The cover of Rythme, no 11, on the Office des Cités Africaines, 1960. By the time Belgian independence was universally recognized in 1839, most European powers already had colonies and protectorates outside Europe and had begun to form spheres of influence. Much of this was spent on public buildings in Brussels, Ostend and Antwerp. It also had a small concession in China, and was a co-administrator of the Tangier International Zone in Morocco.

[18] Although Belgian companies invested in Tianjin, especially in the city's tram system, the Belgian concession remained inactive. Ruanda-Urundi was a part of German East Africa under Belgian military occupation from 1916 to 1924 in the aftermath of World War I, when a military expedition had removed the Germans from the colony. [4] Many deaths can be attributed to new diseases introduced by contact with European colonists, including smallpox which killed nearly half the population in the areas surrounding the lower Congo River.

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The privileging of Belgian commercial interests meant that large amounts of capital flowed into the Congo and that individual regions became specialised.

Belgium controlled two colonies during its history, the Belgian Congo (modern DRC) from 1908 to 1960, and Ruanda-Urundi (Rwanda and Burundi) from 1922 to 1962. Image: Johan Lagae. The RMCA is deeply entangled with the identity of Belgium. In January 1959, riots broke out in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) after a rally was held calling for the independence of the Congo. Since 1896, The Architectural Review has scoured the globe for architecture that challenges and inspires. Schools and hospitals are not only crucial components of a colonial welfare agenda, but also intrinsically linked to policies of control, discipline and biopolitics. Visit our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to learn more. Housing, urban planning, education and healthcare, as well as transport infrastructure and agricultural development, counted as key focal points of the plan, which aimed at introducing a colonial variant of a welfare policy.

Poor relations between factions within the Congo, the continued involvement of Belgium in Congolese affairs, and intervention by major parties of the Cold War led to a five-year-long period of war and political instability, known as the Congo Crisis, from 1960 to 1965.

Their regime in the Congo used forced labour, and murder and mutilation on indigenous Congolese who did not fulfill quotas for rubber collections. Some of their bread and butter peers, often linked to the Brussels’ real-estate milieu, were nevertheless men of talent, as the Corbusian work of Claude Laurens makes clear. colonial interest:[2]. The large numbers of white immigrants who moved to the Congo after the end of World War II came from across the social spectrum, but were always treated as superior to blacks.

King Leopold II of Belgium, frustrated by his nation's lack of international power and prestige, tried to persuade the Belgian government to support colonial expansion around the then-largely unexplored Congo Basin. Violent altercations between Belgian forces and the Congolese also occurred later that year, and Belgium, which previously maintained that independence for the Congo would not be possible in the immediate future, suddenly capitulated and began making arrangements for the Congo’s independence. [16] Belgian colonizing efforts in Guatemala ceased in 1854, due to lack of financing and high mortality due to yellow fever and malaria, endemic diseases of the tropical climate.[17]. 5 September 2018 [20], In 1919, the island of Comacina was bequeathed to King Albert I of Belgium for a year, and became an enclave under the sovereignty of Belgium.

The Congo had a high degree of racial segregation.

Walking the streets of Mbandaka in April 2015, we were reminded by local informants that Mr Patel was locally considered the bâtisseur de Mbandaka (the ‘builder’ of Mbandaka). Catherine Hoskyns; Le Congo de la Colonisation Belge à l'Indépendance, Lumumba's Congo: Roots of Conflict and Le Livre Noir du Congo, International Affairs, Vo Revolts and violence against Tutsi, known as the Rwandan Revolution, occurred in the events leading to independence. More information on how to do this can be found in the cookie policy. We use cookies to personalize and improve your experience on our site. Their refusal led Leopold to create a state under his own personal rule. [14] By the 1950s the Congo had a wage labour force twice as large as that in any other African colony.[15]. It remains to be seen if such narratives will find their place in the new permanent displays of the soon to re-open Royal Museum for Central Africa, that ultimate lieu de mémoire of the Belgian colonisation of (and in) Central Africa. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. [3] By the turn of the century, however, the violence used by Free State officials against indigenous Congolese and the ruthless system of economic extraction led to intense diplomatic pressure on Belgium to take official control of the country, which it did in 1908, creating the Belgian Congo. The Belgian concession was proclaimed on 7 November 1900 and spanned some 100 hectares (250 acres). [1] Belgian traders also extended their influence in West Africa but this too fell apart following the Rio Nuñez Incident of 1849 and growing Anglo-French rivalry in the region. This ended with the seizure of power by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. American architect Richard Neutra, for instance, mentioned that the housing schemes of the Office des Cités Africaines (OCA), providing accommodation for the ever-growing African population in Congo’s major cities, were among the most promising architectural achievements he had encountered on his African trip. As the first census did not take place until 1924, it is difficult to quantify the population loss of the period and these figures have been disputed by some who, like William Rubinstein, claim that the figures cited by Adam Hochschild are speculative estimates based on little evidence.[10].
During the 1940s and 1950s, the Congo had extensive urbanization, and the colonial administration began various development programmes aimed at making the territory into a "model colony". Yet Belgium did build a lot in Congo, especially during the postwar years, when the government launched its first – and last – Ten Year Plan for the Economic and Social Development of the Belgian Congo in 1949. [12] The privileging of Belgian commercial interests meant that large amounts of capital flowed into the Congo and that individual regions became specialised. In Congo, ‘le petit belge’ indeed seemed to see things big. Sandwich Islands, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Rio In the years following the Boxer Rebellion, the diplomat Maurice Joostens negotiated a concession for Belgium. Image: Luca Beel. So the stakes at the re-opening of the museum are high, echoing international expectations in 2005, when the RMCA mounted a large-scale historical exhibition, entitled The Memory of Congo: The Colonial Past, which received major, albeit diverging, critical acclaim. In tune with practices elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, the organisation of urban form in the Belgian Congo was based from the mid-1920s onwards on the principle of spatial segregation along racial lines. Paraphrasing Edward Said, one can contend that to successfully ‘possess an empire’, one needs, first, to ‘have an idea of possessing an empire’. Ironically, the building immediately became the symbol of the new independent state of Congo, later Zaire, and today is still known as the Palais de la Nation. The colonial city was a dual one, with a European part neatly divided from the African cité indigène, or native town, by a buffer zone that in colonial planning terms was called the zone neutre or the cordon sanitaire. This piece is featured in the AR’s September 2018 on Belgium – click here to pick up your copy today, Many of the cultural assets of Britain were paid for by slave labour…, 045 ar 10 essay bellyoftheworld Mouth   As the roast chicken, laden with…, The urbanisation of Los Angeles racially segregated its citizens through ‘redlining’ policies,…, Shelter from the sun in urban Africa is a public resource and…. A fine-grained network of office buildings for colonial administrations, post offices, schools and hospitals was realised, reaching even the most remote parts of a territory which, as colonial propaganda did not fail to stress time and again, measured 80 times the size of the mother country. Successive governments viewed colonial expansion as economically and politically risky and fundamentally unrewarding, and believed that informal empire, continuing Belgium's booming industrial trade in South America and Russia, was much more promising. It was designated as a United Nations trust territory, still under Belgian administration, until 1962, when it developed into the independent states of Rwanda and Burundi. Kansas, Isle of Pines, Cozumel, St. Bartholomew Island, Haiti, Tortugas, Faeroe
However, the government opted for a less prestigious solution, providing accommodation in the newly planned Cité Administrative, illustrating once more how economic and pragmatic considerations were prioritised over issues of representation.


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