Belgian King Leopold II: The Scramble For Africa

What became known as “The Scramble for Africa” began with the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 when the continent was partitioned among several European powers into several colonies. One of those countries represented at the Berlin Conference was Belgium . The African territory which Belgium presided over was the Congo region. Unlike the other European nations that occupied African territory, Belgium did not immediately annex the Congo. Instead, the Belgian King Leopold II made the region his own personal plantation under the name the Congo Free State . During this period, between 1885 and 1908, he administered severe brutality onto of the Congolese people. Simultaneously, the King authorized several Catholic missionaries to convert the
Around 1879, he subsequently organized the Comité d'Études du Haut-Congo - an international commercial, scientific, and humanitarian committee. Both companies were used to gain Belgian influence and sovereignty in the Congo region. His initial end goal was to gain control by creating an ivory trade route through the Upper Congo. Once the Congo Free State was established, Leopold called upon Belgian Catholic missionaries to carry out his demands. He wrote to the missionaries located in the Congo in 1883, one year before the Berlin Conference. King Leopold II told the missionaries, who were there in the region to gain Belgian influence, to pay attention to the “niggers,” but especially keep their eyes on the Congolese children under the assumption that they are more impressionable than their parents and more easily indoctrinated against their own traditions. Furthermore, he wrote at the conclusion of his letter, “Never invite him for dinner even if he gives you a chicken every time you arrive at his house.” Essentially, he means in his outline to bring Christian, Belgian influences into the Congo, but keep the black and whites apart on a social level. He demands that they do
The Congolese subsequently collected harvested from vines and trees in order to collect the resource, most of which was acquired by a handful of private companies, mainly the Abir Congo Company. The government, backing these companies, imposed a rubber tax on the natives. As a result of the rubber tax in addition to the rubber demand, rubber was collected twenty loads at a time by each village. As rubber got scarcer and they had to retreat further into the forest to find more rubber, the quantity demanded loosened. Still, the Congolese got little to nothing in return for these taxes. As a testament to the harsh-plantation like conditions of this process, exposure to the elements and carnivorous leopards were there to finish them off as they picked away. Possible consequences for not do their job, arriving late with their rubber, or not meeting their quotas, included the burning of villages, mutilation of body parts, the inability to harvest crops (usually resulting starvation of the villagers), and even being directly shot and killed by troops authorized by the Belgian King. In total, roughly 6 to 10 million natives died directly or indirectly at the hands of the Belgians, and millions more lived in constant fear. This was not so much what King Leopold called his “final solution” as it was an ends to