STORIES IN IVORY 125 Luckily for me, I am gradually beginning to adapt to my environment and the clerical work I have to do. Every second Sunday, I can leave the house for a few hours, in the sun or in the rain, and always informally, and, if I may say so, that does me a world of good, and is the best way I have of dispelling my worries. I go to Mangue-Grande, where I can speak a bit of Dutch, and that makes it worthwhile (Regeer 1882: 31). Trading agents thus had very little time to devote to the creation of any sort of detailed collections of African art, and any collection they were able to assemble generally consisted of objects from the immediate surroundings or acquired during the course of brief excursions. Given the limited area in which the agents could collect versus the disproportionate number of Loango ivories that came to Europe through them, it is reasonable to speculate that the sculptors’ ivory workshops may have been located at not too great a distance from the trading posts, which is to say in the coastal Loango area. What is certainly clear is that the clientele in the major commercial outposts must have been very important to the Loango sculptors. Life in and around a trading post was not something the local population could easily ignore and it undoubtedly provided many sources of inspiration for ivory carvers (fig. 13). Moreover, trading posts regularly employed African workers as cooks, interpreters, boat builders, porters, etc., and a separate residence was erected for these on the post’s grounds. A goodly number of them were not originally from the area they were working in. The NAHV often imported workers from Liberia and Sierra Leone (called Krus), whom they hired for a specified period of time. Workers from the Lower Congo were divided into several categories.18 Prominent among these were the young sons of wealthier and more affluent families, who were sent to the post as part of their “education” and who were the whites’ personal employees. Then there were the Cabinda, free laborers from the coastal region north of the mouth of the Congo River, who worked as sailors, captains, carpenters, and in construction. Lastly, there were the slaves—the Krumanos— women and children among them, who worked permanently as families, were restricted to the post’s area, and did the heaviest labor. This form of slavery was essentially a variant of indigenous practice (Friedman, 1991). That the destabilizing effect of the international slave trade was fresh in the memory of the Loango is a fact we can deduce from the many and often violent scenes of it depicted on the tusks. We do not know to what extent such abuses persisted in the trading posts after the abolition of the practice which—it is important to remember— was closely linked to the ivory trade.19 For both slaves and ivory, merchant middlemen had to go further and further inland. Africans captured in those places were then used as porters to transport the merchandise (which included both ivory and themselves) to the coast. The Race for Ivory From time immemorial, ivory from Loango and the Congo was associated with power and those who wielded it. Only the latter could wear ivory amulets or ornaments
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