What’s in it for me? A shattering account of one of the most horrifying sagas of the colonial era.
King Leopold wasn’t the first European colonialist to exploit the resources, and people, of another country.
But with the Congo, Leopold took the greed, exploitation, and violence of the era to a far more extreme and ghastly level than ever before. Over nearly thirty years of rule, he used slave labor to amass a personal fortune of over $1 billion in today’s dollars. Leopold forced African laborers to harvest vast quantities of ivory and rubber on land he expropriated from them. In the process, an estimated ten million Africans died. To put it bluntly, Leopold turned African bodies into money.
What's worse, Leopold wasn't the last to interfere in Congolese affairs for personal gain. In fact, his violent regime set the stage for countless subsequent horrors in the Congo, from the CIA’s assassination of democratically elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 to the appalling conditions in Congolese mines that to this day keep diamonds on fingers, uranium in nuclear weapons, and coltan in iPhones.
A short warning: in their exposition of enslavement and colonization in the Congo, these blinks contain graphic descriptions of extreme violence and brutality.
In these blinks, you’ll learn
how Leopold used humanitarianism to mask his true motivations for colonizing the Congo;
why some African chiefs were open to bartering with human lives when European slavers showed up; and
how one Irish father’s weekend chores led to the deaths of millions of Africans.
From first contact, Europeans valued central Africa mainly for its profit-making potential.
In 1482, Portuguese naval captain Diogo Cão was watching the North Star disappear over the horizon. His ship was passing the equator, and was much farther south than any European had ever been before.
Suddenly, he saw the ocean had turned brownish-yellow. It was freshwater. Cão had stumbled upon the mouth of a massive, silty river, larger than anything he’d ever seen. He went ashore and erected a limestone pillar and cross, marking it as discovered for Portugal.
But Cão hadn’t ventured on this dangerous journey just for the sake of discovery. He was in search of treasure.
The key message here is: From first contact, Europeans valued central Africa mainly for its profit-making potential.
The great river, later known as the Congo, lay at the northern end of a wealthy African kingdom, a federation of two to three million people spread over three hundred square miles.
Nine years later, Portuguese monks located its capital and set up an embassy. It was the first interaction between Europeans and a black African nation. The ManiKongo, or king, was enthusiastic about the Portuguese’s fire-spouting weapons – guns, as we'd call them – and the effect they might have on a potential provincial rebellion.
For their part, the Portuguese were largely dismissive of Kongo culture – and they were scandalized by the nudity they saw. They admitted, though, that the kingdom was sophisticated, the most advanced on the west coast of central Africa. Arts and agriculture flourished, and there was an intricate political system that also involved enslavement. This was crucial: the preexistence of a form of slavery there meant that when Europeans showed up and offered to buy human beings, the kingdom’s chiefs were open to selling.
European development of the Americas had created a nearly insatiable market for African slave labor. Slaving fever gripped the Portuguese in the Congo, who generated vast profits by shuffling convoys of chained Africans onto ships. Enslaved peoples were marched to the coast, deprived of sufficient food and clean water on their miserable journey. The trails linking the ocean to the interior were soon littered with bleaching bones.
Europeans were also seized by the urge to explore. But the treacherous terrain meant that several centuries’ worth of visitors never made it up the great Congo River. Many expeditions set out and never returned.
The source of the river remained a mystery. The only thing that Europeans could be sure of was that Africa supplied valuable raw materials: elephant tusks and human bodies.
Stanley was brutal, ambitious, and narcissistic, traits that made him well-suited to Europe's colonization of Africa.
Eventually, the source of the Congo River was discovered by a Welshman whose birth was recorded as that of “John Rowlands, Bastard.” He would spend the rest of his life trying to live down the shame he carried as a result.
After a traumatic childhood in a workhouse, where he was subjected to sexual abuse, he signed on with a merchant ship. Landing in New Orleans, he changed his name to Henry Morton Stanley. He fought in the American Civil War – one of the few people to see combat on both sides. Then he became a journalist, and after getting the scoop on a British expedition against the Emperor of Abyssinia – modern-day Ethiopia – he took a permanent foreign correspondent job with the New York Herald. He was twenty-seven years old.
The key message here is: Stanley was brutal, ambitious, and narcissistic, traits that made him well-suited to Europe's colonization of Africa.
The “Scramble for Africa,” as Europeans called it, was on. European powers were jostling each other for control over the continent’s vast territories and resources. These resources would be vital to Europe’s Industrial Revolution, just as enslaved peoples had been to the colonial plantation economy in the Americas.
But Europeans liked to think their motives were loftier than commerce. They rallied around the importance of bringing Christianity and what they called “civilization” to the indigenous peoples of Africa. The British, in particular, were filled with righteousness about fighting slavery in East Africa, which they attributed to Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula. Arabs, conveniently, were nonwhite.
European explorers in Africa became some of the first international celebrities, much like athletes or movie stars today. Stanley shot to international prominence with a well-publicized series of exploits paid for by his employer at the Herald.
But he was a harsh and brutal man, particularly with those over whom he had power. His servants on his African expeditions bore the brunt of his sadistic streak. He was the judge, jury, and executioner, passing death sentences and decreeing floggings, and frequently carrying them out personally. In one inglorious episode, he cut off his dog’s tail, cooked it, and fed it to the dog to eat.
From the people he met on his travels, Stanley took any show of hostility as a deadly insult. He didn’t bother counting the number of people his party killed along the way.
Leopold wanted a colony, and he saw Stanley as the man who could help get him one.
The Herald tasked Stanley with searching for Dr. David Livingstone, a famous explorer obsessed with locating the source of the Nile. One man followed Stanley’s hunt with great interest: Leopold II, the 37-year-old King of the Belgians. Leopold spoke French, German, and English, but never bothered to learn Flemish, the unfashionable language spoken by more than half his subjects.
As a boy, Leopold had been an unmotivated scholar, with the exception of one subject: profit. He became fixated on the idea of having a colony of his very own, and endlessly badgered his ministers about it. His goal was singular: to get rich. He once complained to an advisor, “Belgium doesn’t exploit the world. It’s a taste we have got to make her learn.” He would soon make that happen.
The key message here is: Leopold wanted a colony, and he saw Stanley as the man who could help get him one.
Leopold noted the disgust Europeans felt toward the so-called Arab slavers. A colonial push from a small country like Belgium, he realized, would require a veneer of humanitarianism. So, in 1876, he launched a plan to establish himself as a philanthropist and vehement antislavery crusader. He hosted a conference for African geographers and explorers, with the intent to convince the powers of Europe that his aim was benevolent.
Meanwhile, Stanley had walked the length of the Congo River, so big it dwarfed all the great rivers of Europe. Just one of its tributaries, the Kasai, carries as much water as the Volga in Russia, and is half as long as the Rhine, which runs through western Europe. Stanley immediately saw the potential for commerce along the Congo’s thousand-mile stretch of calm, deep water.
As for Leopold, he had made up his mind: he would have the middle of Africa for himself. He worked his kingly charms on Stanley, who was gratified to meet a monarch who admired his work. Eventually the two agreed: Stanley would return to the Congo, this time working for Leopold. His goal? To set up a main base on the coast, and several stations along the river. Leopold launched a series of philanthropic associations to mask his true purpose: collecting treasure, in the form of ivory.
Neither man knew much about central Africa, and less still about the people who lived there. But they did know those people didn’t pose a military threat. Centuries of slave raids from the east and the west had weakened the kingdom, and their weaponry was no match for state-of-the-art European rifles.
Leopold began squeezing the Congo for profit by any means possible.
For five years, Stanley was Leopold’s man in the Congo. He carved a rough track around the big rapids of the Congo River and moved more than 50 tons of supplies up the trail. Draft animals couldn’t survive the climate, so African porters were forced to do the heavy lifting. In many cases, people were worked literally to death.
Leopold needed to create a European-style monopoly that would be legally defensible to the other colonial powers. His team of lawyers and bureaucrats came up with an arrangement that would grant his private company the right to act as a sovereign country when dealing with local chiefs. Now all he needed was for the chiefs to sign an agreement to that effect.
The key message here is: Leopold began squeezing the Congo for profit by any means possible.
Many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. In fact, few had even seen the written word before. But this didn’t stop Stanley, who coerced more than 450 Congo basin leaders to sell their land to Leopold for almost nothing. Worse still, they agreed to assist Leopold’s officers “by labor or otherwise.”
While Stanley was swindling local chiefs and leaders out of their land in Africa, Leopold was busy in Europe. He worked his charm on leaders all over the continent, with the goal of getting them to recognize his claim to the Congo.
The “Scramble for Africa” was in full swing. In 1884, European leaders met at the Berlin Conference to carve up the spoils. Even Stanley was uncomfortable with the bald-faced greed at the conference: he said it reminded him of how “my black followers used to rush with gleaming knives for slaughtered game.” But Leopold got what he wanted: land and recognition. He formally set up the Congo Free State, 76 times the size of Belgium, and installed himself as King-Sovereign.
To mold the vast territory to his vision of maximum profit, Leopold would use a series of modern tools that hadn’t been available to colonizers of previous eras. These included the steamboat, which would be crucial to turning the river into a highway through rough terrain. Leopold would also build railroads around 220 miles of rapids that separated the interior and its treasure from the coast and Leopold’s trade ships.
Finally, he would use modern weaponry, especially rifles. Soon after would come the machine gun, which would change the region forever.
Leopold established a brutal slave colony while continually insisting his motives were altruistic.
On May 29, 1885, the Congo Free State was formally proclaimed a corporate state, of which Leopold was the absolute monarch. That same day, Leopold issued a series of decrees. One stated that any land state officials deemed to be “vacant” was now his property, as were all products of the land, whether elephant tusks or villagers’ vegetables.
To shore up his monopoly in the region, he shut out any other potential traders, deploying a private army to drive out any profit schemes of which he did not have a piece. All the while, he maintained publicly that he was working to improve the lives of people in the Congo.
The key message here is: Leopold established a brutal slave colony while continually insisting his motives were altruistic.
Most important to Leopold’s bottom line was ivory. His agents were paid by commission, at a rate that increased according to the weight of the ivory. This created an incentive for agents to force Africans, sometimes at gunpoint, to accept low prices for their ivory – or just hand it over for nothing. Frequently, Congo state officials simply looted villages, taking whatever ivory they found.
But even worse than this was the methodical system of forced labor Leopold enacted. Africans were conscripted to build the Congo railway, which had begun in 1887. They were regularly worked to death. For the slightest offense, people were punished with the chicotte, a whip of dried hippopotamus skin. Twenty-five lashes frequently caused victims to faint; 100 were often fatal. One observer witnessed a group of children being given 25 lashes for laughing in the presence of a white man.
They were also conscripted to join Leopold’s private army, ironically called the Force Publique. This grew to nearly 20,000 men over the next dozen years, and was used to subdue rebellions all over the territory ruthlessly.
Leopold did all this while claiming that profit was the farthest thing from his mind. In 1891, he told the Belgian parliament, “The Congo state is certainly not a business. If it gathers ivory on certain of its lands, that is only to lessen its deficit.” Any forced labor that Africans were made to do, he added, served to rescue the “savages,” as he called them, from their own laziness.
Leopold was running a slave colony. But no early visitors were able to look facts in the face, and record the horror they’d witnessed. Except for two people, about whom we'll learn in the coming blinks.
The horrors of the Congo inspired two canonical works, one of investigative journalism and the other of literature.
George Washington Williams was a Black American pastor, lawyer, and historian. He went to the Congo in 1890 to assess it as a place where Black Americans could potentially settle, away from the racism and discrimination of the Jim Crow South. He made his way slowly upriver by steamboat, with plenty of time to process what he was seeing.
What he found was not the benevolently ruled colony described by Stanley and Leopold, but a human rights atrocity. Instead of an antislavery crusader, Leopold was himself a slaver.
The key message here is: The horrors of the Congo inspired two canonical works, one of investigative journalism and the other of literature.
Horrified by what he encountered, Williams wrote a searing indictment in his professional legal prose. Of the hundreds of Europeans and Americans who traveled to the Congo in the early years, Williams is the only one who talked to Africans about their personal experience with Stanley. The resulting pamphlet is a milestone in human rights literature and investigative journalism.
In the pamphlet, Williams reports the tricks Stanley used to get Congo chiefs to sign over their land to Leopold, like his claim that whites had supernatural powers. He reports excessive cruelty to prisoners, which included stockades, shackles that were too tight, and the chicotte. He exposes as fraudulent Belgian government claims that it was building schools and hospitals. Finally, he reports that state officials were kidnapping African women and girls and using them as concubines.
His pamphlet was published and distributed widely, primarily in Europe but also in the United States. The French press called the situation “un vrai scandale.” In 1891, the furor reached the Belgian parliament, putting Leopold on the defensive for the first time.
But Williams wasn’t the only one to recoil from the horror in the Congo. Konrad Korzeniowski spent six months working on a steamer on the Congo River in 1890. After eight years brooding over his experiences, he published a novel under his new adopted name: Joseph Conrad. This novel was Heart of Darkness, which has since become the most reprinted short novel in the English language.
In the novel, the narrator, Marlow, sails a steamboat up a river. Along the way, he witnesses skeletons tied to posts, dead bodies in chains on the side of dirt tracks, and empty villages whose inhabitants had either fled or been massacred. Conrad said the events of the book varied “but a little” from the facts of the case.
As Leopold’s focus shifted from ivory to rubber, a grisly new chapter began in his Congo slave colony.
While Williams and Conrad were steaming down the Congo, John Dunlop was doing chores one morning in Belfast, Ireland. Tinkering with his son’s tricycle, he invented a device that would lead to new industries – and suffering – beyond anything he could have imagined. This device was the inflatable rubber tire.
The industrial world quickly caught on, demanding vast quantities of rubber for tires, tubing, hoses, and telephone insulation. The price of rubber rose steadily through the 1890s. Nowhere did the boom have a more drastic impact on people’s lives than in the Congo.
The key message here is: As Leopold’s focus shifted from ivory to rubber, a grisly new chapter began in his Congo slave colony.
By the late 1890s, the Congo’s wild rubber was more valuable than its ivory. Leopold shifted his focus accordingly.
As with ivory, the European agents supplying rubber to the Congo Free State were rewarded according to the amount they brought in. Some agents got rich. But most of the money flowed back to the state’s offices in Belgium.
Between 1890 and 1904, total Congo rubber earnings increased ninety-six times over. Profits were maximized because harvesting wild rubber required no cultivation, no fertilizer, and no capital investment in expensive equipment. It required only labor.
But this was a problem for the Congo’s rulers. They couldn’t chain people together and force them to work, as they did with porters and construction workers. Gathering wild rubber required long treks through the rainforest, milking vines often hundreds of feet off the ground in the canopy, and collecting the sap in a bucket. People had to be compelled in other ways.
Congo state officials began kidnapping village women, children, or elders and holding them hostage until the chief of the district had brought in the required amount of rubber. If a man in the village resisted, his wife was killed. If his rubber haul was a few grams off the required total, he or his family members faced the chicotte. Tips for taking hostages were listed in a semi-official instruction book given to every agent.
Huge numbers of Africans were forced to work in this labor army. In 1906, the books for one rubber trading company alone, responsible for only a small fraction of the Congo’s rubber production, listed 47 thousand rubber gatherers.
As reports of ghastly crimes began to trickle out of the Congo, Leopold carefully maintained his public image.
In 1899, American missionary William Sheppard was sent into uncharted jungle to investigate the source of bitter interethnic fighting. What he found was beyond his wildest nightmares. He came upon a camp where, with the objective of preserving them, human hands were being smoked over a fire. There were 81 hands in total, all amputated from right arms.
The hands were from the Kuba people, whose enemies had been incentivized by Congo Free State agents to collect the hands as proof of death. This was deliberate Congo Free State policy. For each cartridge issued to their mercenaries, officers demanded proof that the bullet hadn’t been wasted in hunting. They required right hands from bodies – whether the person was dead or alive.
Sheppard wrote a damning report of the atrocities he witnessed, which was published widely. But Leopold’s strategy remained that of denial.
The key message here is: As reports of ghastly crimes began to trickle out of the Congo, Leopold carefully maintained his public image.
To protect the deception that the Congo Free State was a charitable enterprise, Leopold had to allow Christian missionaries access to the Congo. For the most part, these missionaries had less of a stomach for violence than the hard men who enlisted in the state’s officer corps. Some, like William Sheppard, made reports and took photographs of the horrors they witnessed. In the face of the outrageous atrocities being committed, opposition slowly grew among missionaries and then humanitarians.
And yet Leopold’s base of support was still strong. Using proceeds from regular rubber shipments, he offered the public a meticulously curated, highly biased look into life in the Congo. At his château he added a Congo greenhouse, full of palm trees, open to the public once a year. At the 1897 World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium’s exhibit drew more than a million visitors. On display were machine guns, paintings of Africans by Europeans, and a living exhibit of 267 African men, women, and children imported from the Congo, installed in village dioramas. There was a sign that said, “The Blacks Are Fed By The Organizing Committee.” Visitors simply noted this as useful information.
Supervising the regular rubber shipments in Antwerp was a young British businessman named Edmund Morel. He was sober and respectable, with a family to support, unlikely to get wrapped up in ideological causes. But on the docks of Antwerp, in 1898, he came to a chilling realization that compelled him to take action, as we will learn in the next blink.
Morel’s outrage launched the first international human rights movement of the twentieth century.
On the Antwerp docks, as he oversaw the loading and unloading of ships on the Congo-Belgium line, Edmund Morel noticed two unsettling facts. First, in Antwerp, the ships were unloading vast quantities of rubber and ivory. Second, Belgium wasn’t sending anything to the Congo to pay for these items – except weapons and soldiers. Morel realized the only explanation was slave labor.
Morel’s first step was to tell his boss. The company didn’t know what to make of this junior functionary telling them he’d discovered something terrible about their best customer. Morel’s superiors tried to silence him, offering him a raise and a promotion. In response, Morel quit. He started his own publication, with the goal of exposing the atrocities that were going on unchecked in the Congo. He was only 28 years old, but he was on the cusp of launching a major humanitarian movement.
The key message here is: Morel’s outrage launched the first international human rights movement of the twentieth century.
Morel quickly became the greatest British investigative journalist of his time, working eighteen-hour days organizing meetings and publishing information about the atrocities in the Congo in his newspaper, the West African Mail. He produced a huge body of work on the subject, combining fury with meticulous accuracy.
As Morel’s momentum grew, jaded Congo state officials learned he was the best source through which to leak revealing documents. To Leopold’s growing concern, Morel printed damning evidence that directly contradicted Congo state press materials. One form showed a list of people who had been kidnapped each month, directly refuting official claims that kidnapping was not a state-mandated tactic in the Congo.
Morel courted missionaries who had worked in the Congo for their stories. Their accounts were some of the most horrifying he published. Morel’s articles and well-attended public speeches were accompanied by photographs of devastated villages, and children with missing hands and feet.
The British public became increasingly agitated. By 1903, Morel and his allies had succeeded in putting conditions in the Congo squarely on the British public agenda. In May, the House of Commons passed a resolution urging the Congo state to “govern with humanity.”
Leopold was disconcerted. If Britain, the superpower of the day, turned against him, his profits would be at risk. For the moment, Morel and Leopold were at a stalemate – but it would soon be broken.
Roger Casement’s firsthand experience in the Congo catalyzed the Congo Reform movement.
As soon as the British resolution was passed by the House of Commons, the British Foreign Office sent its consul to the Congo’s interior to investigate the allegations of Leopold’s brutality. The consul was Roger Casement, an Irishman with 20 years’ experience in Africa, who had been criticized by previous employers as being “too kind to the locals.”
Casement’s expedition into the interior took three and a half months. To avoid being dependent on Congo state authorities for transportation, he rented a steamboat. Traveling far upriver, he spent time at rubber camps and mission stations and sloshed through flooded forests to reach remote villages. His letters condemned the atrocities he witnessed in specific, angry terms. Among other horrors, he described hands and genitals being cut off corpses.
The key message here is: Roger Casement’s firsthand experience in the Congo catalyzed the Congo Reform movement.
Casement’s damning report on the situation in the Congo was published in early 1904. But the British Foreign Office, succumbing to pressure from Leopold, censored it. Casement was livid. He threatened to resign from the Foreign Office, referring in a private letter to his superiors as a “wretched set of incompetent noodles.”
Then he met Morel. Casement, with the help of Morel’s wife, convinced Morel to found an organization devoted to campaigning for justice in the Congo. With start-up capital from Casement, Morel founded the Congo Reform Association in 1904.
Morel believed that only the British government had the potential to force Leopold to reform or to take the Congo away from him entirely. But to get the government’s attention, he had to rile up the public.
Tailoring his message to fit a variety of audiences, Morel won the sympathies of millionaires and workers alike. Eager to elevate the movement above partisan politics and religious differences, he featured speakers from a variety of churches and from across the political spectrum. Each meeting had an accompanying slide show, depicting mutilated Africans or piles of amputated hands.
Newspapers began running pictures and reports of the holocaust in central Africa. It’s impossible to know the true number of people killed, because there were so many violent organizations at work at once. The most authoritative judgment is from an American ethnographer of the Congo basin. He estimates that between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was reduced by at least a half – that’s about ten million people.
As the Congo reform movement gained momentum, the tide began to turn against Leopold.
With the Congo reform movement well underway in England, Morel set his sights on the United States.
In September 1904, he met with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. He also won the support of powerful cultural figures Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, and several university presidents. He tailored his message to appeal to a wide range of audiences – from white supremacists who wanted Black Americans to leave the US for Africa, to an old woman born into slavery who wanted to donate her life savings to the cause.
Meanwhile, Leopold aggressively pursued congressional leaders who he thought could help his cause. He also courted an unscrupulous San Francisco lawyer who double-crossed him and sold the story of Leopold’s attempted manipulation of Congress to the press.
It was the first of many major setbacks for Leopold.
The key message here is: As the Congo reform movement gained momentum, the tide began to turn against Leopold.
In apparent response to the concerns Morel and his sources were raising, Leopold launched a sham commission, whose job was to investigate the situation in the Congo and clear his name. He hired three judges who could be counted on as lackeys – or so he thought.
The hearings had an effect Leopold wasn’t expecting. Listening to story after story of murder, rape, dismemberment, family separation, starvation, and cruelty, all from witnesses missing their right hands, one of the judges broke down and wept. Leopold’s plan had backfired: the sham investigation had become a real one. The report the judges produced repeated almost every criticism raised by Morel and Casement.
The report was on its way to the public when Leopold played his trump card. He sent every paper in England a fabricated summary of the report, via a benignly named organization called the West African Missionary Association. Thinking they were getting a break on big news, the papers published the summary before the report reached them.
But over the next few days, editors and reporters realized that the so-called summary had little to do with the report itself. The West African Missionary Association was a front. The document had been smuggled into England by a Belgian priest who owed Leopold a favor.
The writing was on the wall. European governments demanded that Leopold give up his colony. But Leopold, still King of the Belgians, had one last trick up his sleeve.
Leopold's reign of terror finally came to an end, but the true extent of his crimes remains unknown.
Leopold would accept only one alternative to personal control over the Congo: passing it on to Belgium. But he wasn’t just going to give away his colony. He would sell it. And he would make the buyers pay dearly, even if they were his own people.
With its international reputation at stake, the Belgian government was forced to play ball with Leopold. But the king didn’t return the favor. He wouldn’t even show government representatives the balance sheet of the business he was forcing them to buy.
It soon became clear that substantial loans from the Belgian government had gone missing – about $160 million dollars’ worth in today’s money. Meanwhile, Leopold stalled and threw dramatic tantrums, scrambling to hide his Congo-related riches, while maintaining he had none.
The key message here is: Leopold's reign of terror finally came to an end, but the true extent of his crimes remains unknown.
A deal between the Belgian government and Leopold was finally forged in 1908. First, the Belgian government would assume over $500 million contemporary dollars’ worth of the Congo Free State’s debt, much of which was in the form of bonds Leopold had given to friends and mistresses over the years. Next, Belgium would pay nearly $230 million toward completing the king’s building projects. On top of this, Leopold would receive $250 million as a mark of gratitude for his efforts in the Congo.
By the time Albert, heir to the Belgian throne, visited the Congo – something Leopold himself had never done – change seemed inevitable. In the fall of 1909, the Belgian colonial minister announced major reforms. Reports of atrocities from inspection tours by British consuls slowed to a trickle. Edmund Morel had won. He declared his campaign over in 1913, after 28 years of Leopold’s rule.
Leopold himself died in his bed, a year after relinquishing the Congo. It’s impossible to know exactly how much he personally profited from the enterprise. One Belgian historian believes it is approximately $1.1 billion in today’s dollars.
There are no monuments to the estimated ten million murdered Congolese in Brussels, the city built on proceeds from their labor. But our world is shaped less by what we celebrate than by the painful stories we try to forget. Leopold’s Congo is one of those silences of history.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
Europeans’ first view of the Congo was through the lens of profit, but King Leopold of Belgium took their greed to a devastating new level. Between 1880 and 1910, Leopold’s Congo Free State used slave labor to extract ivory and rubber from a territory seventy-six times the size of Belgium, and killed an estimated ten million Africans in the process. Leopold’s personal profit from his exploitation of the Congo and its people is estimated at approximately $1.1 billion in today’s money. But the true extent of his crimes, hidden by his own extensive efforts, will forever be shrouded in mystery.
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What to read next: A People Betrayed, by Linda Melvern
You’ve just learned how one European monarch took over a vast swath of central Africa, strangling it for its resources without a care for how many humans died in the process. But Leopold wouldn’t have been able to get away with it if it hadn’t been for the colonial officials, functionaries, diplomats, and other heads of state who for decades turned a blind eye to reports of atrocities.
Tragically, Europe wasn’t finished with central Africa. In A People Betrayed, journalist Linda Melvern details how the UN and its member states deluded themselves throughout the Rwandan genocide, the worst humanitarian crisis since the Holocaust. Even worse, France and, yes, Belgium, played a role in training and supporting the genocidal death squads affiliated with the far-right ethnonationalist Hutu Power movement, whose activities contributed to the deaths of approximately one million people.