“crime against humanity” and issued an apology to Algeria, where he
was on tour, for past acts. His statements disturbed a portion of the
French political class. Even though a decade had passed since Tony
Blair’s remarks, the intervening years had clearly not resulted in a
normalisation of imperial mea culpas, which still wounded a European
identity built out of acting as a guardian of democracy and human
rights. 3 As the historian Pascal Blanchard (2019) has sharply criticised,
sixty years have gone by since the independence of France’s colonies
and France still has not engaged in any reflection on its colonial past,
nor has it opened spaces dedicated to the subject in a country with well
over 10,000 museums and a host of collections brought from its overseas
colonies.
On the other hand, the case of the Musée Royal d’Afrique Centrale,
which was opened on the outskirts of Brussels in 1897 during the reign
of Leopold II, recalls other heated debates on heritage and its use. The
museum is located in an ostentatious palace that contains over 120,000
items plundered from the Congo, and it has been (and still is) one of the
leading spaces for the glorification of colonialism and racism. Not until
2018 did Belgium conclude a critical review of the museum’s collections
and galleries, which had remained unchanged since the nineteen-
fifties and therefore continued to uphold painful racial hierarchies and
discourses of black “primitivism”. The review, however, was not enough
for the United Nations, which urged the Belgian government to issue
a public apology for atrocities committed in the Congo and linked the
country’s present-day racism against Africans to its meagre review of
its past, publishing a report with 72 recommendations (United Nations,
2019). In addition, thousands of kilometres from Belgium, the Congolese
themselves continue to argue that decolonisation will only be possible
through restitution. To this end, Joseph Kabila, the controversial
former president of the RDC, has repeatedly called for the return of the
museum’s objects to Kinshasa. In this respect, restitution and economic
reparations, together with symbolic apologies, are becoming the key
pillars of today’s demands for historical memory of the colonial past,
both in Africa and in Europe.
Portugal, too, waded into controversy in 2018, when it announced
that a new museum slated to accommodate the history of Portuguese
colonialism was to be called the Museu das Descobertas [in English,
Museum of Discoveries]. In response, historians and civil society
nationwide came out staunchly against the initiative because the
3
«En Algérie, Macron s’excuse pour la colonisation, une ‘faute grave’ pour la droite» [in English, «In Algeria, Macron apologises for colonisation,
a ‘grave error’ for the right»] in Le Parisien (15 February 2017)
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Observing Memories
ISSUE 3