Ambiance Eyenga.

This piece from mid-June explains one reason why Black Lives Matter reaches all the way to Belgium -- a very solid reason, in fact:

"A renewed global focus on racism is highlighting a violent colonial history that generated riches for Belgians but death and misery for Congolese."

Later that month:

King Philippe of Belgium on Tuesday expressed his “deepest regrets” for his country’s brutal past in a letter to the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the first public acknowledgment from a member of the Belgian royal family of the devastating human and financial toll during eight decades of colonization.

The king’s letter, issued on the 60th anniversary of Congo’s independence, acknowledged the historical legacy and pointed out continuing issues of racism and discrimination, though it stopped short of the apology that some, including the United Nations, had asked for.

Among the legacies of Belgium's colonial experience called rightly into question is the "official" museum in Brussels, which has struggled to rebrand in recent years.

"Belgium’s revamped Africa Museum is a magnificently bizarre hybrid."

In Congo itself, it's perhaps surprising that there'd be a city with 100 surviving Art Deco structures. We harbor so many misconceptions about Africa. One is size; Congo is 3.5 times larger than Texas, and that's huge. It is striking, and also slightly puzzling, that some people in Bukavu view the legacy of these buildings as something worthy of protection. Maybe they view it in the context of cultural education. In spite of what I've been told the past few days, history is important.

The Art Deco Capital of Central Africa, by Carly Lunden (Atlas Obscura)

In Bukavu, beautiful buildings have an ugly colonial history. But locals want to save them.

... Bukavu has more than 100 Art Deco buildings. Walking through its streets, you see geometric lines, chevron motifs, stepped rectangles, curved walls with cylindrical roofs. But most of these structures, with the notable exception of the Cathedral, are now dusty and beginning to crumble. “People used to call this city the ‘Switzerland of Congo,’” says Pierre Mpemba, 55, a local historian. “We were known for all these beautiful buildings. But that’s disappearing.”

Too often, this architectural history is forgotten in a city that outsiders associate with endangered gorillas, Africa’s First World War, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege, and the ongoing presence of humanitarian agencies and UN peacekeepers.

Beginning in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, Art Deco symbolized modernism, the technological future, the “machine age.” All clean and curved lines, geometric shapes, bright colors and glamour, the style was meant to signal wealth and sophistication. As it spread from Europe to places that Europeans colonized, it also symbolized and beautified imperial domination, according to scholars such as Swati Chattopadyay in the Routeledge Companion to Art Deco ...

"Belgium’s revamped Africa Museum is a magnificently bizarre hybrid."

“Colonialism as a system of governance is now considered immoral, authoritarian, racist, based on military occupation and exploitation.”
-- Guido Gryseels

I'm an unrepentant fan of most things Belgian, including beer, food, beercycling and the invention of the saxophone; in a pinch, you can even throw in Jean Claude Van Damme, who was born in Brussels in 1960, 70-odd days after me (in New Albany).

However, the story of Belgium's colonial experience is sad and instructive. It cannot be repeated often enough. King Leopold is one of those nasty historical figures best forgotten, except doing so would risk burying the complete story of his genocidal reign in the Congo.

King Leopold and "The Horrors of Belgium's Congo."

I was unaware that the Royal Museum for Central Africa had undergone an ideological refit. During two or three of my visits to Belgium, I was within range, but wasn't able to seek it out.

Next time, maybe it will be possible.

The struggle to tell the story of colonialism: Belgium’s revamped Africa Museum is a magnificently bizarre hybrid (The Economist)

It is a magnificently bizarre hybrid. Still officially called the Royal Museum for Central Africa, but better known as the Africa Museum, it cannot help but ooze colonial triumphalism, despite recent protestations of egalitarian diversity. Housed in a majestic purpose-built palace 20 minutes’ drive east of Brussels, it stands above a lake amid parkland. Immaculate gravel paths sweep around the site. However radically the interior may have been refashioned to reflect new attitudes to Africa, the grandeur of King Leopold II’s design and the fervour of his desire to promote his imperial venture into the continent’s heart still overwhelm the visitor. The monarch ruled Congo as a private estate nearly 80 times bigger than his European homeland from 1885 until a year before his death in 1909; his double-l motif is embossed on almost every wall and above many an alcove.

Short of knocking the entire edifice flat, the museum’s current regime, run since 2001 by Guido Gryseels, a 66-year-old agricultural expert, has spent the past five years behind closed doors seeking to put a modern imprint on an irredeemably archaic structure. It reopens on December 9th. “We’ll be criticised on both sides,” predicts Mr Gryseels, who, like many modern museum bosses, is perforce a canny diplomat. “For not going far enough and for being too politically correct” ...

Lieber Führer visits NAHA, Eiffel Tower: "We're from the government and we're here to help ... ourselves."

Those words in the header are more terrifying than the Gauleiter's sweater, but when you're pulling down the big money, the sty's the limit.

Click this search link  for NA Confidential's observations about the public housing takeover and subsequent colonial administration, in reverse chronological order: New Albany Housing Authority.

Meanwhile, New Albany's corporeal attorney is examining a burning question: Is the city allowed to charge a shit load of pith helmets to its TIF One card, or must campaign donors foot the bill? 

#FireGahan2019

Even as we foresee the Champs-Ély-Jéffrey, Berlin "contends with street names of a brutal, overlooked past."

As we know, it isn't about street names alone. The recent trials and tribulations of Confederate statuary in Louisville are well documented.

Statue removal? Yes, the Civil War was about slavery -- and I'm just fine with tracing it all the way back to the Founders. Now, let's all go read a book.

LEO Weekly's current annual "fake" issue eloquently addresses the point.

Castleman Statue Replaced With Muhammad Ali Punching A Klansman Statue

Now defaced twice, the John B. Castleman statue, which for many represents the worst of Jim Crow America’s whitewashing, has been removed and replaced by a statute of the Double Greatest punching a member of the KKK in the dick.

As for Berlin, you're sentenced to the personal chronology.

Lenin's head finally is located, and will be displayed in Berlin.

The story of the toppled 60-foot tall statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that formerly stood in East Berlin where the Volkspark Friedrichshain (extant) faced Leninplatz (defunct) is such a central part of my personal travel mythology that I've long since abandoned any effort to be rational about it.

Lenin's statue came down, but Karl-Mark-Allee remains. As CityLab's reporter notes (below), Berlin has purged itself of reminders as they pertain to Communism and Fascism, but not pre-WWI Marxism.

In New Albany, we have a few heroic amphitheater plaques, but no sculptural paeans to ward-heelers past -- at least not yet. Ill-advised anchors proliferate like toxic weeds, and they serve the same purpose as a red star; someday we'll be compelled to scrub them clean, while remaining vigilant to the DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party's future plan to name a roundabout after Herr Duggins.

Back in Berlin, there's this little matter of a colonial legacy most have forgotten.

Berlin Contends With Street Names of a Brutal, Overlooked Past, by Feargus O'Sullivan (CityLab)

 ... Germany’s grim colonial record was characterized by incredible levels of cruelty, exploitation, and violence. Under German rule in what is now Namibia, for example, the country’s forces pursued a campaign of wholesale land grabs, enslavement, forced labor, and rape. Facing organized resistance from indigenous people, the Germans quashed opposition by pursuing genocide against the region’s Herero and Namaqua people. Between 1904 and 1907, the Germans intentionally confined their opponents within a waterless desert, launching attacks on them during which, according to official orders, women and children were not spared.

Many thousands more died of disease, starvation, and violence in concentration camps, where mortality rates reached as high as 74 percent. This created an overall death toll of between 34,000 and 110,000 deaths, and a system of murder that—with its concentration camps and medical experiments on prisoners—clearly foreshadowed the Holocaust.

Three people involved in this process are still commemorated in Berlin’s African Quarter. Adolf Lüderitz and Gustav Nachtigal, who first acquired the land for Germany’s southwest African colony on a fraudulent contract, still have a street and a square apiece. Around the corner is an avenue commemorating Carl Peters, a notoriously brutal colonist in East Africa who committed psychopathic acts of violence and was known by locals as “Mkono Wa Damu”—bloody hands.

SNIP

This debate is familiar to cities and countries everywhere, with the result being called in both directions. In the U.S., it’s about monuments and street names associated with the Confederacy. In the U.K., a campaign to remove an Oxford statue of African colonist and diamond trader Cecil Rhodes sparked a similar debate two winters ago, with the statue nonetheless remaining in place. On the European mainland, Poland’s removal of communist-associated place names continued into this decade, while Spain’s attempts to remove names associated with Francisco Franco are ongoing—and by no means unanimously accepted.

In Berlin, recent history makes it difficult to sustain the argument that such names can remain to reflect history, rather than endorse it. The city has already changed so many names associated with Nazis and Soviets (albeit retaining names associated with Marxism). To draw the line at colonialism, whose effects were similarly catastrophic for its victims, would suggest a double standard that would be hard to justify, and harder to stomach. While the replacement names have not yet been confirmed, Berliners living in the area could soon find themselves waking up on Rudolf-Manga-Bell-Strasse or Maji-Maji-platz very soon.

King Leopold and "The Horrors of Belgium's Congo."

My affection for Belgium and the Belgians precludes overt flippancy, but it does not prevent an honest examination of King Leopold's legacy.

It's not a pretty sight, and it's hard not to be scathing about it. It helps to know that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was derived from the Belgian colonial subjugation of the Congo.

European royalty boasts its fair share of rogues and scoundrels, but as a dismal human being, Leopold truthfully was in another league. His personal Congolese wealth-extraction mechanism cost the lives of 10 million persons, and in many respects the Congo hasn't ever recovered from it.

Last week I watched a documentary, described here.

The Horrors of Belgium's Congo, by Manohla Dargis (New York Times)

A latecomer to colonialism, King Leopold II of Belgium searched the world for a satellite to call his very own, finally finding his prey in the Congo region of Africa. Hiding his greed behind the twinned fictions of charity and philanthropy, the king entered the Congo with the help of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley and quickly strong-armed tribal chiefs into signing away their future. Soon after, representatives from Europe and the United States delivered the region -- renamed the Congo Free State, later Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of Congo -- into Leopold's rapacious care.

The ghastly story of Leopold's reign of terror in Africa during the late 19th- and early-20th centuries forms the subject of the documentary "Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death," from the British filmmaker Peter Bate.

It's not for the squeamish.

Many Americans first became aware of this through a book.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998) is a best-selling popular history book by Adam Hochschild that explores the exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908, as well as the atrocities that were committed during that period.[1] In doing so, the book aimed to increase public awareness of these Belgian colonial crimes,[citation needed] successfully as it turned out.

It was refused by nine of the 10 U.S. publishing houses to which an outline was submitted, but became an unexpected bestseller and won the prestigious Mark Lynton History Prize for literary style. It also won the 1999 Duff Cooper Prize. By 2013 more than 600,000 copies were in print in a dozen languages.

The book is the basis of a 2006 documentary film of the same name, directed by Pippa Scott and narrated by Don Cheadle.

I may or may not watch this second documentary. To be sure, there are heroes in this story; primarily journalists and missionaries, who adopted the simple expedient of telling the truth.

History. It really does matter.

ON THE AVENUES: Should the Queen fail to rescue us, there's always H. L. Mencken.

ON THE AVENUES: Should the Queen fail to rescue us, there's always H. L. Mencken.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Last autumn an American wrote to the Queen of England, requesting that she take back the colonies in the event of a Donald Trump presidency.

The office of Elizabeth II actually made a reply, politely noting that it isn’t her habit to interfere in the affairs of sovereign states, something that might come as a shock to Argentina and Iraq, to name just two.

Inevitably, this real-life exchange morphed into a satirical Internet rendering of the Queen’s earnest promise to intervene, which immediately metastasized into widespread on-line gullibility, necessitating a rebuttal by Snopes.

By the time Snopes was finished snooping, hundreds of thousands of Americans were equating Englishness with ISIS-ness, and rushing fully armed (and uninsured) to our border with Canada, since almost none of them grasp that one cannot drive to London from Mississippi.

Perhaps I’m the only observer who made a cup of black tea with milk, inserted Oasis’ “Definitely Maybe” into the CD player, sat on my divan, and started thinking about what a fine idea it would be for the United States to resume colonial status.

Knowing this action is unlikely does not diminish the pleasure of daydreaming, and after all, there’s another way.

This occurred to me last week, while watching an old BBC documentary about the life of the poet T. S. Eliot, who was born into a factory-owning family in St. Louis, but got better.

(Eliot) immigrated to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there. He was eventually naturalized as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship.

My knowledge of Eliot’s life is far too scant to venture an opinion as to why being a mere expatriate was insufficient. However, this passage from his poem “Little Gidding” resonates.

What we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

As non-native Americans, we came to the United States from a variety of places, reflecting myriad circumstances. Obviously, the journey of an African slave was far different from that of my German ancestors.

Still, it can be asserted that as violent, incomplete and messy as the American experiment has been, and in spite of the utterances of the many under-educated dullards currently dotting our degraded landscape, the ultimate point remains: We, as Americans, agree to a contract stipulating our citizenship not through ethnic, religious or financial litmus tests, but by acceptance of certain points of governmental order, as expressed in the Constitution.

In turn, whatever their merits, these points of governmental order arose as post-traumatic manifestations of our colonial experience. Many of them were borrowed from the British. Others were intended as revolutionary improvements. Some were smudged and fudged, requiring adjustments further down the line – as with the American Civil War.

In my view, there has tended to be a measure of hypocrisy with regard to American citizenship. Almost from the beginning, those already established here have tended to divide the planet’s human population into reputable and unsavory potential arrivals, seeking to welcome the former and prohibit the latter.

As it pertains to those fortunate enough to be accepted, we see nothing unusual about their renunciation of citizenship, and in fact celebrate their good taste in domiciles.

However, I suspect an American like Eliot, who chose to reject Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill and become a citizen of the former colonial overlord, was regarded as a turncoat or traitor.

It has been 240 years, but to me this notion of an American choosing to be British is the most profound conversion of all, far outweighing “born again” religious embraces, precisely because it symbolizes the discarding of a rote pledge of allegiance to a cloth flag, in favor of kneeling at the feet of pestiferous royalty.

In the end, or in the beginning, I suppose it depends on what the piece of cloth really stands for. At times these days, I wonder.

My wife’s mother was born in Plymouth, England. She married a man from Maine, and became an American citizen. If British law allowed her to reclaim a slice of citizenship, would she take it? If so, as her husband, would I? Could I abandon New Gahania for Yorkshire?

Our decision-making process would not be restricted to the glories of access to the European Union and the extended Commonwealth, although these factors are significant. Rather, it would address the opportunity to look Americanism squarely in the eye, and see who blinks first.

As with life itself, I wasn’t involved with the process of coming into existence. Leaving it is different. I have no plans to die or emigrate any time soon. But being an American can be very, very tiring.

Must we be so consistently proud to be enduringly stupid?

---

With the horror of a presidential election year about to be unleashed, the fabled American journalist, writer and social commentator H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) needs to be reincarnated.

The whole life of the inferior man, including especially his so-called thinking, is purely a biochemical process, and exactly comparable to what goes on in a barrel of cider.

Mencken is said to have celebrated the repeal of Prohibition by drinking a glass of cold water.

“My first in 13 years,” he succinctly explained.

H.L. Mencken, in full Henry Louis Mencken … controversialist, humorous journalist, and pungent critic of American life who powerfully influenced U.S. fiction through the 1920s … Mencken was probably the most influential American literary critic in the 1920s, and he often used his criticism as a point of departure to jab at various American social and cultural weaknesses.

Controversialist … now there’s a wonderful word, indeed. It may need to appear on my post-NABC business cards.

As a militant American of German ancestry, enduring a “dry” era brought about by the same religious zealots, health fascists, cultural terrorists and bubble-headed activists now inhabiting social media (and local health departments) nationwide, Mencken was not averse to the merits of the tall, cool one, and I could not agree more strongly.

Surely Mencken would take great delight in skewering a petty Hoosier politician by the name of Bill Davis, who until his providential resignation in 2014, habitually used his sinecure as chairman of the House’s public policy committee like a bully pulpit to denounce beverage alcohol, often “bottling” up sensible reforms by preventing their passage through committee to a full reading and vote.

Davis does not drink, and Mencken well understood the fatal implications of this bizarre condition.

Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is scared all the time.

Mencken was one of the earliest advocates of unrestricted bile as a means of ensuring equal opportunity, and he understood that common sense is remarkably uncommon.

All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non-sequiturs. Common sense really involves making full use of all the demonstrable evidence and of nothing but the demonstrable evidence.

Hardly a week goes past without my pulling down a Mencken volume from the bookshelf in my home library and seeking brief consolation in a paragraph or three. The required dosage increases during times of jaundice.

Like now.

I keep reminding myself: History’s lessons provide as many reasons to be sanguine as depressed. Life is cyclical. The pendulum swings forever, first out, then back. One merely needs to be patient, and wait.

In point of fact, I’m perfectly content to bide my time.

Whether or not Trump wins, would the cottage in Cornwall be a better venue for heel-cooling than my present view of a moronic one-way street?

---

Recent columns:

January 7: ON THE AVENUES: You know, that time when Roger interviewed himself.

December 31: ON THE AVENUES: My 2015 in books and reading.

December 24: ON THE AVENUES: Fairytale of New Albania (2015 mashup).

December 17: ON THE AVENUES: Gin and tacos, and a maybe a doughnut, but only where feasible.

December 10: ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2015).

"The biggest illusion, of course, was that victory would be quick and easy."

It has been 16 years since Adam Hochschild's gripping King Leopold's Ghost, which tells a story none of us know, but should.

King Leopold's Ghost (1998) is a best-selling popular history book by Adam Hochschildthat explores the exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908, as well as the atrocities that were committed during that period.^[1]

The book aims to increase public awareness of crimes committed by European colonial rulers in Africa. It was refused by nine of the ten U.S. publishing houses to which an outline was submitted, but became an unexpected bestseller and won the prestigious Mark Lynton History Prize for literary style. It also won the 1999 Duff Cooper Prize. By 2013, more than 600,000 copies were in print in a dozen languages.

Ironically, Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality in 1914 brought England into the Great War, which began when Austria-Hungary armies invaded Serbia ... and as we'd say in these parts, had their asses handed to them, at least at first. Hochschild later wrote about the people who opposed the conflagration.

"To End All Wars" redux.

In short: It was a hundred years ago today. We really ought to know and remember these things.

Colonial Folly, European Suicide, by Adam Hochschild (NYT)

TURNER, Me. — ONE hundred years ago today, Austro-Hungarian artillery and gunboats on the Danube began shelling Serbia — the first shots of the great cataclysm that over the next four and a half years would remake our world for the worse, in every conceivable way. We think of the First World War as having its causes in Europe, where the greatest bloodshed and destruction would take place. But several of the illusions that propelled the major powers so swiftly into war had their roots in far corners of the world.