Leopold II was forced to hire European mercenaries to defend his interests. These were organised into a private army, the Force Publique , which numbered up to 19, troops. All the officers were white, while all the rank-and-file soldiers were black men who had been press-ganged into service and forced to serve in the Force Publique for a minimum of seven years.
Recruits were sometimes bought from tribal leaders, though often they were simply kidnapped. Force Publique acted simultaneously as an army of occupation and as a police force which served the interests of the trading companies.
The Force had to deal with several rebellions, which were put down with horrifying savagery. In practice, the Free State of the Congo was an enormous concentration camp. The construction of these infrastructures, all created exclusively for personal interests, resulted in the deaths of many workers of all ages. There is a renewed focus on the European nation's history after the death of George Floyd in police custody in the US and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed.
Thousands of Belgians have demonstrated in recent weeks and statues of Belgium's colonial leader King Leopold II have been vandalised. Authorities in Antwerp have removed a statue of him from a public square. More than 10 million Africans are thought to have died during his reign. King Philippe is a descendant of the 19th Century ruler. This is the first time a Belgian monarch has formally expressed remorse for what happened during the country's colonial rule.
The remarks, however, fell short of an outright apology. In a letter sent to President Tshisekedi and published in Belgian media, King Philippe praises the "privileged partnership" between the two nations now.
But he says there have been "painful episodes" in their history, including during the reign of King Leopold II - who he does not directly name - and in the 20th Century. I encourage the reflection that has been initiated by our parliament so that our memory is definitively pacified. Prince Laurent did, however, add that whenever he met African heads of state he always apologised "for the actions Europeans have done to Africans in general". In the 19th Century, European powers began seizing large swathes of Africa for colonial exploitation.
Increasing public outcry over the atrocities in the CFS moved the British government to launch an official investigation.
Washington, and Bertrand Russell. Belgium was the obvious European candidate to run the Congo. For two years, it debated the question and held new elections on the issue. Yielding to international pressure, the parliament of Belgium annexed the Congo Free State and took over its administration on November 15, , as the colony of the Belgian Congo. Despite being effectively removed from power, the international scrutiny was no major loss to Leopold or the concessionary companies in the Congo.
By then Southeast Asia and Latin America had become lower-cost producers of rubber. Along with the effects of resource depletion in the Congo, international commodity prices fell to a level that rendered Congolese extraction unprofitable. Just prior to releasing sovereignty over the CFS, Leopold had all evidence of his activities in the CFS destroyed, including the archives of the departments of finance and of the interior.
Leopold lost the absolute power he had had there, but the population still had a Belgian colonial regime, which had become heavily paternalistic, with church, state, and private companies instructed to oversee the welfare of the inhabitants. This led to massive profits for the Belgian colonists in the Congo and increased exploitation of the native population.
In the Congo Free State, colonists brutalized the local population into producing rubber, for which the spread of automobiles and development of rubber tires created a growing international market. Rubber sales made a fortune for Leopold, who built several buildings in Brussels and Ostend to honor himself and his country. To enforce the rubber quotas, the army, the Force Publique , cut off the limbs of the natives as a matter of policy. To monopolize the resources of the entire Congo Free State, Leopold issued three decrees in and that reduced the native population to serfs.
The Congo rubber genus Landolphia came from wild vines in the jungle, which cannot be cultivated, unlike the rubber from Brazil Hevea brasiliensis , which was tapped from trees and could be cultivated. The intense drive to collect latex from these wild plants was responsible for many of the atrocities committed under the Congo Free State.
To extract the rubber, instead of tapping the vines, the Congolese workers slashed them and lathered their bodies with the ensuing latex. When the latex hardened, it was painfully scraped off the skin, taking the hair with it.
Leopold ran up high debts with his Congo investments before the beginning of the worldwide rubber boom in the s. Prices increased throughout the decade as industries discovered new uses for rubber in tires, hoses, tubing, insulation for telegraph and telephone cables, and wiring.
By the lates, wild rubber had far surpassed ivory as the main source of revenue from the Congo Free State. The peak year was , with rubber fetching the highest price and concessionary companies raking in the highest profits.
However, the boom sparked efforts to find lower-cost producers. Congolese concessionary companies faced competition from rubber cultivation in Southeast Asia and Latin America. As plantations were started in other tropical areas—mostly under the ownership of the rival British firms—world rubber prices started to dip. Competition heightened the drive to exploit forced labor in the Congo to lower production costs.
Meanwhile, the cost of enforcement and the increasingly unsustainable harvesting methods ate away at profit margins. A cartoon depicting Leopold II as a rubber vine entangling a Congolese rubber collector. The company was founded with British and Belgian capital and was based in Belgium. The company was granted a large concession in the north of the country and the rights to tax the inhabitants. This tax was taken in the form of rubber obtained from a relatively rare rubber vine. The collection system revolved around a series of trade posts along the two main rivers in the concession.
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