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BITTER COLONIAL TASTE

July 7 is World Chocolate Day, so let’s remind ourselves about Antwerp - Belgium’s capital of the stuff. There, chocolate comes in all shapes imaginable, but one in particular stands out: severed hands.

The story behind Antwerp Hands is rooted in folklore: a Roman soldier defeated a giant who guarded a bridge by chopping off his hand and throwing it into the river - and then founded Antwerp. Until his demise, the giant himself used to cut people’s hands off and chuck them in the river if they didn’t pay him a fee to cross the bridge. And indeed ‘Antwerp’ in Dutch literally means ‘throwing hands.’

Well, it’s a tale that certainly seems to have inspired Belgian royalty - in particular, King Leopold II. Under his genocidal rule in Congo, slaves’ hands were amputated if they or their parents were deemed not to have worked hard enough. Some 10-million Congolese were killed under Belgian colonial rule.

So while Antwerp Hands may have a quirky little tale associated with them, the fact is that they will inevitably make Africans think of the horrors visited on them by Europeans. It displays an incredible insensitivity that these sweets haven’t been withdrawn - revealing that European pleasure is still regarded as more important than African pain.

You can sugar-coat chocolate, but not your evil colonial past.