Africa museum Brussels: Human zoo
A few days ago, during one of my visits to the beautiful capital of Europe, one of my essential stops was the Museum of Africa. This museum, commissioned by King Leopold II, it was a propaganda object to attract investors and a showcase for the Belgian population to appreciate the importance of the Congo colonies. But the most striking thing is that they used people from the Congo and made them interpret their daily life for the public, a real human zoo.
To put the history of this atrocity turned culture in context, the Belgians dominated the Democratic Republic of Congo for 75 years, exploiting its art and plundering its resources, murdering 15 million Congolese. Among these episodes of horror is this human zoo in Tervuren, just outside Brussels.
In 1897 the then king of this country, guilty of the worst atrocities in the history of mankind, brought more than 250 people from colonies to exhibit them on his territory as real animals.
A very good journalist from Girona, Salvador Pérez, has done a lot of research on this subject and he tells us some things like that men, women and children were kidnapped, they had to collect rubber, the indispensable raw material to build tyres for the car industry and if a slave refused to do this, his wife was killed.
In 1921 the museum’s collections were already gigantic and some voices criticised it as a full-fledged depredation. That same year the II Pan-African Congress was held in London, Paris and Brussels and when visiting the Tervuren delegation, the American members were outraged at the monumental plundering of the collections.
Later, in 1952, the museum became the Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo, and from 1958 it began to decline.
Today it is considered a mirror of Belgium’s history in Africa and inevitably leads to controversy. But it is difficult to justify oneself in the face of such barbarism, and it was not until 1960, with the Democratic Republic of Congo becoming an independent nation, that it was renamed the Royal Museum of Central Africa with the intention of broadening the field of associated studies.
The museum has undergone several renovations, but it was not until 2018 that it was inaugurated as a new project developed together with African communities, in an attempt to revisit the country’s colonial past with a critical eye and to repair the memory of all those subjected and tortured people.
Nowadays, there are now rooms in which to view colonial and paternalistic pieces that were removed from the museum, such as the statue of the leopard-man, which shows an image of the wild and primitive African. There are also various themes, from the history of Central Africa and the colonial era to life and art in the Congo today. In a biodiversity room there are some impressive stuffed animals for the human eye, one of the highlights being an elephant, a giraffe and a rhinoceros.
Thanks to Salvador Pérez we also know that the elephant we are looking at in this photo was mounted on a sculpture with a basic wooden frame covered with wood shavings bound with thread.
The tour guide for some of the visits organised by this museum, Louise Dubois, tells us about some of the curiosities that can be observed in the current museum, such as the high corridors of the museum, where you can see part of the spoliation. She also tells us that during the century in which the museum was last remodelled, 10 million biological specimens, 220,000 rocks and minerals, 120,000 ethnographic objects and 370,000 photographs were collected. At present, 250 people work in the museum, including scientists.
Blanca Beuzón Mora
