Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Abstract

Lucie Kamuswekera’s1 embroideries are not popular paintings, but they are very close to them, even if the latter are usually no longer found in Congolese homes. Born in 1944, Lucie Kamuswekera, who prefers to be known as Artiste Lucie2 (Fig. 1), belongs to the generation of Congolese for whom these paintings reflected the memories and experiences lived between the 1950s and 1990s. In her embroideries, she mostly revisits the iconotheque of popular painting by visualizing the experiences of women, but sometimes raises issues of worldwide relevance, like the COVID pandemic (Fig. 2). Explicitly, the artist’s mission is to give relevance to past and present experiences, to reinscribe them in the collective life and reestablish intergenerational links. In Congolese urban culture, the reception of the image is performative. Like a mask in a ritual, her embroideries intervene in social life and relationships. They carry a knowledge—which Lucie Kamuswekera considers currently lost—but above all they make present and therefore active the incorporated xperience whose intergenerational transmission was disrupted by three decades of armed conflict in the Kivu provinces. As a widow and grandmother, she fully assumes the role of guaranteeing generational continuity that her society grants to women. She inscribes her art in a dynamic continuity of sharing memories in images and words. She uses embroidery, a technique learned at the colonial school, to actualize male pictorial discourses on experiences lived during the second half of the twentieth century. She devotes part of the income from the sale of her embroideries to running a workshop where she shelters and trains four orphans (three girls and one boy), formerly street children, because she wants the art of embroidery to survive. For the reasons we have outlined, we need to introduce the reader to Congolese popular painting and its academic analyses. In the 1970s and 1980s, Congolese popular painting, also known as urban painting, became very popular among the city dwellers of the largeand medium-sized cities of the country then called Zaire. In a quarter of a century, a few thousand painters produced tens of thousands of paintings that were hung on the walls of hundreds of thousands of houses inhabited by families of small traders and craftsmen, workers and employees, teachers, etc. In the West, we would label them the middle class. The local popularity of these works began in the second decade after independence. Urban inhabitants found peace and modest prosperity after a decade of civil wars following independence in 1960. The authoritarian government imposed in 1968 by President Mobutu crushed the political opposition (Van Reybrouck 2015). Largely, urban populations accepted this as the price of a return to normal life. Mobutu’s policies of cultural and economic nationalization were initially well received and promoted the development of a national culture in urban areas. Music played a leading role in this. The arrival of the portable 45 rpm record player democratized access to records, while the centralization of the record industry in the capital allowed songs in Lingala to spread nationwide. This language of the army became the dominant language of the capital and of public administration throughout the country. Fearing the return of regional secessionist movements, Mobutu constantly relocated civil servants and army officers, which served as another vehicle for the expansion of Lingala and cultural unification. Also, the movement of students among the three university training centers of the time—Kinshasa, Kisangani, and Lubumbashi—contributed to the language’s spread. While urban painters, trained by apprenticeship with an elder, Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera