When you ask, “Who are the greatest mass murderers you know?” Immediately you start thinking of Hitler, Stalin or even Mao Zedong. But up to Adolf Hitler, the standard of barbarism and cruelty was set by one man. His name? King Leopold II of Belgium, also known as ‘The butcher of the Congo’.
One of Leopold II’s nicknames was ‘the king-builder’. He wanted a pretty and attractive country for his compatriots, so he commissioned a number of infrastructure projects and buildings to be built.
He concentrated mostly on places he liked going to, for example: Antwerp, Brussels and Ostend. There he built the Antwerp central station, the palace of justice, Royal museum for Central Africa, The royal golf club, et cetera. This begs the question, how did he finance all these projects? Where did he get the funding?
This is where his second nickname comes in, namely ‘the butcher of Congo’. The Congo free state now became the private property of the king.
The AIA (Association Internationale Africaine) was turned into a commercial company, where profit became the primary motif (as it was always intended). The next step is to get labourers to garner the riches of The Congo.
Leopold himself never even set foot on the colony. He had his private army of white man that carried out his dirty work. His surrogates were primarily active in ‘upper Congo’ and obviously expanded as the business grew.
To run the new state, Leopold appointed three ministers: for internal affairs, finances and foreign affairs. All three ministers were appointed by the king and answerable only to the king.
One of these three, M. Van Eetvelde summarised the situation perfectly in one sentence: “C’est à votre majesté qu’appartient l’État.” To put it into simple words, they were simply puppets of the ever-watchful Belgian king.
One of the covers of his crimes, was to spread Christianity and to civilise the so-called savages. To justify this cause, Leopold’s officers managed to drive out slave trading Arabs. This way he could show the world that he saved the Africans of slavery. In reality, he pushed out the competition.
Also, a lot of missionaries were sent to convert the Africans. They are the main witnesses to the crimes committed to the Black inhabitants. Some of them were afraid to speak out, because they thought that this would jeopardise the mission.
The majority of the crimes were committed by the white officers and their black helpers. To cite one example, the black soldiers would receive a fixed number of bullets.
To prove they didn’t waste any, they were obliged to cut off the right hand of the dead bodies. All the riches of The Congo, mainly rubber and minerals, were to be exploited at least cost and as fast as possible.
The white officers were allowed to employ every means necessary to reach their goals. The goal was obvious, to earn as much money as possible.
To make this possible, as much rubber as possible was to be gathered. Large returns meant increased pay, speedy return to Europe, official praise and promotion. On the other hand, if your returns were small, it meant poverty, denunciation and humiliation.
There obviously are many witness reports available. I will only mention a few interesting ones. George Washington Williams, an American politician, soldier, lawyer, journalist and Christian minister, wrote an open letter to King Leopold II of Belgium after witnessing the cruelties in The Congo Free State.
In the following excerpt of the letter he expresses his concerns and discontent about the activities in The Congo Free State:
“I was anxious to see to what extent the natives had “adopted the fostering care” of your Majesty’s “benevolent enterprise” (?), and I was doomed to bitter disappointment. Instead of the natives of the Congo “adopting the fostering care” of your Majesty’s Government, they everywhere complain that their land has been taken from them by force; that the Government is cruel and arbitrary, and declare that they neither love nor respect the Government and its flag.
Your Majesty’s Government has sequestered their land, burned their towns, stolen their property, enslaved their women and children, and committed other crimes too numerous to mention in detail. It is natural that they everywhere shrink from “the fostering care” your Majesty’s Government so eagerly proffers them.
There has been, to my absolute knowledge, no “honest and practical effort made to increase their knowledge and secure their welfare.” Your Majesty’s Government has never spent one franc for educational purposes, nor instituted any practical system of industrialism.”
As I mentioned earlier missionaries were the main witnesses to the atrocities commited by Leopold’s men. John B. Murphy, a Christian missionary, wrote
“On December the third 1893 the State sent down some canoes under cover of night to the town of Inego. The people were quietly sleeping in their beds when they heard a shot fired and ran out to see what was the matter. Finding the soldiers had surrounded the town, their only thought was to escape. As they ran out of their homes, men, women, and children, they were ruthlessly shot down. The town was utterly destroyed and is a ruin until this day.
The only reason for this fight was that the people had failed to bring in food to the State upon that one day.”
A missionary once asked a chief how many women were taken hostage, the chief replied:
“Count the grains of sand white man!”
The following testimony is of the governor of the Equator province, the notorious Léon Fiévez.
“I called together the chiefs of the villages and ordered them to bring some manioc, fish. On the agreed day, no manioc. Faced with such flagrant bad will, I declared war on them. One example sufficed. A hundred heads were cut off, and after that supplies were plentiful in the station. My aim was humanitarian. I ended a hundred lives, but that allowed five hundred others to live”.
He was known among the people as ‘the Satan of Equator’. A catholic priest, quotes a man named Tsawambe, saying this about Fiévez:
“All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator…From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets…A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez’s] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river…Rubber causes these torments; that’s why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.”
The cutting of hands became symbolic for Leopold’s Congo. This testimony of a Danish missionary describes his first time witnessing the killing of a Congolese:
“The soldier said ‘Don’t take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don’t bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service”.
“In Forbath’s words: The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State…. The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber… They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace… the people who were demanded for the forced labor gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.”
International pressure forced the Belgian king to distance himself from the colony. In 1908 the colony was officially annexed by Belgium. The Belgian government gave Leopold 50.000.000 Franc.
One year later he died at the age of 74 in Laeken, Brussels on 17th December 1909. He had become the most hated man of Europe. At his funeral, which was a public event, he was constantly being booed by the public.
Why isn’t this known by the general public? Why do we know everything about Hitler, but nothing about Leopold II?