The Belgians and Private Imperialism
Leopold II and the Congo
Key Points
 The Congo Free State was a corporate state privately controlled by Leopold II of
Belgium through his Association internationale africaine, a non-governmental
organization supposedly dedicated to humanitarian purposes.

Under Leopold II’s administration, the Congo Free State became the site of one of the
most infamous international scandals of the turn of the 20th century.

In the Free State, colonists brutalized the local population into producing rubber, for
which the spread of automobiles and development of rubber tires created a growing
international market.

The police force, the Force Publique, routinely mutilated (especially cutting off hands)
and murdered the indigenous population to enforce rubber production quotas.

The report of the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of
white officials responsible for cold-blooded killings during a rubber-collecting
expedition in 1903, including one Belgian national who caused the shooting of at least
122 Congolese natives.

The parliament of Belgium annexed the Congo Free State and took over its
administration on November 15, 1908, as the colony of the Belgian Congo.
Key Terms
 Congo Reform Association: A movement formed with the declared intention to aid the
exploited and impoverished workforce of the Congo by drawing attention to their plight.

Force Publique: A military force in the Congo Free State. Early on, they were used primarily
to campaign against the Arab slave trade in the Upper Congo, protect Leopold’s economic
interests, and suppress frequent uprisings within the state, but eventually they partook in
horrific abuse of the Congolese people, including frequent mutilation and murder.

Congo Free State: A large state in Central Africa from 1885 to 1908 in personal union with the
Kingdom of Belgium under Leopold II.

Private imperialism/colonialism Leopold fervently believed that overseas colonies were the
key to a country's greatness, and he worked tirelessly to acquire colonial territory for Belgium.
Neither the Belgian people nor the Belgian government was interested, however, and Leopold
eventually began trying to acquire a colony in his private capacity as an ordinary citizen. In
1876 he organized a private holding company disguised as an international scientific and
philanthropic association, which he called the International African Society.
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/may/13/features11.g22
https://www.historytoday.com/tim-stanley/belgiums-heart-darkness
King Leopold and the Conquest of the Congo
The story of the Scramble for territory in Africa is full of powerful
European countries making game changing moves to outplay and outlast
their rivals. An unremarkable monarch of an insignificant little kingdom,
however, outwitted them all. Like a tiny yapping watchdog that wakes up
the bigger dogs at the slightest sound of a disturbance, Leopold II, King of
Belgium, made the first bold imperial move into new territory in the interior
of Africa. His bark quickly awoke the bigger dogs in the imperial
neighborhood.
"I do not want to risk...losing a fine chance to secure for ourselves a slice
of this magnificent African cake.”--Leopold II at the Berlin Conference
For decades, most Europeans mistakenly believed that King Leopold spent his considerable fortune
funding public works in the Congo and stopping slavery in East Africa. He was the unintimidating
King of Belgium, cousin of Queen Victoria of England—a wealthy, noble and philanthropic
modern king. But it was all a sham. Underneath the veneer of generosity and graciousness laid a
cunning and self-engrossed scoundrel, a duplicitous fraud to rival the evil charm of Iago or Richard
III. Under the guise of an international charitable foundation, he personally owned the colony of
the Congo, and he ran it as a brutal business investment. His “charity” resulted in the death of ten
million people, approximately 50% of the population in the Congo.
Colonization of the Congo
Belgian exploration and administration took place from the 1870s until the 1920s. It was first led
by Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who explored under the sponsorship of King Leopold II of Belgium.
The eastern regions of the precolonial Congo were heavily disrupted by constant slave raiding.
Leopold had designs on what would become the Congo and was able to procure the region by
convincing the European community that he was involved in humanitarian and philanthropic work
and would not tax trade. Leopold extracted ivory, rubber, and minerals in the upper Congo basin
for sale on the world market, even though his nominal purpose in the region was to uplift the local
people and develop the area.
Leopold formally acquired rights to the Congo territory at the Conference of Berlin in 1885 and
made the land his private property. On May 29, 1885, the king named his new colony the Congo
Free State. The state would eventually include an area now held by the Democratic Republic of the
Congo. Leopold’s regime began various infrastructure projects, such as construction of the railway
that ran from the coast to the capital of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and took eight years to
complete. Nearly all such projects were aimed at making it easier to increase the assets Leopold
and his associates could extract from the colony.
Administration of the Congo Free State
Leopold used the title Sovereign King as ruler of the Congo Free State. He appointed the heads of
the three departments of state: interior, foreign affairs and finances. Each was headed by an
administrator-general who was obligated to enact the policies of the sovereign or else resign.
Leopold pledged to suppress the east African slave trade; promote humanitarian policies; guarantee
free trade within the colony; impose no import duties for twenty years; and encourage philanthropic
and scientific enterprises. Beginning in the mid-1880s, Leopold first decreed that the state asserted
rights of proprietorship over all vacant lands throughout the Congo territory. In three successive
decrees, Leopold promised the rights of the Congolese in their land to native villages and farms,
essentially making nearly all of the Congo Free State state-owned land. Additionally, the colonial
administration liberated thousands of slaves.
Shortly after the anti-slavery conference he held in Brussels in 1889, Leopold issued a new decree
which said that Africans could only sell their harvested products (mostly ivory and rubber) to the
state in a large part of the Free State. This grew out of the earlier decree that all “unoccupied” land
belonged to the state and ivory and rubber collected from this land also belonged to the
state, creating a de facto state-controlled monopoly. Suddenly, the only outlet a large share of the
local population had for its products was the state, which could set purchase prices and therefore
control the amount of income the Congolese could receive for their work.
The Force Publique (FP), Leopold’s private army, was used to enforce the rubber quotas. In the
Congo Free State, colonists brutalized the local population into producing rubber, for which the
spread of automobiles and development of rubber tires created a growing international market.
Rubber sales made a fortune for Leopold, who built several buildings in Brussels and Ostend to
honor himself and his country. Early on, the FP was used primarily to campaign against the Arab
slave trade in the Upper Congo, protect Leopold’s economic interests, and suppress the frequent
uprisings within the state. The Force Publique’s officer corps included only white Europeans
(Belgian regular soldiers and mercenaries from other countries). On arriving in the Congo, they
recruited men from Zanzibar and west Africa, and eventually from the Congo itself. In addition,
Leopold actually encouraged the slave trade among Arabs in the Upper Congo in return for slaves
to fill the ranks of the FP. During the 1890s, the FP’s primary role was to exploit the natives as
laborers to promote the rubber trade.
Many of the black soldiers were from far-off peoples of the Upper Congo, while others had been
kidnapped in raids on villages in their childhood and brought to Roman Catholic missions, where
they received a military training in conditions close to slavery. Armed with modern weapons the
Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages, slaughtered families of rebels, and flogged
and raped Congolese people. They also burned rebellious villages, and above all, cut off the hands
of Congolese natives, including children.
Human Rights Abuses
Leopold’s reign in the Congo eventually earned infamy due to the increasing mistreatment of the
indigenous peoples. Under Leopold II’s administration, the Congo Free State became one of the
greatest international scandals of the early-20th century. The report of the British Consul Roger
Casement led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who were responsible for killings
during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903.
From 1885–1908, millions of Congolese died as a consequence of exploitation and disease. In some
areas, the population declined dramatically; it has been estimated that sleeping sickness and
smallpox killed nearly half the population in the areas surrounding the lower Congo River. A
government commission later concluded that the population of the Congo was “reduced by half”
during this period, but no accurate records exist.
Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the FP was
required to provide the hands of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as
it was believed they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable
cost) for hunting. As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid in severed hands.
Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the FP and sometimes by the villages
themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighboring villages to gather
hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill. Because of the human rights abuses
suffered under King Leopold II’s rule, Congo rubber was eventually nicknamed “red rubber,” in
reference to the blood of the Africans killed during production.
One junior European officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The European
officer in command “ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village
palisades… and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross.” After
seeing a Congolese person killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote, “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 his 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 labour gangs;
and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they
collected.
International Outcry
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, originally published in 1899 based on a brief experience as a
steamer captain on the Congo 12 years before, sparked an organized international opposition to
Leopold’s genocidal activities. Increasing public outcry over the atrocities in the CFS moved the
British government to launch an official investigation. Roger Casement, then the British Consul at
Boma (at the mouth of the Congo River), was sent to the Congo Free State to investigate. Reporting
back to the Foreign Office in 1900, Casement wrote, “The root of the evil lies in the fact that the
government of the Congo is above all a commercial trust, that everything else is orientated towards
commercial gain…”
The Congo Reform Association (CRA) was established in Great Britain by Morel as a direct result
of Casement’s 1904 detailed, eyewitness Congo report, known as the Casement Report. The Congo
Reform movement’s members included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad,
Booker T. Washington, and Bertrand Russell.
One primary source that showed what life was like was King Leopold's Soliloquy. This work
was written by Mark Twain in 1905 and was an anti- imperialist Soliloquy that was very
biased against King Leopold II and showed his brutal rule
in the Congo. It talked about the severe mistreatment that
King Leopold created and the horrid slavery that he was
forcing his people to live under. It had a great affect and
it showed many people the torturous working conditions
and the death that was occurring in the Congo. In his
work, Twain made an effort to keep the US from
following the harsh ways of the other European powers at
the time. It caused many people to question and pressure
their government, even the Belgian Government. In the
end, this work was one of the reasons why the Belgian
Government took the Congo away from King Leopold
and brought it into their rule.
Leopold offered to reform his regime, but international opinion supported an end to the king’s rule,
and no nation was willing to accept this responsibility. Belgium was the obvious European
candidate to run the Congo. For two years, it debated the question and held new elections on the
issue.
Yielding to international pressure, the parliament of Belgium annexed the Congo Free State and
took over its administration on November 15, 1908, as the colony of the Belgian Congo. Despite
being effectively removed from power, the international scrutiny was no major loss to Leopold or
the concessionary companies in the Congo. By then Southeast Asia and Latin America had become
lower-cost producers of rubber. Along with the effects of resource depletion in the Congo,
international commodity prices fell to a level that rendered Congolese extraction unprofitable. Just
prior to releasing sovereignty over the CFS, Leopold had all evidence of his activities in the CFS
destroyed, including the archives of the departments of finance and of the interior. Leopold lost the
absolute power he had had there, but the population still had a Belgian colonial regime, which had
become heavily paternalistic, with church, state, and private companies instructed to oversee the
welfare of the inhabitants.
The Rubber Industry
In the 1890’s, rubber saw a major price boom with the invention of inflatable rubber bicycle tubes
and the growing popularity of the automobile. This led to massive profits for the Belgian colonists
in the Congo and increased exploitation of the native population.
Key Points
 King Leopold II, who owned the Congo Free State as a private enterprise, systematically
exploited the native population for his own commercial benefit, most notably with the
production of wild rubber.

To enforce the rubber quotas, the colonists cut off the limbs of the natives as a matter of
policy.

To extract the rubber, Congolese workers would lather their bodies with latex, which
hardened and was painfully scraped off the skin.

By the final decade of the 19th century, John Boyd Dunlop’s 1887 invention of inflatable
rubber bicycle tubes and the growing popularity of the automobile dramatically increased
global demand for rubber, leading to major economic boom for rubber production and an
increase in the exploitation of the natives.
A cartoon depicting Leopold II as a rubber vine entangling a Congolese rubber collector.