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Crime Scenes with Gift Shops: The Theatre of Colonial Restitution
The 2022 loan of a Kakuungu mask to Kinshasa was not restitution but category fraud. True restitution requires six pillars including an admission of wrongdoing, a transfer of title, and an obligation rather than a discretionary gift. By using the passive voice to mask agency and “moral responsibility” to evade legal liability, Europe performs a theatre of repair while retaining ownership. From the Congo Free State to modern loans, the vocabulary of “generosity” hides a lineage of extraction. We must refuse the applause: until the thief is named, the mask remains a hostage.
Recent Articles
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The Nganga, the Prophet, and the Orchestra
The Europeans in the audience were hearing an African orchestra play European music. The musicians on stage were playing Christian music. I sat between those two sentences for an evening in Kinshasa in November 2022, and have been turning them over ever since. The story of how the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste came to play Rodrigo in a wedding hall runs back to 1706, to a Kongolese woman burned at the stake for preaching in her own language, and forward through a century of a faith the West has never quite known how to hear. Read more
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“Pembeni mwa nafsi” (At the Edge of the Self): Mihalina Nyota’s Meditation on Vanity
Mihalina Nyota Buzilu, one of the rising voices on Kinshasa’s contemporary art scene, revisits one of the oldest themes in the history of Western painting and brings it into conversation with the anxieties of her own generation. In “Pembeni mwa nafsi” (Au bord du soi), a reclining figure gazes into a hand mirror while a skull waits patiently nearby. A meditation on vanity, narcissism, and the life we refuse to accept, the work unfolds as a quiet warning about the dangerous border where self-contemplation becomes self-loss. Watch the artist speak. Read more
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Article 15: The Unwritten Constitution of the Congo
When the state provides nothing, you seize what you can and invent the rest. To exist in Kinshasa is to live by Article 15: Débrouillez-vous. Explore the unwritten constitution of the Congo, where the daily hustle dictates everything from a policeman’s traffic ticket to the art sold in local ateliers. Step off the main boulevards to discover how this relentless pressure acts as the invisible gears keeping millions alive while the elites watch from the hills. Read more
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