History Bites

Appreciation of the symbolic power of statues is clearly not limited to those fetish-worshipping primitives who would have us all bowing down before the graven images of Cecil Rhodes, Bomber Harris and Winston Churchill. Fifteen years ago an activist group removed the left hand of a slave on an Ostend statue of plucky little Belgium's genocidal King Leopold II, in reference to the great man's firm but fair ways with unruly Congolese. Detectives strained their little grey cells to no avail, but the statue revisionists offered to return the hand if the Belgian state and royal family would apologise for the crimes of their predecessors. A UN working group has now concluded that plucky little Belgium remains institutionally racist and that an apology is owed, a conclusion which the Belgian prime minister apparently finds "very strange;" and an apparent representative of the statue's editors has appeared to the culture minister in Ghent, repeating the group's offer with the added condition that the last remains of Patrice Lumumba be returned to his relatives. The Belgian government formally apologised in 2002 for its sponsorship of Lumumba's murder, but it seems that officials at the Palais de Justice in Brussels are themselves fetishistic enough to have kept some of their victim's teeth at hand, just in case.