Regions that were hard to access or lacked profitable resources escaped much of the violence that was to follow, but for those areas directly under the rule of the Free State or the companies it leased land to, the results were devastating. Bulletin Officiel du Congo Belge (1920). Now, Stanley discovered, Tippu Tip's men had reached still further west in search of fresh populations to enslave. Leopold II was born in 1835 to King Leopold I and Louise-Marie of Orleans. Encyclopedia.com. Ewans, Martin (2002). LEOPOLD II (18351909; ruled 18651909), king of Belgium and personal sovereign of the Congo Free State. London: Heinemann. The people of the Congo did not suffer these injustices without fighting back. Morel, E. D. (1968). He had long wanted a colonial empire, and in Stanley he saw someone who could secure it for him. t. e. Colonization of the Congo Basin refers to the European colonization of the Congo Basin of tropical Africa. She does not believe it will not be quick or easy. The conference was a sham: at its close, Leopold proposed that they set up an international benevolent committee to carry on, and modestly agreed to accept the chairman's role. The forced-labour system for gathering rubber was swiftly copied by French, German, and Portuguese colonial officials with equally fatal results. [1]:333, "There are 40,000,000 naked people" on the other side of the rapids, Stanley wrote, "and the cotton-spinners of Manchester are waiting to clothe them Birmingham's factories are glowing with the red metal that shall presently be made into ironwork in every fashion and shape for them and the ministers of Christ are zealous to bring them, the poor benighted heathen, into the Christian fold. Instead, the ships carried soldiers, and large quantities of firearms and ammunition. (1952). So they outsourced the task to Leopold, who used personal diplomacy to convince the European powers to grant him control of a large portion of the Congo basin. Forty years later virtually all of it had been transformed into European colonies, protectorates, or territories ruled by white settlers. A master of public relations who portrayed himself as a great philanthropist, the king orchestrated successful lobbying campaigns in one country after another. New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1986. Brussels: Goemaere. He persuaded first the United States and then all the major nations of western Europe to recognize a huge swath of Central Africaroughly the same territory as the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congoas his personal property. The king's stated goal was to bring civilization to the people of the Congo, an enormous region in Central Africa. He was, nevertheless, an extremely minor monarch in the realpolitik of the times, ruling a totally insignificant nation, a nation in fact that had come into existence barely four decades before and lived under the constant threat of losing its precarious independence to the great European powers around it. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Please select which sections you would like to print: Also known as: Leopold Lodewijk Filips Maria Victor, Leopold-Louis-Philippe-Marie-Victor. If the government of Belgium would not take a colony, then he would simply do it himself, acting in his private capacity as an ordinary citizen. Why did King Leopold colonize the Congo? The instructions were direct and to the point: "It is a question of creating a new State, as big as possible, and of running it. 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. To secure their Reform in Leopold's Congo. At various times, he launched unsuccessful schemes to buy an Argentine province, to buy Borneo from the Dutch, rent the Philippines from Spain, or establish colonies in China, Vietnam, Japan, or the Pacific islands. In Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, Leopold II's statues were moved to the National Museum. 2023 . From the start the regime was founded on forced labor. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. The people being colonized are robbed of their land, resources, and freedom.) Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Leopold spoke of bringing civilization to the Africans and sent a small but heavily armed Belgian force into the Congo. Name Ahmed Kamel Date 2/17/22 Topic 6.2 Reading Check 1. Wearing one of his many hats, that of a journalist, Williams expected to see the paradise of enlightened rule that Leopold had described to him in Brussels. Nzansu, a chief in the region near the great Congo River rapids, led rebels who killed a hated colonial official and pillaged several state posts, although they carefully spared the homes of nearby Swedish missionaries. Eventually, the strain forced him to relinquish his control of the territory, and in 1908 it became the Belgian Congo. Presbyterian Reformers in Central Africa: A Documentary Account of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and the Human Rights Struggle in the Congo, 18901918. Soldiers were also reportedly promised their freedom or given other incentives for killing the most people as proven by supplying the most hands. 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. He wrote three books on the Congo, several dozen pamphlets, and hundreds of newspaper articles, making much use of eyewitness testimony from the missionaries. Brussels: Didier Hatier. 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 . Eventually, the price fell and wild rubber supplies began to run out, but by that time World War I had begun, and large numbers of Africans were forced to become porters, carrying supplies for Belgian military campaigns against Germany's African colonies. Nor was there a strong humanitarian interest in the continent now that the American slave trade had been extinguished. In May 1885, Leopold took possession of his colony and named it the Congo Free State. For a dozen years, from 1901 to 1913, working sometimes fourteen to sixteen hours a day, he devoted his formidable energy and skill to putting the story of forced labor in King Leopold's Congo on the world's front pages. The rapids and falls, had they known it, extended for 220 miles (350km) inland, and the terrain close by the river was impassable, and remains so to this day. Is climate change killing Australian wine? Corrections? 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. Throughout the tropics, people rushed to sow rubber trees, but those plants could take many years to reach maturity, and in the meantime there was money to be made wherever rubber grew wild. The children sent to a 'holiday camp' never to come back, Russia launches pre-dawn missile attack on Ukraine, Chaos at port as thousands rush to leave Sudan. Morel, E. D. (1904). Company agents were paid large concessions on top of their salaries for the profits they generated, creating personal incentives to force people to work more and harder for little to no pay. Leopolds reign over the Congo Free State, however, has become infamous for its brutality. p.20. . Early and Personal Life. Hoornaert, Andr and O. Louwers (1924). Thompsell, Angela. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Several years later he hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to be his man in Africa. (Believing one people is more civilized than another is wrong.) Pakenham, Thomas (1991). Male rubber gatherers often died from exhaustion. POST-1945 HISTORICAL CONTEXTS During that window of time those who profited were the people 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. Former President of Kenya Setting out from Zanzibar, Henry Morton Stanley, a British-born American journalist and explorer aimed to find the famous Dr. Livingstone. Belgium's education minister announced this week that secondary schools would teach colonial history from next year. The focus of the great powers was still firmly on the lands that had made Europe's fortune: the Americas, the East Indies, India, China, and Australasia. Benedetto, Robert, ed. When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Because the system's effects in the Congo could so easily be blamed on one man, who could safely be attacked because he did not represent a great power, an international outcry focused on Leopold. For instance, Leopold II was a first cousin of Queen Victoria of Britain. Statues have been daubed with red paint in Ghent and Ostend and pulled down in Brussels. And in 2018, Brussels named a public square in honour of Patrice Lumumba, a hero of African independence movements and the first prime minister of Congo, since renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2019, the cities of Kortrijk and Dendermonde renamed their Leopold II streets, with Kortrijk council describing the king as a "mass murderer". Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Many classrooms still have Herg's famous cartoon book Tintin in the Congo, with its depictions of black people now commonly accepted as extremely racist. The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. Did this woman die because her genitals were cut? He did however apologise for the kidnapping of thousands of mixed-race children, known as mtis, from Burundi, DR Congo and Rwanda in the 1940s and 1950s. Leopold II was the second son of Leopold I, first king of the Belgians, and his second wife, Marie-Louise of Orlans. 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. Starting in the early 1920s, however, the system became considerably less draconian, mainly because colonial officials realized that otherwise they would soon have no labor force left. "[2]:145. Rather than control the Congo as a colony, as other European powers did throughout Africa, Leopold privately owned the region. "In the Heart of Darkness". E. D. Morel contre Lopold II: L'histoire du Congo 19001910. "We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear," declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium in 1924, "so that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert" (Hoornaert and Louwers, 1924, p. 101). Thompsell, Angela. George Washington Williams: A Biography. Read about our approach to external linking. Ascherson, Neal (1963). (Believing one people is more civilized than another is wrong.) Yet, in the most astonishing and improbable way imaginable, he managed virtually single-handedly to upset the balance of power in Africa and usher in the terrible age of European colonialism on the black continent. Therefore, King Leopold should be condemned as a criminal for his Read More Thesis Critique Of King Leopold's Ghost . 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. Thompsell, Angela. By that point he had made a huge profit from the territory, conservatively estimated as the equivalent of more than $1.1 billion in early twenty-first century terms. ." Leopold II (1835-1909) wanted his country to join the league of European empires, but the Belgian state refused to finance its part in western Europe's expensive scramble for Africa. Women and children were often taken hostage until men fulfilled a quota; during which time the women were raped repeatedly. He made further progress toward realizing his objective at a diplomatic conference in Berlin in 1884 and 1885 that the major European powers attended. He was a figure who, one might have had every reason to expect, would devote himself to maintaining his country's strict neutrality, avoiding giving offence to any of his powerful neighbours, and indulging his keenly developed tastes for the pleasures of the flesh, rather than one who would make a profound impact on history. Demonstrations and protests demanded that Leopold end human rights abuses in the Congo Free State. Tippu Tip, the most powerful of the Zanzibari slave traders of the 19th century, was well known to Stanley, as was the social chaos and devastation that slave-hunting brought. (Colonizing other peoples, regardless of the justification, is wrong. For thousands of years, that territory had been conquered by nearby Netherlands, France, Germany, and Luxembourg. The boundaries of Colonialism, like those of many literary eras, are difficult to draw. Europe was less than keen on the idea: the great European scramble for Africa had not yet begun. To curry diplomatic favor, he allowed several hundred Protestant missionaries into the Congo. official, Major Charles C. Liebrechts, made the same estimate in 1920. 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. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. The king also faced enemies of another sort. Votin, Herero But new rubber trees often require fifteen years of growth before they can be tapped. [11]:66. "Everyone is waking up from a sleep, it's a reckoning with the past," explains Debora Kayembe, a Congolese human rights lawyer who has lived in Belgium. The relentless pursuit of profits in the Congo by King Leopold II resulted in one of the worst levels of moral decadence for mankind. Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. No one will ever know the precise figures, but, from all these causes, demographers estimate that between 1880 and 1920 the population of the Congo may have been slashed by up to 50 percent, from perhaps 20 million people at the beginning of that period to an estimated 10 million at the end. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Brill. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. The kings stated goal was to bring civilization to the people of the Congo, an enormous region in Central Africa. At a Glance Arab vs. European: Diplomacy and war in Nineteenth-Century East Central Africa. When Leopold II died in 1909, he was buried to the sound of Belgians booing. They were a newly independent country . Inside the palatial walls of Belgium's Africa Museum stand statues of Leopold II - each one a monument to the king whose rule killed as many as 10 million Africans. As the realities and suffering within the Congo Free State became more widely known, many European people spoke out against these abuses. Army officers and colonial officials earned bonuses based on the amount of rubber collected in areas under their control. Retrieved April 27, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/king-leopold-ii-and-congo. And under such circumstances people tended to stop having children, so the birthrate plummeted as a result. Tens of thousands of others were shot down in failed rebellions against the regime. Several rebellions were mercilessly put down under Leopold's direction. However, the date of retrieval is often important. The propensity for violence is . As he headed back to England, Stanley was assiduously courted by King Leopold II of Belgium. He created a baffling series of subsidiary shell organisations, culminating in the cunningly named International African Association (French: Association internationale africaine), which had a single shareholder: Leopold himself. Leopold's reign over the Congo Free State, however, has become infamous for its brutality. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Between the time that Leopold started to assume control of the Congo (around 1880) and when the forced labor system became less severe (after 1920), what happened could not, by strict definition, be called genocide, for there was no deliberate attempt to wipe out all members of one particular ethnic group. After all, destroying the iconography of Adolf Hitler did not mean the history of Nazi Germany was forgotten, she points out. In 1924 the first territory-wide census, when adjusted for undercounting, placed the number of colony inhabitants at some ten million. Men who did not fulfill their quota were killed or mutilated. OF DECOLONIZATION Seeing what profits Leopold was reaping from forced labor, officials in these colonies soon adopted exactly the same systemincluding women hostages, forced male labor, and the chicottewith equally fatal consequences. Colonial administrators also kidnapped orphaned children from communities and transported them to "child colonies" to work or train as soldiers. Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Which Flourished on the Congo for Twenty Years, 18901910. Leopold, however, made the Belgian government pay him for his prized possession. The secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure. State troops pursued them, trapping Mulume Niama and his soldiers in a large cave. When the Belgian King Leopold II acquired the Congo Free State during the Scramble for Africa in 1885, he claimed he was establishing the colony for humanitarian and scientific purposes, but in reality, its sole aim was profit, as much as possible, as fast as possible. Although he played a significant role in the development of the modern Belgian state, he was also responsible for widespread atrocities committed under his rule against his colonial subjects. Estimates vary, but about half the Congolese population died from punishment and malnutrition. Amidst all of this, some of the best of people was also seen, in the bravery and resilience of ordinary Congolese men and women who resisted in small and large ways, and the passionate efforts of several American and European missionaries and activists to bring about reform. 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. A cointegration analysis, CRE Working paper, n02/10, juin 2010, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colonization_of_the_Congo_Basin&oldid=1117806574, The fever-ridden mangroves of the lower Niger by the brothers, This page was last edited on 23 October 2022, at 17:53. Millions of Congolese then found themselves suffering near-famine, which made them vulnerable to diseases they otherwise might have survived. Learn how and when to remove this template message, Oasis Kodila Tedika et Francklin Kyayima Muteba, The sources of growth in DRC before independence. Army officers often demanded of their men a severed hand from each rebel killed in battle. The Force Publique, no doubt, also attracted men who, for whatever reason, felt little compunction about wielding such violence, but this was true of the White officers as well. King Leopold II committed heinous . Meanwhile, Leopold had already begun the job of persuading first the United "Congo Free State Rubber Regime Atrocities." If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. Baskets of severed hands thus resulted from expeditions against rebels. L'tat libre du Congo: Paradis perdu. Franklin, John Hope (1985). Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. . On December 12, 1963, the flag of independent Kenya billowed over the capital city of Nairobi f, Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968 Ed. Birmingham Protest March there were "positive aspects" to colonisation, Democratic Republic of Congo country profile, called on Belgium to apologise for atrocities, apologise for the kidnapping of thousands of mixed-race children, MasterChef Australia host Jock Zonfrillo dies, Banana artwork in Seoul museum eaten by visitor, NFL player's daughter, aged two, drowns in pool, Trevelyan relative 'would consider' famine payment, Ding becomes China's first male world chess champion, Indian 'killer' elephant relocated to tiger reserve. The country of Belgium itself was only about five years old at the birth of Leopold II, who became the eldest surviving son of Leopold I, first king of the Belgians, and his second wife, Louise-Marie of Orlans. "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. In 1853 he married Marie-Henriette, daughter of the Austrian archduke Joseph, palatine of Hungary, and became king of the Belgians on his fathers death in December 1865. Writing in the same year, R. P. Van Wing, a Belgian Jesuit missionary, estimated that the population of the Bakongo people, one of the territory's largest ethnic groups, had been reduced by two-thirds.

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