Cheating History: Blocking a Difficult Past at the Royal Museum for Central Africa

• In Event: 234 - Regular Session. Collective Memory: Contesting the Meanings of the Past

Abstract

The challenge of acknowledging “difficult pasts” is a crucial aspect of the sociology of memory because it informs how nations remember their “less than glorious” histories. Belgian colonialism in the Congo was a troubled period notorious for forced labor, gross brutality, and the seizure of precious land and resources. Despite this sordid history, little research has addressed how the colonial past is remembered in Belgium today. This article follows the case of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium, which is the “last colonial museum” in Europe to undergo a renovation in an effort to rewrite its colonial history. The RMCA is responsible for educating visitors about the Congo under Belgian colonial rule. The renovation process provides a lens into the how official memories of Belgium's colonial past in the Congo determine display practices in the current and future museum. As a federal museum, the RMCA has much to offer in terms of informing how and whether we engage colonial histories and how these transformations take shape. I operationalize Ann Stoler's concept of "colonial aphasia" to explain how the museum avoids its "difficult past" in the Congo by creating blockages that disrupt the telling of its “less than glorious” history. This analysis shows how even amidst a dramatic renovation, “blockages” in the institutional memory limit the possibilities of future representations of the past.

Author

• Jenny Folsom, University of Massachusetts-Amherst