Chapter Ten - Truth, Memory, and Justice

CHAPTER TEN

Truth, Memory, and Justice

THERE ARE NO museums.
No national days of mourning.
No mandatory curriculum.
No name etched in infamy.

Leopold II, the architect of one of the deadliest genocides in history, is still remembered in Belgium not with revulsion — but with statues.

The Congo’s suffering has no permanent home in the Western conscience.
It was buried beneath rubber, rewritten in bronze, and forgotten in classrooms that never turned the page.

But the silence doesn’t erase the crime.
It only extends the wound.

Ask the average person about genocides, and they’ll name:
– The Holocaust
– Rwanda
– Armenia
– Cambodia

But the Congo?
Most have never heard a word.

Because this genocide wasn’t filmed.
It wasn’t tried in Nuremberg.
There were no neat death camps — only a system so vast and normalized, it vanished into the background of history.

Leopold didn’t need gas chambers.
He had corporations, quotas, and polite society’s indifference.

This isn’t just accidental forgetting.
It’s engineered amnesia.

– Belgian schools downplay Leopold’s atrocities
– Western textbooks reduce Congo to colonial footnotes
– Hollywood has never told this story on a screen

Even efforts to remove Leopold’s statues in recent years have been met with backlash.

Why?

Because statues aren’t just stone.
They’re permission.
They say: This man is worthy. This man is ours.

But a society that honors Leopold without context doesn’t deserve to forget.

Let’s be clear:

You cannot undo a genocide.
You cannot uncut the hands.
You cannot resurrect 10 million souls.

But you can stop lying.

You can teach the truth.
You can dismantle the statues.
You can trace your wealth back to its source.
You can listen when Congo speaks.
And you can ask: What would justice actually look like?

Because if we only mourn the dead we filmed —
we are saying that visibility is what makes murder matter.

Congo is still bleeding.
Still exploited.
Still misunderstood.

But the silence is cracking.

Activists are forcing Europe to reckon with its past.
Schools are demanding curriculum change.
Descendants are speaking — louder, and louder.

This book is not a history lesson.
It’s an interruption.
A broken silence.
A message to the world:

We know what you did.

Now —
what will you do about it?