It is no secret that the people of Africa have long been taken advantage of and treated inhumanely. It is a terrible battle between good and evil that still wages today. Many countries have come into Africa with promises of modern goodies and religion for everyone but in the end it always ends up with the imposters taking more than what they deserve and giving little in return.
The first man to enter the turbulent Congo and set up a soveirgn nation was King Leopold of Belgium. His government did not give their blessing to him to enter the congo and start a colony. However he ignored their concerns and decided to do it as a private citizen. He hired on his own men and created The International African Society that was cleverly disguised as a scientific and philanthropic association. Really it was nothing more than a private army out to take what they pleased no matter what that meant for the unsuspecting natives of the Congo. With their guise in place it was easy for the king to move in and gain the trust of the natives. He claimed a piece of land that was seventy six times the size of his native Belgium and enslaved the people.
The first of many natural resources to be exploited by a foreign group of people in the Congo was the rubber industry. The Congo has an abundant supply of rubber trees that up until this point had never been comercially harvested. King Leopold was using the natives to harvest the rubber and killing or disfiguring any of the natives that did not comply. Estimates for the number of natives killed under King Leopold are in the millions to tens of millions. He would work the congonese literally to their death and then replace them with another one of their kinfolk.
The King would seperate young children from their families and take the ones that were old enough and put them to work harvesting the rubber while the younger ones went into childrens colonies where they were forced to convert to Christianity. If anyone, be they men, women or children did not comply with the rules of the king he was have their hands severed as a sign of their mistakes.
In the twentieth century the focus turned to what lies beneath the African soil. The Congo has been referred to as “The richest patch of earth on the plane”. Now this certainly does not mean that the people themselves are rich, this statement refers to the mineral wealth that the land posseses. The congo is on of the biggest suppliers of diamonds, copper, zinc, cobalt, manganese, uranium, niobium, and the newest and possibly the most intriguing to foreign markets coltan. Coltan is used is several things, among these are fiber optics, cell phones, computers, military grade night vision goggles, and even in the Sony Playstation. All of these minerals make a profit of one hundred and fifty seven billion dollars per year. Now hardly any of this profit sees its way back into the Congo’s infrastructure. Nearly all of the money is made by foreign companies from Europe, Asia, and even the United States.
There are still terrible dictators running business the same way king leopold did in the early nineteenth century with little or no concern for the well being of the Congonese people.
“Leopold II”. Encyclopedia Britannica.2009. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 2009
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Adam Hochschild. Mariner Books. October 1999
