MATTHEW G. STANARD. Selling the Congo

Despite the vast scholarly literature on imperialism, there is little English-language work on Belgium's relationship to empire. Matthew G. Stanard offers a welcome addition to studies of the imperial metropole. The book offers a survey of “pro-empire propaganda,” with substantive chapters devoted to imperial expositions, museums of empire, educational/curricular efforts by the colonial office, monuments, and colonial filmmaking. While the chapters focus primarily on the 1920s through the 1950s, the figure of Leopold II, who ran the colony as a private fiefdom before 1908, looms large. Based on archival investigation and buttressed by secondary sources in French, Dutch, German, and English, Stanard's is a direct and workmanlike book. In the footsteps of John M. MacKenzie's Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion (1880–1960) (1984), Stanard showcases the variety of state-sponsored, pro-empire propaganda across five decades. The effect of this propaganda, Stanard argues, was not that it forged a “visceral” loyalty toward empire on the part of everyday Belgians; rather, its successes can be seen primarily in two other areas. First, it created or reinforced a denigrating image of Africans, strengthening Belgian “feelings of supremacy and otherness” toward them (pp. 16, 259). At the 1935 World's Fair in Brussels, and again in the state-sponsored films of the late 1950s, the complexity and diversity of Congolese society were submerged in order to trumpet Belgium's role in “civilizing” anonymous savages. A second “success” of the propaganda was to elevate the era prior to 1908 into myth. In the 1930s, the explorers and soldiers from the 1890s were recast as “heroic pioneers”—literally so, in bronze statuary. Most significantly, the figure of Leopold II was rehabilitated; by the 1950s, Leopold's notorious role in the horrors visited upon the Congo was not so much “forgotten” as deliberately erased. While the motivations behind Leopold's rehabilitation remain underdeveloped in the book, Stanard's third argument offers us a glimpse as to its effect: colonial propaganda helped to remake a decentralized, linguistically divided polity into a more centralized, more unified nation of “Belgians.”

Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies