The magnificent African cake“Listen to the cry of Leopold's ghostSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Burning in Hell for Its Hand-Mangled Host. Listen to how the demons laugh and shout to cut off His hands in hell. For years, this area of ​​land now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo was administered as the personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium. From 1885 to 1908, Leopold and his fellow colony investors extracted enormous amounts of wealth from the Congo and, in doing so, created a regime that relied on massive human rights violations, murder , torture, rape and outright theft to achieve his ends. Arguably, the fate of the Congo Free State was one of the first truly international humanitarian crises and is a prime example of paternalistic European colonialism and social Darwinism at work. Eventually, international outcry forced Leopold to abandon his private colony and turn it into Belgium. However, the damage was done. The indigenous population had been savagely depopulated, natural resources plundered, and a harsh colonial administration, primarily interested in profit, had been left in place. It took decades to repair the worst of the damage, and even to this day, Congo has not fully recovered from all the damage caused by the colonial era. Joseph Conrad wrote a fairly accurate account of oppression and evil in the Congo in his well-known book Heart of Darkness, while other activists tackled the Congo problem head on. Museums are often a repository of the past, a place where long-dead cultures can live again, and where artifacts and documents can tell the many diverse and intertwined stories that make up history. A museum should be expected to be a useful source of information about the past and to tell a complete story. One might expect Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa to be a showcase for the history of Belgian involvement in the Congo and, in light of modern sensibilities, to reflect the reality of the role of Belgium in the Congo Free State. However, that chance doesn't exist there, because the best one can find is this little memoir that tells a story so sanitized it's worthy of Stalin. This could be said to be typical of the legacy of Western colonialism in Africa and other parts of the world. the world. An industrialized state appears, seizes control of a weaker state populated by non-Europeans and exploits it to its fullest, and ends up leaving either by the force of localized weapons, or more rarely by international pressure . What remains is often a failed state that has boundaries of convenience, which in turn encourage further internal conflict as traditional tribal and cultural boundaries are erased. Ultimately, the colonizing state will carefully attempt to forget the evils it perpetrated, and continue to ignore the terrible legacy of its actions, and continue to sanitize history at home, rather than face come face to face with the past and its modern consequences. The story of the Congo Free State and the horrors that followed from it can serve well to represent the evils of Western colonialism as a whole. It contains all the classic elements, ranging from forced or deceptive deals with tribal leaders to control land and create treaties, oppressive colonial rule, the operation of the colony with the primary aim of maximizing profits, the widespread massacre ofindigenous people either because of their rebellion or because of their rebellion. other punitive actions, paternalistic views towards the indigenous population, and a desire to impose Christianity on the indigenous tribes. In 1885, the explorations of the famous Morton Stanley (Dr. Livingston, I presume?) on behalf of Leopold II of Belgium, secured the Congo as a private colony. Stanley convinced native chiefs who had little or no idea of ​​what they were signing to cede their rights to Leopold, through many tricks. Obtained the kinds of documents that modern European states considered legal, and of which the more primitive tribes had absolutely no idea. As Leopold's envoy, Stanley traveled across the Congo meeting with tribal leaders and eventually returned to Belgium with the most scandalous treaties that gave Leopold the pretext he needed to claim the Congo. Once he took control of the Congo, Leopold set out to create the nightmare. world that Joseph Conrad would eventually visit and commemorate in his famous book Heart of Darkness. Imagine if you will, a lush part of Africa, largely untouched by European intervention and watered by the mighty Congo River. Certainly, it was not a utopia, but the inhabitants were generally happy, well-fed and generally comfortable. After all, their ancestors had lived there for thousands and thousands of years and had created a stable, functioning culture that used the land and its resources to meet their own needs. But this land contained things that the European industrial machine needed, first and foremost ivory. , then rubber, and always in quantities that seemed impossible to obtain. “The word “ivory” echoed in the air, was whispered, sighed. You would think they were praying to him. A smell of imbecile rapacity floated through it all, like the smell of a corpse. Sapristi! I have never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent desert surrounding this open point on the earth seemed to me something great and invincible, like evil or truth, patiently awaiting the end of this fantastic invasion. » The European ivory trade was a particularly unique form of colonial exploitation. , to the extent that this required the culling of abundant wildlife, which would of course eventually lead to a population collapse of the very animal that provides this valuable resource. In Europe, ivory was used for such mundane items as billiard balls and piano keys, as well as for higher quality items such as knife handles, pistol grips, buttons, jewelry and artistic inlays. The demand for ivory was such that the Congo was dotted with “counters” which all had a quota to fill. Here occurred the first sign of barbarity on the part of the supposedly enlightened and Christian Europeans, who used pressure to force native chiefs to supply all the growing reserves of ivory. According to Hoschild, the natives were forbidden to trade with anyone other than Leopold's authorized agents, who, if they did not steal the ivory from the villages, would pay only a pittance in the form of cloth or of measured brass rods, which served as currency. Added to the existing system of forced or near-forced labor for porters and railway workers, the framework for future exploitation was constructed. It was the initial brutality of the ivory trade and the harsh methods used to coerce the natives into supplying labor and ivory that gave rise to Conrad's infamous character, Kurtz. Hochschild hypothesized that the sophisticated Kurtzeducated, violent and completely insane, was a pastiche of several real people Conrad met in the Congo, including a station manager who actually maintained a fence topped with severed heads of natives who had raised his arm. While in Europe, Leopold had proclaimed his humanitarian objectives and convinced the Western world that his objective in the Congo was strictly for the good of humanity, blood-soaked ivory flowed into his hands, and from there, into all Europe, leaving countless ignorant people enjoying the fruits of deadly forced labor, all in the name of piano keys and false teeth. But while the ivory boom unleashed the horrors of Leopold's Congo, something far more important and useful was upon us. It stands to reason that a colonial state exists not to enrich itself, but rather to serve as a constant source of raw materials and source of supply. captive market for the motherland, so when the rubber boom occurred, the Congo Free State suddenly became a major source of a product that would in no way benefit it, nor supply the industry rubberIt's hard to think about it today, in a world with all sorts of synthetic plastics and artificial rubber, but there was a time when industry and transportation depended on a rather sticky plant sap, which when It was treated with a little heat and the sulfur became a valuable waterproofing agent, electrical insulator and vehicle tire. Rubber was the source of premium rain gear, tires for recently fashionable bicycles, and, in just a few years, that hot new automobile. But it also covered millions of miles of telegraph, telephone and electrical cables that snaked around the world like some sort of 19th century Medusa. Without these cables, the booming industrial state would come to a screeching halt as messages slowed to a crawl, and the giant electric motors that powered factories where once steam engines had belched their smoke would become silent. All this and more required large quantities of rubber, and Leopold wanted to supply as much as his natives could be forced to extract. The rubber boom was a peculiar beast. Rubber can be extracted from a particular vine or type of tree. In each case, being plants, these things can be grown in well-controlled plantations, instead of relying on haphazard harvesting in wild jungles. However, it takes time to grow the plants to maturity, so Leopold was racing against the development of other commercial plantations to market his product. LANDOLPHIA Klainei Pierre is a vine plant similar to the rubber tree, which, due to its presence in the Congo, would lead to untold human suffering and misery. Growing haphazardly in the jungles of the Congo region, the rubber vine exuded a reddish sap, which was harvested, crudely processed, and finally transported to the hungry markets of Europe. Its reddish color is perhaps appropriate, as it represents the blood of the millions of innocent Congolese who suffered because of its demand. Leopold's agents imposed quotas of rubber in their districts and forced tribal leaders to obtain them by any means necessary. Ultimately, this system of forced labor and virtual slavery proved so controversial that colonial administrators resorted to the most brutal and barbaric savagery imaginable to ensure that the precious rubber would continue to flow. to respect production quotas, hostages under theForm of wives and children would further be detained to ensure that men forced into labor would return with their established quota. The heartbreaking images of these hostages and people being mutilated as punishment fill part of Hoschild's book and are as horrific as one could imagine. One image shows two naked women chained together as they are taken into custody to ensure their husbands' return, and another of a father gazing sadly at the severed foot of his five-year-old daughter. These images and many others came from the Congo, taken by missionaries or concerned travelers who sought to bring evidence of the Congo's ills to the same world that had recently presented Leopold as an altruistic humanitarian. 1909 The New York Times briefly recounts the travels of a certain Reverend Doctor William Leslie, a missionary in the Congo for several years. Dr. Leslie bore witness to the horrors of Belgian colonial rule, attesting to the cutting off of hands as punishment, even of children. At the time of the article's publication, the critical situation in the Belgian Congo had become a humanitarian crisis of international proportions. Interestingly, in a world that viewed non-Europeans as inferior people, in some cases little more than animals, the Congo could indeed spark an international outcry. This speaks to the brutality of Leopold's reign and the extraordinary methods he employed. But it is also a testament to the will of a group of dedicated people who have worked tirelessly to expose the truth about Congo. Men such as Dr. Leslie were joined by other missionaries, social activists and concerned people in beating the drum warning of the horrors of colonial rule in the Congo, and even inspired Mark Twain to turn his sharp pen against Leopold. In King Leopold's Soliloquy, Twain writes a satirical story as if drawn from Leopold's voice, which opens with "If I had them by the throat!" [He hastily kisses the crucifix and mutters.] Over these twenty years, I have spent millions to silence the press in both hemispheres, and yet these leaks continue to occur. I've spent other millions on religion and art, and what do I get out of it? Nothing. Not a compliment. These generosities are carefully ignored in the printed version. In the press, I only receive slander – and more slander – and more slander, and slander on top of slander! Grant them the truth, what about it? These are still slanders when uttered against a king. The rest of the Soliloquy is filled with "Leopold's" ramblings, and each is cited to a newspaper article, pamphlet, or other direct source, which damns Leopold with each additional source. In typical Twain fashion, he held up the truth like some sort of still-beating heart of an Aztec sacrifice and showed it to the world. Leopold had spent decades trying to convince the world of the nobility of his rule over the Congo. He claimed to have fought the slave trade (indeed, he drove out Arab slave traders, but only in order to consolidate his own control over the region's labor), to have brought Christianity to a dark corner of the continent ( a typical colonialist ambition, and in this case the missionaries themselves helped condemn Leopold's actions.), and that his sole objective in governing the Congo was to bring civilization to a primitive area. Despite the best efforts of Leopold's vast propaganda machine, even the king himself was "slandered." It could even be that Leopold believed the vast lies he had spread throughout the world, or at least the main ones of them..