A Monument to Denial
No country likes to come to terms with embarrassing parts of its past. Japanese schoolbooks still whitewash the atrocities of World War II, and the Turkish government continues to deny the Armenian genocide. Until about 1970, the millions of visitors to Colonial Williamsburg saw no indication that roughly half the inhabitants of the original town were slaves.
Until recently, one of the world's more blatant denials of history had been taking place at the Royal Museum of Central Africa, an immense, chateau-like building on the outskirts of Brussels. It was founded a century ago by Belgium's King Leopold II, who, from 1885 to 1908, literally owned the Congo as the world's only privately controlled colony. Right through the 1990s, the museum's magnificent collection of African art, tools, masks and weapons -- among the largest and best anywhere, much of it gathered during the 23 years of Leopold's rule -- reflected nothing of what had happened in the territory during that period. It was as if a great museum of Jewish art and culture in Berlin revealed nothing about the Holocaust.
The holocaust visited upon the Congo under Leopold was not an attempt at deliberate extermination, like the one the Nazis carried out on Europe's Jews, but its overall toll was probably higher. Soon after the king got his hands on the colony, there was a worldwide rubber boom, and Leopold turned much of the Congo's adult male population into forced labor for gathering wild rubber. His private army marched into village after village and held the women hostage to force the men to go into the rain forest, often for weeks out of each month, to tap rubber vines. This went on for nearly two decades.
Though Leopold made a fortune estimated at well over $1 billion in today's dollars, the results were catastrophic for Congolese. Laborers were often worked to death, and many female hostages starved. With few people to hunt, fish or cultivate crops, food grew scarce. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the forced-labor regime, but deep in the forest they found little to eat and no shelter, and travelers came upon their bones for years afterward. Tens of thousands more rose up in rebellion and were shot down. The birthrate plummeted. Disease -- principally sleeping sickness -- took a toll in the millions among half-starved and traumatized people who otherwise might have survived.
