So if you're going to ask about who was one of the most genocidal leaders in history, you'd say Hitler, right? Pol Pot. Did any of you guess King Leopold II of Belgium? Maybe. Maybe not.
Because we are only taught U.S. imperial history in schools, we here at Buzzsaw think it would be a good idea to keep you informed of historical events and figures that may have been overlooked, censored, and forgotten in the whitewashing of our history. bring you the story of King Leopold II of Belgium. Now, King Leopold owned the Congo during his reign as the constitutional monarch of Belgium in the late 1800s. While owning the Congo, King Leopold was responsible for the deaths of over 10 million Congolese. Let me repeat that number one more time so you fully understand it.
Ten million. People of the Congo were killed during King Leopold's reign. How does this happen, and how do we get from some guy in Belgium killing 10 million Africans in the Congo, and why? Well, during the 1880s, when Europe was busy kind of dividing up the continent of Africa for its resources, King Leopold II basically came in and laid claim to the uncharted Congo Free State, just said, eh, it's mine.
Even though, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of people lived there. The 905,000 square miles, 76 times larger than Belgium, mind you, African rainforest held a vast fortune of rubber plantations, a commodity that was high demand in the 19th century in Europe. Yeah.
And so seeing that there were these vast wealth of minerals and things that he could make money off of, in 1876, Leopold formed the philanthropic organization, the Association International Afrikaans. or the International African Association, which sounds so lovely, and became its single shareholder. Under the guise of missionary work and the westernization of African peoples, the International African Association was a vehicle to enslave people of the Congo River Basin simply to enrich King Leopold. Pretty much.
That's all that happened. It's very also similar. I mean, this is sort of what happened in the United States.
People came in. and said, hey, you have all of this stuff, so what we're going to do is we're going to tell you that everything you think and everything you do is wrong, and we're going to take your land, and we're going to abuse you, and we're going to do it. We're going to take all the wealth out of your land. We're going to take all the wealth out of your free state that was free. In 23 years, Leopold II ruled Congo, and he massacred, like we said before, 10 million Congolese.
This is how he did it, generally, just so we get an idea of how vicious this guy was how vicious this rain was. He would cut off their hands and genitals. He would flog them to death.
He would starve them and put them into forced labor just to get this, you know, all these minerals and the rubber and all that. He would hold children for ransom and burn villages. Lovely guy, this historical figure who's on money, by the way, who he put on money. You know, lovely. And how does he do this?
Well, he did this because he had his private mercenary force, the force publique, to do his terrorizing and killing. White officers often and commanded black soldiers, many of whom have been kidnapped as children during raids and then raised in missionaries and things like that. So you kidnap the children, indoctrinate them. They have no other way to go because they're kidnapped.
They've lost all their culture. And then you turn these kids. and you turn these former members of Congress on themselves. Yeah.
Great, now we're going to use you guys. Tell me a little bit about how the old Force Publique operated. So you have your charitable organization and your, you know, your...
Your community... Police force. Police force that's just supposed to keep everything in line.
One of the junior officers that was part of that had described a raid to punish a village that had protested what was going on with him, and this is what he had to say, quote, The commanding officer ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women and children on the palisade in the form of a cross. End quote. That's incredible.
I mean, that's just dirty. I mean, it turns my top stomach at how bad that is. And we're all like, what?
How did Africa get where it was? Where it is today, yeah. How does it happen?
It's guys like this. You didn't learn this in history class. I didn't. No. You're not told these things.
You're not told about these. Everything sort of, like you said, gets whitewashed. And I'll tell you why people like this get away with it, why he isn't Hitler, why he isn't Pol Pot, why people don't say, Leopold, what a horrible human being.
That's why it's not a common thing with us. And this is how you get away with it. away with it. Because Leopold II committed every one of these atrocities over the years, while never stepping foot in the Congo.
The humiliation and violence inflicted on black Americans was mirrored in Africa. At the end of the 19th century, as Europe's powers scrambled for control of the continent's riches, the rights of the indigenous peoples were no impediment to their plans for conquest. The attitude of white people in all Europe was tabula rasa, terra incognita, here is a place which is a sort of no man's land, in other words, we can create our own states there and we're going to bring order. and civilize them. Always the word civilized was used, whatever you were actually doing, whether you were shooting them, you were civilizing them.
The vast majority of people thought they would need at best a paternalistic treatment that they would need looking after, like children. After the Conference of Berlin in 1885, Europeans embarked on a continent-wide land grab. In less than 20 years, 90% of African territory would be placed under European colonial rule.
One of the main beneficiaries was King Leopold II of Belgium. Aware of a vast fortune to be made, he persuaded Europe's powers to recognize his sovereignty over one of Africa's largest regions, the Congo. Here was this man who became King of Belgium in 1865 at the age of 30. Enormously shrewd, enormously greedy, enormously ambitious, and with an absolutely brilliant sense of public relations.
He hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, the man who found Livingston, to go to the Congo and essentially stake out this huge territory for him. Leopold got first the United States and then all the major nations of Western Europe to ratify his seizure of this enormous territory in the center of the continent. First, Leopold created a smokescreen claiming that he wished to educate a savage people.
They were all really fooled by Leopold because they took him at his word. They thought he was a sort of a man who's going to lose all his money in this crazy philanthropic venture. But they didn't realize what he was really after at all, which was to make himself hugely rich by exploiting brown hands and broad backs who were going to carry the wealth of Africa and loaded on ships for his own personal profit. Bring them! Extreme violence was employed to impose Leopold's dominion.
The right hands of those who failed to meet rubber quotas were severed. Even young children were not spared. In 1896, a A German newspaper reported that 1,308 hands had been gathered in one day.
Leopold created a 90,000-strong army to enforce his rule. One of his lieutenants wrote, Only the whip can civilise the black. They would go into village after village.
The army would seize the women of the village and hold them hostage in order to force the men of each village to go into the forest and gather a monthly quota of wild rubber. And they did this for about 20 years. And you can just very easily imagine if you have a village where the women are all being held hostage, the men are all in the forest as forced laborers for several weeks out of each month. There's nobody to plant and harvest food, to go hunting, to go fishing, to do all the normal things through which a community feeds itself. So from all of these causes, starvation, being worked to death, and most of all from the disease that hit this famine-ridden population, the best estimates are that between 1880, when King Leopold first got his hands on the Congo, and 1920, that in that 40-year period, the population was slashed from about 20 million at the beginning of that period to around 10 million at the end.
So, an enormous loss of human life. Huge building projects throughout Belgium were funded by Leopold's wealth to celebrate his reign. Leopold built himself a palace, now called the Museum of Central Africa, to display his spoils.
For historian Bambi Koypins, whose father is Congolese, the building embodies the myths created to justify Belgian rule in the Congo. The central hall gives you the idea of what the museum is supposed to be about. You have the central dome through which the light falls on the heart of darkness underneath, you can say. Simultaneously, the dome also presents the sky, God, and then in the central hall, underneath that representation of Leopold II, are statues of Congolese. So what you really see are the hierarchical relationships that struck.
the relations between the colonized and the colonizers. As a human being, I'm obviously shocked by that, because it is very clear that Africans, the way that this museum was originally set up, and the way that most of the exhibitions still work, are really dehumanized, because they were seen... and represented as savages who really needed the help of outsiders, i.e. Europeans, to transform them into fully civilized human beings. From the late 19th century onwards, human zoos exhibiting Africans in their primitive state became popular around Europe.
One of the first was housed in the grounds of Leopold's museum. The Africans were put. on display so people could go and see them in very much the same way that they could look at say caged animals in a zoo and their reactions were also very similar there were notices saying that people were not allowed to throw peanuts at the africans because that was what they did this museum is also in a very real sense the only monument to Belgian colonial history left in this country. So if we dismantle the museum, there is a very great danger that we also eradicate the public memory of that colonial heritage.
And once that happens, of course, one paves the way for all these people who say, well, it was not as bad as that, was it? And Leopold II really did do a great deal of good. In 1908, the year before Leopold died, his crimes were made public, and he was forced to hand control of the Congo over to the Belgian government.
But the cruelty continued. The forced labor system did not come to an end because it was so profitable. The new Belgian Congo continued it more or less until the early 1920s. At that point...
The Belgian colonial officials realized that their population was shrinking so rapidly from the effects of the forced labor system that they had to modify it, they had to make it less lethal, or otherwise they would have no labor force left. Although 10 million people died, the Congolese genocide has largely been forgotten in Europe. In the book The Heart of Darkness, the author Joseph Conrad...
who witnessed the violence in the Congo writes, The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. It was only at the end of the Second World War, when newsreels documented the Nazis'extermination of six million Jews, that the words genocide, holocaust and even racism passed into common usage. Whatever the origins of the word racism, that is when it was first coined, there's no doubt that it was first used to think about Nazi treatment of Jewish people.
That was the case that gave the word racism its modern shape and meaning, in fact, brought it into use as a word, and also, therefore, brought it into use in a context where... It was unequivocally clear that it was a very bad thing.