A colossal painting that once served as Belgium's grand propaganda piece to justify its colonial rule in Congo now sits rolled up in storage, too fragile and controversial to ever be displayed again. The Congo Panorama, unveiled at the 1913 Ghent World Exhibition, was designed to convince viewers of Belgium's supposed civilizing mission in Africa, but more than a century later, it stands as a monument to colonial deception.

The massive artwork stretched an almost unbelievable 115 meters in length and 14 meters in height, covering more than 1,600 square meters of painted surface. The colossal canvas was wrapped inside the walls of a purpose-built rotunda, transforming visitors into spectators inside an imagined version of Congo. It represented a monumental act of image-making, an engineered illusion designed to convince 1913 audiences of the supposed success and benevolence of Belgium's colonial project.

The Belgian state, which had recently taken control of the Congo after the scandals surrounding King Leopold II's brutal private regime, desperately needed to present a sanitized, triumphant new narrative. The panorama was designed to serve exactly that purpose, functioning as a nation-sized piece of propaganda vast enough to obscure the atrocities that had occurred. The government's aim was to distract from the horrors of the Congo Free State and recast Belgium as a modern, humane colonial power.

The panorama was commissioned in 1911 by Minister of Colonies Jules Renkin, who tasked painters Alfred Bastien and Paul Mathieu with producing nothing less than a complete visual justification of Belgian rule. The artists traveled for five weeks between Matadi and Léopoldville, which is now known as Kinshasa, returning with photographs and sketches that were later expanded into the colossal canvas. They were supported by a small army of landscape, market, and sky painters who helped bring the massive project to life.

The 1913 rotunda was constructed in Ghent's Citadelpark, where the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK), the contemporary art museum (SMAK), and the Kuipke velodrome are now located. The building was specifically designed for maximum impact on visitors. People entered through a dark tunnel before emerging onto a central viewing platform, where they found themselves surrounded on all sides by a continuous horizon of lush forests, bustling markets, majestic waterfalls, and modern Belgian infrastructure.

The canvas depicted calm fishing scenes, villagers dancing, and goods being efficiently unloaded from steamers. Belgian engineers and missionaries appeared as benevolent modernizers delivering progress through steamships, railways, and iron bridges. The artists merged these various scenes into a single, harmonious landscape designed to suggest Belgian mastery over a vast, unified territory. A fake terrain of sand, rocks, and cut-out figures at the base of the canvas enhanced the immersion, while a canopy hid the ceiling and edges, creating an early virtual-reality effect.

However, the painting's omissions were glaring and deliberate. Nowhere in the panorama was there any depiction of the forced labor that underpinned every ton of transported rubber, ivory, and minerals. The artwork showed no trace of the countless porters who were compelled to haul goods inland, nor did it acknowledge the human cost of the Matadi-Kinshasa railway, which claimed unrecorded numbers of Congolese lives. Historian Maarten Couttenier notes how prisoners had to be repainted without their chains, providing just one small example of the sanitizing edits demanded by colonial officials.

Today, the original canvas exists only as a 15-meter-long roll weighing several tons, having been badly damaged during World War II when Nazi forces mistook it for a cannon and sawed through it. The War Heritage Institute, which stores the painting, needed two army tank cranes merely to unroll it for photography in 2022, marking the first time it had been opened in nearly 90 years. Photographers created more than 830 ultra-detailed 100-megapixel images, which were later stitched together into a digital reconstruction exceeding seven gigapixels.

Physically displaying the original canvas is unlikely to ever happen again. "If you want to exhibit the original, you'd need a special building – it would cost 20 million," Couttenier explains. "It might never be displayed again." The painting remains far too fragile and logistically unwieldy to exhibit, serving as a hidden reminder of Belgium's colonial past.

This Friday, the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren opens "The Congo Panorama 1913: Colonial Illusion Exposed," an exhibition that resurrects and dissects the giant painting through a new large-scale reproduction, along with archival material. The result is not intended as a spectacle, but rather as a comprehensive takedown of colonial propaganda. "It looks amazing, but the message is horrific," says Couttenier, who curates the exhibition. "The panorama was constructed so that spectators left with a pleasant idea about Belgium in Congo."

The AfricaMuseum's exhibition does not attempt to recreate the old spectacle. Instead, it exposes the panorama's mechanisms of deception and juxtaposes them with Congolese voices, both archival and contemporary. A sound installation confronts visitors with recordings from 1912, including Kaliko songs of flight and death that pierce through the idyllic imagery. The exhibition also places preparatory sketches, photographs, and archival records alongside responses from contemporary artists such as Shurouq Mussran, who interpret what the painting concealed.

The AfricaMuseum itself carries a controversial history. It was the site of the notorious 1897 International Exposition, which Leopold II used to showcase his plunder from Congo, including a human zoo where Congolese people were put on display. Later remade as the Congo Museum and now formally known as the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), it underwent a major overhaul a decade ago, acknowledging its role in upholding Belgium's colonial rule. "The museum used to be a colonial propaganda machine," Couttenier says. "Now we're trying to do the complete opposite."

By centering a reproduction of the Congo Panorama not to admire it, but to expose it, the AfricaMuseum is attempting to transform the gargantuan painting into one of its most important documents of historical deception. The exhibition invites visitors to look more critically at grand narratives, grand illusions, and the political uses of beauty in shaping public opinion about colonial enterprises.