On a mission

With the possibility of a trip to East Africa becoming more and more real I've started doing some research about what to expect. My tendency is to get stuck into a topic and not let off until I've gathered mountains of info, and it's no different in this case! V. refers to this as an 'obsession' but I prefer to call it curiosity instead ;-). My main focus was initially on the countries I hope to visit later this year: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda. But I've somehow veered off topic and am now devouring heaps of books on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I've had a interest in this country for a while now, partly because of the Belgian colonial history but also due to the horrific conflict in Eastern Congo that has been going on for years and fails to get the international attention or political intervention it warrants.

My current focus on Congo was sparked by several Belgian media reports on the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence this year. In 1960 the Belgian government handed the Congo over to its people, but since then the country hasn't exactly flourished. Tim Butcher's excellent travelogue Blood River helped me to understand the complex reasons why Congo has been spiralling backwards since 1960, and it provided an often chilling account of the Belgian colonial rule. I remember reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in my Postcolonial Literature class at university in 2001, with group discussions inevitably focussing on the brutal rule of the Belgians in Congo. As the only Belgian in a lecture theatre full of New Zealanders I was an easy target for questions and judgement, and felt deeply shameful and remorseful about my country's history. More so I was baffled and angry because this period was barely mentioned in the Belgian school curriculum in my day, and the atrocities committed after King Leopold II's handover of Congo were glossed over. It might be my selective memory but I even recollect that Leopold II was praised for being a great statesman and for giving Brussels the architectural grandeur it deserved. That these impressive buildings were paid for by Congolese slave trade isn't really included in commentaries on sighseeing tours of our capital... I feel somewhat misled by our education system and might have to believe what one Facebook friend wrote: "Isn't it interesting how 'education' so often turns out to be about what we do NOT get taught? It's surprisingly often about what someone else does NOT want us to know." So now I'm a woman on a mission to try and find out as much as I can about this topic. Next on my list is King Leopold's Ghost, a book that was extremely controversial in Belgium when it was published in 1998. I'm curious to find out why - too much truth or not enough of it? In May I'm also planning to visit the Royal Museum for Central Africa near Brussels, which houses an impressive collection of ethnographic objects from Central Africa (borrowed, I'm sure) & will have an exhibition about Congolese independence opening soon. I'm curious to find out whether Belgium has come to terms with its past and can now reflect on it honestly and with full transparency...