ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2018, the city of Brussels renamed a public space at the Porte de Namur square Patrice Lumumba. Dozens of streets in Belgian towns are named after colonial figures, for example, Guillaume Van Kerckhoven, infamous for his actions during the Leopoldian era in the Congo, including paying his black African soldiers for each head they brought to him. Historians and the general public alike are yet to fully understand the twentieth-century collapse of European overseas empire and its aftereffects, including in Europe. As anti-colonialism gained momentum after the Second World War, European peoples and policymakers sought to understand and make meaning out of the world-changing series of events that resulted.
