Belgian cartoonist GAL turned 70 this year. The relations between Belgium and Congo haven’t been absent in his work. (I provided some context below each cartoon.) Happy birthday, Gal.

January 2001. Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel (he famously said, “King Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero“) criticizes the Austrian government, calling for a boycott of its ski resorts to protest the inclusion of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in the coalition. He attends Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s funeral a week later.


picture

February 2002. The Belgian parliamentary commission investigating the death of Patrice Lumumba finds that the Belgian government carried a “moral responsibility”. Louis Michel apologizes to the Congolese people. No further legal action was taken.

cartoon

October 2004. Belgian foreign minister Karel De Gucht visits Congo where “I have met a lot of people and I wonder if they are the people to transform this country into a democracy and seriously manage it.” Kinshasa is not amused, slamming the “Tintin minister”.

cartoon

May 2008. Karel De Gucht reiterates his 2004 claims. “If pointing out to the Congolese politicians they have to make bigger efforts meant he was a neo-colonialist,” he says, “then I am a convinced neo-colonialist”.

cartoon

July 2008. Human Rights Watch reports that the peace accord fails to end the killing and raping of civilians in Eastern Congo. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe cracks down on the opposition.

cartoon

June 2010. Weeks after the murder of Congolese human rights activist Floribert Chebeya, King Albert II of Belgium attends the ceremonies in Kinshasa to mark the 50th anniversary of Congo’s independence.

– Tom Devriendt

Further Reading

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.