> And what do the Belgians, including you, owe to those in their former colony, the Belgian Congo, after years of the most brutal exploitation and the rest?
en.wikipedia.org
>>Reports of outrageous exploitation and widespread human rights abuses (including enslavement and mutilation) of the native population, especially in the rubber industry, led to an international protest movement in the early 1900s. Estimates of the death toll range from 3 to 10 million and many historians consider the atrocities to have constituted a genocide. Finally, in 1908, the Belgian parliament compelled the King to cede the Congo Free State to Belgium. Historians of the period tend to take a very dim view of Leopold, due to the mass killings and human rights abuses that took place in the Congo: one British historian has said that he "was an Attila in modern dress, and it would have been better for the world if he had never been born." Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany once described his fellow ruler as a "thoroughly bad man."
Leopold II is perceived by many Belgians as the "King-Builder" ("le Roi-Bâtisseur" in French, "Koning-Bouwer" in Dutch) because he commissioned a great number of buildings and urbanistic projects in Belgium (mainly in Brussels, Ostend and Antwerp). The buildings include the Royal Glasshouses at Laeken (in the domain of the Laeken Royal Castle), the Japanese tower, the Chinese pavilion, the Musée du Congo (now called the Royal Museum for Central Africa) and their surrounding park in Tervuren, the Jubilee Triple Arch in Brussels and the Antwerp train station hall. He also built an important country estate in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera in France, including the Villa des Cèdres, which is now a botanical garden. He was able to satisfy his megalomania and erect these buildings with the wealth provided by Congo exploitation.
There has been a "Great Forgetting", as Adam Hochschild puts it in King Leopold's Ghost, after Leopold's Congo was transferred to Belgium. In Hochschild's words:
The Congo offer a striking example of the politics of forgetting. Leopold and the Belgian colonial officials who followed him went to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence from the historical records. (Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost).<<
And a certain Belgian has the audacity, no, the chutspah, to point the finger at white South Africans for racial crimes. Nothing the South Africans have done compares, even remotely, with the dastardly deeds of the Belgians in Africa. |
