From my years in Brussels as a student I remember a cosmopolitan environment where wealth and precariousness coexisted. Near my flat in Porte de Namur was vibrant Matongé, almost in the heart of the EU capital. Although it was a neighborhood with Congolese roots, it did not evoke the darkness described in Conrad's work. Vitality resounded in its streets, especially from the afternoon on, when the body of civil servants from the European organizations withdrew and a silence that did not require translation into the official languages fell to plummet.
To explore what the Kurz of the novel must have seen, you had to go to the outskirts. To Tervuren, where the so-called Royal Museum of Central Africa stood. Surrounded by a colorful park, in a palace with Parisian airs, the cruel colonial project of Leopold II in the Congo was shown. The self-criticisms were so mild that they barely scratched the traditional account of Belgian looting.
When the need to rethink that racist legacy became evident, a major renovation of the museum was undertaken. Today its rooms celebrate the culture of Africa, a key part of the machinery of modernity.
In Born in blackness (2021), Howard W. French summarizes: "Europe's deep and brutal ties to Africa prompted the birth of a truly global capitalist economy." After the pandemic I returned to that milestone of Western arrogance, now resignified. A temporary exhibition addressed the human zoos that toured Europe from the last decades of the 19th century, in which Africans were exhibited as exotic animals, from Saint Petersburg to Barcelona.
There is no perfect way to repair the incalculable burdens of colonialism and centuries of wrongs. The remodeling of a museum, the revision of the street map or the removal of the sculpture of a satrap are only gestures of a broader and more complex will that must accompany, from now on, the construction of a new and necessary relationship between equals.
In a 2018 open letter to incoming French President Emmanuel Macron, the writer Alain Mabanckou said that if he was to turn the page, he needed to point out "African autocratic regimes, rigged elections and lack of freedom of expression, all orchestrated by monarchs who subdue their populations in French”.
A study published in June by the French Institute for International Relations speaks of the anti-Gallic sentiment that thrives in French-speaking Africa, a resentment that has increased with decisions such as the military presence, the lack of monetary sovereignty or the development aid policy. France and, by extension, the EU, which have invested significantly in the Sahel since 2015 in order to curb migration flows and the terrorist threat, have failed to recognize the symptoms of a dying pattern in West African coups. .
Historian Achille Mbembe laments the situation of the new generation, "blocked from within by a rapacious gerontocracy, and banned from moving abroad by European anti-migration policies and archaic border management inherited from colonization." For these youth, who do not see democracy as an effective path to change, the images of the riots in France act as an accelerator.
Errors are taken advantage of by third parties who know how to exploit system vulnerabilities. In the capital of Niger, what seemed like a Prigozhin-style survival movement by Omar Tchiani, a general and former commander of the presidential guard, has turned into a conflict of unforeseeable consequences as he sets himself up as a spokesman for social unrest against the former metropolis, with Russian flags waving in the background. Putin, responsible for the neo-imperialist invasion of Ukraine, with his gaze fixed on the continent since the 2019 Russia-Africa summit in Sochi, dusted off Soviet rhetoric of the brotherhood of peoples and stoked anti-Western sentiment.
Yet unlike Xi Jinping, who chose Africa for his first international tour in 2013, he does not possess his Chinese counterpart's ability to become a critical partner. The Italian Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, poses this dilemma: either we help Niger, or Russia and China will colonize Africa. The Russian foreign spokeswoman maintains that Ukraine is fighting to liberate Africa. Meanwhile, Nigeriens, spectators of the battle of narratives, continue to be subjected to a poverty that colonizes their lives.
