Leopold II

Early hunter-gatherers in the area were eventually either replaced or absorbed into the Bantu tribes that began migrating southwards probably around the first millennium BC, and these Bantu kingdoms gradually evolved over the coming centuries.

things began to go just a bit apocalyptical when the belgium king leopold ii decided he wanted his own private slave plantation but in truth things had never been easy in this region the eastern area of what is today the drc saw frequent raids by the arab swahili slave traders who were bringing boats ashore on mainland africa to collect people without their consent long before europeans began doing the same but things quickly careened off a high cliff once king leopold envious of other european nations and their african colonies decided he wanted a slice of the pie for himself now this is important because while other nations had certainly marched into african regions and announced that those living there were now under the white rule of the king or queen living thousands of miles away it was always done so under the banner of a nation itself king leopold however have very different ideas in fact it's absolutely insane to think that in 1885 king leopold was able to claim such a massive piece of land not for belgium but for himself even more ludicrous considering what was to come he was able to convince other leaders at the berlin conference which began in 1884 to carve up the continent that he was a humanitarian and esteemed philanthropist and dear viewer i would like you to keep that particular sentence in mind when i begin to explain about what happened in the congo free state it began with a lot of bluster about suppressing the slave trade and the usual pompous crap about civilizing the natives and while thousands of slaves were liberated and the congolese were granted rights over their own lands it didn't take very long for that to go crashing down you see running a country is rather expensive and king leopold quickly ran up huge debts that even threatened his stake in the congo in response he set in motion a series of decrees that would push many to the brink and cause millions of deaths first came new land laws which essentially meant any piece of land without a dwelling or cultivation was automatically claimed by the state and this was followed by rules which forced the congolese to only sell their goods to the state which of course could set the prices at whatever they wanted them to be in 1992 leopold carved up the country and handed out huge parcels of land to private companies to create vast rubber plantations They were also given the freedom to police their land how they wished, which included detaining Africans who didn't work hard enough.

In return, the companies paid a hefty annual dividend which, you guessed it, found its way into Leopold's bulging wallet.

It's estimated that greedy Leo, as we're going to call him from now on, extracted the equivalent of roughly $1.1 billion from the Congo during his 23 years in charge of the region.

but that isn't actually the worst part the most despicable law placed on the congolese were the rubber quotas which as i'm sure you could probably guess were impossibly high with a sentence of death meted out by leopold's private army known as the force public to those who failed to achieve the quota these soldiers were required to bring back a hand as proof that they had actually killed who they were supposed to which sometimes meant limbs were just chopped off with little regard to whether the victim lived or died the results of all of this was near genocide in fact it seems the only reason that word isn't formally used is because the semantics around the phrase the word does not simply mean mass murder as it's often thought and used but rather the intentional extermination of a group of people in their entirety those running the congre free state certainly didn't want everybody killed i mean then who would harvest the rubber but with around 5 to 10 million deaths between 1877 and 1908 this was mass murder on an unimaginable scale Things got so bad that even rich white people became disgusted with what was going on in the Congo.

With missionaries carefully detailing the mass atrocities taking place, it didn't take long for international opinion to firmly turn against King Leopold, even as he did his utmost to discredit the sources.

With pressure mounting, the Belgian parliament decided to formally annex the Congo to bring it under direct state rule, essentially making it a part of Belgium and not the king's private money pit.

now it's important to remember that things really couldn't have gotten any worse in congo so we have to take the phrase things improved in the congo with an enormous dollop of realism between 1908 and 1960 when the country gained its independence the country was run as a belgian colony with absolutely zero tolerance for any kind of political or social debate and any rebellion was put down viciously by the force public that being said conditions slowly approved for some but certainly not all The landscape of the Congo always made it difficult to reach many parts of the country, and while the Belgians installed railway lines and roads, much of the country remained remote.

Beast mode.

But France, I mean, Belgium, King Leopold in Congo.

He's doing some shit.

I'll put him as like second.

I was trying to write a joke about Belgium.

Well, I do a show called A Brief History of History, and I did talk about King Leopold.

Oh, yes.

Because there was a thing called the Scramble for Africa, and Britain and Germany and I think France and a few other countries

Germany was in there.

Yep, Germany owned a bit of Africa briefly.

And King Leopold of Belgium...

He hosted that conference, the Congress of Vienna, I believe it was called.

So what's my point? The age of monsters is the age of this massacre.

It was the age of Leopold's Congo.

Estimated 10 million people.

And there was something else the Belgian colonists did.

I believe we lost the awareness that the essence of the human being is situated in our relationship to truth and to ethical principles.

So I do accept A certain responsibility for what you said.

It's too easy to say for me, like, it's all our King Leopold II who killed and tortured 20 million people in Congo and took all the rubble and the other assets.

It's too easy to say that because we still possess that richness, these riches.

They come here.

I mean, what is the psychology and culture that A, makes you think that you have all the answers that you, and, you know, cause you don't see, know a lot of like when when king leopold took over congo and he didn't think of it i know there's yeah some christianizing missions and stuff like that but for the most part this is a this is a cash grab right we're i'm here to loot the place um I mean, what makes people think that they are the ultimate embodiments of culture and power and that they have the right and the desire to do this to other people? And then, I mean, yeah, it's like sort of like why doesn't everyone else just sort of tell them to fuck off?

Well, why is Christianity popular? To me, it's essentially a Christian impulse.

It's an evangelical missionary impulse, which I see only in Christianity.