https://www.thoughtco.com/congo-free-state-atrocities-rubber-regime-43731 (accessed May 1, 2023). "Everyone is waking up from a sleep, it's a reckoning with the past," explains Debora Kayembe, a Congolese human rights lawyer who has lived in Belgium. He built the Africa Museum in the grounds of his palace at Tervuren, with a "human zoo" in the grounds featuring 267 Congolese people as exhibits. Eventually, the strain forced him to relinquish his control of the territory, and in 1908 it became the Belgian Congo. Colonization of the Congo Basin refers to the European colonization of the Congo Basin of tropical Africa. 2023 BBC. So they outsourced the task to Leopold, who used personal diplomacy to convince the European powers to grant him control of a large portion of the Congo basin. Morel, in his mid-twenties at the time, noticed that when his company's ships arrived from the Congo, they were filled to the hatch with enormously valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. She was not unique - chopping off the limbs of enslaved Congolese was a routine form of retribution when Leopold II's quotas were not met. Leopold II established a colony in the Congo to gain natural resources for Belgium and wealth for himself. Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Which Flourished on the Congo for Twenty Years, 18901910. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. He had long wanted a colonial empire, and in Stanley he saw someone who could secure it for him. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. The current protests are not the first time Belgium's ugly history in Congo has been contested in the streets. The colony in the Congo - the Congo Free State - was personal property for the Belgian king and there was little oversight over what happened there. By 1910 nearly this entire huge expanse had become European colonies or land, like South Africa, controlled by white settlers. The Atrocities of the Congo Free State Rubber Regime - ThoughtCo Bulletin Officiel du Congo Belge (1920). The Herero were traditional occupants of the temperate high plains of central Namibia. However, as he approached Stanley Falls at the junction between the Congo proper and the Lualaba (close to the general vicinity of Central Africa where he had found Livingstone six years before), it soon became clear that Stanley's men were not the only intruders. Wearing one of his many hats, that of a journalist, Williams expected to see the paradise of enlightened rule that Leopold had described to him in Brussels. That would be absurd."[9]. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Instead, he found what he called "the Siberia of the African Continent." Some of these soldiers were recruits, while others were enslaved people or orphans brought up to serve the colonial army. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Africans also died in two decades' worth of unsuccessful uprisings against the king's regime. Charles Michel, prime minister at the time, declined. He was, nevertheless, an extremely minor monarch in the realpolitik of the times, ruling a totally insignificant nation, a nation in fact that had come into existence barely four decades before and lived under the constant threat of losing its precarious independence to the great European powers around it. There seemed no economic sense to investing energy in Africa when the returns from other colonies were likely to be both richer and more immediate.
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