American Imperialism Analysis

The Belgian colonial experience has, since its early days, been the target of strong international criticism. The manner Leopold ruled over his possession was widely decried by a number of people, even notable contemporaries such as Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who were sympathetic to the cause. The forced labour, the chicotte whippings, the system of hostages when the locals failed to produce the quotas of rubber required by the authorities, in short, the injustice and atrocities inflicted on the indigenous were witnessed and reported by numerous missionaries, and Edmund Dene Morel and Roger Casement were to denounce this web of deception and all that was wrong with the regime. They spread the word with lectures during which witness

His colonialism was different than other imperialist systems as it completely neglected the African lives and caused ten million dead by starvation, exhaustion, murder and disease. While the Belgian media of the time was denounced by Morel as being “the reptile Congophile Press of Brussels and Antwerp”, the international press never hesitated to include caricatures of the Leopold II and his atrocities. Until the present days, the strongest criticism comes from the exterior. For instance, in 2007, the British Equality and Human Rights Commission accused Tintin in Congo of containing atrocious racist prejudices and battled for its removal from the shelves of the national libraries. The same year, a Congolese citizen living in Belgium brought the case in justice, with the support of a French association. They pleaded for the forbidding of its selling. Although the Belgian justice did not give them reason, some countries removed it from their libraries and bookshops, restricting its access to an adult public under certain

So things are changing slowly but still there's been an unwillingness to open the lid on our colonial past”. When I was in secondary school, in the late 2000s, we still barely studied the Congo in our history class. Having said that, the difference with the schoolbook from the 1930s is that, nowadays, the students are invited to critically reflect on the characteristics of the decolonisation process, who were the actors and what were its results. The current textbook contains documents to analyse such as extracts from Lumumba’s resentful discourse at the ceremonies of independence, or photographs and newspaper articles (Belgian and Congolese, as well as French) dating from the 1950s. The selection of the particular documents is important: they illustrate, from different point of views, the segregation and paternalism still in operation in the Congo of the 1950s. Although few class hours are dedicated to the Congo, it shows that the school system is now willing to engage critical discussion amongst students and