by Oleg Shevchenko
| The royal family has a pretty little museum in Tervuren, where the palace and the royal court reside when they are in Brussels, containing native ethnographic and artistic artifacts from the Congo, but not a word or an image about the horrors his ancestor allowed or encouraged over there. |
Leopold II reigned for 44 years, and during the first decades of his reign, his reputation was impeccable. The second king of the Belgians (the country only appeared on the map in 1830) banned child labor for children under 12, instituted workers' compensation insurance, declared Sunday a public holiday, and simultaneously patronized the nation's capital.
A neutral country, friendly with France, England, and Germany all at once, the birthplace of Nagant pistols, Flemish lace, and Brussels chocolate, it was a showcase of European prosperity. Few considered the basis of this wealth—primarily, the production of that very chocolate.
Despite its small territory, Belgium had already become a serious industrial player by the mid-19th century. It needed sources of raw materials and markets—and according to the European logic of the time, this meant acquiring colonies. But the country, a latecomer to the map, was late to the division.
The energetic Leopold attempted to purchase the Philippine archipelago from a weakening Spain, but Madrid demanded an exorbitant price (in the end, the Philippines were "squeezed" from the Spanish by the United States for free). The king's advisers then pointed to the vast "no-man's lands" on the map of Equatorial Africa.
For centuries, Europeans had been exporting resources (and, until the 1820s–1840s, slaves as well) from the coasts of the Dark Continent. But the advent of steamships, the telegraph, and quinine had taken their toll, and by 1880, Britain, France, Germany, and the oldest colonial power, Portugal, had joined the race for Africa. Leopold entered this fray, but he was cunning.
"BELGIUM HAS NO COLONIES"
He founded and sponsored the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa, and hired the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley to conduct an "on-the-spot survey."
He brought valuable information: the "no-man's land" of the Congo River basin was rich in rubber (the raw material for rubber production in the factories of Liège) and cocoa beans, which would bring colossal profits to Brussels chocolatiers. The fact that the region was home to dozens of ethnic groups with their own states was of the least interest to Stanley and his client.
The British, French, and Germans were ready to seize control of Central Africa. Leopold (called the "broker king" by his brother-in-law, Austrian Kaiser Franz Joseph ) proposed a compromise. The disputed region would go to the International Association and its president, Monsieur Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who acted not as the King of the Belgians, but as a private citizen and head of a consortium.
This territory was 76 times larger than Belgium's – this result was achieved by 400 treaties that Stanley concluded with local kings and chieftains (beads and fabrics in exchange for "patronage").
In 1885, Leopold II declared that Belgium had no colonies, but rather friendly relations with a new African country, the Free (Independent) State of Congo, created on his private land plots and under his personal sovereignty – not as the King of Belgium, but again as a private individual.
Belgium's progressive laws did not extend to Leopold's private property. The Congolese could not sue in Belgian courts, as they were considered to have their own state.
The king announced through the European media that the civilizing experiment was intended to eradicate the slave trade, unite local tribes, and instill morality and a sense of sin in the indigenous people.
By the end of the century, the European market was filled with tires, erasers, and children's toys made from Belgian rubber—its production increased from 30 tons in 1889 to 5,900 tons in 1903.
Chocolatiers, who obtained raw materials at low cost, experimented with technologies to remove unwanted aromas and achieve a uniform texture.
During approximately the same period (1884–1915), the population of the Independent State of Congo declined from 30 million to 15 million people.
"THE SOLDIERS KILLED EVERYONE."
In Leopold's dominions there was no slavery de jure, but de facto it was a huge concentration camp, the entire contingent of which, from children to the elderly, worked for rubber companies.
The "independent state" had neither an army nor a police force: it was Leopold II's private army, the Force Publique, or "Public Force." Foreign mercenaries—Arabs and West Africans—under European officers were responsible for maintaining "order" during the rubber harvest. There were no Sundays off, no 10-hour workday, and no personal injury insurance.
"Free citizens" were formally forbidden from being sold, but for the slightest offense they could be flogged or beaten with rifle butts to within an inch of their lives, and for refusing to work, they could be killed on the spot. The Force Publique's second function was to conduct labor replenishment raids and punitive expeditions.
For example, Charles Lemaire, High Commissioner of the Equator District of the Independent State, recorded :
"June 14, 1891. Raid on the village of Loliwa, whose inhabitants refused to report to the outpost... A large group of villages, unable to destroy everything. 15 blacks killed. On June 14, 1891, sent the Zanzibari Mechoudi with 40 soldiers to burn Nkole. The operation was successful. On July 13, 1892, Lieutenant Sarazein conducted a raid on the village of Bompopo. 20 natives killed, 13 women and children captured."
From the notes of Force Publique officer Louis Leclerc: "June 21, 1895. Several groups of soldiers were sent to clear the area. They returned with 11 heads and 9 prisoners... The soldiers shot a man who was looking for his wife and child. We burned the village."
The European Commission, which arrived in Congo to investigate the situation, collected testimonies from “citizens”.
For example, these are the words of a child, a victim of the “Public Forces” raid:
"We all ran into the forest—me, my mother, my grandmother, and my sister. The soldiers killed a lot of our people… They grabbed my mother, my grandmother, my sister, and one other person's child, smaller than us. Everyone wanted to 'marry' my mother and argued among themselves, and in the end, they decided to kill her. They shot her in the stomach, she fell, and I cried so terribly when I saw it. Now I had neither my mother nor my grandmother; I was left alone. They were killed before my eyes."
The penalty for disrupting the rubber extraction plan was execution. To prove the effectiveness of their work (the ammunition was being used "for the job," not for hunting, for example), the Force Publique had to produce the severed hands of those "liquidated."
But they came up with a way to demonstrate superior performance: they chopped off the palms of living people. Sometimes they did this to "even the score" if they had expended more ammunition than necessary. And sometimes tribal leaders "paid" with the hands of their subjects—just so the white men wouldn't kill them.
This was the price of wealth for the civilized monarch Leopold and his mistress, Blanche Delacroix, a former prostitute who was granted a baronial title by "Leo's friend." Blanche was called the "Queen of the Congo."
HEART OF DARKNESS
Europe was not unaware of what was happening in Leopold's personal domain. Rubber from the Congo was informally called "red rubber," after the color of blood.
But business is business: shareholders of the Anglo-Belgian Rubber Company received one franc per share in 1892, and over 1,200 francs in 1903. When stories of tens of thousands of victims leaked to the press, the response from the offices in Baume and Léopoldville was: "The data is incorrect; the natives are being decimated by fever."
But while Leopold might have thanked journalist Stanley for acquiring the Congo, three world-renowned writers ruined his life. Mark Twain published a pamphlet, "The King's Soliloquy," which was reprinted in European newspapers. Arthur Conan Doyle collected evidence in his book, " Crimes in the Congo."
Polish-born British author Joseph Conrad published the novel Heart of Darkness (based on which Francis Ford Coppola made Apocalypse Now), in which he described in detail the nightmare of the "independent state."
Leopold tried, in modern parlance, to orchestrate a "media crisis." But photographs from the Congo spoke against him. The broker-king couldn't close the borders of his domains: thus, the world saw rows of black women in shackles and mutilated slaves holding their own severed feet.
By 1906, the situation had reached the point of a pan-European scandal, in which the British played the leading role – not without the expectation of gaining control of the Congo for their own use.
The king appointed a commission of Belgian subjects to investigate the facts. But the situation was spiraling out of control: the commission was horrified and began preparing an indictment against the monarch. The British also sent their own observers.
It was then that Leopold ordered the burning of documentation proving his knowledge of the crimes. All blame was placed on the administration in Leopoldville: "abuses at the local level," "the atrocities of the governors and local chiefs of the Congo Free State."
And in 1908, a year before his death, the king transformed his personal free state into the colony of the Belgian Congo, which allegedly had nothing in common with the actions of the "previous administration." For the people of the Congo, this didn't even mean a change of rulers.
In June 2020, King Philippe of Belgium, the great-great-grandson of Leopold II, wrote to Félix Tshisekedi, President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo: "Our history is full of shared achievements, but it also preserves the memory of painful episodes. During the Free State… many atrocities were committed by the Belgians."
According to researchers, between 3 million and 15 million Congolese fell victim to punitive raids, executions, and disease throughout the war. But nothing like the Nuremberg Tribunal ever took place to prosecute those responsible for the genocide.