The mirror and the tomb: Africa, museums, and memory

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by Francoise Lionnet

The Tervuren exhibition showcased beautiful objects that produce "wonder" (Greenblatt) and "reverberation" (Bachelard). Shown under glass and lit in the "boutique" way described by Greenblatt, they projected an undeniable authority and power (Fig. 2). The extensive commentaries which accompanied the displays furnished the appropriate elements of "resonance." There were exquisitely carved statuettes, masks, musical instruments, staffs and walking sticks, spears, cups, a drinking horn, a pipe, and an anthropomorphic coffin. The function of certain objects was immediately recognizable: a very fine anthropomorphic sanza or lamellophone in the shape of a female body with extended arms (Fig. 1) is a musical instrument that mimics those who dance to its tune; a drummer figure with rounded, benevolent features colored in red pigment (Fig. 3) is an elegant statue with harmonious proportions, its slightly lowered eyes denoting a meditative or respectful mood. Nothing was particularly unusual or disturbing about these two figures: they seemed to suggest the universality of music, dance, and creative or religious contemplation. They provided their own context of understanding, and offered a definite level of "reassurance": the activities and emotions they portray conveyed a safe level of (cultural) difference and (human) similarity, since it was easy to see past their aesthetic and ethnographic specificities toward the larger context of collective human endeavors. Like the fictitious tourists of Tournier's tale, we--as viewers--could relate to these two statues and to their contexts without difficulty. These objects confirmed us in a traditional humanist understanding of the world beyond our own.

[FIGURES 1-3 OMITTED]

Other objects, however, immediately struck the Western viewer as "strange." Their appearance was perhaps disquieting, startling, even suspect. They provoked a degree of fear and terror. This was especially true of the nkondi statues known as mangaaka, a Kongo word that means "one who strikes fear into the beholder." To understand and situate them, we required some explanatory narrative--which was provided, to a certain extent, by the curators. The figures stared back at the viewer, they seemed to frown and shout, and they carried "medicine packs" (Figs. 4, 5). These "fetishes," the curators explained, were meant to frighten off evil or punish enemies. The white paint on their faces indicated that they represent spirits with supernatural and curative powers. The sacred nature of these figures was thus established by an explanatory narrative that did not succeed in containing their meaning within a completely familiar context. Something vaguely threatening remained. A sense of radical difference emanated from these strange shapes that expressed fear or anxiety, and conjured it up in the viewer. The glass eyes of the nkondi in Figure 5 established it as a presence that the spectator could not ignore or subsume within a familiar interpretive framework. This statue thus seemed to observe us and follow our movements.