Deepest Africa

It must be a particular privilege of countries which have shrunk, especially those with past imperial pretensions, to have more stuff on display than they can presently afford. Britain's museums are an example, now holding on to former booty by claiming conservation standards and responsible stewardship, but not so long ago displaying looted treasures proudly as trophies of divinely-willed expansion and projection of power.

Another example is Belgium, whose colonial escapades under the aegis of Leopold II in the Congo aroused such international indignation. Leopold bequeathed his grateful nation a gargantuan Central African Museum, deep in the tropical rainforest of the Brussels periphery, at Tervuren. We decided to take a look.

To get there, like the trip up country in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, required stamina and intrepid organisation. It was a journey beyond human experience. We took a bus, a tram, an underground train, and finally a country tram which rattled through the endless woodlands to the south of Brussels. Finally, we reached a clearing with a strange semi-circular wooden edifice, where the tram stopped and the driver left us. Was it a temple to some bloody ancestor cult? What nameless horrors had it witnessed after sundown as the waning moon bathed its decaying timbers in an eerie light? In fact it was Tervuren Terminus, standing forlorn in the middle of nowhere, with trees on every side.

We found a rusty iron gate, yawning half open, held up by decaying pillars covered in sprayed graffiti suggesting genito-oral pleasures, and, taking a deep breath, headed into the domain of darkness. After following a range of signs which looked as though they had been dumped there rather than deliberately planted for giving directions, we re-emerged into the sunlight to find a grandiose palace, with magnificent lawns, ornamental fountains and lakes, dubious statues and the usual Belgian smell of waffles frying. It was the museum.

Inside, the marbled entrance hall was crowded with immense gilded statues of European gods and goddesses acting as tutelaries to adoring midget Africans invariably sculpted as children. This was clearly not a PC building. But once through the entrance, the anthropological and historical displays were both spectacular and intellectually challenging. And the best thing was that the colonial experience was pretty honestly depicted, with starring roles for Arab slave traders, Belgian entrepreneurs, a rogue Welshman (the Denbigh-born Henry Morton Stanley of 'Dr Livingston, I presume' fame) and the rapacious ogre himself, Leopold II. There were some gruesome exhibits, particularly the meticulous paperwork (Belgium and bureaucracy start with the same letter) which recorded the attempts to get the reluctant locals to tap rubber, including the report of one colonial administrator justifying the expenditure of over 2,000 rounds of ammunition, on the grounds that his policemen had after all killed over a thousand men, women and children, and that the survivors were now busy tapping rubber as they should.

So it was, after all, a journey to a dark land of savages, but the savages were us, not them. We came away with a fresh white man's burden, a sense of shame.