Mary Nooter Roberts

The King is a Woman: Shaping Power in Luba Royal Arts

Women have long been central to Luba political practices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and they are depicted prominently in royal arts dating from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries (cover).Luba possessed one of central Africa’s most influential precolonial polities that continues to play a pivotal role in Katanga Province of southeastern DRC. Kingship is rooted in notions of the person that are integral to Luba philosophy, namely through the concept of bumuntu or humanity, as articulated by Luba scholar Mutombo NkuluN’Sengha. 1 “Kingship is the people,” he tells us, “and the king’s role is to protect the people, to ensure human flourishing, and to serve the spirit.” At the investiture of a ruler, the titleholder Twite reminded the king that he was not king for himself but rather for all his people, including those who came before him. “At the center of this is life, and women are the ones giving life. The foundation of kingship is the women,” the professor adds. The iconography and motifs on Luba insignia and related articles of leadership are devised, owned, and deployed primarily by men, yet they allude to women’s power both conceptually and literally (Fig. 1). The visual record combined with Luba testimony demonstrates that while men ruled in overt terms, women constituted the covert side of sacred authority and played critical roles in alliance-building, decision-making, succession disputes, and investiture rites. Women also figured centrally in attracting and securing the spiritual allegiance necessary for a state built on the strength of tutelary spirits called bavidye. As spirit mediums, certain women served as guardians of and conduits to the most sacred dwellings of Luba spirits. Most important, the memory of each deceased king was embodied by a woman. The perpetuation of the Luba royal line was attributed not just to conception through the king’s mother, but to the reincarnation of the king’s spirit in a woman who became the king herself (Nooter 1991:271–75). Processes of exchange and communication between the new king and the spirit mediums of previous kings formed an important dimension of Luba royal practice that will be considered in the final section of this article. The institution of female spirit mediums created obstacles for Belgian colonial authorities seeking to centralize their power as they exerted hegemony over the Congo in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In effect, spirit mediumship and the entire royal apparatus founded upon the ambiguous gendering of power became a quiet form of resistance in the early colonial period.2 This article explores the ontological relationships among power, gender, and spirituality to propose that ambiguity is a deliberate and integral dimension of Luba politics and artistic representation. Through a varied range of Luba male and female perspectives and voices, combined with theoretical models of “composite,” “fractal,” and “relational” forms of personhood, Luba sculpture can be more deeply understood in its complexity and multireferentiality.

Flickering images, floating signifiers: optical innovation and visual piety in senegal

ABSTRACT A Sufi movement of Senegal known as the Mouride Way possesses a vibrant visual culture made manifest in all manner of popular, devotional, and healing arts. Portraits of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853–1927), the saint around whose writings and life lessons the Mouride movement has been created, appear in every imaginable medium, but all are derived from the only known photograph of Bamba, taken by French colonial authorities in 1913. In 2003, lenticular images of the saint were introduced as an optical technology new to Mourides. Astonishingly enough, one of these shifts from a portrait of Bamba to an image of “the Prophet as a boy,” underscoring their spiritual proximity. This latter picture has been traced back to a photograph of a Tunisian boy taken around 1904 by the Orientalist Rudolph Lehnert and published in a 1914 issue of National Geographic. Despite such history, visual hagiography has it that the portrait was drawn by a sixth-century Syrian monk named Bahira. When Bahira encountered Muhammad as a 12-year-old boy, he recognized that he would become the Prophet, and Bahira is now assumed to have limned Muhammads likeness. From these ancient times the image has somehow floated to contemporary Iran, where it is said to have been a favorite of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and on to Senegal. Some Mourides are uncomfortable with portrayal of the Prophet in this manner, and especially as a lenticular image flickering between His picture and that of Amadou Bamba; yet the image does exist, and it raises intriguing intellectual and spiritual issues broached here.

Senses of Time: Video and Film-Based Arts of Africa

More than fifty years ago, the art historian George Kubler wrote that time is, “like mind, not knowable as such” (1962:13).1 Kubler was concerned with human difficulties in understanding time other than by looking back upon the material record to assess processes of change and permanence. He did not, however, question how time is conceived in situation-specific modes or how it might play out differently based on location. We do live in a world made up of multiple times. Reproductive “clocks” tick according to biological time, the continents move on geological time, our watches are set to the precision of US Naval Observatory time. As scientific as such measurements may be, time is always a cultural construction. Precolonial African societies had their own senses of time, and rather than linear or strictly so, some understood time to be circular or a spiral leading from origins to present moments. Colonial authorities made great efforts to colonize time, yet vestiges of earlier temporal systems, calendars, and astrologies remain.2 As Kubler astutely pointed out, notions of time are all connected to material records—those objects often called “art,” as we often find in Africa. Now that the art world includes an ever-wider spectrum of media including “time-based” video, digital, and performance arts, relationships between time and art have become much more complicated and much more necessary a field of inquiry. The phrase “time-based media” was coined by museum conservators grappling to come to terms with artworks that move through time.3 As a result, time has too often been treated as a byproduct of the medium rather than a central strategy in the production and content of the work. The exhibition “Senses of Time: Video and Film-Based Arts of Africa” explores how and why artists work with time, to what ends and effects, and in parThe exhibition “Senses of Time: Video and FilmBased Works of Africa” is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from December 20, 2015–January 2, 2017, as co-curated by Karen E. Milbourne, National Museum of African Art, and Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts, UCLA and LACMA. Many of the ideas developed in this essay came to fruition during and since a colloquium on Time and Temporalities in African Art hosted by The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, as convened in April 2014 by Karen E. Milbourne. Participants in the colloquium were Bili Bidjocka, Theo Eshetu, Naima Keith, Dominique Malaquais, Prita Meier, Simon Njami, Sylvester Ogbechie, Sue Williamson, and Polly Nooter Roberts. The hosts and colleagues of the colloquium played an important role in helping to create a stimulating dialogue and set of discussions around a provocative subject with far-reaching implications for the fields of art history and African art. This focused exhibition brings together a selection of time-based works that address the role of temporality as embodied by the medium itself and as experienced—and produced—by the body, the senses, and the choreographies of memories and identities in motion. After opening at LACMA, “Senses of Time” will be on view at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton NY, from September 10–December 18, 2016.

The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts

| african arts SPRING 2017 VOL. 50, NO. 1 Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts is Professor in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, Consulting Curator for African Art at LACMA, and a co-editor of African Arts. She was Senior Curator at the Museum for African Art in New York until 1994 and Deputy Director and Chief Curator of UCLA’s Fowler Museum until 2008. Her award-winning works include Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (1996) and A Saint in the City: Su Arts of Urban Senegal (with Allen F. Roberts, 2003). In 2007, she was decorated by the Republic of France as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. proberts@arts.ucla.edu exhibition preview