When you kill between five to six million Jews, more than three million Soviet prisoners of war, more than two million Soviet civilians, a million Polish and Yugoslav civilians respectively, around 70,000 men, women and children with mental and physical handicaps and more than 200,000 gipsies, you are Hitler. Your name is immortalised in lists of most evil men in history and whatever symbol associated with your life is criminalised in total abhorrence.
What if you kill Africans? What if you kill at least 10 million black Africans in the Congo? Is your memory reduced to a taboo or you are branded the Builder King of Belgium? When the history books are consistently penned by beneficiaries of African deaths, villains are eulogised and praised in utter disdain of the millions of black lives lost.
His name is leopold II, and surprisingly Most Africans haven’t heard of him.
His name is King Leopold II of Belgium and here are things you should Know about him, his atrocities in Congo and why they call him the butcher of Congo.
- King Leopold II was a violent, genocidal maniac in his own right. Leopold II became the king of Belgium in 1865, just as other European nations were expanding their empires in Africa.
- With his connections and diplomatic skills, Leopold managed to convince European rulers to let him secure a chunk of the Congo—an area of land that was 76 times larger than Belgium itself!
- He used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
- Leopold’s primary goal was to exploit the land as much as possible to make as much money as he could.
- Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory.
- Things became much worse for the people of the Congo as the demand for rubber exploded in the global market in the 1890’s. The rise in the price of rubber brought about forced labour from the natives to harvest and process rubber.
- To terrorise the population into gathering rubber, Leopold’s men would take women as hostages until their menfolk brought in a sufficient quantity. Villages that resisted the system or failed to meet a quota were attacked and destroyed by the regions police. Individuals who failed to reach their quotas were killed, tortured, mutilated.
- To ensure that the police weren’t wasting bullets on hunting wild game in the jungle, they were required to show proof that each bullet they expended resulted in the death of one of the Congolese natives. When the police couldn’t account for all the spent bullets, a terrible trade system began, in which they’d be provided with severed hands of villagers.
- William Henry Sheppard, a Presbyterian missionary, who witnessed the devastating impact of the rubber terror on the Kuba people of Congo denounced it in his speeches and writings. For this he was Brought to trial for libel, but was later acquitted.
- Finally Reports of deaths and abuse led to a major international scandal in the early twentieth century and the Belgian government ultimately forced Leopold to relinquish control of the colony to Belgian civil administration in 1908.
- Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo was so inhuman and devastating that the country was depopulated. Measuring the scale of the catastrophe is difficult, but one demographic study estimated that the population was halved, from twenty million to ten million, between 1880 and 1920.
Somehow, this murderous man managed to have a dignified presence in history or at least escape the spotlight altogether. No one talks about him with as much impassioned hatred as that directed at Hitler and Stalin yet they are killed people by the millions.
- Leopold died in 1909. Not surprisingly, people jeered during his funeral procession. He was not well liked.
He used the blood and sweat of the Congolese was used to build most of the massive urban projects, public works and monuments in Brussel during King Leopold II’s tenure.. He used great sums of the money from this exploitation for public and private construction projects in Belgium during this period. He donated the private buildings to the state before his death, to preserve them for Belgium.
Although king leonard II was just as a bad as hitler, he is not as known all over the world the way hitler is – even though they both are guilty of the same crimes- instead he is praised as the builder of Belgium.
As Africans, we would be doing a great disservice to ourselves if we do not educate our children in schools about Africa’s true history and what our fore-fathers really suffered in the hands of imperialist.
[…] King Leopold II: The Mad Man Who Got Away With Killing Millions Of Africans […]
great work and i am a better blk man because of it. luv & respect
Them Jews were the colonizers all along… I read the GTVFlyers on it, even the triangle Atlantic slave trade.
I’m a Dutchman living in Australia. When I lived in the Netherlands my job kept me very busy and I had little knowledge about racial problems , genocides, slavetrade etc. It was not very well educated there. YES South African ‘Apartheid’ , it was always in the news. But litle was told that many Dutch migrants in SA were part of those cruelties. In the news in the Netherlands we heard a little about a country ‘Rhodesia’ , about a guy ‘Mugabe’ but it was never brought to us as important from a humanistic point of view, more a political far-away problem on the same ‘pile’ as Vietnam war , drugs in South America . We had a bigger issue : The Cold War with Russia ammassing to many tanks and planes and soldiers to close for comfort. I served as a Sergeant very close to the East/West border…. too close ?!
Ans so Africa remained a far from our bed probvlem.
That all changed when I migrated to Australia – there I learned about the crimes the early white settler commited to the native people. I travelled a fair bit and here ad there picked up snippets of horrific stories. Aboriginal People massacred for no other reason as that they lived on their land.
From one came the other and I developed an interest in how native people all over the world were mistreted , murdered , enslaved , deprived of any say in how to govern their very own lands.
And honestly I feel more than bad to be part of that ‘supremacy white man’s culture’.
What is it in men to think to be supreme over an other human being ? Because of skin color , because of the way they dres , because of the way they value the land , because of ‘not of economical value’ ?!
Do not think such times are behind us:
My ex-wife was invited by Aboriginal people to live on a nature reserve – ‘Crown Land’. She is a very good artist and had made some great aboriginal inspired art. In Australia and other countries Crown Land was never private ‘white mans’ land. It stayed like the whole of Australia one was ‘Aboriginal Land’. It was not stolen from the native people like most of the prime ‘real estate’.
Unfortunately that nature reserve is wedged between a few of the most expensive parts of the country. And so it happened that about 3 weeks ago 120 heavy armed police came to evict … 12 men and women – aged between 25 and 65 , all very peaceful nature lovers. Who celebrated the Aboriginal lands the Aboriginal way ‘Tread lightly leave no traces’.
And so my wife and the others became homeless , because that nature reserve is potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Greed knows no boundaries. The kind of people who order and or excecute to treat kindred people like most of us are is evil to the core. They are amoungst us 24/7.