Google – AFP, Claire Rosemberg (AFP), 31 October 2013
 |
An African
man sculpture is displayed at the Museum of Central Africa in
Tervuren in the
suburbs of Brussels on October 9, 2013 (AFP, Georges Gobet)
|
Brussels —
The world's "last" colonial gallery, Brussels' dusty Royal Museum of
Central Africa, closes this month to re-emerge with a new vision of the
continent more than a half-century after the independence of the former Belgium
Congo.
Set to
reopen in 2017, the venerable institution has often offended African
sensibilities for what is seen as a moth-balled presentation of Africa as it
was a century ago.
One
Belgium-educated black scholar recalled his distress as a father chased his
screaming young daughter around the collection's 1913 "leopardman"
statue, crying "Aaah, here come the cannibals!"
 |
A Congo
tree is displayed at the Museum
of Central Africa in Tervuren in the suburbs
of
Brussels on October 9, 2013 (AFP,
Georges Gobet)
|
It inspired
films as well as the politically-suspect adventures of Belgium's own comic book
hero in "Tintin in the Congo".
"I
decisively told the little girl to stop," wrote Congolese-born Florida
professor Jean Muteba Rahier, saying the incident highlighted how the museum
peddled "an imperial and racist worldview" of Africans as inferior,
bestial and savage beings.
"Africans
do not come to visit," Yoto Djongakodi, who heads a committee of African diaspora
groups involved in the planned refurbishment, told AFP. "The museum's
image must change."
The gallery
dates back to 1897, when King Leopold II decided to hold a Congo exhibition to
raise funds and find investors for his Congo Free State, a personal property 80
times the size of Belgium and notoriously run like a giant labour camp.
The cruelty
of life under the brutal colonial rulers was evoked in Joseph Conrad's 1899
"Heart of Darkness", and denounced more recently in a bestseller by
American writer Adam Hochschild, "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed,
Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa."
The king's
show featured Congo flora and fauna as well as 300 men, women and children
shipped to Europe to portray life in an African village built beside a lake at
his Tervuren forest estate outside Brussels.
'World's
last great colonial museum'
The Africans
cooked, played and rowed around the lake in a wooden pirogue. A few died in
Tervuren, others on the way home.
A Palace of the Colonies was also built to house what has become the world's biggest anthropological and scientific collection from central Africa.
 |
BELGIUM-AFRICA-MUSEUM-HISTORY-DIPLOMACY
(AFP, Georges Gobet)
|
These
include the archives of Leopold's ally, Henry Morton Stanley, best remembered
for his legendary "Dr Livingstone I presume?"
The show
was a whopping success, drawing 1.3 million visitors in six months. A few years
later, in 1908, Belgium finally agreed to take over the colony in the name of
the state and in 1910 the massive neo-classical palace currently housing the
museum officially opened.
"People
often say our museum is the world's last great colonial museum because it
carries so many lasting traces of the colonial past," director Guido
Gryseels told AFP.
"The
permanent exhibition hasn't changed since the 1950s."
With 10
million zoological specimens, 150,000 ethnological items and three kilometres
(nearly two miles) of archives, "we have the world's largest central
African collection", he said.
As in a
time warp, both the glass display cases and the spears, maps, paddles and bowls
inside date from the 19th century.
With
Stanley's cap, Leopold's ivory bust and a host of stuffed wild animals, the museum
evokes an African exotica of costumes and beating drums.
"The
museum just doesn't reflect contemporary Africa," said Djongakodi, the
Congolese head of the COMRAF group which is working with Gryseels on the
revamp.
Shocking to
many are early 19th-century sculptures in the entrance of giant-sized European
missionaries looking down paternally on pint-sized Africans in loin-cloths.
"Belgium
brings civilisation to Congo," says a plaque.
'It's a
headache'
An engraved
tribute to those who died in the Congo lists 1,508 Belgians but not a single
Congolese.
"Not
even those who died fighting for Belgium during the two world wars, though
there were more Congolese than Belgian deaths," said Djongakodi.
The museum
will close its doors on November 30 for the 75 million-euro ($102 million)
refurbishment, and challenges abound.
The glass
cases and high-ceilinged halls, classified as national heritage, cannot be
touched -- precluding the installation of much-needed air-conditioning -- so
authorities plan to erect a new building with modern facilities that will
connect to the old palace via an underground passageway.
But the
test for director Gryseels is to reinvent the museum's image.
 |
Colonial
military uniforms and weapons are
displayed at the Museum of Central Africa
in
Tervuren in the suburbs of Brussels
on October 9, 2013 (AFP, Georges Gobet)
|
"Fifteen
years ago it would've been difficult," he conceded.
"Belgium
was the last colonial power to question its past. It's a very emotional issue
due to the massive number of Belgians who served in the Congo as teachers,
doctors, civil servants or soldiers."
Gryseels
said his generation grew up proud of having provided roads and schools, though
when Congo seized its independence in 1960 it had only 27 university graduates.
The museum
itself helped prompt a re-think with exhibitions and talks in 2001 and 2005
that spurred a national debate on the past on a scale not seen in Britain,
France, Spain or Portugal.
Until then
"the museum symbolised a time when Belgium was rich, when it played a role
on the world scene, when it was still the good old days."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.