The worldwide outcry against police brutality and racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department on 25 May 2020 manifested itself in an unusually robust manner in Belgium, a country where political conflicts have usually taken the form of interethnic squabbles over power and resources among the elites. Thousands of people joined street demonstrations to demand the removal of statues of Leopold II, the second king of Belgians, as symbols of ghastly horrors that his so-called Congo Independent  (or Free) State (1885-1908) inflicted on the people of the country currently known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The recent protests have given a new impetus to the long-running debate on Belgium’s responsibility for the heinous crimes committed in the Congo by both King Leopold II and his colonial successors, including the leaders who joined the United States in plotting the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and provided the execution squad to finish the job on the night of 17 January 1961. King Leopold’s reign of terror was brought back into clearer focus following the publication in 1998 of American writer Adam Hochschild’s bestseller entitled King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, which was quickly translated and published in French and Flemish, the two major languages of Belgium. 

An even more encouraging development with respect to international human rights and humanitarian law was the setting up of a Belgian parliamentary commission of enquiry into Lumumba’s assassination. Parliament acted only a few months following the publication of Belgian sociologist Ludo De Witte’s outstanding book The Assassination of Lumumba (2003) in its French translation in 2000, the Flemish original having already been published in 1999. The commission took eighteen months to do its investigation, with the help of a team of experts including one Congolese scholar working in Belgium.

It acknowledged Belgium’s “moral responsibility” in Lumumba’s death. The Belgian government endorsed Parliament’s approval of the commission’s report, but rejected the claim that King Baudouin I had played a part in the decision to send Lumumba as a prisoner to the secessionist province of Katanga, knowing full well that the probability of his being killed there was high. This was simply one way of evading the truth, which De Witte clearly shows as involving direct orders to the Belgian civil servants and military officers who were really in charge of Katanga stating that Belgian interests in the Congo required Lumumba’s “final elimination,” a euphemism for assassination.

What was astonishing about the demands of Belgian protesters in June 2020 was the calling into question of the established myths of King Leopold II as the roi batisseur (“the builder king”), “visionary hero” and a genial ruler who engaged in humanitarian work in Africa. While schoolchildren in Belgium and the Belgian Congo (1908-1960) generally grew up with this illusion of the epoch, the reality was quite different. Instead of a political ruler who looked after the welfare of his fellow citizens, Leopold was an absentee landlord who used slave labour and overseers to compel the enslaved people to produce the maximum quantity of resources needed to satisfy his greed for more wealth. 

To achieve this objective, the internationally recruited European administrators in charge of resource extraction from the Congo were paid bonuses tied to productivity, and this encouraged them to use maximum violence and intimidation to work people to death. This was particularly evident in the collection of ivory and wild rubber, the latter having become high in demand on the world market in the 1890s for the fabrication of inflated tires for bicycles and automobiles. Men were forced to spend long hours in the forest to collect the sap from rubber vines to meet the required quantity to be delivered to the state or the authorised concessionary companies. Failure to meet the required quota for each village resulted in women and children being held hostage until the required quantity was met. Women were generally subjected to rape and other forms of violence, while children faced the torture of long hours without food or water.

The state held the quasi-totality of land, having defined as “vacant lands” all uninhabited and non-cultivated spaces, and held them for state use or long-term lease to concessionary companies. This ignored the fact that in the African agricultural system of “shifting cultivation,” portions of formerly cultivated land are left in fallow for three or more years so they can recover their fertility. Moreover, forests and grasslands were important sources of food (game meat, fish, fruits and vegetables) and timber for house construction and maintenance.

While he was the main beneficiary of the wealth produced on state land, Leopold went a bit further in his greed for land. In 1896, he set aside a large portion of virgin forest in the Lake Mai-Ndombe region, ten times the size of Belgium and rich in rubber, as the crown domain. This meant a personal exclusive royal preserve, were all revenues obtained from ivory, rubber and other goods were for the king’s own pockets only. He also benefited from the wealth accumulated by the concessionary companies, since he was a shareholder, if not the major shareholder, in virtually all the major companies. Leopold thus accumulated a lot of wealth, part of which he spent on development projects for Belgium and the other part on his personal properties, which he left for the most part as a gift to the state, to prevent the money going to his three daughters, who were all married to foreign princes.

Land alienation and forced labour were the two pillars of Leopold’s system of primitive accumulation. Having deprived the people of the full enjoyment of the resources of their land, Leopold created a very complex way of exploiting their labour force without paying for it. To pay their personal or head tax, all adult males not employed by the state, private companies, or Christian missions, had to provide 140 days of unpaid labour to the state. The major types of work required included (a) the collection of rubber, ivory, palm oil nuts, or other commodities; (b) porterage, with Africans serving as beasts of burden to carry Europeans in tipoia or covered hammocks borne on their shoulders by two or four men on distances too far for whites to walk; (c) the construction and maintenance of roads and public buildings, including guesthouses for itinerant administrators and public health agents in remote areas; and (d) providing food to state administrative posts, Christian missions, and Force Publique (Leopold’s army) encampments in the interior.

All of these compulsory services to the state, concessionary companies and, in some instances, the state-subsidised Catholic Church were often accompanied by arbitrary violence by European administrators, African soldiers and the kapita or sentries used by the companies to coerce and harass villagers into producing more of the resources wanted by the latter. The most serious crimes committed in this regard included massacres by the Force Publique, extrajudicial executions by European administrators and military officers, and the arbitrary cutting of people’s hands, including those of children. Since most of the early recruits for the FP were West Africans, they tended to use their rifles to hunt for their cherished game meat. Given the cost of buying and shipping ammunition from Europe, soldiers were ordered to justify each lawful use of the gun by cutting the hand of the victim. Pretending to obey this order, a soldier would simply use a bullet to kill an animal and then cut the hand of someone alive as proof of having killed somebody.

On the whole, King Leopold hid his real pecuniary objectives behind the screen of humanitarianism and the fight against the Arab slave trade. Ironically, he cooperated with Hamed bin Muhammed el-Mujerbi, best known by his caravan name of Tippu Tip and the most notorious Swahili-Arab slave trader, in order to consolidate his rule in north-eastern Congo. Moreover, some of the first soldiers hired by the Force Publique were Zanzibari askaris who had worked for human traffickers like Tippu Tip.

While the people of the Congo were suffering and dying in their millions from his reign of terror, with a death toll estimated around 10 million, King Leopold was accumulating wealth and using it for the construction of public works and urban projects in Belgium, together with private properties for himself in Belgium and elsewhere. His generous use of his wealth to contribute to Belgium’s development earned him that dubious title of the “Builder King,” for he had done something for Belgium while he simply plundered the Congo and left the country devastated. 

The statues that are under question across Belgium’s city squares and government buildings were erected in his honour under a campaign led by King Albert I, his nephew and successor between  1928 and 1934. This had become possible twenty some years after Leopold’s disgrace and loss of “his Congo,” once the international condemnation of his abuse of power and heinous crimes had died down.

Now that the condemnation has been rekindled all over the world and inside Belgium itself, the question is what to do with King Leopold’s legacy in the Congo.