Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries. It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism. The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered. Adam Hochschild
About This Quote

On the day of the hearing, while I was waiting in the court room for my father to be sentenced, a woman approached me. She introduced herself as a friend of my father's and said she was praying for him every day. I responded with a simple, "Thank you," but she was not finished. Her next words were, "I know from what you tell me that you feel your father did not do this crime." She continued on, telling me that he had been in jail all these years for committing a crime he did not commit and that it was time to release him.

I told her that I believed my father would have been released had he been tried fairly by an unbiased jury and found innocent. She looked at me and said, "Well, if you believe your father did not do this crime who did?"

Source: King Leopolds Ghost

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