Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2010

By Julien Volper, assistant curator of ethnography at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Tervuren.

Introduction
The Nande inhabit the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in what is now the Beni and Lubero areas of North Kivu province, and numbered one and a half million at the time of the most recent census. They speak the Kinande language. At the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, the Nande migrated to the territories they occupy today. Prior to that, they lived east of Lake Albert in what is now Uganda, and were dependents of the Bunyoro kingdom. Not all of the Nande made this westward migration, and some groups remained in Uganda. These “sedentary” Nande are known in the literature as the Kondjo. Various clans, including the Bashu, the Batangi, the Baswaga, the Bahera, the Bakira, the Banisanga, and the Basongora, today constitute the Nande cultural entity. Each of these clans is under the authority of a crowned chief, or mwami. Nande art is relatively little known and few objects have been correctly attributed to them. Within the framework of this article, we will discuss several rare Nande statuettes from the collection of the Musée Royal d’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium, and their relevance to the Nande political and social structure, as well as the clues they hold to the relationships with other cultural groups in the region.