Allen Roberts

A Congolese Furtum Sacrum: Mystical Trajectories of a Mission Madonna

Abstract

Works of African art often work: they possess efficacies to transform lives. Creation and performance of such significant things inevitably instigate narrative processes. Objects speak both figuratively and, sometimes, literally; and as they are recollected, their pathways continue. Through consideration of a Madonna sculpted in the 1930s by a Congolese artist, competing histories of Katangans and Catholic missionaries living along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika suggest ways to decolonize a central African aesthesis.
 

The Madonna was first associated with the Catholic Mission of Mpala (DRC). In 1885, a
Belgian outpost founded at Mpala in 1883 was ceded to Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa,
better known as the White Fathers. In 1898, White Fathers were joined by White Sisters who
remained at Mpala until 1953, with healthcare and girls’ education their preoccupations. First
missionaries created a de facto Christian Kingdom at Mpala with ramifications still felt in the
mid-1970s during the presenter’s years of doctoral research there.
 

Since the early 1960s, most of Mpala Mission has been abandoned, its medical clinic and
other services long lost. Sometime thereafter, a furtum sacrum was undertaken – that is, the
Madonna relocated through what some would understand as theft, others pious “assistance”
analogous to how saintly relics held in European churches were “liberated” and relocated during the Crusades at the behest of the divinities in question. Through her sculpture as an nkisi “power object,” the Madonna was “translated” to local hands to meet local needs. As “Mother of us all,” she yearned to once again bless rural children afflicted by epidemics, and she did so through the ministrations of a Bulumbu spirit medium. Chalk and iron oxide on the sculpture attest to “interformances” of votive exchange. Our Mother’s tale is presented through an anthropology of credibility to counter (neo)colonial credulity and Eurocentric epistemicide.

Bio

Allen F. Roberts is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the University of California, Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. A socio-cultural anthropologist by training, he and his late spouse, art historian, and fellow WAC professor Mary “Polly” Nooter Roberts (d.2018) engaged African arts through research, writing, teaching, and museum exhibitions. Their book Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (1996) won the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Award for Outstanding Museum Scholarship, and the African Studies Association recognized their A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (2003) as the best book of its year. AL co-edited and contributed to a volume dedicated to Polly’s memory that is entitled Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence and was published in late 2022. This presentation foreshadows AL’s return to Polly’s doctoral research in the D. R. Congo in the late 1980s and his own in the 1970s.