2 Editorial When the Reverend Thomas Lewis arrived in 1898 to establish a Baptist Missionary Society station in the village of Kibokolo in what today is the extreme north of Angola, he found the local Zombo population hostile both to him and to his endeavor. His wife, Gwen, described them as “a wild, shy, suspicious people” and referred to life in “that dark and hitherto wholly neglected district” as one of “unmitigated barbarism” made worse by the abhorrent excesses of “fetichism.” As she so eloquently put it, “superstition and heathenism are rampant everywhere, and the moral and spiritual darkness is simply appalling.” Some years later, Thomas backed down a little and allowed that the local religion wasn’t all that bad insofar as “the great majority of fetiches and charms are intended to protect from evil, and not to attack innocent folk.” Good that he eventually got that. His presence there wasn’t a total waste, however, since an important collection of Zombo nlongo masks that Lewis found “left behind” (possibly stored, since such masks are known to have been reused) are now in the collection of the British Museum and are the subject of a significant article in this issue. If the local Zombo population was shy and suspicious, they may well have had good reason to be. Far from being the untutored savages that the Lewises in their own ignorance took them for, they had lived in the region since time immemorial (Portuguese chronicler Odoardo Lopez mentions them in 1591) and had long been masters of profitable trade routes that brought valuable goods such as ivory and slaves from the interior of Central Africa to the trading centers of the Lower Congo, where they likely encountered— or at least heard about—Roman Catholic missionaries and learned what kind of antics people like that could get up to. While they may have fallen on hard times since the dissolution of the Kingdom of Kongo and the abolition of slavery, despite what the Lewises liked to believe, they weren’t exactly backcountry rubes waiting for white evangelists to enlighten them with the Word of God (or to steal their masks). They were an ancient culture of settled agriculturalists with a rich history and even richer cultural traditions, many of which they held in common with the multiplicity of peoples of the Lower Congo. They probably didn’t have much use for the Lewises. The fruit of such asymmetrical encounters is the subject of an unusual and fascinating exhibition currently at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt. Founded as a fairly typical ethnography museum in 1904, in recent years this museum has veered off into an entirely different direction. Rather than remaining an institution bound by traditional notions of scholarship, it is now dedicated to encouraging access to and interpretation of its 67,000-piece collection by just about anyone who is interested. This has resulted in unusual transparency as nonspecialists question how these works from cultures around the world arrived in Germany and why ethnologists, missionaries, and traders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries behaved as they did—that is, frequently ethnocentric, paternalistic, and with a remarkable sense of arrogant entitlement that is difficult for many in the twenty-first century to grasp. These themes contribute to the present exhibition, Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger), which features projects from the museum’s artists’ residency program known as Weltkulturen Labor, in which notable contemporary artists work to help interpret aspects of the collection. Together the works in the exhibition highlight the remarkable art in the museum’s collection while emphasizing the often-disturbing intercultural exchanges or interpretations that brought them out from the contexts in which they were created. The image that appears on our cover embodies some of the show’s themes particularly well. It features two Marshall Islands navigational charts, sometimes known as rebbelib, that were used as mnemonic aids for land mass location and wave and current patterns for canoe voyages between the thirty-four coral atolls in the archipelago. Artist David Weber-Krebs has taken the flowing lines of these creations by other artists and imprisoned them in a rigid metal framework, turning something that was once an organic record of memory and free travel into a static specimen, complete with a rolling desk for note taking. An added layer of meaning that Weber-Krebs may or may not have intended is provided by the fact that, starting at an early period, many objects of this kind were made specifically for trade to the many souvenir-hungry foreigners who visited the islands. While far too many regrettable—and indeed terrible—things have been done in the name of exploration, expansion, and even cultural exchange, the good side is that the remarkable artwork of so many cultures has been preserved and spread around the world for people in faraway places and distant times to learn from and be inspired by. Had Lewis not “found” that particular cache of Zombo masks, virtually none would have survived and the worldwide memory of that small but historically significant culture would have been considerably reduced. But even with this understood, I can only say that, given the perspectives that the Rev. and Mrs. Lewis expressed in their writings, the Zombo showed great restraint by being only “shy” and “suspicious.” If someone rolled into my town with that kind of attitude, I might not be inclined to be so pleasant. Jonathan Fogel Our cover shows an installation by David Weber-Krebs that includes navigational maps from Ralik/Ratak, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, dating from the 19th–20th centuries and acquired by H. Breitkopf. Photo: Wolfgang Günzel, Weltkulturen Labor, 2013.
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