Forms of Wonderment: the History and Collections of the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Z.S. Strother

Wouter Welling gives an extremely useful and balanced overview of the Spiritans and the institutional history of the Afrika Museum. Jacob Libermann, responsible for a focus on Africa following the merging of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary with the Congregation of the Holy Spirit in 1847, was strikingly out of step with the scientific racism developing in France. In 1847 he advised missionaries in Dakar and Gabon: "Do not judge by what you have seen in Europe, nor by what you are accustomed to in Europe. Ignore Europe, ignore its habits, ignore its mentality. Try to become African with the Africans...." (p. 38). Nevertheless, as Welling notes, the attitudes of individual missionaries varied and did not always conform to Libermann's vision (p. 39). Some of this complexity comes out in the life of Jan Vissers, a priest who lived for twenty-five years among the Woyo of Cabinda and Angola. Inspired to burn a "fetish house" at one point, he became a great advocate for the secular arts and is responsible for the museum's remarkable collection of seventy-three pot lids, which he carefully documented in the field (p. 43). Elsewhere, he appears as a sponsor of pottery (ill. 690) and of excavations of soapstone stele in Angola (ill. 460). He also advocated the Christianizing of local symbolism (p. 44). One wonders to what degree the museum's outstanding Angolan collections are due to Vissers' enthusiasm. Did his passion inspire his colleagues? Although many more Spiritan priests served in Cameroon (p. 32), the collections there do not seem as significant (if the catalogue is representative).

In "Alien yet Familiar," Ulrike Weinhold articulates the exhibition policy governing several projects for which she acted as consultant. Weinhold argues that "one of the most important tasks for ethnological museums" is "to break away from these deep-rooted dichotomies between 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity', 'rationality" and "irrationality', art and reality. intercultural dialogue could show that, rather than breaking in upon us from outside, what is alien comes from within, from the dichotomised structures of our own culture, which are then projected outwards, onto other cultures" (p. 368). In particular, she argues that the aestheticization of African works has served as a mechanism intended to keep them at a safe distance. Instead, she would like to see ethnological museums acknowledge these objects' power to enchant, to inspire people to search for meanings. Ultimately, studying other cultures is vital "for the activation or reactivation of repressed or unused potential" (p. 375). Her goal is to have "'[a]lien' objects break in upon us" and become part of us (p. 367).

Weinhold's argument is troubling, to say the least, as it reflects nothing more than a resurgence of primitivism repackaged to speak of "subjectivity" rather than "magic" or the "unconscious." (7) From the beginning, modernists have chosen to believe that Africans (and later, Native Americans) experience a spiritual wholeness lost to the alienated modern psyche. In the long run, this representation is just as exoticizing as any other, even if it appears less negative.