In M’Fumu, Elisabetta Benassi raises the interrelated questions of colonialism, racism, animality and “Otherness”. M’Fumu is an imaginary tram stop along Line 44 in Brussels, made out of casts of bones of exotic, wild animals from the Royal Museum for Central Africa, originally built to showcase the spoils and plundered riches from King Leopold II’s Congo Free State. From 1885 until it was annexed by Belgium in 1908, a country 80 times the size of Belgium belonged to this one man. Ten million Congolese were murdered during his bloody “reign”. Line 44 runs from Montgomery Square in the centre of Brussels to
the village of Tervuren, where the museum is located, 12 kilometers away; it symbolically joins different worlds: Europe and Africa; Belgium and Congo; Global North and Global South; colonisers and the colonised. M’Fumu, to whom the work is dedicated, was the African name of Paul Panda Farnana (1888-1930), a Congolese intellectual and activist, whose thoughts and actions marked relations between Belgium and the Congo between the two World Wars. He was the first Congolese to receive a higher education as an agronomist in Belgium, fought in World War I, and in 1919 founded the Union Congolaise. He was active in the Pan-African movement and helped organise the 2nd Pan-African Congress in Brussels in 1921. In dedicating this work to M’Fumu, Benassi pays tribute to the unsung heroes of Congolese resistance who have disappeared into the margins of history or were deliberately written out of it by the powers that be.