Power in the shadows: Freddy Tsimba’s “nkisi logic” in Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa

When Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) reopened to the public in 2018 after its renovation, the institution highlighted newly commissioned artworks by contemporary Congolese artists as examples of its new “focus on decolonization.” One such installation is Freddy Tsimba’s “Shadows”: facing a 1930s-era memorial listing Belgians who died in Congo, Tsimba installed a list of Congolese who died in Belgium during the colonial period such that they cast shadows on the earlier memorial. This article examines the intersection between decolonizing museums and memory work, using Tsimba’s installation as an example. I tie together theories of memory from the Global North and from Central Africa, reflecting both the artist’s perspective and the cultural entanglements of a postcolonial world. If a museum is to take Central African memorial practices seriously in its turn toward decolonization, the institution must reevaluate its role as mediator between past and present, the living and the dead.