Transcriber: Sehee Kim Reviewer: David DeRuwe
In recent years, we see a growing interest in the study of Belgian colonial history.
Most of the time,
we start to better understand that the second Belgian king, Leopold II,
in 1885, started at Berlin conference
where he took place to divide the African continent.
He, together with different, other European leaders,
divided the African continent in different pieces.
He, too, wanted a piece of it,
but the Belgian government wasn’t interested in a colonial project.
This is how Congo became a colony of just one man,
actually, a huge colony, 80 times the size of Belgium.
After several atrocities under its reign and bad governance,
he received international pressure to give up his colonial dreams.
The Belgian government took over his legacy until 1960,
when the country gained its independence.
I was always interested in this colonial history,
probably driven by my own personal motives.
I was born in Congo, but I grew up in Belgium.
At school, we didn’t learn much about this history,
so I started to do my own research,
and I found out the importance of the Antwerp port.
If you were planning, at the end of the 19th Century,
to travel to the rest of the world,
you had to take the boats because planes didn’t exist yet.
We could compare the Antwerp port to today’s international airport.
Families and friends, they came to say goodbye
to missionaries, colonial officers, and soldiers
who were ready to go to Congo.
The boats, they were packed with luggage, food, and medication,
but they were also packed with weapons -
ammunition and different kinds of explosives.
If we would compare the colonial project to a car,
violence will have been its motor;
terror, its oil;
and exploitation, its fuel.
The extraction started first
with ivory, and later, the rubber.
With the invention of the rubber wheel, in the late 19th Century,
mainly for the bikes and later for the car industry,
the demand for rubber became very high.
Leopold’s colonial project became the main supplier.
This is why Congolese men, women, and children
had to work on the rubber plantations.
If they were not able to provide enough rubber, there were severely punished.
Some of them received whiplashes.
Others, their hands were cut off,
and also others, their feet were also cut off.
Leopold’s colonial project alone
cost the lives of six to ten million Congolese.
When this atrocity was taking place in Congo,
Antwerp organized different world expositions.
One of them was in 1894.
It was a moment for European countries to show off their modernity,
in contrast with the rest of the world.
With this mentality, 144 Congolese were brought to Antwerp
and exposed next to the actual Royal Museum of Fine Arts.
Like animals, they had to stay behind bars,
half naked in the so-called “African village.”
After the exhibition itself, they immediately had to go back.
But the exhibition, it was very successful.
It attracted more than 15,000 visitors,
a huge amount in those days.
Nevertheless, the organization struggled just to find a few accommodations
for the few Congolese who were here.
The main reason -
the majority of Belgians didn’t want to rent a house,
to what they would call, “savage black people.”
The Congolese who came here, they didn’t only face racism,
but also discrimination on the housing market.
Today, we are still seeing the same problems.
According to a recent report of the King Baudouin Foundation,
almost 60%,
I repeat, 60% of black people
are facing discrimination in the housing market.
I encountered the same problem,
and I believe that this discrimination has its roots during colonial time,
and Antwerp also played a role in it,
especially with organizing a human zoo
where black people are portrayed as wild and dangerous.
You are probably familiar with Kipling, the author of Jungle Book, right?
As a kid, I used to love his stories. It was really amazing.
But what I didn’t know back then was that he also wrote a poem:
“The White Man’s Burden.”
In this poem, non-white people
were described as half devil, half child.
It was therefore the task of the white man
to go and to bring civilization to the so-called “savages.”
In Flanders, we too had our own Kiplings.
For instance, Hendrik Conscience or Filip De Pillecyn,
who shared the same ideology.
But was it always like that?
In the 17th century, one of the most famous Antwerp painters,
Peter Paul Reubens painted black people as fellow human beings.
If you put just one of his paintings
next to a picture of 1894,
what do you see?
I see sadness in the eyes of these Congolese,
who were looking to the camera
and asking the photographer why they had to be dehumanized like that.
Today, we will condemn this exhibition
as racist, humiliating, and even irresponsible,
but back then,
there were also critical voices who were questioning this human zoo.
But what about us today?
Do we listen to the critical voice of our time?
Well, one is about structural racism,
colonial monuments in our streets,
the Black Pete, the Zwarte Piet, discussion,
and many other things.
I have the feeling that most of the time, those voices are not heard.
Instead, they receive a lot of critique.
People start to label them as too woke or aggressive,
just to mention a few labels.
But the truth is whether or not we listen to those voices,
history will write itself.
Maybe the next generation will question us why we didn’t do anything
because even in 1894,
the majority of people would have said no to a human zoo.
maybe they would have saved at least seven lives,
and 130 people of a traumatic experience.
Most of them became very sick, and unfortunately, seven of them died.
Thousands of miles away from their homes and families,
buried in Antwerp,
and we forgot their history.
This changed recently, with an exhibition here in Antwerp that took place -
“100 x Congo.”
In this exhibition, it was for the first time,
after 125 years, that we finally knew where they were buried,
but also, most important, their names.
[In Memoriam]
[Sabo (24 years)]
[Bitio (20 years)]
[Isokoyé (31 years)]
[Manguesse (18 years)]
[Binda (25 years)]
[Mangwanda (17 years)]
[Pezo (18 years)]
The exhibition created for the first time,
a space on how to talk about this painful past.
It is, of course, a first milestone, but we should definitely not stop here.
I would recommend to the city of Antwerp
to build a memorial for the seven Congolese who died here in Antwerp,
but also to make it clear policy on how to deal with this colonial past.
And first right here, I will say we should start a dialogue.
Even though this is one of the darkest pages
in the history of Antwerp, we should be able to talk about it.
This dialogue will entail discomfort,
discomfort situations, also, probably awkwardness,
but more than ever, we need this dialogue.
Are you open for it?
(Applause)