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Welcome to Greater Edendale: Histories of Environment, Health, and Gender in an African City

disguised a dictatorship that most Zairois experienced as a new edition of colonial oppression and that soon gave way to the explicit cult of Mobutuism. The IMNZ never received the support it deserved, but whereas Belgium and the RMCA are still struggling to come to terms with the colonial past, the IMNZ (now the Institut des Musées Nationaux au Congo) still displays a statue of Leopold II. Perhaps, in time, Mobutu will also become a work of art. Like King Leopold before him, Mobutu used art to try to influence American opinion. Art from Zaire, the IMNZ’s riposte to Art from the Congo, toured the US and Canada beginning in 1975. By this time American interest in African art had greatly increased, and with it the debate – still unresolved – about how such art should be exhibited. As fine art, exposed for aesthetic contemplation, the objects occlude the historical experience and social motivation of those who produced them. Adding some amount of ethnographic information– as some curators have done – detracts from the “art” effect, but does not compensate for the distortion resulting from the use of purely European criteria in the original identification of certain artifacts, mostly sculpture, as art. If they are to be art, they deserve description and evaluation as such; inarticulate admiration implicitly segregates “tribal” from “real” art. The next big exhibition, Four Moments of the Sun, mounted in Washington in 1982 by Robert Farris Thompson, a professor at Yale, and Joseph Cornet, one of the stalwarts of the IMNZ, represented “an important epistemological shift” (243). For the first time, Central African art (specifically Kongo art) was regarded a part of a global aesthetic heritage, with links to contemporary cultures in the US and the Caribbean. Kongo art had become an element in an ongoing cultural stream, rather than the residue of an indeterminate African past. Since then, North American museums, collectors, and scholars have replaced Tervuren as the major authenticators of Congo art. Using interviews with many of the parties involved, and with the support of documents from previously neglected French and Dutch archives, Authentically African offers an account of the professional, personal, and political differences that emerged among Belgian and Congolese professionals and politicians – men and women who pursued artistic endeavors despite unfulfilled promises, limited resources, and the steady deterioration of the Congo state. With many perceptive comments, Van Beurden shows how artifacts – once defined as the cultural heritage of a sequence of politically imagined communities – gradually became art; the more they were valued as art, the greater their economic value in markets both legal and illegal, which in turn raised their cultural value as “treasures.” For all those interested in African art, in the back corridors of colonial and postcolonial relations, and in the political role of museums, this book is also a treasure.