The reopened Africa Museum in Brussels has sparked a painful debate about Belgium’s colonial past.
By Michael Birnbaum Michael Birnbaum Brussels bureau chief covering Europe Email Bio Follow March 15 at 9:00 AM BRUSSELS — The years-long renovation of Belgium’s grand museum devoted to Central Africa was intended to overhaul an institution that was packed with racist images of Africans as savage, sexualized creatures, in exhibits barely touched since the heyday of the country’s domination of Congo.
Museum leaders say they did their best. The displays in place since the former Royal Museum for Central Africa reopened in December after its five-year revamp present the story of Africa as beginning long before European colonists invaded. The narrative no longer emphasizes the benefits for Africans of colonial rule. And some of the artifacts on display — most of them from the old collection — no longer say they were given by Congolese subjects “in gratitude” to their Belgian rulers.
Gryseels tried to find ways to address parts of the building that couldn’t be removed, including by etching the names of some of the Congolese who died during colonial rule on a window in front of a wall memorializing Belgians, so that when the sun shines, the Congolese victims’ names are projected onto the original memorial.
The colonial system promoted a type of apartheid; nearly no native Congolese had opportunities for higher education, for example. And its assumptions lingered: As recently as 1958, the Belgian government organized a Congolese human zoo in the shadow of the Atomium, a Space Age monument that is now a Brussels symbol.One major objection is the lack of people of African descent on the staff of a museum devoted to the study of Africa.
“If you present Belgian colonialism, you must do it factually,” said Robert Devriese, a former Belgian diplomat who is the managing director of the Royal Belgian Overseas Union, a group devoted to defending the interests of people with connections to colonialism. “Negative, why not? But also the positive.”“In three generations’ time, we managed to make it the wealthiest country. It was an area that wasn’t even in the Middle Ages,” he said.
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