Belgians remember colonial past with nostalgia

• The politics of the Congo — then and now —never come into conversations with “exiled” settlers and their former relationship with the colonised is never evoked except in terms of the kindness and good deeds that were extended towards their African servants.
• The rest is wrapped up in nostalgic recollections of the vividness of the colours and smells, the heat, the rainstorms and running barefoot in the luxuriant bush.
• Perhaps it is because of this reluctance to examine their colonial past that it took 40 years for the Belgian government to apologise and offer its sincere regrets to the Congolese people for its role in the assassination in February 1961 of their first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, less than seven months after independence.

My friend Jeanne had flown with me to Nairobi where she had stayed for a couple of days before taking off for Bujumbura to spend Christmas with her family.

It was while waiting for her one morning in the lobby of the Fairview hotel —Nairobi’s country hotel in town, as they like to claim — that I overheard a conversation that raised my hackles.

An elderly white man was alarming a newly arrived tourist and her teenage son with tales of a mysterious bug with no known vaccine that all tourists catch.

He whipped them into a state of panic as they reeled off all the precautions they had taken before breaking into a wide grin and informing them that the bug was called Africa and that once you caught it, you were afflicted for life. My hackles promptly came down and I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

That man could have been describing Belgians who were born in the Congo. It never ceases to astonish me that men and women who left the Congo at its independence never to return, still speak of the place with so much nostalgia and regret.

My elderly neighbour Francine seems only to live in that past, a life she had been forced to abandon and return to Belgium after her husband died.

She speaks of the indignity of having had to earn a living by cleaning offices in order to bring up her two daughters, where once she had been the mistress of a home with many servants.

Vincent, who turned 70 this year, was born on a farm in the Congo, only coming to Belgium as a youth to attend university. His father having been forced to abandon the farm during the civil strife that followed in the wake of Katanga’s attempt at secession under Moïse Tshombe, Vincent never returned.

But during evenings spent in his company, conversation invariably returns to those halcyon days of his youth and each summer he attends a get-together of childhood friends he had made at his boarding school in the Congo.

The politics of the Congo — then and now —never come into conversations with these “exiled” settlers and their former relationship with the colonised is never evoked except in terms of the kindness and good deeds that were extended towards their African servants.

The rest is wrapped up in nostalgic recollections of the vividness of the colours and smells, the heat, the rainstorms and running barefoot in the luxuriant bush.

Perhaps it is because of this reluctance to examine their colonial past that it took 40 years for the Belgian government to apologise and offer its sincere regrets to the Congolese people for its role in the assassination in February 1961 of their first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, less than seven months after independence.

A commission of inquiry set up by the government following the 2001 publication of “The Murder of Lumumba” by Belgian sociologist Ludo De Witte, concluded that “certain ministers and other actors” carried the “moral responsibility” for Lumumba’s death.

But for the family of the late Lumumba — whose remains have never been found — apologies and profound expressions of regret are not enough. Last year his eldest son, François, went to court demanding access to the state’s archives for the period and the trial of those suspected of having been complicit in his father’s assassination.

A much-awaited ruling by the judiciary has recently concluded that Lumumba’s torture and assassination were war crimes committed in the context of the armed conflict between the young Congo state and the secessionist province of Katanga and for which there is no statute of limitations.