L’image bidimensionnelle, travail de mémoire et représentations en Afrique centrale : domestiquer la modernité imposée, 1870-2010

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between the construction of modern self and the social usage of flat image (drawing, photographic picture, painting). Th rough the long twenty century (from about 1890 up to 2010) in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, individuals produced and shared with others images conveying the knowledge about the new world intruding into local realities. Initially in rural setting, later in cities, image helped people to share with other individual experience but also to create a space where memories about the past can be confronted with social knowledge and integrated into it. Drawings on rural hut walls, paintings on canvas hanged in an urban house living room or images painted as advertisement on walls of shops mediated between individual perception and personal memory on one side and social knowledge on the other.For a century, at the times of discontinuous emergence of the modern self, those images helped to rebuild a social communitydeprived by colonial and postcolonial self of political rights.Th e last section of the chapter explores photography by Sammy Baloji for whom image is the tool to remake his society, to reach to the past in order to restore youth’s capacity to build a future denied to them by the present day society.