Last week a statue of Leopold II in the city of Antwerp was set on fire, before authorities took it down. "It's a good thing that everyone is waking up, looking around and thinking 'is this right?'" In Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, Leopold II's statues were moved to the National Museum. Thompsell, Angela. As he headed back to England, Stanley was assiduously courted by King Leopold II of Belgium. Almost the only early visitor to interview Africans about their experience of the regime, he took extensive notes, and, a thousand miles up the Congo River, wrote one of the greatest documents in human rights literature, an open letter to King Leopold that is one of the important landmarks in human rights literature. In a TV debate this week, a former president of the Free University of Brussels, Herv Hasquin, argued there were "positive aspects" to colonisation, listing the health system, infrastructure, and primary education he said Belgium brought to Central Africa. George Washington Williams: A Biography. Standing on the dock, Morel realized that he had uncovered irrefutable proof that a forced labor system was in operation 4,000 miles away. POST-1945 HISTORICAL CONTEXTS The first nationwide Congolese political party, the Congo National Movement, was launched in 1958 by Patrice Lumumba and other Congolese leaders. Furthermore, as in any society where men and women are separated, traumatized, or in flight as refugees, the birth rate dropped precipitously. These were an incentive for ruthless, devastating plunder. Starting in the early 1920s, however, the system became considerably less draconian, mainly because colonial officials realized that otherwise they would soon have no labor force left. Manchester, U.K.: National Labour Press. The current protests are not the first time Belgium's ugly history in Congo has been contested in the streets. Army officers and colonial officials earned bonuses based on the amount of rubber collected in areas under their control. Last year a UN working group called on Belgium to apologise for atrocities committed during the colonial era. In 1870 roughly 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara Desert was governed by indigenous kings, chiefs, and other rulers. "Everyone is waking up from a sleep, it's a reckoning with the past," explains Debora Kayembe, a Congolese human rights lawyer who has lived in Belgium. Although Belgiums government felt that colonies would be an extravagance for a small country with no navy or merchant marine, that situation suited Leopold perfectly. When the Belgian King Leopold II acquired the Congo Free State during the Scramble for Africa in 1885, he claimed he was establishing the colony for humanitarian and scientific purposes, but in reality, its sole aim was profit, as much as possible, as fast as possible. Throughout the world's tropics people rushed to establish rubber plantations. "Civilisation" was at the core of Leopold II's pitch to European leaders in 1885 when they sliced up and allocated territories in what became known as the Scramble for Africa. In two ways the Congo's rubber boom had lasting impact beyond the territory itself. Joseph Conrad, who spent six months in the Congo in 1890, draws a memorable portrait of this rapacious trade in his novel Heart of Darkness. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. Encyclopedia.com. LEOPOLD II (18351909; ruled 18651909), king of Belgium and personal sovereign of the Congo Free State. Obtaining more precise statistics is difficult, for in 1908 King Leopold ordered the archives of his Congo state burned. View 6.2_Reading_Check.docx from HISTORY 2109320 at Coral Reef Senior High School. Baskets of severed hands thus resulted from expeditions against rebels. European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and Its Aftermath. The country of Belgium itself was only about five years old at the birth of Leopold II, who became the eldest surviving son of Leopold I, first king of the Belgians, and his second wife, Louise-Marie of Orlans. 657, 660, 662). For thousands of years, that territory had been conquered by nearby Netherlands, France, Germany, and Luxembourg. Leopold II's rule in what is now Democratic Republic of Congo was so bloody it was eventually condemned by other European colonialists in 1908 - but it has taken far longer to come under scrutiny at home. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. On Monday the University of Mons removed a bust of the late king, following the circulation of a student-led petition saying it represented the "rape, mutilation and genocide of millions of Congolese". GENEALOGY OF THE TERM DECOLONIZATION The Congo Free State was founded by Belgian King Leopold II on February 5, 1885, after he violently annexed the African continent. Vocabulary On February 5, 1885, Belgian King Leopold II established the Congo Free State by brutally seizing the African landmass as his personal possession. The king's colonial officials quickly set up a brutal but effective system for harvesting wild rubber. Most populous nation: Should India rejoice or panic? The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf as a personal union with Belgium. Since the 15th century, European explorers had sailed into the broad Congo estuary, planning to fight their way up the falls and rapids that begin only 100 miles (160km) inland, and then travel up the river to its unknown source. He made further progress toward realizing his objective at a diplomatic conference in Berlin in 1884 and 1885 that the major European powers attended. As he put it, he did not want to miss out on the opportunity of getting a slice of "this magnificent African cake." King . Therefore, its best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publications requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. Stanley made his way back to Europe with a sheaf of signed treaties in 1884. Leopold financed development projects with money loaned to him from the Belgian government. Leopold II, it seemed, was the only European willing to finance Stanley's dream: the building of a railway over the Crystal Mountains from the sea to Stanley Pool, from which river steamers could reach 1,000 miles (1,600km) into the heart of Africa. Rather than control the Congo as a colony, as other European powers did throughout Africa, Leopold privately owned the region. Arab vs. European: Diplomacy and war in Nineteenth-Century East Central Africa. Rather than control the Congo as a colony, as other European powers did throughout Africa, Leopold privately owned the region. Around 20,000 children born to Belgian settlers and local women were forcibly taken to Belgium to be fostered. In the early years the main commodity Leopold sought was ivory. For all his social shortcomings in European society, he was undoubtedly the right man for the job. Vangroenweghe, Daniel (1986). Brill. If a soldier fired at someone and missed, or used a bullet to shoot game, he then sometimes cut off the hand of a living victim to be able to show it to his officer. He was a figure who, one might have had every reason to expect, would devote himself to maintaining his country's strict neutrality, avoiding giving offence to any of his powerful neighbours, and indulging his keenly developed tastes for the pleasures of the flesh, rather than one who would make a profound impact on history. In one, a man sits on a low platform looking at a dismembered small foot and small hand. His most important legacy, however, remains the human catastrophe that the rubber forced-labour system brought to the Congoa heritage that continued to echo in that region more than a century after Leopolds death. The invention of the inflatable bicycle tire, followed soon by that of the automobile tire, triggered an enormous boom in rubber. Why did King Leopold colonize the Congo? 2, 2022, thoughtco.com/congo-free-state-atrocities-rubber-regime-43731. He is remembered in Belgium for some of what he built with his Congo wealth, such as the monumental Arcade du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, and for his advocacy of strong fortifications in the eastern part of the country, which slowed the advance of German troops in 1914 at the beginning of World War I. He became duke of Brabant in 1846 and served in the Belgian army. States and then all the major nations of Europe to recognize his claim. They were a newly independent country . He used Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. Therefore, King Leopold should be condemned as a criminal for his Read More Thesis Critique Of King Leopold's Ghost Learn how and when to remove this template message, Oasis Kodila Tedika et Francklin Kyayima Muteba, The sources of growth in DRC before independence. oliviall Answer: Since the consequences of the scheme in the Congo could too easily be blamed on one man who could comfortably be targeted because he did not serve a great power, a Leopold-focused foreign uproar. The army become known for its brutality, with the officers and soldiers being accused ofdestroying villages, taking hostages, raping, torturing, and extorting the people. London: Heinemann. Former President of Kenya With women as hostages and men forced to tap rubber, few able-bodied adults were left to hunt, fish, and cultivate crops. For instance, Leopold II was a first cousin of Queen Victoria of Britain. One particularly notorious practice grew out of the suppression of those rebellions. In order to enforce the near impossible rubber quotas imposed on villages, agents and officials called on the Free States army, the Force Publique. Soldiers were also reportedly promised their freedom or given other incentives for killing the most people as proven by supplying the most hands. Europe was less than keen on the idea: the great European scramble for Africa had not yet begun. [5] None of these schemes came anywhere near fruition: the government of Belgium resolutely resisted all Leopold's suggestions, seeing the acquisition of a colony as a good way to spend large amounts of money for little or no return. It is clearly understood that in this project there is no question of granting the slightest political power to the negros. One lucrative source of wild rubber was the Landolphia vines in the great Central African rainforest, and no one owned more of that area than Leopold. On Friday the younger brother of Belgium's King Philippe, Prince Laurent, defended his ancestor saying Leopold II was not responsible for atrocities in the colony "because he never went to. But why was Leopold's Congo so horrific? "Congo Free State Rubber Regime Atrocities." p.20. Tippu Tip, the most powerful of the Zanzibari slave traders of the 19th century, was well known to Stanley, as was the social chaos and devastation that slave-hunting brought. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). I never imagined this happening in my lifetime," Ms Kayembe adds. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Africans also died in two decades' worth of unsuccessful uprisings against the king's regime. This makeover of Leopold's image produced an amnesia that persisted for decades. Presenting himself as a philanthropist eager to bring the benefits of Christianity, Western civilization, and commerce to African nativesa guise that he perpetuated for many yearsLeopold hosted an international conference of explorers and geographers at the royal palace in Brussels in 1876. Humankind will never know even the approximate toll with any certainty, but beyond any doubt what happened in the Congo was one of the great catastrophes of modern times. By the early 1890s a new source of riches had appeared. Shocked by recent local census statistics that showed less than one child per woman, the official Commission Institue pour la Protection des Indignes made a similar reckoning in 1919. On Friday the younger brother of Belgium's King Philippe, Prince Laurent, defended his ancestor saying Leopold II was not responsible for atrocities in the colony "because he never went to Congo". (Believing one people is more civilized than another is wrong.) ThoughtCo, Jun. One by one the other great mysteries had been explored: Though the Congo had been one of the first to be attempted, it remained a mystery. Why did King Leopold give up the Congo? Retrieved April 27, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/king-leopold-ii-and-congo. Several years later he hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to be his man in Africa. As rubber prices soared, so did the quotas. In January 1959, riots broke out in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) after a rally was held calling for the independence of the Congo. It was the last part of the continent to be colonized. Name Ahmed Kamel Date 2/17/22 Topic 6.2 Reading Check 1. Some of these soldiers were recruits, while others were enslaved people or orphans brought up to serve the colonial army. William Morrison, a white man, and William Sheppard, the first black missionary in the Congo, were Presbyterians from Virginia whose acts of witness so infuriated Congo colonial authorities that they put the men on trial for libel. Using a wide variety of local and church sources, Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and the leading ethnographer of Congo basin peoples, calculates that the Congo's population dropped by some 50 percent during this period, an estimate with which other modern scholars concur. A British shipping company had the monopoly on all cargo traffic between the Congo and Belgium, and every few weeks it sent to the port of Antwerp a young junior official, Edmund Dene Morel, to supervise the unloading of a ship arriving from Africa. London, Curzon Press, p.27. Many women hostages were raped and a significant number starved to death. When Stanley returned to Europe in 1878, he had not only found Dr. Livingstone (an event remembered to this day), resolved the last great mystery of African exploration, and ruined his health: he had also opened the heart of tropical Africa up to the outside world. Although Leopold II established Belgium as a colonial power in Africa, he is best known for the widespread atrocities that were carried out under his rule, as a result of which as many as 10 million people died in the Congo Free State. Detachments of his 19,000-man private army, the Force Publique, would march into a village and hold the women hostage, forcing the men to scatter into the rainforest and gather a monthly quota of wild rubber. "Almost all of them", he wrote, "clamoured for expenses of all kinds, which included wine, tobacco, cigars, clothes, shoes, board and lodging, and certain nameless extravagances"[10]:71 (by which he meant attractive slaves to warm their beds). On February 5, 1885, Belgian King Leopold II established the Congo Free State as his personal possession. By that point he had made a huge profit from the territory, conservatively estimated as the equivalent of more than $1.1 billion in early twenty-first century terms. Most made no protest, but some were outraged at the brutal forced labor system. 2 volumes. 2023 . In estimating situations without the benefit of complete census data, demographers are more confident speaking of percentages than absolute numbers. Archive pictures from Congo Free State document its violence and brutality. Borgloon, Belgium: Editions Paula Bellings. Eventually, the price fell and wild rubber supplies began to run out, but by that time World War I had begun, and large numbers of Africans were forced to become porters, carrying supplies for Belgian military campaigns against Germany's African colonies. Meanwhile, Leopold had already begun the job of persuading first the United These men were generally from other parts of the Congo or other colonies entirely, and the orphans and enslaved people had often been brutalized themselves. Ascherson, Neal (1963). The only way to do that was through the use of terror. Combining gift-giving with a show of military force, he persuaded hundreds of illiterate African chiefs, most of whom had little idea of the terms of the agreement to which they were ostensibly acceding, to sign away their land to the king. While Leopold portrayed this as a great humanitarian act, his real purpose was to gain control of the upper Congo River and to acquire more workers. A worldwide rubber boom was under way, kicked off by the invention of the inflatable bicycle tire and spurred on by the rise of the automobile and the use of rubber in industrial belts and gaskets, as well as in coating for telephone and telegraph wires. The boundaries of Colonialism, like those of many literary eras, are difficult to draw. For many years Leopold II was widely known as a leader who defended Belgium's neutrality in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war and commissioned public works fit for a modern nation. Outside of the Cape of Good Hope and the Mediterranean coast, Europe had no African colonies of any significance. For a dozen years, from 1901 to 1913, working sometimes fourteen to sixteen hours a day, he devoted his formidable energy and skill to putting the story of forced labor in King Leopold's Congo on the world's front pages. In the far south, for example, a chief named Mulume Niama led warriors of the Sanga people in a rebellion that killed one of the king's officers. An even greater toll was taken by disease: various lung and intestinal diseases, tuberculosis, smallpox, and, above all, sleeping sickness. There are at least 13 statues to Leopold II in Belgium, according to one crowd-sourced map, and numerous parks, squares and street names. For much of the journey he floated down the river, mapping its course for the first time and noting the many tributaries that, it turned out, comprised a network of navigable waterways more than 7,000 miles long. After all, destroying the iconography of Adolf Hitler did not mean the history of Nazi Germany was forgotten, she points out. At a Glance Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps, Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Virtually no information about the true nature of King Leopold's Congo reached the outside world until the arrival there, in 1890, of an enterprising visitor named George Washington Williams. Ed. Equipped with repeating rifles, cannons, and machine guns and fighting against Africans with only spears or antiquated muskets, King Leopold's 19,000-man army (black conscripts under white officers) gradually took control of the vast territory. From 1874 through 1877 the British explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (18411904) crossed Africa from east to west. In later years he sometimes referred to himself as the Congo's proprietor. Civil rights leader The propensity for violence is . National Geographic Society is a 501 (c)(3) organization. Morel soon quit his job and in short order turned himself into the greatest British investigative journalist of his time. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. Having found the new ruler of the upper Congo, Stanley negotiated an agreement with Tippu Tip to allow him to build his final river station just below Stanley Falls (which prevented vessels sailing further upstream). However, disease of any kind always takes a far greater toll on a traumatized, half-starving population, with many people already in flight as refugees. The movement, in fact, eventually forced Leopold to relinquish his private ownership of the Congo to the Belgian state in 1908. https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/king-leopold-ii-and-congo, "King Leopold II and the Congo In the early 1890s, Leopold's private African army, the Force Publique (Public Force), drove the powerful Muslim slave traders out of the Congo. Du sang sur les lianes. Eventually, the strain forced him to relinquish his control of the territory, and in 1908 it became the Belgian Congo. )1978 In 1879 Stanley returned to the Congo as Leopold's agent. Leopold II, Williams declared, was guilty of "crimes against humanity." Leopold, however, made the Belgian government pay him for his prized possession. Keen on establishing Belgium as an imperial power, he led the first European efforts to develop the Congo River basin, making possible the formation in 1885 of the Congo Free State, annexed in 1908 as the Belgian Congo and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bennett, Norman Robert. It is false to assume that one group of people is more civilized than another. La Force publique de sa naissance 1914: Participation des militaires l'histoire des premires annes du Congo. Now, Stanley discovered, Tippu Tip's men had reached still further west in search of fresh populations to enslave. Instead, the ships carried soldiers, and large quantities of firearms and ammunition. 27 Apr. I Have a Dream ." Published in many American and European newspapers, it was the first comprehensive, detailed indictment of the regime and its slave labor system. "When I walk in a city that in every corner glorifies racism and colonialism, it tells me that me and my history are not valid," she explains from the capital. New and revised edition. For centuries African slave dealers had raided parts of this area, selling their captives to American and European captains who sailed Africa's west coast, and to traders who took slaves to the Arab world from the continent's east coast. In Britain he founded the Congo Reform Association, and affiliated groups sprang up in the United States and other countries. In actuality, Leopold wanted to get his hands on Congo's natural resources. But numerous surviving records from the rubber-bearing land in the adjoining French Congo, which closely followed the model of the Leopoldian forced labor system, also suggest a population loss there of around 50 percent. Thompsell, Angela. Women and children were often taken hostage until men fulfilled a quota; during which time the women were raped repeatedly. Several rebellions were mercilessly put down under Leopold's direction. It was the worlds only private colony, and Leopold referred to himself as its proprietor.. Belgian officers were afraid that the rank and file of the Force Publique would waste bullets, so they demanded a human hand for each bullet their soldiers used as proof that the killings had been done. The events in King Leopold's Congo also rippled beyond its borders in a more positive way: They gave birth to the twentieth century's first great international human rights movement (see sidebar). "We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear," declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium in 1924, "so that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert" (Hoornaert and Louwers, 1924, p. 101). If you have questions about licensing content on this page, please contact ngimagecollection@natgeo.com for more information and to obtain a license. He attributes colonial crimes to the king himself, rather than the Belgian people or state. It had only been through Tippu Tip's help that Stanley had found Livingstone (who himself had survived years on the Lualaba by virtue of Tippu Tip's friendship). Between the time that Leopold started to assume control of the Congo (around 1880) and when the forced labor system became less severe (after 1920), what happened could not, by strict definition, be called genocide, for there was no deliberate attempt to wipe out all members of one particular ethnic group. In 2010, former Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel and the father of future prime minister Charles Michel, called Leopold "a hero with ambitions for a small country like Belgium". In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. VideoThe secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure, LGBT troops take love for Eurovision to front line, Why an Indian comedian is challenging fake news rules. It was down to rubber. Belgian King Leopold II ruthlessly seized control of the African continent on February 5, 1885, establishing the Congo Free State as a . The instructions were direct and to the point: "It is a question of creating a new State, as big as possible, and of running it. They also sometimes eradicatedwhole villages that failed to meet the quotas as a warning to others. Like statues of racist historical figures vandalised or removed in Britain and the US, Leopold II's days on Belgian streets could now be numbered. Instead, he found what he called "the Siberia of the African Continent." (Believing one people is more civilized than another is wrong.) New York: Random House. All rights reserved. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. King Leopold's legacy of DR Congo violence. To avoid discovery, materials and workers were shipped in by various roundabout routes, and communications between Stanley and Leopold were entrusted to Colonel Maximilien Strauch. Warning: This piece contains graphic pictures. The bloodiest single episode in Africa's colonization took place in the center of the continent in the large territory, known as the Congo. Marchal, Jules (1996). Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Paris: Editions L'Harmattan. If the government of Belgium would not take a colony, then he would simply do it himself, acting in his private capacity as an ordinary citizen. He promised a humanitarian and philanthropic mission that would improve the lives of Africans. King Leopold II committed heinous . Its report that year to the Belgian king mostly focused on disease, but stressed that forced labor for rubber and other products "subjects the natives to conditions of life which are an obstacle to their increase" and warned that this situation, plus "a lack of concern about devastating plagues ancient and modern, an absolute ignorance of people's normal lives [and] a license and immorality detrimental to the development of the race," had reached "the point of threatening even the existence of certain Congolese peoples" and could completely depopulate the entire region (Bulletin Officiel, 1920, pp. 1996 - 2023 National Geographic Society. The King Incorporated: Leopold II in the Age of Trusts. The focus of the great powers was still firmly on the lands that had made Europe's fortune: the Americas, the East Indies, India, China, and Australasia. The forced-labour system for gathering rubber was swiftly copied by French, German, and Portuguese colonial officials with equally fatal results. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. But the slashing of the territory's populationthrough a combination of disease, famine, slave labor, suppression of rebellions, and diminished birthrateindisputably occurred on a genocidal scale.

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