The polysemy of visual representations : the Mangbetu of the Congo between colonialism and ethnography

The author looks at the images - drawings, movements and still images - made by the Mangbetu people (Democratic Republic of Congo) during the colonial period. The question is: what can be done with these images if their creators were so compromised by the colonial oppression of African peoples? Can these images still say something about Mangbetu? The author criticizes many postmodern deconstructionists who have rejected the value of photographs and film reels on the basis of the racist and colonialist mood of their creators, proposing a univocal interpretation. Images of the Mangbetu are polysemic and are received differently according to different contexts, from the offices of colonial administrators to contemporary anthropologists.