The English Baptist missionary Reverend John H. Weeks photographed the seemingly endless rows of stalks and named the picture “native tally of the killed and wounded. ” The longer stalks represented the men and chiefs that had been killed, and the shorter ones, the murdered women and children. As many as 10 million Congolese men, women, and children were killed to enrich and bolster the reputation of one man who sat upon a golden throne 10,000 km away.
Here is the life and crimes of King Leopold II and his Congo Free State. Born in Brussels on the 9th of April 1835, a year after his older brother died in infancy, Leopold became heir apparent to the Belgian throne. He was the second child of Louise of Orléans, the daughter of the French king, and Leopold, the first king of the Belgians, who had been elected ruler of a newly independent Belgium in 1831. As an adolescent, it’s said that Leopold was reserved and awkward.
Although Leopold and his wife Marie were technically married for nearly 50 years and would go on to have four children together, the death of their only son, Leopold, at just 9 years old in 1869 caused an irreparable rupture in their relationship. The boy died after falling into a pond and developing pneumonia. Marie spent the rest of her life in a different city, dying still estranged from her husband in Spa in 1902. Leopold was appointed to the Senate the same year that he was married, and in the period before he succeeded his father as the king of the Belgians, he served in the army, reaching the rank of Lieutenant General and traveling extensively across Europe, Africa, China, and India.
The first official phase of Leopold’s imperial ambitions was the arrangement of an international conference in Brussels in 1876. He sent his first expedition to the region in April the next year, but before the team of four Belgians even got to central Africa, two were dead. Henry Morton Stanley, famous for locating the Scottish explorer David Livingstone, was by that point practically a celebrity. To Leopold, though, these traits seemed advantageous.
Established by Leopold and led by Stanley, the international Congo Association, which had already replaced both the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo and the International African Association, basically functioned as a private enterprise. As the Association negotiated with tribal leaders and mapped out the vast lands that it would soon acquire, the United States became the first country to officially recognize its sovereignty over the Congo. The American Secretary of State proclaimed that the US recognized the flag of the “friendly government. ”
The highest level of deception amid the scheme, however, was Leopold’s rhetorical front of philanthropy.
Britain signed a declaration that recognized that the Association was founded by his majesty, the King of the Belgians, for the purpose of promoting the civilization and commerce of Africa and for other human and benevolent purposes. But instead of controlling the region as a Belgian colony, Leopold ruled the area as if it were his private personal enterprise. It was the only private colony in the world, and Leopold even referred to himself as its proprietor. The administration, courts, and army were all Belgian, and the regime quickly descended into pure and violent tyranny.
Trade was monopolized to enrich the king himself. Leopold decreed that all of the profit made through the work of the Congolese belonged to the state. Despite being rhetorically rooted in humanitarianism, the Congo Free State had built a system that, even by the harsh colonial standards of the day, was incomprehensibly cruel. Because it was supposed that Congolese soldiers would stockpile munitions or use the weapons they were given to hunt food, it’s believed that severed hands came to serve as a form of gruesome currency, with soldiers being paid bonuses depending on the number of hands they collected.
In an oral testimony collected later, one Congolese man explained, “From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. ” The state official wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets. Another recounted, “As a young man, I saw a soldier take a net, put 10 arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river. Furious, he fired a gunshot at me, which gave me the wound of which you can still see the trace.
” Over 50% of these children died. Throughout the existence of the Congo Free State, it’s been estimated that 10 million people may have died as a result of famine, murder, and disease that ran rampant under Leopold’s brutal regime. To add insult to injury, Leopold ordered that an African museum be built on palace grounds just outside of Brussels in 1897. A human zoo would serve as a prison for 267 Congolese men, women, and children who were shown as exhibits near an invented African village.
Leopold II never set foot in his central African territory, but those Europeans that did deemed the regime so cruel that in 1908, ownership of the Congo Free State was transferred to the Belgian government. Even so, the Congolese continued to suffer, and it was not until 1960 that a fierce fight for independence resulted in the establishment of the Republic of the Congo. Leopold II died on the 17th of December 1909, just a year after his private Congo Free State came to an end.
His 44-year reign is still the longest in Belgian history.