How Congolese Climate Activists Stopped A ‘Carbon Bomb,’ For Now
“I was very angry. I was astonished. Everything I saw was stolen,” said François Kamate, an environmental activist from the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC. He was describing how it felt to enter the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium for the first time.
The museum was built in a rich suburb of Brussels to showcase the spoils after King Leopold II declared a vast swath of Central Africa, including the entire present day DRC, to be his own private kingdom. What resulted was one of the most vicious and exploitative episodes of European colonial history, and the funneling of 10,000,000 zoological specimens and 120,000 cultural objects into the museum’s collection.