Congo Genocide Museum is a non-profit organization whose objective is to bring to light the genocide committed in Congo between 1885-1908 by Belgium.
The Congolese Holocaust
Between 1885-1912, in what was called the “Congo Free State” (now The Democratic Republic of the Congo), King Leopold II of Belgium and his colonial administration and its policies killed an estimated 3 to 30 million Congolese people.
King Léopold II (1835 - 1909) occupied the Belgium throne from 1865 until his death in 1909. He is primarily remembered as the personal owner of the Congo Free State, a private enterprise undertaken by King Leopold II himself to extract rubber and ivory from his personal colony, relying heavily on slave labor.
Under Léopold II's administrative rule, the Congo Free State committed various atrocities against the indigenous population, including mass killings and maimings intended to subjugate the Congolese, procure slave labor, and maximize profitability.
Estimates of the total death-toll in Leopold’s Congo Free State vary:
-British diplomat Roger Casement's famous 1904 report estimated the death toll at 3 million for just twelve of the twenty years history of Léopold's regime.
-The twentieth-century investigative reporter and author, Peter Forbath, estimated the Congo death-toll at least 5 million.
-Adam Hochschild, author of “King Leopold’s Ghost”, estimated it at 10 million.
-The Encyclopædia Britannica estimates the death-toll to be somewhere between 8 and 30 million.
Léopold II's reputation today:
In the Democratic Republic of Congo: Léopold II is still a controversial figure. In 2005 his statue was taken down just hours after it was re-erected in the capital, Kinshasa. The Congolese culture minister, Christoph Muzungu decided to reinstate the statue, arguing people should see the positive aspects of the king as well as the negative. But just hours after the twenty-foot statue was erected in the middle of a circle near Kinshasa's central station, it was taken down again, without explanation.
In Belgium: Léopold II is perceived by many Belgians as the "King-Builder" ("le Roi-Bâtisseur" in French, "Koning-Bouwer" in Dutch) because he commissioned a great number of buildings and urban projects in Antwerp, Brussels, Ostend and elsewhere in Belgium. The buildings include the Royal Glasshouses at Laeken, the Japanese tower, the Chinese pavilion, the Musée du Congo (now called the Royal Museum for Central Africa) and their surrounding park in Tervuren, the Jubilee Triple Arch in Brussels and the Antwerp train station hall. He funded these buildings with the wealth generated by the exploitation of the Congo.
According to Adam Hochschild, there has been a "Great Forgetting":
"The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting. Leopold and the Belgian colonial officials who followed him went to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence from the historical records."
Astonishingly, the colonial Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren Museum) does not mention anything about the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State. The Tervuren Museum has a large collection of colonial objects but of the largest injustice in Congo, Hochschild wrote: "there is no sign whatsoever." Another example is to be found on the sea walk of Blankenberge, a popular coastal resort, where a monument shows a colonialist with a black child at his feet (supposedly bringing him "civilization") without any comment.
The story needs to be told and the historical record needs to be set straight. The time has come.
To garner interest for the creation of a museum that reveals the crimes and atrocities committed by the Belgian-sponsored Congo Free State against the Congolese people between 1885-1908 in which approximately 10-30 million Congolese were killed.
To stand in contrast to the Royal Museum for Central Africa (located in Belgium), which speaks on behalf of the Congolese people from the perspective of a nineteenth-century Western European colonizer.
To create a space for the Congolese people to speak on their own behalf regarding their experiences living in King Leopold’s Congo Free State.
