Welcome to the sixth and the last of my 2020 to 2023 Slate Lectures.
As you already know, the previous lectures were presented in-person at the examination schools at the University of Oxford.
Unfortunately, the recent strikes across the United Kingdom necessitated the risk handling of these lectures,
and the outcome is regrettably that I am not currently on site for an in-person presentation.
But let me express my immense gratitude.
To Professor Jeff Button and his colleagues and staff, especially Alexander Stavrou at the Department of History of Art.
I also thank Professor John Vickers, Warden of All Souls College,
and especially Dame Marina Wana, also of All Souls College, to whom I dedicate these lectures.
Today I take us to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In the era of Mobutu Sese Seko, when he was referred to as the Republic of Zaire.
Who as president from 1965 to 1997 exemplified the theatrical and ostentatious big man ruler in post-colonial Africa.
By deploying anti-communist rhetoric.
During the Cold War,
he secured the Western bloc's support of his spectacularly kleptocratic and repressive regime and through his anti Western authenticity program,
created a national culture. In his own image.
Against Mobutu's political practice and ideology.
I read the architectural sculptures of bodies.
He said Congolese. And they argue that the extravagant hyper modernity reflected in segments of popular arts
constituted a distinct form of imaginative resistance to our official culture under Mobutu,
and that they must be seen as a rhetorical refutation of Mobutu's authenticity, ideology, and his enforcement of a unitary vision of national culture.
But first, let me acknowledge the Department of Fine and Applied Arts Class of 1990,
a group that has served as my enduring uncle from the very moment I arrived at Sokha with no previous background in the fine arts.
The competitive work ethos we developed during those years and the deep friendship among the entire cohort which continues to this day,
provided me the tools with which I charted my path into and through many of my professional worlds.
The company of my 1990 classmates serves for me as a zone of freedom and imaginative comfort, impossible in other spaces I occupied today.
And for this, I am truly grateful.
And with that, I now turn to the topic of today's lecture.
In 1989. The now legendary exhibition magician, the latter organised by Jean de Mattei at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
The Congolese artist buddies is a Kindle is presented for architectural sculptures that brought him to international attention.
Among them were Le Card de CEO.
A blue highrise structure with square windows framed in yellow and black.
On an 8.8 stop plan. The 11 floor building sits on a high olive green days on the facets of which are large yellow triangular designs with red cords.
The space itself sits on two circular platforms.
The first, also green, has a flat top on which we see pit tiled structures set on a square or range bases.
With fringes. Large and small entry ways on this level are accessed by a double ramp marked with entrance and exit traffic signs.
Atop the building, a dome shaped structure with golden stripes rest on two solid blue bases and holds
aloft a finial that looks more like if four stained arrowhead than a cross.
In the second work. La République Francais.
The main building is tubular with 24 floors and multi level square bases, as well as a delicate finial structure topped by a circular.
Display sign on which the work's title is written.
But I want to draw attention to two design elements connecting these two elements and sculptures.
First. Is the blue, red, yellow green colour combination in both.
And second is the eight pointed star, which in one work is the basis of its plan and in the other the main motif painted on the finial display sign.
I will argue that in deploying this task shape and form the blue colour and the green yellow red tricolore in these two sculptures and elsewhere,
jingles simultaneously glorified the Mobutu regime, yet gestures to a history that not only haunted the dictator himself, but also the nation.
And although King Charles was peerless with his inventive sculptural form and unique in his artistic vision,
I argue that what I might call his double speak occurs in the work of his other contemporaries,
with whom he has been identified in the scholarship and in the exhibitions of modern and contemporary art of the Congo and Africa.
That is, I am interested in how the sculptures of King plays, as well as paintings of his compatriots, Cherie Samba.
And she boomed back in Denmark to look. Who have come to us primarily as leading figures in the so-called School of Popular Painting.
Despite openly exalting or avoiding direct criticism or negative commentary
about a ruler who from the onset demonstrated a propensity for exterminating
any and all opposition and dissident managed to convey fears and perhaps even
surreptitious critique and rejection of Mobutu's politics and ideologies.
To be sure, the choice of Mobutu Sese Seko as the fifth African deep man in these late lectures is far from surprising,
given that he was more than the others we have encountered.
The exemplary, brutal, kleptocratic, colourful, decadent dictator and creature of the Cold War era.
At once, much hated. And all but worshipped by segments of the Congolese population.
And although Tingle's might seem ill fitted for this present inquiry,
I am convinced that his cultures allow us to reckon with Mobutu's uses of buildings,
public structures and his many palaces to express his magnificent like royalty, ancient and modern, but also to appreciate the less studied ways.
King alleged this work, despite its formal specificity and uniqueness,
participated in a widespread visual and expressive culture that drew on the power of
popular art and discourse to challenge hegemonic and progressive governmentality.
In probing these questions, I begin first with an overview of Mobutu's role in shaping the politics of post-independence Congo,
his political ideology and its attendant visual rhetoric, and how these provide the context for reading some of the work.
Congolese and the masters of Congolese popular painting as forms of political speech for and against a repressive dictatorship.
On June 13, 1960, the day the Democratic Republic of Congo gained its independence from Belgium.
Patrice Lumumba, as new prime minister, gave a fiery speech.
That propelled him to the status of a living legend, but also sealed his fate.
As a political matter. With the Belgian king by his side.
Lumumba denounced the decades long exploitation, violation and repression of the people of Congo by the colonial regime.
Noting that, and I quote, No Congolese will ever forget that independence was one.
It persevering and its power struggle carried on.
From day to day, a struggle in which we were undaunted by privation.
Or suffering and stilted needs strained blood.
It was filled with tears, fire and blood.
We are deeply proud of our struggle because it was justice and noble and indispensable in putting an end to the humiliating bondage forced upon us,
unquote. Legend has it that in a speech broadcast on radio through Belgium,
residents of the Congo who had hoped to continue administering the independent nation state into panic, forcing them to return home en masse.
But while his no holds barred speech endeared him to the anti-colonial and anti-imperial world, Malcolm X,
on account of it declared Lumumba the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent.
Authorities in France, Belgium and the United States saw instead a troublemaker.
That is better dead than alive, in charge of one of the world's most resource rich nations.
Three months later, foreign and local anti Lumumba interests converged around the journalist turned army officer.
Just have Desiree the Mobutu.
Who rallied his troops. Dismiss the government.
Paralysed by power struggle between prime minister and president and in December arrested.
Patrice Lumumba. In January 1961.
Mobutu handed the prime minister to rebel forces in the Katanga region, who,
with the help of Belgian missionaries, assassinated Lumumba and his associates.
Their bodies apparently melted with acid.
To avoid the possibility of his grave becoming a pilgrimage site.
Regardless, he became a political matter, celebrated among the non-aligned and decolonising world, as well as among Soviet bloc countries.
In a few years. Mobutu establishes credentials among Western powers as an economic and political ally
in the Congo and as a bulwark against any Soviet interests in the region and Africa.
He went on further military training in Israel and the UK and in 1963 was feted by US President John F Kennedy at the White House.
By 1965, Mobutu was the most powerful force in the country with the president kasavubu all but entirely dependent on him for protection.
On November 24. Six days after the President announced and promoted Mobutu to the peerless rank of Major General,
Mobutu returned the favour by seizing power, executing four members of the President's Cabinet in front of a crowd of 50,000.
To the apparent consternation of his Western allies.
When in an interview, a European journalist noted that the West does not favour the execution of politicians in democracies.
Mobutu retorted with a quote, Me remind you, my dear friend.
We are not Europeans, we are Bantustans.
Just because we were colonised by Europeans.
We have not become Westerners. We are still Bantustans.
Put. Moreover, he argued that.
Even if democracy were to be applied in Africa,
it had to be nuanced in a way that invested the president or head of state with powers
associated with what he described as the African chief whose authority was absolute.
For us over here, said Mobutu. The respect giving to a chief is sacred.
You can mess about with a chief. His decision is final.
Contemporary photographs of him on a later. Like European colonial officers and potentates of old.
Reveal how serious he was once on the national stage about performing his self arrogated chiefly or more appropriately, his big man status.
Thus began the long process of Mobutu's takeover from embattled trade.
Military head of state. Trained in the ways of war and politics in the West.
And fully immersed in European political thought and modernist ideologies.
To a band to Chief King big man fired by a phenomenal desire to transform himself into the deity of a state.
Religion. With the entire citizenry as his adoring worshippers.
His first act of political rehabilitation was to appropriate the legacies of his nemesis, Lumumba.
So in 1966. He declared the same Lumumba whose assassination he helped orchestrate five years before in National Hero,
named the main boulevard in the capital city after him and organised an epic pageantry during which crowds flew banners with the two portraits
with the portraits of the two men amid songs and dances celebrating their cousin really glorious deeds in the service of the new nation.
Then. Mobutu declared himself the second national hero with Lumumba as the first.
And to permanently mark. There's elevation in the landscape.
He ordered the construction of the mighty monument to national heroes.
On the road interchange at limit industrial area connecting the Mumbai Boulevard to the capital cities on the main roads.
Designed by the French Tunisian architect Olivier Clément Kaku,
a favourite of Mobutu and other African dictators like who who fled one year of Cote d'Ivoire and Amadou Ahi joe of Cameroon.
The monument consists of a 210 metre high brutalist tower with a three tier viewing platform and a huge spire clad in copper.
And it is meant for a national museum. Where the foundation laid ceremony chaired by the then Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, in 1967.
Construction began in 1969, but stopped in 1974 after the economy bottomed out.
But that was only the beginning of these bizarre.
Costly, systematic and pervasive effort to not only capture the state, but also to turn it into his own image.
And in this, he sought inspiration from a great variety of historical and contemporary potentates, from Napoleon to Chairman Mao.
Just as he is told himself, the second national hero, he found it necessary to mock his rhetorical rejection of Western culture,
an assertion of his and his country's delinking from the sordid European colonial past by reinventing the South's land, nation and citizenry.
So this simple and highly symbolic act of renaming.
So Joseph distributor became Mobutu Sese Seko.
Mwenda was a banker. Which means the warrior who knows no defeat because of his endurance and inflexible
will and is all powerful living fire in his wake as he goes from conquests to outcast.
River Congo. The country and its currency were giving a singular, supposedly African name Zaire.
Never mind that the Congo rephrase the ancient kingdom of Congo and the Zaire.
In fact, the corruption. By the Portuguese of the kingdom's mighty river inside Zara.
The river that swallowed all rivers.
It seems, though, that in naming the country after the river,
he meant to disconnect the modern nation from the rich and as a member of the tiny minority ethnic group from the far north.
Oppressive legacies of the kingdom with which he had no ancestral claims.
In any case, he established his own political party, the Popular Movement of the Revolution, MPR banning every other.
And in 1967 published his political manifesto, in which he articulated his ideology of authenticity.
If as a concept partly based on the Negritude philosophy of reanimating and celebrating
blackness in response to centuries of denigration by Western thought and racist propaganda.
But where Negritude was a literary argument for affirmative racial subjectivity,
Mobutu's authenticity was an unvarnished political program that relied on systematic propaganda and state enforcement of its shifting tenets,
all driven by the fantasies of the megalomaniac, leader and guide.
Just as he rephrased in 1965 what he claimed to be the Africans view of the chief as an authoritarian wielder of unchallenged power.
He defended the one party state in the modern nation as a derivative of African political system.
For as he claimed. A community does not have two chiefs.
Mobutu also embarked on a colonial iconoclasm.
Taking down the monumental statue of King Leopold, the second,
the terrible Belgian who turned the paradoxically named Congo free state into his modern day fiefdom,
removed the statue of Henry Morton Stanley Leopold's inaugural imperial agent,
as well as the railway monument with its racist depiction of Congolese labourers.
And in addition to building for himself several palaces, including the modernist bamboo.
Pallas, a.k.a. The Backside of the Jungle.
Designed by his beloved architect Kaku, in Mobutu's ancestral village in Batali and the Chinese themed palace at Sella.
Where in 1974. Muhammad Ali stayed during the now legendary Rumble in the Jungle boxing match with George Foreman.
That event for which the boxers were reportedly paid an unprecedented sum of 10 million.
Each was for Mobutu. A propaganda coup.
Billboards near the stadium proudly announced that a fight between two blacks in a black nation organised by blacks and seen by the whole world.
Is indeed a victory of Buddhism. Liberties in being the next stage when the sole objective of the state's authenticity
program congealed into a cult like worship of Mobutu as father of the nation Zaire.
Guide of the Revolution Helmsman Founder.
Saviour of the people. And supreme combatant.
One important change made by Mobutu in 1971, a year before he unsuccessfully tried to name himself president for life,
was the radical change of the country's flag.
From previous designs that consisted of some combination of yellow star and diagonal arrange fringed red band against a blue
background to a decidedly green flag with a central yellow circle in which is drawn a brown hand holding a touch with red flames.
It has been suggested that this illustrative symbol reframes the part of Mobutu's name, identifying him as a fiery warrior conqueror.
In other words, the flag unify the man and the nation.
He was not just the father of the nation. The nation was him.
This flag would feature prominently in the works of King Charles and some of his contemporaries.
And because of its close relationship with Mobutu and his nation,
I argue that the manner of its deployment in the art reveals the artist's shifting allegiances or faith in Mobutu Zaire.
Jean-Baptiste King Charles was born in 1948 in Kimberley in Hunger, a farming village hundreds of miles southeast of Kinshasa.
After attending a Catholic high school run by Belgian missionaries.
He moved to Kinshasa in about 1970.
Just as much, his program of unifying the diverse nation under the banner of his MPR Party and his political ideology was revving up.
King must have. Changed his name to buddies king allies at this time.
Kinshasa, formerly called Leopold,
feel like the rest of the country experienced tremendous economic growth in the early seventies due to the high price of copper.
Zaire's main export commodity.
Those Congolese arrived in an already booming city with magnificent colonial era buildings like the National Museum and Astoria Hotel.
And the new construction is reshaping the urban landscape.
He worked first as a secondary school teacher.
And in the mid 1970s began making paper architectural sculptures,
the earliest of which earned him a job at the National Museum of Zaire Institute
as a restorer of traditional Congo and African art objects in the collection.
The story of King Leslie's beginnings as an artist is a bit murky,
in part because of the discrepancies in the accounts of early writers and the artist's own not always reliable,
sometimes hyperbolic autobiographic writings.
This College on trust once argued that Kingsley's is.
Rather King Kingsley's. Constant. His constant contact with the old stuff he was restoring prompted him to create his own powerful, modern work.
The implication here is that Fingal, as its status as a modern Congolese artist, was mediated by the experience of restoring traditional artefacts.
In other words, that by immersing himself in the ancestral waters of authenticity.
By the act of mending the old. He found his voice as a maker of new art.
King Charles. However, it was clear that traditional art had no place in his art.
He was, in a way, willing to jettison his Western or Christian name as the father of the nation ordered.
But on the matter of his art, he had no interest in going native or on some routes finding trip.
Moreover, he saw his tenure at the museum as a mad job rather than a formative experience,
and thus pushed back against any perception of him as a mimic of the European modernists,
whose work was famously inspired by the encounters with the art of King as his ancestors.
What is not in doubt is that in his early years, which coincided with the first stages of political turbulence and economic crisis in Zaire,
King Charles joined his compatriots to extol Mobutu's greatness.
While I do not know if single ladies participated in the usually mandatory pageants orchestrated by NPR and broadcast on national media.
In one of his surviving works. November 24 City of African Authenticity for Zaire Museums of 1979.
He, I would argue, did just that.
Created as an imaginary and imaginative proposal for a new museum for Zaire that was to have, as its mandate, the promulgation of Mobutu's ideology.
This sprawling campus is stunning for its complexity and ambition.
Though, now in disrespect. At the museum, its original colours much faded.
It is the very act of naming this museum after the November 24, 1965 military coup that brought Mobutu to power.
That is about the address to me.
Nationally celebrated as the Revolutionary Day, November 24, all but eclipsed the June 30th Independence Day in both official and popular discourse.
Given that. I suppose.
King Charles had not intended or imagined this as a real architectural project,
though he clearly identified himself here and elsewhere as an architect who made what he called maquettes or extreme maquettes.
It is safe to say that he envisaged his work as an expressive and architectonic statement of his compliance to,
if not belief in the use of his artistic voice in praise of Mobutu and his Zaire.
This much is evident from the inclusion.
Empires torch in. The portrait of Mobutu himself pasted on a circular display board alongside his party's logo.
Although this might be the only time King has included liberties portrayed in his compositions.
I argue that his subsequent works. Show him step back from this unfiltered glorification of the Dear Leader, who by then.
And despite his still formidable propaganda infrastructure, faced increasing political headwinds and a collapsing economy.
Four. By 1979, Mobutu had seemed to coups in 1975 and 1978.
The latter, leading to the passage of more than 200 officers.
And although he would promote himself to field marshal in 1983, by the late 1980s, he had become so paranoid about coup plots that he.
Recruited military officers to whom he delegated enormous power almost exclusively from among his small bandy ethnic group.
But what form did the critical adjustment I am suggesting here for jingles?
Take. I earlier noted in my reading of the works of Kindle as shown at the 1989 Majesty and the latter exhibition,
that by simultaneously evoking the colours of the Empire Flag and the star form.
Which belonged to. Mobutu is pretty authenticity era.
He might have been engaging in double speak.
That is a less than clear endorsement of an affiliation with the political status quo.
I also noted that Jingles was not alone among his contemporaries in using his work as a space of and for political discourse.
Consider, for instance, the painter Monson will catch what would be better known as Mulcair,
a leading figure in what the scholarship identified as the Xavier School of popular or genre painting that is,
artists whose work was made for the urban working class and circulated outside of the formal
and elite circuits in which we find the academy trained fine artists such as La Jolla,
Linda Wanga and Damsel Sekou Pozzo.
Whose commissions for Mobutu's palaces exemplified the country's official art.
A self-described painted journalist, Mulcair is best known for his scenes of an outdoor revellers.
An ordinary life in the streets of Kinshasa. His political reportage frequently chronicled Mobutu's events.
Whether doling out gifts to women party loyalists.
Or. On a solo parade through the city or visiting.
With visiting famous people like President Mitterrand of France, whose 1984.
They said it became a recurring subject for Mulcaire.
And other artists. It is impossible, I think, to not see in both the recorded events and the ubiquity of the NPR flags,
the artists celebration of the political animations that defined public life in Mobutu Zaire.
In these works. There is no ostensible troubling of signs and symbols of the regime,
nor an overt critique of the performative and theatrical display of the dictator's big manhood.
On the other hand, the paintings of Cherie Samba, undoubtedly the most renowned artist,
not only of the popular genre, but arguably of contemporary Congolese art.
His work. It's full of social commentary.
Laden with erotic or modern humour.
And generally sidestep direct critique of the regime.
Yet. Some of his work, I argue, was made to do just that.
The clandestinely. I'm thinking here, for instance, of two important paintings from the early 1990s, such as the Tricolour Flag.
And Zai memorial both created.
At a time when Mobutu his grip on power crumbled with the end of the Cold War.
As frequent students and workers strikes.
And the re-emergence of this great rival, Etienne Tshisekedi, on the national scene signalled widespread desire for political change.
The Tricolour Flag features a small group of four adults.
And two schoolchildren outside the house watching a burly man hoist the NPR so-called Tricolore flag.
Perhaps to indicate that this might be a local party office.
Three bands of red, yellow and green run vertically along the front corner of the house.
Three of the adults are apparently singing the Syrian national anthem in which the tricolour flag is severally mentioned.
However, the children rather than joined the chorus instead.
Point to the mis naming of the flag that clearly has more than three colours on it.
While the man in the foreground has enlightened by the children's critique refuses to sing the anthem.
Here. Then it seems somebody recognises the role of the youth in unmaking, the Buddhist ideological edifice represented by the party and its flag,
and shows how awareness of the senselessness of the symbols of state money can serve as the catalyst for political dissidents and change.
But if this painting insinuates the need to dismantle the falsehoods that funded Mobutu's political ideology and oppressive regime Zaire memorial.
Presents a damning view of Congo's political history from colonial to post-independence eras,
including Mobutu's as one of unrelenting tyranny and savagery.
While the four men to the left, Duterte, are not united.
Or at least appear to be in preventing the national wheel from falling off the precipice.
I draw attention to the scene in the circles Mobutu period quadrant in which two emaciated couples
engage in a wretched dance in front of a fax and PR big man identified by his leopard skin cap.
For some seems to imagine that era as one in which the big men delighted in the mandatory performance of mass happiness by beleaguered,
sickly and exploited citizenry.
The question that. This might raise.
And that is the questions around my reading these paintings as critical statements under the Mobutu regime.
Is Why did samba. As it were, veiled his critique in this manner,
especially since some scholars have argued that clarity of communication is one of the characteristics of popular art.
To that, I would suggest or rather offer.
I still remember a study of what he called the aesthetic of vulgarity in the post colony,
in which he showed how in Cameroon the ordinary folk deployed double speak, idiomatic and proverbial expressions.
And forms of humour in popular discourse meant to counter and deflect the otherwise scorching power of the ruler's actions as signifying gestures.
Samba seems to have. Avoided.
Frontal critique of power. Out of fear.
Of repression. In fact, he signalled this.
In his painting. I'm a rebel. In which and which.
He refers. To his decision years back against overtly political themes following threats.
By someone who assumed that he was the target of the artist's satirical work.
Another leading figure of the popular painting she boomed Back Under My Tutu provides
us the clearest example of an artist who demonstrated open support for Mobutu,
yet harboured deep fear about the country's future.
Based in Lubumbashi, the capital city of the mineral rich Shabab province.
She, Moomba, came to international attention by virtue of his epic work.
The history of Zaire consisted of 100 or 101 paintings.
Spanning the entire history of the Congo, from the ancient kingdom through to the era of Mobutu.
Commissioned by Johannes Fabian, the anthropologist.
These paintings reveal the artist's keen, sometimes apocryphal, understanding of the Congo's long,
complex and fraught history of encounter with Europe and the internecine bloodletting of the post-independence period.
Following the party line. She?
Mumbai frequently invoked the Mumbai as heroism matted down and the glorious co-optation of his legacy by MPR.
And he indulged in full throated praise singing as we see it in 1974, works celebrating the big man and his one party state.
And the same November 24 anniversary, King Elect commemorated in his City of Africa and Authenticity Project of 1979.
But it is in. She wonders.
Last painting for the history series. That he tactfully conveyed his frightening vision.
Of future life under Mobutu an NPR.
Titled The Key to the Future and described as a mysterious dream.
It features a monumental domed structure set in the clouds festooned with NPR flags.
Its entrance manned by two recumbent skeletons as the words hundred years for Mobutu and X tive.
Chant often made by party foes at official events.
These words and these expressions a hundred years from Mobutu Stream Star was like towards the building.
About this. What she won back told Fabian that in this vision of tomorrow.
He saw skeletons approach him. From the building as revolutionaries priest songs from Mobutu and displaced by that of.
The famous Tacos Maestro Tabbouleh Urrutia Rule.
And that he that is she boomed back contemplated this frightening encounter.
He thought about the popular saying. If you go far, where will you get to?
And here he paraphrased Tabulates lyrics.
If you're going to meet Lumumba, what would you say?
Recalling the dream illustrated in this painting, Shibusawa feared that he might be arrested,
but not for anything he had done, but for daring to envision a future at odds with the fantasy land of Zaire in authenticity.
But let me then turn to Ingles to show how he's playing with NPR's symbols and his invention of hyper
modern architectural imaginaries must be seen both as counter-narratives of official as public discourse.
And as assistant if clandestine identification with nonconforming.
Subjectivities occupying the fringes.
Of the one party state. Consider, for instance.
His Place De La Ville. Which like choir, the seal.
Features the colour scheme of the Empire flag.
But like his 1979 museum project,
that entrance signage and multiple flags mounted atop the buildings clearly identify the campus as a proposal for a hyper modern party headquarters.
However, when perhaps taking cue from Mobutu's creation of the Vici in the jungle in his hometown, Madeleine Taylor.
The following year, King Charles reimagined his own hometown team, Ben Bella, a hunger.
And yet there's a remarkable absence of NPR colours and signage on any of the structures.
Beside the fact of the radical transformation of the farming community into a dream city,
not even in SASSA, nor any of Mobutu's palaces who compete with.
I draw attention to the two flags. Despite the.
Map of Africa. On one of the buildings.
Identified. As the Zaire with NPR colours to the far left.
The flags, blue collar and yellow star.
On the buildings to the right. Reference pre Mobutu Congo.
And we see that from the flag of a 1960 32626.
In Kingsley's futuristic homeland he has scrubbed out.
And he raised Mobutu an NPR substituting that very.
Political subjectivity. Legacies.
The regime violently suppressed. We notice, however,
that in this work as almost as in almost every other single as depicts an eight pointed star rather than the six pointed star of the Congo.
It seems to me that he invented this form as a subversive substitute for the symbol Mobutu banished from his Zaire flag,
but which continue to signify the pre Zaire Congo of Lumumba.
Although as far as I know, the king has never explained.
The choice of this motif. I am convinced about its signifying function in Kinga Leslie's work.
To emphasise this point, let us consider his arguably most ambitious work, the remarkably epic project for Kinshasa in the third millennium.
Created in 1997, as the rebel forces of Laurent Kabila pushed their way towards Kinshasa in the successful bid to overthrow Mobutu,
ending his three decade rule. This future Kinshasa, unlike the 1979 Authenticity City.
Did not belong to Mobutu. Rather, it celebrates Lumumba with the.
Fabulous stadium that in form and visual splendour trumps Mobutu's greed combined.
Yola Stadium in Kinshasa.
Moreover, King imagined the soon to be post Mobutu Kinshasa as what he described as, I quote, a free city.
A peaceful city where delinquents, police and prisons do not exist.
Unquote. And that is a place of lasting peace, justice and universal freedom that, as he said,
will function like small, secular states with its own political structure.
And that will have no need. A policeman or an army.
Moreover, the clean, safe, marvellously designed and ordered metropolis is a powerful, if symbolic, rehabilitation of a city,
nation and body politic ravaged by decades of oppressive state sanctioned disorder and official mismanagement by Mobutu.
But let me draw attention to the politically subversive features of this work.
Considering that it was made in what was still Mobutu Zaire by naming.
Kinshasa's Airline, Congo Airways.
King Charles signals once more what I call counter historical imaginary.
Evident in his previous work. And apart from the prominent neon sign.
On a building dedicated to the liberation of the Congo.
We have on the airport tower.
And unmistakeable and no doubt wilful conflation of the four and eight pointed star as signifiers of pre Congo.
Or Presi Congo. The Congo of Lumumba.
For his flies, not just the suggestive one star banner we saw in him, then barely a finger, but the Congolese independence blue flag with.
Six small and one large yellow star.
And below it, two of these ubiquitous eight pointed stars.
Thus, if in 1974, at the height of Mobutu's power shift, Bomba was terrified by his vision of a dark future under the regime.
By 1979, after years of equivocation and surreptitious expression of disloyalty and loss of faith in the Mobutu and Pierre ideology,
as well as the evident loosening of the regime's hold on power, a failed economy and proliferating armed rebellion.
King Charles finally resolved in this work the puzzle of his cunning display of right a play with or disavowal.
Of the national imaginaries promoted by a regime to which visual and cultural symbolism meant everything.
It seems to me finally that the formal and visual drama of kinglassie sculptures and even the paintings of cherry samba.
The artist's supreme sense of self-importance.
Consider, for instance. KING It's a mausoleum for himself or.
Self-regard as Picasso's equal. And in their bold and colourful sartorial style.
All of this constitute a form of anti-establishment politics they share with members of
Kinshasa's cult of high fashion known as the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People,
or simply suppose. I see the structural and visual excess in kinglassie sculptures and the performative display of
sartorial flamboyance by the supposed as in negation of the vaunted emphasis on a national culture,
revivified supposedly by indigenous African traditions.
Authorised by Mobilities Authenticity Program.
This insistence. And refusal to.
I would say go native. By the hyperbolic simulation of European architectural.
And fashion codes represent, I believe, a form of symbolic resistance to official ideology and rhetoric.
In other words. The efflorescence of subpar culture that was also promoted by rhumba music stars such as Papa Wemba and Kofi Olamide de.
And the increasing formal complexity of Kingsley's work by the 1990s must be seen as expressive coping mechanisms.
And evocations of alternative subjectivities and imaginaries at a time when the Mobutu regime.
Having crashed the economy and all but abandoned by its Western allies.
Still held on to the tatters of its authenticity ideology.
Yet still revisiting terror and misery on the population.
Thank you.