Stanis Mbwanga: the misdeeds of advance

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Oct 24

Pretty much everyone reading this blog is doing so on a mobile phone, tablet or laptop (kudos if you’re on a desktop, less guilt for you during this blog post). Pretty much all of these personal devices use tantalum capacitors, which use much less space on printed circuit boards than previous capacitors, and pretty much all the tantalum comes from coltan mined in the east of Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC – for the purpose of this post I will continue to refer to DRC as meaning the geographic area centred on the Congo Basin that I am talking about, even though this has only been the name from 1997, having previously been known as Zaire, Republic of the Congo, Belgian Congo, Congo Free State and Kingdom of Kongo stretching back over the past 500 years).

Born in DRC, Stanis Mbwanga is an artist whose work focuses on the direct links between the wars and instability that continue in his homeland and the economic health of tech multinationals. Mbwanga uses a consistent set of materials in his work, materials not chosen at random, that help him emphasise the major issues of DRC and the misdeeds resulting from technological advance. He uses ceramics alongside found objects, such as prepaid cards or the printed circuit boards of electronic devices, and his skill as a painter to express his thoughts on these highly sensitive subjects.

Somewhat tellingly, Mbwanga has two streams of artistic output: pieces anchored in the styles of historic artworks and artefacts from DRC; and pieces featuring faceless forms, swamped and consumed by electronic components, often contorted into positions of anguish or depression. The latter links contemporary Western life and ICT with the bloodshed of wars that have been provoked to continue the uninterrupted supply of natural materials like coltan in the east of DRC, the oil in Libya and Iraq or natural gas in Syria.

Coltan is just the latest natural resource that the developed world ‘needs’ that DRC has been unfortunate enough to be rich in. Before coltan, it was uranium: the nuclear part of the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII came from a mine in south-east DRC. Before that, the brass casings of allied shells used at Passchendaele and the Somme in WWI were 75% Congolese copper. Before that, the world's largest supply of rubber was found in DRC at a time when bicycle and car tyres had made it a vital commodity in the West; the late Victorian bicycle boom was enabled by Congolese rubber produced by slave labourers.

When Portuguese traders arrived in the 1480s, they realised they had stumbled upon a land of vast natural wealth, rich in a resource that suited the European colonising needs: DRC was home to a huge population of strong, disease-resistant humans. The Portuguese did their utmost to destroy any indigenous political force capable of curtailing their slaving or trading interests and, by the 1600s, the Kingdom of Kongo, which had ruled the western area of the Congo and places which became parts of other modern states such as Angola just over 100 years previously, had disintegrated into an anarchy of mini-states locked in continuous civil war. Victims of this fighting were captured, bought, sold, enslaved and transported to the Americas; about four million people were forced onto the British ships which were central to the trade. British cities and merchants grew rich out of Congolese slaves.

The world's deadliest conflict since World War II essentially still continues today in east DRC, punctuated by occasional brief periods of peace; a war in which more than five million people have died, millions more have been driven to the brink of death by starvation and disease and several million women and girls have been raped. DRC’s present is the direct result of decisions and actions taken since Europeans first arrived. Under Belgian rule, black Congolese were denied the right to vote, or form unions and political associations, and only given a basic education that suited the rulers and mine owners in exploiting them.

When independence was granted in 1960 it was a disaster, as there was no Congolese talent or administration who could govern the country; of 5,000 government positions before independence, only three were held by Congolese and there was not a single qualified Congolese lawyer, doctor, economist or engineer.

DRC is an enormous country, as big as Western Europe. In the post-independence chaos various areas attempted to gain their own independence, the army turned on their Belgian officers, and shortly afterwards the remaining senior Belgians who ran the state fled the country. The failing Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba, was beaten and executed by Western-backed rebels and a military strongman, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had been a sergeant in the colonial police force, took over, creating a totalitarian dictatorship called Zaire in 1971. The West tolerated Mobutu as long as the mines continued to provide for their needs and as long as DRC was kept out of the Soviet sphere of control. Mobutu, his family and friends stole and misappropriated billions of dollars; a $100m palace was built in remote jungle, and an ultra-long airstrip next to it was designed to take a Concorde, which was then chartered for shopping trips to Paris.

In 1997 an alliance of African states led by Rwanda invaded, as Mobutu's DRC was sheltering many of those responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Laurent Kabila, a Congolese in exile in East Africa, was manipulated to act as a figurehead for the invasion and subsequently president. Mobutu's army collapsed, while foreign armies clashed inside DRC as the weak and unstable state imploded and anarchy spread. Hundreds of armed groups carried out atrocities and millions died. Ethnic and linguistic differences inflamed the violence, while control of DRC’s natural resources fuelled the fighting.

Forcibly conscripted child soldiers forced groups of slaves to mine for minerals such as coltan whilst destroying enemy communities, raping women and driving survivors into the jungle to die of starvation and disease.

A peace agreement was patched together in the early 2000s, but it had glaring flaws. Today war and conflict continue in the east of DRC, the main mining region, which is far removed from the capital Kinshasa in the west and a hostile environment to govern. The country collapsed yet again in the early 2010s; roads no longer linking the main cities and healthcare depending on foreign aid and charity.

Art can be many things to many people, but in the case of Mbwanga his artistic ability combined with his passion to highlight the truths of current global technological consumerism make these objects powerful and vital. Having studied and mastered his art in Jingdezhen, China, the capital of porcelain production for the past 1000 years, Mbwanga returned to his homeland where he lives and works in the capital, Kinshasa, and where he is now a lecturer in ceramics at the Kinshasa Academy of Fine Arts.

The first pieces of his I saw were INFECTED, which features a noticeably white figure in a foetal position with circuit boards instead of a head and circuits spreading and corrupting from the feet (ground) through its body, and Untitled 2019, which features a baby and AK-47 on a blood-red background and a floor of bones and circuitry. These two pieces share common ground where the adult figure of INFECTED is foetal-like, becoming infected by the technology passing through it, pale-skinned but alive with advances whilst the dark-skinned baby of Untitled 2019 is floating, obscured by a white gun, denied an existence, the ignored consequences of the technological progresses. They are pieces which grabbed my attention and forced me to confront a series of guilty truths that I previously hadn’t been entirely aware of. If one of art’s main objectives is to educate, Mbwanga is proof of this every day, not just for his students but for all his audiences.

This blog post ties in with the rare opportunity to see Mbwanga’s work in the UK as part of the Bending Culture exhibition, hosted by HOXTON 253 and Demif Gallery in London from 22-25th October. Please go and see it if you get the chance!

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Edited by Sarah McGill