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Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

2023; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/afar_a_00708

1937-2108

Bogumił Jewsiewicki, Maartin Hendriks,

French Urban and Social Studies

Lucie Kamuswekera's1 embroideries are not popular paintings, but they are very close to them, even if the latter are usually no longer found in Congolese homes. Born in 1944, Lucie Kamuswekera, who prefers to be known as Artiste Lucie2 (Fig. 1), belongs to the generation of Congolese for whom these paintings reflected the memories and experiences lived between the 1950s and 1990s. In her embroideries, she mostly revisits the iconotheque of popular painting by visualizing the experiences of women, but sometimes raises issues of worldwide relevance, like the COVID pandemic (Fig. 2). Explicitly, the artist's mission is to give relevance to past and present experiences, to reinscribe them in the collective life and reestablish intergen- erational links. In Congolese urban culture, the reception of the image is performative. Like a mask in a ritual, her embroideries intervene in social life and relationships. They carry a knowledge—which Lucie Kamuswekera considers currently lost—but above all they make present and therefore active the incorporated xperience whose intergenerational transmission was disrupted by three decades of armed conflict in the Kivu provinces. As a widow and grandmother, she fully assumes the role of guaranteeing generational continuity that her society grants to women. She inscribes her art in a dynamic continuity of sharing memories in images and words. She uses embroidery, a technique learned at the colonial school, to actualize male pictorial discourses on experiences lived during the second half of the twentieth century. She devotes part of the income from the sale of her embroideries to running a workshop where she shelters and trains four orphans (three girls and one boy), formerly street children, because she wants the art of embroidery to survive.For the reasons we have outlined, we need to introduce the reader to Congolese popular painting and its academic analyses. In the 1970s and 1980s, Congolese popular painting, also known as urban painting, became very popular among the city dwellers of the large- and medium-sized cities of the country then called Zaire. In a quarter of a century, a few thousand painters produced tens of thousands of paintings that were hung on the walls of hundreds of thousands of houses inhabited by families of small traders and craftsmen, workers and employees, teachers, etc. In the West, we would label them the middle class. The local popularity of these works began in the second decade after independence. Urban inhabitants found peace and modest prosperity after a decade of civil wars following independence in 1960. The authoritarian government imposed in 1968 by President Mobutu crushed the political opposition (Van Reybrouck 2015). Largely, urban populations accepted this as the price of a return to normal life. Mobutu's policies of cultural and economic nationalization were initially well received and promoted the development of a national culture in urban areas. Music played a leading role in this. The arrival of the portable 45 rpm record player democratized access to records, while the centralization of the record industry in the capital allowed songs in Lingala to spread nationwide. This language of the army became the dominant language of the capital and of public administration throughout the country. Fearing the return of regional secessionist movements, Mobutu constantly relocated civil servants and army officers, which served as another vehicle for the expansion of Lingala and cultural unification. Also, the movement of students among the three university training centers of the time—Kinshasa, Kisangani, and Lubumbashi—contributed to the language's spread.While urban painters, trained by apprenticeship with an elder, circulated only regionally, their clientele imposed on them the unification of the iconotheque. The selling price of a painting was low. Therefore, to survive, a painter had to sell many of them and constantly adapt to the evolution of taste. And as the painting itself quickly deteriorated in quality—because it was painted on recycled fabric with self-made paint—demand imposed the pictorial topics. Buyers belonged mainly to the generation that vividly remembered colonization and the civil wars that followed. The circulation of these buyers between cities promoted the national unification of pictorial representations. Since the paintings were intended for places where people met—such as the living room of a house or a bar—the image had to respond to collective expectation, rather than to the taste of an individual. The result was the emergence of a set of national icons comprising the collective imagination of the 1970s and 1980s: the Belgian colony, the mermaid/Mami Wata, scenes from Patrice Lumumbas political career. Researchers who studied this urban art referred to it as pictorial representations of collective memories. Many painters call themselves historians endowed with the mission to make visible what actually happened and to show how the events of the past affect the present. Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, best known from Johannes Fabian's book Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (1996), claimed to represent the “real” past in his paintings, in opposition to the distorted past represented in official written history (Jewsiewicki 2003).From the 1990s, the West “discovered” Congolese popular painting, which became the subject of numerous scholarly publications and exhibitions. Locally, Congolese political authorities were hostile to these critical images of the relationship between the past and the present and painters’ exposure of the economic and social crises that plagued the population. Three years after the publication of Fabian's book, the exhibition A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art (1999) was held in New York City. In 2003, Bogumil Jewsiewicki's Mami Wata: La peinture urbaine au Congo was published, and in 2008, Leon Verbeek's Les arts plastiques de l'Afrique contemporaine: 60 ans d'histoire à Lubumbashi R-D Congo appeared. Exhibitions that were devoted to Congolese popular painting, or reserved a large role for it, multiplied throughout Europe. Published in 2013, Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visona's A Companion to Modern African Art devotes a chapter to Congolese folk painting (Jewsiewicki 2013). Three years later, the exhibition Congo Art Works (Ceuppens and Baloji 2016) opened in Brussels, before being shown in Germany and Russia. The Royal Museum for Central Africa, where the most important collections of Congo art are located, was responsible for this exhibition, thus recognizing that popular painting is an art.3Many Western and Congolese scholars (Badi-Banda ne Mwine 1977, Ibongo 2009) have analyzed popular painting in relation to historical memory, as popular discourse on politics, or as an expression of collective consciousness and imaginations. All have assumed that popular painting is representative of the urban population as a whole. Even female scholars, whether Ilona Szombati (Szombati-Fabian and Fabian 1976) and Bennetta Jules-Rosette (1984) in the 1980s or Bambi Ceuppens (2016) forty years later, did not note the absence of female perspectives.4 Yet male painters worked for male clients who hung the paintings in places of male socialization. Popular painting legitimized male memories of the generation of the Independence years, thus reproducing their social power. Since the 1990s, young people have denounced the failure of their fathers’ generation to manage the country. Several young, initially male, visual artists testify to this (Jewsiewicki 2016b). However, women's views have also started to emerge, such as the work of the photographer Gosette Lubondo.Occasionally, the absence of female memories and imagination in painting has been noted. Biaya Tshikala (1992, 1996) used painting to understand and highlight female autonomy and agency in religious practices. In the 1980s, he traveled throughout Congo to meet painters. While women's leadership in religious movements surfaced, with other partners of Bogumil Jewsiewicki he searched in vain for women painters5 (Jewsiewicki 1993). Pointing out the male bias in popular paintings, Jewsiewicki (1995, 2003) notes that women only appear in paintings as a vindication of men's economic power or when female figures express men's suffering, a sentiment that men were not supposed to display in public. Determined to see postcolonial society speaking with one voice, a nation marching toward a glorious future, researchers—regardless of gender, generation, and geographic origin—confused male imaginarles with the vision of all Congolese.From the 1990s onward, clients disappeared and painters had to change their source of livelihood. Urban paintings were no longer to be found on the walls of living rooms. In Katanga, more than elsewhere, the close connection between this painting and the social power of the man who sustains and controls his family with monetary income was confirmed by the sale of the paintings in the border markets of Kipushi and Kasumbalesa. In the first half of the 1990s, urban dwellers from the neighboring Kasai region were expelled from industrial Katanga (Dibwe 2003). Unable to take their possessions with them, they offered them for sale in a cross-border market frequented by Zambians. While before it was very difficult to buy a painting from its owner, they were now available in large numbers—due more to the end of male power based on wage labor than the misery of the refugees. The ruin of the formal economy put families’ survival in the hands of women and adolescents. As victims of the civil war, parents from the back country flocked to the big cities, turning living rooms into bedrooms. When adult men—the fathers lost economic power and prestige, their memory and imagination lost relevance, as did their paintings.This summary sketch of the history of academic research on Congolese popular painting reveals the importance of our encounter with Lucie Kamuswekera and her embroideries. Her work transforms the gaze on the production and reception of figurative representations of collective imaginations and memories in Congo. After male popular painters resigned from the role of bearing witness and maintaining knowledge of the past as the Congolese have experienced it, she institutes herself as its artist and historian. Unlike them, she represents both genders’ experiences of the past and the present. Her embroideries, often borrowing from the icons of popular painting, give a place to the experiences of women without erasing those of men.Lucie Kamuswekera started embroidering images after she experienced personal trauma and collective tragedy. Now almost 80 years old, she was born and raised in rural Nande country (MacGaffey 1987) in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter Congo). She learned embroidery as a decorative art in primary school, from the Christian Italian sisters. Only about twenty years ago did she start embroidering images similar to urban popular paintings, after she moved to the city of Goma. The years of independence coincided for her with the end of her schooling, her marriage, and then maternity. She remembers the year 1960 more for obtaining her diploma as a midwife than for independence.6 In addition to her profession as midwife, she practiced agriculture with her husband. The upheavals in the region during the 1990s changed her life dramatically. Violence in the early 1990s in Rutshuru, Masisi, and Walikale, and particularly the genocide in neighboring Rwanda in 1994, set a horrifying humanitarian crisis in motion. Countless people were killed, hundreds of thousands were turned into refugees and IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons). The many Rwandan—largely Hutu—refugees that installed themselves in camps across the Congo-Rwandan border were seen as a threat to Paul Kagame's newly installed Rwandan regime. This added explosive geopolitical fuel to the more “local” violent conflicts ravaging the Kivus before the genocide in the early 1990s. These regional tensions paved the way for the First (1996-1997)7 and Second Congo Wars (1998-2003), and ongoing protracted armed conflicts in Congo's eastern provinces today (Mathys 2017; Hendriks and Büscher 2019). These wars and conflicts often form the subject of Lucie Kamuswekera's embroideries. For example, one of her embroideries, President de la RDC de 1997-2001 (Fig. 3) shows how Laurent-Désiré Kabila's AFDL (Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo Zaïre), in the First Congo War, chased Mobutu from power, forcing him to flee to Morocco. Another embroidery, De 20018 à 2018 (Fig. 4) deals with the history, memories, and main protagonists of the CNDP9 and M2310 rebellions that both heavily impacted Goma and its surroundings. A third embroidery portrays the so- called Massacre à Beni (the massacre of Beni) (Fig. 5). Since 2014, Beni, a town 350 km north of Goma, has suffered from a relentless series of mass killings. In Goma and many other places in the Kivu provinces, these killings evoke much anger. Although the armed group ADF (Allied Democratic Forces) is often identified as the culprit by the Congolese authorities and the media, there is much ambiguity about who is responsible for these murders— which understandably angers people in the Kivus even more (Vogel and Stearns 2018; Vogel et al. 2021).On the way to his fields, Lucie's husband was killed during the First Congo War in 1997. Like many before and after her, Lucy was forced to flee and decided to settle in the city of Goma,11 in the house of one of her children. There, she no longer worked as a midwife, but focused on her embroidery, probably seeing it as a means of meeting her material needs and expressing herself in relation to her nations past.To embroider, Lucie Kamuswekera employs used jute sacks and recycled threads that she finds at the market. This seemingly minor detail is significant. A quarter of a century ago, urban painters were forced to replace canvas with salvaged fabric and use self-made paints to serve their impoverished clientele.Lucie Kamuswekera has taken up the art of depicting collective memories where male painters have largely abandoned it for lack of local demand for paintings. She uses media, techniques, and materials of external origin to express collective memories of her nation's past. Lucie Kamuswekera is a woman, whereas all urban painters have been men and their clientele has been mostly male. In contrast to the small size of popular art paintings, her embroidered bags are too large to be hung in an ordinary Congolese house. So how is it that she embroiders images of collective memories similar to those of urban painting?She maintains that she has never seen any “popular painting” in Goma, and that the images she embroiders come from her memory and her own experiences. Should we conclude that there are elective affinities12 between her social imagination and the social imagination of urban painters and their clients? Is this convergence of social imaginations better understood through the lens of Bourdieu's concept of habitus (1977)? Let us take the scene of the flogging administered in front of the colonial administration post (Fig. 6). Its recollection is part of the memory of the generations of Congolese people that lived Independence without distinction of social background, education, or living environment; and as Lucie Kamuswekera's embroidery shows, without distinction of gender.13 In depictions of “Lumumba's martyrdom, ” both painters and Lucie Kamuswekera (Fig. 7) give the hero a face copied from the 1960 press photograph.14 The written history learned in school is much more present in her embroideries than in popular painting. The latter deploys the written word more in counterpoint to the image. Lucie Kamuswekera writes extensively with her needle to make history present. One of her grandsons is a graduate of a high school where French is the language of instruction. Since she completed her basic education before 1960, she writes only in Swahili. The French texts that she embroiders are first traced by this grandson. It is likely that he composed them by drawing on his school knowledge, probably consulting his textbook.15In addition to images of collective memory, Lucie Kamuswekera embroiders images that represent the current challenges of society (Figs. 8-10) and the region, including the degradation of the natural environment and tourist resources,16 the destruction of natural resources, once the source of Congo's prosperity. At least in part, these embroideries are aimed at a potential tourist clientele, such as the vignettes of the regions national parks. Like the urban painters of old, she has to sell to eat and does not refuse any buyer, including a nostalgic Belgian to whom her embroidery of the complete text of the Brabançonne (the Belgian national anthem) in French could be addressed.Over the past decade, Lucie Kamuswekera and her art have received increasing publicity in her adopted city. Not only was she broadcast by several local radio stations,17 also international media outlets such as TV5Monde and Deutsche Welle have reported on her story. Nevertheless, the effervescent artistic creativity of Goma's youth is made manifest in other media (Rivers Ndaliko 2014, 2016) and mostly18 on other stages. As a woman, Lucie Kamuswekera had the audacity to put into images the collective memory of the generations of men of Independence. She positioned herself towards them as they had positioned themselves towards the colonizer through whom came the colonial modernity that they never mastered. There is perhaps a link between her work as a licensed midwife and her entry into the male domain of visual representation of the memories of colonial modernity. In 1960, midwifery placed her on equal footing with men. Three decades later, after the implosion of the Congolese state and economy19 and in the midst of the protracted armed conflict that ravages Congo's eastern provinces up until today, she asserts her right to represent this memory from the point of view and experience of women of her generation.While easel painters have put Congolese men back into the center of the colonial past, Lucie Kamuswekera restores women to their place in that past. For men and women, recollections of the past matter because making the past present “is neither an account nor a pedigree, but a meaningful configuration of selected events around ‘loci of memory’” (Nooter Roberts and Roberts 1999). In the next sections, we will analyze more in depth two of Artiste Lucie's works: The Colonial Era and The Death of Lumumba.In the West, the painting Belgian Colony is perhaps the best- known pictorial icon of Congolese memory. For many years, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu's painting (Fig. 11), was part of the permanent exhibition dedicated to Africa at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. The scene was featured in tens of thousands of paintings in Congolese homes across the country, was narrated in many Congolese life histories, and also described in Belgian colonial novels. It is at the center of memories of colonization, memories shared by subordinate agents of the latter and the colonized, especially men. Whether described verbally or visualized, the image does not change; apart from a few details. Hundreds of painters have portrayed it in the same way.21 Even though Lucie Kamuswekera never described this scene in her interviews, she makes explicit reference to it several times, stating that in colonial times, a man who did not pay the head tax was imprisoned for seven days and received seven lashes. Let us remember that in urban Congolese culture, it is impolite to be explicit when it comes to shared knowledge. It is therefore safe to assume (especially since she spoke in Swahili and not in French) that she was referring to the “Belgian colony, ” whose image is in everyone's memory.For these reasons, analyzing Lucie Kamuswekera's embroidery on the “colonial era” (Fig. 6) allows us to highlight the enrichment of iconic representation when the experience of women finds its rightful place. Her memories, shaped by her experiences as a woman, lead her to portray this scene differently than male painters did and motivates the different rendition. This brief analytical description draws attention to the compositional elements that distinguish her embroidery from the canonical image.In the center of the embroidery, in front of the prison building, we see two women. In popular painting, when they are shown in “Belgian Colony” paintings, the female figures are on the margin of the action. The gestures of the women in these paintings mainly express the suffering of the men. Lucie Kamuswekera places the female figures in the center of the pictorial space, partly against the white wall of the prison, which accentuates their visibility. The raised arms of one of them express a strong protest. The two women are shown topless, in raffia skirts, making the link with the embroidered village dwellings on their left. The nudity of the breasts of the woman with her arms raised seems intentionally accentuated. The artist seems to be referring to the public expression of condemnation of a perpetrator of a serious crime. In the 1960s, this was the way in which adult women (and thus mothers) expressed their condemnation of Mobutu for the execution of the “Pentecostal convicts. ” Since her work was intended for the Congolese viewer, decency did not allow Lucie Kamuswekera to embroider naked genitalia (Jewsiewicki 2016a). Nonetheless, in Congo, no one needed the explicit image to understand the artist's intention. The two women find themselves above the whipping scene, with prisoners led by soldiers to their left and right. Those on the left are tied by a rope held by a soldier. This is how Lucie Kamuswekera, like popular painters, depicts a caravan of slaves. Finally, at the very top, the title of the embroidery, Colonial Era, seems to have “prison” as a subtitle. To the left and right of this ensemble composed of several scenes and stories, recollections restored by memory appear. On the left, we find the past of the rural world, on the right, colonial modernity. The whole forms a triptych of which the women constitute the core, its navel, while the path leads to the supplicant, like an umbilical cord.On the left, we see all the elements of the pictorial representation of a place of memory called “Belgian Colony, ” a place where memory works.22 A rigid White man, who stares at the viewer, personifies the state and legitimizes the violence exercised by the Congolese soldiers. The pole, on which the Belgian flag flies, stands between this European man and the Congolese soldier who administers the whipping to the prisoner. Under the figure of the White man, a group of prisoners tied by a rope is led to the place of torture under the flagpole presenting the Belgian flag. A path connects the colonial administration post to the prison, and it is across this path that the unfortunate prisoner is laid down to receive his lashes.Lucie Kamuswekera uses the play of colors to assert the appropriation of the Congolese by the state; many painters have done so before her. Even though the flag of the colony was in fact different from the Belgian flag, all show the latter rather than the former. It is the expression of the obvious: since the colony belonged to Belgium, the authority there was Belgian. The colors of the Belgian flag cover the whipped body: his shirt is striped yellow and black, the red of blood streaks his bare buttocks. The whole is framed by the black of his hair and of his lowered pants. Note that the two European civil servants are wearing yellow and black striped socks. The embroiderer seems to be referring to their Belgitude, their “Belgian-ness,” perhaps also qualifying those agents as instruments of the state. Two soldiers stand in front of the colonial administration post, one bearing a yellow object (perhaps a chicken), the other holding a black rifle.23 Their headdresses are red, like the roof of the administration post building and of the prison. The play of the three colors leaves no doubt that the authority and responsibility for its enforcement rests with Belgium.The embroidery is rich in elements evoking those pasts to which the present gives a particular meaning-it is the work of memory. The car next to the administration post is white as well as the mast, the walls of the buildings are white, the bodies of the men who hold power are dressed in white, the strings and belts of the soldiers’ uniforms are white. White indicates the external nature of authority in Congolese society and the violence that it legitimizes. The skin of the foreigners, the Europeans and the traffickers from the Swahili coast, is pink.Lucie Kamuswekera differentiates the respective positions in the hierarchy within the colonial apparatus. Belgians and soldiers wear shoes while ordinary Congolese are barefoot; however, the administrator's boots are white while those of the soldiers are black. Until independence, and even beyond, wearing shoes distinguished between those who belonged to the circle of colonial modernity and those who were excluded from it.24The Congolese who have been appropriated by the state wear either the yellow and black striped jersey of prisoners or the uniform of Force publique (public force) soldiers. The others, whether they are porters or enslaved persons, are dressed only in loincloths that cover their genitals. One can hear an echo of the cliché of Western exoticism opposing the naked barbarian to the clothed civilized. However, this is how the embroiderer seems to mark the separation between two worlds. Colonial modernity is not only characterized by the whiteness of what is specific to it, including the car, it is also orderly. The mast is straight, the buildings are rectangular. The village is located in nature, vegetation is green, there are not even any paths, unlike the red dirt road lined with footprints. In the world of the village, the White man of the state appears only in a sedan chair. In keeping with the reality of the past, showing him in this way also emphasizes that he is not part of local realities, but only passing through as borne on the backs of Africans.The distinction between the pink of the skin and the white of the clothes, absent from urban painting, seems to allow Lucie Kamuswekera to affirm the continuity between Swahili slave traders of the mid-nineteenth century and Belgian colonization (Fig. 6). The colonial power only wrested Congo from the hands of slave traders in order to better appropriate it. Once “saved” from slave traders, the Congolese found themselves subjects of a colonial state that used them as a corvée work force to exploit the country's resources. Differences between the brutalities of such labor and those of enslavement were in the eyes of beholders. The white color of the clothes underlines the continuity of exploitation and expropriation; the shape of the clothes and the headdresses distinguish between two periods of the country's history. The packages carried by enslaved porters driven by traffickers from the Swahili Coast indicate that Lucie Kamuswekera wants to be faithful to the realities of the past, when ivory was more profitable than the enslaved persons captured as indispensable for its transport. Later, porters were indispensable to the colonial economy and to the both World Wars, in which Belgium participated at the expense of Congolese. During both wars tens of thousand Congolese Force publique soldiers fought White men's wars from West to East Africa, and up to Ethiopia. But porters paid the highest price in terms of suffering and death. Hundreds of thousands of them were forcibly conscripted for carrying supplies, which is remembered as the reestablishment of slavery that the Belgians claimed was suppressed thanks the colonial order they imposed.The pictorial organization of Lucie Kamuswekera's embroidery is clearly performative. Several scenes show narratives dialoguing within the three spaces. Each represents a recollection, gives presence to the memory of a person, virtually responds to another recollection, is linked to it so that the experiences of the past can be exchanged and their actuality tested in relation to the shared knowledge. Memories that men sitting in urban middle-class living rooms exchanged in front of “Belgian Colony” paintings hanging on their walls appear in the embroidery. Is this because Lucie Kamuswekera is aware that there is no longer a living room where these oratorical exchanges can take place, or because she embroiders for everyone, including women, whom she knows to have been excluded from potential benefits of colonial and postcolonial economy?Contrary to most Congolese urban painters, Lucie includes a mode of representation, a “perspective25 specific to colonial-era painting of rural homes. The rifle and the chicken held by the soldiers are disproportionate in size to their bodies. In front of the European man on the tippoyi (sedan chair) a dog is sitting. In colonial-period paintings of rural homes, attention was drawn to the bizarre and exotic character, in villagers’ eyes, of the equipment and behaviors of Europeans. Objects rather than people were placed in the center of the image, and unexpected behaviors were depicted—here the dog on a tippoyi. The organization of the scene reproduces the colonial hierarchy. The administrator, and even his dog, are placed higher, in a dominating position over Congolese porters. By proxy of the image, these objects or actions were placed in the village square to be studied. Seeing them and exchanging experiences about them presented the possibility of understanding how and why colonial agents possessed pow