The museum was designed as a showcase for Congo Free State, which King Leopold created in l885 and ceded to Belgium to be run as a colony in l908. It was during this time, according to Adam Hochschild's harrowing book, King Leopold's Ghost, five to eight million Congolese, enslaved as rubber and ivory collectors, died (actually the figure is from Mark Twain). But you won't find anything about the genocidal downside of Leopold’s “philanthropical enterprise,” as he called it (he never even set foot in the Congo)   in the displays, except for one painting in a corridor hung with the work of  the artists, known as les Africanistes, who were sent down to the colonies in the twenties and thirties  to document and celebrate their  riches and colorful exoticity. (Much of their work is reproduced in  Lynn Thornton : Les Africanistes : Peintres Voyageurs). Called  "La Civilization du Congo," it shows a Congolese man being flogged at a whipping post, while a pith-helmeted colonial ticks off the lashes in a notebook.

         As you enter the museum, to the left is undoubtedly one of the longest dugout canoes in existence, excavated from from a single tree and capable of holding 100 people. There is a diorama with a  family of stuffed okapis, the secretive forest giraffe that was the last large mammal on the planet to be discovered by science, in l902. Three adults and a baby with "standoffish glass eyes," as Barbara Kingsolver describes the stuffed okapis in the American Museum of Natural History in her novel about the Congo, Poisonwood Bible . One of the most popular exhibits over the years has been a replica of a Leopard Men, or Anioto. These were members of a secret Congolese society who dressed in leopard skins and murdered people in the night, ripping them open with iron claws or knives and  making it look like the work of a leopard. "It must be understood that such ritual institutions dedicated exclusively to murder have only seen the light of day rarely in Africa," explains a sign, added recently to mitigate the longstanding stereotype of the savage African. 
 
       By the time Congo won independence, in l960, the museum's collection boasted 240,000 objects, and many more have been acquired since. Among them, in a small glass case off to one side that you wouldn't notice unless you knew what you were looking at, is the  delicately
beaded diadem of Rwabugiri, the 19th century umwaami or king of Rwanda, which was worn by every umwaami after him until the monarchy was overthrown in l959. What is this doing here? I wondered in shock. It's like having the crown of England or the mitre of the Pope. But then I came back to the argument : if it wasn't here, where would it be ? Would it exist even ? Would it have survived the revolution of l959 that brought down the monarchy and created a Hutu people’s republic, and the successive purges of the former Tutsi ruling class, culminating in the genocide of l944 ? 

     Saving such primary artifacts of Africa’s heritage, however selfish the motive, is undoubtedly one of the few positive things that colonialism did in its 60 year tenure of  Africa’s political landscape.  

       In another case was a Lega ritual helmet, worn by initiates of the bwami society,  which was almost exactly like one I picked up last summer in rebel-held eastern Congo, whose embattled national parks I was doing a report on for Ted Turner's  United Nations Foundation (the UNF is contributing $4 million to the heroic effort to keep the parks going during the civil war; see Dispatch #2.) It had a plume of elephant tail hairs, clasped in cowrie shells, and the skullcap was studded with cowries. Mine is studded with buttons--  a more recent model, showing the progressive influence of Western goods on Lega culture. The Lega live in the forests of South Kivu province, but like millions of their countrymen, the civil war has displaced them, and they   aren't making these things at the moment and may  never again. So I may well have one of the last Lega helmets.

       One room at the Musee Royale is devoted to the 125 most celebrated pieces :  the masterpiece collection. The most famous one is the Mbangu mask of the Peule, a nomadic people of the West African desert, which was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal l984 show "Primitivism in the 20th century : the Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern." Its twisted face, half black, half white,  is often compared with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, although it was used by the Peule in their curing rituals and represents someone with partial facial paralysis, perhaps from a stroke, and actually postdates the Picasso by decades. 

       On the top floor was a shows called Exit Congo, about the history of collecting the sculpture of the Congo basin, "a story of extraction, alienation, appropriation" of objects that then "had a second life as museum exhibits." The show hoped "to offer some sort of redress to all the unjustly forgotten artists, the creators of the masterpieces on display." Many of the pieces  were fetishes and other "pagan idols" confiscated by missionaries, who burned most of them, but sent the best ones north. "The model of the museum was the 19th-century  approach," the show's curator, Boris Wastiau explained  "collecting everything in every prescribed field of the natural and social sciences." The imposition of the Western rational?scientific mindset on to something that was very
different, more focused on the  world of  invisible causes, "seemed to establish a firm grip on things and thus control them," Wastiau (who obviously read Michel Foucault’s On the Order of Things)  writes in one of the show’s explanatory texts.  Since l960 the museum has been searching how to reinvent itself and to redefine its mission,  but it remains as much a  reflection of its time— a cold, dark, musty  relic of absolutism no longer possible, at least in its monarchic form,  fascinating in its  own way  —      as the exhibits are in theirs.
       There are also 49 important private collections in Belgium. Three--  the Felix, Marc, and Vanderstraete collections--   rival the Musée Royale's. (See Dick Beaulieu's book, "Belgium Collects African Art.") "Collecting is something that is innate in many Europeans and Americans," the museum's curator of ethnology, who turned out to be an old friend,  Gustaaf Verswijver, told
me.  (Verswijver and I had not seen each other since l976, when we spent a month together in a recently contacted Cayapo Indian village in the Amazon, so there was much to catch up on.) "In the nineteenth century,” he went on, “every family had a curio cabinet full of exotic things."

      It was a swath of long-extinct giant sloth fur in Bruce Chatwin's grandfather's curio cabinet that set him off on the quest that resulted in his first book, "In Patagonia." 

       According to Susan M. Pearce's "On Collecting : An Investigation Into Collecting in the European Tradition," nearly one in every three people in North America collects something. Pearce identifies various categories of European acquisitiveness in chapters that include :  "Collecting in a Post?modernist World," "Collecting Culture," "Collecting Ourselves," "Collecting Relationships," "Collecting in Time," "Collecting in Space;" "Collecting the Other, Within and Without"; "The Other Beyond and Before,”  and “Collecting the Shape of Things to Come." The afficionados of African art are collectors of  the Other.  Jacques Germain, a Montreal?based dealer in ancient Africa art, explains that the appeal of his merchandise is "spiritual, plastic, aesthetic, and exotic—   they are things from another culture. They have everything.” Germain reckons that there are about 5000 serious collectors in the world, 200  "serious serious" ones,  20?50 "serious, active, wealthy" ones," and 20 to 30 museums who are "in the game of buying." They are supplied by 10 to 12 high?end dealers, who have "the knowledge and the money to buy and the talent to chose." The record price for a sub-Saharan sculpture is $3.4 million, for a queen figure from Cameroun that was auctioned at Sotheby's in l989. Germain says that after many years of traveling all over Africa, looking for art,  "I don’t go any more, because there is nothing left." He only deals in pieces that have a provenance. "There are so many brilliant fakes. The Congolais are particularly expert at making them."
      This June the five hundred pieces in the Hubert Goldet collection were auctioned in three  sessions in Paris that attracted everyone in the game. Goldet, who died last year, kept the entire collection in his Paris apartment. It was the most important one to come on the market since Helena Rubinstein’s in l966. Germain was there, of course.   
 
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