Settler Colonialism

A Belgian woman arrived at the Guest House last night at around 9pm. She was born in Kinshasa in 1957; her father was an executive at Unilever. Her family returned to Belgium in 1960 when Congo became independent. This is the first time she has been back. This is her husband’s first visit to Congo as well. His great-grandfather, whose letters are still in his family, joined the Force Publique, the Belgian colonial occupation militia, in 1888.

Pretty much every Belgian person has similar personal connections to Congo. At independence (and I may have already put this information on the blog), there were more than 100,000 Belgians in Congo. This was about 1% of the Congo’s population, and even a larger percentage of Belgium’s population. If there were 100,000 here at that moment, the number of Belgians who had spent time here was even higher. The white population was concentrated in a relatively small number of regions and neighborhoods; it was an apartheid system. People here still point out to me the neighborhoods where they were not allowed after sundown. It is not unlike Miami Beach up through the 1960s.

This morning I showed my graduate students, Apocalypse Now Redux, which is the restored version of the original. It was the first time I have seen this version. One of the added scenes has Willard (Martin Sheen) and his crew showing up at 70-year-old French colonial plantation in the middle of North Vietnam during the US war. The family, which is defending the plantation with arms, welcomes the Americans as “allies.” (Nonetheless, their tally of those they have killed includes six Americans.) After being asked, “Why do you stay here?” a settler, himself unable to understand the US’s interest, eventually replies, “It belongs to us.”