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ing—people, animals, and forests—rose to a level previously unimaginable. From 1885 to 1908,
he made the Congo his personal fiefdom, organizing it so as to extract as much profit as possible
from rubber and ivory. Shipping weapons to the Congo and bringing raw materials back to Bel-
gium, Leopold enslaved the population rather than pay workers, and the pressure to meet rubber
quotas depopulated riverbank settlements and made the Force Publique push deeper into the interior
in search of free labor.
The stories of atrocities in the Congo reached Europe first in anecdotal form and were quickly
dismissed. Leopold's Force Publique, composed of African troops and Belgian officers, lived by a
rule whose consequences would become the emblem of his reign: soldiers were not to waste bul-
lets and had to account for each one fired by bringing back a human right hand. If they went hunt-
ing or missed their mark shooting at a fleeing slave and had to fire again, they compensated by
harvesting hands from the local population, a practice that they developed solely to meet the strin-
gent military requirements. This was one of the first times that the nascent art of photojournalism
demonstrated its power to galvanize an international movement. Pictures that missionaries took of
“mutilated Africans or their cut-off hands” were shown in protest meetings and published in papers,
providing, as Adam Hochschild writes in his seminal book, King Leopold's Ghost , “evidence that
no propaganda could refute.”
Despite the lack of clear records, Hochschild and other scholars have estimated the death toll
under Leopold to be ten million, approximately half of the region's population, this as much the
result of starvation, exhaustion, and disease as of murder itself. Entire villages were enslaved to
gather rubber and ivory, and as elephants and latex-bearing plants became scarce, men from vari-
ous areas traveled farther, crossing into each other's territory and competing to fill nearly impos-
sible quotas. Those who failed were severely whipped or killed as examples. Groups that rebelled
were slaughtered, and once the rubber and slaves in a region had been used up, la Force Publique
moved on to new areas. The strategy made Leopold one of Europe's wealthiest men, allowing him
to initiate extravagant building projects, though he never set foot in the Congo, where he caused the
disintegration of the social fabric.
The Congo gradually became the cause célèbre of the period, a little like Darfur today, with
much outcry but little success. Roger Casement and Arthur Conan Doyle penned topics on the sub-
ject, and Mark Twain ridiculed Leopold's claim to be on a humanitarian mission, issuing his now
famous statement: “This work of 'civilization' is an enormous and continual butchery.”
Speaking to the Congolese, I often wondered what they knew of that history, what might have
been passed down through stories or taught in school. But when I asked, they said they knew noth-
ing, even many of those with education. The average life span in the Congo is short, with many
generations between now and 1908, when Leopold ceded the country to the Belgian government,
and the Congolese have lived through many conflicts since then. More than unknowing, I saw a re-
fusal in the gaze of the people I asked. There had been too many wars, too much to struggle against.
The system had always been predatory in some way, whether during the Congo Crisis and the fight
for independence, or during the colonial period, when, despite improved conditions and less bru-
tality, the Belgians still implemented forced labor for mining, roadwork, and cash crops, punishing
dissenters with the chicotte , a hippopotamus-hide whip.
At first, when I asked about that time, I saw people thinking, trying to remember which atrocity
I was talking about, but then the refusal flashed in their eyes, as if at some point they had rejec-
ted the past, having realized that with it they couldn't move forward. Writers have speculated as to
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