Under this clever disguise, he was able to hire the well-known, European explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, to establish a colony in the Congo. It talks about his rule over the Congo and the laws that he had in place. [7] Ultimately, the war became a stalemate and was officially declared over in 2003.
This source is written in a very professional and scholarly way. It also gives a history of the country and its troubled past. He sought to reap the land of all it’s resources, and used the profits to improve his own country rather than help the Congolese natives. Congo had been exploited to the point that much of its remaining resources were too expensive to be sold competitively. Fast forward to today, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has gone through multiple more wars, and is still seen as a fragile and insecure state. Facts About Democratic Republic of Congo's Culture, Geography, and History. Many of the first witnesses of these events were Protestant missionaries. In fact, it has been quite the opposite. However, this was not on any level a change of heart by the ruler.
Leopold had forced the natives of the Congo to go into the jungles and collect rubber by slashing vines and slinging them over their own bodies. it talks about the the rise and fall of Congo Free State after King Leopold’s reign as well, but the important thing is that it goes into depth about how the damage Leopold caused to the Congo has left lasting problems that prevent this nation from coming back and progressing onwards. This source looks at King Leopold from a point of view that is more neutral than most. Stanley’s job was to speak with the native tribe leaders, convincing them to hand over their land with the promise that the king would bring advancement and improvement to their villages. It was an easy decision to give it up, because the flow of resource money had finally dried up.
With pressure mounting, Leopold II realized that his time of unchecked rule over the Congo was reaching a conclusion.Facing harsh international criticism, Leopold saw that he could no longer keep the Congo as his own. Violence and terrorism were the means adopted to impose the will of the Belgian king and the trading agents over the African people.Leopold II was forced to hire European mercenaries to defend his interests. The oppression and genocide of the natives of the Congo Free State was an event that set them back for generations, and they have never truly recovered. Often times people know Belgium for it’s chocolate, french fries, and beer.. This needs to change. He then proceeded to burn any and all records that he could that documented his wrongdoing. The fact that this article was written in a journal and is easy to read is nice because extracting information from it becomes easier to do. Under the impression that Leopold’s intentions were to simply introduce western civilization and bring religion to the Congo, Stanley successfully yet unwittingly, conquered the entire land for the king.
That being said, it does include a very nice overview of the entire relationship between the Congo and Belgium, from the pre-Leopold days all the way up to modern times. When Africa proved to be a difficult conquest as well, Leopold devised a new, much more devious plan. Due to these facts, missionaries were largely ineffective in portraying the atrocities that were taking place in Leopold’s Congo. Belgians were outraged by this description and many were outraged by the work. Facts about the Rwanda Genocide are the key points one should note before they go on a tour to Rwanda so that one can know how it feels to lose those many people. Often times, the militia would use the mutilation of children’s hands as a way to bribe villagers.
But once again, the truth was bound to get out eventually. He believed that colonizing foreign territory was what was truly necessary to the prosperity of Belgium, and he would stop at nothing to try and do this.
It is a little harder to interpret information. Belgian officer Rene de Pementier recounted “If he found a leaf in a courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. The media began to take reports of missionaries more seriously and went to investigate for themselves.