Faber, Paul. The dramatic history of the Congo as painted by Tshibumba Kanda Matulu. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2005. 46pp., 102 color illus. ND1099.C63T755 2004 AFA. OCLC 58480261.
This exhibition showcases Tshibumba Kanda Matulu’s series of genre paintings depicting Congolese 20th-century history. (See Johannes Fabian, below). Painted in 1973-1974 and collected by Fabian, the 102 paintings are now in the permanent collection of the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. Although there were many self-taught Lubumbashi painters doing similar work, Tshibumba is different in the sheer scale and magnitude of this project. Curator Paul Faber offers an excellent overview and context for Congolese genre painting and a cogent analysis of Tshibumba’s œuvre.
Fabian, Johannes. Remembering the present: painting and popular history in Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xv, 348pp. illus. (pt. color), bibliog. (pp. 329-335). ND1099.C63T7534 AFA. OCLC 34412571.
Tshibumba Kanda Matulu had a grand design for telling the history of the Congo: a series of one hundred original paintings. Fortuitously, in 1973 this Shaba-based self-taught genre painter met Johannes Fabian, an anthropologist, who was researching Congolese popular painting. Unbeknownst to either, a long-term collaboration had begun. Twenty years later, this project has finally been realized as an amalgam of art exhibition, ethnographic analysis, and revisionist historiography. Born in 1947, Tshibumba has disappeared in the intervening years -- despite attempts by Fabian and other to locate him -- and is believed dead.
Genre painting in Shaba strongly proclaims "collective memory" of an idyllic past and a troubled, violent present. It finds an audience among local people. Tshibumba's series is unique in that it elevates this historical painting to an unprecedented level and scale. Tshibumba and Fabian conducted hours of discussion, which forms the verbal narratives for these paintings. In the first part of the book, Fabian presents the paintings and accompanying text. In the second part, he offers rich and layered interpretations of these cultural products.
Critiqued by Yaël Simpson Fletcher in Radical history review (New York) no.4, fall 2002, pages 195-207.
