Belgium Confronts Its Heart of Darkness

[Dave Monroe]

New York Times
September 21, 2002
Belgium Confronts Its Heart of Darkness
By ALAN RIDING

PARIS — 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.

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 ....

[...]

... daring, since it raises the broader question of a
country's continuing responsibility for unsavory
actions carried out in its 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....

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....
 
Maria Misra, a lecturer in modern history at Oxford
University, believes that Britain, for one, should
follow Belgium's example. "The point of cataloging
Britain's 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
infrastucture, building roads, organizing school
systems, and they feel they did a good 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.... 

[...]

But all this was expurgated from Belgium's official
memory....

[...] 

By the time he took charge of the museum a year ago,
however, attitudes were changing....  But no book had
the impact of Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost:
A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial
Africa" (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), which appeared in
translation in Belgium in 1999.

In it, Mr. Hochschild describes how, along with the
uncounted thousands who died of disease and famine,
many Congolese were killed by Leopold's agents for
failing to meet production quotas for ivory and
rubber, the territory's principal sources of wealth
before its diamonds, copper and zinc were discovered.
Mr. Hochschild estimates the total death toll during
the Leopold period at 10 million.

Leopold himself never visited Congo, but it fed him
the income to build palaces, monuments and museums and
to buy expensive clothes and villas for his teenage
mistress. In 1897, he built the Museum of the Congo —
later the Museum of the Belgian Congo, today the Royal
Museum for Central Africa ....

"Today we have very fine collections, but the museum
has remained almost unchanged for over 40 years," Mr.
Gryseels said, "so it needs all sorts of change, first
of all the message, which is still very colonial and
provides the Belgian view of Africa before 1960 and is
not very much related to the Africa of today." ...

As part of a reorganization of the museum in
preparation for the 2004 exhibition, Mr. Gryseels
decided to take a fresh look at Belgium's colonial
past....

[...]

... the museum is ill prepared to address the
questions raised by Mr. Hochschild and other recent
authors. "When you visit our museum, you don't find
any information about the allegations made in these
books," he said. "So we thought it was important to
present the different views of historians on that
period and provide scientific information so that a
visitor can make up his own mind."

He 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 in Belgian factories. We should look at it with
the moral standards of those periods."

But, Mr. Gryseels was asked, was he shocked when he
read Mr. Hochschild's book?

"Yes, I was," he said softly. "Obviously, it hits
pretty hard. Especially since I am from a generation
that was brought up with a very positive and
flattering view of our colonial activities. I am from
a generation that sold calendars and New Year's cards
to help missionaries in Central Africa. And when you
read all these revelations, they're pretty hard
hitting." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/21/arts/21LEOP.html

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