STORIES IN IVORY 123 FIG. 7a and b (above): Details of a carved tusk decorated with absurd scenes. L: 76 cm (total object). National Museums of World Cultures, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. TM A-11039. Artis donation, 1920. FIG. 8 (left): Ivory napkin ring with signature. Private collection. FIG. 9 (bottom): Group photo showing two European men and two African women at an NAHV trading post. Late 19th–early 20th century. Rio Lefunda, south of the Congo River. Compare the women’s wrap skirts with that on the figure on the tusk in fig. 3. National Museums of World Cultures, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. TM 60032111. Acquired from D. Kikkert. from it. If one is to believe remarks—which are not contradicted— made by L. J. Godeffroy, a member of the Nederlandsche Expeditie ter Zuidwestkust van Afrika (1884–1885), Europeans themselves had begun producing “African art.” After his second voyage to the Congo in 1888, Godeffroy wrote the following about tourist art in Sierra Leone: One really had to be careful, because even in a specialized field like this ethnography, things have gone bad … Imagine! There is a large factory in London where material for geographic and ethnological collections the world over is being produced. And in Sierra Leone, we were quick to find ourselves being offered objects purported to be African that had actually been made in England!” (Feith, 1910: 53). All of this paints a good picture of what was going on and indicates that a great deal of tourist art was being produced in the Congo in the nineteenth century. The mentions made in the literature of the period indicate that commercial agents stationed there were certainly aware of the ivories’ status as contact art and therefore perceived them differently than they did objects made for indigenous use. When they were later passed to institutions, no information needed to be stated about local use, function, or meaning because the receiving museums were already aware of the objects’ tourist context. A Closed World Until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, contact between the population of the Lower Congo region14 and European merchants was limited to the port cities, where goods were purchased and loaded for shipment to Europe. This situation changed when European trading companies15 began to set up permanent settlements in as a plausible answer, although the dearth of information on Loango ivories appears to stand in contradiction with the amount of information those same collectors took pains to obtain for other types of objects. Certain European in situ accounts strongly suggest that the artists of the Congo area reacted quickly to external demand, and that they adapted efficiently to the presence of Europeans. Correspondence from NAHV agents contains a wealth of information about objects offered at trading posts and in villages along the coast created specifically for sale to Europeans. These creations were often inspired by objects their makers had seen at trading posts, markets, and even in newspapers, and included wooden hats10 (fig. 24), goblets, tea kettles, and even entire service sets. A wooden replica of an eighty-four-piece porcelain service with silver cutlery, which was commissioned at Vista by J.C.W.H. Cremer and sent to the Artis Etnografisch Museum in Amsterdam,11 is the best surviving example of these.12 In this context it is not surprising that the notion of authenticity began to be debated and warnings began to be addressed to collectors, such as the one NAHV agent J. W. Regeer provided in his journals between 1873 and 1882: It will also be necessary, in the assembling of ethnological collections, to avoid being duped by clever impostors. Lacking any moral standards but ever desirous of advancing his own self interests, the negro is always and unscrupulously inclined to invest all of his energy in pursuing the latter (Regeer, 1882: 223–224). The problem of authenticity was also raised in the context of museum expeditions’ hunts for objects, in which demand exceeded supply.13 Relevant to this, Hungarian researcher Emil Torday remarked that on his second expedition to the Congo in 1905, production of material for sale to Europeans and other Westerners was already a well-established habit among the Pende: One of the pieces (masks, SW) is unfinished, and nearly all have a fresh unused appearance which suggests that they were either made for commercial purposes and brought to Dima to be sold or were commissioned from an itinerant Pende sculptor (Mack, 1990: 34). Africans were not the only ones to notice this new and growing demand for their objects and to attempt to profit
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