De Zwarte Kost

In the Flemish village of Akspoele, a clerk named Fortuné Massijn returns from abroad with two young African princes in tow, expecting triumph. Instead, he finds only mockery. The villagers stare, jeer, and recoil at the strangers in their midst, while Massijn furiously defends their dignity and his own. What follows is a caustic portrait of small-town vanity and the brutal certainty with which provincial minds reject what they cannot understand. Published in 1898, Cyriel Buysse's novella arrived years before Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy dared to name the atrocities committed in King Leopold's Congo Free State. Buysse, drawing on his own experiences in colonial circles, dismantles the self-serving myths of European "civilizing missions" with ruthless precision. The "exotic" visitors become a mirror held up to the villagers' own grotesque pettiness and to the hollow prestige that colonialism promises and never delivers. This is a sharp, uncomfortable work that reads like a polemic dressed in narrative clothing. Its brevity only sharpens its edge.