The Charles Lemaire Expedition Revisited Sammy Baloji As a Portraitist of Present Humans in Congo Far West
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The Charles Lemaire Expedition Revisited Sammy Baloji as a Portraitist of Present Humans in Congo Far West Sammy Baloji (photography) and Maarten Couttenier (text) n May 11, 2011, the Royal Museum for Cen- In this article, I shall focus mainly on my collaboration with tral Africa (RMCA) in Belgium opened the photographer and video artist Sammy Baloji, who was fascinated, exhibition “Congo Far West: Artists in Resi- for the purposes of this residency, by Congolese masks, physical dence. Sammy Baloji & Patrick Mudekereza,” anthropology, and colonial art work and photography. Finally curated by Sabine Cornelis (RMCA) and he decided to work on the 400 or so photographs by François Johan Lagae (Ghent University).1 Parts of Michel and the 300+ sketches, drawings, and paintings by Léon the exhibition were selected for the contemporary art exposition Dardenne, who were both responsible for creating a visual record O“Newtopia in Mechelen” (Gregos and Sorokina 2012:158) and the of the Charles Lemaire expedition (1898–1900). This scientific results were also shown in Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of expedition, carried out at the request of the Congo Free State Congo, DRC) in the Institut français-Halle de l’Etoile (July 2013), (CFS), traveled through Katanga, the region where Sammy Baloji the Musée national de Lubumbashi (September 2013) in collabo- was born and raised and that had already featured prominently ration with RMCA, and Picha. A previous article in African Arts in projects such as Vues des Likasi (2005), Lubumbashi Wantashi (Mudekereza 2011a) already explained how Sammy Baloji and (2006), and Mémoire (2006). Since I had already published on the Patrick Mudekereza set up the latter cultural center, using it as Lemaire expedition based on archival research in Belgium dur- a platform to organize the 2008 and 2010 photography bien- ing my PhD training in Social and Cultural Anthropology with nales (Njami 2012). At the same time, during their residency at Prof. Dr. Filip De Boeck at the Catholic University Leuven, I was the RMCA in September 2008 and the winter of 2010–2011, they brought into contact with Sammy Baloji, the start of an intense took a fresh look at the museum’s historical, ethnographical, and and always enjoyable collaboration. My very first scientific pub- musicological collections (Cornelis and Lagae 2011). Although, lication (Couttenier 2003, see also Couttenier 2005:178–96) in of course, not entirely new in its concepts, an artist-in-residence fact dealt with the textual and museological representations of the program with Congolese intellectuals in a Belgian former colo- Lemaire expedition. Famine, sickness, and death, omnipresent in nial institute can be seen as an important step in the rethink- colonial reality and in the diaries of Lemaire, tended to be “forgot- ing and renovation of the museum. Author Patrick Mudekereza ten” once Lemaire returned home and the results of his work were decided to work on treaties between the Comité d’Études du published and exhibited, creating a “saving lie” (Clifford 1988:99) Haut-Congo and local chiefs, who, unable to write, signed with that provided an answer to processes of dislocation and feelings of an X. He wrote intriguing “parasite texts, which feed upon the loss generated by colonial experience (Terdiman 1993). treaty and drain it of its essence” (Mudekereza 2011b). Through a At the end of the first residence in the RMCA in 2008, Sammy form of resistance poetry, Mudekereza also offered a new inter- Baloji presented two works in progress. In one collage he merged pretation of the early twentieth century L’Art au Congo, a kitsch black-and-white portraits by Michel in colored aquarelles of bronze sculpture holding two ivory tusks, made by Auguste De Dardenne. By confronting two different styles, “objective” pho- Wever and an anonymous African artist who once again found tography and “expressive” artwork, questions were raised about his voice. the role of the artist and different uses of media (Baloji 2011). 66 | african arts SPRING 2014 VOL. 47, NO. 1 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00123 by guest on 29 September 2021 131127-001_66-81_CS6.indd 66 11/28/13 9:28 AM 1 Part of the itinerary of the Lemaire expedition in In a second proposal, a Michel picture of the Urua chief Kala- Katanga (1898–1900) with indication of today’s bor- ders and countries. The “Mission Lemaire” entered mata was inserted in a recent Bunkeya landscape photographed the CFS territory in Moliro at the borders of Lake by Baloji, a photomontage technique he had already used in Tanganyika and travelled to Lake Dilolo. Names of Mémoire, also presented in Washington during his solo exhibi- cities with an asterisk were not visited by Lemaire 2 or were created after Lemaire passed through the tion “The Beautiful Time in Lubumbashi” (Jewsiewicki 2010a). region, for example Dilolo (created in 1903) and As already discussed by Francine Weiss in African Arts, this Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi, created in 1910). series consisted of contemporary images of derelict industrial MAP: BENOÎT HARDY, RMCA sites in Katanga and historical black-and-white photographs from the “belle époque” of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) (Weiss 2011). During Baloji’s childhood, the State min- ing company Gecamines (La Générale des Carrières et Mines, created in 1967 by nationalizing UMHK) was omnipresent and to present a one-sided, Eurocentric view of the colonial world, one of the main employers in Lubumbashi. However, when he back to DRC to confront them with today’s Congolese memory. revisited the mining sites in 2004 after the death of Mobutu and During fieldwork in August and September 2010, we toured the ensuing political changes, buildings were abandoned, work- three areas already visited by Charles Lemaire: Bunkeya-Kyubo, ers had left, and production had declined dramatically. By pho- Tenke-Kyamakela, and Lukafu-Lofoi (Map 1). We met local tographing what had become “industrial archaeology,” Baloji experts and gave them the opportunity to react to Michel’s simultaneously tried to capture the lost memory of both the and Dardenne’s photographs and paintings with their knowl- heyday and decline of UMHK/Gecamines. Later on he found edge and memories. These African “historiologies” (Vansina historical photographs in the Service of Public Relations that 1985:196, Fabian 1996:249, Roberts 2013:8) or accounts of how documented the origin of industrial activity in Katanga and the people today interpreted the past, partly counterbalanced, cor- treatment of African workers. By inserting portraits of former rected, but also contradicted the “image world” (Geary 2002:17) workers in today’s context, although not necessarily in the same of colonial archives, collections, maps, paintings, and photo- geographical space, the initial documentary project took a cre- graphs (see also Edwards 1992, 2001), as will become clear in ative turn. The montage made the pictures more eloquent and this article. In Mémoire, man had almost become absent and spoke about the rise, heyday, and fall of a more global, colonial, inferior to the buildings he once created and now was unable and postcolonial economic exploitation.3 In this context, Bogu- to maintain. However, during fieldwork for “Congo Far West,” mil Jewsiewicki referred to Sammy Baloji as a “portraitist of people and their memories were always very present and there- absent humans” (2010b:1085). fore could not be ignored. As a “portraitist of present humans,” However, this inventive use of photomontage in Mémoire Baloji now employed a brand-new technique by creating dip- seemed not suitable for “Congo Far West.” Sammy Baloji rather tychs of François Michel’s and his own new photographs, allow- wanted to bring the museum collections, which have tended ing him to provide a prominent place for Congolese expertise.4 VOL. 41, NO. 1 SPRING 2014 african arts | 67 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00123 by guest on 29 September 2021 131127-001_66-81_CS6.indd 67 11/28/13 9:28 AM 2 The site where Bodson died despite the min- istrations of Dr. Joseph Moloney, a member of the Stairs expedition. PHOTO: SAMMY BALOJI, BUNKEYA, 2010 “a history of M’siri has been written, from which I will prudently refrain from borrowing, as there is no assurance of any sort concerning the narratives taken from the mouths of either the natives or the missionaries, who were long prisoners of that chief.” Charles Lemaire, 1899. As becomes clear by looking more closely at the diptychs, peo- and traces of use. Second, the historical and contemporary pho- ple who showed us the way and provided us with valuable his- tographs selected by Sammy Baloji were accompanied by quotes torical accounts are integrated in the Baloji pictures as a sign of from journals and publications I found in the archives and from recognition. The diptychs therefore go further than merely “re- interviews that we recorded during our trip to Katanga in order to photographing” present-day locations familiar from old photos. avoid “informants” being “seen rather than heard” and to “stress By means of portraits and images of landscapes, ruins, graves, the communicative exchange” (Fabian 1996:x, 221). The combina- monuments, architecture, and interiors, they provide a penetrat- tion of text and image created dialogues between photographs, ing glimpse into a historical and contemporary African real- between pictures and quotes, and even between quotes. It made ity, in which material and immaterial traces of the precolonial, the project more complete, as the texts served as a guideline for colonial, and postcolonial past are ever present. The relationship the public, but also more complex. Therefore, visitors intrigued between the photographs, which is not immediately apparent, by the quotes were able to find further historical background on gives rise to the creation of microhistories that all seem to be a touch screen, a context that will also be addressed in this article.