Notes

Left: The Congo Star which adorned the Congolese flag during the Leopold era, photographed at the Military Museum in Brussels, January 2004. When Laurent Kabila displaced Mobutu Sese Seko during the first Congo War of 1996, he replaced the Zairean flag with a banner featuring the old Congo Star

Right: Goma residents salute Laurent Kabila after his army takes the city, 1997

Guy Tillim first visited the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1996 for a photo story he proposed to a German magazine to travel by boat from Kisangani to Kinshasa.

Thereafter he visited the Congo region repeatedly, notably for three months in 2003 to continue photographing traces of the colonial occupation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium as well as to document vestiges of more recent plunder under Zairian military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Tillim exhibited his photographs as single images and in diptychs and triptychs, the latter juxtaposing historical sites in the Congo and Belgium with contemporary views of daily life in Congo.¹

1. http://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/congo/congo1.htm

Exhibited

Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, Guy Tillim: Leopold and Mobutu, 12 May to 19 June, 2004.