Colonial Encounters with a Clockwork Elephant
Material Culture and nkisi in the Emil Torday Expedition to the Belgian Congo 1907-1909
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51185/journals/rhca.2023.varia09Keywords:
British Museum, African Art, Witchcraft, Colonial expedition, Congo, AnthropologyAbstract
As an envoy of the British Museum, Emil Torday, a collector and proto-anthropologist, was reported as using a clockwork elephant, an example of a seemingly familiar trope in encounters between European and African peoples. In the following case study, these tropes are scrutinised through a deeper analysis of the unpublished sources from the Emil Torday Expedition (1907-1909). Prolific within Torday’s detailed transcriptions of local ethnographies and ontologies from the Kasai region, is the term ‘kissi’, or nkisi; employed to represent the interaction between objects, people and spirits. Recognising the capacity to mediate relationships and trade during his time in South-West Congo (1900-1909), nkisi practices were promoted to his European readership as a potentially valuable tool. Theoretically anchored in the anthropology of art, this case study extends the critique of colonial hegemony and sheds light on the intercultural conversations about power that took place during the colonial encounter.
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