Luc de Heusch 1927–2013

Luc de Heusch was a most remarkable man, at once a brilliant field researcher of Congolese cultures, an innovative scholar and imaginative cineaste, a thoughtful and innovative teacher at the Free University of Brussels (Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1955–1992), a most convivial host and witty conversationalist, an inspirational friend and mentor, and a devoted husband and father—all, it should be added, very distinctly on his own terms.1 Over the years he worked closely with a host of poets, painters, filmmakers, and scholars, and his celebrated associates included Germaine Dieterlen, Marcel Griaule, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean-Claude Muller, Jean Raine, and Jean Rouch, as well as politically progressive faculty and student colleagues at ULB and in French academia. Many of de Heusch’s students have gone on to distinguished Africanist careers, including Vivianne Baeke, the late Marie-Louise Bastin, Anne-Marie Bouttiaux, Jean-Paul Colleyn, Philippe Jespers, Danielle Jonckers, Pierre de Maret, Habi Buganza Mulinda, and Pierre Petit. Most of de Heusch’s prolific writings remain in their original French. Of those translated into English, best known are his books The Drunken King, or, The Origin of the State (1982) and Sacrifice in Africa: A Structuralist Approach (1985).2 In these and other volumes, de Heusch applied and extended structuralist principles propounded by Levi-Strauss, especially through a path-breaking trilogy on Bantu mythology: The Drunken King (Le roi ivre, 1972), Rois nes d’un coeur de vache (1982), and Le Roi du Kongo et les monstres sacres (2000). De Heusch sought commonalities and transformations of logic among people speaking closely related Bantu languages and dialects in an area extending from Gabon to South Africa, Angola to Tanzania. His more particular topics of interest included sacred kingship, trance and shamanism, political anthropology, and visual cultures. De Heusch was a most evocative wordsmith, and a single sentence could instigate constructive argument and propel readers into their own deep thoughts. Despite his own fieldwork during the last years of the Belgian Congo, de Heusch’s wide-ranging “neo-Frazerian” analyses of central African systems of thought—to use his own phrasing—were largely based upon secondary sources. He very willingly joined academic debates between structuralists and historians (most notably Jan Vansina, whose epic riposte of 1983 lives on), with sparks flying on all sides that still illuminate debates extending through de Heusch’s last book, Pouvoir et religion (pour reconcilier l’Histoire et l’anthropologie) (2009). Early research was conducted among Rwandese peoples, about whom de Heusch published a number of articles and monographs. After Rwandan independence he was morally outraged at the militarization of the young republic that led to ethnic cleansing, foreshadowing the Genocide of 1994. De Heusch spoke up against Belgian connivance in these developments, and as his former student Paul Jorion has noted in moving tribute, throughout his career de Heusch was “of a seamless intellectual and political rectitude, a determined enemy of all exigencies of Realpolitik and all conformities of thought.”3 This latter quality was amply reflected in his participation in the important French conferences and journal called Systemes de Pensee en Afrique Noire, and even more evident in his engaging films, such as those about the Belgian artists Rene Magritte and James Ensor. Although his PhD was in Political and Colonial Sciences (Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1955), de Heusch was at heart an ethnographer—and a surrealist one at that, as James Clifford has described the idiom. That is, de Heusch understood ethnography as “an activity” through which “comparison exists in unmediated tension with sheer incongruity” (Clifford 1981:563). His most significant research was conducted among Hamba and Tetela of what was then the Belgian Congo. De Heusch also worked among the congeries of peoples of the Maniema in northeastern Katanga, and his piece on Boyo (Basumba) sculpture published under the pseudonym Luc Zangrie (1947–50) remains one of the few studies of people from this vastly war-torn region. The work features discussion and a much-reproduced photograph of a series of Boyo ancestral figures about which there is otherwise very little literature despite how well such sculpture is known from public collections. De Heusch was a polymath. As the Royal Museum for Central Africa of Tervuren, Belgium, was undergoing a long-awaited transformation of style and purpose, de Heusch served as president of the scientific council from 1987 to 1995. To revitalize the museum’s research and complement its Masterpieces from Central Africa book and blockbuster traveling exhibition (Verswijver et al. 1996), de Heusch edited an important collection of case studies entitled Objects: Signs of Africa (1996, reviewed in these pages as Roberts 1997). Compelling essays include Rene Devisch writing on arts of Yaka divination, Dunja Hersak on striated shields among nineteenth-century Songye, Habi Buganza Mulinda on Woyo masks, and Pierre Petit on “sacred kaolin” in Luba ritual. De Heusch’s own essay was based upon his research in the 1950s among Tetela people of the DRC, and begins with a nuanced discussion of what “Tetela” may mean as an ethnic designation in a region of such complex and shifting social identities. He concludes that what may be labeled Tetela masks in museum collections cannot be that, as Tetela seem to have made no such things, and instead, the works were more probably produced by Songye-related people. Accompanying the piece are photos of face-painting that stand as one of the greatest visualizations of mid-twentieth-century central African body arts. Film was also a life-long passion of de Heusch, and he combined documentary ethnography with creative work, earning him comparison with Robert Flaherty (1884–1951) of Nanook of the North (1922) fame, and leading some to understand de Heusch as “the Belgian Jean Rouch”—with Rouch’s Les maitres fous (1955) in many a mind’s eye.4 Early in his career, de Heusch worked with Henri Storck (1907–1999), the noted Belgian filmmaker and documentalist over whose foundaLuc de Heusch in an undated photograph.