The Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, ABA, was once the most prestigious institution in Congo. Under Mobutu, it created monuments for the nation. Its graduates were the country’s cultural elite. To study there meant something.
Today, the academy struggles with broken infrastructure and irrelevance. Its current director, Henri Kalama, eliminated scholarships and declared that those who cannot pay do not belong. Students who manage to graduate find themselves unable to compete in the international art market. The curriculum, despite reforms, remains anchored in European traditions from its Belgian colonial founding in 1943.
Meanwhile, a parallel system thrives. In the informal workshops scattered across Kinshasa, master painters teach apprentices through practice, not theory. These artists: Chéri Samba, Chéri Chérin, Bodo, Tshibumba to name just few, and their followers learned their craft painting billboards and shop signs. No diplomas. No formal training. Yet their work fills international museums and commands the attention of serious collectors worldwide.
This reversal poses a fundamental question: what happens when the street becomes more effective at education than the institution built for that purpose? Kinshasa offers an answer, though it arrived by accident rather than design. The city didn’t just reform art education; it built something better alongside it.
From Belgian Priests to Cosmic Universalism
To understand this failure, one must return to the Academy’s origins. ABA was born colonial. Founded in 1943 as École Saint-Luc by Belgian missionaries, it was part of the colonial project to create “les évolués”: evolved Congolese who could serve administrative and cultural functions without threatening Belgian authority. Before ABA, Congolese art was dismissed as “art primitif”: primitive art, craft, ethnographic curiosity. The Academy aimed to “civilize” this.
The very name carries the weight of this inheritance. As Chéri Chérin observed, the word “academy” itself implies that European methods are the only path to mastery, the only route to correctness. To be an academy is to accept that legitimacy flows from Europe, that excellence means conforming to standards set elsewhere. The name was never neutral. It was a declaration of artistic hierarchy.
The early Academy practiced its own strange contradiction. It wanted to preserve the “exotic” qualities of primitive art while improving the technique: academic primitivism, one might call it. Students learned European methods to better render African subjects, maintaining the otherness that European collectors desired while demonstrating they could hold a brush properly. It was colonialism dressed as education, teaching Congolese to see themselves through European eyes, just with better brushstrokes.
Mobutu’s authenticité movement shifted this dynamic. For all its flaws, it demanded art that served Congo, not European fantasies. The colossal monuments scattered across Kinshasa today stand as proof: authentic, powerful, addressing Congolese rather than foreign audiences. The Academy finally produced for its own people.
Yet here, a strange reversal has occurred. The current director Henri Kalama speaks constantly of decolonization, but interprets it in curious ways. Students must still choose a European or Western master to copy for at least two years. Only in their final year can they begin developing their own voice. What kind of decolonization is this? The rhetoric speaks of liberation while the curriculum demands submission, of finding authentic expression after years of training your hand to move like someone else’s.
Kalama’s decolonization means abandoning cultural specificity altogether: creating abstract, universal art that could come from anywhere, belong to anyone. The irony cuts deep. In the name of decolonizing from Europe, the Academy has never been more European. This cosmic universalism is, after all, a deeply Western idea: that art should transcend place, culture, origin. The weight of colonialism hasn’t lifted; it has become so heavy that it’s invisible, mistaken for philosophy rather than recognized as subjugation. Not even the Belgians demanded such complete erasure.
The Birth of the Streets
The École Populaire wasn’t planned. It emerged from exclusion, from the simple fact that in the 1970s, only ABA graduates could claim the title “artist.” Everyone else remained craftsmen, decorators, sign painters. The Academy held a monopoly not just on education but on identity itself.
Chéri Samba arrived in Kinshasa in 1972, a village boy who found work painting billboards on Kasa Vubu Avenue. Chéri Chérin painted advertisements, shop signs, whatever paid. They had skill, they had clients, they had something urgent to say about the city exploding around them. They signed their commercial work, added commentary, turned billboards into narratives. Samba discovered that adding text made people stop and read, transforming a glance into engagement. They painted the chaos of urban life: corruption, sexuality, survival. No European master had painted these subjects. No curriculum covered this material.
Yet they remained commercial painters in the eyes of those who mattered. Until Badi-Banga, poet, artist, and influential critic, saw what the Academy refused to see. He organized meetings where these painters could reimagine themselves, their work, their worth. His “Art Partout” exhibition in Kinshasa in 1978 changed everything. Billboard painters stood as artists, their work displayed not as commercial decoration but as legitimate artistic expression. Badi-Banga gave them the language they needed: they were creating a new, popular art form that belonged to the streets. His intellectual framework opened doors both within Congo and internationally.
Recognition sparked growth. Workshops formed organically around established painters. Younger artists learned by watching, by mixing paint, by filling in backgrounds. No tuition, no prerequisites, no lectures on Renaissance perspective. You learned by doing, earned by helping, graduated when someone bought your work. Knowledge passed hand to hand, brush to brush. The only curriculum was the city itself.
These painters mastered complex narrative compositions, sophisticated color relationships, visual storytelling that could hold dozens of individual scenes in a single frame. But technique served content, not the other way around. They painted for their communities first, in languages their communities understood, about problems their communities faced. That this would later captivate Paris and New York was accidental. They weren’t trying to be universal. They were trying to be understood.
The Dynamics of a Revolution
The stark contrast between the Academy’s stagnation and the streets’ vitality is not accidental. It reveals fundamental truths about why one system failed and the other triumphed, truths rooted in generational rebellion, raw necessity, and the simple power of merit.
A new consciousness is now challenging the old compromises, even from within the Academy’s walls. Today’s students and recent graduates are fed up. They see Director Kalama’s “universal” art for what it is: another form of erasure, a globalism that demands they abandon their own context. They no longer want to spend years copying Hieronymus Bosch or Rembrandt, losing their own voice in the process. The art populaire movement proved that success comes from authenticity, not assimilation, and now even those inside the institution are asking why they must follow dead Europeans when the living streets of Kinshasa have already forged a better path.
This demand for authenticity is fueled by a force the Academy cannot replicate: necessity. The popular painters didn’t choose the streets for aesthetic reasons; they painted because they had to eat. Like soccer in Brazil’s favelas, where a ball is the only ticket out, art in Kinshasa became a tool for survival. This creates a different species of artist. Not someone who paints because their parents can afford the fees, but someone who paints as if drowning, and art is oxygen. The constraints of poverty became an aesthetic signature: flour sacks for canvas, local pigments for paint. More than materials, necessity gave them urgency. Every painting had to matter, had to sell, had to speak. There was no room for exercises that led nowhere; every stroke had to count.
Ultimately, this raw urgency created a system where merit vanquishes privilege. The streets fostered a natural meritocracy. A young painter approaches a master, brush in hand. Can you paint? Show me. Can you learn? Watch me. Talent is the only currency. The Academy, however, abandoned the merit it once recognized. Where teachers once recommended promising students and scholarships existed for the poor, now money determines access. The market of the streets is harsh but honest; it doesn’t care about your diploma, only if the work is good. And so the informal school maintains standards of excellence the formal one has long forgotten.
The Verdict
Ask a young street artist in Kinshasa for their inspiration, and they won’t name Van Gogh or Caravaggio. They’ll talk about the billboard on their corner, painted by Chéri Chérin, or remember watching a neighbor’s work attract international collectors. This is what the Académie des Beaux-Arts, hidden behind its institutional walls, never understood: inspiration comes from proximity, not history. A child needs to see someone from their own world succeed. The popular painters are not just artists; they are evidence. Evidence that you can paint in Lingala and still speak to the world, that you don’t need to become someone else to become someone.
Meanwhile, the Academy continues its performance of education. Henri Kalama speaks of decolonization while forcing students to copy European masters. The institution charges fees that exclude the talented poor and graduates artists unable to compete. It is unaware that the real school is outside, in the workshops and markets of the city.
But this is no longer a tragedy. The streets have already won. They didn’t overthrow the Academy; they simply made it irrelevant. Its death is evident in every international exhibition that features popular painters, every collector who bypasses its doors, every young artist who chooses a workshop over a classroom.
The Academy is dead!
Long live the streets. Long live the masters who demand talent over tuition. Long live the education that doesn’t know it’s educating. The revolution already happened and ABA hasn’t noticed yet.
Comments
Vive la rue!!