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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” 2

(Remarks from the comments books of the Pitt Rivers and Horniman Museums.)2 3

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. 4

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 self- reflexive museum might be created.17 5

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 and possible 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 B interactions with christianity and their display

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, F 1890

Accounts of minkisi and fetishism, 1897-1908 G Applied uses of anthropology H

Volume 2 (not included here) Appendix Museum interviews and observational studies I 6

EXITCONGOMUSEUM, an exhibition at The Royal J Museum of the Congo, Tervuren, Belgium, November 2000-June 2001

Africa: Art of a Continent, an exhibition at the Royal K Academy of Arts, October 1995-January 1996

Inventing New Britain, the Victorian Vision, an exhibition at L the Victoria & Albert Museum, April-July 2001

The 1940s House, an exhibition at the Imperial War M Museum, -January 2002

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 7

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 8

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 9

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. 10

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 11

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 sub- races).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 12 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 13 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 14

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 15

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 16 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, 17 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. 18

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 19 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 20 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 21

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 22 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 23 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 24 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 25

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. 26

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 self- reflexive 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 27

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 28

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. 29

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 30 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 31 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 32 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 33 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 34 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 35

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. 36

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. 37

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 The activation of a nkisi to incite it to search out and make a witch or or Koma thief ill or to kill him.180 mianda

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 Minkisi of the nkondi or khonde type. May be tall standing nkondi or anthropomorphic wooden statues having numerous nails and blades Minkisi/Nkisi studded in them and a large medicine packet on the belly. Old term khonde 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. 38

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. 39

Sources for illustrations (the illustrations have been removed from this version)

Fig. 1 Minkisi in the collection of the British Museum, Phillips, T., (Ed) Africa; The Art of a Continent, Catalogue, 1995, Prestel Munich, New York. Figs. 2, 3 Photographs, Peter Crush, August, 2001. Fig. 4 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]. Fig.5 Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890, London, Chatto & Windus. Fig. 6 Phillips, T., (Ed) Africa; The Art of a Continent, Catalogue, 1995, Prestel Munich, New York. Fig. 7 Postcard on sale at the Pitt Rivers museum, July 2001. Fig. 8 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. Fig. 9 Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890, London, Chatto & Windus. p.34. Fig. 10 Bassani,E., African Art and Artefacts in European Collections 1400- 1800, 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. Fig. 11 Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890. Fig. 12 Cover of Crawford, D., Thinking Black, 22 years without a break in the Long Grass of Central Africa, 2nd Edition, London, 1912, Morgan & Scolt. Fig. 13 Kingsley, M. H., West African Studies, New York, Macmillan, 1901, frontispiece. Fig. 14 Author’s sketch. Fig. 15 Author’s figure. Fig. 16 Stanley, Sir H. M., The Congo and the Founding of its Free State, London, Simpson Law, 1885, p.128. Fig. 17 Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890, London, Chatto & Windus. p.50. Fig. 18 “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art, Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, Volume I, ffrontispiece. Fig. 19 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. Fig. 20 “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art, Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, Volume II, p.137. Fig. 21 Ward, H., Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 1890, London, Chatto & Windus. 40

Fig. 22 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. Fig. 23 Ibid., p.72. Fig. 24 Illustration copied from Steains’ sketchbook, see Volume 2, pp.38-44, Appendix F, The Stanley and African Exhibition. Fig. 25 Photograph, Peter Crush, August, 2001. Fig. 26 Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.193. Fig. 27 Reproduction of A-Z Mini London, Geographers’ A-Z Company Limited Fig. 28 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. Fig. 29 Ibid.,183. Fig. 30 Ibid., p.180. Fig. 31 Photograph, Peter Crush, August, 2001. Fig. 32 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. Fig. 33 Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.117. Fig. 34 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. 41 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.

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.

7 Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975.

8 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.

9 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.

10 Hiller, S, Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, Hiller, S., USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.

11 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.

12 Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.

13 Araeen, R., “From primitivism to ethnic arts”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991.

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.

16 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.

Nelson, S. H., Colonisation in the Congo Basin 1880-1940, Athens and Ohio, 1994.

17 McEvilley, Y., “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art”, in Artforum, November 1984.

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.191-203.

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 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 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.

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.

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 Anti-Slavery 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 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.

25 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.

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 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 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

35 Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975, p.5 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 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

“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:

“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.

43 Kingsley’s collection was bequeathed to the Pitt Rivers on her death. Note that the Exeter museum had Dennett’s collection from 1889.

44 Balfour, H., Report of the Curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum for the year 1902, p.B.

45 See Volume 2, pp.29-37, Appendix E, Exhibition of Fetishes at the Pitt Rivers Museum (1902).

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.

48 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).

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.

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, 80-137, 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 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.

54 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).

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.

55 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 1400-1800 Ed. McLeod, M., Great Britain, 2000, pp.xxi-xxxvi.

56 Nelson, S. H., Colonisation in the Congo Basin 1880-1940, Athens and Ohio, 1994, p.1. 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

59 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.

60 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.

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 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 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. 72 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.

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”.

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 and they were collected into special albums. Information from Collected Sights – Photographic collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 1860s-1930s.

78 As an example of such ideas Barley quotes Joshua Nott (spelling?) – a pioneer of racial theory:

“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 life-size 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 “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.

84 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.

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) racesMongolian (yellow) racesCaucasian (white) racesAfricaSouth AmericaEuropeNew GuineaJapanIndiaSolomon IslandsChinaEgyptNew HebridesBurmaPolynesiaMalay ArchipelagoNew ZealandMicronesiaMatty Island 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.

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. 95 See Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, p.114.

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

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 numberName/description of fetishDescription given20.8.97.7FulamecondaIt 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.20.8.97.8ChicocaSaid to attack its victims with rheumatism and syphilitic sores and swellings.20.8.97.9Mabialla MaupauhaSaid 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.

99 Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975, p.4. 100 Ibid.

101 Haggard, H. R. Allan Quartermain, London and Glasgow, Collins with an introduction by Green, R. L. , 1887. 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.

106 Quote from Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975, p.3.

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 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.

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.

122 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.

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 .

126 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

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.

131 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.

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 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 self- esteem, 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).

138 See Street, B. V., The Savage in Literature: Representations of “primitive” Society in English Fiction 1858-1920, London and Boston, 1975, p.2

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 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

142 See Volume 3, pp.33-36, Musée National d’Art Moderne and pp.45-47, Musée Picasso

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.

145 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.

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.

147 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.

148 See Brett, G., “Unofficial versions”, in Hiller, S., Ed., The Myth of Primitivism, perspectives on art, USA and Canada, Routledge, 1991, pp.121.

149 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.

150 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.

151 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.215-237, p.235.

152 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.

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.

153 McEvilley, Y., “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief, “Primitivism” in twentieth Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art”, in Artforum, November 1984, p.56.

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 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 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.

160 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.

161 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.

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. 163 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.

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-dead-mouths’, 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.

167 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.

168 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.

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.

She describes three exhibitions:

Title of exhibitionContentsObjectiveThe Art of Collecting African ArtThe 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.The visitor was being asked to look carefully at the objects and consider the origin and nature of their own opinions.Perspectives: Angles on African ArtTen individuals (Americans and Africans) were asked to select objets and discuss their selections and perspectives. Most of their opinions were arguable and highly personal.The audience was the subject for this exhibition. The issue was how we in the West project our fantasies onto Africans.Art/ArtefactThere 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.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.191-203.

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 See Volume 3, pp.14-23, Musée de l’Homme. 174 See Volume 2, pp.71-77, Appendix J, EXITCONGOMUSEUM, an exhibition at The Royal Museum of the Congo.

175 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.

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.

178 See Dennett, R. E., At the back of the Black Man’s Mind, London, Macmillan, 1906, v-vii, 85-94, 166-171, p.v.

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.96.

180 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.

181 Ibid., p.103.

182 Ibid., p.94.

183 Ibid., p.103.

184 Ibid.

185 Ibid., p.94.

186 Ibid.

187 Ibid., p. 93. 188 Ibid., p.103.

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Lectures

ATTERBURY, P, V&A, 25 July 2001, Curator of V&A exhibition: Inventing New Britain, the Victorian Vision, Discover the Power behind the Victorian Age

WASTIAU, B., Pitt Rivers Research Centre, 9 November 2001, Curator of EXITCONGOMUSEUM, Curator at Royal Museum for Central Africa, Congo Museum: structuring a reflection about Congolese art and colonisation in a Belgian Museum

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