Kongo Reframed

Abstract

One of the most damning colonial paradoxes is that the earliest areas of Africa known to the West remain the most unknown to it six centuries on. Even as the former Kingdom of Kongo (loosely splintered today into Angola, Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)) recently experienced the longest and deadliest wars post-1945, these lands still fall below political, media, and academic radars. Long posited in Western imagination as the blankest spot and blackest point in Africa, the Kongo has recently drawn a tide of revisionary scholarship demonstrating that this remote backwater cut off from history was, in fact, always centrally bound up in the global economy, affected by slavery, forced labour, and resource extraction like no place else in the modern era. The complex and conflicted role of material culture in this is yet to command the same attention, but an unprecedented momentum has built up. In 2015, it culminated in the largest ever overview of five centuries of Central African art, in two large blockbuster exhibitions met with exceptional critical and popular praise. Spanning half a millenium of cultural production, Kongo: Power and Majesty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was billed as ‘the most complete picture of Kongo artistic excellence before the early twentieth century produced to date’.1 And though indirectly related, the Cartier Foundation in Paris picked up from there with Beauté Congo 1926–2015: Congo kitoko, the first retrospective of twentieth-century art in the DRC.