Knowledge about colonial past still very low in Belgium | Inland

“Our general knowledge is seriously lacking”, say the researchers. “Of the twelve questions, we only answer four correctly on average.” For example, most people do not know that Lumumba was the first prime minister of the independent Congo. Or people do not know that Rwanda and Burundi were also under Belgian administration.

The researchers also wanted to find out whether the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States (2020) had an influence on our knowledge of the colonial past. “The protests, which started after George Floyd was killed by police brutality, ensured that decolonization received much more attention in the Belgian media over the past two years,” the researchers found.

An analysis by Het Laatste Nieuws and De Standaard shows that after the BLM protests, twice as many articles were published about decolonization or racism than in previous years. According to the researchers, this would have had a limited impact on our level of knowledge.

“It is remarkable that the Belgian population expressed less support for decolonization measures, such as the removal of street names, in 2022 than in 2020,” says Zeger Verleye, assistant political science at UAntwerp.

Nevertheless, racism appears to be of concern to the majority of the Belgian population, although 20 percent believe that lessons about racism in education are not necessary. The opinions of the Belgian population are strongly divided about quotas for ethnic minorities on television.

Finally, an analysis of the statements made by MPs shows that politicians use three strategies to avoid rather than assume responsibility.

A first strategy is to avoid the debate. A second is recognizing racism as a structural problem, but not linking it to one’s own colonial past. Under the third strategy, parliamentarians do want to ‘repair’ the historical injustice, but mainly through symbolic politics, such as apologies. Material forms of compensation are less discussed.