The Outpost of Propaganda

I think I’m starting to have something like culture shock, and I’m pleased it’s come so late after my arrival. A good sign. The weather is just so shitty and depressing. I’m having a hard time figuring out why the fuck anybody lives here, it’s like Vancouver without the sea. That’s not fair, of course; shitty weather aside there’s no comparison. As I’ve wrote a million times it’s pretty and quaint here, just reeking with history and the traces of colonial expropriation. We went to the African museum last weekend and that was a trip . . . and eye-opening trip.

It was founded as a propaganda piece by Leopold, the Belgian king who contracted out the Congo out in the 19th century as though he was having his back yard landscaped, resulting in the de facto slavery of generations of Congolese and laying the groundwork for the intense struggle over resources there that has sparked the slaughter of so many people. An unqualified disaster, and the obsession of Joseph Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness and The Outpost of Progress about it.

So everybody in Canada, who’s forced to read Heart of Darkness in school – usually when they’re around 15 and utterly unprepared for such a bleak vision of life, Goths included, and they complain about it endlessly – has some idea that the Belgian experience in the Congo was not an edifying one.

But based on the African museum here, and excepting one new exhibit, the museum still stands for the most part as a propaganda piece for the cause of bringing the darkies civilization and rescuing them from the Arab slave traders.

Well. I guess if they just changed the museum altogether, denied the propaganda as it were, that would be a denial of history, since the propaganda was so strong. It was still odd to be there though. In any old colonial power you can show up at the museums and gawk at the emblems of a time when they stripped the land and people of all they could, but this one was quite special.

And in my culture shock resulting from shitty weather, I walk through Brussels, geek on the lovely architecture, and sometimes go up to the royal district with its beautiful stately whitewashed buildings – and you know, maybe Paris is what it is and London is what it is because of what the French and English once did to their colonies, but here, because of Joseph Conrad and now that museum, it’s always on my mind.