Early Belgian Colonial Efforts: The Long and Fateful Shadow of Leopold I

Bouvin and H. Elkhadem were very helpful. But special thanks to Drs. Lisette Danckaert and Wouter Brake for the time and understanding they exhibited in my trips to Brussels. I am especially thankful to Lisette who took time out from her retirement to answer some very strange cartographic requests posed to her in very poor French from an American she had never met.

In the September 22, 2002 edition of the New York Times, Dr. Guido Gryseels, director of the Royal Museum of Central Africa, was the subject of an article on the reverberations of the book by Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost on Belgium in general and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in particular. So great was the outcry as a result of this book that a parliamentary committee of some of Belgium’s most significant historians was assembled to review the Congo and Leopold II. This would have been enough for most directors to hide from any outside inquiry and yet he, only a few months after the article, and his staff extended themselves for whatever I needed.

Dr. Phillipe Marchand especially spent time and effort to provide whatever information I needed. Lastly, I want to thank my distant cousin, ten degrees perhaps, Phillipe Ansiaux, his beautiful wife Nanou, and his daughters Aude (Doctor Aude by now) and Daphné for the marvelous food (and wine!) and company they provided me and my family on our archival trips to Brussels. The conversations and discussions on Belgium and its colonial past filled in the human dimension lacking in the archives The staff at the Hartley Library, University of Southampton, Southampton, England, provided prompt and proper service in our two days at Southampton as we perused the hundreds of letters of Lord Palmerston. Miss Pamela Clark at the Royal iv