ABSTRACT
Colonial literature, although the phrase is not without its ambiguities and inner contradictions with regards to the imperial project, was an off-shoot of cultural anthropology. In the case of Belgium, one can indeed observe that africanism operated both as a legitimising force and as an agent that, in one way or another, authorized fictional discourses about the Congo. The terra incognita was simultaneously explored and 'dreamed over' and in the initial stage of the conquest it generated a host of hybrid accounts that were to lay the foundations on which Belgian africanism and colonial fictions would be later erected. The quest for indigenous or native realism would dominate not only colonial fiction but also — more understandably — the emerging Francophone literatures until the end of the 1950s. Ivory, in this context, appears as a means to an end, as a material symbolising the colonial situation since it enabled artists to convert a purely local product to the Western canon.
