Tuesday, Feb 08, 2005
A guilty past in Africa
By Ian Black
Europe's travail de memoire is difficult but necessary - to face up unpalatable truths.
POOR OLD Leopold II. The King of the Belgians underwent one of the shortest political rehabilitations on record last week, hoisted back on to his plinth — horse, enormous spade-shaped beard and all — in the Congolese capital, Kinshasha, only to be sent back again to the dust heap of history a few hours later.
It was strange, observed one passer-by, when statues of tyrants were being toppled elsewhere, to see the unannounced return of the lugubrious monarch who is still remembered as the cruellest face of European colonialism in Africa.
But King Leopold's ghost, to use the title of Adam Hochschild's brilliant but controversial book about little Belgium's rule over a vast country 80 times its size, has never gone away. And, quite by chance, the King's brief return coincided with the opening of a ground-breaking exhibition in the Royal Africa Museum at Tervuren, near Brussels, where Belgian and Congolese historians have tried hard to agree on a common version of their unequal past.
Leopold acquired the Congo as his private fiefdom in 1885, and only later made it over to the Belgian state. No revisionism, though, will end his association with the scandal of the severed hands and other atrocities committed in pursuit of the rubber trade that helped finance Belgium's take-off as the fourth-richest country in the world in the final years of the 19th century.
The official justification was fighting Arab slave traders operating from east Africa: but that was the humanitarian veneer and only part of the story. It is as if future historians were to record U.S. motives for the war in Iraq as being to eradicate terrorism and install democracy — without mentioning oil, strategy, Saudi Arabia or Israel. In a wonderful trick of history, a fin-de-siecle monument in a grand Brussels park pays tribute to the Belgian military heroes who wiped out l'Arabe esclavagiste — just behind the city's main mosque.
Congo was a case of early rapaciousness and later prosperity. By the time the Belgians were persuaded to leave, as the winds of change blew through the continent, it was a model colony with good healthcare, literacy and schools. But there was so little education beyond primary level that there were only 16 university graduates by independence. After that the words Congo and post-colonial chaos became synonymous. The murder of Patrice Lumumba and the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko (he put Leopold's statue into storage and became even richer than the King) were other outcomes of European greed and paternalism, African divisions, and Cold War containment.
Touchy Belgians, stung by the charge that Leopold was the first genocidaire, are not alone in struggling to come to terms with their colonial past. French relations with Algeria are still a twisted skein of nostalgia, resentment and denial, the belief in a civilising mission tangled with revelations of torture by ageing generals, angry Muslims in the bleak banlieues, rai music and bombs on the Paris Metro.
Britain's imperial retreat has been going on for longer, starting with India in 1947. Tinged still with Kiplingesque romance, memories tend to the self-flattering, with an emphasis on common law, railways and good governance, though recent work on the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya has been a rare antidote to amnesia.
Post-colonial guilt is passe these days, yet whether acknowledged or not it is present still in discussion of African debt relief, trade, development and poverty. Europe's travail de memoire is a difficult but necessary task — to reconcile opposing sides of unpalatable truths. And it takes a lot more effort than sticking an old tyrant back on an empty plinth.
- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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