Museum shows of African tribal art often suffer from double binds of aesthetics and ethnography: objects that stun but bewilder and educational material that informs but devitalizes. Not “Kongo: Power and Majesty,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibits and texts in this show combine to unfold an enthralling, epic tale, which spans more than four centuries, from the late fifteenth to the early twentieth, in the Central African regions that are now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and Angola. You will come away with vivid memories of the art—some hundred and fifty wonderful pieces—both for what it is and for what it says.
When the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão arrived at the mouth of the Congo River, in 1483, and erected a stele invoking the authority of his king, he encountered a courtly civilization that lacked little in refinement except written language. Fantastically carved ivory horns and geometrically patterned raffia weavings from that time bespeak lofty traditions. Amicable trade relations soon brought examples north. Two elegant horns entered the collection of Cosimo I de’ Medici, in Florence.
Kongo chiefs long controlled trade with Europe. The imports weren’t only material. Christianity took hold, as witnessed at the Met by fiercely expressive cast-brass crucifixes by African artisans which convey the ardor of conversion. The Kongo’s main export, until the early eighteen-hundreds, is terrible just to think of: slaves. By the end of that century, something like a third of the region’s population had been sold. (Nineteenth-century spiral reliefs on elephant tusks narrate scenes of the human trafficking.) Thereafter, competition for resources among Great Britain, France, and Belgium crushed local sovereignty, with catastrophic effects that Joseph Conrad dramatized in “Heart of Darkness,” based on his five-month stint on a Belgian riverboat in 1890.
The Kongo’s religious and social orders relied on priests who, dispensing healing and justice, mediated between life and death. We learn from statuary in the exhibition the color code of those realms: black for life, white for death, and red for states of transition. Maternal fecundity was another major theme. Kneeling or sitting cross-legged, eloquently carved females dandle males who range from babies to what look like tiny adults. (One grasps a woman’s breast with one hand and his erect penis with the other.) Robust unions of the carnal and the spiritual declare confidence in the interrelation of the here and now and the beyond.
The show concludes, thunderously, with fifteen of the twenty known surviving Mangaakas from the nineteenth century: wooden male figures, most nearly four feet high, with stout legs, stomach pouches for magical substances, and beetling heads that sport wide, staring white eyes and sharpened teeth. They bristle with nails and bits of iron, each the record of a wish or a curse. They were made as last-ditch defensive implements amid the colonial devastation of Kongo societies. It feels as if all the force of millennia of tribal experience were clenched into fists of violent conviction. There are no other sculptures in the world so fierce and sorrowing. ♦
