As Leopold II Statues Fall, How Do We 'Educate Ourselves'

H-Empire BLOG: As Leopold II Statues Fall, How Do We ‘Educate Ourselves’ About His Colony?

Discussion published by Marc-William Palen on Friday, July 24, 2020

Statue of Leopold II of Belgium (2020) (wikimedia commons)

Robert Burroughs (Leeds Beckett University) and Sarah de Mul (Open University, the Netherlands)

Leopold Must Fall. The words become reality. In Belgium, officials are removing public statues of Leopold II in response to anti-racism protests.

Leopold II deserves notoriety. Between 1885 and 1908 he presided over a colonial regime in which mass murder and atrocities became routine. The impact of his destructive rule of the Congo Free State, today’s Democratic Republic of Congo, is profound.

The dismantling of public shrines is of course part of a wider movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. Across much of the world, protestors are challenging racism by seeking removal of public monuments and street names honouring slave traders and colonial officials. Their actions are creating change. There have been repeated calls for the public to ‘educate ourselves’ on the histories of slavery, imperialism, and racism. Colonial history is now compulsory teaching in secondary schools in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, for example, and other national curricula will follow.

Citation: Marc-William Palen. BLOG: As Leopold II Statues Fall, How Do We ‘Educate Ourselves’ About His Colony?. H-Empire. 07-24-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/5293/discussions/6278935/blog-leopold-ii-statues-fall-how-do-we-%E2%80%98educate-ourselves%E2% 80%99-about Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Empire

Questions have already been asked about this refrain, ‘educating ourselves’. Many of us are feeling a need to learn more about social injustice, but the links between learning and action against injustice are not always clear. Discussion of historical racism in mainstream (and social) media allows an easy performance of moral values with definite limitations on the levels of commitment required. There is a danger that, as Tre Johnson recently put it, ‘When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs’.

As statues topple, many will take to the books. As professors of colonial and postcolonial literature, we value their efforts! But as this desire for education confronts a troubled or contested field of history, then new problems emerge. Take the Congo, for example. Particularly in Britain and the USA, media coverage of Leopold’s fall have refered readers to Adam Hochschild’s popular book King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Central Africa (1998). This is understandable: Hochschild’s book is widely available and engaging account of the Congo Free State. Its author successfully brought that history to a wider audience. continue[ reading at the Imperial & Global Forum]