Volume 1
Dissertation text
Exhibiting cultures (Minkisi, a case study in signification)1
Dissertation for BA(Hons) Degree 2002 in Fine Art (Sculpture)
Wimbledon School of Art
Charms to torture people… Voudou…Some magic, sorcery, powerful witch doctor
feel… pain and torture(Response of a white Australian male, around 25 years old,
visiting the Pitt Rivers Museum, to a question regarding the purpose of nkisi
nkondi.)
The Ethnology Museum – a contested space
“I think that it was really good and I’m glad that I have learnt a bit more
about my black culture! Thanx.”
“Having grown up with the Horniman I find myself with mixed feelings
about the new look… but now where will children go to experience a
Victorian style museum…”
“Why no white mens things?”
“This museum says much about our colonial past – a bit of me feels we
shouldn’t have a lot of these relics in England – but I love this place all the
same”
“One day, stealing sacred objects from pure innocent people of far away
tribes and hidden marvelous civilizations will be a criminal act and
condemned as it should be”
“Simply amazing, perhaps one day people will see each other as human
beings rather than discriminating by cultural backgrounds a least that’s what
this museum tells me”
(Remarks from the comments books of the Pitt Rivers and Horniman Museums.)2
2
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the part played by the ethnographic collection in the
generation of racialist stereotypes of the African.3 It recognises the persistence of these
ideas and challenges the current multi-cultural stance of ethnographic museums.4 The
discussion considers the possible future of such collections and advocates that they adopt
a radical self-reflexiveness. The discussion of the ethnographic museum is interwoven
with an examination of the signification, through time, of a group of Congolese artefacts
called nkisi nkondi.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following staff, of the Pitt Rivers museum, for their help:
Jeremy Coote (Curator) for giving me access to the accession records for the Alan and
Kingsley donations and Andrew McLellan and Kathryn White (Education department)
for facilitating my interviews and observational studies at the Pitt Rivers and British
Museum respectively.
Literature Survey
The starting point for this work was Coombes’ hugely detailed analysis of the role of the
spectacular in building an ideological superstructure to support colonisation and
imperialism.5 However, whilst I endorse Coombe’s view of the importance of the visual,
in the dissemination of racist attitudes and racialist theory, the construction of the other is
essentially a literary/verbal project – implicating newspapers, plays, popular songs and
comics (which I have not had time to research) as well as books.6 In considering the role
of the written I have gone back to the primary accounts of European encounters with the
Congolese of which Kingsley’s and Nassau’s were key starting points although Bentley,
Crawford, Ward and Weeks illustrate the constant repetition of the themes of African
savagery, including cannibalism. Street provides an excellent review of how the African
has been treated in literature and led me to read Haggard’s Allan Quartermain which
makes plain just how naturalized the new racial ways of thinking had became.7 It also
showed how beguiling a well told story is and how perniciously it could reinforce
prejudice.
3
I am indebted to Dias for focussing my attention on the means by which myths are made
and making clear that difference is first created and then fraudulent visual proof of that
difference is manufactured.8 One key idea, as expressed by Hiller, was that the object is
cultural artefact.9 The political tone of the dissertation was encouraged by the essays
Hiller edited in The Myth of Primitivism.10 Thus my discussion, on the future of the
ethnographic collection, was assisted by Coutts-Smith who argues that the artistic
discourse on African artefacts ignores their social meanings and parades them as symbols
of the irrational other.11 He focuses on how their exhibition is manipulated to drain them
of the potential for generating self-analysis in the European spectator or social criticism
of the West. Brett’s account of cultural interactions, and the resistance of the colonised,
reinforces Coutts-Smith’s arguments and shows how the decontextualisation of African
objects avoids any engagement with our colonial past.12 Araeen’s polemic on
institutionalised racism, in European thought, was also influential.13
I have accepted Macgaffey as the source of the most detailed work on the meanings of
minkisi, in their society of origin, although Vanhee provides a much more readable and
succinct account.14 Layton’s thinking is dated, however his discussion of non-Western
artefacts was crucial for opening my eyes to the complex and subtle nature of other belief
systems that are, naturally, as developed as our own.15
It was only as the work progressed that I came across Nolan who alerted me to the gross
abuses that were going on in the Congo at the end of the nineteenth century and led me to
read Nelson’s book detailing the successive waves of Belgian exploitation.16 This was
important in linking the economic and political with what was happening culturally.
As regards the future of ethnographic collections McEvilley’s critique of the conversion
of artefact to art is clearly a seminal text and Vogel and Wastiau demonstrate how a selfreflexive museum might be created.17
4
Table of contents
Volume 1
Dissertation text
Abstract
Acknowledgements
Literature survey
Table of contents
Introduction
Part I: The original social meanings of minkisi, their interpretation as
icons of savage Africa, and the machinery for the creation of the
African other
Section I:
Minkisi in their original social context
Section II:
The background to the reception of Minkisi in England
Section III:
The exhibition of Mavungu at the Pitt Rivers Museum
and the interpretation of nkisi nkondi
Section IV:
The propagation of racialist attitudes towards the
African
Section V:
The culpability of anthropology/ethnography
Part II: The future of the ethnology museum
Section I:
Issues relating to the current paradigms of transcultural
exhibition
Section II:
Solutions
Solutionsand
andpossible
possiblefutures
futures
Glossary
Sources for illustrations (the illustrations have been removed from this
version)
Notes
Bibliography
Appendices A-M
Appendix
Maps (not icluded in this version)
A
Minkisi, the religious cosmology of the Congo and
interactions with christianity and their display
B
A Brief History of the Belgium Congo
C
Racialist Theory
D
Exhibition of Fetishes at the Pitt Rivers Museum (1902)
E
The Stanley and African Exhibition, at the Victoria Gallery,
1890
F
Accounts of minkisi and fetishism, 1897-1908
G
Applied uses of anthropology
H
5
Volume 2 (not included here)
Appendix
Museum interviews and observational studies
I
EXITCONGOMUSEUM, an exhibition at The Royal
Museum of the Congo, Tervuren, Belgium, November
2000-June 2001
J
Africa: Art of a Continent, an exhibition at the Royal
Academy of Arts, October 1995-January 1996
K
Inventing New Britain, the Victorian Vision, an exhibition at
the Victoria & Albert Museum, April-July 2001
L
The 1940s House, an exhibition at the Imperial War
Museum, -January 2002
M
Notes
Volume 3 (not included here)
Museum survey
Appendix N
Summary
The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
British Museum, London
Musée de l’Homme, Paris
Horniman Museum, London
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris
Musée Picasso, Paris
The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford
Musée du Quai Branly, Paris
The Royal Museum of the Congo, Tervuren, Belgium
Notes
6
Introduction
When I visited the exhibition Africa, Art of a Continent, at the Royal Academy, and was
entranced by a carved wooden dog, into which hundreds of nails had been driven, and the
appended explanation of its ritual use, I could not be aware that this was a representative
of a class of objects vilified, in the colonial period, as iconic of savage Africa. Nor did I
comprehend the ties between ethnology, the ethnographic collection and the generation of
the pejorative African other. I was, of course, familiar with stereotypes of the African,
and their persistence, but had not considered how the current display of ethnographic
collections could challenge them.
In the text that follows I first outline the signification of minkisi within the society of
origin. I then give a brief history of the Congo and review the prevailing attitudes to
Africa and the African, at the turn of the nineteenth century, as a prelude to investigating
the meanings generated by nkisi nkondi as they entered England. The text then broadens
out and looks more widely at the infrastructure propagating racist attitudes and beliefs
including the role of the ethnography museum. The shortcomings of current displays of
transcultural objects are then discussed. Finally I consider the future of the ethnographic
collection.
This dissertation is a fragment of ongoing discourses on racism, multiculturalism and
identity.18 Much is left out and what remains is itself an account of myths, past, present
and future, and reflects the world view of a white, male, middle class, middle aged liberal
- others might fashion a different story.19
7
Part I: The original social meanings of minkisi, their
interpretation as icons of savage Africa, and the machinery for
the creation of the African other
Section I: Minkisi in their original social context20
The nkisi nkondi (koso), that I saw in Piccadilly, has anthropomorphic variants of which
Mavungu, the object lesson of this discussion, is one.
When these objects were collected, around the turn of the nineteenth century, little
reliable evidence was gathered on their original social meanings, and what there was was
generally ignored. However since the 1970s Macgaffey and Vanhee have used
indigenous texts from the 1920s and 1930s to reconstruct the primary significations of
these objects.21
Minkisi were only made in the Congo where they were lodged at the core of the economic
and power relationships of society, thus they were used to control commerce in that
business oaths were made before them, and the objects had the power to punish those
who broke the rules of trade. They were used in the investiture of chiefs, and persons,
jostling for power, would work to suppress the minkisi of their opponents. Cults
associated with minkisi were used to protect pregnancies and children. These objects
could both cause and cure illness, they were also part of divination systems.22
Minkisi came in many forms. Usually they were composed of a container, filled with
bilongo (previously termed medicine or magic substance) and a named ancestor or spirit
from the world of the dead.23 Bilongo is a word related etymologically to concepts of
sacredness or taboo. The container could be simply a basket or even a stone, but those
collected by Europeans were usually anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figures. In some
cases the bilongo was applied to the outside of a stone and in a few cases directly to a
person who was then inhabited by the spirit. Minkisi functioned under the control of a
nganga (ritual expert) and their actions could be harmful or benign depending on the
client purchasing the power of the minkisi.24
8
We must now consider the nkisi nkondi, or nail fetish, itself. The use of this object has
been subject to debate. Mack notes that the work of Laman, in the 1920s, suggested that
the principal use of such artefacts was in the making of oaths although other uses are
identified, these being the hunting down of witches or thieves, the deflection of the
possibility that success might lead to antagonistic responses in others, or to prove
innocence. 25 In the final case a nail was withdrawn from the nkisi; if done by the guilty
death could follow. As aggressor the minkisi would be animated by driving in nails,
blades etc. or shaking or insulting it or gunpowder might be exploded in front of it. Once
activated the minkisi could search for a wrongdoer, such as a witch, and kill that person
or make him, or her, ill.
This summary is necessarily a simplification that reduces the complex and subtle Kongo
religion and cosmology to fit our system of rationality.
Section II: The background to the reception of minkisi in England
The meanings generated around minkisi in England, when they entered the country at the
turn of the nineteenth century, were very different from those appertaining to the Congo.
When assessing the meanings generated we need to look at the prevailing economic
relations between Europe and the Congo and European beliefs in relation to African
religion and cannibalism.
A brief history of the Congo
The Portuguese discovered the Congo in 1482 and established diplomatic and trading
relations with the Kongo kingdom. However this intervention was short lived and it was
only in the seventeenth century that the Congo began to be exploited, initially for slaves
until the trade was “abolished” in the mid-nineteenth century, and then for ivory the
commerce in which peaked in 1890. Tragically for the Congolese the fall in profits from
ivory coincided with the inventions of Goodyear and Dunlop which enormously
increased the demand for, and price of, rubber and of its exploitation in the Congo.
9
In 1876 Leopold II of Belgium had began covert operations in the Congo and in 1878 he
hired Stanley to travel up the Congo as his agent. By the time Stanley returned, in 1884,
he held over 400 agreements with local chiefs in which they ceded their sovereignty to
Belgium. These treaties were recognised at the Berlin Conference of 1885 and the
“Congo Free State” was created. This state was administered under the personal rule of
Leopold II who had exclusive monopoly over its natural resources. From 1892 there was
a massive forced mobilization of African labour, to collect the Congo’s natural rubber,
initially yielding enormous profits. The Mungo people refer to this as the “lokeli” (the
overwhelming). This infamous period, which ended in 1908, is otherwise known as the
era of “red rubber” and it has been estimated that there were between five and eight
million victims of Belgian’s system of forced labour, systematic terror and the resulting
destruction of the indigenous economy - that is about half the population. Whilst the
Congo was a Belgium colony, 1890 saw the start of the intense phase of British Colonial
expansion in Africa and of a rapid enlargement of our ethnographic collections.26 Thus at
the time that minkisi were entering England the Belgians were massively exploiting the
Congo to extract its natural rubber and we were participating in the scramble for Africa.
Attitudes to Africa
The relationship between Africa and Europe has been a long one.27 Originally Africans
were considered “different but not substantially inferior to Europeans”, but during the
period of the slave trade they came to be regarded as “different and inferior”.28 In 1608
the Congolese ambassador to Rome was buried in Santa Maria Maggiore but by the
1890s exhibitions of cranial series demonstrated the genetic inferiority of the black race.
The Europeans that started to arrive in the Congo, in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, landed with the prejudices of the slave trade, where Africans were seen as
commodities, aware of the story of Ham and in the certain knowledge of their racial
superiority.29
10
Racialist theory30
To understand the reception of nkisi nkondi it is vital to understand the then prevailing
theories of white superiority. The reader also needs to sense the prevailing power of
some of this nonsense for it seems to me that its influence is still current.31
Victorian scientists identified a number of races of man. They looked at the variety
within the human species and identified different skin and other characteristics. We now
understand that these were originally environmental adaptations. This was the Victorian
understanding as well however their theories differed from the modern view of human
diversity in three profound ways. Firstly we now understand that there is a continuum of
physical characteristics across the world, the Victorians refused to acknowledge this and
shoehorned everyone into a few defined and separate races (although with many subraces).32 Secondly there are few attempts now, although it still happens, to link mental
characteristics and predispositions to physical characteristics whereas the Victorians did
this without compunction, thus Africans were sexually rapacious, stupid, liars; they were
regarded as warlike, with a lust for blood and a predisposition to cannibalism. The
physical prowess of the African was emphasized with the implied corollary that they
were closer to animals than humans. Finally the scientists not only identified discrete
races but unhesitatingly placed them in a hierarchy with white (Caucasian) at the top, the
yellow (Mongoloid) in the middle and the black (Melanesian) races at the bottom.33 The
primitive black peoples of Africa were thought of either as living fossils, displaying a
stage of development that Europeans had passed through a long time ago, or as
degenerates. The evolutionary primitiveness of the African was said to be evidenced by
an abnormal length of arm, prognathism and lightweight brain. In December 1895
Spectator editor Meredith Townsend described Africans as “a people abnormally low,
evil, cruel… It is in Africa that the lowest depth of evil barbarism is reached, and that we
find the races with the least of humanity about them except the form… they are all
degraded”.34 The nature of the civilisations from which the African had degenerated does
not seem to have been of any interest. It should not be thought, however, that the
assumption of white superiority arose in this period of intense colonisation, as this
11
attitude was developing and hardening from 1850, racialist theory was simply one
manifestation of a basic assumption of superiority.35
These theories were used by those who wished to colonize Africa, thus it was argued that,
in the light of the African condition, colonisation was the duty of the West.36 This
argument ignored the belief that, due to the inherent nature of the African, the civilizing
effect of Europe only ever went skin deep.
The European view of African religion
The European mind easily slotted nkisi nkondi into prevailing views on the nature of
African religion. The populist accounts of African religion paint it as vicious and sadistic
and based on fear and manipulation in contrast to the love that exists between the
christian god and believer.37 Africans are casual murderers and are put to death for trivial
offences; there is no justice, merely the manipulated trial by ordeal, staged for the
personal gain of the accuser and witchdoctor. The people are obsessed by witchcraft and
are both under the spell of, and in fear of the cunning and self-serving witchdoctor.
There is an inability to accept natural death and slaves, accused of causing death by
witchcraft, are killed sadistically. People with contagious maladies are beaten to death
and their bodies staked out on a hill top. I doubt whether we are able, at this distance in
time, to find out whether there was any truth in these horror stories but I have not had the
resources to research this matter.
Cannibalism
That Africans were routinely cannibals was a given in the populist accounts of Africa,
thus cannibalism is continually referred to in the special number of the Illustrated London
News of February 6, 1878, published to celebrate Stanley’s return from Africa. Stanley
describes his journey as being to “explore and penetrate this mythic unknown, with its
cannibalism and ferocity and dread dangers”.38 Ward repeatedly mentions cannibalism.39
He says that: “the skulls of the victims to cannibalism are always exposed in some
prominent position in the village… sometimes a house will be decorated with human
skulls placed in rows”.40 Crawford, who was an apologist for Belgium’s administration
12
in the Congo, laments the mistake of converting “cannibals” into state soldiers who
subsequently murdered their officers.41 He speaks of “cannibal pots”, of a man who was
content to let his comrades eat his father, of a warlord who dined each day on children, of
fifteen year old boys eating little girls and of boys offered their lives if they will eat their
brothers. Those who are too old to kill their own food search for corpses in cemeteries.
Section III: The exhibition of Mavungu at the Pitt Rivers Museum and
the interpretation of nkisi nkondi
Our particular story starts with the death of the famous explorer, Miss Mary Kingsley.
Mary Kingsley was the niece of Charles Kingsley, the author of The Water Babies. She
sailed to West Africa, in 1893 and 1894, to hunt for “fetishes and fish” and lasted, as an
explorer/ethnologist, just seven years before disease killed her whilst she was nursing
Boer soldiers.42 On her death the nkisi she had christened Mavungu was left to the Pitt
Rivers Museum and the museum put on a special exhibition of this, and other fetishes, in
1902.43 Henry Balfour, the curator of the museum, reported that a case had been:
“assigned to some important West African fetish figures and objects
associated with them, presented by the Rev. W. Allan, D.D.… In this case
also has been placed the celebrated fetish figure from Kakongo, bequeathed
by Miss Mary Kingsley”.44
1
2
3
4
5
Fig. 1 Plan of the fetish case at the Pitt Rivers Museum
13
I have been able to reconstruct the contents of this case [fig.1] and can hazard a guess at
the contents of the labels.45 It certainly contained:
1. Mavungu: whose label probably explained that it, and three other fetishes, kept the
Congo under “the domination of fear” and by hammering nails into it others could be
made to fall sick or even die;
2. A carved wood idol from Nigeria;
3. The National Idol of the people of Asaba; whose label probably recounted its survival
after all their other idols had been destroyed following the refusal of the chiefs to give
up sacrificing slaves when one of their number died; and
4. A fetish from Bonny; whose label probably recorded that it came from a native
“Ikuba” (skull temple) when it was finally dismantled and cleared out post
conversion of the people to christianity. It may have recorded that the skull house
was 40 feet long by 20 broad and crammed with around 20,000 skulls and that the
flesh of the sacrificed was eaten by the juju priests.
The last item within the case may have been a number of skull fragments. Their label
has been retained and reads:
“Fragments of human skulls, the remains of victims sacrificed and eaten by
the priests and worshippers in the Ikuba at Bonny... Prisoners of war &
criminals were usually sacrificed but when the supply ran short, passers by,
even women and children, were clubbed and eaten….”
Despite the knowledge that not all minkisi were nkisi nkondi, and that minkisi had healing
as well as destructive properties the focus of the labeling is on the destructive.
There are links between the fetish exhibit at the Pitt Rivers and other exhibitions, thus the
National Idol of the people of Asaba was shown at the 1890 Stanley and African
Exhibition.46
14
The interpretation of nkisi nkondi
The religious signification, of minkisi, to Europeans, at the turn of the nineteenth century
is key to their reception although African wood sculpture had, from its first appearance in
Europe, been seen, because of its “crudeness”, as a token of the barbarity of the African.
This was in contrast to the obvious quality of the continent’s ivory carving.47 When, in
1885, Stanley published an account of his 1877 expedition to the Belgian Congo he
described minkisi as “ferocious” and “great gods” and the “medicine man” boasting of
the cures he had performed.48 Whilst Stanley’s narrative mentioned the healing potential
of these objects his account, and many later accounts, reinforced the incorrect notion, in
existence since the first contacts with the Congo, that these figures were idols.49 Idolatry
is a sin prohibited by the ten commandments and god’s wrath towards the Israelites and
the golden calf is well known. It is important, in this context, to understand that the
assumed degeneration of the African was religious as well as cultural, the African had
known the one true christian god but had degenerated, via idolatry, into
fetish worship, the latter being akin to black magic as spirits are incorporated into objects
and are at the command of the owner.50 One contemporary definition saw fetishism as:
“the belief in charms and amulets composed of human eyeballs, human bones”.51
It is my contention that the nkisi nkondi, of which Mavungu was an outstanding example,
epitomized the African as savage Africa.52 Its physical “crudeness” spoke of the
barbarity of its creator. It actually caused death and it provided objective evidence for the
savage, degenerate and superstitious nature of African religion. The motivation for its
display is highlighted by a comment by Balfour who said that the fetishes were “of
historical interest in connection with … the suppression of the gruesome practices
connected with the superstitious beliefs of the natives of the region”.53 The exhibit, in the
Pitt Rivers, and others like it, jammed together artefacts from different cultures and
conflated the triple evils of idolatry, fetishism and cannibalism whilst establishing the
nkisi nkondi as an object lesson in barbarity. Note that no clear distinction was made, in
the labeling and display of these objects, in the Pitt Rivers, between idolatry and
fetishism and that the latter had become a pejorative term used generally to stigmatize
African religion. The nkisi nkondi becomes a container for all that was evil and
15
degenerate. Shelton, without explanation, has said that “no objects were reviled more
than minkisi as embodying all that was distasteful to European sensibilities” and they
rapidly became must haves for ethnographic collections.54
The destruction of minkisi and the undermining of Congolese society
The missionary zeal in either destroying or confiscating what the European’s termed idols
added to the negative connotations of minkisi.55 In the Congo the colonists attempted to
suppress the belief systems of which minkisi were a part, i.e. to destroy the local idols,
and their success is what makes a reconstruction of the original social significance of
these objects so difficult. Given the crucial social significance of these objects the
colonial project to destroy them, and impose christianity, is, in reality, a project to destroy
society, remove any threat to Belgian rule from local and chiefly cults, and recast it in a
white mould whilst attempting to achieve social control and compliance with the colonial
power through identification with its values. In fact the split between the white man’s
world and the indigenous cosmology remained real. The vilification of the Congolese, in
a period of intense exploitation, is akin to the everyday phenomenon of denigrating our
enemies, or those we exploit, be they Germans, in the first world war, or the Taliban. The
propaganda image of the Congo, as a particularly savage part of the dark continent,
persists, Nelson says that:
“As a result of decades of popular literature, film and folklore, the word
“Congo” tends to evoke vivid images of primeval darkness, unfathomable
mystery, and dreadful savagery”.56
Nail fetishes as cultural amalgam
It is interesting to note, that despite their vilification, the form of nkisi nkondi is partly the
result of interactions between Europe and Africa. When I first started to investigate these
objects I suspected that they were either produced for Europeans or elaborated under
European direction because they seemed too good to be true as signs of the savage; thus I
imagined them to be an example of a primitivism constructed, as Miller theorizes, jointly
by colonised and colonizer.57 Whilst it is clear that that the concept nkisi (container,
16
bilongo and spirit) is Congolese the use of nails, to animate the figures, may have been
the result of the adoption of the practices of the early colonists who came from a culture
that drove nails into crucifixes and statues of saints. Shelton argues that the relationship
was closer and that the nailed minkisi was the result of a synthesis between the
indigenous African religion and christianity.58
Vanhee says that “late-nineteenth century minkisi certainly were not made for a European
market”.59 However, when you consider that every Western museum seems to hold at
least three or four nkisi nkondi I suspect that colonial pressure to acquire them at least
increased their production. Further the symmetry of the nailing of some minkisi makes it
appear that it was to achieve a formal grace and not to activate them. However Mack
suggests that the symmetry is a reflection of Congolese notions of completeness.60
Section IV: The propagation of racialist attitudes towards the African
As we have seen minkisi were readily interpreted in the light of existing prejudice and a
developing racist ideology. In this section I look at how this ideology was propagated
through exhibitions and literature.
The Stanley and African Exhibition 1890
The Stanley and African Exhibition was held after Stanley returned from his last African
expedition (1886-1889) to relieve Emin Pasa. The introduction in its catalogue stresses
the romance and adventure of Africa, the necessity of the missionary effort and the fight
against slavery (which was code for the fight against the Moslem evangelist/Arab
slaver/economic competitor) and the commercial potential of the continent.61 The
exhibition was fixated on the dichotomy between Africa and the West in its staging of the
other. The European was represented by portraits and busts, relics of his bravery, such as
General Gordon’s famous telegrams, souvenirs of well known missionaries and maps and
charts detailing Stanley’s progress. Contrasted to this was the grandeur of the African
landscape and its wildlife. A further contrast was with the savage African, represented
overwhelmingly by weapons and idols, including, I have discovered, a, prominently
placed, nkisi. This may be one of the minkisi that Stanley describes in his book of 1885.
17
The display of the African artefacts as trophies, in the Romans manner, made this
exhibition read as a celebration of victory over savage Africa.
Linked to this event is the special edition of the Illustrated London News published to
celebrate Stanley’s return to England from his trip up the Congo sponsored by Leopold
II. This very seductive and plausible account again emphasizes the romance of
exploration, the awesome natural environment of Africa and the savagery of its people.62
On the front cover is Stanley, every inch the stalwart adventurer, he stares you in the eye,
full of courage and determination, vigor and command. Inside he describes his journey:
“to explore and penetrate this mystic unknown, with its cannibalism and ferocity and
dread dangers”.63 The full page engravings show majestic scenery. Thirty two times on
his journey Stanley is attacked without provocation by “every mother’s son… mad with
wildness, and insane from cannibalism” although he is able to repulse the attacks and
carries out ferocious reprisals.64 Stanley is repeatedly paralleled with Aeneas, here the
white hero is creating a new civilisation in Africa. This text does not call Africans
savages but cannibalism and violence are accepted without question by an account that
provides no evidence for the former and no reason for the latter. This text and the earlier
exhibition are crude propaganda that dwell on the moral requirement to colonize Africa
and the barbarity of the natives, sidestepping the point that the Africans presumably
attacked Stanley because of his role as agent for Leopold II - as usurper of local
sovereignty.65
Colonial and missionary exhibitions
These types of exhibition, not extant now, were further sites for the propagation of
racialist attitudes. Colonial exhibitions, well established by 1890, were extremely
popular and were held on massive, purpose built exhibition sites. In 1907 “White City”
was built “dedicated to the pursuit of spectacular pleasures and edification” and its traces
can still be made out in maps of London a metaphor for the persistence, in our minds, of
the racist attitudes that such exhibitions propagated.66 I assume that the city was white
both in the sense that the buildings were stucco and because it was a microcosm of the
world that the white race had created. Such exhibitions incorporated reenactments of
18
battles against the savage African and mock African villages, as well as displays of
produce, raw materials, technology and colonial artefacts.
In order to generate money, public support and recruits the mission societies set up
exhibitions in England. These were substantial events employing special trains to get
visitors to the sites. The missionary societies also had their own museums. As with
colonial exhibitions there were African villages and tableaux and plays, written by
missionaries, were performed. Curio boxes were prepared and sent out to spread the
word to more dispersed parishes.67 That African religion should be of particular interest
to visitors to the missionary exhibitions is not surprising and it might be supposed that
such exhibitions would be a major source of information on this subject. In such
exhibitions up to 10,000 local parishioners were employed as stewards.68 They boned up
on African religion by studying the Manual for Stewards published by the Church
Missionary Society, in 1899.
The overview of African religion, to be gained from this manual, is that the religious
instinct of the black man is utterly perverted so that “the one thought of the people is how
to propitiate the Devil and all sorts of evil spirits, and how to parry their envenomed
shafts of violence”.69 The entire continent was described as infused with “domestic
cruelty, cruel witchcraft and polygamy”.70 The Steward, following the manual, could
have made no clear distinction between a god, an idol and a fetish, all were worshipped
and sacrificed to. After studying the manual a steward might mention human sacrifice to
visitors and explain that African religion is one of the “fear of an angry god, who must be
kept quiet by presents”.71 He would almost certainly have explained that the devil was
worshipped in Africa.
Museum exhibitions on race: the reification of the primitive other
Museums were key to the dissemination of racialist theories because they were where
these theories were made real and because “The nineteenth century was the century of
museums – of spaces designated for the gaze”, it was believed that museums should
“speak to the eyes” and, as Pitt Rivers said, be designed so that “those who run may
19
read”.72 The clearly arranged, didactic, museum was to be a tool of education.73 In part
their importance, during the colonial period, stemmed from their promotion as places of
children’s education where time spent on visits was deemed to be time spent in school.74
In the ethnology museums a visual language of difference was sought for and created.
Physical anthropology, the science of measuring and quantifying racial differences, made
the spurious differences between the races visible and undeniable.75 Anthropometry
became a scientific obsession.76 By 1890 photographic evidence of racial difference was
also an important part of popular literature.77
Museum exhibitions on race were very explicit. Key to understanding them is the
appreciation that racial difference was not just about skin colour it was also about
different intellects and morality.78 Not only intelligence but musical ability and the
predisposition to theft were visible in, and a result of, the different physical
characteristics of the races.79 Exhibitions were staged that arranged skeletons and crania
in a series to trace the evolution of man from primates and the civilized from the
primitive races.80 These were augmented with photographs, casts of body parts, and
tableaux.81 “The insistence on the body in ethnographic collections, as the source of all
knowledge regarding the colonised subject, encouraged the museum public to see [these]
Africans as simply one more ethnographic specimen”, that is, to dehumanize them.
Science and the exhibition of the object abolished both ethics and the colonised subject as
individual.82 Of course we should not overlook the scopophilic delights of these
exhibitions, thus their appeal to the public was “exotic delectation; aesthetic pleasure and
… spectacle”.83 Mavungu is relevant here because the link between cranial size and
culture was seen as direct, the “crude sculptures of savages, [were] likely to throw some
light on their origin and their traditions”, these “objects, products of human intelligence
were… testimony to specific physical organization”, i.e. crude sculptures were a direct
result of inferiority.84
As well as explicit displays on race the whole layout of a museum could illuminate racist
teaching, thus in the Mayer Museum, in Liverpool, the overall layout of the was racial.85
20
Artefacts from the civilized races were in the Caucasian section of the museum, which
occupied the ground floor, to be contrasted with the Mongolian artefacts on the first floor
and the Melanesian in the basement. The physical layout of the museum was a reification
of the hierarchy of the races.86
The eponymous Pitt Rivers is interesting because of its now unique typological
organization. Here the ethnography collection was “conceived [of] as a logical extension
of the natural history collections [of Oxford University]”.87 The common inclusion of
ethnology within, or alongside, natural history museums emphasized the evolutionary
paradigm and linked the primitives of Africa and Asia with apes not human Westerners.88
As Bal says it conflates the twin others of nature and foreign peoples, making the foreign
peoples exotic species, on display like the animals.89 The typological organization of the
collection was regarded as creating a sort of Natural History and Phylogeny of
humankind and culture, it allowed the “tracing of our complex systems and customs from
the primitive ways of our progenitors”.90 Implicit in the incorporation of African
artefacts in these series is that they represent living survivals and illuminate the earlier
stages in evolution. In order to make sense of this nonsense it had to be presumed that
African culture was innately conservative.91 The evolutionary paradigms of some
museums continued even up to the 1960s.92
Museums in support of Empire
Were these museums the innocent purveyors of current scientific theory? No, in fact they
consciously staged these theories in support of Empire. Thus in 1902 the Museums
Association stated that since race and culture were intimately connected it was the duty of
the curator to demonstrate the relationship between the two, something that was seen as
part of the great national work of building the Empire.93 By 1908 the Museums
Association was acknowledging the leading role of colonisers in the world and by
extension their racial superiority.94
Museum displays, based on racialist theories, not only made the theories real but gave
them prestige and authority. As Brett says the museum provides the “official version” of
21
art, culture and life. Museums do this by selection (in the choice of objects that they
display), in classification (and by what they put on the labels) and by the removal of the
objects from life.95
Accounts of minkisi 1897-1908
The Pitt Rivers museum, as part of Oxford University, was an academic institution but
one where the curators made no ethnographic voyages themselves; instead they
purchased, or were donated, objects by adventurers, traders, missionaries and
administrators. They relied therefore in labeling the fetishes on Dennett, a trader from
West Africa, friend of Kingsley and amateur ethnographer. The library of SOAS
contains many books, published at this time, on African religion. Dennett’s and other
accounts of fetishism vary in their quality and balance but at best the reader comes away
seeing it as a superstitious, possibly satanic, practice – barely worthy of the name of
religion where nail fetishes were used to cause harm to others and where witch hunts are
so widespread that thy were actually causing the population to fall.96 Mavungu could
therefore be read as a gruesome tally of death, each nail representing human suffering.
In the wilder manifestations of this hysteria minkisi were credited with the power of
being able to kill by contact.97
To deny the beliefs around minkisi the status of religion is to denigrate the African
because it is considered that it is only humans that have the self awareness to reach for
the divine. In Allan Quartermain the white race the heroes discover, in the centre of
Africa, are sun worshippers but the particularly beautiful, white and blessed have a
innate feeling for the true god.98
Popular literature
Street has looked at the image of the African in literature. From the 1870s the
“ethnographic novel” became popular and information “on other cultures, expressed in
vivid and exciting terms, was available to the mass public of England”.99 These novels
were “similar in style and content and, most significantly, in the assumptions that they
share with regard to “primitive” peoples.”100 Given that background it is interesting to
22
take an example and look at Haggard’s Allan Quartermain.101 Haggard’s view of race
initially seems quite balanced. In the hero’s introduction Haggard speaks of human
nature, which he seems to find distasteful, calling civilisation only “savagery silver
gilt”.102 He expresses the opinion that the savage and the white man, that is his duality,
are very close except that the white man is “more inventive, and possesses the faculty of
combination”.103 But the superiority of the white person saturates the narrative. The
white African race are extraordinarily civilized and divided into classes, just like the
English, “the best bred people [in the state]… are… pure white… but the common herd
are much darker”.104 At the end of the book their good fortune is enhanced because an
Englishman is their king, the English gentleman being the “highest rank whereto we can
attain”.105 In contrast Africans are generally treacherous and warlike, albeit with a
tendency towards cowardice, although some are devoted to their white masters, rather
like children. Umslopogaas, one of Allan’s companions, is the single exception that
proves the rule, a noble savage although all warrior, he is Thucydides’ Spartan, laconic
and warlike he tends his hair before facing inevitable death defending a narrow
passageway.
Section V: The culpability of anthropology/ethnography
The English Ethnological Society was formed in 1843, it developed out of the activities
of the Aborigines Protection Society (founded 1837) and it had, as a basic premise, the
biblical idea of the unity of man, an idea that was also central to the anti-slavery
movement. The London Anthropological Society broke away from the Ethnological
Society in 1863. Street describes this group as more “politically conscious”; its first
president, Hunt, was openly racist believing in the subjugation of certain races and the
inferiority of Negroes.106 In fact this society was covertly funded by an agent of the
Confederate side in the American Civil war who was in London to raise support for the
south.107 To the confederates this society’s endorsement of separate origins for the races
of man was excellent pro-slavery propaganda. In 1871 the two societies reunited to form
the Anthropological Society of Great Britain. Bolt characterizes Anthropology as
dominated by racists up to the end of the nineteenth century.108 The importance and
culpability of the new science of Ethnography/Anthropology, in championing racialist
23
theories, should not be overlooked as the Victorian age was one where the consciousness
of progress was very real and the pursuit of scientific truth was almost a religion.109 In a
way ethnology is tainted by its development hand in hand with colonisation, by its early
racism and by those who advocated its use as a tool of empire.110
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Part II: The future of the ethnology museum
I believe that we need to consider carefully the future of the ethnology museum. Hiller
calls these collections “both a legacy and a debt”.111 I take this to mean a legacy from
colonial times and a debt both in terms of the issue of repatriation and our need to
investigate the colonial discourse and its continuing relevance in the construction of
current racisms. The ethnographic collection is transformed, if my story has hit its mark,
from a day out, looking at objects whose bizarreness delighted you as a child, to a blood
soaked trophy, a colonial artefact standing for the West’s gross exploitation of Africa and
a site for the creation of the African as savage other. The ethnographic collection made
real the primitiveness of the African, objectifying Africans and making them into bizarre
spectacle.112 The silences of these museums have been as damaging as what they have
said. The history of African civilizations have been largely ignored and dissenting
images and events have been kept firmly in the store room. The museums have
suppressed colonial guilt and displayed looted objects without shame or comment.
Section I: Issues relating to the current paradigms of transcultural
exhibition
Let us say for now that the ethnology museum is not irrevocably tainted by its past and
ask how, and if, it can live up to its present stated role of illuminating cultures.113 There
are a number of problems with current displays as set out below, criticisms that are borne
out by the results of my interviews.114 This is not to say that the institutions are not
committed to the education of the visitor, it is simply that this does not happen.
1. Achronology
Whilst collection dates may be given for objects displayed I find that these, and the
labels, leave open the question of when the cultural practices described were current and
if they still persist. Thus the texts in the British Museum, describing nailed minkisi, are
all written in the present tense even though these practices no longer occur.115 In this
way museums fossilize culture, deny it dynamism and make us imagine that Africa is
unchanging.
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2. The denial of diversity
In galleries like the British Museum and the Horniman it is almost impossible to
distinguish the geographical origins of the objects displayed as whilst the labels detail the
country of origin the exhibitions are not organised geographically. 116 Thus the diversity
of Africa is unacknowledged and the whole continent conflates down into a single
culture.117
3. Objectification
This applies both to the cultures on display and to the visitor, thus one person of African
origin, visiting with me, said that she felt like she was on display.
4. Complexity
The exhibits primitivise the societies exhibited by concealing the complexity of their
belief systems. The simple object is made to stand for the culture and whose subtleties
are erased. Even up to date exhibitions do not give any sense of the crucial social
importance of minkisi in Congolese culture or of the nuances and complexities of
Congolese belief systems.118
5. Cultural convergence
No attempt is made, in any of the exhibitions I have seen, to explicitly draw any parallels
to belief systems in our society.119 Such commentary would reduce any tendency to
dismiss the beliefs of others as primitive superstitions and might lead to a more selfreflexive approach by the visitor.120
6. Decontextualisation
This occurs in two ways. Firstly, by displaying only privileged categories of objects,
such as religious artefacts, and ignoring the everyday, the museum renders it impossible
to judge how significant the beliefs and practices were, or are, in people’s day to day
lives. It is like exhibiting a statue of the Virgin Mary and a throne from Buckingham
Palace and expecting them to illuminate our culture. This procedure also distances
26
Africans from us by making them seem otherworldly. Secondly not enough information
is provided either to contextualise the objects in their society of origin or historically. For
instance the social role of minkisi cannot be appreciated nor can the process by which
they got to Europe.121 Brett notes that museums “gloss over” struggles, thus subversive
images created by the colonised have generally remained in museum vaults.122
The museum, by failing to dissent, supports the status-quo. A worthy, though partial,
exception is the Horniman Museum.123 Generally there is no sense that the past is
something disputed or any hint given that the status of the objects, as art or artefact, is in
dispute and only rarely is there any indication that African states might want the objects
back.124 These silences allow new primitivisms to arise.125
7. Use of the term primitive
Some contemporary displays still use terms like primitive, coarse, and barbarous to
describe transcultural work.126
8. The contemporary other
Current ethnography museums are museums of culture, they do not deal with the
contemporary other, unless it is to include some contemporary art or recently made
objects that fit in seamlessly with the other pieces, thus in the British Museum there are
video displays of contemporary masquerade.127 Ironically these merely emphasize the
erroneous idea that Africa is unchanging. This is partly the message that comes from the
display of three contemporary altars in the Horniman gallery although, on the positive
side, the texts accompanying them challenge the view of Voudou propagated by popular
culture.128
9. Typicality denying individuality
Generally the maker is anonymous in these displays. The individual is denied and the
objects displayed become specimens.129
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10. Anti-racism not multiculturalism
The Horniman Museum has taken a multicultural approach in its outreach programme for
children and in its redesign.130 In a way this seems excellent as we are urged, by our
politicians, to be accepting of our multicultural society. The question is, however,
whether the approach should not rather be anti-racist as multiculturalism does not
challenge but merely asks for acceptance.131
Can the ethnography collection illuminate culture?
If these issues were addressed, if high-tech solutions were found to deliver the right
amount and quantity of contextual information might ethnography museums be able to
illustrate other cultures?132 I have doubts because my observations of museum visitors
suggest that they interact with contemporary exhibitions as curios, that is, they rarely read
the texts and even if they do they retain little coherent or accurate information from
them.133
If resources were available the objects could be placed in a whole environment which
Hudson thinks could make other cultures real. This is something which some of the
exhibitions at the Museum of Mankind attempted to do. However my experience of this,
in The 1940s House exhibition, leads me to think that it is only the alien physical
environment that can be experienced and not the culture.134
There is a more fundamental problem, however, because culture is a nexus of lived
relationships, which cannot be illuminated by a museum. Indeed it is arguable that we
cannot ever really understand cultures that are not our own because they depend to a
greater or lesser extent on a different cosmology, a different way of thinking.135 The
point is that we cannot assume that people from other cultures think in the same way that
we do and that we will be able to understand them if we study their culture enough.
Whilst a museum could explain other cultures to us in terms of our culture it can never
make us part of another culture and thus cannot truly illuminate it.
28
Practical difficulties may also intervene thus museums must dance to the tune of their
funding bodies who have priorities that may distort what they can achieve.136 Further
museums may simply not be able to afford the means to contextualise the artefacts.137
Section II: Solutions and possible futures
The problems with the display of ethnographic collections seem to multiply, they are an
artefact of a colonial past, there are problems with how to display them and they do not,
and arguably cannot, illuminate other cultures - what should their future be? There are a
number of possible solutions to this question:
1. The conversion of artefact into art;
2. Closure;
3. The injection of dissent;
4. An engagement with the ethnography museum as cultural object with the museum
becoming an exercise in cultural self-awareness; or
5. The conversion of the ethnography museum into a contact hub between cultures.
This is an important issue as how we display ethnographic objects says much about our
current society, just as the Victorians’ attitudes to the primitive said much about theirs.138
1
The conversion of artefact into art
One response to the problem of the ethnographic collection could be to complete the
project of turning artefact into art.139 The difficulty with this project is that different
societies have different criteria for artistic evaluation and their art, as cultural construct, is
specific to that culture. Thus we can either exhibit artefacts from other cultures that meet
our criteria of art, and look Eurocentric, or exhibit artefacts selected by the criteria of
other cultures and face the reality of the viewer’s incomprehension.
The display at the Musée Branly is an example of an ethnography display which is
virtually an art gallery.140 It contains “a selection of nearly one hundred and twenty
29
masterpieces from the earliest civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas”
selected by Jacques Kerchache for their aesthetic quality.141 Wastiau considers this
creation of a canon of African masterpieces as deeply flawed as the selection is based on
Western aesthetic conventions. A worse treatment is given to African artefacts at the
Centre Georges Pompidou and Musée Picasso, where they are merely appended to
displays of cubist work as illustrations of the sources of the inspiration of that style.142
Yet to deny the artefacts of other cultures the status of art is to belittle them and to retain
them in separate collections is to reaffirm them as representing the other. On the other
hand it might be argued that calling an African object art is insulting something that is
much more complex. This raises the question of whether exhibiting such work is
sacrilegious.
A case study of the process, of converting artefact into art, is the famous 1984 MOMA
exhibition of African art the debate over which illuminates our discussion.143 This
conversion is not, in itself, a new process, however MOMA’s was an enormous
exhibition with exquisite examples of transcultural art and a very scholarly two volume
catalogue.144 The stated mission of the show was to help its audience “appreciate a
variety of great arts remote from its own traditions” and to comprehensively reinvestigate
Primitivism.145
McEvilley’s criticism of this exhibition was that it was Eurocentric simply because it
looked at African artefacts as art, which they were not in the society of origin, indeed that
the concept art was not available in those societies and, further, that it read into them
modernist concerns with aesthetics that never troubled the makers of the objects.146 He
asserted that this strategy supported Modernism, itself then under attack from Postmodern
stirrings, because it bolstered Modernism’s claims to the universality of formalism. He
argued that the exhibition denied context and history to the transcultural objects on
display and thus an identity to their makers and that underlying this was a fear of the
other that led the museum to deny otherness to these objects.147 In one sense then
otherness should be celebrated. Brett criticizes the sub-title of this exhibition, The
Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, on similar lines saying that it serves to remove the
30
work from history as Tribal means nothing, it is not associated with any country or any
discourse on colonisation, thus it makes these transcultural objects the creation of people
who do not exist and establishes them as artists and geniuses.148 Araeen considers all
Western cultural manifestations to be Eurocentric and racist in nature including, almost
by definition, the MOMA exhibition. He construes its “purpose”, although this need not
be conscious, “to perpetuate further the idea of primitivism, to remind the so-called
“primitives” how the West admires (and protects and gives values to) their cultures and at
the same time tell the modern artist, who could only be the Western artist, the importance
of this in his continuing historical role as an advancing force”.149
The curators’ response was simply to state that the exhibits were art. This point is not
arguable, art is a Western term and can be applied to whatever objects the West likes, the
point is the effect of that renaming.150 The effect must be to efface any contentious
discourses surrounding the objects i.e. the circumstances of their collection and any
purposes to which they were originally put that might disquieten cosmopolitan New
York, to rob them of all power of dissent, and to inappropriately incorporate them into
Western art history. Modernism removes all art from life.151 Coutts-Smith argues that
this is part of the bourgeois process of social control whereby there is a sucking out from
art of the potential for social comment and criticism and the acceptance of the artificial
bourgeois world where there is no dissent.152 It is appropriate however, as the curators
assert, to show what these objects meant to the early modernists.
It is necessary to take issue with McEvilley over the meanings he attributes to the
transcultural objects which is that they represent “blood” and “the darkness of the
unconscious”.153 Varnedoe correctly chides him for these comments, that seem to hail
from the stereotypes of the nineteenth century rather than 1985, calling them “latently
racist”.154 They illustrate well the persistence of the colonial discourses that I have
discussed above.
The incorporation of such objects in art galleries as art, not artefact, stripping them of
context, is not, then, as might be thought, a progressive step recognising their artistic
31
merit and giving them an appropriate status although in a sense this is true, but is a “final
appropriation” where they are not interpreted in their own terms, in the context of the
society which produced them, using the social and aesthetic measures of that society, but
become part of the desocialisation or decontextualisation of art that was part of the
Modernist agenda and a part of a discourse that denies their status as icons of an imperial
past.155
One thing that this discussion makes clear is that we are very far from any realisation of
an equal status for transcultural objects and those currently in our art galleries and that
whilst art galleries remain, conceptually, repositories of the aesthetic, and not of the
cultural artefact, an amalgamation of art gallery and ethnographic collection is
impossible.
2
The closure of ethnography collections
In a way the ethnology museum is an artifact of colonisation, the colonised countries do
not have displays of Edwardian culture, thus there is a persuasive argument that given the
past role of ethnographic museums and the likelihood that, in fact, they still perpetuate
the racist myths of the past, however well meaning the displays, that they should simply
be closed down. The problem is that visitors do not take in the contextual information
provided and if objects are left to speak for themselves then what they say may be far
from ideal, thus the exhibition of minkisi may reinforce prejudicial stereotypes, if it does
not challenge them.156 My interviews certainly suggested that stereotypes were left
unchanged by the museum experience as visitors saw the nailed minkisi in the light of
cinema images of Voudou and black magic.157 Further Hiller argues that by making
objects stand for cultures the other is objectified and the Western/other hierarchy is
maintained.158 I have argued that it was anthropology’s objectification that assisted the
exploitation of the other without sentiment, living behavior could only be an exhibition of
resistance.159 The argument would be that there is “no legitimate use [for collections of
transcultural artefacts] display or usage being merely an appropriation by a dominant
culture of the products and ideas of a subordinated one”.160 The closure option would
also deal with the problems of the legitimacy of holding the objects particularly those
32
deemed sacred within the culture of origin.161 The demands, by activists, for repatriation,
and their critique of the museum as racist and colonial is perhaps an indication of the
merits of this solution.162 That such demands are effective is evidenced by the concerns
expressed by the curators of the Pitt Rivers Museum over “the repeated stereotyping of
the museum as a colonial institution full of Victorian evolutionary (if not racist)
displays”.163 The continuing display of transcultural objects demanded back by the
country of origin, could be read as a manifestation of the fantasy of a continued British
sovereignty. In a way the closure option has been followed by the British Museum which
has shut down the Museum of Mankind although it still has ethnographic displays. On
the other hand to shut down these museums would deny spectators the pleasure of
viewing these objects and expunge the possibility of people with colour having access to
the materiality of their past. In addition it would fail to engage with contemporary
demands for “truth and reconciliation” regarding the colonial enterprise and recompense
for the slave trade, and would leave unaltered the attitudes that an imperialist and racist
past has embedded in our culture.
3
The injection of dissent
The Pitt Rivers is very special amongst ethnography collections in that it is prohibited
from innovation. Its current policy seems to be to inject dissent into its collection
through the insertion of contemporary art work.164 Moreover, this museum, by virtue of
its series, is the only ethnographic collection I know to include items from contemporary
British society of which my favourite is the police riot shield placed in with the other
transcultural shields.165 This could cause visitors to reflect on the unity of humankind.
These approaches ask a lot of the visitor as they demand an active spectatorship more
normally required in the contemporary art gallery. My museum fieldwork suggests that
this approach is unlikely to work as the average visitor does not engage deeply with the
texts or objects on display.
One way of challenging easy evaluations of objects such as Mavungu would be to
juxtapose them with contradictory images or parallels from our society. The actual uses
of minkisi were in fact little different from those of bibles, statues and the relics of saints
33
during the middle ages. An intervention that drew parallels between the rituals around
minkisi and the cults around saints relics would unite us and them and educate us about
our past. I think, however, that a more confrontational approach is necessary, as set out
in the next option.
4
The ethnography museum as an exercise in self awareness
In a sense this is the most radical of my suggestions as it involves an engagement with
the ethnography museum as cultural object. Such a project can only provide tools for the
West to look at itself; any display dealing with the experiences of the colonised then, or
now, must be curated by the colonized themselves.166 This approach would give the
museum a positive future as an engine for change. A museum like the Pitt Rivers would
fit into such a paradigm as a “museum of museums”.167 Such transformations would be
in line with those experienced by science museums which have changed from educators
to interpreters of science.168 The sorts of issues that would be dealt with would be:
1 The past role of the ethnography museum in the construction of colonialism;
2 The “old ugly stereotypes of African persons as exotic and transgressive
objects – as hypersexual and criminal abstractions in the white imagination”;169
3 The nature of the sophisticated pre-colonial societies of Africa. If this were
done the bias in our view of Africa, created by the colonial denial of Africa’s
history, would be addressed;
4 The way in which European exploitation of Africa, and European colonial
policy, resulted in Africa’s underdevelopment; and
5 The “legacy of imperialism which coupled with the myopic and corrupt
leadership of many African elites has left much of the continent politically
devastated and economically impoverished”.170
There are already examples of how such a exhibition might be structured, thus Vogel has
curated a series of exhibitions at the Center for African Art, in North America, that have
challenged the viewer to consider how their ideas on Africa have been constructed.171
34
This approach demands an active spectator.172 Another worthy pointer forward is the
exhibition All Different All Related at the Musée de l’homme.173 The exhibits stress our
unity thus there is a case in which a person is removing their skin and whose blood
vessels, organs and skeleton are all visible. The label says that under the skin we are all
the same. Displays deal with the diversity of physical differences between us and
explains their origins as environmental adaptations. At the end is a board dealing with
“The illusion of race”; there are twelve pictures in a circle whereby one face is morphed
through all the different races, the text says that it is impossible to classify humans into
races because of their diversity. The exhibition EXITCONGOMUSEUM is an example
of just the kind of exhibition that I am advocating. This temporary display, at the Royal
Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, dealt head on with the nature of the ethnographic
museum. Wastiau, the curator, staged a critique of this museum as it is today and
questioned the future role of the ethnology museum. He dealt with the relationships
between public and objects, the construction of the masterpiece and the circumstances of
collection of the objects. The exhibition did not reveal the exploitative nature of Belgian
administration in the Congo - its overall objective was to get the Belgian people to
reappraise the museum and their construction of the Congo. Ethnographic objects and
modern art pieces were used to make the relevant points.174
If ethnographic museums were transformed, as I am advocating here, they would directly
display and engage with our colonial past, being as it were exhibitions of colonisation.
They would deal with the origins of the science of anthropology and with the loaded
nature of the ethnography museum. They might compare contemporary Africa with the
colonial construct. In a sense they would not be museums at all but exercises in
anthropology applied to our society, looking at our cultural constructs of the African
other. Of course we have to ask if we have the will to carry out such a project - Hudson
thinks not.175 The experience in Belgium is relevant here, Wastiau’s exhibition caused a
storm of protest from the establishment, he was suspended the day after the opening and
the director was sacked, he describes the backlash as reactionary.176 Another difficulty is
that museum policy aims exhibits at families and the issues I wish them to address may
well be unacceptable in that context.
35
5
The conversion of the ethnography museum into a contact hub between
cultures
This is Wastiau’s suggestion.177 His vision of the ethnography museum is as an art
gallery, but one where the ethnographic objects are judged according to the aesthetic
criteria of the country of origin. It would include work, from other cultures, in all media,
e.g. poetry and performance, and a plurality of voices. The museum would be
anthropological in that it would always have, as its core aim, the investigation and
revelation of the relationships between us and the other.
Conclusion
The transcultural object was used as part of the project to create and demonize the
African other. Its continued display, without an engagement with its previous role, in
museums that fail to face up to the limits of what they can achieve i.e. an investigation of
our past and future relationship with Africa rather than an illumination of cultures, seems
to continue to deny both its potential and its reality. In a sense this is a return to the
question of whether our approach should be multi-cultural or anti-racist.
36
Glossary
BaKongo
The people who made minkisi.
Bilongo
The ritual substance (previously called medicine) within minkisi.
Fetich
Alternative spelling of fetish.
Fetish
Previous name for minkisi.
Jujuism
Synonym of fetishism.178
Khita
Nature spirit who might take up residence in the nkisi, alternative to
Simbi.179
Kiyombe
The name that the people of Mayombe have for their language/dialect.
Koma minloko
or Koma
mianda
The activation of a nkisi to incite it to search out and make a witch or
thief ill or to kill him.180
Kongo
That part of West Central Africa inhabited by the BaKongo who all
speak local dialects of KiKongo and directly or indirectly trace their
common history back to the former Kongo kingdom. In modern
geographical terms it comprises part of northern Angola, Lower
Congo-Kinshasa, Cabinda and part of Lower Congo-Brazzaville.181
Mbula
One part of erroneous classification of minkisi used by Maes. These
were used for protection against witches.182
Minkisi
[plural of nkisi] Whilst these artefacts are referred to as Power Objects
or previously as Fetishes, the word has no equivalent in European
languages.183
Minkisi/Nkisi
nkondi or
Minkisi/Nkisi
khonde
Minkisi of the nkondi or khonde type. May be tall standing
anthropomorphic wooden statues having numerous nails and blades
studded in them and a large medicine packet on the belly. Old term
nail fetishes. The term nkondi is that used in the Laman documents,
the term khonde is the term in the Kiyombe dialect.184
Mpezo
One part of erroneous classification of minkisi used by Maes. These
were nail fetishes with white clay as bilongo and feathers in their
headdress who chased wrongdoers and witches and made their victims
ill.185
Nail fetish
Previous term for nkisi in which nails had been driven.
37
Na moganga
One part of erroneous classification of minkisi used by Maes. These
were used for healing.186
Ndongoism
Dennett’s term for fetichism.
Nganga
Ritual expert who used the minkisi on behalf of his client, could be a
man or a woman.187
Nkisi
[Singular of minkisi], Whilst these artefacts are referred to as Power
Objects or previously as Fetishes, the word has no equivalent in
European languages.188
Power Object
Previous term for nkisi, updated from fetish.
38
Sources for illustrations (the illustrations have been removed from this version)
Fig. 1
Figs. 2, 3
Fig. 4
Fig.5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15
Fig. 16
Fig. 17
Fig. 18
Fig. 19
Fig. 20
Fig. 21
Minkisi in the collection of the British Museum, Phillips, T., (Ed) Africa;
The Art of a Continent, Catalogue, 1995, Prestel Munich, New York.
Photographs, Peter Crush, August, 2001.
Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890, London, Chatto &
Windus. The object the witchdoctor is holding is identifiable as a minkisi
from another illustration in Ward’s book [Fig. 17].
Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890, London, Chatto &
Windus.
Phillips, T., (Ed) Africa; The Art of a Continent, Catalogue, 1995, Prestel
Munich, New York.
Postcard on sale at the Pitt Rivers museum, July 2001.
Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and Disorder: Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed.
Arnaut, K., Revisions, New Perspectives on the African Collections of the
Horniman Museum, London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens,
Museum Antroplógico da Universidade de Coimbra, 2000, p.93.
Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890, London, Chatto &
Windus. p.34.
Bassani,E., African Art and Artefacts in European Collections 14001800, Ed. McLeod, M., Great Britain, 2000, p.xxiv. Engraving by T. and
J. De Bry, in the Latin edition of the Relazione del Reame di Congo by F.
Pigafetta, Frankfurt, 1598.
Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890.
Cover of Crawford, D., Thinking Black, 22 years without a break in the
Long Grass of Central Africa, 2nd Edition, London, 1912, Morgan &
Scolt.
Kingsley, M. H., West African Studies, New York, Macmillan, 1901,
frontispiece.
Author’s sketch.
Author’s figure.
Stanley, Sir H. M., The Congo and the Founding of its Free State,
London, Simpson Law, 1885, p.128.
Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890, London, Chatto &
Windus. p.50.
“Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art, Affinity of the Tribal and the
Modern, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, Volume I,
ffrontispiece.
Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and
Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great
Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.94.
“Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art, Affinity of the Tribal and the
Modern, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, Volume II,
p.137.
Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890, London, Chatto &
Windus.
39
Fig. 22
Fig. 23
Fig. 24
Fig. 25
Fig. 26
Fig. 27
Fig. 28
Fig. 29
Fig. 30
Fig. 31
Fig. 32
Fig. 33
Fig. 34
Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and
Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great
Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.70.
Ibid., p.72.
Illustration copied from Steains’ sketchbook, see Volume 2, pp.38-44,
Appendix F, The Stanley and African Exhibition.
Photograph, Peter Crush, August, 2001.
Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and
Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.193.
Reproduction of A-Z Mini London, Geographers’ A-Z Company Limited
Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and
Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great
Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.188.
Ibid.,183.
Ibid., p.180.
Photograph, Peter Crush, August, 2001.
Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and
Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great
Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p. 56.
Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of
Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991,
p.117.
Howell, S., “Art and meaning”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of
Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991,
pp.215-237, pp.228-232.
40
1
A glossary is supplied at the end of the text.
2
For further details see Volume 3, pp.24-32, Horniman Museum and pp.48-58, Pitt
Rivers Museum.
3
I use the term racialist to designate the sub-genre of racism that relates to theories of
race and their development.
4
As Araeen says:
“my main concern is with the question of the status and representation of
non-European cultures in western scholarship and popular knowledge since
the eighteenth century, and, more importantly the implication today of this
history vis-à-vis the status of non-European peoples in the modern world.
The idea of the colonial other as a group of racial stereotypes, has played an
important role in the development of primitivism in colonial discourse. And
it seems that these stereotypes are still with us today and provide a source
(although often unconsciously) for racist ideas both in popular
consciousness, institutions, and scholarship”. Araeen , R., “From
primitivism to ethnic arts”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism,
perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.167.
5
Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994.
6
The other
Hiller provides a succinct summary of the concept of the other:
“All known human societies seem to formulate ideas of the other in order to
define and legitimate their own social boundaries and individual identities.
The category of the other includes the inhabitants of the realms of
supernatural beings and monsters, the territories or real or imaginary allies
and enemies, and the lands of the dead – places far from the centre of the
world, where one’s own land is, and one’s own reality. The other is always
distant as well as different, and against this difference the characteristics of
self and society are formed and clarified. In the West, this frame of
reference has been complicated by a history of expansion and conquest
which inscribes the relationship between centre and periphery in economic
and political terms.” Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives
on art, Hiller, S., USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.87.
41
The first person account
I have written this dissertation in the first person to avoid the distancing effects of the
third person which, themselves, are similar to the objectification of cultures created by
the exhibiting of artefacts.
Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in
English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975.
7
Dias, N., “The Visibility of Difference; Nineteenth Century French Anthropological
Collections” in Macdonald, S., Ed. The Politics of Display; Museums, Science and
Culture, London, New York, Routledge, 1998.
8
Hiller, S, “It is not all really available to us anymore”, in Thinking about Art,
Conversations with Susan Hiller, Ed. Einzig, B., Manchester, New York, Manchester
University Press, 1996.
9
10
Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, Hiller, S., USA and
Canada, Routledge, 1991.
Coutts-Smith, K., “Some general observations on the problem of cultural colonisation”,
in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada,
Routledge, 1991.
11
Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism,
perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.
12
Araeen, R., “From primitivism to ethnic arts”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of
Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.
13
14
Macgaffey, W., Religion and Society in Central Africa: the BaKongo of Lower Zaire,
Chicago and London,1986.
Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and Disorder: Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed. Arnaut, K.,
Revisions, New Perspectives on the African Collections of the Horniman Museum,
London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, Museum Antroplógico da Universidade
de Coimbra, 2000.
15
Layton, R., The Anthropology of Art, Chatham, Granada Publishing Limited, 1981.
Nolan, S., 1999, Review of Hochschild, A., King Leopold’s Ghost – A story of greed,
terror and heroism in colonial Africa, World Socialist Website,
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/sep1999/king-s06.shtml, 5 October 2001.
16
Nelson, S. H., Colonisation in the Congo Basin 1880-1940, Athens and Ohio, 1994.
42
McEvilley, Y., “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art
at the Museum of Modern Art”, in Artforum, November 1984.
17
Vogel, S., “Always True to the Object, in Our Fashion”, in Karp, I., & Lavine, S., (Eds.),
Exhibiting Cultures, Washington, London, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, pp.191203.
Wastiau, B., EXITCONGOMUSEUM, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren,
Guide to exhibition, 2000.
18
This dissertation within the framework of social control
This dissertation can be classified as part of the post-colonial debate that Araeen has
identified as continuing to perpetuate white Western control over other economies and its
own minority cultures. In a way for us to talk of them is itself a symptom of a desire to
control the other. Araeen , R., “From primitivism to ethnic arts”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The
Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.
19
Excluded discourses
This dissertation has had to ignore certain important perspectives and discourses. Thus
the current meanings of these transcultural objects in the country of origin or for people
with colour in the West has had to be left out of the discussion. Primitivism and the other
appropriations of Modernism have had to be ignored as has the critical use of Primitivism
within Postmodernism (for a discussion of this see Cooke). The discourse on the noble
savage has also had to be omitted as has a consideration of the aesthetics of these objects
within African societies. Also left to one side are the conclusions that might be drawn if
lessons learnt from a consideration of how these objects function were to be applied to
contemporary Western art.
Cooke, L., “The resurgence of the night-mind: primitivist revivals in recent art”, in Hiller,
S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991,
pp.137-157.
Meanings of transcultural objects within the society of origin
See Macgaffey, W., Religion and Society in Central Africa: the BaKongo of Lower Zaire,
Chicago and London,1986 for a full account of the functioning of minkisi in Congolese
society and Layton, R., The Anthropology of Art, Chatham, Granada Publishing Limited,
1981 and Willett, F., African Art, Great Britain, Thames and Hudson, 1971 for
discussions of the meanings of other transcultural objects within their societies of origin.
Primitivism
The use by Picasso, the Surrealists and many other artists, for instance art students
sketching in the Horniman Museum, of transcultural objects, to inject fresh life into their
work or to stand for otherness, barbarity and a rejection of the rationalism of capitalism is
well known. Coutts-Smith ties in the art historical discourse on genius and the sublimity
of art with this colonial appropriation. He argues that the imperatives of capitalism mean
43
that bourgeois art history has become a progression of styles reflecting the continual
innovation that is needed to maintain consumption and that context and any political
motivation, of artists like, for instance, the Surrealists, is generally ignored. In such a
climate art needs fresh ideas with which to innovate, thus the appropriation by Degas and
Whistler of the Japanese and Gauguin of the Melanesian. Modernists, such as Rubin,
dissent from this and continue to argue for a grand narrative of genius. See my
discussion on MOMA’s exhibition: “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art and CouttsSmith, K., “Some general observations on the problem of cultural colonisation”, in Hiller,
S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.
Postmodern criticality
Cooke (142) argues that in the 1980s there was a realisation that our culture was only one
among many and that we were merely other to others and that this paved the way for an
art that deconstructed or critically engaged primitivism. She concludes that “it is the
achievement of the 1980s that the critical mythification of primitivism is at last being
explored in contemporary art”.(149)
Cooke, L., “The resurgence of the night-mind: primitivist revivals in recent art”, in Hiller,
S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.
The noble savage and alternative “positive” primitivisms
The depiction of the other as savage, irrational and dangerous has a species of opposite in
the discourse on the noble savage, begun by Montaigne and Rousseau, revived by Bury
my heart at Wounded Knee and still alive in popular culture such as Dances with Wolves.
It should be noted however that, in general, this discourse does not include the African,
noble savages are generally found in North America or the French Pacific colonies.
Cooke (140) identifies the positive view of primitivism that arose in the 1960s as a result
of the work of Lévi Strauss who saw “primitive thought as different from yet not inferior
to Western rationality” and who linked this to a preference for societies in which there
was “a certain balance between man and nature”. Thus in this imaginary primitive
society there was a communal spirit, a coherence in belief, a lack of alienation and
fragmentation and a oneness with nature. Cooke, L., “The resurgence of the night-mind:
primitivist revivals in recent art”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives
on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.
A parallel discourse is that of the “lament for disappearing peoples” as if they were
species of butterfly, harmonious tribal cultures in touch with nature and treading lightly
on the earth. Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism,
perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.116.)
To investigate these discourses and to tease fact from myth would be further dissertations
in themselves.
44
Dissent
I have found it hard to gauge the level of dissent from the views of the African set out in
this work and I have not had time to research it properly. Such dissent might have caused
minkisi to be read in different ways and have led to different interpretations of the
contents of the ethnography museum. Coombes makes clear that there were dissenting
English humanitarians and journalists and indeed African voices were raised in protest. I
have come across two interesting examples of such dissent. Firstly Birkett writes on
Kingsley’s deconstructions of the ethnocentric and Eurocentric. Thus Kingsley used
terms like tribe, savage and juju in relation to Europeans and could imagine the situation
when the African would study the curious customs of the European. She even wrote to
Frazer telling him that his views were Eurocentric. The second example is Breton, and
other surrealists, urging people not to visit the 1931 colonial exhibition in Paris and their
organization of a counter exhibition.
See Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994, Birkett, D., Imperial Adventuress, Macmillan,
1992, pp.98-99 and Volume 3, pp.37-44, Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et
d’Océanie.
Dissenting voices listed by Coombes
Pinnock ( British trader in West Africa) p.29.
West African Press p.30.
Humanist societies in Britain such as the Aborigine Protection Society and the AntiSlavery Society p.32.
See also p.215.
Coombes, A. E., Ethnography and the formation of national and cultural identities”, in
Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada,
Routledge, 1991, pp.189-214.
A myriad separate subjectivities
The meanings discussed here reflect the attitudes of the author and the significations are
those that ring true for him. Arguably a quite different interpretation would have been
arrived at by another author, especially if that author had not been a white, male, middle
class, middle aged liberal. An approach that included other voices would need to include
those other voices as participants in the writing as no writer can reflect the subjectivity of
another.
20
See Volume 2, pp.5-17, Appendix B, Minkisi, the religious cosmology of the Congo
and interactions with christianity and their display
21
Macgaffey, W., Religion and Society in Central Africa: the BaKongo of Lower Zaire,
Chicago and London,1986, pp.1-18,135-168 and 246-251
45
Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and Disorder: Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed. Arnaut, K.,
Revisions, New Perspectives on the African Collections of the Horniman Museum,
London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, Museum Antroplógico da Universidade
de Coimbra, 2000, p.91
22
Bieduyck, D. P., The Arts of Zaire, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, California, University of California Press Limited, London, England, 1985, p.70
and Tythacott, L., “From the Fetish to the Specimen: The Ridyard African Collection at
the Liverpool Museum, 1895-1916”, in Expressions of the Self and Other, Ed. Shelton,
A., London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, 2001, p.168.
23
The bilongo
The nineteenth century collectors do not appear to have understood the subtlety of the
meanings of the substances and objects that composed the bilongo seeing it as a childish
and superstitious, even malevolent, mix. To give a feel for their attitude let me quote
Ward:
“These amulets or charms consist of some collection of rubbish, which has
been gathered by the nganga, tied up in a bag or a piece of antelope skin,
blessed, and handed over to the confiding purchaser as an infallible
safeguard against crocodiles (Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo
Cannibals, London, Chatto & Windus, 1890, p. 50)”.
For a discussion of bilongo see Volume 2, pp.5-17, Appendix B, Minkisi, the religious
cosmology of the Congo and interactions with christianity and their display.
24
These ritual experts had overwhelming social and religious importance, see Bieduyck,
D. P., The Arts of Zaire, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
California, University of California Press Limited, London, England, 1985, p.67.
Mack, J., “Fetish, Magic Figures in Central Africa” in Shelton, A., Fetishism,
Visualising Power and Desire, The South Bank Centre and the Royal Pavilion, Art
Gallery and Museums, Brighton, in association with Lund Humphries Publishers
Limited, 1995, pp.53-65.
25
Karl Edward Laman was a Swedish missionary.
26
The colonisation of Africa
The colonisation of Africa is often described as the “scramble for Africa” a race for
possession that was systematized by the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. During the
1870s and early 1880s the European powers started to look to Africa for natural resources
and markets for their manufactures. The staking of claims to Africa began to lead to
conflicts between these powers and Bismarck called the Berlin conference to negotiate
the partition of Africa. By 1900 nearly 90% of Africa was claimed by European states.
The division, by the conference, of Africa into fifty countries was imposed over the
46
previous thousand indigenous cultures and regions storing up what we would currently
call “ethnic conflicts” for the future. Heath, E., History: Berlin Conference of 1884-1885,
2001, http://www.africana.com/Articles/tt_473.htm; 05/10/01 and Rosenberg, M. T.,
Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 to Divide Africa: The Colonization of the Continent by
European Powers: Web site discussion, 2001,
http://geography.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa021601a.htm, 5/10/01
27
European attitudes to Africa and Africans pre 1850
Ambassadors of the Kings of Benin and Congo were accredited to the Portuguese royal
court as soon as contact was made with those states. The relations between Africa and
Europe seem, initially, to have been “fairly balanced, even if ambiguous”. In 1518 Pope
Leo X made the son of king Alfonso I of the Congo a bishop and in 1608 a Congolese
ambassador to Rome was buried in Santa Maria Maggiore. Alfonso I was the name
adopted by the king of Kongo on his baptism. A German engraving of 1598 shows the
king of the Congo as virtually European and certainly not savage. However at the end of
the sixteenth and during the seventeenth century there was a change in attitude towards
Africa. The Americas came to be seen as more desirable trading partners although Africa
was exploited for slaves. Whereas when first encountered Africans were considered
“different but not substantially inferior to Europeans”, they now came to be regarded as
“different and inferior”. The European attitude to the African seems to have deteriorated
as our economic relations with them changed from trading partner to exploiter. In the
eighteenth century attitudes of Europeans to the African were little changed. Bassani, E.,
African Art and Artefacts in European Collections 1400-1800 Ed. McLeod, M., Great
Britain, 2000, pp.xxi-xxxvi.
See also Volume 2, pp.18-21, Appendix C, A Brief History of the Belgium Congo.
28
Bassani, E., African Art and Artefacts in European Collections 1400-1800 Ed.
McLeod, M., Great Britain, 2000, p.xxxviii.
29
Ham was the biblical progenitor of the black races and was himself cursed by god.
30
See Volume 2, pp.22-28, Appendix D, Racialist Theory for a fuller account.
31
There is clearly a need for a word other than race to describe people of different
appearance.
The persistence of racialist views is clear (it is even used, as a term in conversation, as
code for racism itself). Araeen endorses this saying that: “it seems that these stereotypes
are still with us today and provide a source (although often unconsciously) for racist ideas
both in popular consciousness, institutions, and scholarship”.(167) Examples abound, we
need only consider the speeches of Mrs. Thatcher when she talked of the British fear of
being swamped by immigration and in her Falklands victory speech when she asserted
that the British were still the same nation that had built the empire. These speeches were
made 20 years ago but still resonate today in the context of current racist immigration
47
policies and attitudes to asylum seekers. Araeen , R., “From primitivism to ethnic arts”,
in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada,
Routledge, 1991.
32
For a critique of racialist theory and a description of what seems to me an excellent
exhibition see Volume 3, pp.14-23, Musée de l’Homme, sub-section All related, all
different.
33
It should not be assumed that there was no contemporary complaint over the
assumptions and prejudices inherent in the creation of hierarchies but nevertheless this
analysis was widely accepted and its nomenclature persists today in a way which still
embeds it in our thought. See Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material
Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great
Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.149.
Levell (1997) explains that the allocation of the races to a position in the hierarchy was
on the basis of the level of technological advance, the more advanced the technology the
higher the society was on the evolutionary ladder.
34
Quoted in Birkett, D., Imperial Adventuress, Macmillan, 1992, p.64
Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in
English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975, p.5
35
36
Imperialists did not produce images of the primitive African, create a desire to
evangelize him or generate racial theories of human development but they used these
things to create their own ideology. Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature:
Representations of “primitive” Society in English Fiction 1858-1920, London and
Boston, 1975, p.5.
37
Populist accounts of African religion
Some quotes from the populist accounts of African religion will give a feel for the
extent of the propaganda surrounding it:
READE, W., The African Sketch-Book, Vol. 1, London, 1873, Smith, Elder & Co.
“These spiritual pastors [the witchdoctors] are neither beloved or esteemed
by their flocks, but contrive to shear them closely all the time… their chief
office is that of Witchfinder and Administrator of Ordeals”, and then the
farce of superstition becomes a tragedy…one evening we sat in the parlour
of the mission house [and] heard a wild and piteous cry… the death wail,
[that] would be the knell of more lives than one. A chieftain had been lying
for some time in a hopeless state; a woman had been found guilty of
bewitching him; and her son, who was seven years old, had been included in
the verdict, lest he should become the Avenger of Blood, when he grew up
48
to be a man…When a person of importance dies the fetish-man is
summoned [who] walks about with a tiger-cat skin in his hand. he lays the
skin at the feet of the witch… and then the ordeal is administered… if the
poison acts as an emetic, he preserves his senses and is acquitted, but if the
draft is retained … the prisoner becomes drunk [and]… is usually killed on
the spot…The woman in question had confessed her guilt, and as she had
been flogged for some hours beforehand, there was nothing mysterious in
her avowal... The woman was taken out to sea and drowned: the boy was
burnt alive. Bags of powder were tied to his legs, and, as an eye-witness
described it, made him “jump like a dog”… It cannot be denied that the
Africans are connoisseurs in cruelty, that murder is one of their fine arts,
that executions with them are entertainments, which they vary with a view
to artistic effect (pp.45-54)”.
WARD, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, London, 1890, Chatto & Windus
“When two villages are about to make war, all the charm-doctors are
particularly busy in making charms…Some warriors are anxious to have a
charm that will protect them from a spear thrust… They visit the Nganga…
and… received … some small charm… [which] consist, as a rule, of small
bits of stone, beads, shells, dried flies, nuts and beans, in fact, any rubbish
that the fetich-man can scrape together. Some of each of these articles are
tied up in a small piece of cloth, into which three or four feathers are placed,
to give them something of a mystic appearance; it is then attached to a string
and hung around the warrior’s shoulders (p.109)”.
BENTLEY, W. H., The Life and Labours of A Congo Pioneer, London, 1907, The
Religious Tract Society
This account speaks of a man arranging with a witch-doctor for the death of his own son
and explains that “witchcraft, with all its attendant evils of deceit, murder and bloodshed,
was depopulating the country (p.116)”.
WEEKS, J. W. Rev., Congo Life and Folklore, London, 1911, The Religious Tract
Society
Week’s tells the story is of the search for the person who killed the chief. A witchdoctor
is summoned who identified the witch by means of questioning the villagers. The
identified man, the brother of the deceased, is chosen because he is unpopular due to his
success. An ordeal-giver is then called to prove his guilt and he is beaten to death.
HENRY, W., The Confessions of a Tenderfoot “Coaster”, A Traders Chronicle of life
on the West African Coast, London, 1927, H. F. & G. Witherby
49
“The African mind is… incapable of penetration by an European one. It is
dark as the skin… it is the product of Nature never pruned, never curbed; of
nature still bursting with gestation and bursting with malignity… It is
transparent to us only in respect of the primitive passions which are
common to us all… it must be something less than human, which we others
have outgrown (p.148)”.
Henry describes fetishism as “the most nauseating subject that ever occupied an
unwilling pen (p.149)”.
“The phrase “he get a witch” or “she be a witch-woman” is the commonest
of all upon their lips; they are eternally thinking, invoking, “praying” and
scheming in terms of witchcraft; and, as to deeds, they kill (and sometimes
decimate) their neighbours, or merely maim and ruin them, according to
their circumstances (p.149)”.
“The witch-doctor, to whom any Chief may owe his position, is a fanatical
old scoundrel (or scoundreless) with rather more intelligence of a kind than
the subjects who he cheats and humbugs and destroys; and his power grows
with every atrocity or killing or plundering that he plans (p.150)”.
Henry describes a divination under possession, an ordeal by poison and the deliberate
blinding of people, as punishment, by the witchdoctor.
African religion as fear and the longevity of that stereotype
This false notion, that African religion was based on fear alone, that Africans lived their
lives in perpetual fear of witchcraft, a situation manipulated by the witchdoctor, was an
idea that echoed down into the 1960s. My first example of the longevity of this
stereotype is Picasso’s famous response in 1907 to meeting African artefacts in the
Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro:
“They were against everything – against unknown threatening spirits…. I
understood what the Negroes used their sculptures for…. All fetishes….
were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits
again, to help them become independent…. All alone in that awful museum
with the masks…. the dusty mannequins Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must
have been born that day, not because of the forms; because it was my first
exorcism painting”. Quoted in Hal Foster “The Primitive Unconscious of
Modern Art” in Art in Modern Culture, an anthology of critical texts Ed
Frascina, F and Harris, J Phaidon (1992) p.199
The Abstract Expressionist Gottlieb, in the 1940s, expresses a primitivist view very little
different from that of Picasso’s. Thus he says:
50
“While modern art got its first impetus through discovering the forms of
primitive art, we feel that its true significance lies not merely in formal
arrangement, but in the spiritual meaning underlying all archaic works.” ”If
we profess kinship to the art of primitive man, it is because the feeling that
they expressed have a particular pertinence today. In times of violence,
personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant. All
primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the
immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition of the terror of the
animal world as well as the eternal insecurities of life”.
Cooke says that, in the 1940s, the belief was widespread that primitivist art revealed an
angst parallel to that felt in the shadow of the bomb. She suggests that the primitive
projections of the Abstract Expressionists were attributable directly or indirectly to the
ideas of Wilhelm Worringer set out in Abstraction and Empathy published in 1908.
(Cooke, L., “The resurgence of the night-mind: primitivist revivals in recent art”, in
Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada,
Routledge, 1991, p.140).
This view can be seen even later, thus Kenneth Clarke in Civilisation (1969) says that
“To the Negro imagination [the spiritual] is a world of fear and darkness, ready to inflict
horrible punishment for the smallest infringement of a taboo (quoted in Brett, G.,
“Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art,
USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.120)”.
38
Illustrated London News, Feb 6 1878, p.2
39
Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, London, Chatto & Windus, 1890.
40
Ibid., p.119-120.
41
Crawford, D., Thinking Black, 22 years without a break in the Long Grass of Central
Africa, 2nd Edition, London, Morgan & Scolt, 1912.
42
Quote from Kingsley in Birkett, D., Imperial Adventuress, Macmillan, 1992, p.23.
For a brief biography of Kingsley see Petch, A., Ed., Collectors, collecting for the Pitt
Rivers Museum, Oxford, 1996.
Kingsley’s collection was bequeathed to the Pitt Rivers on her death. Note that the
Exeter museum had Dennett’s collection from 1889.
43
44
45
Balfour, H., Report of the Curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum for the year 1902, p.B.
See Volume 2, pp.29-37, Appendix E, Exhibition of Fetishes at the Pitt Rivers Museum
(1902).
51
46
Allen boasts in a letter, of 6 January 1902, to the Pitt Rivers Museum, that this piece
“was exhibited for some months in London, like many other objects that I have, at the
African and Stanley Exhibition (sic)”. I was not able to identify this object in the
catalogue to the Exhibition, see Volume 2, pp.38-44, Appendix F, The Stanley and
African Exhibition.
Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) was a British explorer and journalist. He went to
the USA in 1859, joined the New York Herald, and in 1871 was sent by James Gordon
Bennett to search for David Livingstone in Africa. Having found him in Ujiji, the two
men explored Lake Tanganyika together. On a second expedition (1874-77) Stanley
followed the Congo River (now Zaire river) up its mouth. By obtaining Belgian
“sponsorship” for exploration in the Congo he was instrumental in securing Belgian
sovereignty over the Congo Free State (Volume 2, pp.18-21, Appendix C, A Brief
History of the Belgium Congo). His last African expedition (1886-89) relieved Emin
Pasa in the Southern Sudan. (Information from The Macmillan Encyclopaedia, 1981,
Macmillan).
47
The history of the exhibition of African artefacts
European attitudes to African artefacts changed from the first contacts in the fifteenth
century through to the period of mass colonisation at the end of the nineteenth century.
Initially the European interest was in luxury goods and ivories and the skills of African
carvers were held in high esteem. Equally praised were raffia cloths from the Congo and
mats from Sierra Leone. However, as European relations with Africa changed, from
trading to exploitation, so attitudes to African artefacts were transformed. Carved ivory
spoons were beautiful at the start of the sixteenth century but by its end could only be
curious. Thus in 1659 the Exoticophilacium Weickmannianum described the animal and
human figures carved by Yoruba or Aja artists on ivory bracelets, and on an Ifa
divination tray, as “repugnant animals”, “hideous, demoniac images”. It was similarly
observed with surprise, in 1664, in relation to cloths from the Congo, that such fine work
could be done by barbarians.
Whilst there were few wooden African carvings collected prior to the mid nineteenth
century when such artefacts are mentioned in historical sources the comments are never
complementary. Thus whilst the objects collected from Africa in the sixteenth century
have not survived we know that some were described as idols. Bassani, E., African Art
and Artefacts in European Collections 1400-1800 Ed. McLeod, M., Great Britain, 2000,
pp.xxi-xxxvi.
Stanley’s expedition traced the course of the hitherto unexplored river Congo. This
journey seems to have been the focus of international interest as opposite the Musée
National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie in Paris is a memorial to an equivalent 1890
French expedition, beginning at Loango and crossing to Djibouti. (See Appendix I:
Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie).
48
52
Stanley’s account of minkisi is reproduced in Appendix D: Accounts of minkisi.
49
Idolatry
These objects were never worshipped, nor were prayers ever offered to them . We should
not underestimate the importance of the distinction between worshipping an idol and
looking to a figure as an intercessor e.g. the Virgin Mary. Idolatry is a sin prohibited by
the ten commandments, its importance is clear from the biblical account of Moses and the
Israelites temptation to worship idols during the flight from Egypt.
That Africans were believed to worship idols, is demonstrated by its denial by Haddon
and other academic writers. Thus Dennett (p.85) says that “it is commonly assumed by
writers on Africa that fetishism (the worship of tutelary images) is the religion of the
African” (p.85) and Haddon that “It is a common error to regard all representations of the
human form as idols which are worshipped on account of their own power” (pp.1-7).
That this was not the case was also pointed out by various missionaries who collected
material for their churches, however this information was ignored in the exhibitions and
displays put on by their recipients.
Quotes from Dennett, R. E., At the back of the Black Man’s Mind, London, Macmillan,
1906, v-vii, 85-94, 166-171 and Haddon, A. C., “Introduction to Primitive Religions”, in
the Handbook to the Hall of Religions, published by the London Missionary Society to
accompany the exhibition The Orient in London, 1908.
See Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and Disorder: Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed. Arnaut, K.,
Revisions, New Perspectives on the African Collections of the Horniman Museum,
London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, Museum Antroplógico da Universidade
de Coimbra, 2000, p.91 and Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material
Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great
Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.169.
50
The concept of degenerate religion
This idea of a degenerate religion is something quite bizarre. It is easier for us to accept
the view of the Enlightenment philosophers who saw fetishism as representing the most
primitive phase of religious practice. I suppose that the idea of a degenerate religion
partly arises from a need to ensure that the christian god had given these people the
possibility of salvation and secondly to convince people that the missionary effort was
worthwhile. The African could be saved, the missionary/colonial power need only break
the hold of the witchdoctor and remind his ex-followers of the truth. If the survivalist
theory is followed the African is not ready for Christ, he is at too low a stage of
development, if however he is degenerate then a reawakening of the true faith is possible.
One point that Nassau and Dennett are keen to make is that the African has a higher
conception of god as well as a belief in fetichism. R. H. Nassau was an American
Presbyterian missionary.
53
Nassau traces the degeneration of African religion, he believed that the African had slid
from a monotheistic worship of the true god, through polytheism and idolatrous
sacrifices, to the worship of ancestors. As an example of a vestigial practice once
associated with the worship of the true god he cites the precautions that are taken to
ritually defend a village. Thus he says that:
“In an expected great evil the gateway is sometimes sprinkled with the
blood of a sacrificed goat or sheep. The flesh is not wasted; it is eaten by
the villagers, and especially by the magic doctor. Does not this look like a
memory of a tradition of the Passover and the paschal lamb? And does it
not suggest some thought of blood atonement? (p.93)
Fetichism is a step further from god in that he is disregarded and the worship due to him
is transferred to multitude of spirits. However there is a strange conflation, in Nassau’s
account, between idol worship and fetichism and the impression is given that, in the
interior of the country, at least, where christian influences are less strong, that fetiches in
the form of figures are worshipped as idols. Further he says that:
“The people of Loango are more addicted to idol worship than any other
people on the whole coast. They have a great many carved images which
they set up in their fetich houses and in their private dwellings and which
they worship (Nassau is quoting from Wilson)”
Dennett agrees that “fetishism is an overgrowth imposed upon purer knowledge they
once certainly possessed” (p.168).
Dennett, R. E., At the back of the Black Man’s Mind, London, Macmillan, 1906, v-vii,
85-94, 166-171, Nassau, R. H., Fetichism in West Africa: forty years’ observation of
native customs and superstitions, London, Duckworth & Co. , 1904, pp.16, 42-49, 80137, 273-276 and Shelton, A., “Introduction” in Shelton, A., Fetishism, Visualising
Power and Desire, The South Bank Centre and the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and
Museums, Brighton, in association with Lund Humphries Publishers Limited, 1995.
51
Quote from the handbook used to train stewards for the major missionary society
exhibitions “Africa and the East” in Ballsbridge Dublin in 1912, reproduced in Coombes,
A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late
Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and
London, 1994, p.252 note 87.
52
The iconic status of Mavungu is suggested by its inclusion as the frontispiece of
Dennett’s 1906 book on African religion, by the fact that it was one of only two images
included in the “Fetish Worship” exhibit in the “Hall of Religions”, at the missionary
exhibition The Orient in London, and that it was privileged by illustration in the
Handbook of the Hall of Religions. The annual report congratulated the museum on
54
possessing “probably the finest [object] of its kind (Henry Balfour in Report of the
Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum for the year 1902 p.B)”.
53
Henry Balfour in Report of the Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum for the year 1902
p.B.
Quote from Shelton “Case 2, Information Booklet” in the Horniman Museum dealing
with Power Objects see Appendix F. He also says that: this “genre of sculpture… had,
more than any other, embodied the European ideal of “savage” art” (Shelton, A.,
“Introduction” in Shelton, A., Fetishism, Visualising Power and Desire, The South Bank
Centre and the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton, in association with
Lund Humphries Publishers Limited, 1995, p.7).
54
Vanhee notes that the curators of ethnographic museums had a checklist of must have
items for their galleries e.g.. Benin bronzes and Luba sculpture and that a number of
Lower Congo “fetishes” were one of those items. Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and
Disorder: Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed. Arnaut, K., Revisions, New Perspectives on the African
Collections of the Horniman Museum, London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens,
Museum Antroplógico da Universidade de Coimbra, 2000, p.89.
That minkisi are key objects is shown by their nearly unfailing occurrence in
ethnographic collections. Further evidence of their current importance is that one forms
the introductory image to the catalogue on MOMA’s exhibition Primitivism in twentieth
Century Art and this image is one of only four reproduced by McEvilley, Y., “Doctor,
Lawyer, Indian Chief, “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art at the Museum of Modern
Art”, in Artforum, November 1984.
The first reference to the burning of “idols” was by the converted king Alfonso I of the
Congo, in 1514. Bassani, E., African Art and Artefacts in European Collections 14001800 Ed. McLeod, M., Great Britain, 2000, pp.xxi-xxxvi.
55
56
Nelson, S. H., Colonisation in the Congo Basin 1880-1940, Athens and Ohio, 1994,
p.1.
55
57
Creating for the market
Miller reports that there is “abundant evidence for the taking, and for the taking-over of
production or the direction of production, of primitive art by Europeans”, and that
peoples can very quickly change the nature of what they produce as a result of perceiving
the presence of an European market. He suggests that primitivism is constructed in
partnership (vis-à-vis the objects made) with the society on whom the concept primitive
has been projected. See Miller, D., “Primitive art and the necessity of primitivism to art”,
in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada,
Routledge, 1991, pp.61-62.
The sort of incident that makes me ask if minkisi could have been produced in the way
Miller describes is Howell’s account of an amazing, and amusing, story of a people, the
Jah Hut, living in the Malay peninsular whose indigenous carving came onto the
international art/ethnic market in around 1970 and on which a book was written.
However their work was entirely novel to their culture. They had been encouraged to
take up carving as a way of earning money and given some models from Africa and the
Pacific with which to work. See Howell, S., “Art and meaning”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The
Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.215-237,
pp.228-232.
58
See Volume 2, pp.5-17, Appendix B, Minkisi
Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and Disorder: Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed. Arnaut, K.,
Revisions, New Perspectives on the African Collections of the Horniman Museum,
London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, Museum Antroplógico da Universidade
de Coimbra, 2000, p.96.
59
Mack, J., “Fetish, Magic Figures in Central Africa” in Shelton, A., Fetishism,
Visualising Power and Desire, The South Bank Centre and the Royal Pavilion, Art
Gallery and Museums, Brighton, in association with Lund Humphries Publishers
Limited, 1995, pp.53-65.
60
61
See Volume 2, pp.38-44, Appendix F, The Stanley and African Exhibition
The Arab (slave) trader and proselytizing Islam
The activities of European colonial activity were partly justified as countering the Arab
slave trade. This is a theme of the Africa Museum of Tervuren where there is a gallery
full of weapons and uniforms which celebrates the “antislavery campaigns” of the 1890s
and in the room of statues one, entitled “slavery (l’esclavage)”, depicts an Arab slave
trader trying to force an African man to follow him into slavery. The tension between
Arabs and European missionaries increased in the 1870s and 1880s as the moslem drive
for coverts increased. Interestingly the moslems were more successful than the christians
in conversion and in one of racism’s breathtakingly logical moves this was thought by
56
some to be appropriate as the inferior religion of islam was best suited to inferior peoples.
This value judgement was expressed by those who wished to stop christian missionary
activity. Another motive of the anti-missionary voice was the fear that christianity would
nurture ideas of democracy and human equality amongst those rightly kept inferior.
62
Bolt notes that the exotic natural geography of Africa was a recurrent theme of the
Victorians that actually visited Africa. The significance of the scenery is emphasized by
the frescos, showing mountains and plains, that cover the top half of the walls of the
Royal Museum in Tervuren. Bolt, C., Victorian attitudes to race, London, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1971, pp.109-156.
63
Illustrated London News Feb 6, 1878 p.2.
64
Ibid., quote from p.6.
65
Leopold veiled his imperial ambitions under the cloak of exploration, thus he said:
"I'm sure if I quite openly charged Stanley with the task of taking possession
in my name of some part of Africa, the English will stop me. So I think I'll
just give Stanley some job of exploration which would offend no one, and
will give us the bases and headquarters which we can take over later on”
The King’s instructions to Stanley were to:
"purchase as much land as you will be able to obtain, and that you should
place successively under... suzerainty... as soon as possible and without
losing one minute, all the chiefs from the mouth of the Congo to the Stanley
falls..."
He was to purchase all the available ivory and establish barriers and tolls on
the roads he opened up. Land rights treaties should be as "brief as possible
and in a couple of articles must grant us everything." Stanley secured 450
such agreements.
Quotes from Hochschild, quoted by Nolan, S., 1999, Review of Hochschild, A., King
Leopold’s Ghost – A story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa, World
Socialist Website, http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/sep1999/king-s06.shtml, 5 October
2001, pp.58,70 and 71.
66
Quote from Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and
Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale
University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.63.
67
Curio boxes
57
The first curio boxes were mobile cabinets filled with museum specimens and circulated
to schools as part of a systematic educational policy. These were pioneered by the
Liverpool Museum and by 1890 were being used by pastors, teachers and others lecturing
locally on topics relating to the Museum’s collection. Similar boxes were prepared by
the London Missionary Society and permitted congregations to hold mini exhibitions in
the provinces. These were probably very significant in reaching further into the general
population which would not attend the major missionary exhibitions. See Coombes, A.
E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late
Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and
London, 1994, p.174.
68
See Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.175.
69
A Manual for Stewards At Missionary Loan Exhibitions, 1899, London, Church
Missionary Society, Salisbury Square, London, EC, pp.1-2.
70
Ibid., p.2.
71
Ibid., p.18.
The first quote is from Dias, N., “The Visibility of Difference; Nineteenth Century
French Anthropological Collections” in Macdonald, S., Ed. The Politics of Display;
Museums, Science and Culture, London, New York, Routledge, 1998, p.49.
72
Bennett discusses an 1885 report of the Mineralogical and Geological Department of the
Trustees of the Australian Museum, which illustrates the idea, quite new at that time but
already widely accepted, that the museum should “speak to the eyes”. He explains that
there has been the development, by then, of a conceptual framework whereby the
museum is to be an “automated learning environment whose objects are auto-intelligible
through a combination of transparent principles of display and clear labeling.” Bennett,
T., “Speaking to the eyes: museums, legibility and the social order” in Macdonald, S., Ed.
The Politics of Display; Museums, Science and Culture, London, New York, Routledge,
1998, pp.26-27.
Pitt Rivers was quite clear on his principles of display. To educate the working class the
museum must use “unambiguous classificatory principles, rational layout and use of
space, and clear and descriptive labeling” Pitt Rivers (1891) quoted in Bennett, T.,
“Speaking to the eyes: museums, legibility and the social order” in Macdonald, S., Ed.
The Politics of Display; Museums, Science and Culture, London, New York, Routledge,
1998, pp.25-35, p.28”.
58
73
Coombes makes clear that education of the masses was a stated function of museums
and a way in which they privileged themselves over popular entertainments. Thus time
spent at the museum was counted as time spent at school and the museums were
concerned to attract visitors. (See Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums,
Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England,
Great Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1994)
74
See Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.123
75
Physical anthropology, the making visible of racialist assumptions
“Human variation and difference were not experienced “as they really are,
out there in nature” but by and through a metaphorical system that
structured the experience and understanding of difference and that in
essence created the objects of difference” Stephan (1993) quoted in Dias,
N., “The Visibility of Difference; Nineteenth Century French
Anthropological Collections” in Macdonald, S., Ed. The Politics of Display;
Museums, Science and Culture, London, New York, Routledge, 1998,
p.38”.
In the late nineteenth century physical anthropology was at its zenith. The measuring of
cranial features, using scientific methods, allowed the differences between races to be
quantified. Exhibits were set up showing crania, skeletons, models of brains and
drawings of the average brains of each racial group thus proving those racial differences.
Dias’ point is that the bias in the observations were bound to confirm the underlying
racial assumptions. See Dias, N., “The Visibility of Difference; Nineteenth Century
French Anthropological Collections” in Macdonald, S., Ed. The Politics of Display;
Museums, Science and Culture, London, New York, Routledge, 1998.
This measuring of the other was not restricted to people of other races, thus there are
photographs, taken in 1892, of Haddon measuring the crania of two men in the Aran
Islands. Haddon’s evolutionary logic led him to consider even British folk traditions as
evolutionary relics and he incorporated folkloric materials into the displays in the
Horniman Museum. Collected Sights – Photographic collections of the Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology 1860s-1930s.
76
See Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994, pp.133-140 for details of the procedures used.
77
As an example of this some series of cartes de visite depicted racial types. These cards
were developed from calling cards in the 1850s. Their popularity increased in the 1860s
59
and they were collected into special albums. Information from Collected Sights –
Photographic collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 1860s-1930s.
As an example of such ideas Barley quotes Joshua Nott (spelling?) – a pioneer of racial
theory:
78
“The intellectual man is inseparable from the physical man and the nature of
the one cannot be altered without a corresponding change in the other. To
one who has lived among American Indians it is vain to talk of civilizing
them, you might as well attempt to change the nature of the buffalo” Barley,
N., A History Of Anthropology BBC Radio 4: three thirty minute
programmes: Thursday 11, 18 and 24 October 2001.
79
The linking of the physical and the mental stereotype
Kingsley says “The mental condition of the lower forms of both races [Bantu and Negro]
seems very near the other great border-line that separates man from the anthropoid-apes,
and I believe that if we had the material, or rather if we could understand it, we should
find little or no gap existing in the mental condition in this old, undisturbed continent of
Africa.” Kingsley, M. H., Travels in West Africa, New York, Macmillan, 1897, p.458.
Dias makes clear that it was believed that cranial development was linked to intellectual
abilities. It seems an enormous step to link physical and mental stereotypes yet it has a
certain logic when looked at in a historical perspective. It seems to come, as a package,
with the linking of the good with the beautiful (which the Shakespeareans did, think of
Richard III and of Cordelia, Regan and Gonerill), and the acceptance of the supremacy of
Greek thought and the Greek body through the West’s supplication to Greek art as a
summit of achievement. Thus the further a body is from the Greek stereotype the more
culturally inferior its owner must be. The science of anthropometry allowed this
difference to be scientifically measured. See Dias, N., “The Visibility of Difference;
Nineteenth Century French Anthropological Collections” in Macdonald, S., Ed. The
Politics of Display; Museums, Science and Culture, London, New York, Routledge,
1998, Araeen, R., “From primitivism to ethnic arts”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of
Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.169 and
Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994, pp.121 and 155.
80
Such a display was presented at the International Exhibition of Anthropological
Sciences 1878. See Dias, N., “The Visibility of Difference; Nineteenth Century French
Anthropological Collections” in Macdonald, S., Ed. The Politics of Display; Museums,
Science and Culture, London, New York, Routledge, 1998, p.48.
At the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, opened in 1933, there were 87 lifesize bronze sculptures representing typical members of what were believed to be the
more important divisions of the human race. This approach was taken as it was felt that a
60
“display of skulls, charts, casts and photographs, extensive and accurate as they might
be” would fail to make a lasting impression on the mind. Here then is both evidence of
the contents of the usual sort of display and an example of how entrenched these views
were, even in 1933, in the United States. Quote from Field, H., The Races of Mankind,
The Field Museum of Natural History, Reprinted from Science, August 18, Vol. 78, No.
2016, 1933, pp.146-147 p.2.
An effective counter to this is the exhibition All Different All Related, where a set of
sculls from a single churchyard is presented and where their diversity is obvious. It is
instantly clear that to try to impose racial grouping, in the context of such diversity,
would be impossible. See Volume 3, pp.14-23, Musée de l’Homme
81
From 1869 indigenous peoples were photographed in particular postures, against grids,
often holding identification labels.
82
Quote from Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and
Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale
University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.145.
83
Ibid., p.44.
Quote from Topinard (1877) reproduced in Dias, N., “The Visibility of Difference;
Nineteenth Century French Anthropological Collections” in Macdonald, S., Ed. The
Politics of Display; Museums, Science and Culture, London, New York, Routledge,
1998, p.46.
84
85
Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.140.
86
In 1896 the ethnographic collection of the Mayer Museum was organised as follows:
Melanesian
(black) races
Africa
New Guinea
Solomon Islands
New Hebrides
Polynesia
New Zealand
Micronesia
Matty Island
Mongolian (yellow) races
Caucasian (white) races
South America
Japan
China
Burma
Malay Archipelago
Europe
India
Egypt
61
See Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.139.
In a strange, and doubtless unintentional, parallel the new Africa gallery in the British
Museum is in the basement.
87
Souvenir Guide to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Great Britain, 1993, p.9.
88
Pertinent to the conclusions that might be drawn from the arrangement of the rooms in
a museum is a correspondence drawn by a reviewer of the British Museum exhibitions in
1902. This reviewer, of an exhibition of pre-historic tools and weapons, recommended to
his readers that they visit the ethnographic galleries to study perishable objects that were
still in use among races in a stage of culture corresponding more or less closely to that of
the makers of the prehistoric tools. A parallel situation exists in the Musée de l’homme
where there is an exhibition of human development and an ethnographic collection. See
Birkett, D., Imperial Adventuress, Macmillan, 1992, p.64 and Volume 3, pp.14-23,
Musée de l’Homme.
89
Bal, M., Double Exposures, The Subject of Cultural Analysis, Great Britain, Routledge,
1996.
90
William Flower quoted in Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material
Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great
Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.120.
Typology was a word invented by Pitt Rivers to describe his arrangement of objects into
sequences of forms. Thus series of objects, from around the world, are arranged in linear
progressions from the simpler and more organic to the more complex and specialized. For
instance locks are grouped together regardless of where they come from and the series
goes from wooden locks to sophisticated metal ones. See A Souvenir Guide to the Pitt
Rivers Museum, Great Britain, 1993, p.4.
The arrangement of objects into series remains the organisational rationale of the
museum. However no evolutionary paradigm is explicit nor do any of the arrangements
suggest that this is the basis of their arrangement. However there is still a progression,
visible within some of the displays, from simple to complex, which invites the simpler
ones to be interpreted as primitive. See Appendix J: The Pitt Rivers Museum, Coote and
Morton (2000) and Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and
Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale
University Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.117.
91
See Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994, p.146.
62
92
The Horniman Museum, London and Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter
The Horniman Museum began as an exhibition of the curios collected by Frederick
Horniman and its displays have evolved from that curio cabinet. Prior to 1901
descriptions of the Ethnographic Gallery show that it was focussed on the slave trade or
on artefacts from African races such as the Dahomeyans (Dahomey is now called Benin)
or the Zulus and “functioned in a similar way to the Spanish “Torture Chair” from the
Inquisition, that is it was a display of savagery. In the absence of an explicit organization
the visitor would have applied evolutionary theories learnt elsewhere to the displays.
From 1901 onwards the museum began to be coherently organised, by Haddon, using
explicitly evolutionary criteria an organisational paradigm that persisted up to the first
world war despite the loss of status of these theories amongst academics. By 1920
British anthropology had moved away from a primary engagement with evolutionary
theory to an interest in diffusionism and functionalism. A complementary lecture series
was devised by Haddon and the resident curator, Harrison, with titles such as:
“Evolutionism and Darwinism” and “Fashion among Savages”. The evolutionary
arrangement of exhibits at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, in Exeter, where
Dennett’s own collection of minkisi ended up, continued, even longer, up to the 1960s.
Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University
Press New Haven and London, 1994, pp.115, 133.
93
That one task of the ethnographic museum was to promote colonisation is implied by a
quote from de Haulleville (1910): “it was the task of the ethnographic museums to fill all
visitors with this “most noble passion”. Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and Disorder:
Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed. Arnaut, K., Revisions, New Perspectives on the African
Collections of the Horniman Museum, London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens,
Museum Antroplógico da Universidade de Coimbra, 2000, p.89.
See also W. H. Holmes (1902) “Classification and arrangement of the exhibits of an
anthropological museum”, Journal of the Anthropological Institute xxx111:353-72
referred to in Coombes (1991) p.195(July 1902) and Museums Journal 2:13 Quoted in
Coombes (1991), p.203.
94
Museums Journal (July 1908) 8:12 Quoted in Coombes, A. E., Ethnography and the
formation of national and cultural identities”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism,
perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.204.
See Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism,
perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.114.
95
96
See Volume 2, pp.45-59, Appendix G, Accounts of minkisi and fetishism, 1897-1908.
97
Details appended, by the Liverpool Museum, to donations by Ridyard
63
Such claims were made by Ridyard when he donated fetishes, that he collected during 21
years as a chief engineer on vessels trading between Liverpool and the West African
coast, to the Liverpool Museum. These details may come directly from his letters or
from information that he supplied.
Accession
number
20.8.97.7
Name/description of
fetish
Fulameconda
20.8.97.8
Chicoca
20.8.97.9
Mabialla Maupauha
Description given
It is said to “attack its victims with dropsy and
sleeping sickness”. Great care should be taking
in handling these fetishes as cases are know of
the above diseases attacking persons merely
through placing their hands on them. I suppose
owing to the medicine with which they are
covered.
Said to attack its victims with rheumatism and
syphilitic sores and swellings.
Said to “attack the brain rendering its victims
idiots”
Information from Tythacott, L., “From the Fetish to the Specimen: The Ridyard African
Collection at the Liverpool Museum, 1895-1916”, in Expressions of the Self and Other,
Ed. Shelton, A., London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, 2001.
98
H Rider Haggard (1856-1925) who wrote Allan Quartermain spent five years in total
in Africa. He was a colonial administrator in Natal (South Africa) and was involved in
the British annexation of the Transvaal. He was a firm believer in “England’s Imperial
Mission” referring to “all our great muster roll of colonies each of which will in time
become a great nation”. Haggard was a successful writer and each of his romances was
“eagerly awaited by countless thousands of readers”. Information from Green, R. L.
Introduction to Allan Quartermain, quote from page 120.
Haggard’s white race has an echo in the special edition of the Illustrated London News,
published to coincide with Stanley’s return from Africa, in that a reference is made to the
great mountain Gambaragara where Stanley saw some of the “strange white men by
whom the summit of the mountain is inhabited”. Illustrated London News Feb 6 1878
p.31.
Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in
English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975, p.4.
99
100
101
Ibid.
Haggard, H. R. Allan Quartermain, London and Glasgow, Collins with an
introduction by Green, R. L. , 1887.
64
102
Ibid., p.23 .
The novel is written as a first hand account of the heroes’ travels with an introduction,
supposedly by Allan Quartermain, and notes by the editor commenting, where necessary,
on Quartermain’s geographic and historical comments.
103
Ibid., p.22.
104
Ibid., p.178.
Bolt reports that colour symbolism was well established by the Victorian period and
black evoked evil, sin, treachery, ugliness, filth, degradation, night and funeral mourning.
The blacker people were the more gross they were. See Bolt, C., Victorian attitudes to
race, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, pp.109-156.
105
See dedication to Haggard, H. R. Allan Quartermain, London and Glasgow, Collins
with an introduction by Green, R. L. , 1887.
Quote from Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive”
Society in English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975, p.3.
106
107
Barley, N., A History Of Anthropology BBC Radio 4: three thirty minute
programmes: Thursday 11, 18 and 24 October 2001.
108
Bolt, C., Victorian attitudes to race, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971,
pp.109-156.
109
See the Souvenir Guide to the Pitt Rivers Museum p.4.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 had “encapsulated Victorian ideas of the march of progress,
from the simple and primitive to the more sophisticated and civilized” , further the 1859
Origin of Species gave a scientific rationale for that progress. Thus these theories were
part of the modernist evolutionary paradigm of progress the end point of which is
hierarchy. Quote from A Souvenir Guide to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Great Britain, 1993,
p.3.
Araeen argues that the racial theory of human development is one further manifestation
of the paradigm of progress that, since the Renaissance, has been central to western
thought (at least until its postmodern deconstruction). In the west, in the eighteenth
century, Greek art was placed at the summit of human achievement, in a universal history
of art that fitted other world cultures into its linear progression, modern western art being
a minor summit. The idea of progress has a corollary which is hierarchy, thus the Greeks
believed themselves superior to the barbarians and the eighteenth century European knew
he was a superior sort of human being. Racial theories acted to put a veneer of science
onto what had previously merely been prejudices. Hegel’s attribution of a “national
65
spirit” to each nation is another input to the mix. See Araeen, R., “From primitivism to
ethnic arts”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and
Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.167-169.
110
See Volume 2, pp.60-61, Appendix H, Applied uses of anthropology
111
Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, Hiller, S., USA and
Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.3.
112
In this respect the popularity of exhibits on body deformation, through deliberate
manipulation for example by the use of lip plates, should be noted.
113
This is the currently advertised mission statement of the British Museum.
114
See Volume 2, pp.62-70, Appendix I, Museum interviews and observational studies
115
See Volume 3, pp.9-13, British Museum.
116
In a way this a problem opposite to that identified by Wastiau which is that the
Western concept of tribalism was used, in the past, as a rigid set of categories into which
to jam African art and which served to deny its dynamism. Wastiau, B.,
EXITCONGOMUSEUM, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Guide to
exhibition, 2000, p.65.
117
The guide to the exhibition Africa, Art of a Continent tried to claim that its, even more
cavalier, abandonment of any sound socio-geographical approach was a virtue. Volume
2, pp.78-80, Appendix K, Africa: Art of a Continent, an exhibition at the Royal Academy
of Arts, October 1995-January 1996.
118
The current exhibitions at the British and Horniman Museums are the most up to date
of those I was able to review. See Volume 3, pp.9-13, British Museum and pp.24-32
Horniman Museum.
Complexity and subtlety of belief
One thing that comes out very clearly in Layton’s book is the complexity and subtlety of
belief and religious art in non Western societies, equivalent, of course, to the complex
web of theology spun around christianity in the middle ages. He also stresses the
integration of the social and religious. It is only our ethnocentricity that means we do not
immediately accept that other systems of belief are potentially as complex and ambiguous
as our own. Layton, R., The Anthropology of Art, Chatham, Granada Publishing Limited,
1981.
119
This is however implicit in the Pitt Rivers Museum.
66
120
Parallel belief systems
In the Africa gallery of the British Museum the text for the textile display explains how
clothing is used in Africa to signify rank and position. As every comment it makes is
directly applicable to our society it could include the words “as in societies in general” to
make the parallels explicit. This is perhaps a little heavy handed but in other cases the
visitor would not perceive the similarities. Thus there were parallels between the beliefs
in England, up to the early twentieth century, and those relating to minkisi. For instance,
there is, in the Pitt Rivers museum, a bottle, collected in 1915, and said to contain a
witch. This approach could be a double edged sword with the visitor dismissing the
beliefs of both Africans and our ancestors as mere superstitions but I think it would tend
to encourage a greater self-reflexiveness. See inside of back cover of A Souvenir Guide
to the Pitt Rivers Museum.
121
Vanhee discusses this point and suggests that details of how the minkisi were collected
should be acknowledged, which, he says, was often by force and not as a result of their
abandonment following conversion to christianity. Further with minkisi the impression is
given that they are relics from a traditional way of life whereas they are in some ways
still a part of contemporary culture. This is something that needs to be clarified. See
Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and Disorder: Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed. Arnaut, K.,
Revisions, New Perspectives on the African Collections of the Horniman Museum,
London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, Museum Antroplógico da Universidade
de Coimbra, 2000.
Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism,
perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.115 and 118, quote from page
115.
122
123
The Horniman Museum has tried to deal with some of these issues e.g. the colonial
legacy of the ethnographic gallery, and slavery, in the texts that are displayed and in the
curation of the exhibition by a team that includes people from the Caribbean and Africa.
This is not however reflected in any startling changes in the nature of the objects
exhibited. See Volume 3, pp.24-32, Horniman Museum,.
124
Questions over the origins of artefacts are clearly raised by visitors, as evidenced by
entries in the comments book of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the museum has found it
necessary to put up a notice to deal with the issue. See Volume 3, pp.48-58, The Pitt
Rivers Museum.
125
Miller analyses the use of primitivist stereotypes in the Return of the Jedi. Dances
with Wolves also exploits the primitivist myth, albeit the romanticized, noble savage,
variant. Miller, D., “Primitive art and the necessity of primitivism to art”, in Hiller, S.,
Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991,
p.68 also endnote 20 .
67
See Volume 3, pp.33-36, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou;
pp.45-47, Musée Picasso and pp.59-63, Musée du Quai Branly
126
127
The ethnology museum and contemporary culture
The new Africa gallery at the British museum includes some contemporary work, for
instance by Sokari Douglas Camp, but it is work that fits in with the other artefacts, it is
not challenging or political. There are some contemporary masks in the current
Horniman exhibition, but again they merge seamlessly with the other, older, masks.
128
See Volume 3, pp.24-32, Horniman Museum.
129
See Bal, M., Double Exposures, The Subject of Cultural Analysis, Great Britain,
Routledge, 1996, p.49.
130
See Volume 3, pp.24-32, Horniman Museum.
Sivanandan’s evidence to the Swann Committee’s (1985) report makes clear the
distinction between multiculturalism and anti-racism, put simply by embracing
multiculturalism we can learn about the cultures of others without reflecting on or
changing our racism. See quote in Coombes, A. E., Ethnography and the formation of
national and cultural identities”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives
on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.210-211.
131
132
Augmented reality devices
One approach to a lack of context in museums may be “augmented reality devices” i.e.
multimedia aids that provide text, audio, still and moving images and which could allow
the viewer to investigate the object in whatever direction and depth they wished. Future
devices will have the power to offer different perspectives, and by asking questions at the
beginning, attune their presentation to the needs of the viewer. In my experience to date
there are problems with such devices, i.e. audioguides, as the texts provided are bland and
uncontroversial. Schwarzen suggests that they cause other, more fundamental, problems
in that they may stop the spectator looking at the objects, provide information overload,
suspend the opportunities for active spectatorship and inhibit human interactions, within a
group of visitors or with a leader. Schwarzen, M, M., “Art & Gadgetry: the future of the
Museum visit” in Museum News, July/August 2001 pp.38-41, 68.
133
See research done at the Musée du Quai Branly. About 40% of visitors do not even
read the labels and only 2% study the information sheets provided. Volume 2, pp.62-70,
Appendix I, Museum interviews and observational studies.
134
Volume 2, p.93, Appendix M, The 1940s House, an exhibition at the Imperial War
Museum, -January 2002
135
I have argued that there is a need to put the objects exhibited into a proper cultural
context but culture is not objects, its not dry descriptions of how carvings were used, it is
68
a nexus of relationships between people, a shared heritage, a shared life and way of
thinking, a shared cosmology. So the British Museum cannot in that sense illuminate
culture, we have our culture and they have theirs, culture is lived thing. See Street, B. V.,
The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in English Fiction
1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975, pp.16-17 and Howell, S., “Art and meaning”, in
Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada,
Routledge, 1991, pp.215-237.
136
Issues of museum funding
The question of the design of museum exhibits is complex surrounded as it is by
pressures coming from the suppliers of funds be they benefactors or government.
Museums must negotiate the demand that they are both purveyors of scientific truth (and
complexity) and entertainment. Commenting on our current, results based, society
Rounds highlights some key problems that arise when those providing funds demand to
know what their museum is achieving. His complaint is that the goals then established
are short term, easily measured ones which ignore the complexities of the situation.
How, he asks, can outcomes be evaluated if the goal of a museum is “building selfesteem, self-awareness, teaching concrete knowledge and skills and stimulating visitors
to personal meaning-making”.(p.45) How do you deal with the multiple intelligences i.e.
different skill sets and ways of relating to the world found in visitors and the different
reasons for museum attendance. Rounds’ plea is for museums to be freed from goals, yet
they must still have objectives.
Coombes, A. E., Ethnography and the formation of national and cultural identities”, in
Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada,
Routledge, 1991, p.210 and Rounds, J., “Measure for measure: purpose and problems in
evaluating exhibitions” in Museum News, July/August 2001, pp.43-45,66-67,70-71.
137
The contextualisation of the Dennett collection at the Royal Albert Memorial
Museum in Exeter
This museum would like to produce a catalogue to the Dennett collection that would
provide the “interpretive support” needed so that objects like nkisi are not
“misunderstood and misinterpreted as objects demonstrating the otherness of African
societies” however the museum lacks the funding for the external expertise required to
carry this out. Personal communication Len Pool (Curator Royal Albert Memorial
Museum) 13 August 2001).
See Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in
English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975, p.2
138
139
Of course no gallery has yet included African objects within its collection as work of
equal status with the other pieces. The extraordinarily Eurocentric nature of Western
collections of art, modern or otherwise, is easily overlooked. These galleries basically
show only European and North American art. The inclusion of work from other
countries in the Century City exhibition at Tate Modern is thus to be praised. I felt it
69
difficult to relate to the pieces on display, a reflection perhaps of the Eurocentric nature
of my art education.
140
See Volume 3, pp.59-63, Musée du Quai Branly
141
Quote from the Louvre Gallery Guide 2001
See Volume 3, pp.33-36, Musée National d’Art Moderne and pp.45-47, Musée
Picasso
142
143
“Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art
144
Coombes explains that there were two forces within museums, at the end of the
nineteenth century, leading to a reclassification of African curios as art: the first was the
looting of the Benin bronzes whose artistic quality was hard to deny and the second was
the desire for galleries to have the status that came with displaying art. In the twentieth
century there have been numerous references to African figures as art and exhibitions
juxtaposing modern art and ethnographic artefacts. Coombes, A. E., Reinventing Africa,
Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian
England, Great Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1994, pp.27-28.
Quote from Maxwell in Rubin, W., Ed., “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art,
Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1984,
pp.i-x.
145
146
Whilst the societies, from which these objects came, might not have had a word for
art, they did/do have criteria of excellence. Layton, R., The Anthropology of Art,
Chatham, Granada Publishing Limited, 1981 and Willett, F., African Art, Great Britain,
Thames and Hudson, 1971.
This dissertation does not concern itself with Rubin’s implicit claim that modern art
was developing under its own momentum and that the influence of African artefacts was
not germane to its development. Thus to Rubin there are only affinities, a reference to
the sub-title of the exhibition, between transcultural objects and early modern work. This
is denied by McEvilley, and many others, who see Modernism as appropriating styles
from around the world. See Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art,
Hiller, S., USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991 and McEvilley, Y., “Doctor, Lawyer,
Indian Chief, “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art”, in
Artforum, November 1984.
147
See Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism,
perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.121.
148
Araeen, R., “From primitivism to ethnic arts”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of
Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.164.
149
70
Rubin, W., Ed., “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art, Affinity of the Tribal and the
Modern, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, pp.i-x and Varnedoe, K.,
Response to article in Artforum (November 1984) by McEvilley, T., called “Doctor,
Lawyer, Indian Chief, “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art at the Museum of Modern
Art” Artforum, February 1985.
150
See Howell’s discussion of Clifford. Howell, S., “Art and meaning”, in Hiller, S., Ed.,
The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.215237, p.235.
151
See Coutts-Smith, K., “Some general observations on the problem of cultural
colonisation”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and
Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.14-31.
152
The myth of genius as social control
Coutts- Smith (1991) argues that since Romanticism art has been seen as essentially
spiritual, created by the passion of genius and outside history and society. This ensures
that art cannot be a focus of dissent; such treatment of art is a form of social control.
McEvilley, Y., “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art
at the Museum of Modern Art”, in Artforum, November 1984, p.56.
153
McEvilley elaborates:
“In their native contexts these objects were invested with a feeling of awe
and dread, not of aesthetic ennoblement. They were usually seen in motion,
at night, in closed dark spaces, by flickering torchlight. Their viewers were
under the influence of ritual, communal identification feelings (sic), and
often alcohol or drugs: above all they were activated by the … shaman,
acting out the usual terrifying power represented by the mask or
icon”.(p.59)
154
Varnedoe, K., Response to article in Artforum (November 1984) by McEvilley, T.,
called “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art at the
Museum of Modern Art” Artforum, February 1985, p.46.
155
See Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, Hiller, S., USA and
Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.186.
The art historical discourse on the transcultural object
Whilst it is not included within the remit of this dissertation the nature of the artistic
discourse on African artefacts is of tangential interest. Coutts-Smith analyses this
discourse and concludes that it ignores the social meanings of the transcultural object,
instead focusing on it as symbol of the irrational, of the other, of the beauty of
71
abnormality. See Coutts-Smith, K., “Some general observations on the problem of
cultural colonisation”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art,
USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.
156
An object has no fixed meaning by itself, it is dependent on the spectator to construct
a meaning, assisted by texts supplied with the object or brought to it by the viewer. The
reading of meaning into objects, without reference to the context of their manufacture, is
an error that Rubin falls into thus he says “The sense of Africa that he (Picasso) intuited
through its sculpture rings truer today than does most anthropological writings of his
day”(p.42). McEvilley criticizes him for this: “Here Rubin is relying on an implied claim
to a universal sameness of aesthetic feeling; an out of date piece of platonic lore that has
no ground in evidence whatsoever”(p.48).
See Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, Hiller, S., USA and
Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.187, quotes from Rubin, W., Ed., “Primitivism” in twentieth
Century Art, Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York, The Museum of Modern
Art, 1984, pp.i-x and McEvilley, Y., “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, “Primitivism” in
twentieth Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art”, in Artforum, November 1984.
157
See Volume 2, pp.62-70, Appendix I, Museum interviews and observational studies.
158
Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, Hiller, S., USA and
Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.1-4.
159
See Coutts-Smith for comments on the objectification of the other that characterises
anthropology. Coutts-Smith, K., “Some general observations on the problem of cultural
colonisation”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and
Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.14-31.
The danger of the specimen escaping
In the carving section (sic) of the Africa gallery, of the British Museum, is a photograph
of an African woman, wearing a fertility charm of the sort illustrated in an adjacent
cabinet. This colour image was for me the most powerful object in the display because it
was personal. I wondered what happened to her and what would happen if we could hear
her speak about what she hoped of the charm, suppose we saw it being made, suppose we
heard her child cry? This would inject humanity into the object, give us more empathy.
Of course it would make the museum a very different place.
In this context Coombes recounts the problems encountered by the staged African
villages at the colonial and missionary exhibitions. From time to time the Africans would
agitate for fairer pay and conditions, on one occasion marching on a provincial town hall
to put their case. In addition there was the constant fear of transcultural relationships.
Coombes mentions a case of marriage between one of the black performers and a white
woman and the “ensuing furor over miscegenation in the press”. (See Coombes, A. E.,
Reinventing Africa, Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late
72
Victorian and Edwardian England, Great Britain, Yale University Press New Haven and
London, 1994 in general and p.212 and also Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S.,
Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991,
p.115.
Howell, S., “Art and meaning”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism,
perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.215-237, p.224.
160
The sensitivity of this issue is shown by the Pitt Rivers Museum’s denial that its
material represents stolen (or looted) material (see Volume 3, pp.48-58, The Pitt Rivers
Museum) and the inclusion by the V&A, in its exhibition The Victorian Vision, of only
items that had been “legitimately acquired”. Paul Atterbury, personal communication.
161
162
The Africa Reparations Movement which was fronted, up to his death, by Bernie
Grant M.P. has the following aims and objectives:
1. To use all lawful means to obtain Reparations for the enslavement and
colonisation of African people in Africa and in the African Diaspora.
2. To use all lawful means to secure the return of African artefacts from whichever
place they are currently held.
3. To seek an apology from Western governments for the enslavement and
colonisation of African people.
4. To campaign for an acknowledgement of the contribution of African people to
World history and civilisation.
5. To campaign for an accurate portrayal of African history and thus restore dignity
and self-respect to African people.
6. To educate and inform African youth, on the continent and in the Diaspora, about
the great African cultures, languages and civilisations.
(Information from ARM website: www.arm.arc.co.uk 11/01)
The “Expo Times” website leads with a quote from Wastiau to the effect that the
Belgium Museum of the Congo is “nostalgia that is wrong and completely racist”. It
picks up on Hochschild’s book and the EXITCONGOMUSEUM exhibition to expose the
museum as colonial trophy, publicize the genocide of Leopold’s reign and to raise the
question of repatriation. The looting of the Congolese artefacts is equated is equated to
that of the Nazis.
73
Coote, J., and Morton, C., “A Glimpse of the Guinea Coast: Regarding an African
Exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum”, Journal of Museum Ethnography, No.12, 2000,
p.39.
163
164
See Volume 3, pp.48-58, The Pitt Rivers Museum.
165
Other ideas for exhibition strategies that might achieve détournement
Hiller notes how one change to ethnographic collections over the years has been a
pruning out of the distasteful, something that can weaken our appreciation of what they
were once like and why they shocked and whose reincorporation might provide a focus
for détournement.
Another possibility would be an exhibition that dealt with the subversive images
produced by the colonised as a result of their interaction with the colonizer. Brett lists
examples of the colonised subverting the christian ideals of the colonizer in the carvings
made for churches where they might include images from local systems of religion. He
remarks that any surprise we have over this is because of our ignorance of the “sheer
number and extent of resistance movements (uprisings, revolts, wars, religious and
messianic cults) of indigenous peoples against their colonisers”. Such a display would
have other benefits, thus the carvings made of the colonisers, whether subversive or not,
show:
“acute observation and psychological insight and dispel the myth that
Africans were uncomprehending victims of colonisation, or that forms of
“tribal” art are produced by a kind of irrational, instinctual, “low”
mentality”.
This rapid change of style demonstrates that African sculpture could change, dispelling
the caricature of it as unchanging.
Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, Hiller, S., USA and Canada,
Routledge, 1991, note 1, p.188 and Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The
Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.116-119.
166
We can only speak for ourselves
Any other approach becomes a situation where I-come-to-speak-through-your-deadmouths’, see, for an acknowledgement of this quote and a fuller discussion, Hiller, S, Ed.,
The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, Hiller, S., USA and Canada, Routledge,
1991, p.284.
Coote , J., and Morton, C., “A Glimpse of the Guinea Coast: Regarding an African
Exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum”, Journal of Museum Ethnography, No.12, 2000,
p.48.
167
74
Macdonald, S., Ed. “Exhibitions of power and powers of exhibition, An Introduction
to the politics of display”, in The Politics of Display; Museums, Science and Culture,
London, New York, Routledge, 1998, p.13.
168
169
West, C., in Africa; The Art of a Continent, Catalogue Preface p.9, Prestel Munich,
New York, 1995, p.9.
170
West, C., in Africa; The Art of a Continent, Catalogue Preface p.9, Prestel Munich,
New York, 1995, p.9.
It should not be imagined that the colonial past is one problem that has been dealt with,
which is how The Victorian Vision engaged with social problems. The issues of other,
exploitation and appropriation remain live in respect of the continuing legacy of
colonisation as reflected in the status and economic position of the colonised in, for
example, Australia, America and Africa and in the treatment of the other within Western
societies i.e. of so called ethnic groups and, finally, in the neo-colonialism that is
globalization.
As Hiller puts it:
“passing references on these occasions [the Australian bicentenary
celebrations] to the tragic consequences for the indigenous peoples of the
original white invasion of their territories and subsequent efforts of the
whites to subjugate and exterminate them, successfully serve only to locate
any “problem” firmly in the past and to render contemporary peoples and
issues invisible”.(p.283)
Brett describes struggles of indigenous people to have a presence at prestige events where
their voice can be heard and gives as an example the prohibition by the Canadian
Government of native involvement in the exhibitions surrounding Expo 77 in Montreal.
Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives
on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.122-3 and Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of
Primitivism, perspectives on art, Hiller, S., USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.
171
Exhibitions in the Center for African Art (USA)
Vogel describes the exhibitions that she has curated and her intentions when constructing
them. She has “renounced the authorial voice and attempted a drastic recontextualisation
of African Art in Western museums”. She challenges the visitor to understand that their
view of African art is a reflection of themselves and their culture.
75
She describes three exhibitions:
Title of exhibition
The Art of
Collecting African
Art
Contents
The exhibition was of a group of
objects that were the jewels of a
personal collection of African art and
other works that had been passed over
as mediocre. The labels were
personal, informal and opinionated.
Perspectives: Angles Ten individuals (Americans and
on African Art
Africans) were asked to select objets
and discuss their selections and
perspectives. Most of their opinions
were arguable and highly personal.
Art/Artefact
There were four installations
demonstrating alternative ways of
exhibiting African Art: Art museum
style (mijikenda memorial posts in a
white room with individual spotlights
on them), Natural history museum
style (a diorama of men installing a
mijikenda memorial post) a
reconstructed curio room from 1905
and a small room with just a video of
the installation of a mijikenda post
and a label stating that only the
original audience could have had the
authentic experience.
Objective
The visitor was being
asked to look carefully at
the objects and consider
the origin and nature of
their own opinions.
The audience was the
subject for this
exhibition. The issue
was how we in the West
project our fantasies onto
Africans.
Here the nature of the
museum was the subject.
Vogel, S., “Always True to the Object, in Our Fashion”, in Karp, I., & Lavine, S., (Eds.),
Exhibiting Cultures, Washington, London, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, pp.191203.
172
I have not come across any evidence relevant to the question of whether the general
visitor rises to the challenge. Wastiau feels that his exhibition may have “passed over the
heads of visitors” (quote from his lecture of 9 November 2001).
173
174
See Volume 3, pp.14-23, Musée de l’Homme.
See Volume 2, pp.71-77, Appendix J, EXITCONGOMUSEUM, an exhibition at The
Royal Museum of the Congo.
76
Hudson, K., “How Misleading Does an Ethnographical Museum Have to Be”, in
Karp, I., & Lavine, S., (Eds.) Exhibiting Cultures, Washington, London, Smithsonian
Institution Press., 1991, pp.457-464.
175
176
Boris Wastiau, personal communication, 9 November 2001.
Reactions to the EXITCONGOMUSEUM
On the night of the opening one former curator “went berserk” and began shouting. She
argued that the nature of the display of the objects was disrespectful and, after
negotiations, five cases were removed from the exhibition. Antique dealers were
scandalized by the displays, they complained of the lack of light and protested that
religious objects should be treated with more respect. Former colonial administrators
complained – they felt insulted by the exhibition. Academics and art historians, whose
work had created an aesthetic view of these objects, complained that they could not be
seen properly. Within the museum the exhibition was viewed as “pretty controversial”.
On the other side young Africanists in Belgium approved of the exhibition and the press
“liked it”. There was considerable interest from other ethnographic collections. Wastiau
did not know what the response of people with colour was to the exhibition nor was any
survey done amongst habitual visitors to see if it had challenged their views.
Wastiau, lecture 9 November, 2001.
177
See Volume 2, pp.71-77, Appendix J, EXITCONGOMUSEUM.
See Dennett, R. E., At the back of the Black Man’s Mind, London, Macmillan, 1906,
v-vii, 85-94, 166-171, p.v.
178
Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and Disorder: Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed. Arnaut, K.,
Revisions, New Perspectives on the African Collections of the Horniman Museum,
London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, Museum Antroplógico da Universidade
de Coimbra, 2000, p.96.
179
Vanhee, H., “Agents of Order and Disorder: Kongo Minkisi”, in Ed. Arnaut, K.,
Revisions, New Perspectives on the African Collections of the Horniman Museum,
London, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, Museum Antroplógico da Universidade
de Coimbra, 2000, p.98.
180
181
Ibid., p.103.
182
Ibid., p.94.
183
Ibid., p.103.
184
Ibid.
77
185
Ibid., p.94.
186
Ibid.
187
Ibid., p. 93.
188
Ibid., p.103.
78
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Web Sites
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2001