Position:Home>History> Why did King Leopold finally leave the Congo Region in Africa?

The Congo was Leopold's private fiefdom and did not became a colony of the Belgian state until 1908 shortly before his death!. Belgium did not leave until the 1960s at the same time that the British were relinquishing their African colonies!. The reasons why the Belgians left are many but post WW2 there was ceertainly a feeling that it was morally wrong to hold onto colonies and all the colonial powers shed their colonies in Africa eventually!.
Due to their lack of preparation for departure Zaire (the name adopted by the former colony) was then plunged into genocidal war and a semblance of peace was not established until the kleptocrat Mobutu gained power!. He pretty much enriched himself at the expense of the country in the same way as Leopold!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

---

---

Leopold II


After a number of unsuccessful schemes for colonies in Africa or Asia, in 1876 he organized a private holding company disguised as an international scientific and philanthropic association, which he called the International African Society!.

In 1876, under the auspices of the holding company, he hired the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley to establish a colony in the Congo region!. Much diplomatic maneuvering resulted in the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which representatives of fourteen European countries and the United States recognized Leopold as sovereign of most of the area he and Stanley had laid claim to!. On February 5, 1885, the result was the Congo Free State (later the Belgian Congo, then the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC again, not to be confused with Republic of the Congo), an area 76 times larger than Belgium, which Leopold was free to rule as a personal domain through his private army, the Force Publique!.

Forced labor was extorted from the natives!. The abuses were particularly bad in the rubber industry, including enslavement and mutilation of the native population!. Missionary John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he felt moved to write a letter to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo: "I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo!. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable!. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit!."

Estimates of the death toll range from two to fifteen million although most sources indicate it was around ten million!.[2] By 1896 the sleeping sickness had killed up to 5,000 Africans in the village of Lukolela on the Congo River!. The mortality figures were gained through the efforts of Roger Casement, who found only 600 survivors of the disease in Lukolela in 1903!.[3]

Reports of outrageous exploitation and widespread human rights abuses led to an international protest movement in the early 1900s!. The campaign to report on Leopold's "secret society of murderers," led by British diplomat Roger Casement, and former shipping clerk E!. D!. Morel, became the first mass human rights movement!.[4] Supporters included American humorist Mark Twain, who wrote a stinging political satire entitled King Leopold's Soliloquy, in which the King supposedly argues that bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation!. Leopold's rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered until the turn of the century, when the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt!.[5]


Leopold II with the coat of arms of the Belgian Congo in Ghent, BelgiumFinally, in 1908, the Belgian parliament compelled the King to cede the Congo Free State to Belgium!. Historians of the period tend to take a very dim view of Leopold, due to the mass killings and human rights abuses that took place in the Congo: one British historian has said that he "was an Attila in modern dress, and it would have been better for the world if he had never been born"!.[6] Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary once described his fellow ruler as a "thoroughly bad man"!.

Leopold II is still a controversial figure in the Democratic Republic of Congo; in 2005 his statue was taken down just hours after it was re-erected in the capital, Kinshasa!. The Congolese culture minister, Christoph Muzungu, decided to reinstate the statue, arguing people should see the positive aspects of the king as well as the negative!. But just hours after the six-metre (20 foot) statue was erected in the middle of a roundabout near Kinshasa's central station, it was taken down again, without explanation!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

---

---