Belgium’s main museum dedicated to Africa has begun digging into the origins of its vast collection, a first step towards the possible return of items violently acquired during colonial times.
“We will be able to further uncover the origins of the works and determine which were acquired through theft, violence or manipulation,” Bart Ouvry, director of the Royal Museum of Central Africa outside Brussels, told AFP. I want to confirm that.”
An inventory of 80,000 sculptures, masks, tableware and musical instruments from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was handed over to Kinshasa authorities two years ago.
Shortly thereafter, in 2022, Belgium revealed that the DRC, then known as the Congo, had been plundered between 1885 and 1960, when it ruled the DRC, first as the private estate of King Leopold II and then as a Belgian colony. adopted a law specifying the method of return. .
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To date, Kinshasa has not made a formal return request, according to Thomas Delmine, the Belgian minister in charge of the issue.
He said a joint committee of Belgian and Democratic Republic of Congo experts would be established to determine which items were legally obtained and which were not.
To commemorate this process, a new exhibition, ReThinking Collections, opened at the museum on Thursday, with a statue of former Congolese chief Boma Ne Cuco on display as a “symbol of stolen art.”
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“The Congolese diaspora sees this statue as a symbol of the need for reparations,” said Agnes Lacaille, one of the exhibition’s curators.
The statue of Nkisi Nkonde was removed by Belgian officer and explorer Alexandre Delcomune during his 1878 expedition to the western Congo as punishment for the region’s increased taxes on Belgian trade routes.
Historian Didier Gondola said colonial-era soldiers, civil servants and missionaries often used “violence” and “coercion” to “collect” such artifacts.
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Although Belgium is now grappling with the issue in earnest, claims for compensation began to be sent in the late 1960s by Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of the country then known as Zaire.
Ten years later, the museum has handed over 114 works, but the most valuable pieces have not been handed over.
“For example, in Mobutu’s time, the Europeans said, “We are doing you a favor because we are preserving your goods. If we give them to you, they will not last. “It will end up on the international art market and be sold off, because the government is corrupt, or it will perish because there is no way to preserve it,” Gondola said.
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But times have changed, he stressed.
“Kinshasa has a very beautiful museum, as modern as this one, with enough space to restore these items to the national heritage,” he said.
In a half-hearted measure, Belgium’s King Philippe delivered a giant ceremonial mask, the Kakuungu, to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s National Museum on “unrestricted” loan. The monarch expressed “deep regret” over Belgium’s colonial past.
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The sacking of Belgium didn’t just erode the physical heritage of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said Sarah van Beurden, another exhibition curator, standing in front of the 1911-1912 Manza xylophone. explained.
“When you take an object like this xylophone, you take away the ability of a community to maintain its cultural practices,” she says.
“You can give things back, but you can’t give back what the community has lost.”
To repair that loss, she said, a project was launched with young people in the Democratic Republic of Congo from where the instruments were taken to recreate the music the instruments produced “in a different way.”
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