Colonial Amnesia on Trial
A Brussels Panel on Memory, Accountability, and the Unfinished Work of Decolonization
Debate | March 2026
On 26 March 2026, ARCI Brussels hosted an event that was modest in format but substantial in content: a panel discussion at Elzenhof bringing together researchers, activists, and educators to examine how Belgium — and Europe more broadly — continues to mismanage the memory of its colonial past.
The evening drew a parallel between Belgian and Italian colonialism, using Italy’s enduring myth of “Italiani brava gente” as a lens to interrogate how nations construct forgetting. The comparison was pointed: both countries share a pattern of selective acknowledgment, where isolated acts of recognition substitute for genuine historical reckoning.
Geneviève Kaninda, of the Collectif Mémoire Coloniale et Lutte, traced how Belgian public space remains quietly saturated with colonial symbolism — street names, statues, monuments — while political institutions continue to avoid a comprehensive accounting of what colonialism meant, and still means, for the Congo and its people. The assassination of Patrice Lumumba served as a recurring reference point: a case where Belgium’s moral responsibility has been formally acknowledged, yet where the language of apology has been carefully calibrated to avoid legal consequence. The ongoing trial of Étienne Davignon — the last surviving accused in the Lumumba case — was cited as a rare but fragile step toward individual accountability, one that remains at risk simply because the accused is 93 years old.
Carla Poulaert examined how the Belgian press was never merely a passive observer of colonization, but an active instrument of it — from the secret royal fund used to bribe newspaper editors in the nineteenth century, to the fabricated narrative surrounding Lumumba’s death in 1961, to the coverage of the 2022 restitution ceremony, which once again centered the Belgian prime minister rather than the victim’s family.
Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau offered perhaps the most structurally ambitious argument of the evening, grounding the discussion of racism and colonialism in a Marxist analysis of capital. Drawing on Maulana Karenga’s definition of racism as first an act of violence — comparable in scale to the Holocaust of slavery — then an ideology, and finally an institution embedded in law, schools, and everyday life, she insisted on the importance of understanding not just the discourse of racism but its material production. Race, she argued, was invented to legitimize an unequal relationship of extraction: of labor, of resources, of land. This is what Marx names in Capital when he describes primitive accumulation — the violent founding act that made capitalism possible. But following Rosa Luxemburg, Ghebremariam Tesfau pushed further: coloniality is not merely a historical origin point. The system requires the constant reproduction of spaces of violent accumulation in order to sustain itself. This means that the extractive relationships established under colonialism did not end with formal independence — they were restructured. Acknowledging this, she suggested, is not pessimism. It is the necessary condition for fighting back.
Serena Iacobino introduced the conceptual distinction between colonialism — as a historical process — and coloniality — as a structure of power that survives it. Drawing on the modernity/coloniality theoretical tradition, she argued that decolonization is not a completed event but an ongoing political and epistemic project, one that must engage with schools, archives, media, and everyday language. The tool of intersectionality, she suggested, is essential for understanding how colonial hierarchies continue to operate through the compounding of race, gender, and class.
What emerged from the evening was not optimism, but clarity. Progress on colonial memory in Belgium has been real but consistently insufficient — driven by civil society pressure rather than political will, and prone to symbolic gestures that close chapters rather than open them. The lesson from the Lumumba case is instructive: it took four decades of archival work, academic research, and activist persistence just to establish what happened. Accountability, when it comes at all, comes late.
For those working in the fields of education, migration, and social inclusion, the implications are direct. The structures that produced colonial exploitation did not disappear with independence. They were reorganized. Understanding that reorganization — historically, structurally, and politically — remains unfinished wor