Wounds remain raw as Belgium museum confronts colonial past

Royal Museum for Central Africa. Photo / Google Maps

For more than a century, Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa has stood as a monument to some of the worst excesses of colonial plunder.

But Belgium took a step towards confronting its brutal history in the Congo when the museum opened to visitors for the first time in five years, after a 10-year "decolonisation" project.

King Leopold II of the Belgians ruled the Congo Free State as an absolute monarch in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pillaging it of rubber and minerals and overseeing a genocide that killed as many as 15 million people.

Packed to the brim with more than 180,000 looted items, including the beheaded skulls of tribal chiefs, and more than 500 stuffed animals slaughtered by hunters, the museum celebrated the exploits of the Belgians who turned a huge swathe of Africa into a slave state.

The £67 million ($124m) reopening of the 1910 building in the Brussels suburb of Teuveren was supposed to shift the emphasis, with African artists invited to display their work in an effort to modernise and detoxify the museum built by Leopold.

But the reopening risks being overshadowed by a demand from Joseph Kabila, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, for the repatriation of its artefacts. The museum said it would consider the request.

Kabila, whose demand follows Emmanuel Macron's promise to return colonial era African artefacts held in France, told Le Soir he wanted art and documents for a new museum in the DRC, which is being built with financial help from South Korea.

"The museum was frozen in time for many years," Guido Gryseels, the museum director, said.