Matthew G. Stanard’s The Leopard, The Lion and The Cock: Colonial Memories and Monuments in Belgium, builds a case that Belgium’s self-image came from its possession of the Congo. Stanard focuses on the public monuments that paid tribute to Leopold II’s colony.
Few Belgians traveled to Africa to staff the imperial project. And many of the administrators of the Congo were not themselves Belgian. Migration between colony and metropole was tightly controlled. Further, the prosperity of postwar Belgium did not derive principally from Congolese resource extraction: les trente glorieuses depended on political stability and Marshall Plan dollars. So why is this (regrettable, to contemporary observers) colonial relationship memorialized in so many Belgian town squares?
The Congo was a means of Belgian nation-building. Belgium is divided between three language communities. It suffered terribly during a Nazi occupation. But an empire is an opportunity for a people to find a common project. In the Belgian imagination, brave colonial administrators beat back Arab slave traders and pointed the way for primitive Africans to join the community of modern nations. This delusion did not completely collapse after the sudden 1960 independence, nor even after the assassination of Lumumba in 1961 and the subsequent decades of military dictatorship.
King Baudoin claimed as he relinquished the colony that a sovereign Congo had been the goal all along:
The independence of the Congo is the crowning of the work conceived by the genius of King Leopold II undertaken by him with firm courage, and continued by Belgium with perseverance.
But independence was sudden and unplanned, as well as brutal and violent. Belgians should not have been surprised by the chaos unleashed in the wake of their colonial project, but the monuments that Stanard describes reveal what the Belgians thought they were doing.
In 1911, a column was raised in Stadspark in Antwerp. The familiar God Mercury on top, arcing his body and reaching out energetically. The symbol on the side that looks a lot like the medical Rod of Asclepius (one snake), is in fact a Caduceus (two snakes), and represents commerce. The five-point “Congo Star” and Leopold II plaque make clear that the monument commemorates annexation.
The absence of the names of fallen colonial administrators or military men make this column somewhat unique. It lacks the somber character of a memorial. Instead, it is praise directed at an abstraction: commerce, the morally neutral means by which commodities are exchanged and traders reap profit. Mercury of course does not hold a whip or a gun: this chunk of bronze and granite near one of Europe’s biggest and most lucrative seaports glosses over how the wealth is secured.
There remains plenty of evidence though. Stannard quotes a letter from Jules Jacques de Dixmude, leader of expeditions in the Congo, writing to a village administrator on the topic of local subsistence farmers’ habit of clearing rubber vines:
We have to beat them into complete subjection or into complete extermination…warn the people of Inongo a very last time and carry out your plan to take them to the woods as quickly as possible...gather them in the village with a good club and address yourself to the proprietor of the first shack: here is a basket, go and fill it with rubber…if you have not returned within ten days with a basket of five kilos of rubber, I will burn down the shacks. And you will burn it as promised…Warn them that if they chop down one more rubber vine I will exterminate them to the last one.
Dixmuide has many streets named for him and monuments dedicated to him in Belgium, although this is mainly due to his World War I career.
Other monuments eschew abstraction in favor of sensuous displays of African bodies. The sculptor Arthur Dupagne’s Tireur a l’Arc in Etterbeek shows the rippling muscles of a Congolese archer, although it neglects to give the figure a name. Instead, this copper sculpture is an exoticized generic African, compared to the highly specific commemorations of white heroes elsewhere in Belgium.
The choice to depict Africa as a mother and child (Mons City Hall, Thys Monument in Brussels and a plaque in Quaregnon) smacks of literal paternalism: Europeans assume their role as fathers and leaders in these fantasies. The fact that mothers are often semi-nude makes this genre of monument a kind of Swimsuit Issue of colonialism. Instead of a genocide, we are asked to imagine an eroticized homemaker, yearning for a (white) husband.
The world’s first post-national state became an empire, and then dreamt itself into nationhood. The delay of the completion of the Cinquantenaire, Belgium’s national monument, was resolved thanks to profits reaped from the Congo. Stannard’s book is essential to understanding Belgium’s self-image.
Further Reading:
Stannard, Matthew G., The Leopard, The Lion and The Cock: Colonial Memories and Monuments in Belgium, Leuven University Press, 2019.