On Tuesday, some 60 academics, authors and activists are calling on Antwerp to commemorate and contextualise "the colonial tragedy" of the World Fair held in front of the city's Museum of Fine Arts in 1894, where 144 Congolese people were exhibited as part of a human zoo.
After years of renovation works, the city's Royal Museum of Fine Arts will officially be reopened next weekend, celebrated with festivities on the square in front of the museum. However, the 60 signatories find it "inappropriate not to pay attention to the colonial shadow of the museum square" during the event.
"It is time to give the forgotten drama an official place in the city's remembrance policy, almost 130 years after the event," said decolonisation advisor Judith Elseviers and political scientist and author Nadia Nsayi in an opinion piece in De Morgen.
The opinion piece was signed by sixty people, including Africa Museum researcher Bambi Ceuppens, University of Antwerp chancellor Herman Van Goethem and writer David Van Reybrouck.
The authors of the opinion piece take issue with the Congolese village during the world fair of 1894 in which people were "displayed as animals in a zoo", adding that "this inhumane phenomenon was downright racist and still determines the stereotypical image to this day."
Commemorate the site
The images were created to justify colonialism, as the Congolese were displayed as primitive and a "people that needed civilising," the authors wrote. At least seven of the people in the Antwerp fair died, according to the Museum of Stroom. They were buried at a mass grave at Schoonselhoof cemetary, in a suburb of Antwerp.
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The authors of the opinion piece are calling on the city council to commemorate the history of the site and the people who were displayed there after the reopening of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp.
"Place a memorial plaque on the Museum Square," they wrote. "Create an artistic place where residents and visitors of the city can come together and commemorate Congolese people. There are proposals on the table. They must now be taken seriously by the city authorities."
