Heilungs- oder Geistergeschichten?

Post/koloniale Erinnerungen im belgischen AfricaMuseum

Abstract

Public and political discourses in Belgium are slow and hesitant to tackle the country’s colonial history. Only once the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren near Brussels started a multi-year renovation process, public debates around Belgium’s postcolonial memory started to increase. The museum itself aimed to decolonize its permanent exhibition, shifting from a colonial representation of Africa to a portrayal of the beauty and resilience of African culture and nature. Aimé Mpane’s statue ‘Congo Nouveau Souffle’, that replaced a bust of King Leopold II in the museum’s former entrance hall, plays a central role in the new (post)colonial narrative of the AfricaMuseum. This short article analyzes the post/colonial narratives that this statue gives rise to through the lens of postcolonial trauma theory and argues that postcolonial historiography can have both, decolonizing or recolonizing effect. The central question, therefore, is: Which postcolonial memory politics can best effect a decolonization of European-African relations?