The title of this multiple-prize-winning book has many senses, as its author, an art historian, elaborates them in her very artful rendering of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Kongo Catholic culture. The sense of the “visual” in its subtitle is imaginatively broad, with chapters organized by expressive genres, or—alternatively—genres of experience: oral narrative and its performance (as well as written texts, both Kongo and European), key visual symbolic representations, cloth/clothing/regalia, and space/architecture. The book’s principal concession to conversion in a chronological sense is a concluding chapter describing the revision of these otherwise seemingly eternally vibrant modes of Catholicism (and/or ongoing legacies of older Kongo culture) at the end of the nineteenth century in the face of Protestant proselytization and Portuguese colonial military conquest.
This initial nod to change as sequential, as distinct from “transformational” (frequently the author’s word), referring to contrastive change between two conceptually stable abstract states, is more than merely a personal predilection of this historian-reviewer, since the change marked by the central Kongo authority’s adoption of Christian forms in 1506 is the central focus of this elegant, erudite, imaginatively innovative, and deeply thoughtful study. What else might “conversion” be, if not the art of producing—and/or experiencing—change at the most profound levels? This question leads the author into revealing dimensions of well-trodden, and often disputed, intellectual terrain laid out around the enduring conundrum of how Kongo, and also (though only implicitly) how Africa generally engaged with the emerging early modern Atlantic world. Was the result comparable to European monarchical polities–a “kingdom”—and “religion”—Catholicism—or did people there remain distinctly African in these respects? A naive colonial missionary literature took at face value the resolute assertions of Catholic piety in the priestly sources of earlier centuries, and drew the historical Kongo within the purview of modern scholarship, well before professional—i.e., secular—African studies had expanded beyond pioneering ethnographies and, in this case, also their skilled editions (and some translations) of perhaps the most detailed documentary record of any part of the continent. The resolutely Africanizing tenor of emergent African studies in the 1960s then posed a contradiction with the evidently local aspects of modern (and by implication, also earlier) Kongo depicted in a new wave of anthropological attention (Wyatt MacGaffey, John M. Janzen) and in the inauguration of a historical perspective on the region. A notable early example would be Jan Vansina’s Kingdoms of the Savanna (Wisconsin, 1967) followed by the work of some of his students (full disclosure: including this reviewer). Such studies revisited Catholicism in the Kongo as alleged or as a veneer overlying ongoing lineage politics and ancient pan-central-African symbolic structures. John Thornton soon defended the authenticity of Kongo Catholicism and the political ranking of the polity as a “kingdom” fully comparable to its contemporaneous European counterparts in a lengthy (and continuing) series of masterfully thorough and innovative critiques and intricate parsings of the documentation.
Fromont transcends this European/African dichotomy by marshaling the trove of visual (and performative) evidence in these materials to engage the basic dynamics of understanding, expressing, and even achieving the “art of conversion.” Any review risks diminishing arguments of the elegance and intricacy of Fromont’s, but, with that apology: she defines “spaces of correlation” within which Kongo and Catholic symbols invoked compatible, even identical, meanings, thus enabling Kongo political thinkers to use European representations to render familiar and resonant Kongo ideas (e.g., political “might and prestige” expressed through parallel meanings of metal in Kongo vision of the “king” as smith and Portuguese faith in the mighty steel sword of James, the sainted slayer of Moors in their own origin in the ashes of the Iberian Reconquista). Change in the sense of “conversion” in both cultures thus arises ironically from continuity, with rich implications not at all compatible with competing one-sided understandings of this processual “[act] of conversion” as “creolization” or “acculturation.” She does not relate the concept to such current and trendy equivalents as “synthesis” or “hybridity/etc” (16). All of these abstractions reify incompatible, because dissimilar, abstracted “cultures,” whereas Fromont’s “spaces of correlation” put people into play as creators of blended compatibilities, elaborated at length in subtle and intricate discussions of the specifics of dances, swords, the cross, formal costume, public spaces, and more.
To return to my opening accent on historical change: static, abstracted “cultures” still underlie this elegant and original concept. In it, Christianity “transforms” an implicitly stable, central African system of thought, emphasized as “continuing,” rather than portrayed as added to, or augmenting, an ongoing, dynamic process of indeterminate antiquity (though doubtless greater than the “proto-Bantu” of ca. 4000 BCE) of continuous additions and adjustments in response to changing historical circumstances. This historical sense of culture positions Christianity in Kongo as an “extension” or “augmentation” rather than as “transformation,” lessens or removes the possibility of incompatibility (paradoxical in the Western viewer’s eyes), and shifts the emphasis in Fromont’s careful tracing of later uses of Christian symbols from continuity to further adaptations. And it would beg similarly dynamic treatment of “Christianity,” including late-nineteenth-century Protestantism as enhancements or extensions rather than “fading.”
A further promising monkey wrench also lurks in these abstractions. The comparabilities that Fromont discerns so subtly and artfully in these seemingly contrastive universes of symbols seem to this reviewer to derive significantly from her reliance on the inevitably European conceptualizations of the African parties in her rich documentation; to what extent might the apparent overlaps be products of the parallelisms in the two sides that her (only) written access to Africans’ thinking generates? Her impressively thorough, intricate, and erudite footnotes acknowledge the symbolic anthropology of the region (which includes Lévi-Straussian structuralism) and cite nearly all the social and cultural anthropological studies of the area, but the analytical framework of the text does not arise significantly from the local ways of understanding available in them and in current interpretive studies of other areas in Africa. Although she acknowledges these possibilities, increasingly toward the end of the book, they do not structure her argument.
The book thus left this reviewer intrigued, for example, by the implications of its very clever argumentation for elaborating a truly independently African conceptual framework, including plural and situational ontologies, and/or change and time themselves seen as accumulation and confirmation rather than as movement from an abandoned past contrasting with the present. Both of these premises would render moot the entire problematic of “change/conversion/transformation.” To be sure, Fromont acknowledges the principle of change in this historical sense, but these, too, are grace notes on the dominantly structural framework of the book. I take hesitations like these as a tribute to the author’s admirably imaginative and stimulating acuity; what higher accolade can a reviewer offer a book than to embrace the productive questions it leaves unanswered and to embark on the further thinking it inspires?
Perhaps Fromont’s greatest achievements are the vibrant ambiance she senses, the life she brings to the things that are her evidence, and the dignity with which this highly trained and sharp-eyed historian of art endows four centuries of thinkers and artists in Kongo. This beautifully produced, and accessibly priced (!), edition will reward the attentions of lay connoisseurs as well as of scholars in all the academic disciplines engaging Africa’s past—culture and symbolism, history, a range of the expressive arts, so-called “religion,” and more—and the continuing presence of all of these in the emerging present.
