Belgium’s Royal Museum of Central Africa is a gorgeous, neo-classical palace, nestled in an immaculately sculpted park, just a 20-minute drive east of the city of Brussels. Yet for many, it is a symbol of an atrocious legacy. Created to showcase artifacts from the Belgian Congo, it is associated with the horrors of colonial conquest: ruthless pillaging, racist oppression, and heinous slaughter.
It’s an ugly reputation, but the museum is now trying to set things right. On Saturday, it reopens after a five-year, $80 million makeover that is more than just about rearranging the displays. It is about giving the museum a new purpose. The result could help Belgium atone for its African misadventures.
“For more than 60 years, the museum spread a colonial message,” says Guido Gryseels, the museum’s director. “We now take a different view. The principle of colonization is fundamentally immoral and we completely distance ourselves from it.”
Gryseels says the museum’s current role is about raising awareness and becoming a world center for research. “We present the facts and memories of the past,” he says.
The museum was originally built for the 1897 International Exposition in Brussels. It was created by Belgium’s vainglorious King Leopold II to house his enormous collection of zoological and cultural materials from the Congo, from stuffed elephants to witch doctor masks to the uranium from the same mine as that used in the Manhattan Project.
It was the king’s personal collection because the Congo was Leopold II’s personal estate. It was claimed for him in 1885 by the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley. The woefully misnamed Congo Free State was the size of France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Sweden combined–or 76 times that of Belgium. In the so-called Scramble for Africa, Leopold hit pay dirt. His private army squeezed the land of its resources, slaughtering elephants for ivory, tapping trees for rubber.
The Congolese were treated like sub-humans: enslaved, brutalized, and mutilated. Soldiers punished fathers who failed to meet their rubber quotas by amputating their children’s hands. The crazed character of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was likely inspired by the administrator Léon Rom, who decorated his garden with severed Congolese heads. Some estimates say that Congo's population fell by 10 million, or half its population, in the 40 years after 1885.
Post a Comment