Belgian voters have recently elected the first black mayor in the nation’s history, a man originally from the huge swathe of central Africa that Belgium brutalised for generations. Pierre Kompany, 71, who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo as a refugee in 1975, will be sworn in before the end of the year as the mayor of one of Brussels’ 19 boroughs, Ganshoren, where he was elected by an overwhelmingly white community.
“My success, my election, shows the direction of the march of history, which is towards a more peaceful history…I think one has to regard this as a victory for humanity as a whole,” Mr. Kompany noted. According to him, his election shows that Belgium has made significant progress towards integrating a people whom, not so long ago, it systematically suppressed, exploited and almost annihilated.
For almost 80 years, until Congo won its independence in 1960, Belgium exercised a destructive colonial rule, extracting natural resources like ivory, rubber and minerals at a devastating human cost. Particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Belgian King, Leopold II, wielded personal control of the colony. The King’s forces relied on violence, terror and torture to turn much of the black population into a slave labour force, leaving millions of people dead in their wake.
In a positive act earlier this year, a square in Brussels was named after the Congolese independence leader, Patrice Lumumba, whom Belgium helped overthrow. The government has fully opened its colonial archives on Rwanda, another former Belgian colony, the first step of its kind among Europe’s former colonial powers.
While his election is historic, Mr. Kompany, who has served as a city councillor in Ganshoren since 2006, ran a decidedly local campaign, promising to help the elderly, expand day care availability and improve soccer fields.
His victory “marks the undeniable presence of the Congolese here in Belgium,” said Mathieu Zana Etambala, an emeritus professor of history at the Catholic University of Leuven, and an expert on African colonial history. “I’m especially proud, and so is the whole Congolese community, that a black man was directly elected by Belgians in a city like Ganshoren, which has maybe 100 people of Congolese origin.”
About 120,000 people of Congolese descent live amongst the 11 million people in Belgium today. Mr. Kompany fled to Belgium in 1975, completed his studies in engineering, worked as a taxi driver, and became a Belgian citizen after. One of his three children, Vincent Kompany, is an international soccer star, who has served as the captain of both Manchester City and the Belgian national team.
Later this year, Belgium will reopen its century-old Africa museum, which until five years ago presented a favourable image of colonialism. The revamped museum will tell a more critical story of European rule in Africa.
