lain on Nostr: > Filmmaker Magazine: Were the Congolese weary of you at first? > Van Paesschen: ...
> Filmmaker Magazine: Were the Congolese weary of you at first?
> Van Paesschen: That’s really perverse in a way, because the question I hear from them all the time is, “Why did you leave us? When are you coming back?” You have to understand–and this is a major part of why the country isn’t working–at the end of colonization, the Congolese weren’t allowed to develop. [It’s true that] there was no more slavery, there was no more chopping off hands, and they got churches, they got football fields, they got food. They just had to listen to what they were told and they had a good life–to a degree, of course. But when the Belgians left [the Congolese] had to look out for their own, and they never learned. It was a textbook example of paternalism. They weren’t starving back then when the Belgians neared the end of their colonization. Now they are. So fifty years later, many Congolese people tend to idealize the colonization period.
https://filmmakermagazine.com/35197-empire-of-dust-an-interview-with-bram-van-paesschen/
> Van Paesschen: That’s really perverse in a way, because the question I hear from them all the time is, “Why did you leave us? When are you coming back?” You have to understand–and this is a major part of why the country isn’t working–at the end of colonization, the Congolese weren’t allowed to develop. [It’s true that] there was no more slavery, there was no more chopping off hands, and they got churches, they got football fields, they got food. They just had to listen to what they were told and they had a good life–to a degree, of course. But when the Belgians left [the Congolese] had to look out for their own, and they never learned. It was a textbook example of paternalism. They weren’t starving back then when the Belgians neared the end of their colonization. Now they are. So fifty years later, many Congolese people tend to idealize the colonization period.
https://filmmakermagazine.com/35197-empire-of-dust-an-interview-with-bram-van-paesschen/