- Kinshasa had a massive sprawling market place
I think of it as an outdoor market with a lot of booths
and some of them had roofs and shelters, some didn't.
And this was there on the table of one of the dealers
who was, goodness knows what else he was selling,
and all I could see was that it had the texture of beads,
but there was so much accumulation and a really
durable kind of a crust, that was so thick and light
could not get through it. So no colors, absolutely
no colors were apparent. The shape of it was so unusual
and it resembled so much of things I had seen in books.
That, you know I made a price and the fella said "sold"
I took it and showed it and right away to Joseph Cornet.
Frère Cornet, as we called him, he was intrigued and he said
"I think this is good enough that you should let us take
it to the museum headquarters here in Kinshasa. And we'll
do what we can to uncover it so that we can at least,
Conservation people worked on it and then he said "come by the
office and I'll show you what we've found." And they were
delighted and here are the words that we used by Cornet, he
said "it would not be fair to us, to demand
that you leave it here, if we can't afford to buy
it, we have ones similar." and he said "if you'll keep
us involved in the things that you find such as you're doing
now, its important to us, its positive."
So he agreed that day that I could keep it and from then on
I tried to do the same thing for other objects.