Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | World watch (7 february)
Onwaarschijnlijk maar waar, enkele uren later werd het herrezen standbeeld van Leopold II al weer neergehaald.
En hier in België ... hoe zit het hier met die man zijn standbeelden ... onaantastbaar ...? We gaan zien ... toch.
Ian Black
Monday February 7, 2005
The Guardian
"Poor old Leopold II! The king of the Belgians underwent one of the shortest political rehabilitations on record last week, hoisted back on to his plinth - horse, enormous spade-shaped beard and all - in the Congolese capital, Kinshasha (Leopoldville until independence in 1960), only to be sent back again to the dust heap of history a few hours later.
It was strange, observed one passerby, when statues of tyrants were being toppled elsewhere, to see the unannounced return - in now tarnished bronze - of the lugubrious monarch who is still remembered as the cruellest face of European colonialism in Africa.
But King Leopold's ghost, to use the title of Adam Hochschild's brilliant but controversial book about little Belgium's rule over a vast country 80 times its size, has never gone away. And, quite by chance, the king's brief return coincided with the opening of a ground-breaking exhibition in the Royal Africa Museum at Tervuren, near Brussels, where, late in the day, Belgian and Congolese historians have tried hard to agree a common version of their unequal past. "
zie ook:
Passage éclair de Léopold II à Kinshasa
La mémoire retrouvée
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