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Tues-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat & Sun 10am-6pm; ?2 . Without a doubt Tervuren's main attraction is the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale . Only a short walk along Leuvensesteeweg from the Tervuren tram terminal, it is housed in a pompous, custom-built pile constructed on the orders of King Leopold II around 1900. Personally presented with the vast Congo River basin by a conference of the European powers in 1885, Leopold became one of the country's richest men as a result. His initial attempts to secure control of the area were abetted by the explorer and ex-Confederate soldier Henry Stanley, who went to the Congo on a five-year fact-finding mission in 1879, just a few years after he had famously found the missionary David Livingstone. Even by the standards of the colonial powers, Leopold's regime was too chaotic and too extraordinarily cruel to stomach, and in 1908, one year before the museum opened, the Belgian government took over the territory, installing a marginally more liberal state bureaucracy. The country gained independence as Zaire in 1960, and its subsequent history has been one of the most bloodstained in Africa. The museum was Leopold's own idea, a blatantly colonialist and racist enterprise which treats the Africans as a naive and primitive people, and the Belgians as their paternalistic benefactors. Nevertheless, the collection is undeniably rich if a little old-fashioned, and sometimes positively eccentric: one room is entirely devoted to examples of different sorts of timber. Unsurprisingly there is little about Leopold's administration or its savagery. The most interesting displays cover many aspects of Congolese life, from masks, idols and musical instruments to weapons and an impressive array of dope pipes, and there's a superb 22-metre-long dugout canoe. The museum's grounds are also well worth a stroll, with the formal gardens set around a series of geometric lakes, flanked by wanderable woods
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