Sex-Ed in the House of Becoming

 

Apologies for the janky phone photos - it will happen again

CW: Sexual violence. Nothing lurid, but the topic is unavoidable if you're talking about sexuality in the '30s Belgian Congo. 

I talked a big game about micro-blogging, but this barely counts. At least it's focused?

Zoe Strother's Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art is an incredible book, maybe even a perfect book; the quality of the work done in the field almost makes up for the tiny size of Congo Studies today. For this post, I want to spend some time with her discussion of a particular set of carved wooden panels and offer a few comments.

Nkanu Nkanda 

The panels we're looking at are from an nkanda boys' initiation house - Annemieke Van Damme, a Nkanu culture and history expert who has written extensively about the paired gendered initiations of the Yaka-Nkanu-Mbeko cultural complex, introduces nkanda in Nkanu and Mbeko Art and Ritual: 

"The word nkanda has various meanings. First of all, it can be translate as the force that is responsible for health problems such as infertility and sterility…nkanda also stands for a collective initiation ritual, which the Nkanu and Mbeko claim to have borrowed from the Yaka.* An nkanda session is seen as a preventive treatment to assure the procreativity of men and thus the continuity of the society. It is an exclusively male matter and starts with the circumcision of the neophytes…after the operation, the neophytes are gathered within an enclosure in the forest. This seclusion area - wherein they must stay for several months, in former times sometimes for one to three years-is also known as 'nkanda' or 'kimpasi ki nkanda'...Nkanda songs and dances are taught to them as well as an esoteric vocabulary, dictated by the nkisi nkanda** itself. Elder initiated men also instruct them in moral precepts and beliefs."

Initiated sculptor-philosophers created ephemeral installations that served a didactic purpose during the period of seclusion (where elders would explain the values encoded in the work to the boys) and celebrated their emergence into manhood through public display of the panels after they left the forest. Studies of nkanda panels - and similar ones produced for girls' initiations - is hampered by the fact that they were meaningfully assembled in these installations. The placement of the objects in relation to each other was crucial, as we know from anthropological work, but nkanda power vessels and carvings were rarely kept together by colonial collectors and in most cases the ensembles can't be reconstructed. Belgian collectors also seem to have heavily favored the panels that featured Europeans (they thought they were tributes lmao) and almost totally ignored the girls' initiation art. 

Rare example of an nkanda installation fully assembled. Drawing by Van Damme after an archive photograph from 1906.

 

We're lucky enough to know that the two panels that Strother is concerned with here had been placed facing each other when displayed, but there's a great deal of missing context. That being said, there's still a lot they can tell us. 

The Women Panel

The first of the panels, up at the top of this post, is one that would be intensely sexual to an Nkanu viewer. Strother introduces the topic with this framing passage:

"The composition is rich in sexual innuendo. All three figures are shown with young 'bedroom eyes,' that is, half-closed eyes, signifying carnal desire.' The women wear festive attire. Their skin is tinted red through lavish application of cosmetic lotion, and they wear the beaded bodices and skirts of girls who are affianced (Van Damme 2001, 38, 42). However, their bodices are raised to expose their breasts and their skirts are pulled apart to reveal their genitalia. Several of the designs allude to male and female genitalia."

Van Damme goes a bit further and suggests (in her book Spectacular Display: The Art of Nkanu Initiation Rituals) that artwork of this type represents a moment of technically-illicit passion - much like panels that depict erect young men with similarly sexy "bedroom eyes" wearing the garb of a fiancé on girls' initiation installations, the women here are pictured just before sleeping with their betrotheds. One thing that Van Damme misses, tho, is the point Strother catches w/r/t instructional value. 

"One purpose for the sculptures was sex education. The rounded belly of the woman on the man's right shows that she is already pregnant, and the carver has taken pains to depict both girls' vulva in a state of arousal. The labia majora have opened to expose the inner lips, which have dramatically changed color (blue for the pregnant figure)."

This is an excellent get. It fits with the didactic orientation of nkanda installation as a genre and is supported by the other teaching elements of the piece, like the kissing lovebirds (cool how that association exists for us and the Nkanu both) ignoring the phallic Gaboon viper over the top and the inclusion of the civet preparing to attack the coiled snake - which Nkanu informants told Van Damme was a warning for "initiates to respect one another and value their friendships." The detailed depiction of female arousal might also hook into Chokwe ideas of Nkanu men as "subject to their wives" and "unmanned by their style of copulation." Perhaps there was a relatively high societal expectation for Nkanu men to be attentive lovers? More broadly, historians have become more attentive to the premodern use of obscenity (and this was almost def obscene to the Nkanu, who are generally very shy about discussing sex) as a method of sexual education. Carissa Harris' Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain is a very good example of work done in this style:

"Some men deploy obscenity when teaching their peers how to dominate and dehumanize women, while others use it to challenge dominant narratives about masculinity and to propose alternatives…Obscenity enables women to voice their dissatisfaction with the sexual status quo, to instruct their partners about pleasure, and to teach each other strategies for negotiation. It is this capacity of obscenity to educate and change minds that I investigate throughout Obscene Pedagogies, in order to understand its meanings in the later Middle Ages and to uncover its present-day implications."

The Soldier Panel 

The white around the eyes is a trait common to Congolese in Nkanu art, it's in the first panel above as well.

We pivot towards negative instruction in the next panel. Strother provides the description below:

"Another set of wall panels introduces a more ominous note through reference to the Force Publique, the colonial army composed of Africans from across the nation, rarely from the region where they were serving. In the center stands a Belgian colonial officer dressed in pith helmet, khakis, and boots. Paradoxically, the artist deemphasizes his mastery by depicting him unarmed. It is the barefoot Congolese soldiers who protect him, armed with rifles and a showy ammunition belt. The panels directly connect power to sex. All three figures have bedroom eyes, although only the European has drilled pupils, which command the viewer's attention…even as he adopts the perfectly symmetrical, frontal posture appropriate to authority. What is on their minds, all three? The panel is covered with designs representing women's labia (the four leaves) and the vulva during intercourse (the huge concentric diamonds)"

Keep the paradox of the officer in a posture of authority but lacking force in mind, we'll come back to it. Van Damme and Strother both read this panel as a reference to the heavily documented history of routine sexual assault that was a hallmark of Belgian colonialism in the Congo well past the Free State period. I'm not really in the mood to go through this in detail, it's extremely dark ofc, but it is worth noting that the inciting events that kicked off the '31 revolt among the Nkanu's Pende affines was the practice of systematized terror rape by HCB employees and state officials.  As an aside, in reports produced for the Apostolate, the Jesuits seemed to genuinely not understand the resistance of the “Yaka tribes west of the Kwango” (the Yaka and the Nkanu were often conflated in this period - they are related groups with fuzzy boundaries) to Catholic education - "hostile to all whites, missionaries included, they want nothing more than for the intruders to leave" - while also mentioning the sheer amount of “sexual indiscretions” colonial agents engaged in while overseeing Nkanu territory. Perhaps the thinking was something similar to the description of Pende people as an entire culture of pimps and whores by Belgian lawmakers + media after the blistering (and quickly suppressed) Jungers report came out - downplaying the viciousness of the sexual violence perpetrated against Pende, Nkanu, Yaka and many many other women and men. 

Considering the nature of this, it may come as a surprise that Van Damme's Nkanu informants were adamant that the panel should be read as satire:

"Van Damme's field associates insisted that the sculptures were made to provoke laughter. In fact, depictions often mocked named individuals, including colonial administrators (2001, 27, 37)...which has the goal of awakening an individual from his "absentmindedness" to be more "attentive to his social surroundings"...The Nkanu panels mocked colonial officers and thereby encouraged the boys to laugh at (rather than emulate) their behavior…In the talk and jokes that surrounded the presentation of the carvings, Nkanu men depicted oversexed Europeans (whether commercial agent, colonial administrator, or missionary) as negative masculine models demonstrating how not to behave. The first panel goes further, warning that boys who take the colonial as their model will reap the consequences...The bawdy humor surrounding boys' initiations allowed European sexuality to be brought into the daylight."

And we return to sexual education; the presentation of the deviant (and inherently violent) sexuality of the representatives of the colonial state as a lesson in failed masculine behavior for Nkanu boys entering their own manhoods. This floored me when I read it the first time; what an elegant and powerful visual discourse on sexual ethics. It's all the more skillful for being easily understood by other Nkanu while remaining obscure to twitchy Belgian authorities and their fragile egos:

"Even though the sculptures were made by Nkanu for Nkanu, they were exhibited publicly, and it took daring to represent agents allied with the government in a police state. There are documented cases of Congolese in this region being cruelly whipped for mockery (Gusimana 1970, 64-65), and territorial officers were charged with surveillance of collective gatherings and all forms of representations."

It's almost unbelievable in a very believable way but the mocking soldier panel was displayed for years in a missionary museum. Maybe they agreed that the colonial state was made up of rapist freaks. 

Power Differential

The only loose end for me is the Belgian administrator in the women panel - following Van Damme's lead, Strother says that "the man's overlaid hands probably indicate that he is clapping to acknowledge the viewer - or to accept responsibility for impregnating his female companion." I'm not satisfied by this answer, especially when considering that this panel was placed across from the soldier panel. As we've seen, Strother argues that there is a reversal of power in the soldier panel - it is the Congolese askaris who are armed and portrayed in the warrior's martial poses, not the Belgian officer. The officer's power stance is another joke; like the colonial state itself, he is impotent if not flanked by the bodies of his Congolese subordinates. I suspect that the Belgian administrator, standing between the Nkanu women, is meant be understood in the same light. The administrator isn't in control here, the women are. They're smiling (in a subtler way than the broad grin of the administator), they're aroused, they have the red lotioned glow of the women's retreat upon them…they're into it. It's not the broken sexuality of the rubber camp. They're not interested in the Belgian between them, who - following the ideas presented by Strother - may be literally impotent in this reading; they're looking at their carved counterparts on the girls' initiation panels, ready for the embrace. 

* The Yaka in turn say that they got it from the Nkanu, so who knows where it started. Could all be true, with parts of the modern ritual being added on as it circulated between various neighboring peoples. 

**The representations of the nkisi nkanda, spirits of Yaka origin key in initiations, and the other minkisi are extremely cool. Here's an nkisi mpungu - collected in the 90s but possibly made as far back as the 1910s:

***Not useful but interesting - among the closely-related Eastern Pende, this specific lowered half-glance associated with seduction in women is called meso a kushiya (“eyes that kill”) and considered especially powerful if a man can pull it off.