Belgian King Leopold II Turned the Congo Into a House of Horrors
Belgium’s king Leopold II is usually not one of the first names people associate with massive atrocities. However, his name belongs in the same league as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao: from 1885 to 1908, Leopold ran a colonial empire so vile and cruel that it rivals or exceeds the worst of most 20th century tyrants. The Belgian king’s colonial victims numbered in the millions, with ten million dead being the most commonly cited figure, although some scholarly estimates go as high as fifteen million.
It began in 1885, when Leopold painted himself as a humanitarian philanthropist and convinced the European powers then gathered at the Berlin Conference to award him a large state in central Africa – today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. He named the new colony the Congo Free State, but did not uplift the locals and develop the region as he had promised. Instead, the Belgian king transformed his African colonial possession into a living nightmare that claimed millions of lives in atrocities that were referred to by European contemporaries as the “Congo Horrors”.
Leopold consolidated his power in the Congo basin by making an alliance with a powerful Arab slave trader named Tippu Tip. That was awkward, given that the Belgian king had convinced the Berlin Conference to award him the Congo by promising to combat its endemic slave trade. Leopold made Tippu a provincial governor in the eastern Congo, and gave him a free hand in exchange for the slaver’s promise not compete with the king in the western Congo. Unsurprisingly, Tippu ramped up his slaving activities in his province, until Leopold, under pressure from European public opinion, turned on his slaver ally. He double crossed Tippu, and raised a mercenary army which expelled him from the Congo.
The Belgian king then reorganized his mercenaries into an occupation army named the Force Publique, and turned it loose to visit a reign of terror and horrors upon the natives. Leopold turned the Congo into a massive dystopian plantation, and the Congolese into de facto slaves. The natives were given quotas of rubber, ivory, diamonds, or other goods, to produce, and men who fell short of their quotas were mutilated by having their hands or feet amputated. If a man escaped, or it was deemed necessary that he keep his limbs to continue producing, the Belgian king’s goons would mutilate his family instead, amputating the hands of his wife and children.
Millions were mutilated for failure to meet production quotas. Millions more were murdered, starved, worked to death, or perished from various forms of mistreatment and misgovernment under Leopold’s colonial regime. Numerous villages were wiped out, with all their inhabitants massacred, for daring to protest their colonial overlords’ tyranny.
When the Belgian king was awarded the Congo in 1885, it contained an estimated 20 million people. When a census was conducted in 1924, that figure had fallen to 10 million. The exact number of victims is unknown and likely unknowable, but with estimates going as high as 15 million deaths, the Belgian king qualifies as one of history’s worst monsters.
