Towards a History of Mass Violence in the Etat Indépendant du Congo, 1885-1908

The present article provides an up-to-date scholarly introduction to mass violence in the Etat Indépendant du Congo (Congo Free State, EIC). Its aims are twofold: to offer a point of access to the extensive literature and historical debates on the subject, and to make the case for exchanging the currently prevalent top-down narrative, with its excessive focus on King Leopold's character and motives, for one which considers the EIC's culture of violence as a multicausal, broadly based and deeply engrained social phenomenon. The argument is divided into five sections. Following a general outline of the EIC's violent system of administration, I discuss its social and demographic impact (and the controversy which surrounds it) to bring out the need for more regionally focused and context sensitive studies. The dispute surrounding demographics demonstrates that what is fundamentally at stake is the place the EIC's extreme violence should occupy in the history of European ‘modernity’. Since approaches which hinge on Leopoldian exceptionalism are particularly unhelpful in clarifying this issue, I pause to reflect on how such approaches came to dominate the distinct historiographical traditions which emerged in Belgium and abroad before moving on to a more detailed exploration of a selection of causes underlying the EIC's violent nature. While state actors remain in the limelight, I shift the focus from the state as a singular, normative agent, towards the existence of an extremely violent society in which various individuals and social groups within and outside of the state apparatus committed violent acts for multiple reasons. As this argument is pitched at a high level of abstraction, I conclude with a discussion of available source material with which it can be further refined and updated

Museum practices and the Belgian colonial past : questioning the memories of an ambivalent metropole

This article questions the traces left by colonialism on Belgium's museums. Adopting a comparative approach to specific museographic representations of Belgium's colonial past, we examine the images they convey of this period. Museums directly concerned with Belgian colonisation are analysed (the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, the Musée Africain de Namur, and the Musée Belvue). This discussion is framed within the context of past exhibitions, but also by a consideration of more recent temporary exhibitions which express the need for Belgium to confront its colonial legacy in more complex and creative terms. The task of confronting the past and of assessing the role which colonialism played in glorifying the Belgian nation reveals the uniqueness of the ‘postcolonial’ Belgian context in which this problematic history has been debated within a broader national identity crisis that has put into question the very future of the country itself