A major European museum still presents Belgian colonial rule as a civilizing mission

Evidence

A particularly pernicious instance of cultural bestialization, by contrast, can still be found embodied in the Royal Belgian Museum for Central Africa. The Museum exemplifies just how deep the link between colonial past and postcolonial present can remain. A show piece, if not a white elephant, it still sits in a royal park in Tervuren, a suburban tram ride from EU and NATO headquarters in downtown Brussels. Where most European museums have become more careful in their depiction of European colonial history and contemporary European diversity, the contents and display of the Tervuren Museum look today much as they might have when Leopold II moved it to its present building on his palatial estate in 1910, or certainly as they did at the close of World War II. Proclaiming itself to promoting the “scientific study of Africa,” the Museum continues to represent the Belgian colonial adventure in the “Congo Free State” from 1885 onwards in terms of the civilizing mission. In 2005, in the interests of narratological balance, the Museum mounted a special exhibition, “Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era.” The exhibit undertook to represent the Belgian colonial experience. It stressed the modernizing progress Belgians had brought to the “dark continent,” emphasizing the introduction of bicycles, railways, trading, air travel, universities, and scientific research. Even more tellingly, the regular entrance foyer to the Museum greets one with a series of largerthan-life gold statues declaring on their pedestals that “Belgium brings the gift of civilization,” “of support,” and “of economic wellbeing to the Congo.” — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 884

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to anyone interested in Belgian colonial history or museum curation — the Tervuren foyer gold statues literally declare ‘Belgium brings the gift of civilization.’
• SEED: Essay angle: how ostensibly neutral ‘scientific’ museums function as living monuments to colonial ideology decades after decolonization.