1/27/2024 0 Comments Graveyard of the atlantic museumIt was as if a museum of Jewish life in Berlin made no reference to the Holocaust.Īfter I mentioned my visit in King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, published a few years later, a dissident staff member began emailing me about internal conflicts. When I first visited the museum, in 1995, the exhibits of Congo flora included a cross section of rubber vine-but not a word about the millions of Congolese who died as a result of the slave-labor system established to harvest that rubber. The human zoo was gone, but silence about the plunder remained. Part of it houses archives and sponsors natural-science research, but throughout the 20th century, its public exhibition halls continued to express a highly colonial view of the world. In 1910, soon after the king died and his personal colony became the Belgian Congo, the museum finally opened its doors. More than 1 million visitors came to see them. In the “civilized village,” men dressed in the uniform of Leopold’s private Congo army played in a military band. In the “river village” and the “forest village” they used drums, tools, and cooking pots brought from home, and paddled dugout canoes around a pond. Its centerpiece was human beings: 267 Congolese men, women, and children who for several months were on display in three specially constructed villages with thatched roofs. In 1897, when a world’s fair took place in Brussels, the king had orchestrated a special exhibit on the Congo here, just outside the city. ![]() Until that point, Leopold, a master of public relations, had worked hard to portray himself as a philanthropist, motivated only by the desire to bring Christianity and civilization to the “Dark Continent.” In 1904, he had hired his favorite architect, the Frenchman Charles Girault, who designed the Petit Palais in Paris, to build this museum on the site of a royal PR coup seven years earlier. The museum was filled with relics of colonial soldiers and idealized figures with inscriptions like “Belgium Brings Civilization to the Congo.” Rising outrage finally pressured the king to reluctantly sell the Congo to Belgium in 1908, a year before his death. Washington to Mark Twain to the archbishop of Canterbury took part in mass protest meetings. Using testimony and photographs from missionaries and whistle-blowers, the British journalist Edmund Dene Morel turned Leopold’s slave-labor system into an international scandal. Demographers estimate that the Congo’s population may have been slashed by as much as half, or some 10 million people. The birth rate plummeted and, weakened by hunger, people succumbed to diseases they might otherwise have survived. Hunting, fishing, and the cultivation of crops were all disrupted, and the army seized much of what food was left. ![]() The king’s soldiers would march into village after village and hold the women hostage, in order to force the men to go deep into the rain forest for weeks at a time to gather wild rubber. He made a fortune from his privately owned colony-well over $1.1 billion in today’s dollars-chiefly by enslaving much of its male population as laborers to tap wild rubber vines. Exasperated by the declining power of European monarchs, Leopold wanted a place where he could reign supreme, unencumbered by voters or a parliament, and in the Congo he got it. For 23 years starting in 1885, Belgium’s King Leopold II was the “proprietor,” as he called himself, of the misnamed Congo Free State, the territory that today is the Democratic Republic of Congo. That impression is only enhanced by an inner courtyard and a surrounding park: formal French gardens, a reflecting pool and fountain, ponds with ducks and geese, wide lawns laced with hedges, and carefully groomed paths that sweep away to majestic trees in the distance.Ī visitor here is a long way from Africa, but not from the fruits of the continent’s colonization. ![]() The tall windows, pillared facade, rooftop balustrade, and 90-foot-high rotunda of the main building give it the look of a chateau. Although one of the largest museums anywhere devoted exclusively to Africa, it is thousands of miles from the continent itself. Welcome to the Royal Museum for Central Africa. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
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