Three claims from one interview, and the documents that answer them.
The watercolours that open the canon in 1926 came from the office of a Belgian clerk who also took in the head tax. On the painters’ own tapes, the freedom of the Élisabethville studio meant painting what its French director painted and selling to nobody. The curator who calls all of this a miracle bought close to ten thousand of the results.
In 2022 Belgium handed the Kakuungu mask back to Congo as an indefinite loan, because its own law forbids giving anything away. The same three principles that keep it in Brussels are available to any African statute book willing to claim them. Stop asking; declare.
·6 min read
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