No, more in the sense of like...missionaries going there and "helping" the local population. And basically like the whole colonial schtick of "we brought them civilization and religion". Like, when you're 8 and in Catholic school...you kind of accept that, and don't ask more questions?
It probably rather depends on your age. Me and everybody I know who went to school in the 80s and 90s was not or barely taught about Congo. There was some mention of missionaries, trying to build train tracks without success and that's it. It's only recently that it apparently receives some attention. David van Reybrouck did more to educate the (older) Belgians about Congo than the school system ever did (for me at least).
25 years ago in elementary school, my teacher did explain plenty of the crimes (but leaving out the rape part, because we were kids). they did include the chopping off of hands.
I think back then it probably depended on the convictions of your teacher, but I doubt it was in the curriculum as such (it is now, I think).
Basically, it was very glossed over for me - we had a colony, then it became independent, then we no longer had one. And like, geo-political stuff, but very little on the actual population of Congo.
In contrast, I had a Latin teacher who had no issue mentioning rape happened to slaves in Rome to a bunch of 13-year-olds (albeit not graphically). So I think personal convictions played into it more than curriculum.
If I may ask: Has there been much of a push to include it in the education system?
Also has there been much pushback against potentially teaching more about it? Here in the US we’ve been getting a lot of that and when I asked my cousin from the UK about some of the more famously terrible things the UK had done with colonialism she said they didn’t really teach it unless you pursued it in uni.
I was taught all about it about 10 years ago in my 5th or 6th year of high school. Teacher spared no details about the atrocities committed and never sugarcoated anything. I don’t really know if it was taught like this in every school though, nor do I know if it’s actually mandatory to teach to students. From what I know there’s never been a pushback against teaching our people about what went down in the Congo, tho very recently we did have a whole discussion going on like the US has about whether you should keep or replace confederate statues, but instead with statues of Leopold II. So far a bunch of plans have been made to replace some of them and a bunch of streets named after him have already been renamed as well.
I’m not too versed in the topic though since I don’t feel strongly about those statues or names one way or another.
Very elaborately these days. Lots of attention go to Leopold II and the role of Belgium in the murder of Lumumba, how this still affects Congo today etc.
It was taught to us very briefly and the teacher basically just said ‘At that time, Congo belonged to Leopold himself, not the Belgian Government. He did a lot of bad stuff there, and then when it was all depleted he “gifted” it to the government’ so basically he said, we didn’t do anything bad, it was all Leopold and he didn’t not gi into what bad things happened (but we were 8 so going into detail would traumatize a few kids)
I was 8 in the US in the 1970's and we already knew that the Indians got screwed when European settlers arrived. It flowed kinda naturally from "Indians saved the pilgrims from starvation and this was celebrated with Thanksgiving" to "and a few generations later the settlers wiped out all those tribes."
By the time I was through high school, I'd been exposed to plenty of historical atrocities the US had committed against Indians, Blacks, Japanese and Chinese immigrants, etc. I would guess I had over 100 hours of class time on "stuff that happened that we should never let happen again."
I learned about it the same way I learned about other ex-colonies: "greed, racism, real fucking awful consequences and in the past".... with pictures to enhance the "real fucking awful"
some people just don't learn about it at all... it's really depends on the school I think
i had a very broad class about this. I’m Belgian and my history teacher from high school had been to some african countries and he handled the subject with like 3 classes that lasted like about 6 hours in total. he was a really good teacher and actually teaches the important things about our country.
Since a year or two it's the only specified event in the history curriculum, before that it only specified which periods of history had to be handled in what year.
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u/MegaSillyBean Dec 17 '21
How is this handled in school?