The Magnificent African Cake“Listen to the scream of Leopold's ghost. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Burning in Hell for its hand mutilated host. Hear how the demons cackle and scream Slashing their hands, down in Hell." For over twenty years, that area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo was administered as the personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium. From 1885 to 1908, Leopold and other investors in the colony extracted enormous amounts of wealth from the Congo and, in doing so, created a regime that relied on massive human rights abuses, murder, torture, rape and theft to achieve its ends Arguably, the plight of the Free State of the Congo was one of the first truly international humanitarian crises, and is a prime example of paternalistic European colonialism and social Darwinism at work. Ultimately, international protests forced Leopold to give up his private colony and turn it over to Belgium , the damage was done. The native population had been savagely depopulated, natural resources plundered, and a harsh colonial administration interested primarily in profit was left in place. It took decades to undo the worst of the damage, and even today, Congo has not fully recovered from all the damage caused by the colonial days. Joseph Conrad recorded a reasonably accurate account of oppression and evil in the Congo in his famous book Heart of Darkness, while other activists were tackling the Congo problem head on. Museums are often repositories of the past, a place where long-dead cultures can be revived and where artifacts and documents can tell the many different 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 well-rounded story. One might expect the Royal Belgian Museum for Central Africa to showcase the history of Belgian involvement in the Congo and, in light of modern sensibilities, reflect the reality of Belgium's role in the Congo Free State. However, no such luck there, as the best one could find is this short short story which tells a story so polished it is worthy of Stalin. It could be argued that this is typical of the legacy of Western colonialism in Africa and other parts of the world. the world. An industrialized state shows up, forces its way to take control of a weaker state populated by non-Europeans and exploits it for all its worth, and ultimately leaves through localized force of arms or more rarely international pressure. What is left behind is often a failed state that has borders of convenience, which in turn encourage further internal conflict as traditional tribal and cultural boundaries are erased. Ultimately, the colonizing state will carefully try to forget the evils it has perpetuated, and will continue to ignore the terrible legacy of its actions, and will continue to cleanse history at home, rather than come face to face with the past and its modern consequences . The history of the Congo Free State and its resulting horrors can serve well to represent the evils of Western colonialism as a whole. It contains all the classic elements, ranging from forced or deceptive treaties with tribal leaders to control land and create treaties, oppressive colonial rule, colony operation with the primary purpose of maximizing profits, widespread slaughter of natives due of their rebellion or as a consequence of other actionspunitive, paternalistic views towards the native population and the 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 the native leaders, who had little or no idea of ​​what they were signing, to cede their rights to Leopold, and through much deception they obtained the kind of documents that modern European states considered legal, and of which the more primitive tribes were completely unaware. As Leopold's envoy, Stanley traveled around the Congo meeting with tribal chiefs and eventually returned to Belgium with the most outrageous treaties that gave Leopold the claim he needed to reclaim the Congo. Once he took control of the Congo, Leopold set out to create the nightmare world that Joseph Conrad would later 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. It certainly wasn't a utopia, but the inhabitants were overall 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 needs. But that land had the things that the European industrial machine needed, first of all ivory. , then rubber, and always in quantities that seemed impossible to procure. “The word 'ivory' rang in the air, it was whispered, it was sighed. You would think they were begging for it. A shadow of imbecile rapacity lingered in all this, like the smell of a corpse. By Jove! I have never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck of earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, patiently waiting for the end of this fantastic invasion. “The European ivory trade was a particularly unique form of colonial exploitation, as it required the killing of abundant wildlife, which of course would eventually lead to the collapse of the population of the very animals that provided the precious resource. In Europe , ivory was used for mundane items such as billiard balls and piano keys and for more fine quality items such as knife handles, gun grips, buttons, jewelry and artistic inlays. Such was the demand for ivory that the Congo was dotted with “trading posts” that all had a quota to fill. Here then was the first sign of barbarism on the part of the supposedly enlightened and Christian Europeans, who used pressure to force the native chiefs to supply all the growing supplies of ivory. the natives were forbidden to trade with anyone except Leopold's authorized agents, who, if they did not steal ivory directly from the villages, would pay a pittance in the form of cloth or measured brass bars, which served as currency. In addition to the existing system of forced or quasi-forced labor for porters and railway workers, the framework for future exploitation was created. It was the early brutality of the ivory trade and the harsh methods used to force natives to supply labor and ivory that gave rise to Conrad's infamous character, Kurtz. Hochschild theorized that the sophisticated, educated, violent, and completely insane Kurtz was a pastiche of several real people Conrad had met while in the Congo, including a station director who actually maintained a fence topped with the severed heads of natives who had raised the head. ira.While in Europe, Leopold had proclaimed his objectiveshumanitarians and convinced the Western world that his goal in the Congo was strictly for the betterment of humanity, blood-soaked ivory flowed into his hands, and from there, across Europe, leaving countless people unaware enjoying the fruits of labor lethal force, all in the name of piano keys and dentures. But while the ivory leap began the horrors of Leopold's Congo, something far more important and useful was just around the corner. It is a fact that a colonial state exists not to enrich itself, but rather to serve as a constant source of raw materials and a captive market for the motherland, so when the rubber boom occurred, the Congo Free State suddenly became a of the main sources of a product that would in no way benefit itself, or supply the rubber fuel industry. It's hard to think about it now, in a world with all kinds of synthetic plastics and artificial rubber, but there was a time when industry and transportation depended on a rather sticky plant sap, which when treated with a little heat and sulfur became a valuable waterproofing agent, electrical insulator, and vehicle tire. Rubber has been the source of high-quality rain gear, newly fashionable bicycle tires, and within a few years that newly minted automobile. But it also covered countless millions of miles of telegraph, telephone and electrical cables that snaked around the globe like some sort of 19th-century Medusa. Without those cables, the thriving industrial state would come to a screeching halt as messages slowed to a crawl and the giant electric motors that drove the factories where steam engines once belched their smoke grew silent. All this and more required large quantities of rubber, and Leopold wanted to supply as much as his natives could extract. The Rubber Arm was a peculiar beast. Rubber can be extracted from a particular vine, or from a type of tree. In any case, being plants, these things can be grown in beautiful, controlled plantations, instead of relying on random harvest from wild jungles. However, it takes time to grow plants to maturity, so Leopold was racing against the development of other commercial plantations to get his product to market.LANDOLPHIA Klainei Pierre is a rubber-like climbing plant, which due to its presence in Congo it would have led to untold pain and human misery. Growing haphazardly in the jungles of the Congo region, the rubber vine emitted a reddish sap, which was harvested, roughly processed, and eventually made its way to the hungry markets of Europe. Its reddish color may be appropriate, as it represents the blood of millions of innocent Congolese who suffered because of its demand. Leopold's agents imposed rubber quotas in their districts and forced tribal chiefs to protect 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 kept flowing. Most infamously, the hands of those who failed were cut off. to respect the production quotas, wives and children would also be held hostage to ensure that the men forced to work returned with the established quota. Harrowing images of these hostages and people mutilated as punishment fill a section of Hoschild's book and are as gruesome as one might imagine. One such image shows two naked women chained together as they are taken into custody as collateral against returnof their husbands, and another of a father staring despondently at the severed foot of his five-year-old daughter. These images and more are from the Congo, taken by missionaries or concerned travelers seeking to bring evidence of the Congo's evils to the same world that had recently heralded Leopold as a selfless humanitarian. 1909 The New York Times briefly recounts the travels of a Reverend Dr. William Leslie who had been a missionary in the Congo for several years. Dr. Leslie witnessed the horrors of the Belgian colonial regime, attesting to the cutting off of hands as punishment, even that of children. At the time of the article's publication, the plight of the Belgian Congo had become a humanitarian crisis of international proportions. Interestingly, in a world that considered non-Europeans inferior people, in some cases little more than animals, Congo could in fact raise an international outcry. This testifies to the sheer brutality of Leopold's rule and the extraordinary methods he employed. But it is also a testimony to the absolute will of a group of people who have worked tirelessly to expose the truth about Congo. Men like Dr. Leslie joined other missionaries, social activists, and interested people in sounding the warning drums about the horrors of colonial rule in the Congo, and even inspired Mark Twain to direct his sharp pen against Leopold. In King Leopold's Soliloquy, Twain writes a satirical tale as if from Leopold's voice, which opens with “If I had them by the throat! [Hastily kisses the crucifix, and mutters] In these twenty years I have spent millions to keep the press of the two hemispheres quiet, and yet these leaks continue to occur. I spent millions more on religion and art, and what do I get out of it? Nothing. It's not a compliment. These generosity are studiously ignored in the press. In the press I receive nothing but slander - and more slander - and more slander, and slander upon slander! Grant them the truth, so what? They are still slanders when uttered against a king. The rest of the soliloquy is filled with "Leopold's" ramblings, and each is quoted in a newspaper article, pamphlet, or other direct source, condemning Leopold with each additional source. In typical Twain fashion, he held up the truth like some kind 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 in the Congo. He claimed to have fought the slave trade (indeed, he drove out the Arab slave traders, but only for the purpose of consolidating his control over the workforce in the area), to have brought Christianity to an obscure corner of the continent (a typical colonialist ambition, and in this case, the missionaries themselves helped to condemn Leopold's actions), and that his sole purpose 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 may be that Leopold even believed the enormous lies he had spread around the world, or at least the main ones of them. He certainly wanted to have a colony and bring his little European nation to the same table as the great powers, each with overseas possessions, but like a petulant child who is eventually given a puppy to keep him quiet, Leopold proved incapable of taking care of himself. of what was his, and instead caused him great torment and suffering. Ultimately, public protests and internal pressure forced Leopold to cede (or rather, sell) the Congo to Belgium to operate as a true colony, rather than a private fiefdom. In doing so, Leopold first destroyed all documents.