Notes

Irma Stern travelled to the Congo in 1942. Buoyed by romanticised accounts about the Nilotic¹ ancestry, elevated status and physical beauty of the Rwandan nobility, Stern was consumed both with the curiosity and the desire to paint/portray them. Well-connected with both the Belgian administration and the South African attaché, she found an opportunity to see the Royal party at the Fête Nationale held in Kigali, a two day-long celebration that included royal processions and public displays of drumming, singing and dancing.

“I painted the king and queen and the queen mother of the Watussi. Their movements were dignified beauty, their features – long necked, long faced – were exquisite, a beautiful and timeless majesty. Here I had found as I had thought, the quintessential of beauty.”²

This portrait, Watussi King³ was most likely completed on the same day as Watussi Queen.⁴ The two portraits have captured their respective subjects wearing the distinctive beaded and plumed crowns reserved exclusively for senior royalty. Stern’s disregard for political and ethnographic sensitivities is often underpinned by the generic titles she gave her works. She seldom identified African subjects by name and this has led to many flawed identifications. Identified as Mwami⁵ Rudahigawa Mutara III (1912-1959) and Queen Rosalie Gicanda⁶ (1928-1994), this may require revision after examining photographs taken on the day of the Fête Nationale. Whilst the male sitter was indeed the Mwami, the female portrait may well not be that of his young queen but perhaps his mother, the dowager queen. In historical photographs taken at the same time, Mutara III is shown wearing this crown whilst his bride wears the “symbols of the horns of the sacred cow” held on her head by a double band. His mother however wears the full crown, acknowledging her status in the royal family.

Mwami Rudahigawa died in 1959. The circumstances surrounding his death are shrouded in mystery with many accounts alluding to his having been poisoned by the then Belgian administration. The Rwandan monarchy lasted only two more years, coming to an end in 1961.⁷

¹ Nilotic peoples or Nilotes refers to related ethnic groups mainly inhabiting the Nile Valley, the African Great Lakes region, and southwestern Ethiopia, who speak Nilotic languages, a large sub-group of the Nilo-Saharan languages. These include the Kalenjin, Luo, Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Ateker and the Maa-speaking peoples, all of which are clusters of several ethnic groups.
² My aim in art, Irma Stern 1954, newspaper article
³ Purchased in Brussels where Stern held an exhibition on her return from Central Africa
⁴ Purchased by the South African National Gallery in 1967 after Stern’s death.
⁵ Mwami means King in the Kinyarwanda language
⁶ Mutara III’s second wife was only 14 years old when they married. She withdrew entirely from politics after his death. She was murdered in the Rwandan genocide on 22 April 1994.
⁷ We would like to thank Carol Kaufmann (Curator of African Art) of IZIKO South African National Gallery for her assistance with this catalogue entry

Exhibited

Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Imagining Beauty: Body Adornment Including Young SA Designers, 2010/2011, illustrated in colour in the exhibition catalogue on page 17