Colonial Amnesias, Photographic Memories, and Demographic Biopolitics at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA)

Abstract

This article provides readers with a biopolitical critique of the recent debates that have swirled around the renovations at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (rmca) and the ‘Memory of Congo’ exhibits. The author argues that the rmca has become a contested site of memory, where some older photographs that were once used in Congo Reform Movements have been reappropriated in (post)colonial disputes about the epistemic and demographic features of what Adam Hochschild has called the forgotten Congolese ‘holocaust’.