Belgium Table medals Belgian Congo

[GM1]

Hi there:

I have the following table medals, but I can´t find any information about them. There is a silver and a bronze version. Both a signed Fr. Huygelen and the silver one has Fonson stamped. Diameter is 90mm and weight about 450 g each. Any information is more than welcome!

The adverse holds the inscription 1914 CONGO 1918

[paul wood]

The Medals are a tribute to the participants in the African Campaign 1914-18 by the famous medallist Belgian Frans Huygelen, the medals were retailed by the Brussels jewellers Fonson, who retailed many of Huygelen's work s (who also were makers of Belgian Orders) as double set it is quite scarce. I am aware of single bronze examples which sell for about £100 but the cased double set I would have thought ought to be worth £400-500. A very nice acquisition.

Paul

[GM1]

Thanks a lot Paul for your information! If awarded to participants of the African Campaign, this means that the number of medals is rather scarce also? I´m very happy that they have ended up in my collection .

Best regards,

GM1

[paul wood]

No these are commemorative art medals not award medals which were marketed in Belgium for collectors, they would have been advertised in various relevant publications. The double set would have been the most expensive and probably a relatively small number would have been sold, certainly no more than a few hundred. Certainly the Congo theme would make them more collectable than most Belgian medals of the period.

Paul

[GM1]

Thank you very much for the additional information Paul!

Best regards.

GM1

[Chris Boonzaier]

I find the symbolism totally bizarre ... we are talking about the Belgian Congo,

In this photo the children of indiginous Rubber plantation workers... those who did not reach quotas had to watch their children have their hands hacked off.....

"Thus, under Léopold II’s administration, the Congo Free State became the site of one of the worst man-made humanitarian disasters of the turn of the 20th century. The report of the British Consul Roger Casement, published in early 1904, was an irrefutable indictment of the “rubber system”: “... the drowsy, unsupervised machine of coercion which wore out the people and the land”.^[8] In the absence of a census (the first was made in 1924), it is difficult to quantify the population loss of the period, but it must have been very high. According to Roger Casement’s report, depopulation was caused mainly by four causes: “indiscriminate war”, starvation, reduction of births, and tropical diseases. Adam Hochschild argues that roughly 10 million perished.^[9] The human suffering inflicted by the rapacious exploitation of the colony was immense."

“…The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. , The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber, They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace, the people who were demanded for the forced labor gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected…”

[Chris Boonzaier]

So for me the symbolism is.... a woman, too poor to own clothes, her husband murdered by Rubber plantation overseaers, bearing a child concieved in slavery with a colonial... asking for a handout, but being told "look, we are off to fight the germans, leave me alone!"

Without sounding facetious.... The Belgian congo is maybe the last colony in the world that seems to have had a reaon of producing a medaillon with local people looking fondly at a symbol of the Colonialist?

[paul wood]

Huygelen had probably never been further than northern Europe in his life he was producing a stylised version for Belgian consumption and government propoganda. By the Great War the administration in the Congo was considerably better than it was in Leopold's day. The Casement report had stripped Leopold of his private fief and the colony was run by the Belgian government, it was probaly by then no worse but no better than other European colonies. Certainly many Congolese did serve with the Belgian Army for whatever reason. Mind you after Leopolds day the Congo was probably a lot safer than it is now with various rival armies comitting murder and rape on an industrial scale.

Paul

[Stuka f]

Sorry, just noticed the way of posting images, so I will redo my post.

Primary post can be deleted.

A example of thise medal was recently sold on ebay.be;