Concept Garage

Leopold II, king of the Belgians and monster par excellence, rivals Hitler and Stalin in the scale of villainy 10 million deaths, scorched African earth, and slavery. But Leopold carefully concealed his rape of the Congo by wearing the mask of altruism.

In 1890, when John Dunlop’s invention of the inflatable bicycle tire launched a worldwide rubber boom, Leopold found himself ruling one of the greatest stretches of wild rubber in the world. He immediately began to cash in, implementing a brutal system of forced labor to bring harvested rubber to Europe. Troops would enter a village, round up women and children and hold them hostage until the men brought back a quota of rubber. Torture, rape, murder, and widespread death from rubber harvesting halved the Congo’s population within two decades while bringing Leopold a fortune of more than $1 billion (in today’s terms).

These should be considered as the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and camera. In its mixture of bloodshed on industrial scale, royalty, sex, the power of celebrity, and the rival lobbying and media campaigns raging in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Atlantic, it seems strikingly close to our time. Furthermore, unlike many other predators of history from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, king Leopold II of Belgium never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in Congo. There is something modern about that too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams and sees shattered homes or torn flesh.

King Leopold’s Ghost, a story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild. A must read book for any African who wishes to have a vivid perception of colonialism.