Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism

Introduction

One July afternoon in 2000, a group of people, including former colonials, walked through the Cinquantenaire Park in Brussels and halted before the simply named Colonial Monument. The monument’s foreground depicted a young African lying down, representing the Congo River. On the left a European soldier combated the slave trade, while figures on the right represented another colonial soldier tending to a wounded comrade. The large central panel portrayed the African continent, “henceforth open to civilization,” and a group of soldiers surrounding King Leopold II. Atop the monument a young woman represented the country of Belgium, “welcoming the black race.”1 Two members of the group advanced solemnly toward the memorial and, kneeling, placed wreaths to honor the memory of the nation’s colonial pioneers.2 Similar scenes continue to be enacted at other monuments across the country. In June 2003 a “national ceremony to honor the flag of Tabora” commemorating the World War I victory in German East Africa began at Namur’s Leopold II monument .3 On 24 June 2005 a large equestrian statue of Leopold II was reinaugurated in Brussels after a restoration in time for the country’s 175th anniversary, at which a small group from the Association des anciens et amis de la Force publique du Congo Belge (Association of Veterans and Friends of the Belgian Congo Introduction 2 Armed Forces) honored Leopold II by presenting the colors.4 All these people were paying homage to imperialism at just a few of the dozens if not hundreds of imperialistic monuments that still dot the Belgian landscape five decades after the Congo’s independence. These memorials are remnants of the country’s colonial past, former propaganda pieces created to rally public support for the Belgian empire in central Africa. The large body of pro-empire propaganda produced in Belgium is the subject of this book. Because the term “propaganda” has taken on numerous meanings over the years, a brief word on its definition is in order before examining the case of Belgian imperialistic propaganda. As a result of the mobilization of enthusiasm and censorship that accompanied World War I, propaganda “came to be a pejorative term; all governments installed propaganda offices, and all of 1. Vinçotte’s Colonial Monument in Cinquantenaire Park (photo by the author). Introduction 3 them falsified news.”5 The word became more suspect after the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union became better understood. Goebbels and Hitler believed Germany had lost World War I in the realm of information production and created propaganda with little regard for the truth. Even Communists turned against the Soviet system, as the extent of the interwar show trials and Stalin’s cult of personality became better known.6 These developments led many to equate propaganda with outright lies. Nevertheless, to understand propaganda as only untrue is to misconstrue the term. Propaganda is the production and dissemination of information to help or hinder a particular institution, person, or cause, and the actual ideas, concepts, and materials produced in such an effort. As Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell define it, “Propaganda is the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”7 Propaganda might be biased or partial, but it is not necessarily false. For example, particular government, missionary, and private films deliberately misrepresented the situation in Belgium’s colony or events in its history to make particular points, thereby qualifying those films as propaganda. But often films were tendentious rather than deliberately misleading, having as their goal the instruction of the audience along the lines of a particular ideology. Many also understand propaganda as primarily a state product .8 Yet it can issue from a variety of sources, such as during World War I when not only governments but also various elites produced propaganda. In Italy, for instance, the army controlled the press and information at the front; the government produced information directed at foreign audiences; and civil, financial, and industrial elites worked in concert with both.9 The same Introduction 4 was true for propaganda in favor of overseas empire: it emanated from a variety of sources, including the state and colonial administrations, commercial interests, missionary orders, and individuals. A distinction is to be made, however, between propaganda and advertising—the latter of which endorses products and, in the...