The DE-BIAS project aims to promote a more inclusive and respectful approach to the description of digital collections and the telling of stories and histories of minoritised communities. To examine the particular challenges posed by historical language linked to cultural heritage from colonial contexts, colleagues from the project set out to learn more about a collection of early 20th century missionary photographs, preserved in Belgium and never before shown in Congo.
The visual archive of a mission
The archives of the Friars Minor of the Flemish province of Saint Joseph, preserved by KADOC-KU Leuven, contain an extensive and diverse audiovisual collection. They include around 240 different photo and glass plate series and photo albums created between 1920 and 1970 in locations in the current provinces of Lualaba and Haut-Katanga in Congo.
The archive documents the activities of the Friars who acted as missionaries in Congo, including their relations with other colonial actors, as well as the environment and society in which they operated. The missionaries applied their photography to record local communal life; how communities lived, worked, played, hunted, celebrated and honoured their ancestors, and how they were engaged as labourers in mission work or employed by colonial companies. The archive contains both location-based visual material, as well as records for which provenance information is lacking.
The original descriptions – written adjacent to images collected in albums, on the back of postcard-sized photographs, or as captions to a glass plate – frequently contain derogatory language. Because of generic, incomplete or insufficiently reliable information in the archives themselves, more recent descriptions are often very general.
Returning to Katanga
During the Belgian rule of Congo (1908-1960), the Flemish Franciscans founded mission posts, parishes, schools and dispensaries in about a hundred locations across the southwestern area of the colony. Together with Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu, professor of Université de Lubumbashi and expert on the history of the area, KADOC and KU Leuven staff involved in the DE-BIAS project made a careful selection from the visual material related to five of these locations. This selection comprised a mix of photographs of places which can still be recognised today, to representations of individuals, communities, activities or places for which little or no information was available. Project collaborators were assigned locations to visit, where they initiated conversations with elderly members of the community. Particular attention was hereby given to the match between the profile of the interviewer (such as ethnic background and spoken language) and the community to be visited.
In each of the locations, the interviews resulted in the enrichment of the metadata for the images shown during the conversations. Some triggered vivid memories. A photograph of a gymnastics performance in Kolwezi gave rise to a multitude of recollections about the location where the event allegedly took place, as well as about the school that organised such gymnastics shows, and even about the people in the photograph. Similarly, photos of labor camps of Union Minière unfolded a social history of living conditions in the Katanga mining region through personal reminiscences of individuals who grew up in similar cités. A photo of an assembly of people taken in Kanzenze elicited stories about how villagers used to perform labor for the mission or companies in exchange for a weekly food rations.
Some of the conversations led to surprising responses. For instance, one of the interlocutors was able to explain, in unexpected detail, the division of roles on a fishing sloop based on a rather generic-looking photo that was only known to have possibly been taken in the vicinity of Kilwa, a town on the shores of Lac Moëro. Likewise, collected memories based on a seemingly banal photograph of a church building in Kamina serve as reminders of the racial segregation of the church in this epoch, causing separate church buildings to be erected for non-European Christians.
Several of the photographs and these responses were collected for an exhibition in Antwerp, ‘Face/Surface. Metamorphosis of colonial perspectives’, which was co-curated with Congolese Circle, an organisation dedicated to the social-economic and cultural interests of the Congolese community in Belgium. As the (bilingual) title suggests, initiating dialogues about colonial photography enables us to bring untold histories to the surface and face the ongoing consequences of the past today.
The value of enriched metadata
During the conversations in Katanga, photographs functioned as an aide mémoire for interviewees to explore personal memories and stories that often went beyond what the actual photograph showed. In general, the interviewers observed reactions and feelings of pleasure springing from the mere presence – albeit in the form of reproductions – of historical material, which none of the interviewees had ever seen before, and the act of revisiting the past through vocalizing memories and storytelling. Personal histories and collective stories about the community blend into one another.
This exercise raised many questions about how archival descriptions could or should accommodate the information that came to light during these interviews. According to historical academic literature, it should at least be considered. Art historian and curator Temi Odumosu views metadata as virtual spaces to vocalise different understandings of history, making archival descriptions more representative of communities. Moreover, by integrating multiple layers of meaning and different perspectives into metadata, preservation institutions can work toward what Charles Jeurgens has called the “emotional accessibility” of archives for a broad spectrum of users. Hopefully, co-curating descriptions based on conversations with community members, as was the case in Katanga, will not only gradually lead to more accurate descriptions, but also to new connections between communities and cultural heritage preserved in remote archival institutions.
Find out more
You can find out more about the work of the DE-BIAS project and explore the physical exhibition Face/Surface. Metamorphosis of colonial perspectives in Antwerp until 18 December 2024. You can read the contributions collected in Congo in this physical exhibition, or read some of them on Europeana.eu.