Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2007

By Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers, anthropologist, curator of the Ubangi exhibition, and editor of the accompanying book.

Introduction :
Consider this unique sculpture (fig. 1). Collected in northwestern Congo before 1897, its origin is unknown and so is its function. A hundred years ago it was attributed to the non-existent “Bangala” people and said to have served as a “neckrest-fetish.”1 The object’s patina contradicts this use and more recently it has been reattributed alternatively to either the Ngbandi or the Mbanza people. And yet, notwithstanding all these uncertainties, the sculpture has an unmistaken Ubangi feel to it. This is an area in which the arts share “family resemblances”—“a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.”2
The exhibition and the book Ubangi: Art and Cultures from the African Heartland at the Afrika Museum in Berg-en-Dal, Netherlands, from September 29, 2007–March 31, 2008, will survey the various artistic productions from the Ubangi region, which is situated in the heart of Africa. The term Ubangi has been chosen for several reasons, and even though it may sound unfamiliar, it is quite appropriate to encompass the cultures discussed here. In the past, Ubangi has not been used as a specific cultural designation but rather as the name of a river that runs through Central Africa. It separates the northwestern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from both the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Republic of Congo. It flows into the Congo River just south of the equator, yet upstream it has no real source: the Ubangi “rises” at the confluence of the Mbomu and Uele Rivers. Properly, the latter should also have been called Ubangi, since it constitutes its longest branch, but because of past maneuvering by one of the colonial powers, we are left with this anomaly.