FEATURE 120 Dutch anthropological museums hold some of the world’s earliest and most important collections of art from the Congo. The reason for this is the commercial activity that the Nieuwe Afrikaanse Handelsvereniging (NAHV)1 and its employees engaged in there. Among the many Congo objects held in Dutch collections are some forty elephant and hippopotamus tusks richly decorated and carved in spiral registers, which are known as “Loango ivories.” These tusks, which can also be found in other international collections, mainly depict scenes of local daily life, commercial activity, and flora and fauna. They are rarely shown in permanent exhibitions or even in temporary ones, and when they are, it is usually for the purpose of evoking tourist or post-contact art, and little additional information about them is provided. As much for their intrinsic formal qualities as for what they reveal about the society they originated from, these creations deserve more in-depth study and scrutiny than has heretofore been accorded to them.2 Loango ivories belong to a particular category of objects whose existence is owed to contact between two cultures. I first became interested in them in 19973 while studying the development of tourist art in the Lower Congo region4 during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when European presence was impacting the area’s art. The study essentially took inventory of all of the Loango ivories in Dutch museums5 and made it possible to understand to what extent these objects and the stories relating to them provided insight into a world that has long since disappeared. The first mention of this art form dates to the beginning of the twentieth century. Herbert Lang referred to them in 1918, stating that: The natives of Loango ... are encouraged by traders and other white men to make processionally carved tusks, which sometimes are skillfully executed, but which represent a motley of European ideas badly jumbled in a negro’s brain (Lang, 1919: 529). FIG. 1 (right): Elephant tusk carved with scenes relating to trade. L: 82 cm. National Museums of World Cultures, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. TM A-11083. Artis donation, 1920. © for all visuals: Tropenmuseum/Irene de Groot. Stories in Ivory ART OF LOANGO FIG. 2 (far right): Elephant tusk carved with scenes of daily life: a man with a drink, another attacked by an elephant, and a blacksmith at work. L: 38 cm. National Museums of World Cultures, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. TM 229-3. Bequest of Baronness von Gotsch, O.E.A.E., Wüste, 1924. By Sonja Wijs
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