ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the postcolonial memory discourse at work in a number of early twenty-first-century comics featuring the Congo, manifested variously as denunciations of atrocities, silences, or disillusions. Such memorial work reveals how the colonial past continues to spill over into the present and most likely determines or unveils the thorny relations between Belgium and the Congo and between Belgian citizens and the Congolese diasporic community. Belgium remains haunted by Hochschild's actual accusations of genocide as expressed in Leopold's Ghost, a study that is 'informed by the paradigm of the Jewish Holocaust' and 'a pre-Auschwitz ethical discourse and its clear-cut moral categories' in which accusatory comparisons perhaps need to be read within a larger imperial framework whereby several nations competed to establish control over the Congo. Belgium has in many ways kept silent about its colonial past, a past that has also been shadowed by civil unrest, mass murder, and the public plundering of resources.
