ARTLOOKS & ARTLINES |
ISMAIL MAHOMED
John Kani & Robert Whitehead in a thinking person’s play
John Kani, Robert Whitehead and Lesedi Job. PHOTOS Thandile Zwelibanzi
I
n June this year, an opulent 187-year-old mansion in
Africa Museum, which was founded by King Leopold II and
France belonging to King Leopold II of Belgium went on
which, for a century, had neglected to tell the story of his
sale for a whopping $410 million. The 14-bedroom villa,
rule, hosted an academic conference in order to ascertain
which has an Olympic-size swimming pool and is set
the ‘historic truth’ behind Adam Hochschild’s book, King
in a glamorous coastal enclave close to Nice, is considered
Leopold’s Ghost, a haunting account of a megalomaniac of
to be the ‘world’s most expensive house’ and was built for
monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and
the King of Belgium using his profits from land-grabs in the
cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains.
Congo. Close neighbours of the palatial home include British
Veteran South African actors John Kani and Robert
composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the late US tech-tycoon
Whitehead have come together at the Market Theatre to
Paul Allen.
star in a gut-wrenching political thriller, CONGO The Trial
In December last year, student activists at the Queen
of King Leopold II, directed by award-winning director
Mary University of London tore down two plaques
Lesedi Job. Adapted from Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s
commemorating a visit to the British university by King
Soliloquy about his defence for his Congo rule, the script
Leopold II of Belgium. Students claimed that the plaques
has been developed by Kani, Whitehead and Job with
were offensive to ethnic minority students because they ‘pay
financial support from the Thabo Mbeki Foundation.
homage to a genocidal colonialist’ and should be removed.
CONGO The Trial of King Leopold II is an imagined encounter
The 19th-century monarch visited it in 1887 when he laid the
between Advocate Xola Mlambo (Kani) and King Leopold
University’s library’s foundation stone.
(Whitehead) about the 23-year rule of the Congo by King
If King Leopold II were alive today, there is no doubt
Leopold II. During this period, more than 10 million Africans
that he would be on trial at The Hague for genocide and
were massacred without him even setting foot in the Congo.
crimes against humanity for his exploits in the Congo at the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2005, Belgium’s
54 / Creative Feel / November 2018
Under his rule, the Congo Free State, suffered a decline in population from 20 million to 10 million as his colonial
