Reading this week:

• Stories from Sierra Leone by Farid Raymond Anthony

Ha! You thought our vacation was over but SIKE! My super amazing wife and I decided to spend a day (like 1.5 days) in Brussels, Belgium. That was great.

I of course got to go that one other time, but my super amazing wife hadn’t been, so a) I got to act like I was a big expert on Brussels and b) she picked how we were going to spend the day. I hinted that I would be perfectly happy to visit the Royal Museum for Central Africa again, you know, if she wanted to see all the stuff as well, but alas, she was much too kind and allowed us to go elsewhere since I had already been to the museum. But someday man I will spend more time in those archives.

Arriving in the Brussels airport after a couple short hops in various airplanes, we hauled our mass of luggage onto the train and headed downtown. We proceeded to be those obnoxious tourists hauling our wheeled suitcases over cobblestone streets looking for the place we were staying, but survived intact. We then spent the afternoon and early evening wandering around Brussels seeing exactly how many different chocolate shops we could visit, and eventually fortified ourselves with the obligatory waffles. The serious museum-going would happen the next day.

The first of these serious museums was the Fashion & Lace Museum. It was smaller than I expected and seemed to be split into two parts: fashion, and lace. We did the fashion bit first. When we visited it was entirely an exhibit (the first) on the fashion designer Jules François Crahay. That was good. His stuff wouldn’t exactly fit my silhouette but I liked it a lot. Looking back through the photos he seemed to have a particular shape he favored but definitely experimented over the long course of his career. He also seemed to be a fan of playing around with different textiles. Maybe he tended to default to black and white (which designer doesn’t) but he explored some wild colors and patterns, and then even in black and white multiple layers could give a great effect.

After the fashion part we then descended back down to ground level and entered the lace room. This was not so easy to navigate for us (in the figurative sense) because nothing was in English but it was impressive even without explanation. The Shetland lace is amazing for being knitted and so fine, but this stuff focuses on fine-ness to the nth degree. They had one video on loop of someone putting together lace with dozens of little bobbins and pins and I can’t fathom how you even keep all that straight. They had examples on display from at least the 18^th century and just imagine trying to do that without even particularly good lighting.

Textile arts out of the way, it was now time for Brussels’ other claim to fame: chocolate. Choco Story Brussels is a trip man. It is clearly set up for tourists. Like the admission fee is tourist prices and the first few rooms has that particular Disney-fied hokeyness to it. It tells the story of chocolate, and particularly chocolate’s introduction to Europe and the industry that took off there (even more specifically in Brussels). I do not recall them being too particularly interested in say colonialism or exploitative labor practices. On the labor front though they do have live demonstrations of praline-making. It was only here that my super amazing wife and I learned that a praline was specifically a soft filling (called the praliné) coated in chocolate. We had thought it was just a fancy word for a chocolate.

But back to the weirdest aspect of the museum. As you wind your way upstairs you discover that the museum has to have what is one of the most extensive collections of chocolate-related artifacts anywhere? It was astounding and somehow very much not the focus of the museum? Like okay sure they had them on display, cabinets and cabinets of ancient Mayan and Aztec (and even more ancient!) chocolate-related vessels, but they are all just sorta off to the side? In the more European section you pass entire hallways lined floor-to-ceiling with chocolate pots, which I didn’t even know was a thing? There has got to be just gobs of scholarship possible at this museum and instead they got mannequins harvesting fake cacao pods. They do give you some chocolate though, that’s nice.

Which then finally brings us to the Magritte Museum. Last time I was in Brussels I tried and failed to go, but armed with much more knowledge about how the museum works this time everything went perfectly smoothly. It was nice! Magritte had some good stuff of course. In the museum you wind your way up through a history of his works, and they also occasionally paired his work with contemporary art and I suppose that was an interesting juxtaposition. Like everyone else I was entranced when Magritte uses sky-filled negative space, though now I particularly want to put a painting of a slice of pie underneath a glass cake stand, for real.

An um yeah that was it. Besides all the museums we spent the time in Brussels getting dinner with a friend of ours and checking out places like Tropismes and generally just having a blast getting our feet very tired walking around a European city. We are so lucky to live a life that lets us do that. But all good things have to take a bit of a pause at least, and so the next morning we left for the airport bright and early, our vacation finally over. I can’t wait for next time.

Reading this week:

• Tales from the Dark Continent edited by Charles Allen
• Journey into Africa by James McCarthy

Having stumbled out of the Royal Museum for Central Africa and into the daylight (well into the overcast skies), I proceeded to make my way into Brussels proper. Since the trolley out to the museum was undergoing maintenance, this involved a bus ride to the metro station and then a lovely metro ride into the city center. Except I didn’t really mean to go into the city center, that was too far, I meant to go to the city edge because there was supposed to be a yarn store which I was going to check out on behalf of my super amazing wife, but then I couldn’t find it which made yarn hunting feel a bit demoralizing so trying to figure out what else to do in Brussels I went to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts! Oh also there was an accordion player on the metro when I was riding it. When we were in Spain (which I will write about later) there was an accordion player on the metro and now here I was in Belgium with a metro-bound accordion player so I assume this is a European thing?

The first thing to know about the Royal Museums of Fine Arts is that “Museums” is plural. I did not realize this for quite a while and it made the whole experience rather bewildering. Not helping was the fact that I entered the place about two hours before closing and I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to see every single piece of fine art within that time and by golly I wanted to get my money’s worth. So I beat through the crowds and rushed over to the ticket machine and got what I thought was a general entry ticket to the singular Museum which noted what I thought was just a special exhibit: IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism. Ticket in hand I wandered off to the first exhibit I thought might be interesting to see, the Magritte Museum.

I found the Magritte Museum (what I at that time thought was the Magritte exhibit) and first had to figure out how to work the lockers so I could store the bag of Belgian chocolates I got for my super amazing wife at the behest of the friend I came to Belgium to see. With that done I got into the rather long line for the Magritte exhibit and waited and waited and finally got to the front where you scan your ticket only for my ticket to not work. Because it was actually a ticket for the surrealism exhibit, and the docent eventually told me that I had to go to that exhibit and couldn’t come into the Magritte exhibit. Stressed and put out, I went down to the surrealism exhibit, only to come across another barrier. Besides my time limit and being bewildered, the other off-putting thing about the museum was that every single other tourist there was as confused and bewildered as I was, so here I was trying to get into an actual exhibit to see some actual art in this museum only to find another tourist arguing with the docent there and it took a while. I mean maybe like 2 minutes but I was stressed! I just wanted some culture! And I was very annoyed at not being able to see any Magrittes in this town where Magritte lived! I didn’t even want to see any Magrittes before I came to Brussels but now that I was here I wanted to see some Magrittes and I had been thwarted! The whole thing was very annoying! But eventually I got into IMAGINE! and it turns out it had a pretty good chunk of Magrittes anyway.

I really liked the one above, “The Dominion of Light.” I have a cousin who told us once proudly that she knew she had good taste because everything she likes turns out to be expensive. In that case I have really great taste because another one in the series sold for £59.4 million. I think I like what everyone else likes about it, the paradox that makes you work hard to try to understand it. Plus he paints really good. Pretty big plus if you’re a surrealist.

A few other works jumped out at me. Having been to the Dalí Museum, I find it fun to see a Dalí anywhere else. Like, you’re a Dalí! You should be in the Dalí Museum! That’s where Dalís go! Of course that is silly but that is the way my brain works so it is extra surreal to see the surrealist elsewhere. My two absolute favorite pieces in the surrealist exhibit however were in a section that gave you a little warning that some topics might be sensitive for particular viewers. They meant sex, sex is the topic that might be sensitive. The first was the sculpture? object? in the gallery on the left by Mimi Parent. A whip made out of two braids of hair, two pigtails, is pretty provocative, but then you title it “Mistress” and man (woman?) that is the height of wit. I loved it. The other probably wouldn’t have been so great on its own, Duchamp putting a boob on a book, but the museum itself managed to put together just an absolutely exquisite meta-artwork by taking a sculpture titled “Please Touch” and putting it under glass.

Full of surrealism I now had an hour left before the museums closed. What to do? I had already paid I think €18.50 to see the surrealists, and I was in a bit of a huff that didn’t cover the entire museum, did I really want to pay another €10 to see more stuff when I only had an hour? I waffled but eventually decided that art is priceless and got a ticket (correctly, this time) to see what I thought was the actual Fine Arts museum itself but now reading the website I realize is the Old Masters Museum. It was still not smooth sailing from here, because first I had to confirm what ticket I needed, and then wait in line for that, and then try to enter only to be told I needed to recheck my chocolate bag because I had retrieved it, and that being accomplished I was then once again in a line behind other bewildered tourists, and the poor docent who must be at least trilingual and is therefore very impressive was trying to explain to the bewildered tourist what to do while other tourists were skipping the line which annoyed me and the lady in front of me but we eventually got there, we figured it out, I entered the museum, and admired some old masters.

Old masters are not normally really my style. I probably waffle on that but like religious iconography just doesn’t really vibe with me. Maybe if I knew more Christian lore it would but I don’t. Plus I was annoyed by the whole process of getting in the door so it took me a bit to settle down and what really did it for me was going into the Bruegel room. It wasn’t a huge collection but the neatest part (for me) was the two different versions of “The Numbering at Bethlehem” but Bruegel I and Bruegel II. Kinda fun to paint the same painting as your old man just to prove you got the chops. I assume that is what he was doing, I don’t know. They weren’t directly next to each other so you had to shuffle between the two to take in the pair, but overall I thought it was pretty neat and it chilled me out enough to really examine the rest of the artwork in a levelheaded manner.

Of the rest of the paintings the one that really caught my attention was “The Art Lover’s Gallery,” which was displayed just sorta tucked away in a hallway. It wasn’t a major focal point of the collection but it had exactly the thing to appeal to me: an astrolabe. I noticed that the dudes in the frilly collars had a whole set of navigational instruments and man do I love navigational instruments. Plus the room is decorated in a way I would like to decorate, choc-a-bloc with paintings and other curiosities. I had almost walked away when I realized too that my astrolabe tunnel vision kept me from noticing the black boy that looks to be maybe a servant wandering in with tea? I’m not sure. But since this painting is from 1621 there is a whole world to be unearthed just from his presence in the painting. Unfortunately I did not have the time and do not have the knowhow to unearth that world, but it was a pretty neat way to end my time in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts.

The timeline of the official date of this post and of subsequent posts aren’t going to make a lick of sense but that is what happens when I am behind on writing and I feel bad about it. But anyway for undisclosed reasons I recently found myself in Brussels for a day. I had a friend to see and I wouldn’t ever tell her this but she was actually only my second priority for the day, the first priority being seeing the Royal Museum for Central Africa!

I learned about the museum from Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost (available in the gift shop). He does not exactly speak highly of the museum in the book, but given it is a repository of so many artifacts from central Africa (and more specifically the DRC, Rwanda, and Burundi), I wanted to go, trusting myself to contextualize what I was seeing appropriately. Since the publication of King Leopold’s Ghost, and possibly spurred on by it, the museum closed down for five years between 2013 and 2018 to rethink and revamp its collections and displays, and Adam Hochschild had a chance to revisit it, which he wrote about in The Atlantic. In the article Adam describes taking “one of Europe’s loveliest urban journeys” to the museum via the trolly. I was so excited to see the museum that I took a slightly different path, going to the museum via the bus straight from the airport (still an extremely lovely trip). I think I was the very first guest in the museum that day.

I knew the museum had been revamped and had reopened in 2018, so was hoping that it would embrace more modern views of what this sort of institution ought to be. After entering the museum the very first exhibit I saw was “Rethinking Collections,” and the very first artifact I saw in that very first exhibit was the dude above. A more proper name for this dude is “a kitumba sculpture stolen by the Belgian tradesman Alexandre Delcommune from the Congolese chief Ne Kuko” (okay full disclosure the very first artifact you actually see is in the hallway to that exhibit, which is this extremely cool pirogue) (as a second parenthetical I was going to call the pirogue “potentially problematic” and alliteration aside that applies to every artifact so I am going to skip it generally). There is of course a sign next to the kitumba sculpture and I was worried about the tone it was setting. The sign notes that Ne Kuko asked Delcommune for the statue back, and Delcommune refused. The sign then notes that a descendant of Ne Kuko has asked for the statue back more recently, but that the museum hadn’t given it back then either. Then the story on the sign ends, leaving me wondering, you know, why the heck they didn’t give it back. Maybe I missed it in the exhibit itself but it wasn’t until I was able to review the museum’s page on the statue (linked above), where they note that “there is still no legal framework for the restitution of objects and human remains,” explaining why they still have it.

I am in many ways very sympathetic to this excuse, being a dedicated government bureaucrat myself, and if I was a museum administrator that would kind of be the end of the story for me. But as a society that excuse is awfully thin. Laws are all made up, you know? We can just change them. Returning to the moment in the exhibit, I was just left with a sign that said they had turned down requests for restitution twice, which wasn’t encouraging. The purpose of the “Rethinking Collections exhibit was to ask “How do we trace the origin of collections? What new insights can be gleaned from these provenances? And what should become of such collections, within and beyond museum walls?” For this visitor at least it missed the mark a bit, but as Adam Hochschild pointed out in his Atlantic article, these signs in this museum are the result of compromises. As we evolve maybe we’ll get closer to a better answer.

Having gone through that exhibit, I finally went upstairs into the main building itself (you enter through an annex and then go through an underground hallway). The building was first opened in 1910, purpose-built for this museum, and it is constructed as like a palace to display the grandeur of Belgian colonialism. Let me tell ya it is certainly awe-inducing. I was overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the collection. The picture above is just one small corner and I think it would take days to give every artifact its due consideration. It’s in a big square, with two layers of rooms, and I chose to go through the museum counter-clockwise. This had me starting with the I guess you would say ethnographic portions of the museum. As you can see above and below these displays are chock full of artifacts collected during the colonial era, and reflect the western interest in the more “exotic” aspects of the Congo basin cultures the colonialists were encountering.

I had been familiar with much of the sorts of types of objects on display, having done my reading and visited places like the Smithsonian Museum for African Art. The nkisi mangaaka I actually recognized from the book Kongo: Power and Majesty, which my super amazing mother-in-law had given me for Christmas last year, so that was a bit like seeing a celebrity in person. However a whole category of objects I had no idea existed were what the museum called “currency in the shape of throwing knives.” There is a spectrum I think between actual throwing knives and currency in the shape of throwing knives, but some examples are below. They had even more elaborate versions but those did not photograph well on my smart phone camera so you are left with these ones that I think are slightly closer to the “actual throwing knives” part of the spectrum, but not by far (there’s also a ceremonial axe). The sheer artistry of the metalwork in these knives (along with, you know, every single other metal object in the museum) is overwhelming and extremely cool and I dunno man if I was a young bride-to-be in Congo I think I would want my husband to come up with some of these things in order to bond our families together, you know? They had some really nice hoes as well but you also gotta throw in some of these knives man. They’re so cool.

One of the more impressive things which I did not expect to see (besides the knives) were several gigantic maps of central Africa, depicting various aspects of Belgian colonial interests. I used a selfie in the picture below to try to give you some sense of scale, but man it doesn’t hit. These things are huge. The building itself is huge, with 50-foot ceilings (or something like that, they are TALL), and these maps go from nearly the floor to nearly the ceiling. The one above depicts the routes various European travelers took through Africa (you should be able to see Cameron and Livingstone labelled above). Others depicted political boundaries or natural resources. As a man who likes maps (i.e. I guess a man), these were about the mappiest maps you could map. They were scattered throughout the building and provided impressive backdrops to the displays.

If I recall correctly, the displays the particular map above were backdropping were, fittingly, about the various horrors of colonialism. It is quite the mix of artifacts. I was excited to spot a sextant and then a little stunned to discover it was owned by Stanley. I have read about Stanley a lot and he seems almost not real. Then you come across an actual object he used, one I’m familiar with. That same feeling went for the objects below associated with Tippu Tip. Tippu Tip! When I was in Zanzibar we went to a Chinese restaurant that I later think I figured out what in Tippu Tip’s old house, which doesn’t help make the man seem real. My super amazing wife and I have been to Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca (I will write about that eventually), and you know that’s fake, and so I guess Tippu Tip’s house felt the same? But here you have a necklace supposedly owned by him (link in the caption for more details), and a dagger owned by his son. The actions of Tippu Tip and his fellows was used to justify so many of the actions of the Europeans took in Africa that again he is much larger than life, too large to have been real, and yet here is his stuff. Lest the section is entirely the Big Man theory of history, it also gets down to more of the brass tacks of colonialism. They have several examples of the hippo-hide chicottes (whips) on display, along with photos of the horrors inflicted on the people of the Congo.

The next part of the museum was about the natural resources in central Africa:

Another criticism of this and similar museums as an institution that I hadn’t thought about too deeply until I read the Atlantic article is the fact that people, animals, and geology are all lumped together into a single museum. This is not a pattern that is replicated in museums about more “western” subjects, with western peoples getting their own museums separate from western animals and western geology. The Royal Museum addresses this a little bit obliquely, in some signs about the “crocodile room” (pictured above). They’ve preserved the crocodile room to look like it would closer to 1910, meant to catalogue all the items under Belgian colonial rule, both natural and man-made. The paintings lining the upper parts of the walls are also meant to depict an idealized Congo, peaceful and prosperous.

That being said it was neat to see the different animals and shells. Some of the more interesting things for me (pictured above) were a tilapia (because we’re big tilapia fans around here), along with shells named after various famous British travelers in Africa. One oversight I noticed is they neglected to include (as far as I could tell) any examples of the most important specimens, my main man Ed Hore’s Tiphobia horei. Later on they also had examples of more robust fauna:

Also notable in this general section was a whole room dedicated to the mineral resources of the country. They had discussions on the some of the political implications of the exploitation of these minerals from the DRC, but as these rocks sit there sterile on a shelf it is hard to imagine the suffering they can help perpetuate:

The focus of the section on the natural resources of the Congo was the “paradox” it creates, where DRC is sitting on trillions of dollars worth of minerals and other resources and yet still remains poor due to exploitation. The section had a long discussion on what those resources are and how they have been exploited and what resources the Congolese people themselves use. As can be seen from the ivory bust of King Leopold below, that all is put in stark terms.

In the second half of the museum, which I didn’t really get great pictures of because at this point I was exhausted just from the sheer scale and trying to see it all, the exhibits turned towards the more modern eras of the Congo and its relationship to Belgium. A particularly interesting section talked about the Congolese diaspora in Belgium post-independence, and another highlighted the relationships between traditional music and modern-day Rumba. But the single most powerful section trying to address the modern and historical relationship of Belgium and the Congo was in the rotunda.

The Grand Rotunda of the museum was designed (like the rest of it), to showcase the glory and what have you of the Belgian empire. Besides being a gigantic and impressive room, it features four gilded bronze sculptures by Arsène Matton. The sculptures represent a colonial vision, with the Belgians presented (according to the sign) “as if there had been no civilization beforehand… African women are sexualized. An Arabo-Swahili slave trader tramples a Congolese who tries to protect his wife. It is clichéd colonial propaganda, but it is still effective more than a century later.” Apparently “the statues in the niches are part of the protected heritage building and may not be removed.” Like I said above the legal excuse I think is a pretty thin one but in this case it meant the museum was forced to be a little more creative in how it addressed the statues.

The art project they have done instead is called RE/STORE, and for it “the museum invited Congolese artist Aimé Mpane to create a project that would serve as a counterweight.” The result are these translucent banners hung in front of the statues that speak to them and provide an alternative vision of colonial-era Congo, one where there is civilization and the horrors of colonialism aren’t excused. I thought it was really cool how instead of just acting as a counterweight the banners really speak to and respond to the statues themselves for a super stunning effect, and is a great example of how to communicate with these previous idioms of how we view our relationships with other peoples.

And that was my visit to the Royal Museum for Central Africa. The place is far from perfect but they seem to be trying, and I hope we can put in place in the near future the institutions needed to bring some justice to the colonial relationship with Africa. Everyone should be able to see the treasures the museum holds, especially the people that should rightfully own them.