King Leopold and the Belgian Congo One of

King Leopold and the Belgian Congo One of the world’s worst genocides

Background • The European scramble for Africa reached a high point in 1884, when several European countries met in Berlin to divide Africa up between each other. The goal was to control the resources and people of the mysterious continent. Not a single African was invited to these talks.

King Leopold II • The country of Belgium controlled the region of Africa known as the Congo. King Leopold II was the monarch of Belgium, and he had big plans to make his country as important as France or Great Britain. Part of that plan involved holding colonies overseas. This would lead to a bloody genocide that rivaled the Holocaust.

What did King Leopold want? • The Congo Free State did not belong to Belgium, but was 100% owned by Leopold himself. He began forcing the native Africans of the Congo to kill elephants for ivory, dig for gold, and work on plantations to harvest rubber. He ruled them through fear and violence, enforced by brutal Belgian soldiers. Cutting off hands and whipping as punishment and burning down entire villages became common and technically legal.

• Leopold made sure people didn’t protest against his crimes by covering up the violence, courting reporters for favorable stories, and saying he only wanted to spread Christianity and commerce to the “savage” Africans.

The end of Leopold’s reign • Eventually, through the work of some crusading reporters, word got out to the United States and all around Europe about what was happening. Protests from regular people and other countries eventually made Leopold sell the land to Belgium in 1908. The worst violence stopped (although not completely) until the Congo became independent in 1971.

Legacy • The crimes of King Leopold have almost been forgotten, despite the fact that over 10 million Africans died during his reign. • Although the Democratic Republic of Congo is technically independent today, foreign countries still own the rights to most of the Congo’s natural resources and the country is incredibly impoverished.