AFRICAN CARVED IVORY

A Mini-Conference on
Local Images & Global Connections of a 19th Century Loango Tusk

April 13, 2005
Spencer Museum of Art
University of Kansas


Nichole Bridges and Wyatt MacGaffey examine the tusk.

Sponsored by the
Kansas African Studies Center

Sessions & Speakers

Western Equatorial African Art History
1:00 - 3:50 Spencer Museum of Art, Room 211

1:00 Art and Kongo: A Short History
Wyatt MacGaffey, John R. Coleman Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, Haverford College
2:30 Ivory Trade Art
Nichole Bridges, Ph.D. Candidate Art History, U. Wisconsin-Madison, Smithsonian Doctoral Fellow, National Museum of African Art

Symposium: Local Images & Global Connections of the Hamburger Ivory
Please click on the Presenter's name to read their remarks and see some of their visual aids.

Spencer Museum of Art Auditorium

4:00 Saralyn Reece Hardy, Director of Spencer Museum, Welcome
4:05 John Janzen, Director, African Studies Center, Welcome
4:10 Gitti Salami, Assistant Professor of Art, KU, Introductions
4:15 Reinhild Janzen, The Hamburger Story
4:45 Gerald Mikkelson, The Trans-Siberian Railroad: Boons and Boondoggles
5:00 Wyatt MacGaffey, Local Meanings of the Hamburger ivory in light of Kongo art
5:30 John Janzen, The Lemba Trading Association as seen in the Rymar Ivory
5:45 Nichole Bridges, Imagery, Carvers, and Consumers: Investigating Carved Loango Tusks
6:15 Daniel Breslauer, Latkes and Ivory: Reflection on Jewish Tradition and the Loango Ivory

Reception
6:30 - 7:30 p.m. Spencer Museum Atrium

This conference is occasioned by the gift of a century-old carved ivory tusk to the University of Kansas by Rabbi Wolfgang Hamburger and his wife Susan, of St. Joseph, Missouri. The story of the ivory's century as a Hamburger family holding is as interesting as the meaning of its original production. The conference assembles scholars on African art and Western Equatorial African society, as well as those who will comment on the Hamburger family during two World Wars in Germany and subsequent emigration to America.
The conference thus explores the historical layers of significance of a unique cultural object across four continents, three generations, and multiple political eras.

Right: Carved ivory tusk Loango coast, Western Equatorial Africa, late 19th to early 20th century. 15" H.
University of Kansas Museum of Anthropology
# 2005.1.1.
Donors: Wolfgang & Susan Hamburger,
St. Joseph, Missouri.

The 76 figures of the ivory are displayed in various poses and modes of dress: adults and children; male and female; dressed in European clothing, others in African raffia fiber from the palm tree; stooped over, using a walking cane; a child seeking its mother's breast; a couple in embrace; figures "floating" in the air; figures on the ground; a prisoner on his knees, apparently bound.





Scholars will compare this ivory to others and analyze its motifs, vignettes, themes, and styles. They will seek to determine its age, the atelier of its origin, and the significance of the figures. Whatever interpretation further study may yield, we may safely observe that the carved ivories from the pre-colonial Congo coast are a creative self-representation by the artists of their society and their world, as they imagined the desires and fancies of prospective buyers-merchants, travelers, other middlemen.

Ivory from Loango

The MaLoango, King of Loango, is shown in this 17th century engraving by Dapper holding court, seated on leopard skin and thick piled raffia. An orchestra of drums and ivory horns perform. Several insignia of office are on display around the king.

The distinctive Loango ivory carvings emerged in the cultural context of trade routes and port cities of the flourishing international trade along the coast of Western Equatorial Africa. Beginning in the 15th century, when the Portuguese reached Congo and were soon joined by other European mercantile powers, trade transformed societies of interior Africa. Europeans' guns, liquor, cloth, and manufactured goods were used to purchase slaves, ivory, metals, and other raw materials. African merchants maintained markets, trade routes and river traffic, and negotiated independently with Europeans until colonial conquest in the 1880s. Railroads eventually replaced the caravan routes, and European traders and tax collectors targeted the African merchants and priests.

Trade from the entire Congo Basin moved by canoe to the market at Mpumbu (Kinshasa) and, from there, because of rapids in the Congo river, moved by caravan paths to the Lower Congo coastal ports. By the 19th century the force of the trade had largely dissolved the states of Loango, Kakongo, Ngoyo, and Kongo.

Loango City

Loango city is on the Atlantic coast, in a 17th century engraving from Olfert Dapper's, Description de lÁfrique (French, German, and original 1665 Dutch editions are evident in the inscriptions). Founded in the 12th century as one of a cluster of Equatorial African kingdoms, Loango was in full engagement with Europeans and global trade by the 16th century.
Scenes identified are:(a) king's palace; (b) wives' compound; (c) crier's tower; (d) royal wine house; (e) royal dining house; (f) public audience court; (g) royal garden; (h) wives' garden; (i)(k) fetishes; (l) road criminals are taken to capital punishment.

From Loango to Lawrence:
The Global Journey of the Hamburger Ivory

Hamburger family tradition recalls that Wilhelm Hamburger traveled to the Far East on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, sometime before World War I, to promote agricultural products, particularly soybeans, for the Dreyfus Corporation. On his way home, in India, he purchased the ivory carving from Loango.

Let us go back to the beginning, for a moment, and recognize that in telling the story of one ivory piece we must recognize the original owner of the ivory: an elephant somewhere in the Congo Basin, a member of a herd, a small individual, even a child, by comparison to the reported mature bulls whose tusks weigh 160 lbs. A hunter, armed with either a poison arrow or a spear, brought down the elephant, cut off the tusks, and perhaps feasted on the meat. From there the tusk, now an object of trade and earning, may have been transported on a merchant's canoe down the Congo River to Mpumbu market (today's Kinshasa), and from there on the head of a porter to Loango.

An ivory carver, part of a workshop, carefully crafted the designs with an iron knife, or adze. The tusk, transformed into a cultural object, was next sold to a European shipper in the cargo or cabin luggage of a sail ship, or steamer, around the Cape of Good Hope to South Asia. It is here, in South Asia, where the tusk was purchased by Wilhelm Hamburger and brought home to Germany.
In Germany the ivory may have stood on a mantel in the Hamburger home in Görlitz, Nuremberg, or Hamburg. When Wilhelm emigrated to Australia in 1939, the ivory took up residence in Stettin on the Baltic seacoast, in the home of his son,
Eric, daughter-in-law, Lizzie, and grandson, Wolfgang. During the World War II air raids, the ivory was taken to shelters. When the Russian front advanced on Stettin, Lizzie buried the ivory in the garden. When the Hamburgers fled because their homes were being given to Polish people from the east, they took the ivory with them to Berlin. After Wolfgang and his mother Lizzie emigrated to America in 1947, the ivory was in Lizzie's chest of drawers until her death in 1966. Then it was prominently displayed in her son's and daughter-in-law's home until 2004.

Lizzie Hamburger, wife of Eric Hamburger, and her son Wolfgang Hamburger, seen on street in Berlin after World War II, in 1946, shortly before their emigration to the United States.

Related Artifacts in the Exhibit "African Carved Ivory: Local Images & Global Connections of a 19th Century Loango Tusk."

The dynamic and creative influence of the international trade in precolonial centuries is evident in these few artifacts from two Kansas collections. Although the coastal states, like Loango, collapsed from the overwhelming impact of wealthy merchants, a regional culture and economy continued with its own currency and mercantile class. North of the Congo river, the Lemba association of traders rose in the 17th century by forming networks of marriage alliances between local lineages, villages, and market districts, in the process taking on significant governing and juridical powers. The Lemba bracelets on display feature couples - prominent alliances - formed to stabilize society, promote trade, and assure reproduction of local lineages.

South of the Congo River the Chokwe of Central and NE Angola became significant brokers of international trade, bringing guns and other European goods from the coast in return for slaves and ivory from the interior. Chokwe material culture reflects both the dynamic and expansionistic character of their life, as well as the avid incorporation of external influences - new forms, functions, and materials. These artifacts are from the large early 20th century collection by Claude Brown, University of Kansas engineering alumnus, who went to Angola to work for a Portuguese diamond mining company along the Kasai River.

Right: Gourd water tobacco pipe, wrapped with brass wire, studded with brass tacks; woven vine; wooden tobacco stem; Chokwe people of NE Angola; KU Museum of Anthropology Claude Brown Collection E 493 ca. 1915. 12" H The pipe reflects the adoption of a foreign plant (tobacco from the Americas) and its use in a new way (smoking, literally "drinking leaves"). The use of new materials obtained in trade is evident in the brass wire and tacks on the gourd pipe.

Left: Beaded chief's headdress. Chokwe, KU Museum of Anthropology, Claude Brown collection E 499 / 00.1703 8" H x 14" L x 8" W. The expansionist Chokwe of 19th century Angola often invaded neighboring peoples, raided their villages, enslaved, ruled, and intermarried with them. The rulers who governed over this network of Chokwe military camps produced a variety of symbols of prestige and authority, such as this headdress.

Right: Chokwe chair in Renaissance style, KU Museum of Anthropology, Claude Brown Collection, E 580 21" H x 18" L x 13" W The form of the Chokwe "throne"is adopted from European chairs and is quite unlike African chairs or stools. These "thrones" were displayed as prestige objects alongside elders and judges who sat on mats or stools. The motifs on the chair are scenes of daily life (e.g., drumming), episodes and images from political origin legends (the Lweji motif of a sister resisting her two brothers, lower back), legendary heroes or masks (Chihongo the elder, center backrest; Chibinda Ilunga the hunter, right top) or cosmological forces (the circular motif of Nzaji, Lightning, center front of backrest).

Kansas African Studies Center

The KASC coordinates and develops the interdisciplinary interests of Africanists across the University of Kansas, and promotes the study of Africa in the University, the region, and beyond.

We would like to thank the Spencer Museum of Art, the Museum of Anthropology, the Kress Foundation Department of Art History, the Murphy Lecture Fund, Susan and Wolfgang Hamburger, and all the speakers who have been so kind as to come and make this conference a memorable event.

Design of brochure, flyer, and pamphlet, Stephanie Kirmer.
Text and curation of exhibition, John M. Janzen.
Spencer Exhibition by Janet Dreiling & Austin Porter.

Kansas African Studies Center
785-864-3745
Bailey Hall 10
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS 66045
kasc@ku.edu
http://www.ku.edu/~kasc