Het idee van verzoening tussen blank en zwart in Koen Peeters’ De Mensengenezer

The “Congo-novel” is an important subgenre in Flemish literature. Dutch texts from as early as the sixteenth century contain passages about Africa. Interest in this continent continued to grow over the following centuries. This article discusses one of the themes present in De Mensengenezer (“The People Healer”, 2017), a recently published Congo-novel by the contemporary Flemish author Koen Peeters (born 1959). The focus in this article is on the relationship between whites and blacks in the context of the Congo-novel. Most of the Flemish prose on the Congo from the twentieth century and earlier depicted the blacks as inferior to the whites. Instead, De Mensengenezer offers the idea of reconciliation between these two groups.