At the end of the 19th century, King Leopold II of Belgium, whose power in his homeland was very limited, in a cunning way made the huge African colony of the Congo his property. In governing this country, this monarch of one of the most advanced civilized and democratic countries proved to be a terrible tyrant. Under the cover of the spread of civilization and Christianity, terrible crimes were committed against the black population, about which nothing was known in the civilized world.
Business king
This is what Leopold II was nicknamed at home. He took over in 1865. Under him, universal suffrage appeared in the country, and secondary education became available to everyone. But the Belgians owe this not to the king, but to parliament. Leopold's power was severely limited by parliament, so he languished from tied hands and constantly tried to find ways to become more influential. Therefore, colonialism became one of the main directions of his activity.
In the 1870s and 1880s, he obtained permission from the world community for Belgium to colonize the vast territories of modern Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. It was these three territories that remained undeveloped by the European powers by that time.
In the mid-1880s, with his support, commercial expeditions were sent there. They acted very vilely, in the spirit of the conquistadors who conquered America. In exchange for cheap gifts, tribal leaders signed documents according to which all the property of their tribe was transferred into the possession of Europeans, and the tribes were obliged to provide them with labor.
Needless to say, the leaders in loincloths did not understand a word in these papers, and the very conceptual concept of "document" did not exist for them. As a result, Leopold took possession of 2 million square kilometers (that is, 76 Belgium) in Central and South Africa. Moreover, these territories became his personal possession, and not the possession of Belgium. King Leopold II began the merciless exploitation of these lands and the peoples living on them.
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Free not free state
These territories Leopold called the Free State of the Congo. The citizens of this "free" state became, in fact, the slaves of the European colonialists.
Alexandra Rodriguez, in her "Recent History of the Countries of Asia and Africa," writes that the lands of the Congo were the property of Leopold, but he gave private companies broad rights to use them, which even included judicial functions and tax collection. In pursuit of 300% profit, as Marx said, capital is ready to do anything - and the Belgian Congo is perhaps the best illustration of this moral law. Nowhere in colonial Africa were the natives so powerless and unhappy.
The main way to siphon money from this land was the extraction of rubber. The Congolese were forcibly driven to plantations and industries, and punished for every offense. A terrible method of stimulating labor, which was used by the Belgians, went down in history: an African was shot for failure to fulfill an individual plan. But the patrons for the protection of concentration camps-plantations - it was called force publique, that is, "social forces", were issued with a requirement to report on their consumption so that the soldiers did not sell them to local hunters. Soon the severed hands of slaves, who surrendered to the authorities as proof that the cartridge was not wasted, became a way of doing this.
In addition to cruel exploitation, the Europeans brutally suppressed any actions: as soon as one African resisted the order of his colonial leader, his entire village was destroyed as punishment.
In the "New History of Colonial and Dependent Countries" by Soviet historians Rostovsky, Reisner, Kara-Murza and Rubtsov, we find references to such punishments: and, having locked them there, burned alive. Quite often tribute collectors took away their wives and property from the debtors."
Ending the atrocities and their results
Such cruel treatment of innocent people led to the fact that the population of the country in less than 30 years has decreased, according to various estimates by 3-10 million, which amounted to half of the population. So, according to the "Belgian Society for the Protection of the Natives," out of 20 million Congolese in 1884, only 10 remained in 1919.
In the early years of the 20th century, the European public began to pay attention to these crimes and demand to be investigated. Under pressure from Great Britain in 1902, Leopold II sent a commission to the country. Here are excerpts from the testimonies of the Congolese that were collected by the commission:
“Child: We all ran into the forest - me, mom, grandmother and sister. The soldiers killed a lot of ours. Suddenly they noticed mother's head in the bushes and ran up to us, grabbed mother, grandmother, sister and one strange 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 no mother or grandmother, I was alone. They were killed in front of me.
The native girl reports: On the way, the soldiers noticed the child and headed towards him with the intention of killing him; the child laughed, then the soldier swung and hit him with the butt, and then chopped off his head. The next day they killed my half-sister, chopped off her head, arms and legs, which had bracelets. Then they caught my other sister and sold her to the tribe ooo. Now she has become a slave."
Europe was shocked by this treatment of the local population. Under public pressure, after the publication of the results of the commission's work in the Congo, the life of the Aboriginal people has been greatly facilitated. The labor tax was replaced by a monetary tax, and the number of mandatory days of labor for the state - in fact, corvee - was reduced to 60 per year.
In 1908, under pressure from the liberals and socialists in parliament, Leopold got rid of the Congo as a personal property, but even then he did not fail to turn this to his personal benefit. He sold the Congo to the state of Belgium itself, i.e., in fact, made it an ordinary colony.
However, he no longer really needed it: thanks to the merciless exploitation of Africans, he became one of the richest people in the world. But such bloody wealth made him also the most hated man of his time. Which, however, did not prevent their surnames from continuing to rule Belgium and doing so to this day: the great-grandfather of the current King of Belgium Philip is the nephew of Leopold II.
Alexander Artamonov