“King Kasai” by Christophe Boltanski in paperback at Folio

It’s a bit of a chilling night at the museum, this “King Kasaï” by Christophe Boltanski, published in paperback by Folio. This is the choice of Gilbert Chevalier.

King Kasaithis is Christophe Boltanski’s account of the night he spent at the Africa Muséum in Tervuren, in the near suburbs of Brussels, the museum dedicated to the colonial history of Belgium.

The book was released in large format by Stock a year ago in the “My night at the museum” collection. Leila Slimani, Lola Laffont, Yannick Haenel, Aurelien Bellanger, and still others have also engaged in this exercise, in other museums or historical monuments. Christophe Boltanski, writer, journalist, has already written about Congo and its mines in North Kivu, where we extract this material that we find everywhere in our cell phones or computers.

This night at the Tervuren museum is a sort of logical extension on the trails of this Belgian Congo, desired by King Leopold. Firstly, the personal property of the king, who had never set foot there, but who derived from it all the wealth possible and imaginable. All with incredible contempt for the populations who lived there. The Belgian state then took over until independence in 1960.

This museum, wanted by Leopold himself, was supposed to encourage vocations and honor this Belgian conquest. There are sculptures, objects and stuffed animals like this immense elephant King Kasaï, killed and installed in 1958, for the Brussels Universal Exhibition. Outside, in a corner, there are also the graves of dead indigenous people, men and women torn from their country to be exhibited like animals, during exhibitions, practices very widespread in Europe at the time.

Christophe Boltanski looks with dismay at this Belgian colonial past

And we find there all the prejudices and violence of a story which concerned all generations until 1960. A story which crosses a family, that of the hunter who killed the stuffed elephant. Large family of Flemish Brabant ennobled at the beginning of the 19th century. Christophe Boltanski also tells us about Hergé by Tintin in the Congo, or even Joseph Conrad, In the heart of darkness.

The story of that night at the Tervuren museum is exciting and chilling, is worth for its references and for a detailed description of the places and the colonial mess it contains. With for the author, before each discovery, an observation: the violence and inhumanity hidden behind this story staged in this museum.