páginas. 172–79. Gainesville: Uni-
versity of Florida Press.
MacGaffey, Wyatt, and John Janzen. 1974. “Nkisi Figures
of the Bakongo.” African Arts 7 (2):87–89.
M’Bokolo, Elikia, and Jakob Sabakinu, eds. 2014. Simón
Kimbangu. Le prophète de la libération de l’homme noir.
París: L’Harmattan.
Mbakam, Rosine, and Mirkjo Popovitch. 2011. Mavambu.
Bruselas: Africalia, Kabola Films and Ti Suka, DVcam.
Mboukou, Serge. 2010. Messianisme et modernité: Dona
Béatrice Kimpa Vita et le mouvement des antoniens.
París: L’Harmattan.
McLeod, Kembrew, and Rudolf Kuenzli, eds. 2011.
Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Intervention-
ist Collage, and Copyright Law. Durham, CAROLINA DEL NORTE: Duke
Prensa universitaria.
Mudimbe, Valentin Yves. 1991. “‘Reprendre’: Enonciations
and Strategies in Contemporary African Art.” In Africa
Explores: 20th Century African Art, ed. S. Vogel and I.
Ebong, páginas. 276–87. Nueva York : Center for African Art.
Ndaywel è Nziem, Isidore. 1998. Histoire générale du
Congo de l’héritage ancien à la République démocratique.
Bruselas: Duculot.
Nora, Pierre, ed. 1996–1998. Realms of Memory: El
Construction of the French Past. 3 vols. Nueva York:
Columbia University Press.
Ntimasiemi, douglas, and Raffi Aghekian. 2013. Kin-
shasa mboka te. DVD. Bruselas: Sens Uniek, DL Multi-
media et Antenne A.
piscina, Deborah. 1997. Vision, Carrera, and Modernity: A
Visual Economy of the Andean World. Princeton:, Nueva Jersey
Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton.
Herrero, Roberto E.. 2013. “Réalités coloniales congolaises:
Trois cas.” Anthropos 108 (2):609–20.
Sontag, Susan, 2002. Regarding the Pain of Others. Lon-
don: Farrah, Straus & Giroux.
Strother, Zoe. 1999. Inventing the Masks: Agency and
History in the Art of the Central Pende. chicago: universidad-
sity of Chicago Press.
Precio, Sally. 2007. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s
Museum on the Quai Branly. chicago: Universidad de
Chicago Press.
Roberts, Allen F. 1996. “The Ironies of ‘System D’.” In
Recycled, Reseen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap,
ed. Charlene Cerny and Susan Seriff, páginas. 82–101. Nuevo
york: Harry Abrams for the Museum of International
Folk Art, Santa Fe.
_______. 2013. A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early
Colonial Hegemony in the Congo. Bloomington: Indiana
Prensa universitaria.
_______. 2014. “A Powerful Book for Powerful Pur-
pose” [Book review]. H-Africa, https://www.h-net.org/
reviews/showpdf.php?id=42328.
Roberts, Mary Nooter. 1996. “Luba Memory Theater.” In
Memoria: Luba Art and the Making of History, ed. M.N.
Roberts and A.F. Roberts, páginas. 117–59. Munich: Prestel,
for the Museum for African Art.
Stoler, Ann. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic
Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, Nueva Jersey:
Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton
Thompson, Nato, ed. 2012. Living as Form: Socially Engaged
Art from 1991 a 2011. Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON prensa.
Thompson, Robert Farris. 1983. Flash of the Spirit. Nuevo
york: Random House.
Thornton, John. 1998. The Kongolese Saint Anthony:
Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Anthonian Movement.
1684–1706. Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge.
Tsimba, Freddy. 2012. Légendes et saisons de métal. Kin-
shasa: Le Cri éditions.
Visionary Africa. 2010. Bruselas: BOZAR Broadcast,
DVD.
Vogel, Susan. 1991. “Digesting the West.” In Africa
Explores: 20th Century African Art, ed. S. Vogel and I.
Ebong, páginas. 14–31. Nueva York: Center for African Art.
Vogel, Susan, and Ima Ebong, eds. 1991. África
Explores: 20th Century African Art. Nueva York: Center
for African Art.
Walcott, Derek. 1962. “The Royal Palms …an absence of
ruins.” London Magazine 1 (11):12–13.
_______. 1987. Collected Poems 1948–1984. Nueva York:
Farrar Strauss and Giroux.
_______. 1992. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Mem-
ory.” transcription of speech at http://poetry.rapgenius.
com/Derek-Walcott-the-Antilles-fragments-of-epic-
memory.
_______. 1992a. Omeros. Nueva York: Farrar Straus and
Giroux. Originally published 1990.
_______. 1998. What the Twilight Says. Londres: faber
and Faber.
_______. 2001. “Sharing in the Exhilaration: An Inter-
view with Derek Walcott.” ARIEL: A Review of Interna-
tional English Literature 32 (2):120–35.
_______. 2007.“The Sea as History.” In Selected Poems.
Nueva York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Originally pub-
liado 1978.
Zervigon, Andres Mario. 2012. John Heartfield and the
Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, y el ascenso de
the Avant-Garde Photomontage. chicago: Universidad de
Chicago Press.
VOL. 49, NO. 1 SPRING 2016 african arts | 25
yo
D
oh
w
norte
oh
a
d
mi
d
F
r
oh
metro
h
t
t
pag
:
/
/
d
i
r
mi
C
t
.
metro
i
t
.
F
/
mi
d
tu
a
a
r
/
a
r
t
i
C
mi
–
pag
d
yo
F
/
/
/
/
/
4
9
1
6
1
7
3
6
8
5
2
a
a
r
_
a
_
0
0
2
6
7
pag
d
F
.
F
b
y
gramo
tu
mi
s
t
t
oh
norte
0
8
S
mi
pag
mi
metro
b
mi
r
2
0
2
3
