This is a curious affair revealed by The Economist last March. Belgium, the newspaper recalls, behaved very badly with the Congo: at the end of the 19th century, King Leopold II allegedly transformed the territory into a “gigantic slave plantation”, killing and raping the natives at gunpoint. larigot. A real butcher’s shop.
So when the current King of Belgium, Philippe, visited the Democratic Republic of Congo last June, he decided to “open a new chapter” in relations between the two countries and returned a wooden mask known as the Kakuungu mask, one of thousands of primitive works of art he promised to return. Bad luck to him!
The mask is venerated by two ethnic groups, the Sukus and the Yakas. According to them, it’s very simple: the object would offer nothing less than the power of invisibility, would resist bullets (the machete is corny) and would give all kinds of superpowers to those who hold it. So the Sukus and Yakas formed a militia called “Mobondo” and went to war against another ethnic group, the Tekes, whom they already didn’t like very much. We don’t know if it was to recover the magic mask.
Result: at least 300 dead and 160,000 people forced to flee. It’s a bit as if the Normans and Bretons went to war against the Basques because of a dolmen. We can imagine the embarrassment of King Philippe who thought he was doing the right thing. If he returns the thousands of other items as planned, it could be bloody.
