Leopold II and the Congo Free State - HISTORY CRUNCH 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. The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. He created a baffling series of subsidiary shell organisations, culminating in the cunningly named International African Association (French: Association internationale africaine), which had a single shareholder: Leopold himself. Encyclopedia.com. Most populous nation: Should India rejoice or panic? Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Tippu Tip had raided 118 villages, killed 4,000 Africans, and, when Stanley reached his camp, had 2,300 slaves, mostly young women and children, in chains ready to transport halfway across the continent to the markets of Zanzibar. https://www.thoughtco.com/congo-free-state-atrocities-rubber-regime-43731 (accessed May 1, 2023). Marchal, Jules (1996). 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. ADAM HOCHSCHILD. Leopold's most formidable enemy surfaced in Europe. It was the last part of the continent to be colonized. If the estimates from varied sources of a 50 percent toll in King Leopold's Congo are correct, how many people does this mean? La Force publique de sa naissance 1914: Participation des militaires l'histoire des premires annes du Congo. A Bantu people, they had moved south into this region f, King of the Bingo Game by Ralph Ellison, 1944, https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/king-leopold-ii-and-congo. 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. Why did Leopold want the Congo? - JOUNIMARTIKAINEN Morel, E. D. (1919). As he headed back to England, Stanley was assiduously courted by King Leopold II of Belgium. Now, Stanley discovered, Tippu Tip's men had reached still further west in search of fresh populations to enslave. "Leopold II certainly does not deserve a statue in the public domain," agrees Bambi Ceuppens, scientific commissioner at the Africa Museum. From the start the regime was founded on forced labor. 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. SCLC Formed Birmingham Protest March This was to be his most enduring legacy. 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. Vangroenweghe, Daniel (1986). ThoughtCo. 27 Apr. At the time, his father, Leopold I, was the King of Belgium. [1]:333, "There are 40,000,000 naked people" on the other side of the rapids, Stanley wrote, "and the cotton-spinners of Manchester are waiting to clothe them Birmingham's factories are glowing with the red metal that shall presently be made into ironwork in every fashion and shape for them and the ministers of Christ are zealous to bring them, the poor benighted heathen, into the Christian fold. King Leopold II was the ruler of the Congo Free State, and the King of Belgium. Men who did not fulfill their quota were killed or mutilated. Imperialism in Africa Assignment and Quiz Flashcards | Quizlet 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. That pressure finally forced him to relinquish his ownership of the territory, and it became the Belgian Congo in 1908. Votin, Herero 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. Around 20,000 children born to Belgian settlers and local women were forcibly taken to Belgium to be fostered. Inside the palatial walls of Belgium's Africa Museum stand statues of Leopold II - each one a monument to the king whose rule killed as many as 10 million Africans. Many classrooms still have Herg's famous cartoon book Tintin in the Congo, with its depictions of black people now commonly accepted as extremely racist. The newly named Belgian Congo remained a colony until the Democratic Republic of Congo gained its independence in 1960. Moreover, he had a well-known penchant for teenaged girls, and, when he was age 65, he began a liaison with a teenaged former prostitute who bore him two additional children. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. 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. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. The British consul, an Irishman named Roger Casement, later famous as an Irish patriot, took the assignment seriously. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Congolese fled their villages to avoid being impressed as forced labourers, and they sought refuge deep in the forest, where there was little food and shelter. The New York Review of Books. The people being colonized are robbed of their land, resources, and freedom.) The Herero were traditional occupants of the temperate high plains of central Namibia. 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. Morel, E. D. (1904). Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. [8], It was only at this point that Stanley was informed of the magnitude of Leopold's ambition: Stanley was not merely to construct a series of trading stations, he was to secretly carve out an entire nation. 8 Disturbing Facts About King Leopold II, the Butcher of Congo It quickly became a brutal, exploitative regime that relied on forced labour to cultivate and trade rubber, ivory and minerals. Colonization of the Congo Basin - Wikipedia National Geographic Society is a 501 (c)(3) organization. In estimating situations without the benefit of complete census data, demographers are more confident speaking of percentages than absolute numbers. 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. POST-1945 HISTORICAL CONTEXTS 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. 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. "Congo Free State Rubber Regime Atrocities." there were "positive aspects" to colonisation, Democratic Republic of Congo country profile, called on Belgium to apologise for atrocities, apologise for the kidnapping of thousands of mixed-race children, MasterChef Australia host Jock Zonfrillo dies, Banana artwork in Seoul museum eaten by visitor, NFL player's daughter, aged two, drowns in pool, Trevelyan relative 'would consider' famine payment, Ding becomes China's first male world chess champion, Indian 'killer' elephant relocated to tiger reserve. In May 1885, Leopold took possession of his colony and named it the Congo Free State. (Believing one people is more civilized than another is wrong.) From 1874 through 1877 the British explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (18411904) crossed Africa from east to west. The king then embarked on an ultimately successful effort to make a vast fortune from his new possession. 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. 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. Last year a UN working group called on Belgium to apologise for atrocities committed during the colonial era. 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. But for Leopold this posed no problem; he would acquire his own. The first nationwide Congolese political party, the Congo National Movement, was launched in 1958 by Patrice Lumumba and other Congolese leaders. He promised a humanitarian and philanthropic mission that would improve the lives of Africans. 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. Corrections? The treaties, some of which appear to have been subsequently doctored to Leopolds liking, were then put to use by the Belgian monarch. Rather than control the Congo as a colony, as other European powers did throughout Africa, Leopold privately owned the region. The only way to do that was through the use of terror. 657, 660, 662). Leopold II ruled Belgium from 1865-1909 - activists want this statue in Brussels removed due to his brutal regime in Congo Free State, Before a renovation in 2018, Belgium's Africa Museum was known as the world's "last colonial museum", Thousands marched in Black Lives Matter protests in Belgium, This TV image shows a statue of Leopold defaced and damaged by fire being removed in Antwerp, Colonial officials amputated and mutilated Congolese people, including children, as punishment, A now infamous photo capturing atrocities committed in Congo Free State, Congolese people were forced to be human exhibits in a "zoo" in Belgium in 1897, Missionaries documented amputations while investigating abuses committed in Congo Free State, Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba is commemorated in a Brussels square, This bust of Leopold II was removed on Friday in Auderghem, near Brussels, Colony built on forced labour and brutality, The secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure. These were an incentive for ruthless, devastating plunder. "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. For five years Stanley traveled up and down the immense waterways of the Congo River basin, setting up trading posts, building roads, and persuading local chiefsalmost all of them illiterateto sign treaties with Leopold. Bierman, John (1990). 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. 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. Obtaining more precise statistics is difficult, for in 1908 King Leopold ordered the archives of his Congo state burned. In 1924 the first territory-wide census, when adjusted for undercounting, placed the number of colony inhabitants at some ten million. "It's a good thing that everyone is waking up, looking around and thinking 'is this right?'" June 11th, 2020. 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.
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