Can anyone tell me the lagacy that King Leopold left behind in Africa?

Question

How did he treat the people there? Can anyone find a journal? A daily account of his cruelness?

Why is he not mentioned at all in schools (at least the schools that I went to) or any TV programs?

Answer 1

Leopold managed to get the territory assigned to himself as a person, rather than Belgium as a country, so the parliament had no oversight: He exploited the territory for profit in the extreme, with no regard to human life. The supervisors he hired (usually hardened criminals) were to produce a hand for each bullet used, as to document the bullets were not used for hunting. At some point the chopped of arms became a "currency" to show that the production ratios were not met due to deaths among workers. Within a short period of his ownership (I believe less than two decades) millions of people have died. It is uncertain what the exact number was, as there was no census. Not only Joseph Conrad wrote about this dark example of collonialism, also Mark Twain did.

Leopold has unfortunately become a footnote in history, just like for example Armenian genocide. It is the result of the fact that education is always focused on the country where you study and its environs. E.g. in Europe you don't learn that much about the US Independence War, you pretty much ignore the entire Africa's and Asia's history...
Why TV ignores it? For the same reason the US TV stations don't report on for example Polish or French elections: the audience prefers celebrity gossip.

Answer 2

He viewed the Congo as his own personal corporation; not even as an administered province of his state. He had the Belgian Congo claimed in his name, as a personal possession. He had no concern for the native populations and was solely focused on squeezing as much profit as possible from the land; from rubber, ivory, metals, etc. He did not care how brutalized the population was, as long as the revenue kept pouring in. In short, his legacy was to not place any sort of political infrastructure beyond that of exploitation in the Congo. This lack of a vibrant and stable government, as well as the forced cohesion of many different ethnicities, is perhaps his greatest legacy (but has been common to African nations generally). The brutality forestalled any sort of real union between whites and Africans in the Congo.

Read: "The Scramble for Africa" by Thomas Pakenham and "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild.

Answer 3

well, they only mentioned him like 200 times my history classes. If you need eyewitness-account on the matter, without beeing able to read french...there's one major source. A british diplomat, Roger Casement, caused a riot at the time with his account of the conditions in Congo.

On a sidenote: the french elections were all over the news :P.

but then again, i'm belgian.

Answer 4

One English historian has commented: "(Leopold) was an Attila in modern dress, and it would have been better for the world if he had never been born."

Answer 5

Death, destruction, and hate. His was the worst of the colonial systems. Conrad's "heart of darkness" takes place in the Belgian Congo.