A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo [Paperback]

A Dance of Assassinspresents the competing histories of how Congolese Chief Lusinga and Belgian Lieutenant Storms engaged in a deadly clash while striving to establish hegemony along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika in the 1880s. While Lusinga participated in the east African slave trade, Storms' secret mandate was to meet Henry Stanley's eastward march and trace a white line across the Dark Continent to legitimize King Leopold's audacious claim to the Congo. Confrontation was inevitable, and Lusinga lost his head. His skull became the subject of a sinister evolutionary treatise, while his ancestral figure is now considered a treasure of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Allen F. Roberts reveals the theatricality of early colonial encounter and how it continues to influence Congolese and Belgian understandings of history today.

The legacy of a fatal clash between two ambitious men

Allen F. Roberts is Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author (with Mary Nooter Roberts) ofA Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal, which was awarded the Herskovits Prize.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. The Emperor Strikes Back
1. Invitation to a Beheading
2. A Conflict of Memories
3. Histories Made by Bodies
4. Tropical Gothic
5. Storms the Headhunter

Part II. Remembering the Dismembered
6. The Rise of a Colonial Macabre
7.Art ?voon theChauss?e d'Ixelles
8. Lusinga's Lasting Laughs
9. Composing Decomposition
10. Defiances of the Dead

Appendix A: Some Background on Our Protagonists
Appendix B: A Note on Illustrations
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Winner, 2013 Arnold Rubin PrizeFinalist, 2014 Herskovits Award

The beheading of the Tabwa ruler and slave trader Lusinga lwa Ng'ombe by warriors loyal to the Belgian commander ?mile Storms sets the sl³®