Magazines - Tribal Art Spring 2011

By Bart Suys, art historian and head of communications at the Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire in Brussels.

Introduction
Bart Suys, art historian and head of communications at the Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire in Brussels. Tony Jorissen’s De Lunda en de Tshokwe van Shaba is a major work: a voluminous book devoted to the peoples of the high arid plateau area between the Kasai and Lubilash rivers in the extreme west of the Shaba province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Lunda, Chokwe, Lwena, Ndembo, and Minungu all inhabit this area. This work compiles a series of hitherto unpublished texts and photographs from the archives of the Catholic Order of Friars Minor in Saint-Trond (Sint-Truiden), Belgium. These documents arrived there between the 1920s (the year that the Friars Minor took over the work of the Scheutist and Benedictine missionaries in the former Lulua district) and the 1960s, as colonialism came to an end. Previously published studies are consciously omitted in this work, so rather than being an exhaustive compilation, it is intended to complement what already exists. The work’s merit lies in its presentation of this hitherto unknown material, which is now permanently preserved for history. The author has transcribed the fathers’ texts in their entirety, offers commentary on them, and compares their content to that of other sources. He gives a brief biography of the principal authors and photographers, who include Ambroos Delille, Theodard Claes, Johannes-Franciscus Borgonjon, and Medard Marchal. Footnotes reference the work of ten or so additional but less important authors.