Mémoire Coloniale
IN PREPARATION
18 October 2008 will be an important date in the history of colonisation. A century ago, on 18 October 2008, King Leopold II transferred his private property on part of Central Africa to Belgium.
Belgian’s colonisation of the Congo lasted 52 years, from 1908 to 1960. Colonial images tell of the white man’s epic. They are an ode to the pioneers and the builders who developed the road and railway infrastructures, the waterways, the hospitals, the schools and the barracks and who especially industrialised the heart of Africa in order to extract the mining riches essential to the home country’s economy and to that of the western world.
Colonial archives are the memory of that period and its ideology. They were works of propaganda and served the conquest and to submitting entire peoples in the name of civilisation and evangelisation. The images tell us of an essential page in 19th and 20th century world history. This colonial memory describes the unbelievable domineering epic of the white man in his conquest for empires and his will for power.
The ideology of these colonial documents convey the idea of the savage that needs to be educated, evangelised and put to work in plantations and for big industrial companies. It was done with the “civilising” desire whose slogan was “educate to serve” and with faith in Christian and Western values, the only ones able to save Africa from its obscurantist and fetishist practices.
This “colonial memory” shows the arrogant violence of the conquerors while its commentators talk, by the absurd, of servitude and humiliation. Putting these archives into perspective is also a way of going back to a page of our memory and, through its vision of Africa, a way of reflecting the colonising West and Belgium itself.
Through a play of montage, the film will go back over this filmed history with its avowed objectives and hidden aims and the insidious ideology of discrimination. The images are tragic as well as brutal, shocking, funny, lyrical and disdainful. Seen with historic distance, they speak for themselves, even though an African voice will whisper the other point of view and the suffering and oppression left unspoken.
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