Morel soon quit his job and in short order turned himself into the greatest British investigative journalist of his time. Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Leopold financed development projects with money loaned to him from the Belgian government. In 1870 more than 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara was under the rule of indigenous chiefs or kings. Soldiers were also reportedly promised their freedom or given other incentives for killing the most people as proven by supplying the most hands. At a Glance 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. Leopold II established a colony in the Congo to gain natural resources for Belgium and wealth for himself. [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. 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. (1996). The horrific consequences of rubber's toxic past - BBC News 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. New York: Random House. When you reach out to him or her, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource. The Belgian cabinet of the day was not interested in colonies. 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. "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. The New York Review of Books. "I will dance if it comes down. States and then all the major nations of Europe to recognize his claim. 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. [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. 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. Interestingly, a longtime high colonial As the price of rubber soared, the quotas increased, and as vines near a village were drained dry, men desperate to free their wives and daughters would have to walk days or weeks to find new vines to tap. E. V. Sjblom of Sweden was one of the first and most outspoken missionaries in the Congo. Morel, in his mid-twenties at the time, noticed that when his company's ships arrived from the Congo, they were filled to the hatch with enormously valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. Belgian Congo | History & Facts | Britannica 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. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. In Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, Leopold II's statues were moved to the National Museum. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. During that window of time those who profited were the people And under such circumstances people tended to stop having children, so the birthrate plummeted as a result. With women as hostages and men forced to tap rubber, few able-bodied adults were left to hunt, fish, and cultivate crops. 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. Morel, E. D. (1904). 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. 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. "The rebels displayed a courage worthy of a better cause," (Flament et al., 1952, p. 417) acknowledged the army's official historywhich, remarkably, devoted fully one-quarter of its pages to the various campaigns against mutineers within the army's own ranks. 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. In 1908, international pressure forced the king to turn the Congo Free State over to the country of Belgium. Europeans were interested in Africa for its abundance of natural resources (ivory, rubber, gold, etc.) 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. Shaloff, Stanley (1970). Last week a statue of Leopold II in the city of Antwerp was set on fire, before authorities took it down. Last week thousands in the country of 11 million joined solidarity protests about the killing of US black man George Floyd in police custody. 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. Atrocities in the Congo Free State - Wikipedia It was the last part of the continent to be colonized. Stanley was applauded, admired, decoratedand ignored. 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. Last year a UN working group called on Belgium to apologise for atrocities committed during the colonial era. 2 volumes. Borgloon, Belgium: Editions Paula Bellings. Belgium's Heart of Darkness | History Today In 1879 Stanley returned to the Congo as Leopold's agent. 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. The movement, in fact, eventually forced Leopold to relinquish his private ownership of the Congo to the Belgian state in 1908. Because his only son had predeceased him, Leopolds nephew Albert I succeeded to the throne. King Leopold II and the Congo The European colonization of Africa was one of the greatest and swiftest conquests in human history. Throughout the 1870s, Leopold cunningly established a reputation as a great philanthropist and humanitarian who wanted to spread Christianity and civilization to Africa. 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. It is false to assume that one group of people is more civilized than another. Archive pictures from Congo Free State document its violence and brutality. He was, nevertheless, an extremely minor monarch in the realpolitik of the times, ruling a totally insignificant nation, a nation in fact that had come into existence barely four decades before and lived under the constant threat of losing its precarious independence to the great European powers around it. 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. 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. From the start the regime was founded on forced labor. (Believing one people is more civilized than another is wrong.) 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. Omissions? Nzansu's men fought on sporadically for five years more, and no record of his fate exists. Leopold acquired the Congo through unethical means and thus took the people's chances away at self-rule. Corrections? All rights reserved. t. e. Colonization of the Congo Basin refers to the European colonization of the Congo Basin of tropical Africa. Ed. Thompsell, Angela. 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. When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Although neither figure is well-documented, Hannah Arendt's seminal The Origins of Totalitarianism cites an estimated minimum population loss of 11.5 million, and a Congolese historian writing in 1998, Isidore Ndaywel Nziem, estimates the loss at roughly 13 million. 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. At various times, he launched unsuccessful schemes to buy an Argentine province, to buy Borneo from the Dutch, rent the Philippines from Spain, or establish colonies in China, Vietnam, Japan, or the Pacific islands. King Leopold II's rule over the Congo met fierce resistance. Then, as they would be into the 21st century, most of the royal families of Europe were related. It was too lucrative, for the price of rubber was still high. It was the worlds only private colony, and Leopold referred to himself as its proprietor.. Demonstrations and protests demanded that Leopold end human rights abuses in the Congo Free State. In 1853 he married Marie-Henriette, daughter of the Austrian archduke Joseph, palatine of Hungary, and became king of the Belgians on his fathers death in December 1865. The Congo and the Founding of Its Free State: A Story of Work and Exploration. 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. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. Reform in Leopold's Congo. 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. William Roger Louis and Jean Stengers. Leopolds reign over the Congo Free State, however, has become infamous for its brutality. Updates? Ewans, Martin (2002). The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. A man of great charm, intelligence, ruthlessness, and greed, he was openly frustrated with inheriting the throne of such a small country, and in doing so at a time in history when European kings were rapidly losing power to elected parliaments. Outside of the Cape of Good Hope and the Mediterranean coast, Europe had no African colonies of any significance. Brussels: Institut Royal Colonial Belge. The Congo Free State was founded by Belgian King Leopold II on February 5, 1885, after he violently annexed the African continent. Millions of Congolese then found themselves suffering near-famine, which made them vulnerable to diseases they otherwise might have survived. Retrieved April 27, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/king-leopold-ii-and-congo. Bierman, John (1990). Nor was there a strong humanitarian interest in the continent now that the American slave trade had been extinguished. 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. who owned land where rubber grew wild. ThoughtCo, Jun. 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. The people of the Congo were forced to labor for valued resources, including rubber and ivory, to personally enrich Leopold. Thompsell, Angela. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. 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 Province of Angola). He became duke of Brabant in 1846 and served in the Belgian army. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. 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. The invention of the inflatable bicycle tire, followed soon by that of the automobile tire, triggered an enormous boom in rubber. The Atrocities of the Congo Free State Rubber Regime - ThoughtCo Around the BBC. Forced labor remained a major part of the Congo's economy for many years after the war. Hochschild, Adam (October 6, 2005). Repeated attempts to travel overland were repulsed with heavy casualties, accidents, conflicts with natives, and, above all, disease saw large and well-equipped expeditions got no further than 40 miles (64km) or so past the westernmost rapid, the legendary Cauldron of Hell. As a result of King Leopold actions, thousands of African tribes populations decreased significantly. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. Around 20,000 children born to Belgian settlers and local women were forcibly taken to Belgium to be fostered. Marchal, Jules (1996). Encyclopedia.com. 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. Why did King Leopold want to take over areas of Africa? Is climate change killing Australian wine? 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). Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Cambridge University Press. Meanwhile, Leopold had already begun the job of persuading first the United Standing close by, one visitor said, "I didn't know anything about Leopold II until I heard about the statues defaced down town". However, Leopold's rule over the Congo Free State is well known for its cruelty. Why did King Leopold want the Congo ? - Brainly.com SCLC Formed Leopold II | Biography, Facts, & Legacy | Britannica Leopold was an intelligent and ruthless man who wasn't afraid to lie or kill in order to expand Belgium's power. I Have a Dream Some writers, almost entirely in Belgium, claim that such estimates are exaggerated. 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 . 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. Europe was less than keen on the idea: the great European scramble for Africa had not yet begun. They refused to surrender, and when troops finally entered the cave three months later, they found 178 bodies. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. 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. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Hoornaert, Andr and O. Louwers (1924). The king's colonial officials quickly set up a brutal but effective system for harvesting wild rubber. 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. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. There seemed no economic sense to investing energy in Africa when the returns from other colonies were likely to be both richer and more immediate. Angela Thompsell, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of British and African History at SUNY Brockport. I never imagined this happening in my lifetime," Ms Kayembe adds. The largest mutiny involved three thousand troops and an equal number of auxiliaries and porters, and continued for three years. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Africans also died in two decades' worth of unsuccessful uprisings against the king's regime. ." ADAM HOCHSCHILD. Vocabulary On February 5, 1885, Belgian King Leopold II established the Congo Free State by brutally seizing the African landmass as his personal possession. Dark Safari: The Life behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley. These were an incentive for ruthless, devastating plunder. By the end of his life, Leopold was unpopular with his people, but, ironically, that had much less to do with his actions in Africa than with his conduct of his personal life. He attributes colonial crimes to the king himself, rather than the Belgian people or state. The European colonization of Africa was one of the greatest and swiftest conquests in human history. 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. No one will ever know the precise figures, but, from all these causes, demographers estimate that between 1880 and 1920 the population of the Congo may have been slashed by up to 50 percent, from perhaps 20 million people at the beginning of that period to an estimated 10 million at the end. The rapids and falls, had they known it, extended for 220 miles (350km) inland, and the terrain close by the river was impassable, and remains so to this day. Army officers and colonial officials earned bonuses based on the amount of rubber collected in areas under their control. He called it tat Indpendant du Congo, the Congo Free State. If you have questions about licensing content on this page, please contact ngimagecollection@natgeo.com for more information and to obtain a license. The Herero were traditional occupants of the temperate high plains of central Namibia. Most of the monarchs in western Europe had been forced to largely yield political power to the electorate by the late 19th century, so Belgiums parliament and cabinet were the real locus of power, but Leopold used the prestige of the monarchy to lobby for pet projects. They were the very first royal family of Belgium, because the country was just 5 years old. Initially, government and commercial agents focused on acquiring ivory, but inventions, like the car, dramatically increased the demand for rubber. They belonged to his five-year-old daughter, who was later killed when her village did not produce sufficient rubber. Congo Free State - Wikipedia In two ways the Congo's rubber boom had lasting impact beyond the territory itself. ThoughtCo. )1978 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 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. It was the last part of the continent to be colonized. A short history of colonialism in Congo, 1885-1997 | libcom.org 2023 . Belgian King Establishes Congo Free State - National Geographic Society p.20. King Leopold II committed heinous . Together with epidemic disease, famine, and a falling . In 1870 roughly 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara Desert was governed by indigenous kings, chiefs, and other rulers. Manchester, U.K.: National Labour Press. Leopold's reign over the Congo Free State, however, has become infamous for its brutality. While Leopold II did much to establish Belgium as an economically and militarily stable power in Europe, he is chiefly remembered for the nightmarish practices that were carried out in his name. London: George Allen & Unwin. Colonization of the Congo Basin - Wikipedia European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and Its Aftermath. After Morel orchestrated a protest resolution by the British Parliament, the government, in response, asked its representative in the Congo to investigate his charges. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. "Congo Free State Rubber Regime Atrocities." Morel, E. D. (1919). "King Leopold II and the Congo 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. Tens of thousands of others were shot down in failed rebellions against the regime. A renewed global focus on racism is highlighting a violent colonial history that generated riches for Belgians but death and misery for Congolese. A detachment of soldiers would march into an African village and seize the women as hostages. Charles Michel, prime minister at the time, declined. The British consul, an Irishman named Roger Casement, later famous as an Irish patriot, took the assignment seriously.