Near the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, the eastern region of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo was home to one of Africa’s most refined, artistic, and inventive pre-colonial sculptural traditions. For purposes of this discussion, we shall refer to the style in question as “Pre-Bembe”, following the theory that they belong to a sculptural tradition which pre-dates those of the Bembe people who live in this region. As noted by Constantine Petridis, “Until the 1970s large standing figures like the three in the Menil collects ion [a group to which we may add the present figure, as shall be shown below] were attributed without discrimination to either the Bembe or the Boyo. Thanks to anthropologist Daniel Biebuyck’s research and publications, it is now generally accepted that the Bembe, as such, do not carve figurative sculptures but instead produce a variety of masks in distinct styles. [In Daniel P. Bieybuyck, Statuary of the Pre-Bembe Hunters, Tervuren: The Royal Museum of Central Africa, 1981] Biebuyck further distinguishes between the arts of the Bembe proper and those of a multitude of smaller, and more or less independent, ancient hunting groups of various origins who were established in the region before the immigration of the Bembe, which he has labeled ‘pre-Bembe.’”^[1]

Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi has noted: “Recognition of the assumptions embedded in bounded cultural or ethnic categories demands shedding those categories as t.mes less markers of meaning. This unbinding of arts from ahistorical classifications means looking beneath the labels that constrict analysis. It requires peering into the past to investigate the individuals and contexts behind the making, use, and circulation of a single form.”^[2]

One thing is certain: the “Pre-Bembe” cultures referenced above produced ingenious sculptors, whose work has been celebrated since its discovery by the outside world, and especially since art-historical studies of the area began in the late 1940s. Few styles in Africa have been more obscured by the confusion of outsiders as to what they should be called. The Bembe of the Eastern Congo are not to be confused with the Kongo-adjacent Bembe or Beembe of The Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), a separate culture a great distance to the west, which is known for its diminutive figural sculpture. As study continued in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently, our understanding of these artistic traditions has been revisited and updated to reflect a more nuanced art-historical analysis. The works in question have been called, somet.mes s interchangeably and referring somet.mes s to a culture group, and at others to an artistic style: Pre-Bembe, Sikasingo, Basikasingo, Kasingo, Buyu, and Boyo, to give a partial list, which does not include all the combinations thereof. The history of appellations associated with these works serves as a reminder that the naming of art styles by outsiders – that is, western art historians – can obscure the mixing, movement, influence and transferal of styles and traditions in pre-colonial Africa.

Nicolas de Kun was a geologist and field-collects or active in the Congo between 1948 and 1960. His 1979 article on the topic of “Boyo” Art remains one of the authoritative sources of information on this rare corpus.^[3] In his typology of Buyu (Boyo) art, he defines nine forms, the first two of which pertain to fully-realized ancestor statuary. The first and rarest of them is the so-called “spherical style”; and in naming the second he concurs with Leuzinger ^[4] and calls it the “cubist style”. The artistic concepts expressed by the sculptors of the eastern Congo are indeed structural and geometric, and embody a novel and rather strikingly unusual conception of the human form. While they follow the same general scale, formulae, and to some extent iconography as Hemba, Luba, and Tabwa ancestor statuary, the Eastern Bembe styles are distinctive and instantly recognizable. The comparison to western Cubism, while interesting, is not sufficient to fully describe their artistic quality. The sculptors who composed these sacred ancestral images maneuvered the tension between geometry and fluidity, straight lines and curves, abstraction and naturalism; the result at the height of these traditions was a hieratic portrayal of the nobility, wisdom, and spiritual power of the all-important progenitors of the sculptor and his clientele.

In 1950, de Kun photographed several groups of sculptures in the Eastern Congo which he publishes in the 1979 article. The present figure appears there alongside two figures which are today in the Menil Foundation in Houston (inv. nos. V 9065 and X 0011). Those two sculptures were acquired by John and Dominique de Menil in 1959 from the New York dealer John J. Klejman. Pierre Schlumberger acquired the present figure in 1959, too, and it is reasonable to assume that he also purchased it from Klejman, perhaps alongside his cousin John de Menil.

De Kun, Luc de Heusch (under the pseudonym Luc Zangrie), and Daniel Biebuyck made detailed studies of the lineages and interrelated groups within the groups of the eastern Congo, some of which involve suppositions and theories which contradict one another. Biebuyck supposed that there was an archetypal tradition among “Pre-Bembe” hunters, which influenced the style of later groups, the Buyu, Sikasingo, and Boyo. It has been debated whether these groups influenced or were influenced by the Luba.^[5] Viviane Baeke refutes Biebuyck’s interpretation, and, relying on the field studies conducted by Pol-Pierre Gossiaux, suggests that the Eastern Bembe adopted the older style of Buyu ancestor statuary in order to legitimate their claims to land, under colonial pressure, by showing a long ancestral lineage and thereby legitimatizing their presence and prestige.^[6]

Early, archaic, large-scale “Pre-Bembe” ancestor figures are exceedingly rare, with many of the extant examples now in institutional collects ions. While proposed chronologies remain theoretical, there exists a subgroup of these figures which are characterized by larger scale and evidence of greater age. It is to this group that the present figure belongs, along with the two aforementioned figures in the Menil Foundation in Houston.^[7] These figures also share in common a thick, oily patina of accumulated ritual material, as if “dipped in an oil bath, oozing like Fang figures”, as de Kun puts it.^[8] For the reasons given above, these figures have not garnered the same canonization as other iconic styles of African Art, but by virtue of their conceptual ingenuity, sculptural quality, large size, great age, and spiritual power they belong among the great jewels of classical African sculpture.



^[1] Constantine Petridis, catalogue entry 105, in Kristina Van Dyke, ed., African Art from the Menil collects ion, New Haven and London: The Menil collects ion and Yale University Press, 2008, p. 210

^[2] Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Senufo Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity in West Africa, Cleveland and Milan: The Cleveland Museum of Art and Five Continents Editions, 2015, p. 49)

^[3] Nicolas De Kun, “L’Art Boyo”, Africa-Tervuren, Vol. XXV, No. 2, 1979, pp. 29-44

^[4] Elsy Leuzinger, Afrika. Kunst der Negervölker, Baden-Baden: Holle Verlag, 1959; subsequently published in English as

^[5] Alissa LaGamma, Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002, p. 75

^[6] Viviane Baeke, “Figures de pouvoir. Figures de mémoire”, in Serge Schoffel, ed., Finalité sans fin / Finality Without End, Brussels, 2017, pp. 77-79

^[7] Published in Kristina Van Dyke, ed., ibid., pp. 214-215, cat. nos. 106 and 107.

^[8] Nicolas de Kun, ibid., p. 40