 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Last week, a party was held on the grounds of the Africa Museum of Presence. This party had a so-called African theme and a huge controversy arose when people came with black faces, pith helmets and all sorts of exotic-seeming African costumes. All these issues brought to the fore the question of Belgium colonization in Africa and the impact of it even today. To talk more about this, we have with us Pabir So last week we saw this event happening and there was an uproar on by various organizations, African organizations in Brussels, other parts of the world. So could you actually talk a bit about the context in which and especially the context of Belgium, Belgian colonization also? You know the interesting part of it is that it should have come so late in terms of shall be say addressing Belgium's both culpability in what happened in Africa, particularly Congo and also the fact that it has really not decolonized the minds of its own people. See, forget about few people coming in costumes and blackened faces, caricaturing as it were, the people they supposedly are representing. But leaving that out, the point is King Leopold statues are there all over Belgium and in Brussels. King Leopold II, the second, was the architect of what happened in Congo from 1885 to 1908 in which estimated 8 to 10 million people lost their lives, children were killed in large numbers, people's hands were cut off and taken as kind of trophies to show how strongly they were executing Leopold's policy of extracting rubber for selling abroad. So all of this history is known to only a select few people. But the fact that you do not have the decolonization of the minds is because you put up statues all over, you celebrate the Belgians shall be say the colonies, you celebrate Belgium's history in Africa and you are not able to, you are not willing to talk about what really happened there. The brutality of the colonial regime and the fact that it is still to say, still to apologize for its colonial record. The only apology Belgium has given has been the apology that it took away mixed parentage children from the parents. That is the only apology Belgium has made till now. The fact that more than almost half the population, not more of Congo was actually killed during that 20, 25 years that we are talking about that has not elicited any apology, neither the rest of its colonial regime in Africa and when it took over Leopold's private fiefdom which is what Belgium, Congo was supposed to be, its own complicity in both maintaining Leopold's rule in that period and subsequently. All of it has not been something which Belgium has addressed. I think this is the key issue. In fact, this museum we are talking about came under the United Nations report which said that this is insensitive that does not address the colonial past and in fact, it does not really have quote unquote any apology for Belgium's record. It has presented the exotica of shall we say it is African by demonstrating African objects, exhibits and so on but it does not address really the colonial history of Belgium and its brutal atrocities and massacres that it carried out there. And it is also more important considering that all this information for the longest time was completely hidden and it is only much more recently that this information has come to light. Yes, in fact, it came to light because there was one diplomat, career diplomat Marshall, who was there in Belgium's service. He was posted in one African country and he found references to Belgium's massacres in Congo and he was very upset because he thought it is a canard and he wanted to refute it. So he asked Belgium can I get some documents of the period so I can show that this is wrong. So he was told that these documents are not available to you. We went back at some point to Brussels and tried to access the archives. He was too junior to be given access. So these records were not even accessible to Belgian civil service or to its diplomatic core. It's only when you receive the certain seniority that he had the requisite shall we say access rights and he goes to the history and is horrified that this was the brutality with which this whole things were carried out and the massacres, the record. Of course, Joseph Conrad in his book The Heart of Darkness does show all of this. People thought it's an allegorical account. They thought evil was not real. It was really imagined. But the evil that Conrad wrote about and he is by no means criticizing it. He in fact criticized the excesses of colonialism, not colonialism itself. In fact, you can argue that he is actually a defender of colonialism or shall we say legitimizer of the colonial rule. So this whole history where he is able to access it, he gets horrified. So he wrote five volume history of what happened under a pseudonym and later on he does come out in public about it after leaving the civil service and Hokesfield's book King Leopold's Ghost is really based on that research which was there. So it's now quite clear that this was the real brutal history of Congo and it is based on the archives of Belgium. It is not based on anything else, archival history as seen in the Belgian archives. Which again, I don't know to what extent they have been made accessible now. But all of this actually is not just Belgium. It's also the rest of the colonial countries who have hidden their history, hidden the archives, tried to sanitize it, fought bitterly over returning the plunder of Africa or other colonies and also not refusing to apologize or accept for what they have done. So this is a part of a much larger history that while Western Europe claims to be the so-called harbinger of civilization, enlightenment and so on, all this has gone hand in hand with the most brutal atrocities you can think of and Africa becomes particularly brutal because it was late colonization and it came really with the intent of loot and very little else. So the kind of massacres that took place in Africa, the after, of course, the slavery exercises, the brutalization of its people by the so-called shall we say representatives of the civilized order is something which still needs to be addressed, still needs to be known and I think therefore Belgian younger people not knowing their history is not surprising. That's a history that's not being told to them. That's a history that is being glorified. That's a history which is being celebrated in different forms even today and therefore every generation believes that Belgium had a glorious colonial past. Maybe some blemishes the king was a little brutal but in large they think they had a civilizing mission in Africa as well as in other places and this is by and large whether you have a Neal Ferguson kind of historian, you have other historians, this is by and large the kind of history that's repeated again and again to its internal audience. Even the French with Haiti for that matter. French with Haiti and French in Algeria for that matter, its own colonial history in Africa is not much better and you have basically people who are supposed to be the enlightened people writing about how you this is what is called the science of war being practiced in Algeria and how genocide is a necessity of trying to get colonies and colonies are important French has to contest England and this is how the Algerian war is framed in French to the French people and this is done by people who are supposed to be really shall we say the forerunners of civilization, the forerunners of enlightenment, the forerunners of shall we say democracy in the world. So this is a part of the colonial history and the European shall we say legacy that is there which European particularly western Europeans who are the colonizers refuse to address and it's also all the more important considering for instance the neocolonial phase starting with Lumumba and Belgium's role in that in the 60s and even now today considering the kind of extraction that is going on in Congo of course that in some senses it is a continuation this lack of historical awareness is also a huge problem there. You know Congo is the richest country probably in the world in terms of natural resources and that is its curse the fact that it is in natural resource terms so rich so you today have Ebola in Congo you have the collapse of say basically the civil infrastructure of Congo due to civil war why do you have civil war as you have rightly said you come to Belgium's history when the handover quote unquote handover because they are virtually forced to they are no longer able to maintain a colonial administration over such a large territory then you find that they have really not built any local capabilities entirely being run by Belgium the Belgians coming to Congo and running everything they had not built schools colleges I think the total number of graduates in Congo at the time was something like 500 and when the Lumumba and others take over of course there is a huge hostility to them attempt to break up Congo there is attempt to create secession of the most mineral rich part of Congo all of that is a part of Congo's history which is post-colonial history so to say and it happens as you said in collusion with the Americans who then regard Lumumba whose main really interest was nationalism to be controlled by the Congolese and that becomes a huge enemy for the ex-colonial states as well of course the United States who backed the colonial states and then of course Lumumba is killed brutally killed and we still don't know what has happened to his body so this is the history of shall we say the post-colonial history of Congo and the fact that civil wars have continued in Congo it's not because the Congolese won civil wars but because of the natural resources it has and therefore the need to control it means weakening Congo really arming different sections and different times letting them fight so that Congo remains weak and cannot control its own natural resources this is the resource curse of Congo but Congo is the biggest state in Africa it has as we said the richest mineral resources so this state once it's able to raise from the shackles of colonialism and really coalesce into a country which is why the colonial powers will not let it do that so easily it can be the motor of African development and I think that is what the ex-colonial powers in the United States are so scared of that Congo will become then the as a as a powerful economy and a powerful state and that will take Africa in a different direction so therefore weakening Congo is the primary goal at least in southern Africa that is very clear thank you that's all we have time for today keep watching news click