Now, Stanley discovered, Tippu Tip's men had reached still further west in search of fresh populations to enslave. She or he will best know the preferred format. Exhausted, Stanley returned to Europe, only to be sent straight back by Leopold, who promised him an outstanding assistant: Charles 'Chinese' Gordon (who did not in fact take up Leopold's offer but chose instead to go to meet his fate at Khartoum). Brussels: Didier Hatier. One particularly notorious practice grew out of the suppression of those rebellions. Leopold noted, "Our frontiers can never be extended into Europe." p.20. Votin, Herero Belgian King Leopold II ruthlessly seized control of the African continent on February 5, 1885, establishing the Congo Free State as a . 2 volumes. Bierman, John (1990). From 1874 through 1877 the British explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (18411904) crossed Africa from east to west. 2023 BBC. Then, rather than perish in the impenetrable country of the cascades, Stanley took a wide detour overland to come within striking distance of the European trading station at Boma on the Congo estuary. In the early 1890s, Leopold's private African army, the Force Publique (Public Force), drove the powerful Muslim slave traders out of the Congo. Like statues of racist historical figures vandalised or removed in Britain and the US, Leopold II's days on Belgian streets could now be numbered. When you reach out to him or her, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource. . Shocked by recent local census statistics that showed less than one child per woman, the official Commission Institue pour la Protection des Indignes made a similar reckoning in 1919. 27 Apr. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Congolese fled their villages to avoid being impressed as forced labourers, and they sought refuge deep in the forest, where there was little food and shelter. Corrections? Henry Morton Stanley (2011). who owned land where rubber grew wild. In one of them, a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State, he used a phrase that was not commonly heard again until the Nuremberg trials more than fifty years later. Livingstone had not been heard from in several years and was, in fact, exploring the upper reaches of a great navigable inland river called the Lualaba, which Livingstone hoped was connected to the Nile, but which turned out to be the upper Congo. Thompsell, Angela. Read about our approach to external linking. The Congo and the Founding of Its Free State: A Story of Work and Exploration. Joseph Conrad, who spent six months in the Congo in 1890, draws a memorable portrait of this rapacious trade in his novel Heart of Darkness. These were an incentive for ruthless, devastating plunder. When Stanley returned to Europe in 1878, he had not only found Dr. Livingstone (an event remembered to this day), resolved the last great mystery of African exploration, and ruined his health: he had also opened the heart of tropical Africa up to the outside world. Leopold II's reign as King of Belgium coincided with the time period of the Scramble for Africa, during which the European powers of the day raced for control of different regions . One lucrative source of wild rubber was the Landolphia vines in the great Central African rainforest, and no one owned more of that area than Leopold. Archive pictures from Congo Free State document its violence and brutality. Apparently finding nothing reprehensible about Leopold's ambitions, Stanley set about his task with a will. "[2]:145. Leopold II's rule in what is now Democratic Republic of Congo was so bloody it was eventually condemned by other European colonialists in 1908 - but it has taken far longer to come under scrutiny at home. The iconic images to emerge from this terror, though, were the baskets full of smoked hands and the Congolese children who survived having a hand cut off. Many of the women hostages starved, and many of the male rubber gatherers were worked to death. Marchal, Jules (1996). Moreover, he had a well-known penchant for teenaged girls, and, when he was age 65, he began a liaison with a teenaged former prostitute who bore him two additional children. Nor was there a strong humanitarian interest in the continent now that the American slave trade had been extinguished. Leopold II established a colony in the Congo to gain natural resources for Belgium and wealth for himself. Did this woman die because her genitals were cut? Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. But numerous surviving records from the rubber-bearing land in the adjoining French Congo, which closely followed the model of the Leopoldian forced labor system, also suggest a population loss there of around 50 percent. CONGO.docx - Why did the King of Belgium Leopold II want He wrote articles, appeared at public meetings, lobbied the rich and powerful tirelessly; and always his theme was the boundless opportunity for commercial exploitation of the lands he had discovered or, in his own words, to "pour the civilisation of Europe into the barbarism of Africa". They belonged to his five-year-old daughter, who was later killed when her village did not produce sufficient rubber. When the ships turned around and steamed back to Africa, however, they carried no merchandise in exchange. Presenting himself as a philanthropist eager to bring the benefits of Christianity, Western civilization, and commerce to African nativesa guise that he perpetuated for many yearsLeopold hosted an international conference of explorers and geographers at the royal palace in Brussels in 1876. Leopold then used the treaties to convince other Western colonial powers that he had legal right to the Congo River basin, an area more than fifty times the size of Belgium. Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. Belgian officers were afraid that the rank and file of the Force Publique would waste bullets, so they demanded a human hand for each bullet their soldiers used as proof that the killings had been done. The army become known for its brutality, with the officers and soldiers being accused ofdestroying villages, taking hostages, raping, torturing, and extorting the people. Explore in 3D: The dazzling crown that makes a king. But heat, tropical diseases, and the huge rapids near the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic had long kept the Congo's interior a mystery to Europeans. Having established a beachhead on the lower Congo, in 1883 Stanley set out upriver to extend Leopold's domain, employing his usual methods: negotiations with local chiefs buying sovereignty in exchange for bolts of cloth and trinkets; playing one tribe off another; and if need be, simply shooting an obstructive chief and negotiating with his cowed successor instead. In Britain he founded the Congo Reform Association, and affiliated groups sprang up in the United States and other countries. Montgomery Bus Boycott National Geographic Headquarters 1145 17th Street NW Washington, DC 20036. Combining gift-giving with a show of military force, he persuaded hundreds of illiterate African chiefs, most of whom had little idea of the terms of the agreement to which they were ostensibly acceding, to sign away their land to the king. Soon after Stanley returned from the Congo, Leopold tried to recruit him. London: George Allen & Unwin. Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf as a personal union with Belgium. Morel, E. D. (1968). Imperialism in Africa Assignment and Quiz Flashcards | Quizlet Tens of thousands of others were shot down in failed rebellions against the regime. This brutal practice was a catastrophe for the population of the Congo, and Leopold was eventually forced to give up his hold on the colony. When the 1860s explorers focused attention on Africa, Leopold schemed to colonise Mozambique on the east coast, Senegal on the west coast, and the Congo in the centre. . Birmingham Protest March As the vines near a village were often drained dry, the men would sometimes have to walk for days to find areas where they could gather their monthly quota of rubber. He died the following year. For decades, colonial history has been barely taught in Belgium. With most able-bodied adults prisoners or forced laborers for several weeks out of each month, villages had few people who could plant and harvest food, or go hunting or fishing, and famine soon spread. Leopold II was born in 1835 to King Leopold I and Louise-Marie of Orleans. 8 Disturbing Facts About King Leopold II, the Butcher of Congo When Leopold II died in 1909, he was buried to the sound of Belgians booing. No one owned more land like this than King Leopold II, for equatorial rain forest, dotted with wild rubber vines, comprised half of his Congo state. Belgium's Heart of Darkness | History Today But taking the monument away does not solve the problem of racism, she believes, while creating one museum devoted to the statues would not be useful either. For activists the holy grail is the giant statue of Leopold II on horseback at the gates of the Royal Palace in Brussels. A master of public relations who portrayed himself as a great philanthropist, the king orchestrated successful lobbying campaigns in one country after another. wives' release, the men would have to disperse into the rain forest to collect the sap of wild rubber vines. But new rubber trees often require fifteen years of growth before they can be tapped. They also sometimes eradicatedwhole villages that failed to meet the quotas as a warning to others. Since the 15th century, European explorers had sailed into the broad Congo estuary, planning to fight their way up the falls and rapids that begin only 100 miles (160km) inland, and then travel up the river to its unknown source. Leopold acquired the Congo through unethical means and thus took the people's chances away at self-rule. Its report that year to the Belgian king mostly focused on disease, but stressed that forced labor for rubber and other products "subjects the natives to conditions of life which are an obstacle to their increase" and warned that this situation, plus "a lack of concern about devastating plagues ancient and modern, an absolute ignorance of people's normal lives [and] a license and immorality detrimental to the development of the race," had reached "the point of threatening even the existence of certain Congolese peoples" and could completely depopulate the entire region (Bulletin Officiel, 1920, pp. Throughout the 1870s, Leopold cunningly established a reputation as a great philanthropist and humanitarian who wanted to spread Christianity and civilization to Africa. The propensity for violence is . Learn how and when to remove this template message, Oasis Kodila Tedika et Francklin Kyayima Muteba, The sources of growth in DRC before independence. In his novella Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, who spent six months in the Congo in 1890 as a steamboat officer, gives a searing picture of the brutal and voracious European quest for Congo ivory. Humankind will never know even the approximate toll with any certainty, but beyond any doubt what happened in the Congo was one of the great catastrophes of modern times. It was too lucrative, for the price of rubber was still high. It quickly became a brutal, exploitative regime that relied on forced labour to cultivate and trade rubber, ivory and minerals. Presbyterian Reformers in Central Africa: A Documentary Account of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and the Human Rights Struggle in the Congo, 18901918. King Leopold II's rule over the Congo met fierce resistance. Morel's History of the Congo Reform Movement. Early and Personal Life. official, Major Charles C. Liebrechts, made the same estimate in 1920. Aware that Belgian neutrality, maintained during the Franco-German War (187071), was imperilled by the increasing strength of France and Germany, he persuaded parliament in 1887 to finance the fortification of Lige and Namur. Flament, F., et al. Dark Safari: The Life behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley. However, Leopold's rule over the Congo Free State is well known for its cruelty. "Almost all of them", he wrote, "clamoured for expenses of all kinds, which included wine, tobacco, cigars, clothes, shoes, board and lodging, and certain nameless extravagances"[10]:71 (by which he meant attractive slaves to warm their beds). https://www.thoughtco.com/congo-free-state-atrocities-rubber-regime-43731 (accessed May 1, 2023). If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. 24 February 2004. It had only been through Tippu Tip's help that Stanley had found Livingstone (who himself had survived years on the Lualaba by virtue of Tippu Tip's friendship). I never imagined this happening in my lifetime," Ms Kayembe adds. SCLC Formed The great population movements caused by the colonial regime brought these illnesses into areas where people had not built up an immunity to them, and many would have died even under a government far less brutal than Leopold's. Stanley made his way back to Europe with a sheaf of signed treaties in 1884. The king then embarked on an ultimately successful effort to make a vast fortune from his new possession. [11]:66. Army officers and colonial officials earned bonuses based on the amount of rubber collected in areas under their control. In 1924 the first territory-wide census, when adjusted for undercounting, placed the number of colony inhabitants at some ten million. "Civilisation" was at the core of Leopold II's pitch to European leaders in 1885 when they sliced up and allocated territories in what became known as the Scramble for Africa. William Morrison, a white man, and William Sheppard, the first black missionary in the Congo, were Presbyterians from Virginia whose acts of witness so infuriated Congo colonial authorities that they put the men on trial for libel. In articles in church magazines and in speeches throughout the United States and Europe on visits home, they described what they saw: Africans whipped to death, rivers full of corpses, and piles of severed handsa detail that quickly seared itself on the world's imagination. The Hidden Holocaust: How King Leopold II - The African Exponent Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Africans also died in two decades' worth of unsuccessful uprisings against the king's regime. I Have a Dream oliviall Answer: Since the consequences of the scheme in the Congo could too easily be blamed on one man who could comfortably be targeted because he did not serve a great power, a Leopold-focused foreign uproar. Millions of Congolese then found themselves suffering near-famine, which made them vulnerable to diseases they otherwise might have survived. Although Leopold II established Belgium as a colonial power in Africa, he is best known for the widespread atrocities that were carried out under his rule, as a result of which as many as 10 million people died in the Congo Free State. As the realities and suffering within the Congo Free State became more widely known, many European people spoke out against these abuses. In actuality, Leopold wanted to get his hands on Congo's natural resources. 60 years after independence, traces of the system of exploitation and violence that Leopold II and colonial-era Belgium created still remain in DR Congo. Sadly, Williams, only forty-one years old, died of tuberculosis on his way home from Africa, but not before writing several additional denunciations of what he had seen in the Congo. He had long wanted a colonial empire, and in Stanley he saw someone who could secure it for him. Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps, Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. After leaving Livingstone, Stanley sailed for 1,000 miles (1,600km) down the Lualaba (Upper Congo) to the large lake he named Stanley Pool (now called Pool Malebo). Why did King Leopold colonize the Congo? - Sage-Advices But in the chaos of the early 20th Century when World War One threatened to destroy Belgium, Leopold II's nephew King Albert I erected statues to remember the successes of years gone by. On February 5, 1885, Belgian King Leopold II established the Congo Free State by brutally seizing the African landmass as his personal possession. (Believing one people is more civilized than another is wrong.) The king's colonial officials quickly set up a brutal but effective system for harvesting wild rubber. The royal coffers would become a central focus of Leopolds life, and he once grumbled to German Emperor William II while watching a parade in Berlin, There is really nothing left for us kings except money! Leopold soon decided that the best way to acquire wealth would be by establishing an African colony, at a time when the great European Scramble for Africa was under way. Leopold spoke of bringing civilization to the Africans and sent a small but heavily armed Belgian force into the Congo. There are at least 13 statues to Leopold II in Belgium, according to one crowd-sourced map, and numerous parks, squares and street names. The King Incorporated: Leopold II in the Age of Trusts. Thompsell, Angela. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. States and then all the major nations of Europe to recognize his claim. At a Glance Morel, in his mid-twenties at the time, noticed that when his company's ships arrived from the Congo, they were filled to the hatch with enormously valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. The forced-labour system for gathering rubber was swiftly copied by French, German, and Portuguese colonial officials with equally fatal results. Paris: Editions L'Harmattan. As rubber prices soared, so did the quotas. He was interested in the Congo river basin because there were many natural resources such as rubber, minerals, ivory, diamonds, and gold. "The rebels displayed a courage worthy of a better cause," (Flament et al., 1952, p. 417) acknowledged the army's official historywhich, remarkably, devoted fully one-quarter of its pages to the various campaigns against mutineers within the army's own ranks. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. New York: Random House. King Leopold II was the ruler of the Congo Free State, and the King of Belgium. A Lasting Legacy Of The Builder King In Brussels - Culture Trip "I will dance if it comes down. State troops pursued them, trapping Mulume Niama and his soldiers in a large cave. To prove that he had not wasted bulletsor, worse yet, saved them for use in a mutinyfor each bullet expended, a Congolese soldier of the Force Publique had to present to his white officer the severed hand of a rebel killed. Manchester, U.K.: National Labour Press. Du sang sur les lianes. Last week thousands in the country of 11 million joined solidarity protests about the killing of US black man George Floyd in police custody. Because of his actions King Leopold should be condemned as a criminal for his exploration and abuse to the Congo land and people. Male rubber gatherers often died from exhaustion. Leopold bought half of the Congo as his own private possession after convincing the European community that his actions would be humanitarian and philanthropic. For all his social shortcomings in European society, he was undoubtedly the right man for the job. The museum is largely protected by heritage law but, in the streets outside, monuments to a monarch who seized a huge swathe of Central Africa in 1885 have no such security. In 1870 roughly 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara Desert was governed by indigenous kings, chiefs, and other rulers. Name Ahmed Kamel Date 2/17/22 Topic 6.2 Reading Check 1. She was not unique - chopping off the limbs of enslaved Congolese was a routine form of retribution when Leopold II's quotas were not met. Colonization of the Congo Basin - Wikipedia After Morel orchestrated a protest resolution by the British Parliament, the government, in response, asked its representative in the Congo to investigate his charges. While Leopold portrayed this as a great humanitarian act, his real purpose was to gain control of the upper Congo River and to acquire more workers. "When I walk in a city that in every corner glorifies racism and colonialism, it tells me that me and my history are not valid," she explains from the capital. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Leopold II was the second son of Leopold I, first king of the Belgians, and his second wife, Marie-Louise of Orlans. Nothing was being sent to the Congo to pay for the goods flowing to Europe. The newly named Belgian Congo remained a colony until the Democratic Republic of Congo gained its independence in 1960. ThoughtCo, Jun. In 1879 Stanley returned to the Congo as Leopold's agent. ." Using a wide variety of local and church sources, Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and the leading ethnographer of Congo basin peoples, calculates that the Congo's population dropped by some 50 percent during this period, an estimate with which other modern scholars concur. The horrific consequences of rubber's toxic past - BBC News It was the last part of the continent to be colonized. He provided for no education or vocational training, which would stunt future Congolese leaders from making sound economic and political policies. He made further progress toward realizing his objective at a diplomatic conference in Berlin in 1884 and 1885 that the major European powers attended. Thompsell, Angela. Within three years, his capacity for hard work, his skill at playing one social group off against another, his ruthless use of modern weaponry to kill opponents, and above all his relentless determination opened the route to the Upper Congo. Women and children were often taken hostage until men fulfilled a quota; during which time the women were raped repeatedly. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Presenting himself as a philanthropist eager to bring the benefits of Christianity, Western civilization, and commerce to African nativesa guise that he perpetuated for many yearsLeopold hosted an international conference of explorers and geographers at the royal palace in Brussels in 1876. Forbath, P. The River Congo: The Discovery, Exploration, and Exploitation of the World's Most Dramatic River, 1991 (Paperback). King Leopold II and the Congo The European colonization of Africa was one of the greatest and swiftest conquests in human history.
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