Furnishing the spaces of l’Authenticité. The interior designs of New Form/Ndako Ya Sika in 1970s Kinshasa

In the late 1960s president Mobutu Sese Seko initiated his nation-building project of a “Recours à l’Authenticité”, through which he aimed, first, to restore the country’s unity after the turbulent years following Congo’s independence on June 30th 1960, and, second, to give Kinshasa and Congo/Zaïre a strong presence on the international scene. Concrete as “liquid stone” was a crucial instrument for shaping this political project that claimed to “draw” on the “values” and “legacy of the country’s ancestors”, as Mobutu would articulate it in a famous speech given at the UN Headquarters in New York on October 4th 1973. Kinshasa’s skyline indeed was changed significantly in those years with the construction of among others the Tour de l’échangeur and [JL1] the high-rise tower for the national radio and television broadcasting company. Having discussed this argument elsewhere, we seek to extend in this paper the analysis to the interior spaces of the particular built landscape produced by the “Recours à l’Authenticité”-policy.  More in particular, we will focus on the Kinshasa based furniture & interior design company New Form/ Ndako Ya Sika, which was founded in 1971. Run by Aleksandra Kosinska, a female entrepreneur of Polish origin who moved to Congo/Zaïre with her husband and chemical engineer Cyprian Konsinski around 1968, the company became responsible for many of the most politically charged interiors in Congo/Zaïre’s capital city. Using publicity source material from the firm, Kosinski’s memoirs as well as information drawn from archival research and oral history in Belgium and Congo, we aim to demonstrate that any discussion of diplomatic interiors in 1970s Kinshasa not only needs to encompass the interior furnishing of the assembly hall of a major public building like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but also that of other, more intimate spaces of encounter of “le Tout Kinshasa”, such as “le Privé”-nightclub.