BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY: THE BELGIANS AND AFRICAN COLONY - CONGO FREE STATE:

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, news of outrageous atrocities, countless deaths, mass starvation, and ethnic cleaning began to leak out of the Congo Free State, the personal dominion of King Leopold of the Belgians. Leopold had acquired this vast domain, about the size of Western Europe, by hook, crook and brute force. His rights over it were confirm by the great European powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884 - 1885. No one from the Congo who was Black was at hand to voice his or her opinion.

Leopold claimed that by colonizing the Congo River basin he would suppress the internal Slave Trade and bring the light of Christian civilization to those who lived inn darkness. In fact he was driven by Greed, and his zeal to extract the greatest possible profits from his colony, he, his family and many officials turned to forced labor, men were imprisoned and sent to labor camps, rebels were hunted down without mercy, notoriously  soldiers who were expected never to wast ammunition who were ordered to return to their barracks with a human hand for every bullet they have fired. There were real events that inspired Joseph Conrads  "Heart Of Darkness" which is not about African Savagery as people who have never read the book usually think, but its about European Barbarism.
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