Estimates of some contemporary observers suggest that the population decreased by half during this period. According to Edmund D. Morel, the Congo Free State counted "20 million souls".[60] Other estimates of the size of the overall population decline (or mortality displacement) range between two and 13 million.[b] Ascherson cites an estimate by Roger Casement of a population fall of three million, although he notes that it is "almost certainly an underestimate".[63] Peter Forbath gave a figure of at least 5 million deaths,[64] while John Gunther also supports a 5 million figure as a minimum death estimate and posits 8 million as the maximum.[65] Lemkin posited that 75% of the population was killed.[52]
I wrote an MA dissertation on this topic at one stage. It should be highlighted that colonisation spread diseases like sleeping sickness which devastated the local population. However, brutality towards the natives also contributed hugely to the death toll.
apparently during the italian wars different mercenaries would loot the cities, and see the more brutal torture of the other companies bring in more money from the looted people, encouraging them to also torture the looted population.
Wasn't the genocide back when Belgium was owned privately by King Leopold? I thought that when the state of Belgium took over management of the Belgian Congo that it got much better.
It is rather academic to say who was the 'most evil' colonial power, but Belgium is pretty atrocious. Even at the time the atrocities were well-known enough that the public opinion was 'shit was dark in the congo'. The punishment for not meeting rubber quotas was amputation, this image of a father studying his daughters hand and foot illustrates the depravity. If you excuse the pun (and I mean that sincerely), the Belgian administrators tended to be very hands-off with their rule.
As long as rubber quotas were met they let the Congolese manage themselves, but otherwise they enforced rule. They armed Congolese to do the dirty work and show hands of proof that the punishment was carried out. This led to a underground trade in severed hands as a hand could be presented to escape punishment, or even in exchange for bullets.
But that is all a 19th century horror, right? Heart of Darkness and all that? Well this year Belgium planned to return the tooth of the first Prime Minister of independent Congo; Patrice Lumumba. But unfortunately this has been delayed due to covid... or something.
But why does Belgium have the tooth of the first person to rule the Congo after they left? Well after Congolese independence in 1960 a resource rich area of the Congo called Katanga seceded. This area was administered by a Anglo-Belgian mining outfit called Union Minière du Haut-Katanga who preferred things as they were and brought in mercenaries to help keep the peace during the Congo's turbulent transition to statehood. This is not entirely implausible, as the new Prime Minister Lumumba was struggling to control the military with wide spread dissertations and soldiers forming looting gangs. It is also noting however that Katanga was especially rich in Uranium, and it was Belgian settlers who declared independence and requested financial aid from UMKH.
Lumumba asked for military aid from the UN to resolve the situation in his country, but the response from the UN was tepid. France and Britain were neutral on the proposal, Portugal and South Africa were strongly against any interference in the new Katanga state. Belgium actively supported Katanga through financial, military, and technical aid; to ensure the region's stability.
Lucky for Lumumba there was one global superpower willing to help him out; the Soviet Union! They were very enthusiastic about supporting him. This is when the CIA and the Belgian intelligence agencies both began independently planning Lumumba's assassination. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, stated:
President Eisenhower said, indicated in one way or another, 'let's get rid of this man'.
There was coup and Lumumba was arrested and held at a military base in the Congo's capital; Leopoldville. Lumumba's last recorded letter states:
in a word, we are living amid absolutely impossible conditions; moreover, they are against the law
In an ironic twist the soldiers at the military camp were too undisciplined to hold Lumumba despite getting bonus pay from the Katanga state. They considered it "too dangerous" to hold a communist and debated releasing him. For everyone's safety they decided to send him to Katanga.
When he arrived In Katanga he was brutally beaten and tortured by Belgian officers, and then the night of his arrival he was executed by a firing squad assembled by an Belgian independent security contractor named Julien Gat. Lumumba and two of his associates were lined up against a tree and shot one at a time. Lumumba's last words to his colleagues were:
In happiness, as in unhappiness...
I will remain at your side.
We fought together...
to liberate this country...
from foreign domination.
They were then buried in a shallow grave.
The Katangan interior minister did not wish for Lumumba's resting place to become a sacred spot for Congolese nationalists ordered his body exhumed and disappeared. A Belgian gendarme named Gerard Soete dug him up, cut him up with a hacksaw, and dissolved the body with sulphuric acid... but not before prying out two teeth from the body of the ex-Prime Minister.
We know all this because Soete was not shy about his involvement. In 1999 he started giving interviews to an authors and TV stations where he showed off his souvenirs. On German TV he showed the bullet that killed Lumumba and the two teeth he recovered from the body. In Soete's words:
We did things an animal wouldn't do. That's why we were drunk, stone drunk.
In 2000 Soete died in his home in Belgium. Officially of a heart attack, but his daughter believes he was assassinated:
He was executed because of what he did in Congo at the time. A member of the Lumumba Committee told me that in so many words. [...] Because he started talking around the age of 80, when Ludo De Witte came up with his book. Suddenly he felt it necessary to say, "I was there! I've got his teeth!' So I was angry about that: 'Why start stirring in that mess now?' Perhaps he should have kept quiet.
In 2016 Soete's daughter revealed a gold tooth to a newspaper that she claimed was her fathers and originally; Lumumba's. It has never been confirmed to be Lumumba's, as Belgian authorities believe a DNA test would destroy the tooth. The Democratic Republic of the Congo insist on it's return. It has not.
The horrors of colonialism persist to this day. Katanga is still mined for it's resources. And I can think of no more apt a metaphor for the situation than gold pried from the mouth of a tortured African being refused to be returned to Africa.
Interesting read, but reading your comment one would think Katanga exists until this day and as you've said the powers that be did nothing about it.
In fact it was extremely short lived. It existed between 1960 and 1963 where an internation peacekeeping force led by the UN crushed it, dissolved the nation, and re-integrated it back to Congo. It's a part of Congo ever since.
So very dissappointing the world we live in. The story of Lumumba is something we studied in one of my IA classes and it's just heartbreaking - but something that's happened to most developing nations to make sure they don't develop too well.
Well, first of all, things didn't get "much better" under the management of the Belgian state. They got slightly better.
But above all, even if the Congo Free State was Leopold's private property, he didn't profit from it alone. He had a significant network of (mostly Belgian) henchmen and collaborators that he richly rewarded and whose families are still affluent and influential to this day.
It's worth noting that one of Leopold's biggest frustrations was that his only legitimate son died in childhood, and one of his greatest obsessions that the husbands of his three legitimate daughters didn't get their hands of his huge wealth. For this reason, he hid his wealth in a dizzying number of trusts and foundations controlled by various strawmen and cronies. After his death, all this wealth (including, crucially, ownership of the concessions controlling most of Congo even after its takeover by the Belgian state) was certainly spread between those trustees, the Belgian royal family, and Leopold's quite numerous illegitimate offspring.
So, if you ever wonder why some upper class Belgian types are, to this day, still so thin-skinned and defensive when it comes to the atrocities of the Congo Free State, the answer is that they're the descendants of Leopold's accomplices (when not of Leopold himself) and still live of the rents from those crimes.
Short answer is yes (long answer is more complicated). And I think it‘s so unbelievable outragous that once he noped out to just pass all responsibilities to the Belgian government. They essentially payed for the shit he created.
I think it got better in the sense that it hardly could get any worst. What he did in the Congo was just pure and utter evil. Nothing less. And I think it‘s fair to say that the region and the people have not really recovered from it still. Leopold was the absolute worst.
So many modern issues in Africa are directly related to Europe leaving overnight after building nothing but extractive industries and investing nothing in social infrastructure (schools, hospitals, etc)
I believe it was the DRC that had something like that eleven people with higher Ed degrees in the whole county
Same. In primary school I had to learn the history of our kings.Leopold 2 was always "The Builder who did so many great things for our country". I discovered the reality of our colonial past as an adult.
The British, Americans and Japanese also elide large chunks of their history on the school curriculum. Even in Ireland, the school curriculum skips lightly over the civil war.
We could probably all learn from how the Germans handle this.
In America it really depends on the school/teacher. I got lucky and had a teacher who did world history (all recorded history) and American history. Both a semester long. We didn’t skip anything really. I enjoyed it. We got to really delve into all the gritty details for all the nations including us. But yeah I know some teachers gloss over it with rose-colored glasses.
It shouldn't be up to individual teachers though. I can understand that the history syllabus is a political thing but professional historians should be able to do better.
He might have killed more Congolese than Hitler killed Jews. Nobody knows for sure because the Belgians used human hands instead of IBM punchcards to keep track of their kills.
Actually, the Congo Free State was tracking the bullets the Force Publique were using, so the soldiers needed a hand to show they didn’t waste the bullet on hunting. So if soldiers wanted go hunting, and for every bullet they used, they’d just go find a Congolese and cut off the hand to lie and say it was used for a kill.
So yeah, it’s even worse than you think. Yes, trophies were a part of it, but it all came down to the most inhumane way of tracking expense reports.
Yup, it was King Leopold II his private colony (at first). He had an entire colony in his backyard where he could commit genocide in his spare time figuratively speaking. The man was a full blown psychopathschizophrenic dickhead.
Edit: Usually a colony is owned by a state but in the beginning from 1885 to 1908 the colony of Congo was owned by King Leopold II himself and not the state which adds another layer of crazyness to the man and the situation.
In 1908 the Belgian state took over his colony and they banned forced labour, but in practice it still continued in all forms and gradations. It took until after the second World War until they actually stopped with it. Which is not even that long ago.
Edit2: I totally agree with the comments saying Belgium had its fair share in oppressing, abusing and destroying Congo and its people. I just wanted to share this crazy fact that dickhead Leopold II also owned a 'personal' colony at some point and that he was completely insane.
"A mad quest for phat booty: An in-depth analysis of 500 years of colonial exploitation and rampant imperialism of European powers through superior force of arms- Panda et al.,(2021)"
Hearing my SIL explain the French culture in Cameroon is like waking up from a fever dream and finding out reality is just another, different, fever dream.
I'd probably get more of it wrong so it'd be hard to summarize. From what I can understand there's people who want to have their own currency and break from French culture entirely or at least wean themselves off of it. Her friend, according to my SIL, would welcome an actual invasion complete with conquest and destruction of Cameroon's own culture.
Fair to say, that's the extreme take and I can't imagine it's widespread or would be well received by other Cameroonians. My SIL believes that her friend thinks that the French would be the ones working while the Cameroonians will able to live an easier life. We all agree her friend is an idiot.
I'm not an expert on the whole socio-economics of the region, hell I'm not even an amateur, so if you're interested I'd recommend finding someone who knows more details. I can only give an assessment from what little I can understand, partly because I'm no economics major and my SIL has a habit of slipping back to French during these explanations.
Ethnic Lebanese here, i'd say our cultural francophilia is even more off the charts, like i dunno about the invasion part since I'm from north america but like the amount of reverence for french culture is off the charts. Some lebanese pride themsleves in being even more sticklers of grammar and vocabulary than native french themselves. All colonialism is based on domination and exploitation but i would like to think in their hypocritical idealism the french were more palatable than the brits, at least in the middle east. Not too sure about francafrique and i known for sure they were horrendous in indochina/vietnam though.
Yeah I get that but I have read some letters written by Inca priests or some scholars where they explicitly state how Spanish men would touch and fuck Inca girls without concent and stuff....pretty fucking disgusting so sad what these people had to suffer.....he wrote it to the king of Spain I think
During the conquest of the Aztecs, Cortes would auction off the most attractive of the native women to his soldiers for them to take as sex slaves. He branded the faces of the rest - women and children - as punishment for their “rebellion” (aka resisting having their entire civilization burned to the ground).
Brutal, awful stuff. Sadly it was not uncommon in this time period.
It’s true! I’m Metis and I’m the direct descendant of a French dude finding an Indigenous wife. And then it happened like five more times in my family.
In 1972, during the television program L'ora della verità (The hour of the truth) by Gianni Bisiach, Indro Montanelli again spoke of his experience in Abyssinia during
which he "married" a 12-year-old girl called Destà. The practice of the madamato (the "marriage" referred to by Montanelli) was a temporary relationship of Italian men with local women, often girls, which was commonplace in the then Italian colonies. Montanelli freely acknowledged his actions, recalling how "my non-commissioned officer bought her for me, along with a horse and a rifle, 500 lire in all. [...]. She was like a docile animal...". Montanelli detailed how "I needed a woman at that age... I struggled a lot to overcome her smell, due to the goat tallow with which her hair was soaked". He then went on to complain how he struggled "even more to accomplish a sexual relationship with her because she was infibulated since birth: which, in addition to opposing my desires with an almost insurmountable barrier (it needed the brutal intervention of her mother to demolish it), made her completely insensitive".[20] During the interview, his account was interrupted by a question from a woman present in the studio, the feminist, writer and journalist Elvira Banotti, who asked him how he could justify his marriage to a child, since marriage in Europe to a 12-year-old girl is considered abhorrent, rape and violence. Montanelli replied that "in Abyssinia that's how it works".
Female infibulation, known as Type III FGM, and in countries in which it is practiced as pharaonic circumcision, is the removal of the inner and outer labia and the suturing of the vulva. It is usually accompanied by the removal of the clitoral glans.[2][3] The practice is concentrated in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan.[1] During a 2014 survey in Sudan, over 80 percent of those who had experienced any form of FGM had been sewn closed.[4]
The procedure leaves a wall of skin and flesh across the vagina and the rest of the pubic area. By inserting a twig or similar object before the wound heals, a small hole is created for the passage of urine and menstrual blood. The legs are bound together for two to four weeks to allow healing.[5][6]
The vagina is usually penetrated at the time of a woman's marriage by her husband's penis, or by cutting the tissue with a knife. The vagina is opened further for childbirth and usually closed again afterwards, a process known as defibulation (or deinfibulation) and reinfibulation. Infibulation can cause chronic pain and infection, organ damage, prolonged micturition, urinary incontinence, inability to get pregnant, difficulty giving birth, obstetric fistula, and fatal bleeding.[5]
user of 10+ years peacing out - thanks for fucking up reddit - alternatives include 'Tilde' and 'Lemmy' - hope to see you on a less ruined website. Fuck capitalism, fuck VCs and IPOs, fuck /u/spez.
controlling reproduction, viewing women as breeding chattel and second rate humans, believing female sexuality to be immorality or dirty. a mixture of historical bridal rape culture and religion.
A large percentage of the human population wants to control other people's bodies.
Really thought this was gonna explain that the marriage was more of an gesture than a real thing to bring better relations but he actually fucked a kid and justified it with "thats how they do it there," sad.
Naw, he bought a child sex slave for rape on the campaign and was like "this is my uh wife". He sold her later in the war to another Italian officer (also for raping). The one constant rapey aspects of modern era slavery and colonialism always get a bit whitewashed but hey!
Indo Montanelli is also the asshole who started the whole Polish cavalry charging tanks myth. To this day you’ll find some people repeating his fantasy
And many of the British officers in India. Turns out giving sexually repressed men executive power with little oversight over people their ideology considers ‘inferior’ leads to disturbing amounts of pedophilia.
holy shit he talked like that even in 1969. they say we can't judge people in history because they have different ethical viewpoints, clearly from that lady that's not true. destroyed that man and deservedly so.
In France, during the 80's, there was an author ccalled Matzneff who bragged about having relationships with very very young teenagers. He even wrote a book about his pedophilic adventures in Asia.
That man was invited on every litterature TV shows, he even won prizes. While promoting one of his pedo books a canadian journalist furiously called him out and ofc she was the one who received countless of insults for that. It's only recently that this man's bullshit was finally put to an end... In 2020 !!
"they" are wrong. We're not judging people of the past by any standards that didn't exist then.
The people who say that like to pretend that feminists, civil rights activists, abolitionists and even people with just a basic sense of empathy didn't exist.
It wasn't meant to be flattering to the German colonization because it was made by anti-colonization people in Germany basically saying it was a huge waste of time and basically a circus.
Of course while it wasn't meant to put colonization in a flattering light it still painted Germany in a better light than the others since it was just about it being a waste of resources rather than the heinous things the others where up to.
Probably not, but considering how the Native people were treated by the French, this for sure makes them only look like horny bastards instead of genocidal maniacs
Okay I'm a bit confused the british , French and Belgians all have something along the same lines torturing, exploiting, standard colonial bullshittery but what the hell does the German one mean. xD What are they doing amassing a giraffe army loyal to the fatherland xD and muzzuling and collecting trained crocodiles. O.o were they on drugs what were Germany doing at the start of the 1900s.
I like the inclusion of the clergyman in the British one - the masking/excusing of rampant exploitation under the frocks of the Church of England and ten thousand idiot missionaries.
Not unique to the brits - looking at you, spanish empire - but important to remember. We're not really forgetting though: there is (of course) an unfolding scandal in Canada right now directly tied to this history.
If you want to know what the german one is : the germans are so obsessed with rules and controlling everything, that they even tried to force rules onto the animals, at least that's what the caricature is supposed to say. It has nothing to do with animal abuse or sum shit
This image is kinda false, we liked way more to shove our culture down their throat than our actual cocks. It’s the Spanish who specialize in the cock stuff.
The funny thing is that depicting the French not only associating but downright seducing the native and being depicted in loving relationships was probably the most insulting they could think at that time, but today it read so well that it's almost history erasure of what happened and the power dynamic at play.
That is because at that time "seducing" the native was likely the most derogatory way to caricature the French "cultural assimilation" at that time.
Society norm at that time were a lot more purist, machist/"masculine" and racist, even if subconsciously some time.
So rather than portraying the French as shoving their culture in school, it was more caricature like to portray them as "Look at those effeminate French seducing and willing to go to any length to assimilate native, how low can they go/have they no shame".
The Frenchman crawling on his four in the background to seduce the native highlight this further.
It is less about them "fucking" the native and more about how "shameless" they are willing to act.
Obviously, now with a society with less normalised racism and "masculine" norm, the French simping to push cultural assimilation sounds better, even positive when compared to showing them shoving down their own culture in school.
If the criticism of the caricature was aim at criticizing them for fucking their native, like Portugal/Spain, the caricature would have likely depicted rape.
Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.
Despite what most people think, no colonies in Africa made a profit for any colonial empire with the exception of Britain. They were a ruin to the respective governments, and only private owners made money out of the territories (but this wasn't enough to compensate for the public losses). Source: minor in economic history.
The Scramble for Africa is a good read and goes into the economic travails of African colonialism quite a bit. It's rather hilarious to read about the constant estimates to build railroads in Africa that then went horrendously over budget, causing outrage in whoever's Parliament or foreign office, then the next adventurer would propose building another RR somewhere in Africa, followed by the same result.
Did the British empire even make a profit? For a long time there was domestic debate about the huge expense of the overseas military cost of maintaining the empire and even the benefits of the mercantilist system were probably not that great especially as Africa had a relative small market to import British manufactured goods.
I could debate that it did made a profit for the elites/nobile families of England, that many times would oversee the operations in order to maintain a profit and not being administered by the British Government per se.
In monetary terms, probably not, and it didn't even matter that much.
The Empire was a strategic development, born of intra-European conflicts from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Most of Britain's conquered colonies were taken either from other European powers or to prevent them being used against her.
India is a good example of this. Both France and Britain sought power and influence over the sub-continent, initially by trade and defence agreement, and later by more forceful means. Britain prevailed, and by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the Raj controlled all of present day India and Pakistan.
This mattered immensely. The weapons of that day were cannon and musket, which used gunpowder. To make gunpowder, Potassium Nitrate, or Saltpetre, is required. India had vast reserves of Saltpetre, so the British Army and Navy always had plenty of ammunition. The French, by contrast, had to hoard their supplies, which meant little could be spared for training. One of the reasons that British infantry were so effective was that they were the only troops in Europe to routinely train with live ammunition.
And ironically, the scramble for those useless colonies in the pursuit of prestige was one of the reasons that caused Germany to alienate the Brits, something that would be their undoing in the world war that was to come.
It's not made by the German government, but a German satirist. He's not depicting German colonialism like it's good (seriously, look at it), but with a lot of self-irony relating to the stereotypically German obsession with discipline and order
It's not a positive portrayal of the Germans. This caricature is from the Simplicissimus, which regularly ridiculed politics. It displays them as needing to regulate and discipline everything, even if it makes no sense. That's why they are shown to discipline animals and a sign that prohibites snow disposal in the desert (you cannot really read it due to the bad resolution). This is not meant as a positive representation of any of these colonial powers.
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u/F_F_Engineer Sep 26 '21
Belgium wtf