- Joined
- Mar 9, 2019
King Leopold of Belgium.
In the late 19th century, Belgium was a constitutional monarchy like Britain or Sweden or Holland. Sure, Leopold had some ceremonial powers and duties but no real powers. That belonged to the National Assembly. And Leopold didn't like that. He also didn't like that Belgium had no overseas colonies like the British or French or Portuguese. Needless to say, he identified a solution to both these problems.
He bought the Congo.
As in, he legally obtained a title to a huge swathe of central Africa partly from his own finances and partly from a government loan. This private holding became the Congo Free State, which he mapped with the aid of Henry Morton Stanley, and ran as his own private fiefdom. He then recruited a private army, the Force Publique, partly from Belgian volunteer officers and partly from local tribesmen that he press-ganged into service, and forced all the locals to go out and tap rubber vines for him. Rubber, at this stage, was a seriously hot commodity because vulcanisation had just been invented and with the dawn of motorised transport and bicycles there was a huge demand for tyres. And his private fiefdom in the Congo was full of it. However, he didn't want to spend large amounts of time and money developing plantations or infrastructure, so he literally worked the locals to death. You failed to meet your quota, you were murdered. It got to the point at which his Force Publique started to run out of bullets, so he decreed that all bullets must be counted in and counted out on every patrol, and where a bullet was expended, proof was demanded that a "criminal" had been shot with it, specifically, by chopping off their hand.
Of course, he didn't pay his Force Publique sufficient enough to eat, so they would shoot wild animals to eat and then chop the hand off a living native to show that they had actually shot a bad guy with them. Needless to say, even by other late 19th century Scramble for Africa colonial powers, whose attitude towards the natives rarely got above "white man's burden" at best, the Congo Free State was considered objectionable. One person even wrote to Leopold personally asking that he only execute people for crimes they actually committed.
By 1908 the Belgian government had had enough. Leopold's venture was garnering massive flak from other European powers and hadn't even turned a profit, partly because chopping peoples' hands off isn't exactly an effective way of motivating your workforce, and partly because he spent all the income on his own vanity projects back in Belgium. In fact, it was deeper in debt than when he bought the place. Yes, boys and girls, he failed to extract a single centime of profit from a private holding backed up by a private army of one of the most resource rich areas of Earth, and brutalized the natives in the bargain. So they voted to expropriate him and administer it directly as a colony.
Leopold died in 1909. His funeral was booed. His exploits in the Congo were so embarrassing that Belgian civil society to this day doesn't like to remember it.
I just read a book about him.
The guy is a lolcow, if not a horrorcow for what he did.
