half art
CHRIS THURMAN: Guilty Leopold’s unspeakable lack of guilt
Lesedi Job, John Kani and Robert Whitehead stage the forgotten history at the origin of the travails of the DRC
In a few weeks, people around the globe will pause to recognise the centenary of the armistice that ended World War l. “The Great War” resulted in at least 15-million deaths and is usually viewed as the foundational collective trauma of the 20th century. But in the decades before the first shot in that seminal conflict was fired, an equally violent and destructive phenomenon — involving a similar death toll — had already been experienced and witnessed: the sustained atrocity that was the Congo Free State under the rule, or ownership, of King Leopold II of Belgium. Although it caused international outrage at the time, Leopold’s wholesale rape of the Congo River Basin and his persecution of its peoples was forgotten as the world turned its attention to “the war to end all wars” (and the series of wars that followed it, giving the lie to that description). The Belgian government’s annexation of the territory that had been Leopold’s personal domain, ostensibly stopping the systematic ab...
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