06/12/2024
10 years since our dear White Queen changed the temporal for the eternal.
Still held in such a high moral esteem...?
It was Friday evening, December 5, 2014, on the eve of the St. Nicholas celebration, at 7:12 PM. A tweet from the royal household announced the death of Queen Fabiola. On the VRT, the scheduled debate in the current affairs program Terzake about "Zwarte Piet" and racism was canceled to make way for a report on Fabiola, the "White Queen."
On the first anniversary of her death, the CRDCB (Research Center on the Decolonization of Belgian Congo) created a page to initiate a debate about the notion of a "White Queen" and its potential connection to a racist ideology of white supremacy. The starting point: one of the "Twelve Marvelous Tales" written by Doña Fabiola, The Prince of the White Mountain. This story was chosen to be published in the Patriote Illustré on the day of her arrival in Belgium, September 16, 1960.
If Tintin in the Congo, Pippi Longstocking, and Zwarte Piet have sparked debates about racism, then Fabiola’s tale, dealing with the struggle between good and evil, white and black, and a white figure fighting a black one, deserves even more scrutiny—if only because of the high moral stature of its author, Belgium's (White) Queen.
Read in its historical context, the tale becomes even more intriguing. For while the day of its publication, accompanying the announcement of her engagement, may have been a day of glory for Belgium, it was one of the darkest days in Congolese history. That date, which was "carefully chosen," according to her hagiography Fabiola, the White Queen, coincided with Mobutu’s first coup in Congo and the arrest of Lumumba. This marked the beginning of his ordeal, which would end a few months later with his transfer to Katanga, where he would be tortured, executed, and dissolved in sulfuric acid. A fate not so different, in the end, from that of "the horrible knight with very black skin," who dissipates at the end of The Prince of the White Mountain in black smoke.
In her book Fabiola, Pawn on Franco's Chessboard, published a few months after its subject's death, Anne Morelli demonstrates the close link between Fabiola and Franco’s dictatorship. Although the author does not mention it, one might wonder, based on the chronology of her rise in Belgium, whether there is an even closer link between Fabiola and Mobutu's dictatorship.
A page, then, to tackle these ideological and historical questions. Please like the page and join the debate.
An audio version of Fabiola’s tale is available on SoundCloud.
