Belgium’s AfricaMuseum has a reckoning with the past

When the newly revamped AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, Belgium, reopened its doors to the public in 2018 after a five-year hiatus, it found itself just about outdated again.

The palatial neoclassical building, once labelled "the last colonial museum in the world", had shut in 2013 as it sought to revamp its image and shift the focus of its exhibits from celebrating colonialism to confronting this violent, exploitative past. Only, by the time it reopened, the debate had moved on from the violence of colonialism to issues around restitution and the return of artefacts, leaving the museum to again play catch-up.

The museum revamp, which first began in 2001, was a necessary move. At that point, the permanent exhibition hadn’t changed since 1956, says museum director-general Guido Gryseels. "So we were still giving the view of Belgium on Africa before the independence of Congo and other countries."

Writing in The Atlantic in 2020, Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost (a historical exposé of the Belgian king’s brutal enterprise in the Congo), notes: "When I first visited the museum, in 1995, the exhibits of Congo flora included a cross-section of rubber vine — but not a word about the millions of Congolese who died as a result of the slave-labour system established to harvest that rubber.

"It was as if a museum of Jewish life in Berlin made no reference to the Holocaust."

But the transformation of the museum was by no means smooth. In his article, Hochschild documents the false starts and tensions between the "old colonialists" and those with proposals to incorporate the African gaze into the exhibits. In the end, €66m was set aside and the museum closed its doors for the revamp — a process that was further slowed by disagreements over what the final product should look like.

As the building itself is a protected historical site (it dates from 1904), no features could be removed. Instead, artists added works that would draw attention to the legacy of colonialism. So, for instance, translucent screens bearing interpretive prints hang in front of statues that depict white people as superior and more civilised.

Another room features a panel containing the names of Belgians who died in the Congo. Previously, there was no mention of the several million Congolese who were worked to death to gather rubber during Leopold’s reign. Now the names of seven Congolese who died in Belgium after they were forcibly brought there are inscribed on a window. When the sun shines, their names cast a shadow over the names of the Belgians.

Around the time the museum was supposed to have reopened, in November 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to repatriate looted African art and artefacts. That speech sparked action from other European governments — a response at last to the demands that African activists had been making for years.

Belgium, however, was relatively slow to react. In fact, it was the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 that pushed it to face up to its colonial past, after colonial-era statues were defaced by protesters.

It led the government to appoint a working group, which last month recommended that a number of statues, including one of Leopold, should be done away with.

Over at AfricaMuseum, a restitution policy was adopted, and €2m was set aside for "provenance" research to determine how its artefacts were acquired. As part of that, a "provenance trail" was created, allowing visitors to read the backstory of particular exhibits by scanning a QR code with their phones.

At the museum entrance, some of the best-known artefacts are on display in individual glass boxes, set against a backdrop of a wall painted cold white. Among them is Ne Kuko, a wooden human figurine about 1m high, dressed in nails and ribbons, with an expression that appears to be both terrifying and terrified.

Belgian trader Alexandre Delcommune looted the piece from a village chief in Kikuku in the then Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC) in 1878, believing that its magical power would protect his business.

Former president Mobutu Sese Seko asked for Ne Kuko’s return as far back as 1973 — a demand reiterated more recently by the current chief of Kikuku.

The artefact will likely be returned once the National Museum in Kinshasa is ready to receive it — along with the 2,000 other objects similarly identified. But contention over which communities such objects should be returned to is also delaying the process.

Some works might end up staying in Belgium through a loan agreement with the DRC, Gryseels says, while others could be "returned" in digital form where there isn’t space to store the originals, as is the case with some pieces from Rwanda, which was also a Belgian colony.

AfricaMuseum’s collection is the largest on Africa in the world, with 4km of archives, 10-million zoological specimens, 200,000 books, 17,000 mineral samples, and 200,000 aerial photographs. Its digital inventory on the Congo alone comprises 1TB of information.

Contrary to its name, the museum focuses mainly on the DRC and Rwanda. But its research in geology, biology, anthropology and history is carried out in 15 countries, and a number of African scientists come to the museum to train or do fieldwork.

The museum was a direct consequence of Leopold’s private colonisation of the Congo in 1885. In 1897, during the World Fair in Brussels, he constructed a real-life exhibit of Congolese villages and shipped in 267 Congolese men, women and children to be part of the display, which lasted several months and received about 1-million visitors.

That all took place at the museum’s site in Tervuren, now a 20-minute ride in a tram from Brussels. Those vast grounds feature lawns, manicured gardens and a reflecting pool and fountain. Leopold’s initials are inscribed in the building in 45 places.

"He was looking for investors to invest in the Congo, because it was a very expensive enterprise, and he also wanted to convince the Belgian public that colonisation was a good thing, that it was a mission to ‘civilise’ the people," Gryseels says.

The Belgian government was ambivalent, but ended up running the colony after Leopold’s death in 1909.

In the same year, the museum opened its doors as the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Military personnel, civil servants, missionaries, traders and scientists in the Congo were encouraged to collect specimens and artefacts to fill the grand halls.

Leopold’s 1897 "exhibition" was itself the focus of a recent temporary exhibition at the museum, Human Zoo. It aimed to "look history straight in the eye", Gryseels says.

The exhibition documented similar human zoos all over Europe. These received about 1.5-billion visitors in total, and thus played an important role in ingraining colonial stereotypes of Africans as less "civilised".

A black-and-white reel of one such exhibition showed visitors throwing coins into a pool of water to be entertained by children diving in to fetch them. Sometimes the human exhibits were thrown peanuts and bananas, Mathieu Zana Etambala, a historian working for AfricaMuseum, once noted in a radio interview.

The remains of 500 to 600 "exhibited persons" who died between 1870 and 1910 are still in Europe. Some are buried there; others are in "institutional" collections and are the subject of repatriation debates.

In one of the few mentions of SA in the museum, an information plaque notes that "Saartjie Baartman, previously conserved at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, was repatriated and honoured with a state funeral in SA in 2002".

Baartman’s remains were returned after Nelson Mandela requested it in 1994. But the process took eight years, and included denials by museum management that her remains — her skeleton, brain and external genitalia — even existed.

According to Gryseels, 80% of Africa’s heritage is held abroad, and the museum has tried to take an "open and constructive attitude" towards this situation. Still, it’s not normal, he adds. "Each country should have access to [its] cultural heritage."

During the AU-EU summit in Brussels last month, some of the African leaders visited AfricaMuseum. DRC Prime Minister Jean-Michel Sama Lukonde was the only one to visit officially: he received an inventory of 84,000 Congolese artefacts in the museum from his Belgian counterpart, Alexander de Croo.

That will go some way towards rebalancing the relationship between the country and its former colony. But there is more to be done. As Leopold’s grandniece Princess Marie-Esméralda told news service AFP last month, it’s important for the government to "apologise" for its colonial past, not simply express regret. "Apologies are important to restart a balanced relationship," she said.

Meanwhile, Gryseels says attitudes in Belgium are changing. In a poll about 20 years ago, 95% of respondents believed colonialism was a positive force, but this is now down to 25%. He believes the debates sparked by the museum’s own journey to reckon with its history played some part in this.