Brussels — home to human rights and cartoon strips
For some, Brussels is not a city but a metonym for an idea and an organisation: the EU. Brexiteers and other Eurosceptics complain about “the dictates of bureaucrats in Brussels” as a shorthand for unnecessary regulations or excessive concerns about human rights.
For others, Brussels conjures associations of glamour and grandeur – although these recede into the background, overwhelmed by urban noise and clutter. Belgium’s capital is busy, bustling, hustling; its denizens are pragmatic rather than romantic.
But Brussels is also arguably the best face of the new Europe. It is a place where cultural, racial, religious and linguistic diversity is taken for granted; first- and second-generation immigrants outnumber “Belgians”.
Microcommunities from Morocco, Turkey, Vietnam, Ghana and Poland exist in an area such as Ixelles. The glue that binds them is the French language (in fewer cases, Flemish Dutch), and a shared sense that Brussels is home.
The diversification of “European” identity stymies attempts at postcolonial critique based on the diametric opposition of, say, Africa and Europe. Although the mass movement of people from the developing to the developed world – setting aside forced migration – testifies to continued material inequalities between the old colonial “centre” and the “periphery”, it is precisely this movement that complicates the centreperiphery distinction by undoing assumptions about demographics.
I arrived in Belgium expecting the opportunity to harangue locals about their wilful ignorance of, or indifference to, colonial atrocities in central Africa. But this hasn’t really been the case since the late 1990s, when the Belgian state had to face up to its historical complicity in the fabricated Hutu-Tutsi division that ultimately led to the Rwandan genocide, and the Belgian public belatedly grappled with incontrovertible accounts of King Leopold II’s cruelty in his “Congo Free State” and of the government’s later role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
Institutional change is usually slow, so it took a while for the Royal Museum of Central Africa to embrace a new way of engaging with the history of the Belgian Congo and exhibiting its substantial but controversial “ethnographic” collection. As a result, the museum was closed in 2013 and will reopen only in 2018.
Still, if it’s museums you’re after, Brussels has them in abundance. For visual arts buffs, there is a cluster of musées des beaux-arts: Old Masters, 19thcentury, Modernism, as well as those dedicated to celebrated individuals (René Magritte, Constantin Meurnier, Antoine Wiertz). Yet the most famous images produced in Belgium are housed elsewhere. To see them, you can visit the Centre Belge de la Bande Desinée, the Belgian Comic Strip Centre.
You know those little blue guys with the cute white hats? You call them The Smurfs, but they are properly known as Les Schtroumpfs – for thus they were designated by their Belgian creator Peyo (Pierre Culliford) back in 1958. Forget Bruegel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens; in terms of Belgian influence on global visual culture, Peyo probably tops the list. The Comic Strip Centre, which is housed in a glorious art nouveau building designed by Victor Horta, gives Peyo his due.
The museum also has extensive exhibitions on graphic novels, offers a brief history of the comic strip (from medieval manuscripts to the 21st century), and pays homage to much-loved Belgian cartoon characters: from the innocuous kids’ favourites Boule and Bill to the mordant satire of the “universal loser” Boerke.
Aside from The Smurfs, however, the main attractions are those figures that have Belgian origins but have become icons worldwide. There is Tintin, obviously, the daring reporter-adventurer conceived by Hergé (Georges Remi); and there are Asterix and Obelix, created by the French duo Goscinny and Uderzo, whose partnership started in Belgium and whose last book together, Asterix in Belgium, made the most of the country’s quirks and paradoxes.
Hergé was not quite as subversive. To the last, his redheaded hero was a defender of the Belgian colonial imagination. Failing to acknowledge this, the Comic Strip Centre is out of touch with the Brussels I know.