Titans of History

LEOPOLD II

1835–1909

Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and bodies and taken away.

Roger Casement, reporting to the British foreign

secretary on the treatment of the natives in Leopold’s

Congo Free State

Leopold II, king of the Belgians, was the colonist who developed the vast and lucrative central African colony of the Congo at a terrible human cost. He carved himself a colossal personal empire, exploiting and killing millions, to build his fortune—turning the heart of Africa into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Leopold succeeded his father, Leopold I, in 1865. He avoided involving Belgium in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, realizing that his small country had no influence in the power politics of Europe. But European neutrality did not amount to high-mindedness; instead, Leopold’s ambitions extended beyond Europe, and in 1876 he confided in his ambassador in London: “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.”

Leopold set his sights on the untapped natural resources of the river basin of the Congo, covered in dense rainforest and eighty times the size of Belgium. In 1876 he formed the Association Internationale Africaine to promote the exploration and colonization of Africa, and two years later commissioned the British-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley to explore the Congo region. By buying off local tribes for a pittance and duping them into signing away their lands to European control, Stanley requisitioned massive portions of the Congo for Leopold. Thus was created the Congo Free State, for which Leopold gained international recognition at the Conference of Berlin of 1884–5.

The Congo Free State was free only in name. It was not even a Belgian colony, but rather Leopold’s personal property, from which he squeezed profits as he plundered the area’s rich natural resources, notably rubber and ivory. Leopold never visited the Congo, preferring to govern it through a series of agents, whose own profits were gleaned from commission.

Order in the Congo Free State was maintained by the Force Publique, a notoriously cruel mercenary army of 20,000 men, officered by Europeans but relying on badly paid Africans as foot soldiers. The Force Publique was charged with the collection of the rubber tax, an oppressive levy that effectively required forced labor. Arriving in tribal villages, Leopold’s agents seized the women and children and refused to release them until the men went into the rainforest and brought back the requisite quantity of rubber, which was then sold on, all the time swelling Leopold’s coffers.

In order to stop them wasting ammunition on hunting wild animals, the Force Publique were ordered to account for every bullet they fired by bringing back the right hand of their victim. The hands of thousands of innocent Congolese were cut off by the mercenaries, whether they were dead or alive. Villages were burned down, inhabitants tortured and some reports even suggested that members of the Force Publique engaged in cannibalism. The headquarters of Leon Rom, the barbaric Belgian soldier in charge of the Force Publique, was surrounded by hundreds of severed heads.

These atrocities caused the death of an estimated 10 million people, half the population of the Congo, either at the hands of the Force Publique or through hunger and deprivation. Meanwhile, Leopold presented himself to the rest of Europe as a humanitarian, determined to liberate the area from the scourge of the Arab slave trade, and spreading European “civilization.” But the Christian missionaries who penetrated into the heart of the Congo told a very different story, and reports of awful abuses began to filter back to Europe.

In the first decade of the 20th century there were a number of tribal rebellions. These were brutally suppressed, but they did serve to provoke further scrutiny into conditions in the Congo Free State. In 1900 Edmund Dene Morel, an English trader, began to campaign against the horrific conditions in the territory, and in 1903 the British Foreign Office commissioned the diplomat Roger Casement to go to the Congo to find out what was going on. Casement’s detailed eyewitness report did much to stir up international outrage, and writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain joined in the campaign. In 1908 the Belgian Parliament finally voted to annex the Congo from their own king, ending his control of the region.

It was not until 1960 that Congo achieved full independence, but the brutal legacy of Leopold II still continues to haunt the country, which has suffered from years of civil war in which millions have been killed. Leopold died on December 17, 1909, a shamed and hated figure, who justified his behavior in the Congo to the very end of his life. Mark Twain wrote that the aging king was a “greedy, grasping, avaricious, cynical, bloodthirsty old goat,” while for Arthur Conan Doyle the rape of the Congo was simply “the greatest crime in history.”