I’m working on a story about a small exhibition, featuring only 10 objects, near the entrance to the Kehinde Wiley exhibition at Seattle Art Museum. This little show is called Emblems of Encounter: Europe and Africa Over 500 Years, and it includes the painting above.
The Congolese artist Chéri Samba depicts a corrupt African ruler with an empty state treasury box but pockets full of cash. The white businessman with his briefcase, hands on hips and surveying the horizon, is already on his way to push into another territory that might be more ripe for exploitation.
To find out more about Emblems of Encounter (which I’ll be writing about soon), I interviewed Chiyo Ishikawa, who curated the show at SAM. She recommended I read the book King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild, which is turning out to be one of the best books about one of the worst things I’ve ever read.
This morning I arrived at a part that seemed apt in today’s land of billionaires and homelessness yet ostensible democracy. It’s a moment in the book when the Belgian King Leopold—heralded as a humanitarian but actually a mass killer motivated by the desire for ever-waning royal power in an increasingly democratic Europe—is sitting next to Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. They’re at some kingish happening, and this is the equivalent of the kids in the back of the class leaning across the aisle to whisper in commiseration.
“There is really nothing left for us kings,” Leopold tells Wilhelm, “except money.”
