Antwerp's 'human zoo': Belgium confronts shame of colonial past

What the report says

Belgium’s colonial past is back in focus after a France 24 report on Antwerp’s 1894 World’s Fair and the Congo Pavilion, where more than a hundred Congolese people were forcibly brought to the city and displayed in what is now described as a “human zoo.” According to the supplied material, seven Congolese men died of disease during the exhibition, an episode that continues to symbolize some of the darkest aspects of Belgium’s rule in Central Africa.

The report says the case remains politically and emotionally sensitive in Belgium, where the memory of colonial violence and exploitation has become part of a wider public reckoning. Antwerp is the setting for this history, and the event is tied to broader European-era exhibitions that treated colonized people as objects of spectacle rather than as individuals with rights and dignity.

A new monument to the victims was unveiled this year, reflecting efforts to acknowledge the harm and preserve remembrance. France 24’s coverage presents the memorial as part of a continuing effort in Belgium to confront and educate about colonial abuses, especially those linked to the former Congo Free State and the country’s colonial era. The report notes that the issue still resonates today because it raises questions about how nations remember imperial history and whose suffering is formally recognized.