Belgium museum wrestles with colonial past, with 40,000 objects tainted with violence

Belgium museum wrestles with colonial past, with 40,000 objects tainted with violence

Brussels’ AfricaMuseum, founded to glorify a brutal project, faces demands for restitution of exquisite treasures stolen from Belgian Congo

For years, the lustrous copper and glass necklace was on display at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, east of Brussels. Reputed to have belonged to a notorious 19th-century trader of enslaved people, it has 10 bright gilded copper beads suspended on silk, with red glass “jewels” on an intricate medallion. But nobody really knew how the jewellery from central Africa came to be in Belgium.

The museum first registered the necklace in 1959. A decade earlier, a Greek resident of the former Belgian Congo tried unsuccessfully to sell it to the museum. He had acquired it from an anonymous Belgian mechanic, who in turn had bought it from a Congolese chief – or so the archives said.

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