In King Leopold's
Congo Free State alone, for example, seven million Africans perished due to forced labour, genocide and the most brutal abuses known in the annals of human infamy.
Belgium's rule in what is now Democratic Republic of Congo was particularly cruel, especially between 1885 and 1908, when the country, then called the
Congo Free State, was run as a private fiefdom by King Leopold II.
He was a key part in opening up the lower Congo to trade which meant the creation of the
Congo Free State under King Leopold II of Belgium.
However, the museum in its original form never mentioned the millions of people who died during Leopold's ruthless extraction of natural resources from the
Congo Free State. Instead it paid homage to its missionaries and explorers, those who brought the contents of the museum back to Belgium in the spirit of the mission civilisatrice.
An international reform campaign forced the transfer of the
Congo Free State to the Belgian government, which was expected to rule the colony in greater accordance with the vision of imperialism articulated in the General Act.
At the peak of European imperialism in Africa, Belgium's King Leopold II ran a personal empire known as the
Congo Free State, and he stood as its only slave master.
This was the transformation of Leopold IPs International Association of the Congo into the
Congo Free State. While there were no obvious precedents in the law of nations for making the kind of metamorphoses Leopold required, the salient experience in Twiss's life of working outside recognised conventions and laws in creating a new kind of person was that which he had performed with his wife in her own transformation.
It was particularly bad during the rule of King Leopold II in the
Congo Free State up to 1909.
The
Congo Free State was a large state in Central Africa which was in personal custody of King Leopold II.
Combing through a vast array of primary source material--from Lomongo memory essays, colonial records, photography, songs, and her own ethnographic encounters--Nancy Rose Hunt argues that the nervousness at the core of the two colonial states, the
Congo Free State (1885-1908) and the Belgian Congo (1908-1960), stimulated oscillating regimes bringing the state, its actors, and the local Congolese into collision.
Williams is an African-American veteran of the Civil War who the US sends to King Leopold II's
Congo Free State to investigate reports of slavery there.