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«The Jamaican Observer», un quotidien Jamaicain s'en prend à Christophe Muzungu pour avoir re-érigé la statue de Léopold II.
LA DECISION DE MUZUNGU DE RE-ERIGER LA STATUE DE LEOPOLD II A SUSCITE DES CRITIQUES AUSSI LOIN QU'AU JAMAIQUE!
This article originally appeared in the Jamaica Observer.
There was a curious story out of the Congo a few days ago. The Culture Minister, Mr. Christopher Muzungo, explained that he was personally responsible for the re-erection of a giant statue of Belgium’s King Leopold II in the capital, Kinshasa. For nearly forty years it had lain in a trash heap outside the city.
Just hours after the statue was put up it was taken down again. There was no explanation.
In the 1885 Berlin carve-up of Africa, Leopold II persuaded the Europeans and the Americans to give him free rein in the Congo for a "civilizing project, rather like the Red Cross," he said. In less than two decades he made himself one of the world’s richest men.
Leopold was allowed by the great powers to murder and maim millions of Congolese while he plundered Congo’s resources. His subjects lost their hands, their feet and their heads to Leopold’s sub-agents. One of them was described, under the name of Captain Kurtz, in Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Heart of Darkness. In the novel, the narrator approaches Captain Kurtz’s jungle encampment and sees round it a palisade with white knobs decorating the tops of the posts. It is only when he comes close that he discovers that the objects atop the posts are human skulls. Conrad’s Kurtz was based on a real Belgian lieutenant who like his fellows, carried out his monarch’s orders with fatal efficiency.
Conrad described the Congo’s Belgian experience as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience”.
According to Congo’s Minister of Culture, he replaced the statue of Leopold because it was part of Congolese history. “A people without a history is a people without a soul,” he said, and referred to the remembrance of the holocaust last week. Perhaps no one had explained to him that the Jews had not felt the need to erect a statue of Hitler to remind themselves of their history.
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