Visuality and Colonialism in the Congo: From the "Arab War" to Patrice Lumumba, 1880s to 1961.

Abstract

This dissertation is a work in visual historical methodology, grounded in examples and artifacts from the colonial history of the Congo Free State (1885-1908) and Belgian Congo up to the time of decolonization and independence (1908-1960). The study focuses on the Tetela, once a colonial “tribe” known as the Batetela, and today a loosely configured “community” whose members think of themselves, according to the terms of modern African politics, including cultural politics, as belonging to a larger Mongo “ethnicity.” Part of my purpose in this dissertation is to show how Tetela constituted themselves as historical and collective subjects, connected to key events and spaces in Congo’s colonial history, in and through visuality. More specifically, my dissertation locates how Tetela ways knowing and seeing, and also being Tetela emerged and shifted in visual worlds from the late 1880s to 1960. The Tetela emerged visibly, immediately, and as modern subjects in relation to Zanzibari and then Belgian overlords, raiders, and patrons in the 1880s and 1890s. Seventy years later the emergence of Patrice Lumumba, who was born and raised a Tetela, in Congo’s decolonizing politics reproblematized this group as an early colonial category. Between the 1880s and the late 1950s the formation of collective Tetela subjects as well as individual Tetela self-fashioning, partly took place in visuality: through the creation, aggregation and circulation of certain images and iconic objects in and across networks and spaces, in time. This visual knowledge was also, especially after the Second World War, a way of inscribing meanings on photographs by intervening into their creation, and through ways of seeing. These By the 1950s, a certain understanding of who the Tetela were was in place. This understanding expressed itself, sometimes obliquely and at other times overtly, in the ways that Patrice Lumumba was imaged, and also imagined by supporters and detractors alike. By applying visual methodologies to artifacts, situations, moments, texts, persons, names, and “ethnic” as well as social categories, this study seeks locate Tetela subject formation, collective and individual, in images and visual worlds.