In ‘The Story of Flanders’, Tom Waes soon comes up against the dichotomy between science and myth-making

The emergence of nation states in the 19th century marked the beginning of a national history. The more we go back in time and prove the existence of a national feeling, the more the country is firmly anchored in the world. Governments spared no expense in populating the public realm with statues of majestic lords – usually on horseback and sword in hand – and school history became synonymous with a line that squirmed in the waiting for when there was almost nothing when there was not. so distant past where everything had become, almost on purpose, what it is now.

Sometimes it seems that this Flemish government wants to propel this region into the 19th century. As if there were no waiting lists in health care, the poverty line did not move and the climate managed itself, he was thrown a big government budget to invent a canon of one hand and to dramatically depict the history of this territory on the other. With historically sound staging, mammoth encounters – wow, these are big! – descents into the depths – wow, that’s deep! – will be in the coming weeks The history of Flanders unfold before our eyes. Even if the territory is too paved, Tom Waes will cross Flanders in an SUV like a contemporary knight. The bloated cart and the rubber boots he invariably puts on symbolize in their superfluity, perhaps unconsciously, the foundation of this whole enterprise.

The inflated cart and the rubber boots of Tom Waes symbolize in their superfluity, perhaps unconsciously, the foundation of The History of Flanders.

History does not materialize, it is always multiplicity, never uniformity. Anyone who prefers to tell “the story” rather than “one of the stories” quickly comes up against the dichotomy between science and myth-making. Also because a lot of things are unclear due to the lack of tangible material. Sometimes we just can’t know what people who lived in the past did. This is especially true for the first period Waes travels to.

In a typical Limburg residential area, a housing estate with well-trimmed gardens and the development of ribbons, he puts on a thick coat and suddenly finds himself on an unrecognizable plain. An icy meadow, without trees and for the moment without anyone. This is the biggest leap that Waes will make in the series, he explains in detail, 38,000 years back. Flanders, he says, was completely different back then. Logical, because it did not yet exist. But, he continues imperturbable, something special happened, because we had visitors. And there you see them in slippers across the frozen steppe, a group of people in animal skins, with black hair, black eyes, black skin. They could only be the first inhabitants of these regions, who entered South Limburg via the Maasvlakte.

“An educated guess,” calls one of the archaeologists. In The history of Flanders scientists constantly temper the heroism with which Waes traverses the past. Though their restrained analyzes sometimes sound a bit like lip service, as if allowing the daring narrator to take the shortest path between science and myth.

Because this single story about the first homo sapiens who crossed from the Meuse to the Scheldt exposes the problem of the whole “history of Flanders”. For 450,000 years another human species lived in the area. As geneticist Maarten Larmuseau clarifies in a conversation with Waes, almost all of us carry some of his genetic material. However, traces of its existence have only been found in Wallonia, Spy and the German Neanderthal. This is where the rewriting of history already begins, because to tell the story of Flanders, you have to go far beyond Flanders. When, explained another archaeologist, there was no territory. Not to mention national excesses. That was the time.