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. 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. Stanley was lionised across Europe. State troops pursued them, trapping Mulume Niama and his soldiers in a large cave. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. I Have a Dream Soldiers were also reportedly promised their freedom or given other incentives for killing the most people as proven by supplying the most hands. Morel, E. D. (1904). La Force publique de sa naissance 1914: Participation des militaires l'histoire des premires annes du Congo. Leopold II may never have set foot there, but he poured the profits into Belgium and into his pockets. But taking the monument away does not solve the problem of racism, she believes, while creating one museum devoted to the statues would not be useful either. The king's stated goal was to bring civilization to the people of the Congo, an enormous region in Central Africa. Other parts of the Congo economy, from road building to chopping wood for steamboat boilers, operated by forced labour as well. Belgium took over the colony in 1908 and it was not until 1960 that the Republic of the Congo was established, after a fight for independence. Throughout the tropics, people rushed to sow rubber trees, but those plants could take many years to reach maturity, and in the meantime there was money to be made wherever rubber grew wild. The king of Belgium wanted the Congo for the vast amounts of wild rubber it held, and to establish a colony as he thought kings were supposed to do. (1952). Stanley made his way back to Europe with a sheaf of signed treaties in 1884. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. [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. For decades, colonial history has been barely taught in Belgium. 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. In one of them, a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State, he used a phrase that was not commonly heard again until the Nuremberg trials more than fifty years later. Villages throughout the region had been burned and depopulated. Did this woman die because her genitals were cut? (Believing one people is more civilized than another is wrong.) Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press. The conference was a sham: at its close, Leopold proposed that they set up an international benevolent committee to carry on, and modestly agreed to accept the chairman's role. New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1986. It was the worlds only private colony, and Leopold referred to himself as its proprietor.. But for Leopold this posed no problem; he would acquire his own. Early and Personal Life. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Apparently finding nothing reprehensible about Leopold's ambitions, Stanley set about his task with a will. Seeing what profits Leopold was reaping from forced labor, officials in these colonies soon adopted exactly the same systemincluding women hostages, forced male labor, and the chicottewith equally fatal consequences. Ewans, Martin (2002). Leopold bought half of the Congo as his own private possession after convincing the European community that his actions would be humanitarian and philanthropic. 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. By the early 1890s a new source of riches had appeared. In articles in church magazines and in speeches throughout the United States and Europe on visits home, they described what they saw: Africans whipped to death, rivers full of corpses, and piles of severed handsa detail that quickly seared itself on the world's imagination. A hundred lashes of the chicotte, a not infrequent punishment, could be fatal. (April 27, 2023). More than one thousand mass meetings to protest slave labor in the Congo were held, mostly in Britain and the United States, but also in Europe and as far away as Australia and New Zealand. Read about our approach to external linking. "King Leopold II and the Congo [12] At the end of his physical resources, Stanley returned home, to be replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Francis de Winton, formerly a British Army officer. 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. 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. King Leopold's legacy of DR Congo violence. A detachment of soldiers would march into an African village and seize the women as hostages. (1996). One particularly notorious practice grew out of the suppression of those rebellions. 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. As the realities and suffering within the Congo Free State became more widely known, many European people spoke out against these abuses. 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. Leopold then used the treaties to convince other Western colonial powers that he had legal right to the Congo River basin, an area more than fifty times the size of Belgium. For thousands of years, that territory had been conquered by nearby Netherlands, France, Germany, and Luxembourg. Du sang sur les lianes. Instead, the ships carried soldiers, and large quantities of firearms and ammunition. 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. The only way to do that was through the use of terror. official, Major Charles C. Liebrechts, made the same estimate in 1920. In May 1885, Leopold took possession of his colony and named it the Congo Free State. Leopold II established a colony in the Congo to gain natural resources for Belgium and wealth for himself. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Aware that Belgian neutrality, maintained during the Franco-German War (187071), was imperilled by the increasing strength of France and Germany, he persuaded parliament in 1887 to finance the fortification of Lige and Namur. 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. Learn how and when to remove this template message, Oasis Kodila Tedika et Francklin Kyayima Muteba, The sources of growth in DRC before independence. Therefore, King Leopold should be condemned as a criminal for his Read More Thesis Critique Of King Leopold's Ghost Forty years later virtually all of it had been transformed into European colonies, protectorates, or territories ruled by white settlers. Published in many American and European newspapers, it was the first comprehensive, detailed indictment of the regime and its slave labor system. Brussels: Didier Hatier. 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". They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. 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). The British consul, an Irishman named Roger Casement, later famous as an Irish patriot, took the assignment seriously. The colony in the Congo - the Congo Free State - was personal property for the Belgian king and there was little oversight over what happened there. In addition, Leopold's regime faced resistance from within his own conscript army, whose soldiers sometimes found a common cause with the rebel groups they were supposed to pursue. 13(May 15). The largest mutiny involved three thousand troops and an equal number of auxiliaries and porters, and continued for three years. It was not until 1867 that the Congo was explored by Europeans, and even then it was not from the sea, but from the other side of the African continent. Leopold II (1835-1909) wanted his country to join the league of European empires, but the Belgian state refused to finance its part in western Europe's expensive scramble for Africa. ." Most populous nation: Should India rejoice or panic? He spoke contemptuously of Belgiums small size, could not speak proper Dutch, the native language of more than half of its citizens, spent long winters in luxurious quarters on the French Riviera, and was estranged from two of his three daughters. 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. "Congo Free State Rubber Regime Atrocities." Updates? 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. King Leopold II and the Congo The European colonization of Africa was one of the greatest and swiftest conquests in human history. "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). Initially he was most interested in ivory, a material that was greatly valued in the days before plastics because it could be carved into a great variety of shapesstatuettes, jewelry, piano keys, false teeth, and more. He persuaded first the United States and then all the major nations of western Europe to recognize a huge swath of Central Africaroughly the same territory as the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congoas his personal property. Reform in Leopold's Congo. In 1876, Leopold II sponsored an international geographical conference in Brussels, inviting delegates from scientific societies all over Europe to discuss philanthropic and scientific matters such as the best way to coordinate map making, to prevent the re-emergence of the west coast slave trade, and to investigate ways of sending medical aid to Africa. But in the chaos of the early 20th Century when World War One threatened to destroy Belgium, Leopold II's nephew King Albert I erected statues to remember the successes of years gone by. Retrieved April 27, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/king-leopold-ii-and-congo. He had no power to decide policy. Regions that were hard to access or lacked profitable resources escaped much of the violence that was to follow, but for those areas directly under the rule of the Free State or the companies it leased land to, the results were devastating. 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. Hochschild, Adam (October 6, 2005). Leopold's most formidable enemy surfaced in Europe. "Leopold II certainly does not deserve a statue in the public domain," agrees Bambi Ceuppens, scientific commissioner at the Africa Museum. Unlike previous European nations that spread their influence over Forced labor remained a major part of the Congo's economy for many years after the war. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were put to work as porters to carry the white men's goods, as cutters of the wood needed to fire steamboat boilers, and as laborers of all kinds. Forbath, P. The River Congo: The Discovery, Exploration, and Exploitation of the World's Most Dramatic River, 1991 (Paperback). 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. Among those who weren't killed, many were punished by having a hand and/or foot amputated. 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. A petition calling on the city for its removal has reached 74,000 signatures. In 1870 roughly 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara Desert was governed by indigenous kings, chiefs, and other rulers. From the start the regime was founded on forced labor. Europe was less than keen on the idea: the great European scramble for Africa had not yet begun. Wearing one of his many hats, that of a journalist, Williams expected to see the paradise of enlightened rule that Leopold had described to him in Brussels. Because the system's effects in the Congo could so easily be blamed on one man, who could safely be attacked because he did not represent a great power, an international outcry focused on Leopold. Hochschild, Adam (1998). 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. 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 BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. And in 2018, Brussels named a public square in honour of Patrice Lumumba, a hero of African independence movements and the first prime minister of Congo, since renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. A master of public relations who portrayed himself as a great philanthropist, the king orchestrated successful lobbying campaigns in one country after another. On 29 May 1885, after the closure of the Berlin Conference, the king announced that he planned to name his possessions "the Congo Free State", an appellation which was not yet used at the Berlin Conference and which officially replaced "International Association of the Congo" on 1 August 1885. He called it Congo Free State. Although the domestic affairs of his reign were dominated by a growing conflict between the Liberal and Catholic parties over suffrage and education issues, Leopold concentrated on developing the countrys defenses. Why did King Leopold II own the Belgian Congo colony 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. On February 5, 1885, Belgian King Leopold II established the Congo Free State as his personal possession. BBC World Service: 50 Things That Made the Modern . It was the world's only major colony owned by one man. The people of the Congo were forced to labor for valued resources, including rubber and ivory, to personally enrich Leopold. From 1874 through 1877 the British explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (18411904) crossed Africa from east to west. He became duke of Brabant in 1846 and served in the Belgian army. In 1870 more than 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara was under the rule of indigenous chiefs or kings. He established his control over the colony through the use of brute force in an attempt to wean the Congolese into submission. So they outsourced the task to Leopold, who used personal diplomacy to convince the European powers to grant him control of a large portion of the Congo basin. Belgium's education minister announced this week that secondary schools would teach colonial history from next year. 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. But rumours of abuse began to circulate and missionaries and British journalist Edmund Dene Morel exposed the regime. Belgian King Leopold II ruthlessly seized control of the African continent on February 5, 1885, establishing the Congo Free State as a . OF DECOLONIZATION New York: Alfred A. Knopf. The kings stated goal was to bring civilization to the people of the Congo, an enormous region in Central Africa. States and then all the major nations of Europe to recognize his claim. Standing close by, one visitor said, "I didn't know anything about Leopold II until I heard about the statues defaced down town". The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. However, as he approached Stanley Falls at the junction between the Congo proper and the Lualaba (close to the general vicinity of Central Africa where he had found Livingstone six years before), it soon became clear that Stanley's men were not the only intruders. Renting a missionary steamboat, he spent more than three months traveling in the interior. Corrections? For some years ivory was a principal source of the great wealth that Leopold and his associates drew from the new colony. William Roger Louis and Jean Stengers. Stanley, still hopeful for British backing, brushed him off. Brussels: Institut Royal Colonial Belge. Because his only son had predeceased him, Leopolds nephew Albert I succeeded to the throne. Rather than control the Congo as a colony, as other European powers did throughout Africa, Leopold privately owned the region. By 1908, Leopold II's rule was deemed so cruel that European leaders, themselves violently exploiting Africa, condemned it and the Belgian parliament forced him to relinquish control of his fiefdom. In 1870 roughly 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara Desert was governed by indigenous kings, chiefs, and other rulers. The great population movements caused by the colonial regime brought these illnesses into areas where people had not built up an immunity to them, and many would have died even under a government far less brutal than Leopold's. He built the Africa Museum in the grounds of his palace at Tervuren, with a "human zoo" in the grounds featuring 267 Congolese people as exhibits. Company agents were paid large concessions on top of their salaries for the profits they generated, creating personal incentives to force people to work more and harder for little to no pay. Flament, F., et al. Having established a beachhead on the lower Congo, in 1883 Stanley set out upriver to extend Leopold's domain, employing his usual methods: negotiations with local chiefs buying sovereignty in exchange for bolts of cloth and trinkets; playing one tribe off another; and if need be, simply shooting an obstructive chief and negotiating with his cowed successor instead. 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. In two ways the Congo's rubber boom had lasting impact beyond the territory itself. Furthermore, huge, uncounted numbers of Congolese fled the forced labor regime, but the only refuge to which they could escape was the depths of the rain forest, where there was little food and no shelter; travelers would discover their bones years later. In 2019, the cities of Kortrijk and Dendermonde renamed their Leopold II streets, with Kortrijk council describing the king as a "mass murderer". In the early 1890s, Leopold's private African army, the Force Publique (Public Force), drove the powerful Muslim slave traders out of the Congo. Leopold agreed and in deepest secrecy, Stanley signed a five-year contract at a salary of 1,000 a year, and set off to Zanzibar under an assumed name. Morel, E. D. (1968). New York: Random House. London: George Allen & Unwin. Although he played a significant role in the development of the modern Belgian state, he was also responsible for widespread atrocities committed under his rule against his colonial subjects. He did however apologise for the kidnapping of thousands of mixed-race children, known as mtis, from Burundi, DR Congo and Rwanda in the 1940s and 1950s. Thus was the Belgian Congo created. Charles Michel, prime minister at the time, declined. Amidst all of this, some of the best of people was also seen, in the bravery and resilience of ordinary Congolese men and women who resisted in small and large ways, and the passionate efforts of several American and European missionaries and activists to bring about reform. SCLC Formed 24 February 2004. All failed. In later years he sometimes referred to himself as the Congo's proprietor. [7], Stanley, much more familiar with the rigours of the African climate and the complexities of local politics than Leopold Leopold II never set foot in the Congo persuaded his patron that the first step should be the construction of a wagon trail and a series of forts. Jolle Sambi Nzeba, a Belgian-Congolese poet and spokesperson for the Belgian Network for Black Lives, says the statues tell her she is "less than a regular Belgian". To curry diplomatic favor, he allowed several hundred Protestant missionaries into the Congo. 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. He was the architect of one of history's greatest, if lesser known, crimes against humanity. I never imagined this happening in my lifetime," Ms Kayembe adds. 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. Women and children were often taken hostage until men fulfilled a quota; during which time the women were raped repeatedly. He was interested in the Congo river basin because there were many natural resources such as rubber, minerals, ivory, diamonds, and gold. Beyond removal of statues, far more work is required to dismantle racism, protesters and black communities argue. Leopold II, Williams declared, was guilty of "crimes against humanity." When the ships turned around and steamed back to Africa, however, they carried no merchandise in exchange. Unfortunately, for the Congo, it was one of the only places in the world to have a large supply of wild rubber, and the government and its affiliated trading companies quickly shifted their focus to extracting the suddenly lucrative commodity. 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. It would be "really significant for Congolese people, especially those whose families perished," she explains. Baskets of severed hands thus resulted from expeditions against rebels. 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. Franklin, John Hope (1985). 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. In Britain he founded the Congo Reform Association, and affiliated groups sprang up in the United States and other countries. Some writers, almost entirely in Belgium, claim that such estimates are exaggerated. Exhausted, Stanley returned to Europe, only to be sent straight back by Leopold, who promised him an outstanding assistant: Charles 'Chinese' Gordon (who did not in fact take up Leopold's offer but chose instead to go to meet his fate at Khartoum). Video, The secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure, US black man George Floyd in police custody, statues of racist historical figures vandalised or removed, "rape, mutilation and genocide of millions of Congolese". Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. These were an incentive for ruthless, devastating plunder. 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. Last week a statue of Leopold II in the city of Antwerp was set on fire, before authorities took it down. . 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. After Morel orchestrated a protest resolution by the British Parliament, the government, in response, asked its representative in the Congo to investigate his charges. In his novella Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, who spent six months in the Congo in 1890 as a steamboat officer, gives a searing picture of the brutal and voracious European quest for Congo ivory. He produced an excoriating, detailed report, complete with sworn testimony from witnesses, which is in many ways a model for the reports produced by contemporary organizations like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. By the end of the 19th century, the Basin had been carved up by European colonial powers, into the Congo Free State, the French Congo and the Portuguese Congo (modern Cabinda . Leopold's reign over the Congo Free State, however, has become infamous for its brutality. Estimates suggest more than 50% died there. By 1910 nearly this entire huge expanse had become European colonies or land, like South Africa, controlled by white settlers. He promised a humanitarian and philanthropic mission that would improve the lives of Africans. 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. Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Which Flourished on the Congo for Twenty Years, 18901910. 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.
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