Leopold and Mobutu series 6: The statue of Henry Stanley which overlooked Kinshasa in colonial times. It rests on a steamboat that belonged to the African International Association, a company publicly charged by Leopold with a philanthropic and 'civilising' mission that veiled its true purpose of annexing and exploiting natural resources. The statue was removed during the Mobutu period of Africanisation in the 1970s and dumped in a government transport lot in Kinshasa. The boots belonging to the statue are found in another lot, September 2003

Notes

Guy Tillim spent July to September 2003 photographing traces of the colonial occupation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium and vestiges of more recent plunder under Mobutu Sese Seko. Tillim's images, frequently composed in diptychs and triptychs, juxtapose historical sites in the Congo and Belgium with contemporary views of the DRC. Adam Hochschild, author of the highly acclaimed King Leopold's Ghost, writes: 'Rare is the photographer whose work so well captures not only the country before his camera's lens, but also the country of a hundred or more years ago.'

Exhibited

Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Guy Tillim: Leopold & Mobutu, 12 May to 19 June 2004

OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria, Biennale Cuvée, 2008

Literature

Adam Hochschild. (2004) Guy Tillim: Leopold & Mobutu, Bégard, France: Filigranes Éditions, unpaginated.