A Punch cartoon showing King Leopold of Belgium looking at the spoils of his African campaign.

King Leopold and the Belgian Congo

The Congo provides the most curious and the most bloody example of European colonisation in Africa.

Belgium had only become independent in 1830 and was obliged by law to be a neutral country. Consequently, it could not engage in any adventures in Europe alongside the big powers. Although the Belgian people and government were not particularly enthusiastic, the king, Leopold, was desperate to give the country an Empire. "There are no small nations .... only small minds", he is quoted as saying.

Creating an "Association Internationale Aticaine", he had, by 1875, laid claim to a huge territory, eighty times the size of his own country, in the Congo basin. It was the king's own property, paid for entirely out of his own pocket. By the 1880's, however, his finances were in difficulty and, by a series of royal ordinances, the colonial tax-collectors were authorised to go into villages and extract quotas of rubber from the villagers as taxation.

The British Consul in the "Congo Independent State", Roger Casement, produced a famous report in 1903, in which he revealed how Congolese natives were being systematically mutilated (hands, ears, noses cut oft), ',whipped and executed for not 'producing enough wild rubber for their (taxes. The scandals grew so great that ithe Belgian parliament demanded that their king relinquish his private colony and hand it over to the Belgian state (1908). The Congo had become the most notorious of all European colonies in Africa.