Sculpted posts: architectural decoration on Gabonese stamps.

A few blocks from Libreville's Musee national des Arts et Traditions stands the Centre Philatelique. Located alongside the city's main post office, the postage stamp center complements the national museum by offering visitors a pictorial overview of Gabonese history in miniature. Each one-inch canvas, framed by black felt and exhibited behind a thick plastic sheath, opens a window to local politics and global participation. Among the tributes to cultural achievements, medical advances, and international celebrities, one can survey here postage stamps documenting over 150 years of evangelization. Gabonese stamps of early missionaries, local churches, and indigenous arts do more than chronicle religious history--they illustrate Gabon's place within the Christian and "traditional" worlds. At home and abroad, affixed on a letter or in a collector's album, these postage stamps propagate an image of Gabon as an African nation where Christian themes find local expression.

Postal images of the world's most famous medical missionary, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, have introduced legions to the country's stamps more generally. For philatelists worldwide, stamps honoring the doctor's humanitarian work continue to rank among the most prized issues, as Gabon's Office of Posts and Telecommunications 1993 Schweitzer album attests (Fig. 1; Gabon Scott 769). Aside from Schweitzer's influence, stamps from France and French Equatorial Africa predating independence have long made an impression. Since 1939, the France and Colonies Philatelic Societies of America and of Great Britain have put out newsletters on various aspects of design and production. COL.FRA (Association des Collectionneurs de Timbres Poste des Anciennes Colonies Francaises) is a stamp-collecting society whose members focus on former French colonies. In Libreville, the Raponda-Walker Cultural Center has published a series of albums compiled by Claude Dauthille that tell the story of Gabon's economic, religious, and political history through the medium of stamps.

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Within the range of Gabonese postage, a significant number of stamps celebrate indigenous musical instruments and reliquary art forms. An even greater number honor the missionary enterprise--one of the earliest ventures in West and Central Africa. The long history of evangelization in present-day Gabon began in the seventeenth century when Catholic priests from Silo Tome visited the region and Continued in the 1770s when Italian Capuchins based on Principe traveled to the estuary (Patterson 1975; Hastings 1994; Nguema et al., 1994; Isichei 1995). The arrival of two representatives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABC) in 1842 marked the beginning of a settled missionary presence. Just one year later the Holy Ghost Fathers, also known as Spiritans, established a base on the Gabonese coast (La Congregation du Saint-Esprit 1926; Marie-Germain 1931). This French congregation was led by Father Jean Remy Bessieux, portrayed with his Church of St. Marie in the background on the 1976 stamp honoring the centenary of his death (Gabon Scott 364). In the latter part of the nineteenth century, certain missionary organizations changed hands, as in 1870 when the American Presbyterians took over the ABC, and then in 1892 when the Societe des mission evangelique de Paris (SME) took over the American Presbyterians. (1) Numerous other denominations have since entered the field, including New Pentecostals, Adventists, and the New Apostolic Church. Although President El Hadj Omar Bongo converted to Islam in 1973, he nonetheless welcomed Pope John Paul II during his pastoral visit to Gabon in February, 1982, by building a guest residence to house the papal entourage and later commemorated the Pope's historic visit with a stamp (Gabon Scott 502). (2)

Among the country's distinct issues are stamps that display architectural decoration from local houses of Christian worship. (3) Postal images of architectural decoration offer the opportunity to examine issues of image selection and the production of meaning in striking ways. First extracted and then highlighted on the space of a stamp, the building details necessitate a close and focused view. By design, architectural decoration is fixed to a supporting structure and tied to its immediate environment. Unlike masks and freestanding sculptures that populate museums, relief carvings and ornamental forms often remain in their original contexts. When represented on stamps, however, these generally immobile artistic elements become detachable, ready to circulate around the world. En route, the isolated images come to signify a range of meanings to their different audiences, both local and foreign. Traveling in this way are two sets of large-format commemoratives: five stamps of the Church of Bizangobibere at Bikele; and ten of thirteen stamps of the Church of St. Michel at Nkembo.

The Church of Bizangobibere at Bikele (hereafter referred to as Bikele) is commemorated by the set of stamps in issued in 1980-81 (Fig. 2; Gabon Scott 443, 453-4, 457-8). (4) The small Fang community is one of many in the estuary region of Gabon where the male Bieri association formerly directed the religious activities of its population. The top stamp presents the church's full structure. Framing the exterior view are two illustrations of architectural decoration. They are visual quotations taken from the wooden posts depicting stories of the Old and New Testament that line the front and sides of the church, respectively. This framing device attempts to recreate a fuller conception of the church, which the frontal view cannot accommodate. When looking at the stamp, however, only local audiences and those who have visited the site can mentally retrieve Bikele's full context and larger setting, beside a school at the entrance of the Fang village located approximately 40km from the capital city.

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At the far end of Bikele's interior space is the tabernacle altar (Fig. 3). Supporting the table are allegorical sculptures of the four Evangelists. Moving left to right, Luke is symbolized by an ox, Mark by a lion, Matthew by a man, and John by an eagle. For the Christmas and Easter stamps of 1980 and 1981, each sculpture was singled out and drawn in contraposto. The scupltures, no longer caryatids, stand alone and are highlighted by an aura of bold color. Thus extracted, the forms open themselves up to unique visual scrutiny. The miniaturized--and thereby domesticated--animals act as a site onto which Western collectors and foreign recipients can project ideas about both Africa and the missionary project. When the church name marked on the stamp is ignored, the images can refer singly to the objects featured. From this vantage, the carved figures can signify "traditional" African statuary, presumably created by an unknown artisan.

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What these stamp viewers do not know is the history of this sculptural program. Gabonese sculptor Zephyrin Lendogno and French Spiritan missionary Gerard Morel worked together to conceive and execute the architectural decoration for the tabernacle and the church columns, a set of works which integrate traditional art in vital ways. Morel first hired Lendogno in 1960 to collaborate on Bikele, this project becoming the prototype for the much larger Church of St. Michel at Nkembo. During both projects, Father Morel would read the Bible aloud and the two men would invent ways of representing the characters and stories. At times Morel would draw directly on the wood to be carved, while Lendogno would realize the forms and their dynamic spatial arrangements. When quoting local art traditions, Lendogno focused on masks and statues either loaned from individuals or purchased from the art market to use as models. I photographed Mr. Lendogno at his home as he showed me his tools and artifacts, the latter including a piece of elephant ivory which he described as his daughter's cultural patrimony (Fig. 4). I photographed Father Morel at his request in front of his most recent church project, his seventh in over forty years working in Gabon (Fig. 5).

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Just three years after Morel and Lendogno's initial collaboration, the Vatican called on bishops working in mission lands to incorporate local artistic styles into church architecture. Pope Paul VI's December 4, 1963, Sacrosanctum Concilium revised the constitution on the sacred liturgy of the Catholic Church, thus reforming the liturgy by promoting norms for adapting local culture and traditions. For instance, regarding sacred art and sacred furnishings:

   The Church has not adopted any particular style of art as
   her very own; she has admitted styles from every period
   according to the natural talents and circumstances of peoples,
   and the needs of the various rites. Thus, in the
   course of the centuries, she has brought into being a treasury
   of art which must be very carefully preserved. The
   art of our own days, coming from every race and region,
   shall also be given free scope in the Church, provided that
   it adorns the sacred buildings and holy rites with due reverence
   and honor; thereby it is enabled to contribute its
   own voice to that wonderful chorus of praise in honor of
   the Catholic faith sung by great men in times gone by
   (Sacrosanctum Concilium, chapter VII, no. 123).

With special mention made of mission lands, the Vatican's call reaffirmed, legitimated, and allowed Motel's project at Bikele. Morel's collaboration with Lendogno fulfilled the Sacrosanctum Concilium's key directive that "Bishops should have a special concern for artists, so as to imbue them with the spirit of sacred art and of the sacred liturgy" (Sacrosanctum Concilium, chapter VII, no. 127). During this and future projects, Morel sought to encourage Lendogno's artistic vision as well as his religious life.

Morel describes himself as both a philosopher and a Catholic priest. (5) Raised in Normandy, Father Morel had studied some of Europe's great cathedrals independently. The form and meaning of indigenous art traditions were also important to him. Lendogno was born in Lambarene across from the famous Schweitzer hospital. (6) His father was Senegalese and his mother was Gabonese of Galoa ethnicity. As a young man, he traveled to Port-Gentil where he trained as an artist for ten years with Loembe Andre, a well-known Vili sculptor from Pointe Noire. He then came to the capitol city of Libreville as an artist and, until 1999, had a studio in the Petit Paris section of town. Both in and out of Gabon there is a widespread misconception that Lendogno is a blind craftsman. (7) This rumor might have gained currency due to symbolic associations in the New Testament in which Jesus heals the blind on a number of occasions. In Libreville, the artist's supposed blindness has taken on the dimension of an urban myth, making its way into Lonely Planet's print (Newton 1994:385) and Internet (8) guides to central Africa, thereby promulgating the legend to tourists and other visitors.

Mythic elements also are part of this sculptural project. It is quite fitting that Morel and Lendogno chose to represent St. Matthew in the form of a Fang reliquary statue, a work similar to the bieri seen in Figure 6, formerly in the collection of Paul Guillaume. Similarities in form include the characteristic heart-shaped face, prominent eyes, arms held close to the body, and exaggerated buttocks, among others (see Figs. 6 and 7). Such reliquary figures were created to sit atop and guard over bark barrels holding skulls of deceased family members. The Bieri society's veneration of skulls rested upon the belief that bones could channel the power and influence of the dead. Matthew's link to the ancestral realm is consistent with his gospel, which begins with the tree of Christ's ancestors. The inclusion of bieri visual vocabulary in this way draws on vital local associations to offer Fang churchgoers a way to think about Christ as an ancestor to be venerated.

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For some Fang viewers, presumably, the St. Matthew stamp also may bring to mind a difficult history marked by loss and destruction. In the early years of the twentieth century, a number of Catholic missionaries waged an iconoclastic campaign against the use of bieri reliquary sculptures (Mintsa 1960). Oral histories tell dramatic stories of priests moving from village to village, gathering statues and throwing them in the sea. Missionary diaries and collection reports also confirm the massive effort to collect and export these traditional reliquaries to the West. Today it is extremely rare for Fang families to own a bieri reliquary. In fact, they are described as nearly extinct by Benjamin Meye M'Owone, the former director of the national museum and minister of cultural patrimony. (9) Paradoxically, in the minds of many Western stamp collectors and art enthusiasts who are familiar with these canonical works of African art, the St. Matthew stamp only attests to the art tradition's endurance.

The series of stamps seen in Figure 8 celebrates the artistic achievement of Morel and Lendogno's second project, the Church of St. Michel at Nkembo. Remarkable in this regard are the church's thirty-one carved wooden posts that depict stories of the Old and New Testament and at the same time include local artistic forms and styles. Divided into registers, each post consists of a number of vignettes which wrap around the column form. Twelve of these vignettes and the mosaic frieze were chosen for Christmas and Easter stamps in 1976, 1978, 1979, 1983, and 1984 (Gabon Scott 421-2, 437-8, C176-7, C188-9, C220-21). Because the posts took seventeen years to carve, the stamps were issued at different stages of the church's completion. (10)

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Unlike the Bikele architectural stamps, there is no stamp of the full exterior of this church. Therefore, the selection of specific views is critical, as collectors and others reconstruct an imagined whole from these particular vantage points. Peter Werker, a Dutch artist, created the frieze on St. Michel's facade (Fig. 9). The illustrated stamp of the mosaic frieze in Figure 10 (Gabon Scott 573-4) hints at the structure below with the diagonal cropping along the bottom edge. Here, it is worth considering not only what has been left out of the frame, but also what has been added to it. The inclusion of a celestial blue sky, complete with white puffy clouds and heralding angels, ordains the church, and by extension the Gabonese Republic, as graced by God. The additions send a message to stamp collectors, dealers, letter writers, mail carriers, and mail recipients that Gabon occupies a special place in the Christian world.

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Presumably, the selection of vignettes was based on aesthetic appeal as well as on narrative content. The Nkembo stamps include such canonical scenes as the Adulterous Woman, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Presentation at the Temple, and the Birth of Jesus. The reduction of the three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional representations in the space of a stamp creates new opportunities for the making of meaning. For the Gabonese and other publics, there is a metonymic displacement of part to whole evoked in these stamps. To local viewers, the vignettes, cropped and fully isolated or positioned within the columnar structure, stand for the whole of the church--that is, a church located in the busy Nkembo district of downtown Libreville, just up the street from a major market and the city hospital. For those not familiar with the Church of St. Michel and its city surrounds, the vignettes are able to stand alone, free of supports--architectural or mental. The viewer is thus able to imagine the works of art in any number of contexts and arrangements.

Taken as a series, the stamps suggest a certain movement. The stamp in Figure 11 (Gabon Scott C176) is drawn from the upper register of the column in Figure 12, located on the right side of the church en route to the amphitheater that seats 2,000 people. Churchgoers walking to their seats for one of three masses given each Sunday can read the sculptural reliefs from all sides. Indeed, Lendogno and Morel designed certain visual "passages" to direct the viewer's movement. The expressive representation of Christ in the middle register does so as well. To convey Christ's burden under the cross, the artists lead the viewer around the post, encouraging one to follow Christ's path. Moving clockwise, the congregant sees the Christ figure's hunched shoulders, stretched side, bent leg, and flexed foot. The isolated images featured on these stamps at the same time deny viewers the opportunity to visually and mentally form connections between and among the posts. The narrative interpretation of the whole is contingent on the relationship of its parts. The reflexive character of the columns is made clear by two views of the lower register of the post in Figures 13 and 14. The first post to be carved, it also maps out the artists' conception of the church as a whole. The column depicts the arcade seating, the brick walls, and the openwork windows of the church. It also outlines the narrative posts in relief. At the base of the post in Figure 14 is a carved depiction of President Bongo's palace--instantly recognizable by its International Style architecture--carved to signify the seat of power. (11) Enmeshed within the city fabric, this sculpted post in this way refers to the church compound, to the capital city, and to nation. Like the stamps under consideration, it displays an attachment between Church and State.

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The selection of iconic scenes for the commemorative stamps speaks to Gabon's efforts to assert its place within the Christian world. Yet throughout the visual program, depictions of masks, musical instruments, and traditional objects also suggest indigenous Gabonese cultural forms. These elements include Fang bieri carvings featured on the pulpit and ngombi harps and Mahongwe m'bweti reliquary figures and Punu mukudj masks referenced in the column decoration. It is ironic in light of these local references that the nation's stamps ignore those aspects of the architectural decoration which stress countrywide relevance. The series of St. Michel stamps already examined, for example, only hints at the church's strong messages of inclusion and nationalism. Specificity of place is suggested by the inclusion of a map of Africa as well as by depictions of local flora and fauna. The overall form echoes that of Fang men's meeting houses (aba) while the church's buildings materials comprise the various woods of Gabon's equatorial forest. These symbolic elements visually welcome congregants who hail from each region of the country. The multicultural assembly at Sunday Mass reflects the diversity of the capital, with Fang, Myene, Punu, Galoa, Eshira, Teke, and other participants in attendance. (12)

The decision to feature the religious carvings of St. Michel in these stamps is significant in light of other stamps being produced during the same time period. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Gabonese government imprinted another kind of Christian art: Western Old Master paintings with religious themes. While the reproduction of European artworks on stamp faces is common in IGPC countries, this practice takes on added significance when the biblical stories are told in two formats, European oil painting and Gabonese architectural decoration. For instance, the country issued two versions of the Flight from Egypt; one a Rubens reproduction in 1977 (Fig. 15; Gabon Scott C203) and the other a photograph from the architectural decoration at St. Michel in 1979 (Fig. 16; Gabon Scott 437). Choosing to showcase works by Rubens, Poussin, Bellini, Breughel, and Raphael alongside the St. Michel carvings not only aligns the two cultures in worship, but also implies a qualitative equivalence among all these works of art.

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When made miniature for stamp production, the religious paintings and carved vignettes accrue a range of meanings in addition to those evoked by the scenes themselves. For collectors, the stamps not only have postal use value but also carry a new narrative potency, linked to the seriation nature of the collection and their place as miniatures. As literary critic Susan Stewart explains, "The reduction in scale which the miniature presents skews the time and space relations of the everyday life-world, and as an object consumed, the miniature finds its 'use value' transformed into the infinite time of reverie" (Stewart 1993:65). The stamp as miniature in this way is readily manipulated and arranged in response to personal experience, as each stamp fits into an organizing principle. (13) Just as the church pillars at St. Michel at Nkembo represent a collection of stories, so too do the individual stamps and the specific views they depict. As the Gabonese stamps featuring architectural decoration from the Church of Bizangobibere at Bikele and the Church of St. Michel at Nkembo demonstrate, postal images often convey multiple messages to different audiences as they circulate locally and globally.

[This article was accepted for publication in December 2003.]

(1.) It was under the auspices of the SME that Albert Schweitzer went to Lambarene in 1913.

(2.) Although percentage numbers differ, between 65% to 80% of the population is Christian. Nearly half of Christians in Gabon are estimated to be Roman Catholic. The Vatican itself has long used stamps to propagate the faith.

(3.) While numerous African counties have issued stamps with religious themes, few nations have stressed local expressions of Christian sentiment. Gabon's active participation with the Inter-Governmental Philatelic Agency (IGPC) has ensured the production and dissemination of postal imagery particular to the central African nation.

(4.) The church is also known as Saint-Luc-de-Bikele. The Bikele and Nkembo stamps were issued as commemoratives, or stamps printed in limited quantities and available for a limited time, designed to honor an individual, an historic event, or a national landmark. Commemoratives are usually large to accommodate more of an image and to attract collectors.

(5.) Biographical information on Gerard Morel from interviews by author, February 28, 2000, and March 21, 2000. Describing a later project, he explained that his first priority was to build a big house of worship, and his second priority was to teach the Bible, for which he used art as a means.

(6.) Biographical information on Zephyrin Lendogno from interview by author, February 23, 2000.

(7.) John, chapter 9, offers one of the many instances in which Jesus heals a blind man. The rumor works metaphorically, then, suggesting that it is the Church which heals the spiritual blindness of Lendogno and by extension the Gabonese peoples. Another possible Biblical interpretation is that the artist's spiritual sight was so strong that he did not need physical sight to carve. Alternatively, the rumor might identify the artist as endowed with special sight, or might serve to make his work seem miraculous. Lendogno reasons that the rumors might be connected to a brief period of illness when someone had tried to poison him out of jealousy. For a sustained discussion of blindness in the New Testament, see Just 1997.

(8.) The travel website comments that "L'eglise St-Michel is a landmark church because of its thirty one unusual wooden columns, carved by a blind Gabonese craftsman, each with a biblical scene." www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/africa/ gabon/attractions.htm, 4/19/2004.

(9.) Interview by author, February 17, 2000.

(10.) On average, each post at St. Michel took roughly four months to carve. At Nkembo, the posts were carved while on the ground. At Bikele, the posts were carved while upright.

(11.) Brother Remi Bonnin, interview by author, February 19, 2000. The palace is rumored to have cost 800 million USD to construct; marble imported from Italy (and not taken from Gabonese quarries) is supposed to be part of the building materials.

(12.) Sermons often correspond to a particular narrative scene portrayed in one of the carved posts and are read in both French and Fang. Choral music is sung in an array of local languages. While St. Michel's Sunday masses at 7:00, 8:30, and 10:00 o'clock draw huge crowds of people, certain of their number also attend ceremonies of Bwiti, a syncretic traditional-Christian religion. The portrait of a Bwiti adherent on one post serves as a countermeasure to such dual membership. This carving depicts a cloaked figure standing beside a Bwiti temple post with its characteristic diamond-shaped opening. Given its location among the other St. Michel posts representing biblical narratives, as well as its position facing congregants as they move toward the church's main doors, this didactic post warns against idolatry. Such carvings effectively illustrate passages from the Bible through the use of contemporary idioms of special relevance to Libreville's urban congregation.

(13.) The stamps can act as souvenirs, mnemonically triggering memories of beloved locations. They can also offer collectors a view of destinations not yet traveled to but imagined. Thematic collections focusing on religious art and architecture are also popular. Typically a high value is placed on the pristine stamp in "mint condition," with perforations intact and paper clean. Such stamps are maintained exactly as issued in every detail, including full original gum. Once licked and pasted to the face of a letter or parcel, stamps can send messages to several people en route to their destination, thereby increasing the opportunities for interpretation. Carlos Stoetzer aptly describes the power of a stamp: "It goes from hand to hand and town to town; it reaches the farthest corners and provinces of a country and even the farthest countries of the world. It is a symbol of the nation from which the stamp is mailed, a vivid expression of that country's culture and civilization and of its ideas and ideals. By the use of symbols, slogans, pictures, and even loaded words, it conveys its message far and wide" (Stoetzer 1953:1).

References Cited

Hastings, Adrian. 1994. The Church in Africa, 1450-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Isichei, Elizabeth. 1995. A History of Christianity in Africa. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans.

Just, Felix N. W. 1997. "From Tobit to Bartimaeus, From Qumran to Siloam: The Social Role of Blind People and Attitudes toward the Blind in New Testament Times." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University.

La Congregation du Saint-Esprit. 1926. Paris: Letouzey et Ane.

Marie-Germaine, Soeur. 1931. Le Christ au Gabon. Louvain: Museum Lessianum.

Mintsa, Joachim. 1960. "Ancien Rites 'bieri' chez les Fangs de I'Estuaire," Realities Gabonaises 7:n.p. Service d'Enseignement-Bureau Pedagogique et culturel. Ministre de L'Education nationale, de la Jeunesse & des Sports.

Newton, Alex. 1994. Central Africa: A Travel Survival Kit. 2d ed. Berkeley: Lonely Planet Publications.

Nguema, Noel Ngwa, et, al. 1994. Eglise du Gabon, leve-toi et marche: 150 ans d'evangelisation du Gabon, 29/9/1844-29/9/1994. Limete-Kinshasa: Imprimerie Saint Paul.

Patterson, David. 1975. The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

Second Vatican Council. 1963. Sacrosanctum Concilium: Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. Rome: The Vatican.

Stewart, Susan. 1993, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, N,C.:, Duke University Press.

Stoetzer, Carlos. 1953. Postage Stamps as Propaganda. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press.