Although the colonial era may have contributed to Belgium’s national cohesion, post-colonial memory does the opposite: it provides another opportunity for debate and division. When King Baudoin, oblivious heartthrob that he was, traveled to Kinshasa in 1960 for a ceremonial liberation of the Congo, a guy named Ambroise Boimbo rushed the King’s convertible and grabbed Baudoin’s ceremonial saber.
The moment is examined in this short documentary, and a suspenseful score makes it seem like a precursor to the Zapruder film. After the sword thief was apprehended, Baudoin insisted that he go free, since magnanimity was the whole point of the trip. The symbolism is almost too much. A Catholic monarch condescendingly welcomes Africans into the community of nations, which of course would touch off a wave of political instability and bloodshed. The power that the Congolese received from the Belgians was, at best, symbolic. The anachronism of a sword-toting Catholic monarch in a post-atomic world is jarring.
And what of Boimbo himself? I can’t find any account at all of the man’s motivations. He worked as an electrician in the Équateur province of the newly independent Congo and lived till 1989. The documentary claims that the purloined sword was never recovered, although this blogger claims that Baudoin got it back just a few moments after the famous photo of the sword-snatch was taken.
However farcical the larceny may have been, the act’s defiance resonates now that Belgium has been asked to face its actions in the Congo. Contemporary critics have snatched imperial grandeur from Belgium. There is little consensus in the country about how the Belgian Congo should be remembered, or even whether colonialism itself was wrong. Matthew Stanard’s The Leopard, the Lion and the Cock discusses the rivalry between Flemish and French language communities and how their collective memory of their colonial possession differs.
For instance, the Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika in (Flemish) Tervuren, formerly a tribute to the colonialist adventure, has undergone a reckoning, partial though it may be. The King Leopold statue was removed from the outdoor promenade, and a new installation by an artist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo came up. Still, despite much discussion about a new vantage on the colony during the 2013-18 closure, when the museum reopened the changes were mostly structural renovations.
The Tervuren Museum still evokes a strikingly different perspective than the Musée Africain in French-speaking Namur. This site remains unapologetically colonialist and militarist, insulated in its provincial setting from the pressure to reconsider the Belgian Congo. French was the language of colonial administration, and the mother tongue of the royal family, so a vestigial sympathy with the colonial project write large exists in French-speaking Belgium. In the minds of Flemish Belgians, these institutions have less valor than the work of the Catholic missionaries.
Of course many Belgians have no roots in the French or Flemish language communities: their heritage instead comes from the countries from which their families have immigrated (or from Belgium’s German language community in the east). Notably, the people of the Congo have never exceeded the single digits in the percentage of migrants to Belgium. The question of multiculturalism has focused instead on the more sizable populations from north Africa and Turkey.
And so the Congo remains both central and peripheral to the nationhood of Belgium. Adam Hochschild’s famous indictment of the colony, King Leopold’s Ghost, talks about a “great forgetting” when it comes to the Belgian Congo, but Stanard persuasively establishes that Belgium has undergone cycles of remembering and forgetting. It must also be acknowledged that as long as the global south remains rich with natural resources and politically disadvantaged, the colonialist impulse is likely to stick around.
Further Reading:
Karel Arnaut, “Belgian memories, African objects: Colonial re-collections at the Musée africain in Namur,” Temporalité et Muséographie, 2001.
Dries Engel, Bart van Peel, “Ambroise Boimbo, le voleur de l’epée du roi,” extract from Boyamba Belgique, RTBF, June 2010.
Matthew Stanard, The Leopard, the Lion and the Cock: Colonial memories and monuments in Belgium, Leuven University Press, 2019.
“Africa Museum removes several colonial statues from its tour route,” The Brussels Times, July 10, 2023.