Tshibumba in Our Class, We

Tshibumba

In our class, we have considered painting in relation to conflict, the State in the combination of the visual traditions and painting schools in Africa in the second half of the 20th century. Also, we have examined the paintings in the History of Zaire series by Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu that was done in collaboration with anthropologist Johannes Fabian. Tshibumba's paintings provide a visual history of the Congo, focusing on the atrocities of the Belgians, the war for independence and the postcolonial political struggle in the 1960s and 1970s.

In this essay, the author will first, summarize, compare and contrast the way that Blommaert and Moten discuss Tshibumba's histories. Secondly, we will consider the series of paintings in the Tropenmusuem Collection in order to discuss the way in which histories are constructed both textually and visually. For brevity's sake, we will focus on painting number 34. In this vein, the author will discuss which versions of history are effective for different audiences and how an artist renders history as compared to the official versions of history. We will consider how Tshibumba incorporates historical language into his paintings, how he creates affective imagery, why might an artist might diverge from official histories and then we will reflect on how the visual and textual languages are similar and different.

Tshibumba began to paint a series of 100 paintings beginning in 1973. This was to commemorate the history of Zaire. His work does so by transforming traditional African storytelling into a contemporary style. In the colonial period, Tshibumba's paintings feature important events and characters such as the political leaders Lumumba and Mobutu and Belgian monarchs Leopold II and Baudouin. Blommaert and Moten discuss Tshibumba's work. Moten uses this when he cites painting 34 of the Tropen museum collection where the military metes out punishment. As he puts it, there is a "lyric singularity" that unites colonial and post colonial eras. The song is obviously one of sadness, one provided at the suffering hands of the Belgian, then the Congolese military on the innocent civilian population and is unfortunately played by a military band (Moten, 2003, 127). Blommaert's analysis however is not pictorial. It is linguistic due to his analysis of handwriting in History of Zaire

Tshibumba shows how the forms of genre can work to offer space for Tshibumba to define himself as a historian by being a produce of ordered and organized knowledge. His writing style was generically regimented, reflecting Tshibumba's pictorial style of historical representation. It is not so much fact as voice (interpretation). This goes as well for Tshibumba's paintings (Blommaert, 2004, 6).