Where 'Human Zoos' Once Stood, A Belgian Museum Now Faces Its Colonial Past

Aimé Mpane remembers when he first saw the old statues.

It was 1994, and the Congolese visual artist had just moved to Belgium, which once ruled his country. Growing up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mpane says he had been taught in school that the Congolese were descended from the Gauls — "that they were our kings."

"In our schoolbooks, it was as if the Congolese did not exist without Belgian colonialists," says Mpane, 50. His work explores the memory of colonialism in Congo and Belgium. "I wanted to know what [the Belgians] knew about us."

So he set out for the place where he thought he'd find some answers: the Royal Museum for Central Africa in the Flemish village of Tervuren.

"When I walked inside, it struck me that our history had been confiscated," he says through a translator. "That when our children come here, they would not see a positive image of themselves."

They would see statues depicting Africans as primitives, their children