Is Repatriation Inevitable?

Abstract

Debates about repatriation of human remains and significant cultural materials to their communities of origin, including objects deemed “art” following culturally determined assessments, have raged for many years. One need only consider how the “madness” of returning the famed fifth-century bce “Elgin Marbles,” as they are known in the UK after the man who purloined them from the Acropolis in the early nineteenth century, is debated as an issue of contemporary politics in Britain, as has been the case for generations (Trend 2018). Yet there seems a sudden acceleration of such conversations with regard to sub-Saharan holdings (e.g., Scher 2018).Perhaps most notable has been French President Emmanuel Macron's November 2017 declaration at the University of Ouagadougou that within the next five years, “conditions should be met for a return of African patrimony to Africa.” This position was found “surprising to many” in France, Le Monde reported. In March 2018, President Macron named Bénédicte Savoy, an historian of French arts, and Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese economist, novelist, and theorist of Afrofuturism, to produce a plan to this effect before the end of 2018.1 Such news was well received in former French colonies like the Republic of Bénin, where calls have long been made for return of important sculptures and other artifacts seized during colonial conquest in the 1890s. President Macron has promised to see to changing the legislation that has long considered such works the inalienable property of the French Republic.2Equally well-heralded initiatives are underway concerning loot from the Punitive Expedition of 1897 to what is now south-western Nigeria, including the famed Benin Bronzes held at the British Museum and other institutions across Europe and the Americas. In an interview with The Guardian, Africanist art historian John Picton captures the conundrum:… presumably with regard to inclusion in encyclopedic histories composed for largely non-African audiences. “Concerns about security were … foremost in the minds of European institutions,” Picton continues, and “there has to be a recognition perhaps that things are on long-term loan from Nigeria” (Quinn 2017).3 Who gets to decide what constitutes “security” is haunted by ongoing colonial notions of African “incompetence” and refusal to recognize that if, by some measures, certain African museums are “insecure” because treasures have been stolen and sold from their reserves, Africans are usually not the ones purchasing them or whose countries show disinterest in establishing bilateral agreements to prohibit such commerce.4That such complexities have been readily ignored is a function of broader neocolonial strategies and colonial amnesia—the forgetting of inconvenient pasts.5 Nonetheless, ça commence à bouger un peu—things are beginning to “shake” just a bit and in unexpected ways, as attested by the denouement from the following case study from Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The case itself suggests how politically and culturally complicated repatriation can—and, perhaps, should—be.Lusinga lwa Ng'ombe visited Los Angeles in 2013,6 despite the fact that this Congolese warlord was decapitated in 1884 by assassins dispatched by the Belgian military officer Émile Storms. A majestic wooden figure of Lusinga (Fig. 1), seized by Storms's mercenaries and transported to Belgium where it is now understood to be among the “treasures” of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), is invested with ancestral spirits of the chief and his matrilineage. When the sculpture was displayed in an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art entitled Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Lusinga was present as well.7Sculpture and related performance practices played instrumental roles in the formation and expansion of important central African polities. Indeed, the efficacies of such works of art shaped power, even as they were shaped by power.8 Such an active sense of artistic engagement with people's purposes informed the composition and design of the LACMA exhibition. The juxtapositions of objects on display further suggest ways that museum exhibitions can be curated so that ambiguities of who “owns” what are given full play, and no one has the last word—as, indeed, neither Lusinga nor Storms did, can, or will.First, a beheading. The event occurred on December 4, 1884, and has been articulated ever since through competing Congolese and Belgian histories attuned to particular audiences and political goals (A.F. Roberts 2013). Two protagonists engaged in a deadly pas-de-deux driven by immense ambition, as each man violently strove to establish hegemony along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika in what is now the DRC: Lusinga lwa Ng'ombe, deemed a “sanguinary potentate” by the British explorer Joseph Thomson after visiting the chief in 1879 because of Lusinga's ruthless slaving for the east African trade; and Émile Storms, belligerent commander of the fourth International African Association expedition and founder of an outpost at Mpala near Lusinga's redoubt.9 The IAA's overt mandate was to promote scientific knowledge while helping to suppress slavery. Lusinga and Storms were bound for confrontation, and Lusinga lost his head.Storms did develop IAA scientific aims, and as he scheduled, mapped, traded, and collected, he broached Belgian colonization of time, place, value, and Nature itself. He also initiated changes in social organization still perceptible in the mid-1970s at Mpala.10 Ye t despite its lofty public goals, the IAA was a front for the imperialist maneuvering of Léopold II, King of the Belgians. Storms had a covert directive to strike of westward from Mpala to join Henry Morton Stanley coming up the Congo River from the Atlantic coast. Together they would inscribe a “White Line across the Dark Continent,” as a contemporary tract had it (Anon. 1883), and in so doing, they would substantiate Léopold's audacious—and successful—claim at the much-anticipated Berlin Conference of 1885 that the Congo should become his personal property.Had the IAA plan been realized, Storms could have expected to share some portion of the enormous celebrity accorded to Stanley. As it was, the seasoned Stanley proved so swiftly successful that Storms's further services were deemed unnecessary, and he was summoned back to Belgium and into disgruntled anonymity. Twists and turns continued as Storms returned to Europe, however. He bore Lusinga's skull in his luggage and presented it to the eminent physical anthropologist Émile Houzé, who made it the subject of a sinister treatise in proto eugenics applicable to Africans as well as to his own Flemish countryman—Houzé being a Walloon (see A.F. Roberts [2013: 143–56], Couttenier [2014], and Arndt [2013] on the heated regional politics of Flemish-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia). Storms also brought home booty seized from Lusinga, including the compelling ancestral figure mentioned above. Unpublished photos taken in 1929 as the Widow Storms prepared to donate her husband's African collections to the Royal Museum show the sculpture standing before an over-mantle mirror that refected phantasmagorical displays in the Storms's drawing room, through which the aging general invented an “Africa” to suit his triumphant recollections (see A.F. Roberts 2013: 157–73, Volper 2012, Wastiau 2005.)What might have become of Lusinga's skull and sculpture had they remained in the Congo? His cranium would have been venerated following a complex funerary process. If his kinsmen had followed what they may have understood Luba procedures to be, the skull would have been detached from the corpse and buried in the bed of a momentarily diverted stream, along with the skull of the deceased chief's predecessor. Such an enchaining of remains suggested continuity of leadership by an incipient dynasty.11As for the ancestral figure, in the late 1800s, Lusinga and a few of his kinsmen seeking to exploit the explosive potentialities of the east African ivory-and-slave trade adapted symbols of self aggrandizement in emulation of the fabled Luba kingdom so influential throughout southern Congo and adjacent lands (Reefe 1981; cf. Heusch 1982). In becoming increasingly “Luba-ized” (Verhulpen 1936) in this way, Lusinga embellished and invented traditions to establish continuity with a suitable historic past (Vansina 1996). Among his strategies, Lusinga commissioned a large wooden figure to embody his matrilineage that would serve as an active life force to which he might look to protect and promote his interests.One can assume that Lusinga expected to keep his ancestral figure in perpetuity, to be inherited and cherished by his successors, and that such permanence would have been of great value unto itself. As Annette Weiner (1985: 210) suggested with regard to conceptually similar material culture among Maori people of New Zealand,In commissioning and then carefully preserving the sculpture, Lusinga must have hoped to create and/or elaborate upon a dynastic history for himself and to have it be recognized by others. Again among Maori, Weiner (1985: 210) stressed that “inalienable wealth takes on important priorities in societies where ranking occurs,” and one can assume that Lusinga aspired to establish a social hierarchy among otherwise strikingly egalitarian Tabwa people then living in widely scattered, small, lineage-based communities southwest of Lake Tanganyika.For Lusinga, then, the figure that Storms would eventually capture and bear away to Europe was his dynastic lineage, a living essence with which the chief could commune while sharing freshly brewed beer and long, meditative hours. In this, the figure constituted a “compressed performance” (Pinney 2004: 8) of the practices and associations to which it alluded, and to Lusinga's own interactions with his matrilineal ancestors. And to redirect Alfred Gell's (1998: 62) assertions when writing of Kongo minkisi sculptures, “an instructed person” among Tabwa who approached the figure of Lusinga's matrilineal ancestors—or his skull, either—would not have seen “a mere thing, a form” to which s/he might or might not “respond aesthetically.” Instead, s/he would have perceived “the visible knot which ties together an invisible skein of relations, fanning out into social space and social time.”Storms clearly understood Lusinga's skull and ancestral figure to be war trophies, via a property regime very different from what the same objects meant to the chief and people from whom Storms's men seized them. The “use value” for Storms was directed toward his own self-presentation rather than any purpose Lusinga and his followers might have intended. Storms's African souvenirs remained in his widow's possession until 1930. As Boris Wastiau (2005: 101–105) comments, by then they had become “family relics, metonyms of the deceased … thereby implying new ‘rituals’ of remembrance and devotion”—to the Widow Storms and her family and friends, that is, rather than to the Congolese people who had possessed or used the objects. The ongoing “social lives” of the things seem to have left any such possibilities far behind.Since 1930, when Storms's collection was given to what is now the RMCA, Lusinga's skull and ancestral figure have served further enunciatory functions as signs of “primitivity” underscoring the justifications and purposes of Belgian “civilization” (see Saunders 2005). While the Lusinga sculpture resided in a forlorn vitrine, a bust of Émile Storms was to be seen at the Royal Museum in 2010, scowling in marmoreal pallor at Herbert Ward's larger-than-life sculpture Defiance (1909), depicting an angry African striding forth below the plinth bearing the bust.12 Through such odd encounters, one can assume that Storms and Lusinga have whispered to each other through the many years since their epic encounter in 1884, for they do have a great deal in common despite ongoing narratives about them.In contrast to Lusinga's and Storms's portraits of hubris is a contemporary work by the Congolese artist Aimé Mpane called Congo: Shadow of the Shadow (2005) that was featured in LACMA's Shaping Power exhibition (Fig. 2).13 Composed of nearly 5,000 matchsticks, the fragility of a muscular man is as poignant as his pensive stance, gazing upon a tombstone cross inscribed “Congo … 1885.” Lit from behind, the figure's even larger shadow seems to mirror the gaze from an afterlife. What suffering Congolese have known since the Berlin Conference of that year, when the Congo Free State was conferred upon Leopold II as his very own piece of “this magnificent African cake,” as the king famously quipped (see Cornelis 1991)! The pas-de-deux of Lusinga and Storms presaged well more than a century of turmoil still ongoing in the DRC, with the genocidal strife of last decades among its dire consequences.Shadow of the Shadow was a deeply moving presence that gave further voice to historical sculptures displayed in Shaping Power, over and above their label copy. Like the Lusinga figure, these works still have much to say about what they once were and how and why they have become “treasures of the Royal Museum” (see Couttenier 2018). On the wall opposite the entrance to the Mpane installation, a small screen showed a video interview with Dr. Mutombo Nkulu-N'Sengha, professor of religious studies at California State University, Northridge. The Congolese scholar, himself of Luba heritage, spoke to the themes of the Shaping Power exhibition, but also to the we-are-still-here courage required to face harsh realities of present-day DRC.How will the Lusinga figure and other important works in the collections of the Royal Museum be displayed to convey rather than mask mimeses such as that between Lusinga and Storms?14 How may historical ambiguities like those that resulted from that epic day in 1884 be featured to mitigate colonial amnesia that, for so long now, has permitted Belgians to ignore aspects of their collective pasts that remain acutely uncomfortable? How may earlier Congolese voices, such as Lusinga's and those of millions of others who fell in colonial conquest, not only be heard but inform Belgo-Congolese collaboration in humane futures for both sides?15Hopeful progress has begun. To cite but a few of many provocative activities:A major work by Aimé Mpane has been commissioned for the new RMCA. Surely, intentional juxtapositions between such works and those of the museum's earlier treasures will result, as they did in the Shaping Power exhibition at LACMA; but so will unintentional ones, as chance encounters of the sort inherent in all museum displays—witness the 2010 event at the RMCA when Storms's bust gloomily gazed down upon Herbert Ward's Defiant African.Museums should be provocative rather than staid places, after all, where one yearns to learn something new every visit.20More is brewing in Brussels. In March 2018, journalist Michel Bouffioux (2018a) published an exposé in the popular weekly Paris Match Belgique, drawing attention to how Lusinga's skull lies forgotten in a drawer of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. Yet it “invites us to remember crimes committed in the name of ‘civilization’ during the first years of colonization.” The author consulted Storms's diaries and other pertinent archival documents, including discussion of Émile Houzé's treatise through which, as Bouffioux puts it, “voilà l'insoumis devenu sous-homme”—and thus did the person who would not submit become subhuman (Bouffioux 2018a: 69, 72; see also Wastiau 2017: 470–71).21As an investigative reporter, Bouffioux also interviewed Camille Pisani and Guido Gryssels, respectively directors of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Brussels and the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Dr. Pisani holds that she is prepared to repatriate Lusinga's skull and other human remains held by her museum should DNA testing affirm the consignee's kinship to the deceased person and “complete documentation” of the cranium be realized. She added that legislative work must also be undertaken, for Belgium has engaged in of of the (Bouffioux 2018a: his Dr. stressed that he and his no for the certain collections were through military and to rather than he is in of collaboration with African museums and long-term long as are (Bouffioux 2018a: was where as of the March issue of Paris Match Belgique, but Michel Bouffioux was by no He a at where he published his with Pisani and as well as from Congolese and other African in A piece on the by and the of The that Storms was not following as a military officer during his in the but was by and of European Lusinga's skull is a of such for which Storms has been on such as who calls for the Belgian of State for to repatriate Lusinga's of Belgian political such a and to standing legislation to the and also for of colonial of which the encounter is a in and Storms should be brought before a a century after his to end the of colonial holds that Storms's be understood as crimes even as he that such of have been to African of and colonial that such recognition should produce at the RMCA as displays and are such art historian that have been the of a about their colonial history of which people are only just beginning to become Among other calls to his to in a of and Belgian as has been of late with regard to to of the colonial Belgian should be from public A day for of colonial should be As for repatriation of “treasures” held at the RMCA such as the figure of Lusinga's about how African museums are prepared to and works of art is of Congolese cultural objects is but “the of the Museum must the next for its is and politically with the will these initiatives from the presented in this Lusinga's have to be and it is not certain what they would do were the skull and ancestral figure returned to them. have of repatriation been is ongoing in and the given the of such why would of Lusinga's remains and as with the of in small are before can be are small a to

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