A Diplomat’s Muse

Consider an image: a portrait of the Polish-born and naturalized British author Joseph Conrad. The picture is the work of Scottish drafter and printmaker Muirhead Bone (1876–1953), a drypoint etching completed in 1923, one year before Conrad’s death.4 The portrait captures the aging author listening to music (Brahms, apparently). Conrad sits on a chair, wearing a heavy coat, the collar turned up; his hands tucked into the pockets of his pants, suggesting cold. Is this a live concert, held outside? Or is he listening to a gramophone in a drafty room? Apart from the chair, there is nothing to provide context for this sitting. Particular attention is given to the author’s face. It is a stern visage, angular and coarse, with a shock of black hair and a carefully groomed beard and moustache. Shadows texture the brow, darken the eyes, and shape the contours of a hollow cheek and bony jaw. The author’s posture is at once tense and relaxed, hardened and contorted with age, but softened and soothed by this moment of aural focus and reflection.

Three decades later, this portrait would be hung in the New York residence of the United Nations secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld. I am struck by Conrad’s pictorial presence in the home of this Swedish civil servant: two polymaths who mastered and employed several languages beyond their native tongues, who embodied the cosmopolitanism and humanism of their day, face to face, in an encounter spanning a generation. What kinship might there be between the elder Joseph, a wordsmith at the end of his life, and the middle-aged Dag, a diplomat at the height of his powers? As historian and Hammarskjöld biographer Roger Lipsey notes (2013, 61), “With his incomparable appreciation of the ambiguities of human nature and conduct, Conrad was among Hammarskjöld’s teachers in early years and in effect a companion-at-arms in later years.” As “companions-at-arms,” these two men would share and, in different ways, add infamy to a common battleground: the Congo, under Belgian rule and on the road to decolonization when Hammarskjöld entered the UN secretariat in 1953; the de facto fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium when Conrad’s serialized Heart of Darkness first appeared in 1899.

Conrad’s infamous verdict on Africa at the turn of the century seems to have stuck with Hammarskjöld. It is reported that when the secretary general arrived in the Congo for his first post-independence visit to the country, he turned to his colleague, UN veteran George Ivan Smith, and said, “George, this is the heart of darkness.” More than a passing comment, Hammarskjöld’s observation suggests a thoroughgoing impression. Accompanying the Swedish soldiers called on to intervene on behalf of the UN in the Congo’s escalating internecine conflict was a handbook prepared by the Royal Swedish Army titled A Meeting with “Darkest Africa” (James 1996, 24n28). Of course, Conrad’s narrative indictment does more than simply restate widespread prejudices about Africa and its people (Achebe 2016). In a story that begins at nightfall along the Thames, with London in the distance, we read of a darkness that has fallen on the West as well, obscuring “the horror” of Europe’s deathly project in Africa under the banner of a “civilizing mission.” “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” Conrad writes ([1899] 2008, 92).5

Hammarskjöld surely understood, as Conrad did, that this “Europe” also included his native Sweden,6 which enthusiastically endorsed Leopold’s avaricious claims to the Congo at the Berlin Conference in 1884–85 and thereafter sent hundreds of soldiers, sailors, engineers, and missionaries to support their Belgian ally’s ignoble conquest of this vast African territory (Nilsson 2013; Tell 2005). Again, as Lipsey notes, “Conrad pointed toward a passion for observation and deep humanism without illusions” (2013, 389, my emphasis), including, one might infer, the “illusion” that Sweden played no part in Europe’s colonial history (McEachrane 2018, 479)—a perception of a country, nominally neutral and unfettered by Empire, that certainly bolstered Hammarskjöld’s ascension to power at the UN. As such, Conrad’s portrait undoubtedly gave the Swedish secretary general pause as he entered his own “drama of the Congo in July 1960” (Lipsey 2013, 389).

Yet, if Joseph provided Dag with a cautionary tale of Europe’s calamitous misadventure in a faraway land that was now, for the Swede, too close for comfort, the writer also spoke to his avid reader of an existentialism that bore witness to other horizons of human possibility. That is, if Conrad’s portrait revealed the horrors of the recent past to its singular audience, it would also have reminded Dag that life’s story continues, awaiting the next Marlow to tell the tale—to illuminate an unfolding and ambiguous present by putting words to deeds so that we might better reflect on and, perhaps, understand them without illusions. For Hammarskjöld, at the end of the 1950s, the next chapter of humanity’s story-in-the-making belonged, first and foremost, to the African vanguard of a rapidly decolonizing world. At a February 1960 press conference in Copenhagen, following a twenty-one-state whirlwind tour of the African continent, Hammarskjöld makes this point by noting the significance of a decolonizing African presence at the United Nations:

I have already referred to the interest taken by African leaders and the African regions and States in the United Nations. Why this interest, as we are, from their point of view, poor as concerns finance and not very rich when it comes to the question of the number of officials and technical experts? The reason is quite obvious. The United Nations is now, or will be, their Organization. The United Nations can give them a framework for their young national life which gives a deeper sense and a greater weight to independence. (Foote 1962, 240; my emphasis)

For Hammarskjöld, the task of setting the international stage for Africa’s postcolonial story had become an increasingly urgent aspect of his office when, in July 1960, a crisis in the Congo began to unfold and the portrait of an author once again loomed large.

I would like to think of Conrad’s portrait, as it hung in Hammarskjöld’s New York apartment, as a “chronotope.” Building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s well-known literary definition of the term, my use of the concept, here, refers to any object, text, image, or sound that signifies “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (1981, 84). Thus, to gaze with Hammarskjöld on Conrad’s etched figure in the summer of 1960, at the outset of the secretary general’s fateful foray into the Congo, is to inhabit the time-space of a waxing and waning Eurafrican world (Hansen and Jonsson 2015), encompassing the brutal past, turbulent present, and uncertain future of European colonialism in Africa. Further, I have suggested that Hammarskjöld’s unique perspective on the portrait as a Swedish viewer offers insight into his native country’s own spatial orientation to Africa, and the Congo in particular, in the mid-twentieth century. Such a viewing implicates Sweden in the temporality of colonial conquest and offers historical context for Hammarskjöld’s commitments to decolonization and African independence through the United Nations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the case studies that follow, my aim is to add substance and significance to this “Afro-Swedish chronotope,” by staging a series of encounters with texts, images, objects, scenes, and sounds that, like Conrad’s portrait, make the “density and concreteness” of Sweden’s historical relationship with Africa “palpable and visible” (Bakhtin 1981, 250). Specifically, I am interested in the way distances of time and space condense around particular cultural objects and events to become artifactual signs of diasporic remembering. As a chronotopic practice, remembering takes shape in the assemblage of an Afro-Swedish archive that evokes the deep (and frequently colliding) currents of colonial imperialism and anticolonial struggle, white supremacy and anti-racist activism, of a past that remains stubbornly present. Particularly striking is the recurrent presence of the “Congo” as a geographic location and idea of Africa in the content and contexts of these chronotopic encounters. Such an observation indicates, I suggest, that we have much to learn about colonialism’s brutality, decolonization’s necessity, and postcoloniality’s contradictions from Sweden’s modern history, from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Of Darkness and Light

Consider, now, a collection of five short documentary films archived by the Swedish Missionary Society (Svenska Missionsförbundet), now restored, annotated, and made available online by the Swedish Film Institute (filmarkivet.se): I fetischmannens spår (On the Trail of the Witch Doctor, 1948), Natten försvinner (The Night Disappears, 1948), Bisi Congo: Ett litet reportage om Kongo förr och nu (Bisi Congo: A Brief Report about the Congo Then and Now, 1950), Landet under ekvatorn (The Land under the Equator, 1950), and Vördnad för livet (Veneration for Life, 1952). These films represent some of the earliest work of the late Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who, in this collection, also gets credit for direction. A master of lighting, with a keen sense of portraiture and cinematic affect (Nykvist 1997), he is perhaps best known for his camera work with Ingmar Bergman, for which he earned two Oscars for Best Cinematography (Viskningar och rop, 1974; and Fanny och Alexander, 1984). There are glimpses of the more mature Nykvist in these films, in the artful rendering of nature and landscape, and a visual fascination with the body, gesture, and facial expression. But if these documentaries suggest a latent sensitivity to the nuances of light and shadow on their subjects and setting, they are also overdetermined by a colonial gaze that racializes such contrast in more rigid patterns of black and white.

The opening credits of I fetischmannens spår chart the parameters of this dichotomous, color-coded worldview. A sensational orchestral score sets the tone as a scene fades into view. Two bare-chested African youths pound vigorously on a large slit drum, an idiophone made from a hollowed-out tree trunk. The staccato rhythm of their drumming mixes subtly with the legato melody of the orchestra, just enough to signal an aural dissonance between the “West” (orchestra) and “Africa” (drumming) (Ebron 2002; Agawu 2003). The young men stand in what looks to be an open-air courtyard framed by a wooden fence and flanked by tropical trees. A forested mountain range rolls in the distance: the African wilderness, the “bush.” Against this scene, the film’s title appears to dramatic effect, as the hammering pulse of the drum amplifies. The caption’s otherwise cursive script is disrupted by the word FETISCH (fetish), which appears in a large and coarse font, as if violently scratched onto the screen. The image then cuts to the players’ hands and forearms as they repeatedly strike the large drum with crude mallets. More text appears: “It has only been a few generations since the interior of Congo was discovered. During this short time, the country has experienced a revolutionary transformation in all areas, to which the Christian mission has contributed in no small measure.”

Following a short ethnographic sketch of “primitive” life in a vast and largely untamed wilderness, bound to “the primeval forest’s law” (urskogens lagstiftning), the film tells the fateful story of a boy, caught between barbarism and civilization, “Africa” and the “West.” Lamed by a festering injury to his leg, the boy’s life rests in the hands of a local witch doctor (fetischmannen), whom we encounter in the throes of a wild song and dance. “One lives close to life and death here,” the narrator explains. “Close to the essentials, but still so far away. Far away in witchcraft’s and fetishism’s devilish domain [djavulskvarter].” In the midst of this savage ceremony, a white missionary with a tidy pith helmet and walking stick emerges from the surrounding forest, scaring off the witch doctor with his mere presence. The man kneels before the boy, dresses his wound with a clean bandage, and, smiling at his mother, says, “Take your child to the whites.” They do, overcoming fears born of superstition and traditional authority, and the boy’s life is transformed. His wound treated and healed, the boy enrolls in the mission school and learns French, “the language of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hugo.” Later, he studies medicine at a mission hospital funded by “Drottning Astrid,” a noble of Swedish birth, who married Leopold III to become, briefly (until a car crash cut her life short), queen of Belgium (1934–35). The boy, now a young man, becomes a nurse practitioner and brings modern health care to his village. Infant mortality diminishes. Endemic diseases are treated. In the end, he is married in the Church, signaling a generational triumph over the burdens of an ignorant and idolatrous past, and affirming the Swedish mission’s essential role in fostering an enlightened and pious modernity “in that primitive continent we call ‘Africa.’”

While Hammarskjöld’s portrait of Conrad brought particular moments of colonial conquest and postcolonial intervention into spatiotemporal proximity, the chronotopic contours of Nykvist’s Congo films appear more diffuse and expansive, coupling a timeless African antiquity with the unfinished business of Europe’s civilizing mission (Fabian 2002; see also Conklin 1997).7 In Bisi Congo: Ett litet reportage om Kongo förr och nu and Natten försvinner, we encounter a similar narrative arc to I fetischmannens spår, moving from the demonic darkness of tradition to the spirited light of modernity. These three films also use a common stock of footage, edited and narrated to tell their respective stories. Bisi Congo emphasizes industry, showing the way Western innovations have improved palm oil and cement production, rationalized factory labor, and introduced sanitary farming practices. Natten Försvinner focuses on education, highlighting the achievements of the Swedish mission schools. In one scene, an African teacher points to a map of Europe and says, “Our missionaries came from Sweden and brought us the Gospel. Before they came, our country was in darkness, but because of their message we have come to know Christ.” Landet under ekvatorn (the only color film in the collection) starkly contrasts the traditional lifeways of the “natives” with the schools, hospitals, factories, and religion of the “whites”—a dialectic with a synthesis, “civilized Africa,” that is always already on the horizon. “It is the mission’s hope,” the narrator explains, “that the Blacks themselves will one day take over Christian evangelism.” A goal, we are told, that “with God’s help, should be attainable.”

Reference to the brutality of colonial rule and the struggle for African sovereignty are almost entirely absent from these films. Only in Vördnad för livet, a biographical sketch of German Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, do we get a hint of the violence that Western “civilization” brought to bear on its African colonies. Schweitzer, the film tells us, pursued his medical and evangelical work in the French Congo as an “attempt to atone for the crimes the white man has committed against the Blacks, a penance for the days of the slave trade and human hatred [slavhandelns och människoföraktets dagar].” Schweitzer appears, thus, Christlike, framing his work as a self-imposed sacrifice for Europe’s past sins to clear the conscience of an ongoing Eurafrican adventure. But what of the filmmaker’s intentions? Do these films exorcise similar demons to sanctify a colonial contemporary, or are they mere agitprop for Sweden’s evangelical interests? There are whispers of an answer in Nykvist’s biography. The son of Swedish missionaries, Nykvist spent much of his childhood apart from his parents, living at a Christian boarding school in Sweden. Prior to one of their departures to the Belgian Congo, Nykvist recalls his mother crying while his father told him, “We are going back to Africa now, to our black children. Let us pray” (related in the 2000 film The Light Keeps Me Company, directed by Carl-Gustaf Nykvist). While these films certainly are a kind of propaganda for the Swedish Missionary Society, made for a Swedish audience to show the “good” work carried out in the name of their country, faith, and race abroad, Nykvist’s upbringing suggests an additional reading. In these films, Nykvist seems to reconcile himself to his parents’ calling, filling the gaps left by their absence during his youth with stories of triumph over adversity, of progress against all odds. This is an Afro-Swedish chronotope that is as colonialist as it is psychoanalytic, as archival as it is artificial; a stylized spatiotemporal compression that displaces past traumas with a curated yet no less earnest desire and nostalgia for what Brian Larkin (2008) has called “the colonial sublime.”8

Writing Africa in Sweden

One finds traces of this hybrid culture born of a sublimated Afro-Swedish colonial encounter in Bakhtin’s preferred area of study, literature, as well. Consider, for example, the poetry of the late Swedish writer Tomas Tranströmer. Tranströmer won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature “because,” the committee observed, “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”9 Two decades earlier, writer and literary critic Lasse Söderberg (1990) notes such access to a particularly Swedish reality in the “deeply buried memory” embedded in the poet’s verse. “The present would be intolerable if it did not also include a past,” Söderberg writes, invoking the existential spirit of Tranströmer’s lyrical worldview. “Every moment includes all moments” (576). This capacious perspective on time is, as fellow poet and Scandinavian enthusiast Robert Bly (1990) observes, stubbornly worldly. Though, for Bly, Tranströmer’s worldliness is as much earthbound and rooted in Sweden as it is the product of “chance encounters” across “borders, boundaries of nations, [and] the passage from one world to the next” (571). In Bly’s view, “Tranströmer values his poems not so much as artifacts but rather as meeting places. Images from widely separated worlds,” and, I would add, following Söderberg, times, “meet in his verse” (571).

Such are the chronotopic qualities of the poem “Skyfall över inlandet” (Downpour in the Backcountry), from Tranströmer’s 1966 collection Klanger och spår (Noises and Tracks).10 The poem begins with a sudden summer rainstorm that forces a driver to park his car along a forested hillside, where he lights a cigarette and waits for the cloudburst to pass (Tranströmer 2012, 16). Peering up the incline through a rain-soaked window, the motorist observes:

With these lines, a collapsing of prehistory and the present meets the suddenly proximate cultural geographies of Sweden and Africa through the memory of a common tribalism, “a colder Congo,” an Afro-Swedish chronotope.

Of course, Sweden’s primitive past is present, here, only as a ruin, manifest in an old pile of stones that lies—now, as it did three thousand years ago—just up the hill. In a poem published only five years after the internecine conflict in the Congo that took Dag Hammarskjöld’s life, one suspects that Tranströmer’s reference to “tribal warfare” in Africa is of a more recent vintage. That is, “Africa” appears in these lines, as it so often does, as a haunting reminder of Europe’s primitive past in the present (Fabian 2002). Yet, invocations of Africa recur throughout Tranströmer’s work in ways that suggest, perhaps, a more subtle reading. In a poem from 1954, “Strof och Motstrof” (Strophe and Antistrophe), Tranströmer (2012, 26) writes of “the Congo’s green shadow” that “holds the blue men in their exhalation.” A poem titled “En man från Benin” (A Man from Benin), published in 1958, takes its inspiration from a photograph of a sixteenth-century bronze sculpture, depicting a Portuguese merchant (77). “En Simmande Mörk Gestalt” (A Swimming Dark Figure) from 1962 begins with the image of a “prehistoric painting on an outcropping in the Sahara” (125). More can be gleaned from the 1963 poem, “Ur en Afrikansk Dagbok” (From an African Diary), that tells of “the canvasses of a Congolese market painter,” on which “figures move, light as insects, deprived of their human strength” (138). In the next stanza, a drama unfolds:

In the third stanza, in lieu of a resolution, Tranströmer observes, “The Europeans otherwise keep close to the car as if it were their Mother” (138). In “Vinterns Formler” (Winter’s Formulas) from 1966, we gaze on an icy path that is “not Africa [and] not Europe. It is no other place than ‘here’” (144). And, in 1970, “a memory emerges from Africa” toward the end of the poem “Upprätt” (Upright). Here, the poet recalls “a very pleasant atmosphere” among “the blue-black people with three parallel scars on each cheek.” The “Sara tribe,” Tranströmer notes parenthetically, before relating an unsteady entrance into a canoe (hence the title, “upright”), for a ride down the Chari River, somewhere in Central Africa (187).

What are we to make of these disparate invocations of Africa in the mid-twentieth century verse of a distinguished Swedish poet? How might we interpret these lyrical encounters with African landscapes, objects, individuals, “tribes,” and events, past and present? To begin to answer these questions, there is one more reference to consider, a short recollection from Tranströmer’s memoirs, Minnena ser mig (The Memories See Me), first published in 1993.11 Reflecting on his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, Tranströmer (2012, 457) describes his fascination with “the Africa shelf” (Afrikahyllan) at his local library in Stockholm, where he could pore over the testimonies of European missionaries, adventurers, and ethnographers who spoke to him of “tantalizing and unknown lands.” Some places, like Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, were missing from the shelf, but he could see them on his map of Africa, which made these strange and distant places all the more puzzling, and alluring. Tranströmer then recalls a summer when he “lived a great and persistent daydream about Africa.” He spent his days walking the forests of Runmarö (an island in the Stockholm archipelago), marking the distances he traveled on his Africa map, beginning on the western shore of Lake Albert and descending into the Ituri forest of northeastern Congo. “It was a nineteenth-century expedition, with porters and such,” he writes. Other daydreams would follow, in which notions of Africa’s modernity gradually filtered in, a sense that “Africa had changed” (458–59).

I suggest that the fragments of verse we have collected from Tranströmer’s oeuvre, indicating a recurrent African presence in the poet’s work, might best be understood as lyrical “tracks” (spår) left from journeys—real and imagined—into Africa’s interior on Swedish terrain. Further, I propose that such itinerant readings of this “colder Congo” add symbolic but no less significant substance to what I am calling an Afro-Swedish chronotope, manifest in a prominent Swedish author’s sense of intimacy with, nostalgia and desire for Africa. Like Conrad’s portrait and Nykvist’s films, Tranströmer’s poems encode the time-space of a (post)colonial worldview, anchored in Africa. This is where and when Tranströmer’s childhood dreams of “tantalizing and unknown lands” couple with more mature explorations of African landscapes, artifacts, and inhabitants. And this is where and when maps of Africa and Sweden overlap around dense primeval forests, in which piles of rocks seem to signify a forgotten kinship and rainstorms, like local tricksters, keep the foreign onlookers close to their car, “as if it were their Mother.”

Tintingate

Our next case takes us, in many ways, back to Tranströmer’s “Africa shelf” at the Stockholm public library, or to a place much like it, where an innocent and worldly curiosity meets an archive of the exotic. The location of this story is the Culture House (Kulturhuset) in downtown Stockholm, specifically two adjacent libraries on the second floor of this vast, municipally sponsored arts complex: TioTretton, a library for children between the ages of ten and thirteen, and Serieteket, a cartoon library. The time is the fall of 2012, a moment of intensified debate in the Swedish public sphere around issues of identity politics and freedom of speech, in which the question of how (or if) to address the twinning legacies of European racism and colonialism in Sweden has become increasingly focal. The object of the story is The Adventures of Tintin, an immensely popular and widely translated comic series created by the twentieth-century Belgian artist and author Georges Rémi, who published under the pen name Hergé. The drama has to do with a decision made by artistic director Behrang Miri on September 25 to remove the Tintin collection from the TioTretton library, as part of a broader effort to critically reappraise the programs and resources that target children and young adults in Kulturhuset’s facilities—though Miri would later clarify that the intent was not to expunge the books, but merely to move them from TioTretton to Serieteket, to a shelf in the comic library that appeals to an older clientele, a few yards away.12 As Miri explained to Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s largest daily news outlets, “Children don’t read the fine print, they go right into the story. The prejudiced image becomes stigmatizing.” Then, turning to the material at hand, he noted, “Tintin reflects a caricatured colonial perspective. Small children take it in uncritically” (Söderling 2012).

The public response to Miri’s move, much of it on social media platforms, was fierce, robust, and varied, with many articles, editorials, blogs, status updates, and tweets proclaiming their commitments to postcolonial criticism, antiracism, civil libertarianism, and Tintin fandom.13 In these responses, one particular book in the Tintin collection looms large, Tintin in the Congo, even though this work was apparently not part of TioTretton’s collection at the time.14 Nonetheless, this now infamous comic discursively manifests, here, as yet another example of the generically varied Afro-Swedish chronotope I have been tracing.15 The appearance of Tintin in the Congo in the 2012 debate is, moreover, a reappearance, following a 2007 case in which a Congolese-Swedish man, Jean-Dadou Monya, took legal action against Bonnier Carlsen, which publishes Swedish translations of The Adventures of Tintin.16

Originally serialized from 1930 to 1931 in Le Petit Vingtième, a Belgian children’s news supplement with a Catholic nationalist (and strongly pro-colonial) bent, the comic’s intent was twofold: to promote Belgium’s civilizing mission in the Congo and thereby offer a counternarrative to the well-documented excesses and horrors of King Leopold’s Congo Free State; and to help market the Congo’s export products (ivory, rubber, as well as “primitive” tokens of “African” culture) in the Belgian metropole (Hunt 2002, 92). A Swedish translation first appeared in 1978, based on the book’s slightly less paternalistic 1946 color edition, and was reissued in 2004 (and again in 2009), with a forward by the translator, Björn Wahlberg, encouraging readers to treat Tintin in the Congo as “a product of its time” that provides “neither a realistic nor just image of Africa” (Hergé [1978] 2009). Two years later, Monya’s legal action argues that this qualifying statement is entirely insufficient—that the book’s pro-colonial, anti-black, and market-driven intent remains intact and unequivocal. Citing the book’s “racist character” that “no longer has a place in twenty-first-century society,” Monya insisted that Tintin in the Congo be removed from library shelves and bookstores throughout the country, setting the stage for the “Tintingate” at Kulturhuset five years later. Notably, Monya received strong public support for his complaint from Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund (National Union of Afro-Swedes), though the Swedish chancellor of justice (Justitiekanslern) ultimately declined to hear the case, claiming that the timeframe for pursuing such an action had been exceeded.

I do not wish to personally weigh in on these debates here, which are now, in any case, part of the historical record of the recent past. For many, the Tintin comics are beloved for their humor, style, and fantastic scenarios, even as most would admit that the books frequently peddle in reductive caricatures, and that Tintin in the Congo is a particularly egregious example of such stereotyped representation. What interests me, again, is the recurrent presence in the Swedish public sphere over the past decade of an infamous artifact of Europe’s colonial encounter with Africa that, like Conrad’s portrait, Nykvist’s films, and Tranströmer’s verse, closes the gap between Africa’s colonized past and a Swedish contemporary under the sign of the “Congo.” Of particular interest in the case of Tintingate is the leading role self-identified Afro-Swedes have played in prompting and setting the terms of these public discussions and debates around the discursive and practical legacies of racism and colonialism in Sweden today, a point to which I shall return in concluding this chapter.

Traces of the Congo Exhibited

In 2005, the same year that Swedish publisher Bonnier Carlsen reissued Tintin in the Congo, an exhibit debuted at the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm titled “Kongospår” (Traces of the Congo), staging perhaps the most objective example of the Afro-Swedish chronotope presented thus far. The exhibit was a cooperative venture between museums in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, and would travel to each of these countries through 2008 with sponsorship from the Nordic Cultural Fund. The idea for the exhibit emerged from the remarkable fact that Nordic countries possess more artifacts from the Congo—over forty thousand objects in public and private collections—than from any other non-European country (Nordic Co-Operation 2005b). Sweden alone holds approximately eighteen thousand Congolese artifacts, including household items, sacred objects, weapons, tools, and ceremonial and personal adornments (Reinius 2011). The vast majority of these objects were collected by Scandinavian missionaries, engineers, sailors, soldiers, and functionaries who worked under the auspices of King Leopold’s Congo Free State at the turn of the twentieth century. Some objects were claimed for personal collections, others as trophies of conquest, though many were brought to Scandinavia at the bequest of social scientists and museum curators, people like Erland Nordenskiöld, head of the Ethnographic Department at the National Museum of Natural Science (Naturhistoriska Riksmuseum).

In 1907, Nordenskiöld spearheaded the Ethnographic and Missionary Exhibition at the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, where a number of the aforementioned objects were gathered and presented for public display. The purpose was, in Nordenskiöld’s words, to “shed light upon the imprisonment of heathen people in witchcraft, ancestral cult and idolatry” (Reinius 2011, 403). Ethnologist Lotten Gustafsson Reinius, in a historical study of the 1907 exhibition, observes the shear abundance of objects included in the Congo display (which was notably sponsored by the Swedish Missionary Society), but also the peculiar manner of their organization “into symmetries and other aesthetic patterns.” This suggests, she explains, “the ability to control and transform into a new aesthetic order what is unordered and wild” (409). One hundred years later, a comparable selection of Sweden’s vast Congolese artifacts would again be displayed to remember their colonial provenance. This time, however, the objects appear not as the exotic tokens of an otherwise “savage” people, as Nordenskiöld presented them, but as physical evidence of the long and fraught history that Congo and Sweden share—as artifacts of an Afro-Swedish chronotope.17

Reinius, one of the first scholars to critically examine the Congolese collections in Sweden from a post-colonial perspective, describes these objects as “neither Swedish nor entirely Congolese, but as hybrids” (2009, 78), as “powerful things [that] have been lifted into another powerful material genre, the collection of ethnography” (92). “What sorts of agency and voice may be expressed by Congolese objects in Swedish museum sceneries,” Reinius asks, “and what narrative roles do their very presences perform in this setting?” (79). Part of the rationale of the 2005 “Traces of the Congo” exhibit was to tell the ambivalent stories of these “hybrid objects.” In the words of Mats Jönsson, director of the Nordic Cultural Fund, the exhibit would “trace a Nordic-Congolese history in which we were, are, and will remain, collaborators” and, further, pose “questions on cultural inheritance, cultural relations and historic responsibility” (Nordic Co-Operation 2005a). In other words, “Traces of the Congo” was as much about revealing Nordic countries’ complicity in the colonization of Africa as it was about the possibility, in Reinius’s words, “to unveil, destabilize and transcend such legacies” by publicly interrogating the long twentieth century that continues to bind Scandinavia to Africa, and to the Congo in particular.

Yet, such critical interrogation would encounter dogged if all too familiar representational limits, in which a dominant (if flawed) European (post)colonial agency contrasts with a more passive, subordinate, and often objectified African subjectivity. As described by Swedish historian Cecilia Axelsson, in a doctoral thesis that thickly describes and critically analyzes the “Traces of the Congo” tour (2009; see also Axelsson 2007), the core exhibit featured two main areas, both dimly lit with red carpeting and black walls, juxtaposing past and present signs of a Scandinavian–Congolese mutuality. In the first area, maps of central Africa and the continent as a whole, explanatory texts, silent black-and-white films made by missionaries and other colonial functionaries, and exotic jungle sounds18 provided context (of a kind) for six glass display cases along the walls and on the floor, each holding an assortment of objects, photographs, and documents acquired and produced during the colonial period. As Sara Craig Ayres (2011, 269–70) notes, in another dissertation that describes and analyzes the exhibit, “BaKongo ritual objects were displayed in alcoves on shelves in the exhibition as if they were seen in the informal environment of the homes of colonial agents.” That is, display items were not shown in an African cultural context, but emphasized, rather, an interpretive frame established by their European collectors. Further enhancing this Europeanist perspective, curator Michael Barrett recalls that “the labels and text panels reflected an almost exclusive European voice and perspective. This facilitated a tendency to ‘neutral’ or apologetic descriptions of colonial conquest and violence, in order to ‘understand the Scandinavian perspective.’”19

The second area, a different room in Copenhagen but part of a single space in Stockholm, also featured objects, images, and texts on display, but provided areas to listen to recorded sound and view colorful video projections, creating a more interactive and livelier visitor experience with a more contemporary and dynamic set of ethnographic objects. In one such space, a video of an everyday street scene in modern-day Kinshasa was projected onto a large spherical object (Ayres 2011, 375). In another space, four television screens with earphones allowed visitors to watch and listen to interviews with individuals who have roots in both Scandinavia and the Congo (Axelsson 2009, 217). While the latter opportunity for audiovisual encounter does suggest a degree of Afro-Nordic agency at the exhibit, Axelsson (2007, 94) notes that “Congolese people could only be heard in the headphones,” which were frequently in use in the busy gallery, preventing many from listening. As such, visitors to the exhibit were mostly left to gaze on an array of modern objects and commodities, mainly derived from Europe’s mercantile encounters with the Congo, including fashionable furniture, rubber boots, high-tech products containing “conflict minerals,” and, of course, a copy of Tintin in the Congo.

Dramas of War, Trauma, and Catharsis

The next chronotopic case study juxtaposes two recent “traces of the Congo” in Sweden: the fateful United Nations mission in the Congo, spearheaded by Dag Hammarskjöld in July 1960, in which over six thousand Swedish soldiers participated over the course of four years; and the global popularity, from the early twentieth century to the present day, of colonialism’s most famous (and now, for many, infamous) superhero, Tarzan.20 The first trace appears in the production of Kongo: En pjäs om Sverige by the Lumor theatrical company, which ran from January through February 2016 at the Tribunalen theater in Stockholm. The second trace manifests in the Hollywood spectacle The Legend of Tarzan, released in the summer of 2016 and featuring Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård in the lead role.21 While differing in terms of genre, audience, and storyline, both “traces” of an Afro-Swedish chronotope stage a critical reflection on the traumas of the colonial past, highlight a Swedish and Congolese copresence therein, and present comparable, though strikingly contrastive, modes of postcolonial “remembering,” in Edward Casey’s (2000) sense of collective recollection as community formation.

Let’s begin with The Legend of Tarzan. This is not a good movie, and my point here is not to redeem the film’s convoluted plot, reliance on spectacular digital effects, or tendency to fall back on reductive representations of “primitive” Africa and “savage” Africans. My interest, rather, is in the film’s attempt to confront imperialism’s destructive legacy, even as it peddles in caricatures of imperial design. It is, perhaps, an impossible task to tell the tale of Tarzan against the grain of white supremacy and colonialism, but that is precisely what director David Yates seeks to accomplish, offering us a Tarzan, as franchise scholar Aaron Bady (2016) notes, who “is ashamed of being Tarzan.” This is a Tarzan mediated by postcolonial criticism and a hefty dose of white guilt, who (spoiler alert) returns to his forested environs and primate family in Africa from a self-imposed exile among Europe’s nobility to confront the anti-blackness of his past by waging war on King Leopold’s rapacious and murderous henchman, Leon Rom, and his band of Belgian mercenaries in the Congo. Tarzan is aided in the film by fictionalized “anti-imperialist crusader” George Washington Williams (played by Samuel L. Jackson), whose presence mitigates an otherwise overwhelming “white savior” narrative, but only just.

Scandinavian film critics in Norway and Denmark did not take kindly to this revisionist Tarzan, calling the film, pejoratively, “politically correct,” with a Danish reviewer sarcastically adding that it is no surprise that this Tarzan is Swedish (Skotte 2016; see also Lismoen 2016). Commenting on these reviews, Swedish writer and culture critic Jan Guillou (2016) notes that the term “politically correct” in Scandinavia today tends to signify an extreme and generally naïve sense of cultural relativism, which the reviewers implicitly associate with Sweden’s supposedly acquiescent attitude toward immigration and, more sinisterly, the country’s apparent tolerance for non-European (i.e., non-white) interlopers. This Swedish Tarzan is thus complicit in what far-right news channels have called the “collapse” of Sweden’s multicultural welfare model. Rejecting such doomsday xenophobia, Guillou defiantly claims that he prefers Skarsgård’s Tarzan because of his “politically correct” (by which he means “tolerant and humanist”) strivings, which leads me to wonder: What if we take seriously the idea of this PC Swedish Tarzan, for whom—and, as Aaron Bady notes, for the first time in franchise history—Black Lives Matter? Further, what if, in lieu of recent ahistorical rants about immigration and systemic collapse, we remember Sweden’s historical solidarity with liberation movements in Africa, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, while watching this flashy anti-colonial blockbuster? This line of inquiry does not make the film less bad, or less problematic for its otherwise indelicate characterizations and narrative, but it does make The Legend of Tarzan more interesting as a chronotopic trace in contemporary Afro-Sweden.

Our second dramatic trace gestures to the more recent history of Sweden’s political solidarity with African states, a history that, for many, is exemplified by the country’s robust support for southern African liberation movements, and the anti-apartheid struggle in particular. Others might also emphasize the current politics of development aid, with nationally funded projects spanning the continent (to which I turn in the next and final case study). But the story begins, in many ways, with Dag Hammarskjöld’s hasty intervention in the Congo in 1960, which is at the dramatic center of Kongo: En pjäs om Sverige.22 This play is based on a series of oral history interviews with Swedish veterans of the United Nations Operation in the Congo conducted by playwright Johanna Emanuelsson and staged in three scenes of ethnographic encounter with elderly soldiers and their spouses, set in the couples’ simple and tidy Swedish homes. A fourth scene moves from Sweden to the Congo, and from Swedish to Swahili, for a lone woman’s remembrance (performed by the late Afro-Swedish actor Kudzai Chimbaira) of these “pale, young” Swedish peacekeepers-turned-soldiers (Ring 2016). Throughout, the play grapples with the traumatic memory of the UN mission’s rapid descent into violence, a theater of war virtually unknown to the nine battalions of Swedish soldiers called on by their secretary general to mitigate the conflict and secure the peace on this stage of Cold War intrigue (Tullberg 2012). As such, the play is a reminder that political acts of apparent solidarity and goodwill can have unforeseen and sometimes severe consequences.

The play also recalls that Sweden’s involvement in the “Congo Crisis” is part of a longer and no less violent history of encounters between Europe and the Congo. Scenographer Sören Brunes captures this dynamic between personal trauma and a history of violence in the play’s set design. Surrounding the perimeter of the stage and illuminated by spotlights are a series of altars to the Congo’s sordid colonial past, ranging from the Portuguese Catholic missions of the late fifteenth century to the ongoing internecine conflicts of the postcolonial present. These memorials frame the dramatic content of the play, in which the onstage built environment plays a primary role. As veterans’ vocal memories move from expectations of big game hunts and sunbathing prior to deployment to watching comrades fall and shooting to kill on the front lines as the crisis unfolds, the tranquil domestic scenes on stage begin quite literally to fall apart. Tables, chairs, and cupboards are slowly drawn together and lifted into the air by ropes as unsteady words approach almost forgotten memories. Plates, cups, and silverware are overturned and fall to the floor as scenes of homey composure and decorum are transformed into the unruly and broken embodiment of a severe subconscious wound. For such an injury to heal, the play suggests, it must be spoken and made visible, so that we might remember this violent past as our own—that the Congo’s history is also a story about Sweden.

Seeing Colonialism

In the summer of 2015, a debate roils the local congregation at Immanelskyrkan (Immanuel Church) in downtown Stockholm, a conflict that soon spills out onto the broader Swedish ecumenical community (Dahlén Gotting 2015) before catching the attention of the national secular press (Manfredh 2016). The issue centers on a mural displayed in the Immanuelskyrkan’s coffee shop (kaffestuga) painted by Swedish artist Sigfrid Södergren (1920–2000) in 1974 to celebrate the church’s opening the same year. Like the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Södergren is the son of Swedish missionaries and grew up between homes in Sweden and the French Congo.23 Such an upbringing left an impression on his artwork: much of his oeuvre depicts the life and landscapes of the Congolese countryside and Öland, the island off the coast of southeastern Sweden where he eventually settled. Södergren’s mural, which fills an entire wall at the café, depicts scenes from the history the Swedish mission in the Congo, showing, according to an accompanying plaque, “how the mission’s work intervened in the African milieu and restored human dignity.” The painting is at once realist and abstract, arranging a series of relatively lifelike scenes to emphasize contrasts of color, shape, and subject matter. From afar, the painting appears as a large collage (indeed, many of the scenes look to be based on photographic references) suggestive of a dream’s whimsically concatenated imagery. Looking closer, though, this artful reverie tells a familiar story.

Viewed as a triptych, the mural may be read from right to left in three parts, beginning with the scene of “a chief’s burial.” Here, villagers escort the deceased into the afterlife in the form of a “large red niombo,” a sacred symbol that once marked the transit between the earthly and ancestral worlds for peoples in the region surrounding Kingoyi, a Swedish missionary district (located between the present-day Congo Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo).24 In the foreground of the funerary procession stands a woman, pictured as an “earth spirt” or nkita (MacGaffey 1986), “the village’s contact with the spirts’ mystique,” the plaque explains. Moving from the warm hues (reds and oranges) of the village ceremony to the cooler and more natural tones (greens and browns) of a riverine wilderness, the next scene presents a visual and symbolic contrast between “the old culture and the Church’s development”: a mass baptism. Overseen by a pair of white-clad missionaries, a long line of the African faithful await this rite of passage. A few initiates stand waist deep in the river, hands held in prayer over bare chests, ready to be immersed by the strikingly white figure of a pastor. In the foreground of this image, three stone-faced men, dressed in white skirts like those above awaiting baptism, reveal arms with no hands, a sign of punishment for those who did not meet their rubber quotas under colonial rule (as stunningly recounted in Hochschild 1999). The overt brutality of this image strikes yet another contrast with the third and final scene, to which we are also led via the baptismal queue: the mission station. In this placid locale, a harmony of warm and cool color achieves visual order in the linear and angular shapes of the buildings, themselves set apart from the mountainous bush in background. Here, the sick await medical treatment and children receive instruction, all under the watchful eye of an elder missionary, a visual homage to the artist’s father, John Södergren.

Three things appear simultaneously true about this piece, contributing to the complex debate about its place in Immaluelskyrkan, and the Swedish Ecumenical Church more generally. First, like Sven Nykvist’s Congo films, the painting pays tribute to an older generation of Swedish missionaries, recalling their lives and labors abroad from the point of view of the children they left behind in Sweden. Second, echoing the literary work of authors like Lennart Haggerfors (another son of Swedish missionaries in the Congo), the mural draws attention to the ugly violence of colonial rule (see, e.g., Hagerfors 1985), a sin Södergren places front and center in his composition. Notably, this image lies in close proximity to the apparent sanctity of the mass baptism. And third, again like Nykvist’s Congo collection, there is clear narrative flow from “tradition” to “modernity,” from the pagan ritual of a native burial, awash in “hot” color and abstract form, to the cooler geometric harmony of the mission station, the picture of pious civilization.

It is the latter interpretive truth that signaled the gravest offense to certain congregants at the Immanuel Church, particularly its African-descended parishioners. One such member told Pastor Ulla-Marie Gunner, “We are presented as savages” (Dahlén Gotting 2015). Patrick Amofah, a Ghanaian Swede and outspoken advocate for immigrant rights (Amofah 2015), argued that the mural alienates African churchgoers, adding historical insult to the everyday injuries endured by minority groups in Sweden. “The painting reminds [us] of the difficult times our ancestors endured,” he explained to the ecumenical newspaper Sändaren. “That’s not something one wants to see every Sunday when one comes to the church to socialize and gather strength.” For Amofah, the proper place for such a piece should be a museum, not a church. “I don’t want it to be thrown away,” he said. “I understand that there is history behind [the work], and that is why it is good for those who wish to see it [to go to] a museum. Then, we won’t have to feel bad, offended, and debased when we come to church” (Dahlén Gotting 2015). Amofah’s critique struck a chord with the church leadership, who strive to present their community in inclusive, multicultural terms. “I am convinced that we must take [the painting] down,” Gunner affirms. “There is a large group that feels put off by the mural. We must do it in order to be a church that respects diversity and differences” (Dahlén Gotting 2015).

By raising their voices in public protest, African-descended parishioners at the Immanuel Church have staked a claim to a specifically Afro-Swedish presence within this otherwise amorphous discourse of diversity. Their message is as simple and clear as it is urgent and necessary: in the face of European colonialism’s legacy in Africa—including Sweden’s mission in the Congo—Black lives, Black history, and Black perspectives matter. Still, there are those who feel threatened and angered by this sociopolitical posture, for whom the historical work of Swedish missionaries in Africa is something to be celebrated, not criticized (Anon. 2015b); who are aghast to hear accusations of prejudice and racism leveled on their community and the culture they foster (Anon. 2015a). It is a struggle, in many ways, over historical narrative, and of how community is imagined in parishes like the Immanuel Church and in countries like Sweden. Who gets counted as a member? Whose voices contribute to the stories society tells about itself? And what responsibilities does such a society have to restore justice and, as the church itself says, “human dignity” to those deprived of such fundamental rights? In the next and final case, I conclude with the story of an Afro-Swedish artist who, like Patrick Amofah at the Immanuel Church, has begun to wrest the societal narrative free from its paternalist and imperialist roots, revealing the new routes Sweden’s unfinished story of Africa might take when told by the children of its diaspora.

To Congo with Love

On a chilly afternoon in late spring, I arrive at the Kägelbanan music club in central Stockholm for an event called “To Congo with Love.” The event has been organized by the Swedish Pentecostal Mission’s global development and aid organization (Pingstmissionens Utvecklingssamarbete), known by its simpler and more secular acronym, PMU. The purpose of the gathering is to raise awareness and funds for the Panzi Hospital in the city of Bukavu in the South Kivu province of eastern Congo. PMU helped build the hospital in 1999 and has supported its work, emphasizing women’s reproductive health, up to the present day. One of the primary missions of the Panzi hospital is to provide medical and psychosocial care, but also refuge for female victims of sexual violence in the region. PMU supports this work through its membership and charitable donations, collaborations with nonprofit organizations in Sweden and the European Union, and major funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).25 I am one of many drawn to this evening’s event because of a notable guest, Jason Diakité, son of Afro-Swedish elder Madubuko Diakité (whose life and work we encountered in chapter 1) and arguably one of Sweden’s most famous hip-hop artists, rapping under the name Timbuktu. As a public figure, Jason Diakité has established himself as an anti-racist activist who, in recent years, has drawn critical attention to the particular struggle of anti-black racism in contemporary Sweden (Diakité 2016). On this day, Jason takes the stage as a rapper and social critic but also as a prominent exponent of Swedish civil society and its robust support for development and aid initiatives throughout the world, and Africa in particular.

The event highlights Jason’s travels to the Congo, first in 2008 and again in 2015, to support PMU’s work at the Panzi hospital and contribute to it as a guest artist in their music therapy program. A video shows us the transformative potential of collaborative music-making, in which Jason performs with resident survivors.26 The point is to educate and inspire, to raise awareness and money. The point is also to showcase a successful public sector collaboration with Swedish civil society. Another guest at the event is a program consultant from an IT firm, who speaks in technical terms of “efficiency,” “implementation,” and “sustainability.” He does not seem to address the various small donors (or hip-hop fans) in the room; rather, I suspect his audience to be representatives of Sweden’s taxpayer-funded development agency, SIDA, on which PMU largely relies to sustain its programs. This combination of bureaucratic machination with narratives of suffering and salvation is, of course, the stuff of modern development discourse (Eriksson Baaz 2005), the deleterious political effects of which Africanist scholars have carefully and critically observed over the past decade. As Charles Piot (2010), Gregory Mann (2015), and Chérie Rivers Ndaliko (2016) have shown, the post–Cold War era has been defined as much by structurally adjusted neoliberalism as by a turn toward “nongovernmentality,” with foreign agencies provisionally supplementing or replacing altogether core state functions in contemporary postcolonies, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is easy, thus, to be cynical about the way such “charitable imperialism” masquerades as “development aid,” but Jason remains sanguine, conscious of both the perils and potential of this modern, developmentalist trace in the chronotope of Afro-Sweden.

When I interview the artist a week later, he emphasizes the knowledge, talent, and humanism present in the Swedish nongovernmental agencies he has worked with in Africa over the past fifteen years, including PMU.27 These groups, Jason explains, include people “who know a lot about Africa, have spent a lot of time there, and are really passionate about a lot of the issues.” They are, for him, the inheritors of a modern Swedish tradition of solidarity with African states and social movements, among whom he counts himself. But there is a caveat. “A lot of times I see Western-organized forays into Africa as having been more or less colonial,” he says. And with particular reference to PMU, he notes “a dark history” surrounding their Pentecostal missionary work. “Why is abortion illegal in Congo?” Jason asks. “Or why are they so vehemently homophobic in a country like Uganda?” The troubling answers lie, in Jason’s view, with the burdensome legacy of Christian missions, and colonialism more broadly, in Africa past and present. But this is not a zero-sum game. Seeing good people doing mostly good work, Jason offers his time, skills, and profile to make that work better, more helpful and less hurtful. At the event, he adds yet another layer of constructive criticism to this mix when he takes the stage to perform the track “Misstänkt” (Suspect), his lyrical critique of racial profiling in Swedish society. As he raps, we hear how the oppressive, racialist logics of colonialism apply here, in Sweden, too, drawing out a productive tension in Jason Timbuktu Diakité’s participation in the PMU event that afternoon. Namely, if development and aid work in Africa can be (and often is) paternalistic, even imperious, it is also, for Jason, a proud Swedish citizen with roots in the African diaspora, a meaningful and even powerful tool to address and perhaps even redress matters of common—African, Swedish, and more generally human—concern.