Calls for statue of ‘butcher of the Congo’ to be melted down
A BRONZE statue of the Belgian king responsible for the murders of millions of people in the former Belgian Congo should be melted down and turned into a memorial for the victims of colonialism, government advisers have said.
The group, composed of historians, architects and other specialists, have compiled a 256-page report on the “decolonisation” of public spaces in Brussels. The document was commissioned by the Belgian capital’s regional government in the wake of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the city.
Protesters clambered on to the imposing statue of King Leopold II, known as the “butcher of the Congo”, waving a flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo, reigniting the public debate about racism and Belgium’s colonial past.
For a long time, few people questioned the number of monuments and streets named after the men who built the country’s 19th-century empire.
Under King Leopold II’S brutal rule of the Congo between 1885 and 1908, millions died of hunger and disease.
The Belgian state later took over the country, before it regained independence in 1960.
The group said Belgium’s colonial past, including the violent treatment of natives, theft of natural resources and
‘A decolonised space should not promote the relation between the “civiliser” and the colonised black person’
racism are “established historical facts that are not always recognised and fully acknowledged by Belgium”.
However, the advisers do not recommend pulling down all statues.
Instead, they suggest a case-by-case approach for each monument.
“A decolonised public space is not a space in which all colonial traces have been effaced,” their report said, “but free of material elements that promote [the] asymmetric relation between the former white ‘civiliser’ and the former colonised black person, perpetuating a racist ideology and inequalities.”
The group recommends that some monuments could be relocated to museums or a statue park, while others could be renamed or given new information plaques.
A number of monuments to King Leopold II have already been taken down – in Ghent and in Antwerp – while others remain.