8. The Congo Horrors In Action
Under the rule of King Leopold II, Congolese natives were given quotas of rubber, ivory, diamonds, or other goods, to produce. 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 in order that he continue to produce for the Belgian king, Leopold’s goons would mutilate his family instead, and amputate the hands of his wife and children. Millions ended up mutilated for failure to meet production quotas.
Millions more were murdered, starved, worked to death, or perished from various forms of mistreatment and misgovernment. Numerous villages were wiped out when they dared to protest the colonial tyranny, with all their inhabitants massacred. When the Belgian monarch was awarded the Congo in 1885, it contained an estimated twenty million people. When a census was conducted in 1924, that figure had fallen to ten million. The exact number of victims is unknown and likely unknowable, but with estimates going as high as fifteen million deaths, Leopold II qualifies as one of history’s worst monsters.