King Leopold II of Belgium, to phrase it in an understated fashion, was not a good person. It is important to remember that (h/t Erik Loomis):
Today [December 17] is the 104th anniversary of the death of Belgium’s King Leopold II. The book [Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness] made me loathe this greedy man who was, like many Kings of his era, a spoiled, insecure and violent maniac. Belgium, unlike its neighbors, didn’t control many colonies. Of course, Leopold thought, how could a country be influential if it didn’t have darker peoples under its boot (It should be noted, however, that Leopold’s invasion of the Congo started off as a personal investment, which makes it even more heinous). The despot’s nefarious forces, dubbed the Force Publique, invaded the Congo Free State and unleashed a horror many of us can’t even fathom. The invaders raped Congolese women, destroyed homes and villages, sucked vital resources rubber and ivory) from the country and, more infamously as shown above [I used a different picture -CP], cut off the hands of native peoples to intimidate those who didn’t produce enough rubber to meet the quota or to show military superiors that bullets hadn’t been wasted on, gasp–wait for it, animals. Those beautiful black hands, by the way, are still a presence in Belgium. I was in Brussels several years ago and a candy shop, near the European Commission’s headquarters, was selling chocolate hands. No other customer seemed to recognize the odious irony of it all. But, then again, that’s Europe for you: a lovely and historically rich continent spectacularly ignorant of its role in multiple genocides.
Leopold was truly an evil man who enriched himself by murdering some 10 million people. Most Belgians are, amazingly, unaware of his crimes. Instead, they see him as the longest reigning monarch in the country’s history who helped build things. Belgium is indeed a beautiful country, but whatever Leopold built there was constructed on the bloodied backs of millions of black people who were slaughtered or maimed by his “rubber regime”. The the only good to come from Leopold’s unfortunate birth was its role in spawning the first global humanitarian cause, a campaign formed to combat his actions in the Congo.
Photo credit: Olnnu (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
