Protesters repeatedly vandalize statues of controversial former monarch Leopold II over past artocities
Workers clean graffiti from a statue of King Leopold II in Brussels, the Belgian capital. The statue was targeted by protesters during a demonstration in June. (FRANCISCO SECO / AP)
Ahuge equestrian statue of King Leopold II that has stood in central Brussels since 1926 has had to be cleaned repeatedly in recent months after being vandalized by activists protesting against racism and colonialism.
In a demonstration that drew 10,000 people to the Belgian capital on June 7, protesters climbed the statue, chanting “murderers” and waving the national flag of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a former Belgian colony.
Early in August, a bust of the monarch in the garden of the Royal Museum of Central Africa, or RMCA, in Brussels was daubed with red paint, the third time it had been defaced. A “BLM” sign was scrawled on the pedestal, a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Leopold II, who reigned from 1865 to 1909, has become the focal point as Belgians reassess their country’s colonial legacy. Historians believe he was responsible for the deaths of millions of Congolese during colonial days.
In recent months, several statues of the former king have been removed from Belgian cities.
Gia Abrassart, an activist and founder of Cafe Congo, a cultural salon in Brussels, said the statues definitely had to go.
“For me, it’s really important to be able to rewrite a shared collective story between Belgium and D. R. Congo,” she said.
Jean Carlier, a 74-year-old Belgian, disagreed and said that destroying historical monuments makes no sense.
Many petitions have been raised throughout Belgium demanding the removal of colonial statues, but there have also been a number in favor of these remaining.
A recent study by the University of Antwerp and the RMCA also sent conflicting signals.
About 60 percent of Belgians want to see statues of colonial figures removed from public places and relocated to museums, while 75 percent said the country should apologize to the D.R. Congo for the colonial past. At the same time, 50 percent of those polled feel that Belgium did more good than harm in colonizing the Central African nation.
The poll respondents, who also took a colonial history test, averaged only 7.5 points out of a possible 20, with fewer than one-third scoring 10 points or more.
The result was widely attributed to a serious lack of education about colonial history in Belgian schools in the past 20 years. Belgians attending school two decades ago were taught that Leopold II was a philanthropist who brought civilization to the Congolese, building roads, schools and hospitals. However, there was no mention of his ruthless treatment of the people and bloody exploitation of resources.
Flemish Education Minister Ben Weyts recently proposed that colonialism be part of the standard curriculum at schools in the Dutch-speaking region. Caroline Desir, education minister in the French-speaking Wallonia-Brussels region, supported the reform proposal, which has to be approved by local parliaments.
In mid-June, the Belgian parliament approved a proposal to set up a parliamentary commission to examine the country’s colonial past, mainly in D. R. Congo, but also in Rwanda and Burundi, which were colonized years after the death of Leopold II.
Parliament Speaker Patrick Dewael, who put forward the motion, described the panel as a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a reference to the body formed in South Africa in 1996 after the end of apartheid.
On June 30, the 60th anniversary of D. R. Congo’s independence, Belgian King Philippe surprised many people by sending a letter to Felix Tshisekedi, the African nation’s president, expressing his “deepest regrets” for the “suffering and humiliation” inflicted during colonial rule.
Congo Free State, the privately owned territory held by Leopold II from 1885 to 1908, is part of present-day D. R. Congo and an area 76 times that of Belgium.
The letter marked the first time a Belgian king had publicly condemned the country’s colonial past, but it stopped short of an apology. Early last year, a group of experts from the United Nations called on Belgium to apologize for its colonial history and crimes committed during a dark chapter in the country’s past.
However, with Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes sworn in only in March after being nominated by the king to form a permanent minority government during the COVID-19 pandemic, Belgium is still struggling to form a coalition administration after an election in May last year.
Unveiling a commemorative plaque on June 30 at Ixelles Town Hall in Brussels to mark the 60th anniversary of D. R. Congo’s independence, Wilmes said: “The time has come for Belgium to embark on a journey of research, truth and remembrance.”
Born on April 9, 1835, five years after Belgium’s independence from the Netherlands, Leopold II became king in December 1865 on his father’s death.
In 1879, he hired the Welsh-born explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley to represent him in Africa. For the next five years, Stanley traveled the Congo River Basin, setting up trading posts, building roads and persuading local chiefs, who were mostly illiterate, to sign treaties with Leopold II.
Through his public relations skills, the king persuaded the US and major European nations to recognize the area as his private fiefdom. He named the world’s only private colony the Congo Free State, a place he never visited.
US journalist and historian Adam Hochschild described in his book, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, how the king embarked on an ultimately successful effort to make a vast fortune from the new possession.
For some years, ivory was a principal source of great wealth drawn from the new colony by Leopold and his associates.
By the early 1890s, natural rubber in the Central African rainforest had emerged as a new and lucrative source of wealth. Detachments of Leopold’s 19,000-strong private army, known as Force Publique, would march into a village, hold the women hostage and force the men into the rainforest to gather a monthly quota of the commodity.
Hochschild wrote: “As the price of rubber soared, the quotas increased, and as vines near a village were drained dry, men desperate to free their wives and daughters would have to walk days or weeks to find new vines to tap.”
Forced labor was also used to operate other parts of the economy in the colony, from building roads to chopping wood for use in steamboat boilers.
The effects were devastating. Numerous female hostages starved, and many of the men harvesting rubber were worked to death, according to the book, which was made into a documentary.
In one particularly cruel practice aimed at preventing Congolese troops in Force Publique from wasting bullets or saving them for use in a mutiny, the soldiers had to present the severed hand of each rebel they killed to their white officers.
“Baskets of severed hands thus resulted from the expeditions against rebels. If a soldier fired at someone and missed, or used a bullet to shoot game, he then sometimes cut off the hand of a living victim to be able to show it to his officer,” Hochschild wrote.
After journalists’ reports triggered an international outcry against Leopold’s crimes in Africa, he was forced to relinquish his territory in 1908 to the Belgian government, which renamed it the Belgian Congo.
Hochschild’s book also makes a brief mention of how Leopold II invested his Congolese profits in a railway in China in 1897 — a clear reference to the Beijing-Hankou line. He viewed China in the same manner as the “magnificent African cake” — as a feast to be consumed, and he was just as ready to invite himself to the table.
While Leopold failed to realize many of his Chinese ambitions, many of the 540 workers brought from the country to labor on a Congolese railway in 1892 lost their lives.
Hochschild puts the Congolese death toll under Leopold at more than 10 million, based on population estimates from 1880 to 1920.
Guido Gryseels, director of RMCA, said the book is very well written and the facts are basically all true, but Hochschild mainly uses a journalistic style, and there are “errors and exaggeration”.
The RMCA has also become a target in the ongoing debate despite its decolonization efforts following a five-year renovation project undertaken before it reopened in December 2018.
Gryseels said the museum now has a very different narrative of the colonial past.
“Basically, we consider colonialism to be immoral. Colonialism is by definition a form of government based on military occupation, racist and authoritarian rule, and exploitation of a country,” he said.
