Africa In The European Imagination
Visions Of The Kongo, Angola, & Matamba 1600 - 1750

April 12 - June 1, 1997

 

To "discover" and to conquer, to conquer, to combat paganism and to Christianize, to trade in goods and to profit from the lucrative traffic in human flesh.

Such were the motivations of the colonists who ventured into the African continent from the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. as a function of their objectives, the era, and the particular African kingdom into which they journeyed, European soldiers, sailors, missionaries, merchants, and exiled prisoners used various means to impose their will: at best, there was persuasion and diplomacy; at worst, brutal and bloody repression. Encounters based on a respect for the cultural structure and local customs in place were rare, not to say exceptional.

These illustrations - drawn from travel accounts from the then-
kingdoms of the Kongo, Angola, and Matamba - simultaneously translate and obscure European intentions in Africa. Created at the outset to illuminate the content of their accompanying texts - to intensify and enlarge the significance of the written word - this iconography conveys an underlying spirit of political, ideological, and religious propaganda as much as it reveals the fundamental incomprehension of the European mind when confronted with foreign civilizations.

Beyond reflecting obvious value judgments and European obsessions, however, these illustrations draw attention to what would become a striking incongruity in European thought itself: the rift between the supposed universalism of the eighteenth-century values and the increasingly inhumane treatment of foreign cultures at the hands of colonial travelers. Denis Diderot (the co-editor of the 1751 Encyclopedie) underscored this contradiction brilliantly in a stinging rebuke to his own century: "You are proud of your enlightenment; but what use is it to you? What use would it be to Hottentot? Is it really so important to know how to speak of virtue without practicing it?".










Curators:
Patrick Graille
Andrew Curran
Sandra Ericson, Director, Mandeville Gallery