The Butcher of Congo
By Baffour Ankomah, New African, October 1999
Only 90 years ago, the agents of King Leopold II of Belgium massacred 10 million Africans in the Congo. Cutting off hands as we see in Sierra Leone today, was very much part of Leopold's repertoire. Today, Leopold's "rubber terror" has all been swept under the carpet. Adam Hochschild calls it "the great forgetting" in his brilliant new book, King Leopold's Ghost, recently published by Macmillan. This is a story of greed, exploitation and brutality that Africa and the world must not forget.
This story is actually best understood when told in reverse order. Leopold never set foot in "his" Congo Free State - for all the 23 years (1885-1908) he ruled what Hochschild calls "the world's only colony claimed by one man".
It was a vast territory which "if superimposed on the map of Europe", says Hochschild, "would stretch from Zurich to Moscow to central Turkey. It was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. Although mostly rainforest and savannah, it also embraced volcanic hills and mountains covered by snow and glaciers, some of whose peaks reached higher than the Alps."
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