When Belgium under King Leopold colonised the Congo, he did it with the sole impression of ending slave trade by the Arabs in Congo. At least what he told the world. Britain, America and the rest of the western world supported him. Who else at the time could be more benevolent to Africans of Congo than King Leopold? Who was so passionate over spending his entire royal fortune to save the helpless Congo people.
By the time he had secured Congo as a colony, the real intentions of Leopold was made manifest. His intention remained in accord with the colonial mentality of the time; that is to extract as much wealth from oversea territories as much as possible.
Because of space, I will not talk about the tragic start, but this was how the Congo people ended-
A. Due to the time coincided with the period of rubber boom, Congo was fortunately blessed with abundant wild rubber, on the contrary, the natural resource became a motivation for their own undoing by Leopold.
B. With enough Belgian soldiers who were ever willing to obey their sovereign, Leopold expropriated the resources of the Congo people in impunity.
C. Men by their head count per community were forced to deliver over four kilos of rubber to the rubber agents per week.
D. Women, children and elderly chiefs were kidnapped and held at ransom by the Belgian soldiers until their community provided the required amount of rubber for the week.
E. The women in detention, whether children virgins, wives of the towns people, mothers and grand mothers of the community, were brutally and sexually abused within the period of captivity, and in the process a good number of them died.
F. After each male delivers his quarter, he must also redeem their loved ones with chickens, goats, vegetables and other food items, because Leopold left the soldiers to fend for themselves while in Congo.
G. And when the soldiers think that the hostage taking was too demanding, because they had to first go on raid, kidnap people and then keep them locked up, which was becoming more difficult everyday. They therefore devised a more convenient approach to gather rubber for export to Europe.
H. When they approach a community that was found deficient on their rubber quarter, they opened fire on every living thing in sight. Young able bodied men, women and children were laid to waste in such expeditions, and their community burned to the ground. It was a warning to the next community that the Belgian colonial government was not joking over rubber collection.
I. And to ensure that the soldiers were not using their bullets on non human targets, (as many of them became wasteful of bullets and used it for hunting games) the soldiers were mandated to cut off the right hand of those they shot with the bullets supplied. The number of people killed must be in parity with the bullets used.
J. The hands that were cut off were usually roasted by a slow fire in army barracks to prevent them from decomposing until when inspectors come for bullet-hand audit. They were then stored by the hand keeper in iron cages to prevent rodents from eating them.
K. Now, when soldiers need bullets for hunting or other purposes, they normally gathered a group of villagers by a stream, force them inside a large fishing net, attached a large stone to the net and then drowned all of them. They were afterwards pulled out like large fishes in a net and had their hands cut off. Their bodies were dumped back to the river that it polluted it, and then their hands used to steal out bullets. Worst, some Belgian soldiers sometimes would cut off the hands of unsuspecting villagers without killing them.
L. When too many Congo people by their millions have either died, ran away, or without hands, it began to tell on the amount of rubber that could be secured for export to Europe. The ingenuity of the soldiers brought other barbaric ideas.
M. Men who could not secure enough rubber were made to face four options, cut of the hand of one of his children, have sex with one of his daughters, have his penis cut off or lose one of his children by strangulation.
N. Some men actually lost their penises in this manner. Europeans were actually good Christians, and also civilised considering their actions in Congo.
Anyways, there were no CNN, BBC OR ALJAZEERA TO COVER THAT IMPORTANT DEVELOPING STORY IN THE CONGO AT THE TIME.
-@izu-Chigbo