imJustiKe

[trigger warning: murder, mutilation, rape]


Leopold II set up the operations to extract the maximum profit, and over the course of the decades the Free State altered its policies several times to ensure its basic objective. The many different policies were united by a premise: as a 1923 manual put it, ‘The laziness of the colored races is a kind of genetic burden.’ Violence was necessary to overcome this natural indolence. Therefore, the Free State’s officials brutalized the people of the Congo, killing them mercilessly, and torturing those who could not or would not work. Leopold II’s Free State set up the Force Publique, a militia designed to strike terror in the heart of the workforce. If a worker did not work hard, the officer would cut off their hand; one district official received 1,308 hands in one day from his subordinates. Fievez, and official of the Free State, noted of those who refused to collect rubber or else who did not meet their rubber quota, ‘I made war against them. One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people, but that allowed five hundred others to live.’ Rape was routine, but so was the mutilation of the male and female genitalia in the presence of family members. To supply the emergent tire industry, Leopold II’s Free State, therefore, sucked the life out of the rubber vines and murdered half the Congo’s population in the process (between 1885 and 1908, the population declined from twenty million to ten million).”

raped women. mutilated children. discarded black bodies.

Peepo Choo vol 2