Belgium Confronts Its Heart of Darkness;
Unsavory Colonial Behavior in the Congo Will Be Tackled by a New Study
ARTS & IDEAS/CULTURAL DESK | September 21, 2002, Saturday
By ALAN RIDING (NYT) 1569 words
Late Edition - Final, Section B, Page 9, Column 4
LEAD PARAGRAPH - No less than other European powers, Belgium proclaimed its colonial mission to be that of spreading civilization. But while Britain and France, say, had global empires, Belgium's attention was focused overwhelmingly on the vast, resource-rich Central African territory of Congo, 75 times larger than Belgium itself. The deal was implicit: in exchange for extracting immense wealth from its colony, Belgium offered schools, roads, Christianity and, yes, civilization.
Yet Belgium's pride in its colonial past has always been shadowed by a darker history, one marked by two decades of perhaps the cruelest rule ever inflicted on a colonized people and, a half-century later, by a violent intervention in Congolese politics after the country's independence in 1960. This history, long buried, neither taught in schools nor mentioned in public, is now beginning to surface.
The above abstract is at this url, the rest of the article is pay per view: query.nytimes.com
I have copied the following from the dead tree version.
>> In February, Belgium admitted participating in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba Congo’s first Prime Minister, and apologized for it. The motivation for the crime was to avoid losing control over Congo’s resources, but Belgium steadfastly denied any involvement until new evidence collected by a parliamentary commission last year confirmed the direct role of Belgian agents in carrying out and covering up the murder.
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Yet the initiative is daring, since it raises the broader question of a country’s continuing responsibility for unsavory actions carried out in it’s name generations or even centuries earlier. These range from promotion of the slave trade and annexation of territories to colonial repression and ransacking of natural resources. Further while the study is not subject to Belgian government control, it will be financed by the taxpayer, which makes intense public debate of it’s findings even more likely.
So far, no other former colonial power has shown an appetite for looking back with a critical eye, even though the colonial records of say, the British in India, the French in Algeria, the Dutch in Indonesia and the Portuguese in Angola all contain examples of human rights abuses and excessive use of force. Interestingly Mr. Gryseels said he had received strong expressions of support from foreign historians and social scientists.
Maria Misra, a lecturer in in modern history at Oxford University, believes that Britain, for one, should follow Belgiums example. “The point of cataloging Britains imperial crimes is not to trash our forebears,” she wrote in The Guardian of London, “but to remind rulers that even the best-run empires are cruel and violent, not just the Belgian Congo. Overwhelming power, combined with boundless superiority, will produce atrocities - even among the well intentioned.”
The strong emotional attachment of some former colonial administrators to prized former colonies, however, can pose a problem. “Every time Belgian ex-colonials hear criticism of what happened under King Leopold, they see it as a criticism of colonialism in general,” Mr. Gryseels explained. “A lot of Belgians worked hard in developing the infrastructure, building roads, organizing school systems, and they feel they did a god job and it is very unfair that the whole thing is being criticized in a very one-sided way.”
A case against King Leopold, though, was already being made a century ago. In 1899, Joseph Conrad published “Heart of Darkness,” in which he exposed the horrors of Congo. In 1904 a British shipping agent, Edmund Morel, formed the Congo reform Association, which publicized the human toll of Leopold’s rule. Finally under British pressure, Leopold sold Congo to Belgium in 1908. In 1919, a Belgian commission estimated that Congo’s population was half what it was in 1879.
But all this was expurgated from Belgium’s official memory. “My generation was brought up with the view that Belgium brought civilization to Congo, that we did nothing but good out there,” said Mr. Gryseels, 49, who attended high school in the late 1960’s. “I don’t think that during my entire education I ever heard a critical word about our colonial past.”<<
There’s more but I can only type out so much. Basically the rest of the article is about how Gryseels, director of the Royal Museum for Central Africa near Brussels (which was originally set up by Leopold as the Museum of the Congo) is trying to change the message, not to pass judgement, but to provide new information about the past.
ok, three last snips
>>Leoplod, <g>, himself never visited the Congo, but it fed him the income to build palaces, monuments and museums and to buy expensive clothes and villas for his teen age mistress.
>>At the museums entrance, for instance, a large statue of a white colonial and two kneeling Africans still stands, accompanied by the inscription, “Belgium brings civilization to the Congo.”
>>He (Gryseels) does not expect the study and exhibition to lead to a fresh apology to Congo, however. “A lot of very positive things happened during the real period of colonization after 1908,” he said. “Also I don’t think one should look at the past with the moral standards of today. After all, early in the last century, children of 6 or 7 were working 17 hours a day inBelgian factories. We should look at it with the moral standards of those periods.”
The article references Adam Hoschschild’s book, “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa” amazon.com
my final thought on the subject - who really cares about Africa anyway, it’s just one of those shitty little countries I suppose. |
