Observing Memories Issue 3 | Page 64

“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) 62 Observing Memories ISSUE 3