Latest / The History of Belgium: A Small Country with a Giant Colonial Legacy — Fexingo History
Belgium's 1897 Congo Museum: Science, Racism, and Empire
In 1897, Belgium opened the Palace of the Colonies in Tervuren, a monumental museum designed to showcase the 'civilizing' achievements of King Leopold II's Congo Free State. This episode takes you inside the museum's creation, its ethnographic collections, and the carefully curated dioramas that presented Congolese people as exotic specimens frozen in time. We explore the role of anthropologists like Édouard de Jonghe, the infamous 'human zoo' that accompanied the 1897 Brussels International Exposition, and the way Congolese art—masks, sculptures, tools—was…
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