A Dance of Assassins

Allen-F. Roberts

Description

Winner, 2013 Arnold Rubin PrizeFinalist, 2014 Herskovits Award

A Dance of Assassins presents the competing histories of how Congolese Chief Lusinga and Belgian Lieutenant Storms engaged in a deadly clash while striving to establish hegemony along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika in the 1880s. While Lusinga participated in the east African slave trade, Storms' secret mandate was to meet Henry Stanley's eastward march and trace "a white line across the Dark Continent" to legitimize King Leopold's audacious claim to the Congo. Confrontation was inevitable, and Lusinga lost his head. His skull became the subject of a sinister evolutionary treatise, while his ancestral figure is now considered a treasure of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Allen F. Roberts reveals the theatricality of early colonial encounter and how it continues to influence Congolese and Belgian understandings of history today.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. The "Emperor" Strikes Back
1. Invitation to a Beheading
2. A Conflict of Memories
3. Histories Made by Bodies
4. Tropical Gothic
5. Storms the Headhunter

Part II. Remembering the Dismembered
6. The Rise of a Colonial Macabre
7. Art Évo on the Chaussée d'Ixelles
8. Lusinga's Lasting Laughs
9. Composing Decomposition
10. Defiances of the Dead

Appendix A: Some Background on Our Protagonists
Appendix B: A Note on Illustrations
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• African
• HISTORY
• África
• History of art
• African people
• History of Africa
• Art
• Central
• Belgium
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253007599
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A Dance of Assassins
African Expressive Cultures
Patrick McNaughton, editor
Associate editors
Catherine M. Cole
Barbara G. Hoffman
Eileen Julien
Kassim Kon
D. A. Masolo
Elisha Renne
Zo Strother
A Dance of Assassins
Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo
Allen F. Roberts
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2013 by Allen F. Roberts All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roberts, Allen F., [date]
A dance of assassins : performing early colonial hegemony in the Congo / Allen F. Roberts.
p. cm.-(African expressive cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00743-8 (cl : alk. paper)-ISBN 978-0-253-00750-6 (pb : alk. paper)-ISBN 978-0-253-00759-9 (eb) 1. Congo (Democratic Republic)-Colonization. 2. Congo (Democratic Republic)-History-To 1908. 3. Storms, mile Pierre Joseph, 1846-1918. 4. Lusinga, ca. 1840-1884. 5. Belgians-Congo (Democratic Republic)-History-19th century. 6. Hegemony-Congo (Democratic Republic)-History-19th century. 7. Ethnological museums and collections-Belgium. I. Title. II. Series: African expressive cultures.
DT654.R63 2013
325.3493096751-dc23
2012030702
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
For Polly
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART 1 THE EMPEROR STRIKES BACK
1 Invitation to a Beheading
2 A Conflict of Memories
3 Histories Made by Bodies
4 Tropical Gothic
5 Storms the Headhunter
PART 2 REMEMBERING THE DISMEMBERED
6 The Rise of a Colonial Macabre
7 Art vo on the Chauss e d Ixelles
8 Lusinga s Lasting Laughs
9 Composing Decomposition
10 Defiances of the Dead
Appendix A Some Background on Our Protagonists
Appendix B A Note on Illustrations
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Because this study has extended over more than forty years, I hold no hope of being able to thank all of my friends in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (known as the Republic of Za re during my research of the mid-1970s), Belgium, the Vatican, the United States, and the several other countries where I have consulted relevant museum and archival collections or conferred with colleagues about this project. So many have been so generous with their time and intellect and so warmly hospitable that I can only express my deepest gratitude for all they have offered so freely and cheerfully.
Inspiring mentors have set me on my path, from Donald Pitkin at Amherst College to Victor and Edith Turner at the University of Chicago, with many more along the way. Wonderful teachers in Za re included Sultani Mpala Kaloko, Kizumina Kabulo, and Louis Mulilo, whose wisdom and guidance will be obvious in the pages to come. My forty-five months in Lubanda and other Congolese communities were fruitful, pleasant, and often hilarious thanks to these and a host of others, including Belgian and American friends in Lubumbashi. The late Genevi ve Nagant put her decades of humanistic research among Tabwa at my disposition, and she opened her home in Kalemie as did the family of Kalunga Twite Dodo for the several months needed to perfect my local Swahili before moving to Lubanda. My former spouse, Christopher O. Davis (then Davis-Roberts), and I pursued complementary dissertation projects in Za re, and her study of Tabwa medicine informs the present book. I am most grateful for her amiable companionship through the thick and thin of such long fieldwork.
Financial support for my doctoral research was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Society of the Sigma Xi, and the Committee on African Studies and Edson-Keith Fund of the University of Chicago. Later sponsorship by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a postdoc with the Michigan Society of Fellows, and faculty grants from Albion College, the University of Iowa, and UCLA have contributed mightily to the present project. I greatly appreciate the research affiliation I was afforded by the Center for Political Study of Central Africa at the National University of Za re in Lubumbashi, 1974-1977.
Colleagues at the Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA) have been very supportive of this and my other projects over the years, especially and most recently curators Anne-Marie Bouttiaux, Sabine Cornelis, Maarten Couttenier, and Boris Wastiau. Thanks, too, to the Clendennings for weeks of hospitality in Brussels as I worked in RMCA archives in late 1977. Evan M. Maurer was a wonderful partner for the NEH-sponsored traveling exhibition and book in 1985 that was based upon my doctoral research in Za re. Again, many more faculty and student friends have offered thoughtful assistance than can be mentioned here. Nonetheless, particular thanks must go to Lucian Gomol, Prita Sandy Meier, and David Delgado Shorter for their cogent editing and suggestions about my manuscript, and especially to Johannes Fabian and Polly Nooter Roberts for their close and thoughtful reading. Thanks, too, to Kathleen Louw and Christian Ost for their remarkable scholarly investigations in Belgium on my behalf. Despite such brilliant support from so many, all responsibility for the present volume remains my own.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Ruth Fraleigh Roberts and Sidney Hubbard Roberts, and to my late spouse, Mary Kujawski Roberts. It is also dedicated with all my love to my spouse, Mary Polly Nooter Roberts; our children, Avery, Seth, and Sid; and to son-in-law James and grandson Gus. Writing a book is always an obsessive engagement, and Polly and the kids tolerance for my mountains of books and papers, endless hours of lost-in-laptop concentration, and my other book-related preoccupations and idiosyncrasies has made this project not just possible, but profoundly fulfilling.
A Dance of Assassins
Figure 0.1. Map of central Africa. David L. Fuller, 2011, by commission for this book.
Introduction
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, If one may say so. And yet relation appears , . . . expanding like the shade Of a cloud on sand . . . .
W ALLACE S TEVENS , C ONNOISSEUR OF C HAOS
This book is about a beheading. The event occurred in December 1884 and has been articulated ever since through competing Congolese and Belgian histories attuned to particular audiences and political goals. Two protagonists engaged in a deadly pas de deux driven by immense ambition, each violently striving to establish hegemony along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): Lusinga lwa Ng ombe, deemed a sanguinary potentate by the British explorer Joseph Thomson, who visited the chief in 1879, because of his ruthless slaving for the east African trade; and mile Storms, belligerent commander of the fourth International African Association (IAA) caravan and founder of an outpost at Mpala-Lubanda near Lusinga s redoubt ( fig. 0.1 ). 1 The IAA s overt mandate was to promote scientific knowledge while helping suppress slavery. Lusinga and Storms were bound for confrontation, and Lusinga lost his head.
In the mid-1970s I spent most of my forty-five consecutive months of Congolese research among Tabwa people in and around the large lakeside village of Lubanda, studying local-level politics and cosmology for a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago ( fig. 0.2 ). I was offered accounts of Lusinga s rise and demise by several elderly men. One named Kizumina told me that when Storms sent his warriors to execute Lusinga, they sang a ribald refrain as they climbed the steep mountain path to his palisade. The men accompanied their engaging song with three days of vivid dance, lulling Lusinga to lower his guard, and then they shot him dead and took his head. The assassins choreography was an essential device of battle, and one can surmise from Kizumina s narrative that it mystically and magically empowered their reversal of Lusinga s fate, yet neither singing nor dance was featured in Storms s arid account of the incident left to us in his diary and letters. Whether or not the performance happened is irrelevant, for Kizumina s emphasis was derived from the embodied logic through which Congolese at Lubanda understood the lethal encounter and its far-reaching consequences ninety years after the fact.

Figure 0.2. The main street of Lubanda (DRC) in the mid-1970s, looking south to Sultani Mpala s residence. Photo from the research of Christopher Davis-Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, 1976.
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 that were still perceptible at Lubanda in the 1970s. All was not orderly during Storms s brief stay along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, however, as ramifications of the bizarre behavior of a French