What Does “Decolonizing” Mean?

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Johan Leman, 2 June 2025

While preparing an exhibition this autumn titled “Brussels, la Congolaise” at the MMM museum, I had the opportunity to speak with several Congolese residents of Brussels, whose arrival in the city dates back to different periods between the 1950s and 1985. Listening to them, I tried to understand what “being liberated from colonization” means to them. What follows is a first attempt to summarize some of their insights—open to debate and without claiming to have fully grasped everything.

In speaking about what it means to have been colonized, I heard the following elements:

1. Feeling colonized cannot be reduced to simply experiencing discrimination, as is often the case with migrants who are perceived by some “native” inhabitants as encroaching on the space of “native” inhabitants.
2. Feeling colonized is partly about realizing that others have come to exploit the resources of a land that is not theirs, without returning the appropriate value—but it goes beyond that.
3. Feeling colonized means that you were not allowed to make decisions for yourself, and that others made decisions on your behalf, even on matters that rightfully belonged to you as an indigenous inhabitant of the land.
4. Feeling colonized, particularly in the Belgian context, relates to the creation of a myth by the colonizing power, in which it set itself apart with a superior, nearly unreachable status. At the same time, it instilled in the local population the belief that this new “white” status was virtually unattainable. And people were made to truly believe that—through education (not so much the individual teachers, but the system), segregated housing policies, and employment practices. One feels deeply wounded as an indigenous inhabitant when realizing that this myth was entirely unfounded.

Decolonizing, then, is primarily about points 3 and 4, compounded by the burdens of points 1 and 2. I suspect there is much I have yet to understand, but even from this alone, it is clear that we still have a great deal of work ahead of us.

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