Description
April 1958. When the Brussels World's Fair opens, Robert Dumont, one of the organizers of the biggest international events since the end of the Second World War, ultimately relents under pressure to include a 'Congolese village' in one of the seven pavilions devoted to the settlements. Among the eleven recruits mobilized at the foot of the Atomium to put on a show is the young Tshala, daughter of the intractable king of the Bakuba. The journey of this princess is revealed from her native Kasai to Brussels via Léopoldville, to her forced exhibition at Expo 58, where she disappears from view.
Summer 2004. Freshly arrived in Belgium, a niece of the missing princess crosses paths with a man haunted by the ghost of his father: Francis Dumont, professor of law at the Free University of Brussels. A succession of events reveals to them the secret carried to his grave by the former deputy commissioner of Expo 58. From one century to the next, the novel embraces History with a capital 'H' to pose the central question of the colonial past: can the past pass?
A gripping multigenerational novel that explores the history and human cost of colonialism in the Congo.