The 10 Best Monuments & Statues in Mons, Wallonia

Reviewed By Steeve17 - Dinant, Belgium

It always makes me laugh when British or American people talk about Leopold II as if they knew him. His "administration", his "legacy",... In truth, we don't know too much about that time. What do we know for sure? He outsmarted the British in such an unprecedented way by acquiring a state 80 times bigger than his own that they got angry. Later on, it was the turn of the Americans to get upset when they realized that they had to buy uranium for their atomic bombs (with whom they killed thousands and thousands of innocent women and children) from the Belgians and not from the Congolese, to whom they could have bought that for nothing, since the Congolese didn't know how to use it. Leopold II stopped the slave trade in this area of the world. Leopold II made of 480 hostile tribes a unified country. He made thousands of schools in a country where there wasn't any before. He taught natives a beautiful and useful language: French. He gave them an inspiring world religion: Christianity (which is practiced today in that country more fervently than I have ever seen or heard anywhere else). He gave them a currency they still used today: the Congolese Franc. He made many hospitals, including several only for natives. Some people say he had made hospitals only for Europeans, but I need to laugh when I hear that, I am writing this review less than one kilometer away from the "Hôpital de la Rive", a leprosery which he built in 1900 and which is still open today: no European ever got leprosy in Congo. He built the first cities (today called Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, etc.) and gave them a modern infrastructure, including a railway system and roads that are still used today. He passionately collected thousands and thousands of objects from the Congo and made a museum with all that, in Brussels. Today, this museum has still by far the richest collection of Congolese art in the world. For over 100 years, the only museum of Congolese art that existed was that one created by Leopold II. He gave jobs to 1 million Belgians (I am a Belgian working in Congo like several people in my family) and a chance to over one hundred thousand Congolese people to become, to this day, Europeans. So yes, his legacy from a British or an American point of view (being outsmarted for a huge property for the British, having to pay the real price of something they could have had almost for free for the Americans) isn't brilliant. But from another perspective, for the Belgians and for the Congolese for example, is legacy isn't small. Everything is a matter of perspective. He deserves a statue in Mons, no doubt!