Almost ten years before Christopher Columbus set sail for the Americas, the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão left the port of Lisbon. Cão had recently distinguished himself by capturing the Mondanina, a Castilian ship transporting slaves off the coast of Guinea, but his journey this time would take him farther along the coast of Africa, farther south than any European had been before. With him, he carried two padrões, stone pillars hewn from smooth-grained Portuguese limestone with royal proclamations engraved on their capitals. Cão’s voyage curved down the west coast of Africa, past rainforests and arid deserts, until he reached a plume of muddy freshwater that stretched some five miles into the sea. He turned east and found the mouth of a huge river—the Congo.
It was here that Cão chose to erect the first of his padrões; he placed the second a little farther up the river. The inscription on the pillar reads, “In the year 6681 of the world, and in that of 1482 since the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most serene, most excellent and potent prince King D. João II of Portugal did order this land to be discovered.” The second padrão currently stands at the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum’s new exhibition “Kongo: Power and Majesty,” which explores the remarkable culture of the kingdom that Cão encountered as he sailed up the river, which would soon be obliterated by a boom in demand for slaves and by the attendant tide of European greed.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Didier Reynders, who serves as both the deputy prime minister and the foreign minister of Belgium, was quietly inspecting Cão’s second padrão as James Green, a research associate, gave a tour of the exhibition. Reynders, who is fifty-seven, and is a member of the center-right Mouvement Réformateur Party, drew public ire earlier this year when he appeared in public with his face blackened for a traditional charity parade in Brussels. At the Met, he was more conventionally attired, in a suit and crimson tie. A billow of aftershave trailed in his wake as his attention was directed to the second object in the exhibition, an intricately carved ivory oliphant, or hunting horn. Whereas the pillar is heavy and blunt, expressing power and dominion over the “new” land, the oliphant is light and almost glows in its illuminated case. When blown, its sound would have reverberated through several surrounding villages. The tradition of these horns, like so many of the objects in the exhibition, died out as the country was plundered.
The Kingdom of the Kongo was a centralized state with a monarch, or Manikongo, whose seat was at M’banza-Kongo, which is in modern-day Angola. The society was a developed one, and the craftsmanship of the items on display at the Met powerfully attests to this fact. One of the highlights of the exhibition is an assortment of fine raffia mats and pillowcases, which found their way into European collections through trade and as gifts. An entry in an eighteenth-century Italian inventory of such fabrics gushes, “They look like silk cloth notwithstanding they are made of very thin palm threads.” The author continues, “We are rightly amazed to see among barbarous peoples so great an art which surpasses or equals the European one.” Reynders was visibly impressed. “I was very surprised to see the quality of the early pieces,” he said. “Here you see first what the situation in the region was before.”
Less than ten years after Cão’s voyage, the Manikongo at the time, Nzinga a Nkuwu, was baptized by Portuguese missionaries, becoming King João I of Kongo. His son, Afonso I, made Catholicism the state religion, and it seems that, for a while, the kingdom was taken somewhat seriously by the Europeans. A series of illustrations in a sixteenth-century codex, purporting to show “the perfection of the coats of arms of the Christian kings,” juxtaposes the arms given to Afonso with those of the Catholic kingdoms of Europe. At the bottom of Afonso’s crest, a shield is flanked by a pair of broken idols, depicting his order for traditional Kongolese artifacts to be destroyed.
There is a letter from Afonso to the king of Portugal, in a remarkable calligraphic hand, boasting that he had burned the “Great House of Idols,” which most probably contained power figures like the wooden nkisi statuettes that are on view in the exhibition. As Portugal and other northern nations seeking riches became more muscular in Africa, the rulers of the Kongo found themselves making and breaking alliances with the Europeans and quelling civil wars. Catholic objects, including a series of crucifixes on display at the Met, began depicting Jesus as an African. A mvwala staff from this era, an object that traditionally symbolizes power and a connection with ancestors, invokes Christianity as a source of authority with a figure of St. Anthony on its finial.
Soon after Cão’s arrival, the Europeans had established a trade in slaves, who were often exchanged for cheap Portuguese goods, which was draining Kongo of its people. As the journalist Adam Hochschild recounts in “King Leopold’s Ghost,” his history of European oppression in the area, Afonso I implored the king of Portugal to curb the kidnapping and enslavement of the Kongolese. In a letter dated 1526, he wrote, “This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated.” A carved ivory tusk at the Met shows the harshness of life in the kingdom by the eighteen-nineties. On it, slaves are depicted in chains, headed to the New World.
A few years before, in 1885, the kingdom had been bought by a group of European investors, headed by the Belgian King Leopold II and organized as the Congo Free State. Hochschild contends that some ten million Congolese perished under Leopold’s control and in the years following, mainly because of brutalities perpetrated by Leopold’s private army in its search for rubber and ivory, although that figure is contested by other historians. Even after the Congo Free State was abolished and an official Belgian colony was established, in 1906, the atrocities continued, including the death of more than seven thousand forced laborers who were pressed into expanding a railroad in the nineteen-twenties.
The current public discourse around race in Belgium remains very different from that in the English-speaking world. When Reynders appeared in blackface, the costume provoked more anger internationally than it did in Belgium. While international activists tweeted about how the spirit of King Leopold had never left the country, many Belgians said that the tradition, which dates to 1876, was “folkloric.” I discovered the pictures only after I interviewed Reynders, so I called a spokesperson at the Belgian foreign ministry to see if he had any comment. The spokesperson said that he and his colleagues were surprised that a fundraising event for disadvantaged children could have garnered so much negative press. He pointed out that members of the Belgian royal family had, in the past, been involved in the organization. Minister Reynders did not apologize for the event, the spokesperson said. “We were very surprised to hear the criticism of such an event with a good and nice aim,” he added.
While it’s clear that much of the Belgian public is still ambivalent about the country’s history in Africa, it should be noted that the citizens of many other former colonial powers also have complicated relationships with their own histories, as this country does with the legacy of slavery and the extermination of Native Americans. One of the problems in Belgium is that a simple understanding of what happened in the past is often muddied by contemporary political concerns—something that could be said about many modern European countries, where nationalist narratives of identity are resurgent, and the transnational project of the European Union appears to be faltering under the burden of debt and refugee crises. The death toll during Leopold’s reign is vehemently disputed in Belgium, and the state has never apologized for its colonial excesses. (Though, in 2002, the Belgian government did apologize for helping to organize—along with the C.I.A.—the murder of Congo’s first legally elected President, Patrice Lumumba, after the country had gained independence.)
At the end of the tour, I asked Reynders what responsibility the Belgians bear for the fact that the Democratic Republic of Congo has only a shaky peace after numerous years of civil war. “Fifty years after independence, it’s quite difficult to say it’s all the time due to our responsibility,” Reynders said. “Of course it’s possible to take part of responsibility, but not for all. In the end, they are responsible for themselves,” he continued. “Fifty years has become to be too long.”
Reynders spoke of the responsibility that Belgium has to help the D.R.C. develop through international organizations and established political frameworks. I did get the sense, as I spoke to him, that he cared deeply about the current political realities in Africa and that he was working toward insuring the rule of law as well as the increasing prosperity of the region’s economies. “The difficulty for us is not just to invest in development aid, it’s also to see what kind of democratic process is possible in those countries with a real peaceful transition,” he told me.
Reynders was speaking to me in the final room of the exhibition, where fifteen of the world’s twenty or so known Mangaaka_ figures are exhibited. A Mangaaka is a form of nkisi n’kondi—a nkisi in the shape of a human which is used in rituals where metal objects are hammered into it in order to prosecute wrongdoers, seal alliances, and maintain order. A fascinating article in the exhibition catalogue by Alisa LaGamma, the exhibition’s curator, explains that Mangaaka started to be made in the nineteenth century, as a last-ditch response to the turmoil that colonial powers had created. In many ways, they reminded me of the Ghost Dance, a last-ditch attempt by Native Americans in this country to use spiritual means to induce European settlers to leave and the buffalo to return to the Central Plains. The disquiet of white settlers upon witnessing the Ghost Dance led to the massacre at Wounded Knee. Similarly, the Mangaaka _figures were considered so effective that colonial military powers deliberately targeted them as they sought to control Congo.
I pressed Reynders about how it felt to stand in front of these figures, many of which were created as a response to colonialism. He explained that Belgium is still going through a “long process” of recognizing its legacy in Central Africa. I asked him what the Belgian debt to the Congo is, and whether the country would countenance reparations payments, like those some have recently suggested should be paid to the African-American community to counter the continuing effects of slavery and racism. “The first problem is to have a recognition of the facts,” Reynders replied, saying that racism continued to obscure any meaningful debate about reparations. He then reiterated his call for a positive involvement with former colonies, including negotiations with the beleaguered government of Burundi, also once part of Belgium. “We try to not give any lessons, we try just to see what are the possibilities to help the population,” he said. “Now we are convincing a lot of leaders in Central Africa that they need to change their ways,” he continued. “That’s a fight against corruption—that’s the present, not the past.”
After Reynders and I finished talking, he went back to inspecting the Mangaaka. Some of his aides fretted that he was going to be late to his next appointment, but he still had many questions for the guide. The figures are about the same size as healthy seven-year-olds and, at the Met, they are placed on pedestals. They loomed above us. The look on their faces is at once ferocious and deeply self-aware, as if they understand the inevitability of the fate that is befalling the people they were made to protect. As Reynders bent down in front of one of them to inspect some of the wall text, and to ask yet another question, I wondered if his excitement contained within it the kernels of atonement.
