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Papers of an African King Collected by Jacques Hymans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2014
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During a visit in the summer 1970, Jacques Hymans, professor of History at San Francisco State Univeisity, found discarded papers strewn over the floor of an abandoned European-style house at Mushenge (Nsheng), the capital of the Kuba kingdom, zone Mweka, West Kasai, Democratic Republic of Congo. He salvaged them and then kept them at home. After his death Ms Kelley Hymans gave the papers to the collections of Memorial Library of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. To this a notebook, which Wisconsin obtained through the good offices of Professor Mary Douglas, has been added. This contains a census of the capital for 1939-40 carried out by Jules Lene (Lyeen) as tribute collector for the Kuba king.
Since early colonial times the Kuba people were well-known in Europe for their sculpture and their artistic textiles, and because they formed a single kingdom headed by a “divine” king. This was also the only territory in the Belgian Congo where “indirect administration” was officially practiced after 1920. Under such circumstances it is not surprising that the Kuba capital Nsheng, known as Mushenge, eventually became a minor tourist attraction for amateurs of their arts. After independence, travel in Congo became difficult and the prestige of Mushenge declined, but some of its fascination remained, and Hymans was one of the persons still attracted to it. His last visit to Mushenge occurred in 1970, not long after the death of king Bop Mabinc maKyeen. It is on that occasion that he salvaged the papers now in Madison.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 2003
References
1 As far as I know, the earliest recorded visit of such a tourist is the mention of a certain van Essche, artist-painter on 1 January 1940, found in the Hymans papers. For tourism see Guide du voyageur au Congo Belge et au Ruanda-Urundi, published in Brussels by the colonial office for intending tourists. In the 1953 edition (p. 400) we are told that the Kuba are a people of artists and later on that one can buy interesting “objets de collection” at Mushenge but made for commercial sale: objects in ivory, in wood and in iron—and one of the five illustrations in color in that edition is a Kuba mask. This collection of papers makes relatively frequent references to masks and other art objects, and even includes a request by the official cooperative of carvers to the king in December 1954 to decree minimum prices so as to avoid unfair dumping.
2 Some researchers might want to use the Tshiluba grammar and/or dictionary by E. Willems (but allow for variation in grammar and spelling, as most texts are in the Lulua variant of Tshiluba). The largest community of Tshiluba-speakers in the USA lives in Milwaukee.
3 For the 1950s a good deal of concrete evidence in this regard is preserved in Vansina, , “Kuba Field Notes,” 6Google Scholar reels of microfilm, available from the Center for Research Libraries, MF-4975
4 The main account of the kingdom or “chefferie des Bakuba” for this period is Vansina, Jan, “Les Kuba et l'administration territoriale de 1919 à 1960,” Cultures et Développement 4(1972), 275–325Google Scholar; See also idem., “Du royaume kuba au “territoire des Bakuba,” Etudes Congolaises 2(1969), 3-53, and idem., “Les mouvements religieux kuba (Kasai) à l'époque coloniale,” Etudes d'Histoire Africaine 2(1971), 155-87.
5 These materials are available digitally at http://www.library.wisc.edu/reslist.etexta.html and include this introduction and a rough list of contents.
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