Latest / The History of Belgium: A Small Country with a Giant Colonial Legacy — Fexingo History / The 1957 Evere Plane Crash and the Battle for Belgian Memory
Transcript
- Lucas: So today I want to talk about a moment that Belgium has mostly forgotten, but that sits right at the heart of the colonial story. In February 1957, a brand-new DC-7 airliner operated by Sabena came down on the outskirts of Brussels, in the suburb of Evere. Everyone on board was killed, including a group of soldiers and civilians who were coming home from the Belgian Congo. Luna: Hmm, I've never heard of that. What happened? Lucas: The flight had left Léopoldville, the capital of the Belgian Congo, on the morning of February 15. It stopped in Kano, Nigeria, then headed north across the Sahara, over the Mediterranean, and into a heavy fog over Belgium. The pilot made several attempts to land at Brussels' Zaventem airport, but visibility was terrible. On the third approach, the plane clipped some trees and slammed into a farm field just a few hundred meters short of the runway. Luna: That's horrific. How many people were on board? Lucas: Forty-four passengers and nine crew. All fifty-three died. Among them were a dozen soldiers from the Force Publique, the colonial army, who were returning after their service in the Congo. There were also several families — women and children — who had been living in Léopoldville or other cities like Élisabethville and were coming back to Belgium, maybe for good. It was the deadliest aviation disaster in Belgian history at the time. Lucas: And here's what makes it so interesting for us: the crash became a political lightning rod. It forced Belgium to confront, in a very public way, the human cost of its colonial project. The passengers weren't just statistics. They were real people with names, families, and stories that intersected with the broader colonial economy and administration. Luna: Like who? Can you name some of them? Lucas: There was Eugène De Velder, a colonial administrator who had spent twenty years in the Congo and was coming back with his wife and three children to settle in Brussels. There was also a young lieutenant named Kerkhoffs, who had just completed his second tour with the Force Publique and was planning to marry his fiancée in Antwerp. And then there were people like a nurse who had worked in a mission hospital near Kasai, and a mining engineer who had been with Union Minière in Katanga. Lucas: These were the people who built and maintained the colonial system. They were the mid-level functionaries, the technical experts, the young officers — the cogs in the machine. Their deaths, all at once, made the abstract idea of 'the Congo' painfully concrete for the Belgian public. And the government knew it. Luna: I can imagine. So how did the government react? Lucas: They moved quickly to control the narrative. King Baudouin, who was only twenty-six at the time, declared a period of national mourning. A memorial service was held in the cathedral in Brussels, with the royal family in attendance. The government offered compensation to the families, but quietly, and with no public discussion. The bodies were buried in a communal grave at a cemetery in Evere, with a simple monument erected later. Lucas: But here's the thing — the authorities were terrified that the crash would spark debates about colonial policy. They didn't want the deaths to become a symbol of sacrifice or, worse, of waste. So they downplayed the colonial angle in the public mourning. The focus was on 'our brave countrymen' who perished in an accident, not on the fact that they were part of a system that was increasingly under scrutiny. Luna: It sounds like they were trying to bury the colonial question along with the victims. Lucas: Exactly. And it worked, to a degree. The crash barely made it into the history books. But there were always cracks in that silence. For years, families held private vigils at the grave. Some of the survivors' associations kept the memory alive among themselves. And once the Congo crisis exploded in 1960, and Belgium was forced to withdraw, the crash took on a new, bitter resonance. People started to ask: was this a sign? And the answer, from many quarters, was no — it was just an accident. Luna: But you're suggesting it was more than that. Lucas: Well, consider the logistics. The crash was caused by pilot error in bad weather, that's clear. But the broader context was that Belgium was flying its colonial personnel back and forth in record numbers, on new state of the art planes, because the colonial economy was booming. There was a constant rotation of administrators, soldiers, engineers, and families. The disaster was a product of that intense circulation. It wasn't just an accident — it was an accident of empire. Luna: Hmm. So how does this fit with the episodes we've done on the Congo? Lucas: We've talked a lot about the political and military history — the Force Publique, the mutinies, the reformers. But the crash gives us a way into the everyday texture of colonial life. It shows us who was actually going back and forth between Belgium and the Congo, and what the stakes were for them personally. And it reveals a pattern that historians have only recently started to examine: how Belgium has dealt with the memory of its colonial past. Lucas: And that's also where we come in, as a show. We've been doing this for a while now, episode after episode, trying to piece together a more honest picture of Belgium's colonial legacy. We don't run ads, because we think that kind of independence matters. If you want to support that work, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small thing, but it really helps us keep going. Luna: Yeah, and it's a nice way to say thanks without any strings attached. We appreciate everyone who's joined us along the way. Lucas: So back to Evere. The crash also had a direct impact on the families of the victims, and on the colonial administration in Léopoldville. There were rumors that the governor-general wanted to impose stricter travel regulations for colonial employees, but nothing came of it. The flow continued, unabated, until 1960, when independence came crashing down much faster than anyone expected. Luna: I keep thinking about those children on the plane. What happened to the children's remains? Lucas: That's a poignant detail. The crash site was a field near a small village. Local farmers were the first to arrive, and they pulled bodies from the wreckage. Because the plane had broken apart on impact, the bodies were scattered. The children were buried in a separate section of the Evere cemetery, under a plaque that just says 'The Children of February 15.' There's no list of their names, at least not on the public monument. Luna: That's so sad. Their names are lost. Lucas: They're not entirely lost. A local historian in Evere, André Vandewalle, spent years collecting their names from family records and newspaper archives. He published a book in 2007, fifty years after the crash, called 'Evere, 15 février 1957' — and it's the main reason we know about this at all. But his work is largely unknown outside a small circle of aviation buffs and local historians. Luna: So the Belgian state has not exactly been proactive in remembering this. Lucas: No, and that's the point. The official memory of the Congo has always been selective. While the crash was conveniently forgotten, other colonial events were commemorated with pride — the Tervuren exhibition of 1897, which we talked about, the colonial pavilions at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, which happened just a year after the crash. Those were celebrations of empire. The crash was a reminder of its costs, and so it was pushed aside. Luna: But you're saying the crash is actually more telling of the real colonial relationship than the exhibitions. Lucas: I think so. The exhibitions were pageantry, staged for public consumption. The crash was raw, unscripted. It exposed the fragility of the whole enterprise — the fact that thousands of Belgians were risking their lives in a system that was already beginning to crumble. And it also exposed the inequalities: the passengers were mostly Belgians, but there were also a few Congolese on board. They were often described in the press as 'servants' or 'nannies' accompanying European families. Their names are even harder to find today. Luna: Wait, were there actually Congolese passengers? Lucas: Yes. At least three, maybe four. They were likely domestic workers or employees of the colonial administration who were traveling with their employers. In the official death lists, they're often listed only by their first names, or even as 'boy' or 'femme de chambre.' That's how they were recorded. So even in death, the colonial hierarchy persisted. That's a detail that hasn't been fully recovered. Lucas: And that raises a broader question, one that historians are still grappling with: how do we remember the colonized people who were caught up in these events? The crash was a Belgian tragedy, but it was also a Congolese one. For the Congolese families who lost relatives, there was no compensation, no memorial service, nothing. Their losses were invisible to the Belgian state. Luna: So what happened to the crash site itself? Lucas: It's now a residential area. There's a small park with a few trees, and a modest stone marker, about the size of a suitcase, placed there by the city of Evere in 2007. It has a propeller as a symbol, and a simple inscription: 'In memory of the victims of the Sabena crash of February 15, 1957.' No names, no mention of the Congo. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd walk right past it. Luna: And I guess that's actually a bigger lesson about how Belgium deals with its colonial legacy. Lucas: Exactly. The crash is a microcosm of that selective memory. It shows how a nation can choose to forget what is inconvenient, and how the memories of the colonized are often the first to be erased. But it also shows that forgetting is never complete. The families remember. The local historian remembers. And now, we remember too, in our small way. Lucas: There's one more thing that strikes me. In 1957, Belgium was just two years away from the 1958 World's Fair, which was supposed to showcase the wonders of the Congo to the world. The crash was a kind of premonition, a crack in that image. And yet, the fair went ahead, with its famous Congolese village, where people from the Congo were put on display. That was the same year that the crash victims were being buried. The contrast is almost unbearable. Luna: That's so telling. The fair was about projecting power, and the crash was about the reality of loss. Lucas: And the two events were connected in another way. Several of the crash victims had been involved in preparations for the fair — architects, engineers, and even a few artists who were working on the Congolese pavilion. Their deaths meant that the fair's planning was delayed, but it went ahead. So, in a way, the fair was built, literally, on the shoulders of those who had died. But nobody acknowledged that. Luna: I never thought about the human cost behind those exhibits. Lucas: Right. And that's the lesson of Evere. History isn't just about big political decisions or famous figures. It's also about the silent, unrecorded lives that are caught up in the machinery of empire. The crash reminds us that the colonial system was not just about rubber, minerals, and forced labor. It was also about families, hopes, and fears — on both sides of the color line. Lucas: So here's a question for us to end on: when we say 'colonial legacy,' what do we mean? Do we mean the buildings, the statues, the archives? Or do we also mean the graves, the silences, the names we can't recover? I think the crash pushes us toward the latter. Luna: That's a good way to put it. The grave in Evere is the real monument to the colonial era, not the Tervuren palace. Lucas: And maybe that's the most honest legacy we can pursue. Thanks for sticking with us through this deep dive. And if you want to support what we do, you know the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. We'll be back next time with another story from the archives.