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Belgium
An important factor in the "Scramble for Africa" was the sense of "grabbing" territory, even if it was impenetrable jungle or waterless desert, simply to prevent a neighbour in Europe from putting up his flag on the same land. It was King Leopold of Belgium, and his claim to the huge Congo Basin,
who contributed most to this sense of urgency. He was prepared to pay from his own pocket for a colony bigger than his own country. Caught in the frenzy, Portugal felt obliged to extend its old claims, going back to the 16th century, to enormous parts of Angola and Mozambique.
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A Punch cartoon showing King Leopold of Belgium looking at the spoils of his African campaign. |
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King Leopold and the Belgium Congo
The Congo provides the most curious and the most bloody example of European colonisation in Africa.
Belgium had only become independent in 1830 and was obliged by law to be a neutral country. Consequently, it could not engage in any adventures in Europe alongside the big powers. Although the Belgian people and government were not particularly enthusiastic, the king, Leopold, was desperate to give the country an Empire. "There are no small nations .... only small minds", he is quoted as saying.
Creating an "Association Internationale Aticaine", he had, by 1875, laid claim to a huge territory, eighty times the size of his own country, in the Congo basin. It was the king's own property, paid for entirely out of his own pocket. By the 1880's, however, his finances were in difficulty and, by a series of royal ordinances, the colonial tax-collectors were authorised to go into villages and extract quotas of
rubber from the villagers as taxation.
The British Consul in the "Congo Independent State", Roger Casement, produced a famous report in 1903, in which he revealed how Congolese natives were being systematically mutilated (hands, ears, noses cut oft), ',whipped and executed for not 'producing enough wild rubber for their (taxes. The scandals grew so great that ithe Belgian parliament demanded that their king relinquish his private colony and hand it
over to the Belgian state (1908). The Congo had become the most notorious of all European colonies in Africa. |
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©
Shirley Burchill, Nigel Hughes, Richard Gale, Peter
Price and Keith Woodall 2007
Footnote : As far as the Open Door team can ascertain the images shown on this page are in the Public Domain. |
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