Belgium’s notorious Africa Museum yesterday reopened after a five-year restoration that curators hope would bury its reputation as a colonialist holdover.
Treasures looted from the continent have been repackaged in the hope of contributing to a more healthy debate about Belgium’s brutal past and multicultural future.
However, there is an elephant in the room — and not just the giant taxidermic animal looming over visitors to the remodeled Landscapes and Biodiversity gallery.
Photo: Reuters
The former Royal Museum for Central Africa is reopening in the Tervuren Palace outside Brussels amid a renewed European debate about returning stolen artifacts.
The museum’s research team said that the exhibits would take a much more critical approach to the depredations of king Leopold II and his agents in the Congo.
However, should Belgium still be holding its African prizes at all and can it better integrate its growing African minority without first coming to terms with its past?
Several former imperial powers are confronting the issue and last month French President Emmanuel Macron said that in principle Africa’s treasures should return.
However, Belgium stands out from its neighbors, in part because institutions like the Tervuren Museum have been relatively slow to adapt to the post-colonial era.
“The permanent exhibition had barely changed since 1958, two years before Congo became independent,” the collection’s curator and anthropologist Bambi Ceuppens said.
Before it closed for refurbishment in 2013, visitors were greeted by a statue uncritically depicting white European missionaries “bringing civilization to Congo.”
However, now, in Ceuppens’ words, the permanent collection is no longer “an exhibition of dead objects in an Africa without history and without human beings.”
Instead, with the help of multimedia displays and detailed captions, visitors would be encouraged to take a critical view and to see colonialism through African eyes.
The museum’s academic experts said there is no attempt to cover up the past, but rather to use the collection of 125,000 ethnographic objects more educationally.
People can still see a witch doctor in a leopard-skin cowl that resembles the villain in another notorious Belgian colonial artifact, the comic book Tintin in the Congo.
However, the caricature is now in an underground side-gallery of statues arranged to demonstrate how colonialist art exploited and fetishized African subjects.
However, above, main halls of the palace are lined with African objects that were in many cases plundered by military exhibitions or collected by curious missionaries.
The director of the museum and the research institute it houses, Guido Gryseels, said he respects calls for these items to be returned to their African homelands.
“I agree with President Macron when he says it’s not normal that 80 percent of African art objects are in Europe,” he told reporters this week. “Obviously it’s their history, it’s their culture, it’s their identity. We’re willing to consider claims for restitution, but obviously there’s a lot more discussion to be done.”
The Belgian colonies, run as a private royal estate by Leopold II, covered lands now included in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo).
Congolese President Joseph Kabila has said he plans to formally request the return of art and records before his country’s own museum opens next year.
Advocates doubt the museum’s sincerity and have urged it to form a committee to “objectively and materially” determine the origin of the works.
So divisive is the debate that Belgium’s King Philippe has declined an invitation to the weekend’s ceremony.
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