From my years in Brussels as a student I remember a cosmopolitan environment where wealth and precariousness coexisted. Near my flat in Port de Namur, there was the vibrant Matongé, almost in the heart of the EU capital. Although it was a neighborhood with Congolese roots, it did not evoke the darkness described in Conrad’s work. Its streets resounded with vitality, especially from the afternoon, when the body of officials of the European organizations retreated and there was a silence that did not require translation into the official languages.
To explore what the novel’s Kurz must have seen, it was necessary to go to the outskirts. Specifically in Tervuren, where the so-called Royal Museum of Central Africa stood. Surrounded by a colorful park, Leopold II’s cruel colonial project in the Congo was displayed in a Parisian-style palace. The self-criticisms were so mild that they hardly scratched the traditional narrative of Belgian plunder. When the need to rethink this racist legacy became clear, a deep renovation of the museum was undertaken.
Today its rooms celebrate the culture of Africa, a key part of the machinery of modernity. In Born in blackness (2021), Howard W. French sums it up like this: “Europe’s deep and brutal ties to Africa fueled the birth of a truly global capitalist economy.”
After the pandemic I returned to this monument of Western arrogance, now resigned. The temporary exhibition dealt with the human zoos that toured Europe from the last decades of the 19th century, in which Africans were exhibited as exotic animals from Saint Petersburg to Barcelona.
There is no perfect way to repair the untold burdens of colonialism and centuries of grievances. The remodeling of a museum, the review of street names or the removal of a satrap’s sculpture are just gestures of a broader and more complex will that must accompany, from now on, the construction of ‘a new and necessary relationship between equals.
In a 2018 open letter to incoming French President Emmanuel Macron, writer Alain Mabanckou said that if a page were to be turned, he needed to point out “African autocratic regimes, rigged elections and the lack of freedom of expression, all orchestrated by monarchs who subjugate their populations in French”.
In a study published in June by the French Institute of International Relations, the sentiment against the Élysée Palace that thrives in French-speaking Africa was collected, a resentment that has increased with decisions such as the military presence on the ground, the lack of monetary sovereignty or development aid policy. France and, by extension, the EU, which have invested significantly in the Sahel since 2015 with the aim of curbing migratory flows and the terrorist threat, have failed to recognize the symptoms of a dying model in coups a West Africa.
Historian Achille Mbembe laments the situation of the new generation, “blocked from within by a rapacious gerontocracy, and its external mobility blocked by European anti-migration policies and an archaic border management inherited from colonization”. For this youth, who does not see democracy as an effective tool for change, the images of the riots in France act as an accelerator.
Errors are taken advantage of by third parties who know how to exploit system vulnerabilities. In Niger’s capital, what appeared to be a Prigojin-style survival movement by Omar Tchiani, a general and former commander of the presidential guard, has turned into a conflict of unforeseeable consequences as he becomes the mouthpiece of social unrest against the old metropolis with Russian flags flying in the background.
Vladimir Putin, responsible for the neo-imperialist invasion of Ukraine, with his gaze fixed on this continent from the 2019 Russia-Africa summit in Sochi, dusted off the Soviet rhetoric of the brotherhood of peoples and stoked anti-Western sentiment. However, unlike Xi Jinping, who chose Africa for his first international tour in 2013, he lacks the capacity of his Chinese counterpart to become a key partner. The Italian Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, poses this dilemma: either we help Niger, or Russia and China will colonize Africa. The spokeswoman for Russian Foreign Affairs maintains that in Ukraine they are fighting to liberate Africa.
Meanwhile, Nigeriens, spectators of the battle of narratives, continue to be subjected to a poverty that colonizes their lives.
