MellowYellow wrote: ↑02 Oct 2018, 11:26The book 'Heart of Darkness' is worth a read about the Congo. The author Joseph Conrad raises questions about imperialism and racism by creating a parallel between what the author calls "the greatest town on earth", London, and the Congo as a place of darkness. Heart of Darkness suggests that Europeans are not essentially more highly-evolved or enlightened than the people whose territories they invade. To this extent, it punctures one of the myths of imperialist race theory.
The history of European colonisation and exploitation of the region is shameful...
The Berlin Conference of 1884 decreed that the 905,000 square miles of the Belgian Congo [now the Democratic Republic of the Congo] became the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. His genocidal exploitation of the territory, particularly the rubber trade, caused many deaths and much suffering. Murder and mutilation ~ very often the removal of hands and womens' breasts ~ were common.
The Force Publique were required to provide a hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions for hunting food. As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in chopped-off hands. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighbouring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill.
A man with his daughter’s hand & foot
The Congo was a playground for sadists. Rene de Permentier was an officer in the Force Publique in the 1890s. He had all the trees and bushes around his house cut down so he could shoot at passers by. He had women prisoners sweep a courtyard. If he then found a leaf in the courtyard he would have a dozen of them beheaded. If forest paths were not well maintained he would order a child killed in the nearest village.
In the book (another well worth reading) ‘King Leopold’s Ghost’ Adam Hochschild estimates that over ten million Congolese died during the years that Leopold and the Belgian Government controlled the country. It is likely that more people died in this Belgian holocaust than died in Hitler’s, but no one was ever brought to book and the crime is largely unknown now. Thousands of Belgians served in the Congo and the crimes that took place there were hardly less known to the Belgian population than Hitler’s were to ordinary Germans.
None of the European colonial powers have an enviable record but Belgium’s was easily the worst. So much for the ‘Plucky Little Belgium’ that the British were urged to defend in World War One. Belgium ~ and in particular it's Royal Family ~ still refuses to acknowledge its own crimes.
In 1908, after an international outcry, Leopold was forced to hand over his territory to the Belgian Government. They controlled the Congo until independence in 1959. The number of murders diminished but mutilations and exploitation continued. The Belgians left the country in such a state that after independence many millions more died in a series of wars and because of government incompetence. The murder of President Lumumba and approximately 100,000 deaths was followed by the disastrous government of Mobutu. The First Congo War of 1996-98 was followed by the Second Congo War [1998-2003]. This is considered the deadliest war in modern African history. The war killed 5.4 million people, mostly from disease and starvation, making it the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Again, largely unknown in the West.
This too makes educational viewing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b0bk8t10
Currently; my daughter is studying this history of her heritage and her mother's flight to France and later Belgium then England for refuge, as an extra-curricular subject and expresses an ambition to become a human rights lawyer.
