Veils cover a number of statues in the Royal Museum for Central Africa, which is just outside Brussels city. The statues are among several depicting Africans as primitive and the Belgian colonisers as white saviours. They serve as a reminder of both the museum’s and Belgium’s colonial past.
Much of the collection is made up of artefacts from African states formerly under Belgian rule, particularly Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The museum even traces its roots to an exhibition in the late 1890s that included a human zoo, where Congolese people were displayed in huts, like animals.
Rebranded in recent years as AfricaMuseum, there was a major overhaul to change how it portrayed Belgium’s former colonies, and the European state’s role in their history.
“It was becoming a museum of a museum ... We recognise our past, we were a colonial museum,” says Bart Ouvry, director of AfricaMuseum.
Some offensive colonial-era statues that were built into the walls could not be removed, as the building was covered by heritage protection. Hence the veils.
Ouvry, a former Belgian diplomat who was posted to the DRC at one point, took over as director in 2023. “Twenty years ago a majority of Belgians still thought colonisation was a good thing,” he says.
Now there is a much greater recognition of the harm Belgium caused in Belgian Congo and Rwanda. Under Belgian rule the Congolese were ruthlessly oppressed and the valuable minerals of the land extracted by mining companies, enriching the Belgian elite.
Western meddling after Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960 saw its fledgling democracy quickly snuffed out and replaced by a corrupt autocracy, propped up by the United States.
Both Belgium and the US conspired to remove the African state’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. The motivation was to protect western mining interests and the remaining white Belgian population. The US was working under the misguided fear Lumumba was siding with the Soviet Union in the cold war.
The man they backed instead, Joseph Mobutu, overthrew Lumumba’s young, fragile government. He went on to rule as a dictator for three decades. The assassination of Lumumba, who was captured and shot dead in 1961, is explored in a new documentary, Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat.
“I think it was a pivotal moment, where what was installed was not a postcolonial situation, it was a neocolonial grab at the riches, by way of installing a kleptocracy, and that kleptocracy in the dear Congo was Mobutu,” says director Johan Grimonprez.
“In the Congo there were more factors involved, there were mining interests. The Belgians were dragging the United States [in] by labelling Patrice Lumumba a communist, which he was not,” he says.
[ Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat: A fleet-footed chronicle that never lets upOpens in new window ]
“It was a way to get the United States on their cause, so the CIA and the Belgian security service were banding together in this whole situation,” he says. Cables that later became public confirm the CIA’s role in the downfall of the Lumumba government.
The episode was a formative period for the United Nations, who sent a peacekeeping contingent – which included Irish troops – to the Congo to try to prevent a violent break-up of the state. Lumumba and other African leaders grew disillusioned with the UN, accusing it of favouring the interests of western states during the crisis.
In 2020, King Philippe of Belgium expressed his “deepest regrets” to the DRC for his country’s colonial abuses. Many were disappointed the monarch stopped short of a full apology.
“If you say ‘we regret’, it’s not saying ‘I’m sorry’ ... ‘I’m sorry’ has a deeper implication because it’s about reparations,” Grimonprez says.
“We can say Belgium is not thinking about saying ‘I’m sorry' for the past but it’s also not really [speaking up] about what’s going on today and that’s more important. So the situation has not changed,” he says.
Today the DRC still doesn’t know peace. Rwandan-backed M23 rebels have taken over the largest city in eastern Congo, Goma, and are threatening to advance further. The fighting has raised fears of another looming regional war in the DRC, similar to devastating conflicts that played out there between 1996 and 2003.
Back in Belgium, campaigners hoped a law passed in recent years might pave the way for the return of tens of thousands of artefacts previously looted from Congo.
AfricaMuseum has been working to identify the provenance of items in its collection, the majority of which came from the DRC. Ouvry says the museum has identified objects that would be subject to return, but Brussels and Kinshasa have been slow in finding agreement about how that process might work. The Belgian foreign ministry sent a draft treaty to Congolese authorities in June 2022, but talks have not moved on since then, a spokeswoman says.
In the meantime Ouvry says AfricaMuseum will keep working to address the institution’s colonial legacy. “What may have been sufficient yesterday, might not be enough tomorrow,” he says.
