Leon de Sousberghe, S.J. 1903-2006.

"Nous parlons de l'art Pende actuel..."

Leon de Clerque-Wissocq de Sousberghe, the author of Lart pende (1959) and many other important treatises, died on March 30, 2006, at the age of 102. He was born on October 25, 1903, at Conjoux Hall, Conneux, in the Province of Namur. Scion to one of the aristocratic families of Belgium, de Sousberghe wryly remembered a happy childhood hunting rabbits on the picturesque family domain. Following the chaos of the German invasion in 1914, his family sent him to secondary schools first in Paris and then on the Isle of Jersey. In 1918, he transferred to the College jesuite de Marmoutier in Tours, where he obtained a French Baccalaureat in Letters and Philosophy. Returning to Belgium, de Sousberghe began graduate studies at the University of Louvain and received doctorates in both philosophy and law, 1929-30.

The son of a vicomte and grandson of a count, de Sousberghe forfeited his title to join the Jesuits in 1930. He achieved his lifelong desire of being ordained as a Catholic priest in August 1936. His younger sister, Anne, showed a similar dedication and joined a congregation of cloistered nuns in London. De Sousberghe spent two years teaching constitutional law and social legislation at the Institut superieur de commerce St. Ignace in Antwerp before war once again intervened. In 1939, he was mobilized as a military chaplain. Assigned to serve the Allied troops because of his superb English language skills, he was captured and interned as prisoner of war by the Germans.

Although de Sousberghe had long been interested in the formal study of prehistory and ethnography, he initially pursued philosophy and law, believing that he would be more likely to gain entry to the Jesuit order.

However, in 1950, his superiors authorized his professional retooling and sent him for a year of independent study in London with Daryll Forde, head of the department of anthropology at University College London and director of the International African Institute. Forde directed the studies of many leading Belgian Africanists after 1948, including Jacques Maquet, Daniel Biebuyck, and Jan Vansina (Biebuyck 2001:105-106). For such a mature student, the switch from law to ethnography was more credible, since prehistory was classed as one of the natural sciences. Following the year of coursework in London, de Sousberghe conducted his first field research among the Pende of the Belgian Congo, 195153, supported by the Institut pour la Recherche scientifique en Afrique centrale (IRSAC). After a furlough, he returned for additional fieldwork, 1955-57, funded this time by both IRSAC and the Academie royale des Sciences coloniales.

From 1951, de Sousberghe became a professional researcher and only occasionally performed teaching or other duties for the church. From 1960-62, he served as professor

of social anthropology at the Universite Ibero-Americaine in Mexico. In 1963, he taught at the Universite Lovanium in Kinshasa and at the University of Bujumbura in Burundi. In 1965-67, he conducted another two years of fieldwork in Bukavu among the Havu and Nyanga.

Many have speculated that the great anthropologists experience alienation from their home culture which renders them sympathetic to and curious about the mechanics of culture elsewhere. Although de Sousberghe renounced his family fortune in joining the Jesuits, his social position sometimes isolated him. It is probably no accident that he spent most of his adult life abroad before retirement. As a Belgian imprisoned among Allied troops in a German prisoner-of-war camp; as an anthropologist working among missionaries; and as a scholar usually berthed outside of a university, he never fit easily into any one community.

When finally authorized to conduct ethnographic research, de Sousberghe requested a posting in the Great Lakes region. However, his Jesuit superiors insisted that he be lodged in one of their own mission stations and selected Totshi, just west of the Kwilu River, arguing that the Kongo had already received much scholarly attention, whereas there was nothing comparable for the Pende. As a result, the Kwilu Pende became the center for de Sousberghe's research. He spent the first nine months attached to the mission of Totshi, near the Shimuna chiefdom, studying the language (Kipende). He then conducted six months further research at Ngashi among the South-Central Pende, who are culturally allied to those west of the Kwilu. He spent three weeks visiting small chiefdoms on the left bank of the Loange River, several weeks at Kilembe, a few days in the territory of Idiofa (with the help of the Abbe B. Sheta), three weeks among the Eastern Pende, and returned for another six-month stay west of the Kiwlu, this time concentrating on the chiefdom of Mushinga. The Pende language is characterized by great dialectical diversity. De Sousberghe found that each zone required significant linguistic adaption, since even the Kipende spoken at Mushinga differed significantly from that at Ngashi.

It can be inspirational to realize that de Sousberghe discovered his life's work at the age of forty-seven. When he arrived in the Belgian Congo, he hoped to build on his years of training in theology and law. However, the realities of working during the colonial period dictated otherwise. "I had asked to live in a village or in a Pende family as a way of learning the language. But Jesuit superiors ordered that I had to live in a Mission-house and wear a [white] cassock.... The most painful restriction was the refusal to let me live among the Pende." (1) As it was, he was only allowed to travel away from the mission after nine months in residence and then had to spend the night in one of the rest houses established by the colonial government. De Sousberghe never failed to regret that he was unable to take advantage of church policy, liberalized fifteen years later, which would have allowed him to dress as a layman and to spend the night in local villages.

De Sousberghe spoke often of feeling psychologically inhibited by wearing a cassock. He only broke the rule once, removing the cumbersome garment when he needed to "waddle for kilometers in the water knee-deep" (2) to reach the remote seat of Mwaat Kombaan, an act for which he was rebuked. The Jesuits never forbade him from pursuing religious inquiries, and indeed his predecessor at Totshi, Jacques Delaere, published a superlative overview of Pende religious beliefs (Delaere 1942-45). Nevertheless, de Sousberghe steered away from most religious questions, believing that his interest would be met with suspicion. Marked so clearly as an ambassador for the Catholic Church, he also felt unable to attend divination sessions.

De Sousberghe's hopes to study the indigenous justice system met other obstacles. Immediately on his arrival, the Belgian Chef de Territoire visited his superiors and insisted that he "avoid political inquiries" that could revive old disputes about land tenure or the appointment of chiefs, warning, "We have settled the political situation for good." (3) Even when administrators were sympathetic, de Sousberghe discovered that he needed to exercise a certain caution. When he presented his papers at Kilembe, the colonial administrator asked if he wished to interview the Lunda chief, Mwaat Kombaan. De Sousberghe assented. Only later did he learn that in order to obey the official summons, the old man had been obliged to walk more than 100 kilometers in a few days' time, in acute distress, suffering as he was from a scrotal hernia. De Sousberghe's conscience never failed to bother him about this incident. In response, he decided to concentrate on kinship and marriage, issues that seemed inoffensive but which were engaging so many anthropologists of this period. The mature statement of this work is Les Pende (1963). The culmination of his comparative work on definitions of incest appears in Don et contredon de la vie (1986) for which he won the Georges Bruel Prize of the Academie des Sciences d'Outre-Mer at the age of eighty-two.

De Sousberghe's faith led him to a respectful engagement with Pende culture, but he often felt himself to be the odd man out in the field. Although the Jesuits have a long history of supporting distinguished ethnographic research in the Congo (e.g. J. Van Wing, M. Plancquaert, Wautier de Mathieu), some of de Sousberghe's colleagues resented his work. In 1953, when he took furlough, de Sousberghe left behind most of his photographs. He was horrified to discover on his return that someone had systematically destroyed his photographs and slides, believing that this work somehow undermined the Mission. De Sousberghe found this act of iconoclasm doubly painful because he was unable to reproduce much of his documentation of religious and architectural sculpture among the Central Pende due to the fast pace of cultural change, 1953-55. De Sousberghe's experience was far from unique. Daniel Biebuyck has described the need to negotiate the "antagonism and even latent hostility from most of the European locals" during his fieldwork, 1949-51, in eastern Congo (2001:113).

Nevertheless, a community of art enthusiasts arose among the expatriates in the Belgian Congo during the 1950s, who became particularly interested in the Pende, located within an easy day's drive of the capital at this time. Among the promoters of Pende art figured Governor and Mrs. Maquet-Tombu; Adrien Vanden Bossche, curator for the Musee de la Vie indigene in Leopoldville; Robert Verly, director of the Ateliers Sociaux d'Art indigene du Sud-Kasai; and Charles Souris, an Agent Territorial who opened a small museum dedicated to the Eastern Pende in Kitangua. Moreover, a flurry of short articles illustrated by professional photographers made clear the vitality of the arts (Vanden Bossche 1950; Scohy 1952; Maquet-Tombu 1953; Mathy 1953; Kochnitzky 1953a, 1953b). In 1954, there was even a long series of broadcasts on the Belgian National Radio program "Anthologie folklorique" devoted to Pende music (Maquet 1954).

No doubt sensitized by this publicity, Henri Lavachery recognized that de Sousberghe was ideally placed to produce an important study on a living Congolese art tradition. Lavachery "pursued" de Sousberghe during his furlough, proposing that he should dedicate an entire book to Pende art and promising that he would help to find the means to publish a truly "beautiful edition" Lavachery, whom Luc de Heusch describes as "one of the pioneers of the study of Congolese art" became the director of the Musees royaux d'art et d'histoire in Brussels but also taught a seminar on "General and Congolese Ethnography" at the Free University in Brussels (2001:290). De Sousberghe dragged his feet, believing that he did not have the best training for the job, but Lavachery's persistence won the day.

And yet, how did one conceive of writing a book on Pende art in the 1950s? In his introduction, de Sousberghe writes that one might expect an ethnographer to situate the art in its social milieu and to detail the social position of the artist. However, "[a]t the time when this study was undertaken, the disintegration of the Pende traditional milieu was too advanced for there still to be interest in conducting research in this direction" (1959:8, my trans.). It is curious that de Sousberghe appears never to have interviewed the leading sculptors of the day, although many were identified in the colonial press (Vanden Bossche 1950, Maquet-Tombu 1953, Kochnitzky 1953b, Verly 1959). However, his base among the Kwilu and southern Pende explains this pessimism.

Although de Sousberghe attributed the cultural dislocation that he observed to the Chokwe invasion in the late nineteenth century, he never once makes reference to the consequences of the 1931 Pende Rebellion, which was centered precisely in the areas where he based this research, triggered by abuses in forced labor. Following the murder of a Belgian officer, the region suffered brutal reprisals, including the execution or deposition of many chiefs. (4) In this context, one understands the sensitivity of the Chef de territoire who forbade him from conducting political inquiries. There is a ringing silence in my own work on Pende masquerading about the abuses of the Mobutu regime out of fear for the safety of field associates (Strother 1998). It is important to recuperate the context of what can and cannot be said for the informed reading of any text.

De Sousberghe began his research only twenty years after the suppression of the Rebellion. His mission base at Totshi was located next to the Yongo chiefdom, which lost an astounding 207 men during military operations (Vanderstraeten 2001:78). It is not surprising that he found his interlocutors guarded. He noticed the difference when he worked later among the Ding and Nyanga, where field associates seemed much more spontaneous and receptive to his research. Among the Pende, he sought information from chiefs and judges but, in the end, deemed his best informants to be Louis Kashita, a storekeeper in Kondo; Samuel Mulebo, a clerk for the Compagnie du Kasai near Lake Matshi; Donatien Tukweso, an instructor for the school in Gungu; Raphael Kingombo, the Chef de Secteur Kondo; and Joseph Kisefu, a nurse in Kondo. Kisefu was the second son of the Lunda chief Mwaat Kombaan, who had been forced to walk so far to meet de Sousberghe. It was Kisefu who reprimanded de Sousberghe for making his father suffer, but the two became reconciled when the latter apologized. Kisefu alerted the anthropologist to his most important revelations on the chastity belts of chiefs and the rules of incest in the Kwango (de Sousberghe 1963:66-75). It is no doubt due to Kisefu's influence that de Sousberghe accepted exaggerated claims for Lunda suzerainty over parts of Pende territory (1959:25). All of these men spoke excellent French and could better grasp the significance of de Sousherghe's project because of their own training in Belgian schools. Thanks to their positions, they were used to cycling between colonial and local frames of reference.

For the Eastern Pende, where de Sousberghe spent relatively little time and was bedeviled by serious dialectical difference, he drew on a circle of cultural enthusiasts: Charles Souris, Robert Verly, and three doctors--Haveaux, De Vleminck, Fourche--employed by Forminiere, the diamond consortium.

In this difficult climate, de Sousherghe turned to style and formulated a descriptive project of documenting Pende art from 1907 (the time of Emil Torday's collection) to 1957 (1959:2). Although he was unable to study law and theology in the field, one wonders if his training in these disciplines pushed him to greater rigor in weighing historical evidence. Although de Sousberghe made every effort to recuperate the past and was energetic in archival research, he seems curiously inoculated from his contemporaries' desires to evoke a mythic precolonial Africa. He found it difficult enough to understand the present.

Although there were many important exhibitions devoted to African art between 1946 and 1960, L'art pende comprises the "only major work on the arts of a single ethnic group" (Biebuyck 1985:32). It is hard to comprehend today the novelty and scope of de Sousberghe's research agenda. By 1955, only a few objects were attributed to the Pende in print (and not always correctly). It was no mean feat to untangle the distribution and history for the various arts when the corpus of masks alone numbered in the hundreds. Returning to the Congo in 1955, de Sousberghe kept his bases at Totshi and at Kondo, but took advantage of the excellent late-colonial road system to drive to every corner of Pende country north to south, east to west, to a degree unimaginable for someone working in Mobutu's Zaire thirty years later. On his return to Belgium, he carefully consulted as many private collections as possible, as well as those at Tervuren. As a result of his work with these collections, many questions arose which he was able to communicate in correspondence to Donatien Tukweso and Samuel Mulebo, who conducted interviews for him after his departure.

De Sousberghe strove for a precision that is simply unprecedented in the literature of the period. There is absolutely no evocation of timeless Africa here. L'art pende is a book bristling with dates. As much as possible, he tried to pinpoint when and where an object was made, who made it, and when and where it was collected. Refusing to over-synthesize, he created an invaluable census of visual culture in the 1950s, including masks, pendants, divination devices, whistles, staffs, lances, stools and chairs, architectural sculpture, mortars, snuffboxes, adzes, axes, cups, wigged hats, and architectural and other sculpture.

There is a fierce honesty about this text. De Sousberghe will not bend the facts to submit to established models for reasons of ambition or political agenda. Although he works within the rubric of "tribal style" he acknowledges the artifice where neither the distribution of objects nor the distribution of styles conforms to linguistic boundaries. He reminds readers periodically of points at which Pende objects overlap with works produced by the Mpiin, Mbuun, Kwese, Mbala, Suku, Holo, or Chokwe. Moreover, he concludes that one must discard the idea of a single, homogenous Pende style and recognize a multitude of local centers (1959:10, 21-7). He writes that the style described so eloquently by Frans Olbrechts may be the "most original" i.e. "the most easily identified ... however, it is only a local style ... one of the Pende styles" (p. 22, my trans.). Finally, although he struggles to identify local centers he is forced to admit fluidity. He documents the acquisition by Pende of objects from different regions (e.g. pp. 23-5, 26). He must also confess that the development of local styles cannot be explained through kinship models (p. 10).

Daniel Biebuyck has written that "it is frustrating to observe how little of the substantial information (e.g., on substyles and differential artistic productivity with the Pende area) provided by de Sousberghe has been incorporated into recent publications on African art" (1985:32). Indeed, L'art pende should have blasted the whole concept of "tribal style" out of the water. Instead, the exceptional nature of his work seemed only to render the Pende exceptional. Long dear to collectors because of its encyclopedic coverage, L'art pende should now be recognized as making a significant theoretical contribution to African art history. In Tristes tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss asks himself if future travelers will reproach him for not seeing what was before his eyes due to his longing to resurrect the past (1975 [1955]:43). Somehow de Sosuberghe was able to state with unflinching clarity, "We are speaking of contemporary Pende art" (1959:2, my trans.). As a consequence, thanks to him, we have an almost unique record documenting an African art tradition during the colonial period.

Notes

Father de Sousberghe was a gracious mentor, making available to me copies of his slides, photocopies of his field notes, original annotated maps, and even bundles of letters* He donated the originals of his surviving slides to the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC through the kind mediation of his friend Marie-Louise Bastin. The above draws upon conversations between the author and Leon de Sousberghe, 1986-2004, our correspondence, a taped interview September 9, 1994 (also with Marie-Louise Bastin), and a typed chronology prepared by Father de Sousberghe in 1994. I thank Louis de Stryker for generously providing additional information. For a more complete bibliography of de Sousberghe's writings, see Strother 1998.

(1) Letter to author, February 14, 1992.

(2) Letter to author, August 14, 1990.

(3) Letter to author, February 14, 1992, my trans.

(4) There is a flourishing literature on the 1931 Rebellion, including Gusimana 1970; Mulambu-Mvuluya 1971; Sikitele 1973, 1976; Vanderstraeten 2001. Despite the political complications, de Sousberghe's base among the Kwilu and southern Pende was a fortunate one. Following Independence in 1960, some Kwilu and Central Pende joined a rebellion led by Pierre Mulele against the new regime, which resulted in civil war and a reign of terror, 1963-65. During this period, vicious reprisals once again caused many Kwilu Pende to spend long periods hiding in the forest, where mortality was high, especially among the elderly. This event (following so closely upon the devastation of the 1931 Rebellion) proved a cultural watershed leading to the abandonment of many customs and religious beliefs. De Sousberghe's research in this region could not be duplicated today and provides precious historical documentation of a unique interethnic society west of the Kwilu, composed of groups of Pende, Lunda, Kwese, Sonde, Holo, and Hungaan, about which little otherwise is known.

References cited

Biebuyck, Daniel P. 1985. The Arts of Zaire. Vol. 1. Southwestern Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press.

--. 2001. "Olbrechts and the Beginnings of Professional Anthropology in Belgium." In Frans M. Olbrechts (1899-1958): In Search of Art in Africa, ed. Constantine Petridis, pp. 103-114. Antwerp: Antwerp Ethnographic Museum.

de Heusch, Luc. 2001. "Epilogue." In Frans M. Olbrechts (1899-1958): In Search of Art in Africa, ed. Constantine Petridis, pp. 289-95. Antwerp: Antwerp Ethnographic Museum.

Delaere, Jacques. 1942-45. "Nzambi-Maweze: Quelques notes sur la croyance des Bapende en l'Etre supreme." Anthropos 37-40, fasc. 4-6:620-28.

de Sousberghe, Leon. 1959. L'art pende. Memoires in-4[??], 2d series, vol. 9, fasc. z. Brussels: Academie royale de Belgique.

--. 1963. Les Pende: Aspects des structures sociales et politiques. Classe des sciences humaines, Annales, serie in-8[??], no. 46. Tervuren: Musee royale de l'Afrique Centrale.

--. 1986. Don et contredon de la vie. Structure elementaire de parent et union prefentille. St. Augustin: Anthropos-Institut.

Gusimana wa Mama (=Bartholome Gusimana). 1970. "La revolte des Bapende en 1931 (Souvenir d'un temoin)." Cahiers Congolais de la Recherche et du developpement (Kinshasa) 16 (4):59-69.

Kochnitzky, Leon. 1953a. "Masques geants, masques en miniature." La Revue coloniale belge 8 (174):53-5.

--. 1953b. "Un sculpteur d'amulettes au Kwango." Brousse (Leopoldville) n.s., no. 3:cover, 9-13.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1975 [1955]. Tristes tropiques. New York: Atheneum.

Maquet, Jean-Noel. 1954. "Anthologie folkdorique: Initiation a la musique congolaise," Micro Magazine 10 (462):11-12; (463):9-10, 26; (464):11; (465):9; (466):8-9, 14; (467):8-9; (468):8-9; (469):9; (470): 9-11; (471):10-11; (472):9-10; (473):9; (474):12, 14-15.

Maquet-Tombu, Jeanne. 1953. "Arts et lettres: le sculpteur Mupende Kabamba." Bulletin de l'Union des Femmes Coloniales no. 142:16-17.

Mathy, Rose-Marie. 1953. "Chez les Bapende, la calebasse: ses usages et sa decoration." Bulletin de l'Union des Femmes Coloniales 142:17-18.

Mulambu-Mvuluya, Faustin. 1971. "Contribution a l'etude de la revoke des Bapende (mai-septembre, 1931)." Les cahiers du CEDAF (Centre d'etude et de documentation africaine) (Brussels) no. 1:1-52.

Scohy, Andre. 1952. "Savanes du Kwango." In Etapes au Soleil, pp. 135-73. Brussels: Aux Editions du Chat qui Peche.

Sikitele Gize. 1973. "Les racines de la revolte pende de 1931." Etudes d'histoire africaine 5:99-153.

--. 1976. "Les causes principales de la revolte pende en 1931." Zaire-Afrique (Kinshasa) 16 (109):541-55.

Strother, Z.S. 1998. Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vanden Bossche, Adrien. 1950. "La sculpture de masques Bapende." Brousse (Leopoldville) no. 1:11-15.

Vanderstraeten, Louis-Francois. 2001. La repression de la revolte des Pende du Kwango en 1931. Classe des Sciences morales et politiques. Memoire in-8[??], Nouvelle Serie, tome 53, fasc. 1. Brussels: Academie royale des Sciences d'Outre-mer.

Verly, Robert. 1959. "L'art africain et son devenir." Problemes d'Afrique centrale 13 (44):145-51.

Z.S. STROTHER is professor of African art history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and author of Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende (1998).