DRC: a Belgian municipality unbolts the statue of a character of colonization

The bust of Lieutenant-General Emile Storms in the Square de Meeûs in Brussels.

© CC BY-SA 4.0/EmDee/Wikimedia Commons

Text by: Pierre Firtion Follow

2 mins

The municipality of Ixelles in Belgium made a very symbolic gesture this Thursday, June 30.

She removed the statue of Lieutenant-General Emile Storms from public space.

The latter, commissioned by King Leopold II to colonize the Congo in the 19th century, had committed numerous abuses on the spot.

In particular, he had sent the skull of a local chief back to Belgium.

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Since the investigation in 2018 of a journalist on the human remains present in the collections of the museum of Tervuren, associations demanded the unbolting of this bust of Emile Storms.

A sulphurous character sent in 1882 by King Leopold II to conquer new territories in the Congo.

This very brutal lieutenant-general had committed numerous abuses in the Lake Tanganyika region, notably cutting off the head of a local chief, Lusinga Iwa Ngombe, whose skull he sent to Belgium.

A leader from whom he will also loot hundreds of items.

He is a really second, third rank personality, a lieutenant-general who was known only for his barbaric acts in the service of the authority of the time

, recalls Christos Doulkeridis, the mayor of Ixelles, who decided to remove this statue.

And the reports that were written around this colonial period, explicitly indicated that maintaining in the public space such a controversial and secondary personality made no sense.

And that at certain times, it's also useful to be able to withdraw in a logic of appeasement and in a more contemporary logic.

 »

Dismantled on Thursday morning, this bust will now be exhibited in a museum where contextualization work should be undertaken in order to tell its story precisely.

Is the dismantling of this statue part of this change in Belgium's outlook on its colonial past?

Guido Gryssels, the director general of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren in Belgium, believes that today there is a certain "

 evolution of societal thinking

 " on this subject. 

Belgium has always been proud of its colonial past and used figures who had played a role in colonization as examples of model citizens.

That's why there are hundreds and hundreds of statues of people who played a role in the colonial past.

And we now realize that these people were bullies, were violent, responsible for many deaths.

There is a shift in societal thinking that these people don't deserve a statue.

Guido Gryssels, Director General of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren

Pierre Firtion

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