Social Science Research Council

“A Visual History of the Congo: From Ngongo Leteta to Patrice Lumumba”

Certain “moments” in history (which can accommodate diverse temporalities within them) produce a visual richness: images, memories, metaphors. But how does this visuality contribute in turn to the production of historical moments? Or, to be more specific, how does the visual, via transnational networks of production, circulation, and consumption, collaborate in the production of the “historicity” of certain events or eras?  And how is this “historicity” different if one is located in the metropolitan archive or in the former colony?

A history of colonial visuality and of Congolese “seeing” in the Congo from the 1880s through the 1960s, my dissertation will take up some of the questions above. Most existing studies limit themselves to a study of photography and cinema in the interwar and postwar periods, and there has never been any analysis moving outside a limited study of visual representations. I will approach the study of visual history in the Congo through a number of key “moments,” beginning during the imperial wars of conquest and concluding with Patrice Lumumba’s era and the Simba rebellions of the mid-1960s. This study represents a new departure in imperial and Congolese history by foregrounding the visual. Not only will the production of colonial visualities be at its core, but this study will explore whether and how the “key moments” I identify in the archives are known and remembered in the Tetela cultural zone. The dissertation will, moreover, rethink how visuality, which I hypothesize was essential to the production of ethnicity in colonialism, “fixed” ethnicity in colonial imaginations, through visual conceits. Finally, this dissertation will shed additional light on the production of colonial modernities through the mechanisms of production, consumption, and circulation of visuality. 

My second major goal will be to take parts of the visual archive for each of these moments to the field, bringing this archival evidence into conversation with the memories of living Congolese-especially Tetela-thereby adding specifically Congolese layers of knowledge about visual history.