Anybody seen this killer??????
- Thread starter water
- Start date
kayanation said:
Thx anyway, but the link is broken. Some real sad stuff here, but I know none of us are that surprised. Almost every African country will have another story (maybe not on the same magnitude but just as horrific). For some reason, we were so divided that the Euro's could and conquered almost the whole damn continent (I have always heard Ethiopia was the only country in Africa that wasn't colonized). Yes the Euro's were/are at fault for these things but I don't think we can/could depend on their "kindness" or "conscience". Even in South Africa under the apartheid system we manage to be fighting amongst ourselves (ANC vs Zulus).
Thanks again for the drop.
Disanddat said:
Don't let them fool ya.
When America fought for independence from Britain they didn't just get along.
They fought a bloody civil war based on greed amongst themselves.
White on white violence if you will..........
Don't let them make you feel that Africa has a monopoly on not sticking together.
Right now Eastern Europe is in a mess, more white on white violence.
We just need to see the lessons to understand how something like this could occur.
kayanation said:
You have a point there. So we don't have a monopoly on sticking together but it is still our main problem. I site again the South Africa , if we stuck together their then apartheid could not have held up so long. It is just the theme of the post, I don't want to discount that there have been times when we worked together and it paid off, but I never seen on a grand scale. I know that is what Garvey was pushing for though, pity it never materialized into anything much.
B
blackcity
Guest
^^^^
Great post! This is only one of the numerous stories on the horrors of colonial Africa. Those interested can also get the Book - http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0618001905/ref=sib_dp_pt/105-4003433-5388414#reader-link
BUMP! Revolution Is Coming.
Anikulapo said:Great post! This is only one of the numerous stories on the horrors of colonial Africa. Those interested can also get the Book - http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0618001905/ref=sib_dp_pt/105-4003433-5388414#reader-link
Thanks for the assist........
Yeah I've this stuff before...had to find out on my own...after so much reading, I've finally come to the conclusion that White people are just a group of heathens and all they know how to do is kill people still their land. Did it in Africa, the New World, Austrailia, and the list goes on.
If you want to blame anyone, blame this MF.
Pope Leo XIII
He's the one that gave them permission.
I almost forgot. Belgian citizens were against the Congolese conquest. Leopold was booed at his funeral because of it.
Pope Leo XIII
He's the one that gave them permission.
I almost forgot. Belgian citizens were against the Congolese conquest. Leopold was booed at his funeral because of it.
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da_monumental_1 said:If you want to blame anyone, blame this MF.
Pope Leo XIII
He's the one that gave them permission.
I almost forgot. Belgian citizens were against the Congolese conquest. Leopold was booed at his funeral because of it.
I don't know about that booing etc.... but I do know that the majority of white europeans think colonisation brough civilisation and religion to afrcan savages.
I do know also that there is enough precedence by the white man to pretend to help to mask his true intentions.
Example below King Leopold was elected honorary president of the Aborigines Protection Society, a venerable British human rights organization
Leopold: Champions Anti-Slavery
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>People in Europe continued to feel indignant over the “Arab” slave-traders based on Zanzibar and Africa’s east cost. The slavers were indeed spreading a wide swath of terror much of east and central Africa, and the slaves they captured continued to be sold all along the northeast shore of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. But European righteousness over the issue was more intertwined than ever with a growing desire for African colonies. Conveniently, the slave-traders were mostly Muslim, which allowed Europeans to feel still more virtuous about their ambitions. Leopold won much praise for his patronage of Christian missionaries in his new colony; he so impressed people with his vigorous denunciations of the slave trade that he was elected honorary president of the Aborigines Protection Society, a venerable British human rights organization.<o></o>
To the king’s great satisfaction, Brussels was chosen as the location, starting in November 1989, for an Anti-Slavery Conference of the major powers. The Anti-Slavery Conference was a boon to Leopold. The delegates approved plans the king proposed for the fighting the slave-traders – plans that bore a striking resemblance to those for the expensive transportation infrastructure he was hoping to build in the Congo. The king described the need for fortified posts, roads, railways, and steamboats, all of which would support columns of troops pursuing the slave traders. He grandly offered the services of the new Congo state toward this noble end, and asked in return only that the conference authorize him to levy import duties to finance the attack on slavery.<o></o>
Belgians confront colonial past
Belgians are finally learning the unvarnished truth about the brutalities of their colonial past - and they are queuing up to find out more. An exhibition at the Royal Museum for Central Africa just outside Brussels, entitled Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era, has been attracting 2,000 visitors a day.
Congo, which is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, was Belgium's only African colony, and from 1885 to 1908 it was the personal possession of King Leopold II, who ran it like an enormous private business, plundering its rubber, ivory and minerals.
His police enforcers, the Force Publique, meted out cruel punishments on villages that failed to pay taxes or produce sufficient rubber.
The exhibition includes photographs of children with limbs chopped off by the white colonisers. Yet for years most Belgians knew little about this.
The museum director, Guido Gryseels, says many Belgian family histories include doctors, missionaries or nuns who went to the Congo, and until recently most grew up with the idea that Belgium did nothing but good in Africa.
"We had a one-sided view of our colonial past" says Mr Gryseels. "There was a positive view that Belgium went to Africa to stop the slave trade and civilise the Africans.
"Now we are giving a balanced view, with all the pros and cons. For many people this has come as an enormous shock."
Rubber was the chief commodity extracted from Congo's jungles at a time when the world was desperate for it.
A contemporaneous cartoon on show in the exhibition depicts a Belgian "concierge" at a barred door marked "Congo", saying to an American client: "Never mind what goes on behind the door! Should you feel any remorse, rest assured I will give you as much rubber as you require to render your conscience 'elastic'!"
Enormous wealth
King Leopold finally sold his "Congo Free State" to the Belgian government in 1908, having looted it and slaughtered millions of its people (exactly how many is a matter of dispute).
He used the enormous wealth thus gained to build grand palaces and monuments - including the Africa Museum and neighbouring Colonial Palace.
An enormous statue of the long-bearded Leopold has been moved from its once prominent position in his museum to a discreet corner - all part of what Mr Gryseels calls a "revolutionary" reassessment of the king's role. The impetus for the change came from the publication in 1998 of King Leopold's Ghost, a devastating account by US historian Adam Hochschild of what he called Belgium's "greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa".
The exhibition does not accept Hochschild's claim that as many as 10 million died during Leopold's rule, but it no longer shies away from the atrocities the author described.
Mass education
The exhibition also chronicles the good work done by Belgian missionaries, who introduced health care and schools to the Congo.
Unlike the French and British colonial powers, the Belgians favoured mass education, in local languages, over educating an English or French-speaking elite.
Mr Gryseels says that despite a policy of racial segregation there was also a lively interchange of cultures between the colonisers and the natives.
He concedes, though, that education only went so far - to the extent that even in 1960, when Congo finally gained its independence, there were only 27 Congolese with a university education, making it almost impossible to create a successful administration. With no political class, the country fell into chaos and civil war.
Its first leader, Patrice Lumumba, was ousted within months and murdered, with Belgian and American complicity.
Belgium accepted responsibility and finally apologised for the assassination in 2002.
Belgium's collective amnesia about the unsavoury side of the country's rule in the Congo is strange, because the facts were well publicised a century ago.
The first claims of 10 million victims of Leopold's rule were made by Edmund Morel, a British shipping agent who in 1904 set up the Congo Reform Association.
Roger Casement, a British diplomat, also exposed the violence and forced labour he heard about from missionaries, while Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness described the brutality of the regime.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4332605.stm
Published: 2005/03/09 16:33:39 GMT
- them mafuckas.........
great post
keep up the good work
keep up the good work
wutevabeotch said:great post
keep up the good work
Thx.
Just got tired of the treatment of black lives throughout history while we are made to marvel at the glory of Europe who built their empire on black blood..........
RIP my people...........
'Spirit of Berlin'
The philanthropic 'spirit of Berlin', however, was not entirely hollow. Once it became known that slavery was alive and well in the Congo, which was run as a personal fiefdom of Leopold, King of Belgium, an international anti-slavery conference was held in Brussels in 1889-1890.
The man who exposed the existence of slavery in Leopold's Congo was a French missionary to Africa called Cardinal Charles Lavigerie. During a sermon at St Sulpice in Paris in 1888, Lavigerie had shocked his audience by describing the horrors of the Congo slave trade: villages surrounded and burnt; men captured and yoked together; women and children penned like cattle in the slave markets.
The upshot of the Brussels conference was that Leopold cynically agreed to stamp out Arab slavery in return for the right to tax imports. He thereby overturned one of the key resolutions of the Act of Berlin, which had guaranteed free trade for the region.
But while Leopold made all the right noises, his agents in the Congo used forced labour (slaves in all but name) to extract rubber, his single most profitable export. By 1902, rubber sales had risen 15 times in eight years, and were valued at 41 million francs (£1.64 million).
By taking the women of Congolese villages hostage, Leopold had turned the men into forced labourers, with a monthly quota of wild rubber to collect from the rain forest. The system was harsh. Many hostages starved to death and many male forced labourers were worked to death.
More people were killed as rebellions were brutally crushed.
Demographers today estimate that the population of the Congo fell roughly by half over the 40-year period beginning in around 1880.
The truth behind the Congo's rubber trade - 'legalised robbery enforced by violence' - was finally exposed by Edmond Morel, an Anglo-French ex-shipping clerk, who wrote a series of accusatory articles in 'The Speaker' in 1900.
By arguing that Leopold's illegal state monopoly was robbing British merchants as well as African peasants, Morel was able to enlist the support of both businessmen and humanitarians. A British consul, Roger Casement, was sent to investigate, and the publication of his damning report in 1904 was, for Leopold, the beginning of the end.
In 1908, in return for £3.8 million, Leopold handed over control of the Congo to the Belgian state. But even then, the forced labour system continued. It took a different form during World War One, when tens of thousands of Congolese were conscripted as porters for the Belgian army.
The forced labour system significantly changed only in the early 1920s, when Belgian colonial authorities realised the population was dropping so rapidly that they soon might have no labour force left.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/scramble_for_africa_article_04.shtml
Who is the black man's devil??????
The philanthropic 'spirit of Berlin', however, was not entirely hollow. Once it became known that slavery was alive and well in the Congo, which was run as a personal fiefdom of Leopold, King of Belgium, an international anti-slavery conference was held in Brussels in 1889-1890.
The man who exposed the existence of slavery in Leopold's Congo was a French missionary to Africa called Cardinal Charles Lavigerie. During a sermon at St Sulpice in Paris in 1888, Lavigerie had shocked his audience by describing the horrors of the Congo slave trade: villages surrounded and burnt; men captured and yoked together; women and children penned like cattle in the slave markets.
The upshot of the Brussels conference was that Leopold cynically agreed to stamp out Arab slavery in return for the right to tax imports. He thereby overturned one of the key resolutions of the Act of Berlin, which had guaranteed free trade for the region.
But while Leopold made all the right noises, his agents in the Congo used forced labour (slaves in all but name) to extract rubber, his single most profitable export. By 1902, rubber sales had risen 15 times in eight years, and were valued at 41 million francs (£1.64 million).
By taking the women of Congolese villages hostage, Leopold had turned the men into forced labourers, with a monthly quota of wild rubber to collect from the rain forest. The system was harsh. Many hostages starved to death and many male forced labourers were worked to death.
More people were killed as rebellions were brutally crushed.
Demographers today estimate that the population of the Congo fell roughly by half over the 40-year period beginning in around 1880.
The truth behind the Congo's rubber trade - 'legalised robbery enforced by violence' - was finally exposed by Edmond Morel, an Anglo-French ex-shipping clerk, who wrote a series of accusatory articles in 'The Speaker' in 1900.
By arguing that Leopold's illegal state monopoly was robbing British merchants as well as African peasants, Morel was able to enlist the support of both businessmen and humanitarians. A British consul, Roger Casement, was sent to investigate, and the publication of his damning report in 1904 was, for Leopold, the beginning of the end.
In 1908, in return for £3.8 million, Leopold handed over control of the Congo to the Belgian state. But even then, the forced labour system continued. It took a different form during World War One, when tens of thousands of Congolese were conscripted as porters for the Belgian army.
The forced labour system significantly changed only in the early 1920s, when Belgian colonial authorities realised the population was dropping so rapidly that they soon might have no labour force left.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/scramble_for_africa_article_04.shtml
Who is the black man's devil??????
kayanation said:For the non-readers, just read the parts I have highlighted in blue.
Think about what is happening in Black America & the world today while reading it.
History really tries to repeats itself.......
Another link:
http://www.formofmoney.com/xKingLeopold.html
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, 1998, Excerpts
Congo Pre-Western
The Kingdom of Kongo had been in place for at least a hundred years before the Portuguese arrived. Its monarch, the ManiKongo was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders. He sat on a throne of wood inlaid with ivory.<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>
As in much of Africa, the kingdom had slavery. The nature of African slavery varied from one area to another and changed over time, but most slaves were people captured in warfare. Others had been criminals or debtors, or were given away by their families as part of a dowry settlement. Like any system that gives some humans beings total power over others, slavery in Africa could be vicious.
In other ways, African slavery was more flexible and benign than the system Europeans would soon establish in the New World. Over a generation or two, slaves could often earn or be granted their freedom, and free people and slaves sometimes intermarried. The fact that trading in human beings existed in any form turned out to be catastrophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready to buy endless shiploads of slaves, they found African chiefs willing to sell.<o></o>
The Portuguese recognized in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-developed state – the leading one on the west coast of central Africa. The ManiKongo appointed governors for each of some half-dozen provinces, and his rule was carried out by an elaborate civil service that included specialized positions.<o></o>
Slave Market
The Western Hemisphere became a huge, lucrative, nearly insatiable market for African slaves. Once they were properly baptized, clothed in leftover burlap cargo wrappings, and chained together in ships’ holds, most slaves from this region were sent to Brazil, the nearest part of the New World. They were put to work by the millions in Brazil’s mines and on its coffee plantations, as well as on the Caribbean island where other European powers quickly began using the lush, fertile land to grow sugar. [Rum].<o></o>
Many of the slaves shipped to the Americas came from the Kingdom of the Kongo. Forced-marched to the coast, their necks locked into wooden yokes, the slaves were rarely given enough food, and because caravans usually traveled in the dry season, they often drank stagnant water. The trails to the slave ports were soon strewn with bleaching bones.<o></o>
Starting in the 1600s, a growing demand tempted many ship captains to make the longer voyage to the British colonies in North America. Roughly one of every four slaves imported to work the cotton and tobacco plantations of the American South began his or her journey across the Atlantic from equatorial Africa, including the Kingdom of Kongo.<o></o>
Missionaries
The newcomers built churches and mission schools. Like many white evangelists who followed them, they were horrified by polygamy; they thought it was the spices in the African food that provoked the dreadful practice. <o></o>
The lust for slave profits engulfed even some of the priests, who abandoned their preaching, took black women concubines, kept slaves themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery.<o></o>
Industrial Revolution -- African Resource Grab
Underlying much of Europe’s excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe’s earlier dealings with Africa. Expectations quickened dramatically after prospectors discovered diamonds in South Africa in 1867 and gold some decades later. But Europeans liked to think of themselves as having higher motives. The British, in particular, fervently believed in bringing “civilization” and Christianity to the natives. <o></o>
During the nineteenth-century European drive for possessions in Africa and Asia, people justified colonialism in various ways, claiming that it Christianized the heathen or civilized the savages or brought everyone the miraculous benefits of free trade. Now, with Africa, a new rationalization had emerged: smashing the “Arab” slave trader.<o></o>
Livingston
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>All the European impulses toward Africa – anti-slavery zeal, the search for raw materials, Christian evangelism, and sheer curiosity – were embodied in one man, David Livingston. Physician, prospector, missionary, explorer, and at one point even a British consul, he wandered across Africa for three decades, starting in the early 1840s. He searched for the source of the Nile, denounced slavery, found Victoria Falls, looked for minerals, and preached the gospel. As the first white man to cross the continent from coast to coast, be became a national hero in England.<o></o>
In 1866, Livingston set off on a long expedition, looking for slave-traders, potential Christians, the Nile, or anything else that might need discovering. Years passed and he did not return.
The Opulent Philanthropist: King Leopold
The man whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the records of conquistadors. Dutch profits from Java depended on forced labor. Leopold remarked that forced labor was “the only way to civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples of the Far East.”<o></o>
Leopold had learned from his many attempts to buy a colony that none were for sale; he would have to conquer it. Doing this openly, however, was certain to upset both the Belgian people and the major powers of Europe. If he was to seize anything in Africa, he could do so only if he convinced everyone that his interest was purely altruistic.
Livingston, Stanley, and other explorers, Leopold saw, had succeeded in stirring Europeans by their descriptions of the “Arab” slave traders leading caravan of chained captives to Africa’s east coast. As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits.<o></o>
For several months before Stanley emerged at Boma, Leopold had eagerly scanned the Times of London daily for news of his fate. At one point he wrote to an aide, “The first thing on the agenda seems to me to check again if Stanley has reached the Lualaba.” As soon as Stanley reappeared, the king sent him a telegram of congratulations.<o></o>
Leopold Hosts a Philanthropy Conference
In 1876, Leopold began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers. Leopold’s welcoming speech was a masterpiece. It clothed the whole enterprise in noble rhetoric, staked out his own role in what was to come, and guaranteed his plans a stamp of approval by the group he was hosting.<o></o>
Between sumptuous banquets, those attending the conference pulled out their maps and marked points in the blank space of central Africa for such “hospitable, scientific, and pacification bases.” Before the guests dispersed to their respective countries, they voted to establish the International African Association. Leopold magnanimously volunteered space in Brussels for the organization’s headquarters. The new body was welcomed throughout Europe. Prominent citizens, from the Rothschilds to Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, hastened to send contributions.<o></o>
Leopold Funds Stanley
In 1878, when Leopold sat down for his long-anticipated meeting with Stanley, Leopold was 43. Stanley was now a best-selling author, recognized as one of the greatest of living explorers. Although Leopold had lived a pampered life in yachts and palaces, Leopold was wiser in the ways of the world. He had taken into measure of Stanley’s ambition, of his immense capacity for hard work, of his craving for constant flattery, and of his need for a sponsor.<o></o>
Of the riches Leopold hoped to find in the Congo, the one that gleamed most brightly was ivory. European and American merchants were already eagerly buying African ivory in the markets of Zanzibar. Ivory from elephant tusks was shaped into knife handles, billiard balls, combs, fans, napkin rings, piano and organ keys, chess pieces, crucifixes, snuffboxes, brooches, and statuettes. In a faint echo of its original use to the elephant, it was made into false teeth. For the moment, such riches lay at least several years in Leopold’s future, for first Stanley had to build his road.<o></o>
Ambitious as his and Stanley’s plans were, Leopold was intent that they be seen as nothing more than philanthropy. The contracts Stanley made his European staff sign forbade them to divulge anything about the real purpose of their work. Leopold sent word that Stanley was lay the groundwork in the Congo for a “confederation of free negro republics,” black tribes to whose president would live in Europe and rule under the guidance of the Belgian king.<o></o>
Congo Chiefs Sign Treaties
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The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark X’s to documents in a foreign language and in legalese. The idea of a treaty of friendship between two clans or villages was familiar; the idea of signing over one’s land to someone on the other side of the ocean was inconceivable. Did the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela, for example, have any idea of what they agreed to on April 1, 1884? In return for “one piece of cloth per month to each of the undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand,” they promised to “freely of their own accord, for themselves and their heirs and successors for ever give up the said Association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories and to assist by labor or otherwise, any works, improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories. All roads and waterways running through this country, the right of collecting tolls on the same, and all game, fishing, mining, and forest rights, are to be the absolute property of the said Association.” It was an even worse trade that the Indians made for Manhattan.<o></o>
For five years, Stanley was Leopold’s man in the Congo. In June 1884, his work for Leopold done and a sheaf of treaties in his baggage, Stanley sailed home to Europe. He grumbled a bit about his employer’s greed; the king, he complained, had the “enormous voracity to swallow a million square mile with a gullet that will not take in a herring.” But it was Stanley who made the big swallow possible.<o></o>
United States Recognizes Belgium’s Colony
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Once one major country recognizes anther’s existence, other nations are likely to fall into line. If no major European country would take this crucial first step, Leopold decided, he would look elsewhere. Unnoticed on his home continent, the king had already quietly begun making a dazzling end-run around Europe entirely.<o></o>
On November 29, 1883, Sanford was received by President Arthur at the White House. He claimed that Leopold’s treaties with Congo chiefs were similar to those which the Puritan clergyman Roger Williams, famed for his belief in Indian rights, had made in Rhode Island in the 1600s. The President cheerfully incorporated into his annual message to Congress text that Sanford had drafted for him about Leopold’s high-minded work in the Congo:<o></o>
The rich and populous valley of the Kongo is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is the president. Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs, roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established under one flag. The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the valley.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>On April 22, 1884, the United States of America recognized King Leopold II’s claim to the Congo. It was the first country to do so. With Leopold’s embryonic state recognized by the United States and later Germany, Leopold was in a strong position.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>In Europe, the thirst for African land had become nearly palpable. Europeans were still used to thinking of Africa’s wealth mainly in terms of coastline, and there was remarkably little conflict over ceding to Leopold the vast spaces he wanted in the interior. A major reason he was able to get his hands on so much is that other countries thought that they were giving their approval to a sort of international colony – under the auspices of the King of the Belgians, to be sure, but open to traders from all of Europe.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>His power as king-sovereign of the colony was shared in no way with the Belgium government, whose Cabinet ministers were as surprised as anyone when they opened their newspaper to find that the Congo had promulgated a new law or signed a new international treaty.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Most Belgians had paid little attention to their king’s flurry of African diplomacy, but once it was over they began to realize that his new colony was bigger than England, France, Germany, Span, and Italy combined. It was on thirteenth of the African continent, more than seventy-times the size of Belgium itself.
Leopold Develops the Congo<o></o>
At last, at the age of fifty, Leopold had the colony he had long dreamed of. As he prepared to develop the enormous colony, he found a number of tools at his disposal that had not been available to empire builders of earlier times. The tools were crucial, for they would soon allow a few thousand white men working for the king to dominate some twenty million Africans.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>To begin with, there was weaponry - breech-loading rifles which had just shown their deadly power on the battlefield of the American Civil War. They shot much farther and more accurately and used quick-loading waterproof brass cartridges. Another tool that allowed Europeans to seize virtually all of tropical Africa was medical knowledge. Around the turn of the century malaria and hematuria became better understood. Finally, because of the Congo’s unusual geography, one tool was even more important: the steamboat.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>By the end of 1889, there were 430 whites working in the Congo: traders, soldiers, missionaries, and administrators of the king’s embryonic state. Staff in place and tools in hand, Leopold set out to build the infrastructure necessary to exploit his colony. A rudimentary Congo transportation system was the first item on his agenda.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Leopold began to find himself under financial pressure. He had inherited a sizable fortune, yet by the late 1880s, explorers, steamboats, mercenaries, armaments, and other Congo expenses had burned up almost all of it. If he hoped to turn a profit in exploiting the territory, where was the money to come from? He struck a deal with important members of the Belgian Cabinet, who were beginning to realize that the king’s African possession might someday be quite valuable. If Parliament gave him the loan he wanted, Leopold would leave the Congo to Belgium in his will. To support the philanthropic work he was doing in the Congo, he got a loan of twenty-five million francs [some $125 million in today’s money], interest-free.<o></o>
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>
Leopold: Champions Anti-Slavery
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>People in Europe continued to feel indignant over the “Arab” slave-traders based on Zanzibar and Africa’s east cost. The slavers were indeed spreading a wide swath of terror much of east and central Africa, and the slaves they captured continued to be sold all along the northeast shore of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. But European righteousness over the issue was more intertwined than ever with a growing desire for African colonies. Conveniently, the slave-traders were mostly Muslim, which allowed Europeans to feel still more virtuous about their ambitions. Leopold won much praise for his patronage of Christian missionaries in his new colony; he so impressed people with his vigorous denunciations of the slave trade that he was elected honorary president of the Aborigines Protection Society, a venerable British human rights organization.<o></o>
To the king’s great satisfaction, Brussels was chosen as the location, starting in November 1989, for an Anti-Slavery Conference of the major powers. The Anti-Slavery Conference was a boon to Leopold. The delegates approved plans the king proposed for the fighting the slave-traders – plans that bore a striking resemblance to those for the expensive transportation infrastructure he was hoping to build in the Congo. The king described the need for fortified posts, roads, railways, and steamboats, all of which would support columns of troops pursuing the slave traders. He grandly offered the services of the new Congo state toward this noble end, and asked in return only that the conference authorize him to levy import duties to finance the attack on slavery.<o></o>
Stanley Heads Emin Pasha Relief Expedition
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Leopold’s ambitions had grown. His desire for colonies inflamed, he was now dreaming of the valley of the Nile. The Sudan, through which the upper branches of the Nile flowed, was under joint Anglo-Egyptian rule. Members of a rebel Muslim fundamentalist movement, the Mahdists, staged a rebellion in the mid-1880s, killing the British governor’s general and rebuffing the British forces sent against them. England was shocked, but the country had too many colonial wars under way elsewhere and decided, for the moment, not to fight this one. The rebels pushed to the south, where, holding out against them, was the governor of the Sudan’s southernmost province. Most conveniently for Leopold, it bordered on the Congo.<o></o>
The governor, Emin Pasha, asked for help from Europe. The Beleaguered pasha was a slight, short German Jew, originally named Eduard Schnitzer. In photographs, Emin’s unmistakably European face, adorned with thick spectacles and topped with a red fez, looks like that of a nearsighted delegate to a Shriner’s convention.>
To lead the Emin Pasha relief Expedition, who was a more suitable choice than Henry Morton Stanley? The explorer eagerly accepted the invitation. He was particularly delighted by the Maxim gun, which he tried out at its maker’s home, satisfying himself that it really could shoot the advertised six hundred rounds per minute. The new gun, Stanley said, would be “of valuable service in helping civilization to overcome barbarism.” The financing for the venture came from sources ranging from the Royal Geographical Society and British traders interested in Emin’s rumored stash of ivory to the press barons who knew that a new Stanley expedition would sell newspapers.
The expedition was to go through Leopold’s Congo, which would require crossing the unexplored Ituri rain forest. Once Stanley found Emin Pasha, he would ask him to remain the governor of his province – but as a province of the Congo state. <o></o>
He departed in early 1887. Stanley slogged through the rain forest at the head of the vanguard column, sentencing a deserter to be hanged and ordering numerous floggings, some of which he administered himself. To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley’s officers wrote in his diary, “The natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round. It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the native quietly at their day’s work. Some women were making banana flour. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing. I opened the game by shooting one chap through his chest. He fell like a stone. Immediately a volley was poured into the village.”<o></o>
By the time they finally reached Emin, Stanley and his surviving men were hungry and exhausted. Most the supplies were hundreds of miles behind them with the rear column. Stanley had to ask Emin for supplies. Emin politely declined Leopold’s proposal to join his province to the new Congo state. Most embarrassing of all to the bedraggled vanguard, the rebel threat had eased since Emin’s letters of several years earlier, and he turned out not to be eager for relief. <o></o>
For some months after Stanley’s return in 1890, a controversy boiled in England over the loss of more than half the expedition’s men and over the atrocities committed under his command. The Emin Pash Relief Expedition had indeed been brutal. But those who condemned it were unaware that, compared with the bloodshed beginning just then in central Africa, it was only a sideshow.<o></o>
Stanley “shoots negroes as if they were monkeys” commented the explorer and writer Richard Burton.<o></o>
Leopold ‘s Decrees
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>There were a number of royal decrees from Brussels. The first and most important had been issued on the very day in 1885 that the existence of the Congo state was formally proclaimed; it declared that all “vacant land” was the property of the state. There was definition of what made land vacant. All over the world, of course, land that looks vacant has often been deliberately left to lie fallow while corps are planted somewhere else – especially in the tropics, where heavy rainfalls leach nutrients out of the soil.<o></o>
Leopold did not have the resources to exploit the entire territory, so anther set of decrees carved pasts of the Congo into several giant blocks, whose “vacant land” was leased out for long periods as concessions to private companies. In each of them the state – which in effect meant Leopold himself – usually kept 50 percent of the shares. Leopold was like the manager of a venture capital syndicate today. He had essentially found a way to attract other people’s capital to his investment schemes while he retained half the proceeds. <o></o>
The Lazy Native
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Leopold’s will treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited real estate to be disposed of by its owner. In this the king was no different from other Europeans of his age, explorers, journalists, and empire-builders alike, who talked of Africa as if were without Africans: an expanse empty space waiting to be filled by the cities and railway lines constructed through the magic European industry.<o></o>
To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold’s regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as theft of land and freedom. <o></o>
Talk of the lazy native accompanied the entire European land grab in Africa, just as it had been used to justify the conquest of the Americas. To an American reporter, Leopold once declared, “In dealing with a race composed of cannibals for thousands of years it is necessary to use methods which will best shake their idleness and make them realize the sanctity of work.”<o></o>
To Europeans, Africans were inferior beings: lazy, uncivilized, little better than animals. In fact, the most common way they were put to work was, like animals, as beasts of burden. In any system of terror, the functionaries must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation.<o></o>
Pursuing the Ivory with Forced Labor
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>As the 1890s began, the work whose sanctity Leopold prized most highly was seizing all the ivory that could be found. Congo state officials and their African auxiliaries swept through the country on ivory raids, shooting elephants, buying tusks from villagers for a pittance, or simply confiscating them. Congo peoples had been hunting elephants for centuries, but now they were forbidden to sell or deliver ivory to anyone other than an agent of Leopold.<o></o>
For Africans, transactions in money were not allowed. Money in free circulation might undermine what was essentially a command economy. The commands were above all for labor. At the beginning, the state most wanted porters. The death toll was particularly high among porters forced to carry loads long distances. Edmond Picard, a Belgian senator, described a caravan of porters he saw on the route around the big rapids in 1896:
“Unceasingly we meet these porters … black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loin-cloth for clothing, frizzy and bare head supporting the load – box, bale, ivory tusk, barrel; most of them sickly, drooping under a burden increased by tiredness and insufficient food – a handful of rice and some stinking dried fish; pitiful walking caryatids, beasts of burden with thin monkey legs, with drawn features, eyes fixed and round form preoccupation with keeping their balance and form the daze of exhaustion. They come and go like this by the thousands, requisitioned by the State armed with its powerful militia, handed over by chiefs whose slaves they are and who make off with their salaries, trotting with bent knees, belly forward, an arm raised to steady the load, the other leaning on a long walking stick, dusty and sweaty, insects, dying along the road or, the journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages.”
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Stanislas Lefrance, a devout Catholic and monarchist, was a Belgian prosecutor who had come to the Congo to work as a magistrate. Lefranc learned that several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all servant boys in town be given fifty lashes of whom several were seven or eight years old, lined up and waiting their turn, watching, terrified, their companions being flogged
Lefranc was seeing in use a central tool of Leopold’s Congo. It was the chicotte – a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim’s bare buttocks. Its blows would leave permanent scars; more then twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more – not an uncommon punishment – were often fatal.<o></o>
The bulk of the chicotte blows were inflicted by Africans on the bodies of other Africans. This, for the conquerors, served a further purpose. It created a class of foremen from among the conquered, like the kapos in the Nazi concentration camps.<o></o>
Force Publique
The framework of control that Leopold extended across his enormous realm was military. After all, without armed force, you cannot make men leave their homes and families and carry sixty-five pound loads for weeks or months. Leopold had made use of African mercenaries ever since sending Stanley of stake out his claim from 1879 to 1884. In 1888 he formally organized them into the Force Publique, an army for his new state.<o></o>
All the commissioned officers and some sergeants of the Force Publique were white, mostly Belgian. All the ordinary soldiers were black. Mercenaries from Zanzibar and the British West African colonies in the army’s first few years were soon outnumbered by soldiers from the Congo itself, most of whom were conscripts.
Children’s Colonies
<o></o>
Even the children were not spared the rigors of Leopold’s regime. “I believe we must set up three children’s colonies,” the king wrote on April 27, 1890. “One in the Upper Congo near the equator, specifically military, with clergy for religious instruction and for vocational education.”<o></o>
The children’s colonies were ruled by the chicotte and the chain. If they survived the kidnapping, transport, and schooling, most the male graduates of the state colonies became soldiers, just as Leopold had ordered. These state colonies were the only state-funded schools for Africans in Leopold’s Congo.<o></o>
As the years passed, many more children’s colonies were established by Catholic missionaries. Leopold subsidized the Catholics lavishly and sometimes used this financial power to deploy priests, almost as if they were soldiers, to areas where he wanted to strengthen his influence.
World’s Fair
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>In 1897, when a world’s fair took place in Brussels, the most talked-about exhibit was on the outskirts of the city, at Tervuren. More than a million visitors came to see this celebration of the Congo. The most extraordinary tableau was a living one: 267 black men, women and children imported from the Congo.<o></o>
There in the park, they were installed in three specially constructed villages: a river village, a forest village, and a “civilized” village. A pair of Pygmies rounded out the show. The “uncivilized” Africans used tools, drums, and cooking pots brought from home. They danced and paddled their dugout canoes around a pond. During the day they were on exhibit in “authentic” bamboo African huts with overhanging thatched roofs.<o></o>
Told that some of the Africans were suffering from indigestion because on snack and candy given to them by the public, Leopold ordered up the equivalent of don’t-feed-the-animals sign. The placard said” THE BLACKS ARE FED BY THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE. They were fed – and slept – in royal stables.<o></o>
These were not the only indigenous people on exhibit at world’s fair and elsewhere around the turn of the century. Perhaps the most appalling case was that of Ota Benga, a Pygmy from the Congo, who was displayed in the monkey house of New York’s Bronx Zoo in September 1906. An orangutan shared his space. Visitors ogled his teeth – filed, newspaper articles hinted, for devouring human flesh. To further this impression, zookeepers left a few bones scattered on the floor around him.<o></o>
The promoter who staged this exhibit was a former Presbyterian missionary who abandoned his preaching for several business ventures. A delegation of black ministers finally rescued Ota Benga from the zoo. He remained in the United States and committed suicide ten years later.
King Leopold Dies
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>In December 1909 the seventy-four-year-old king fell gravely ill with an “intestinal blockage,” possibly a euphemism for cancer. Both in Africa and Europe, Leopold’s death had promised to mark the end of an era. Many Belgians felt relieved; at last they would be rid of the multiple embarrassments of his youthful mistress, his unseemly quarrels with his daughters, and the sheer nakedness of his greed. But it was soon clear that Leopold’s ghost would not vanish easily.
French No Better
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>In France’s equatorial African territories, where the region’s history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing lad was far less that what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all-exploitable land was divided among concession companies. Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company “sentries,” and the chicotte were the order for the day. Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold’s regime eventually fled back to escape the French.<o></o>
During this period a scandal erupted in France when two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in the black prisoner’s rectum.<o></o>
Germans No Better
The exclusive focus of the reform movement on Leopold’s Congo seems illogical if you reckon murder by the percentage of the population killed. By these standards, the toll was even worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today’s Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance. <o></o>
After losing much of their land to the Germans, the Hereros rebelled in 1904. In response, Germany sent in a heavily armed force under General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order. “Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot.”<o></o>
Von Trotha’s extermination order stirred some protests in Germany itself, but internationally it was greeted with silence, even though the Congo reform campaign was then flying high. Of the estimated eighty thousand Hereros who lived in the territory in 1903, fewer than twenty thousand landless refugees remained in 1906. The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst [the Germans poisoned the waterholes], were shot, or – to economize on bullets – bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stock.<o>></o>
United States and British No Better
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world was largely ignoring America’s brutal counter guerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed 20,000 rebels, and saw 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease. Britain came in for no international criticism for its killing of aborigines in Australia, in accordance with extermination orders as ruthless as von Trotha’s. <o></o>
Congo Legacy
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <o></o>What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans than those at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”<o></o>
Forced labor became particularly brutal during the First World War. The years after the war saw the growth of copper, gold, and tin mining. It was legal for mine management to use the chicotte, and at the gold mines of Moto, on the upper Uele River, records show that 26,579 lashes were administered in the first half of 1920 alone. This figure is equal to eight lashes per full-time African worker.<o></o>
More than 80% of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe.<o></o>
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Thanks to this thread I rented the documentary.....that shit will have you steamin'.
Although I have to believe those Belgians are some lying motherfuckers, cause they know cot damn well the source of their wealth.
The documentary showed that their logo is a "hand". Now, knowing that King Leopold used the severing of African's hands as a tool to control the natives, how these motherfuckers gonna say they don't know what the hand symbolizes.
The narrator, a Black man, went into a candy store and bought chocolates shaped as hands and lined them on his table in the chocolate store. A line of brown hands appearing to be severed at the wrist.
FUCK THEM MUHFUCKAS
Although I have to believe those Belgians are some lying motherfuckers, cause they know cot damn well the source of their wealth.
The documentary showed that their logo is a "hand". Now, knowing that King Leopold used the severing of African's hands as a tool to control the natives, how these motherfuckers gonna say they don't know what the hand symbolizes.
The narrator, a Black man, went into a candy store and bought chocolates shaped as hands and lined them on his table in the chocolate store. A line of brown hands appearing to be severed at the wrist.
FUCK THEM MUHFUCKAS
good job homie educate the masses thankfully my dad actually told me about this when I was younger truly vicious and inhumane wats even more terrible it will never get taught in school
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