orup:
A father stares at the hands of his five year-old daughter, which were severed as a punishment for having harvested too little rubber.
This is what was happening in the Congo at the hands of the Belgians under King Leopold. Let us be clear dear people who like to claim that because their parents were immigrants to America they never benefited from the slave trade. People were taken from Africa & exported as slaves to other countries, but Africans were also enslaved & killed on the continent. For generations. That’s the legacy of the colonialism & imperialism that made the West so wealthy & created the “Third World”.
From the end of the 19th century through the turn of the 20th century, King Leopold II of Belgium ran the so-called Congo Free State as his private property, amassing an enormous fortune by turning most adult males into slaves to collect wild rubber and ivory from the jungle. The women and children were held hostages—their hands, noses and ears often chopped off when the men in their families did not meet their rubber quota or failed to return. For over 23 years, Leopold’s army forced hundreds of thousands of slaves to work in killing conditions where many died from exhaustion. Some 20 slave uprisings were put down with extreme bloodthirstiness. After the Belgians discovered gold in 1903, they worked thousands to death in gold mines. It has been estimated that about 10 million people out of a population of 20 million lost their lives under King Leopold’s barbarous rule.
