Welcome back to the Deep Dive. You know, I was
walking through Brussels a few months ago, and
the architecture there is just, it's staggering.
It really is. You have these massive triumphal
arches, the sprawling royal greenhouses at Laken
that look like crystal palaces, and the grandeur
of the Antwerp Central Station. A railroad cathedral.
Exactly. It feels like a city built by giants.
And locally, the man responsible for a lot of
that is still sometimes called the Builder King.
It's a powerful nickname, isn't it? It conjures
up images of, you know, infrastructure, progress,
a golden age. Yeah. But it's also a nickname
that serves as a bit of a mask. Because if you
take that same man and mention his name in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, you aren't
talking about a builder. You're talking about
a ghost. A ghost that haunts one of the most
mechanically brutal regimes in human history.
We are talking, of course, about King Leopold
II of Belgium. And the mission for today isn't
just to recount the atrocities, because sadly,
I think a lot of our listeners know the headline,
the king who cut off hands. Right. The basics
are known. The mission today is to really unpack
the paradox. How does a constitutional monarch
of a tiny, neutral European country, I mean,
a guy with very limited political power at home,
how does he manage to personally privately own
a chunk of Africa, 76 times larger than his own
kingdom. And not just own it, but run it as a
vertically integrated corporate monopoly, one
that extracted wealth with such a ruthless efficiency
that it broke the demographics of Central Africa
for a century. So today we've got a massive stack
of sources. We're pulling from his personal correspondence,
the breakdown of the Berlin Conference treaties,
the famous casement report, and some really interesting
modern economic papers that look at the long
-term effects of the rubber tear. Yeah, those
are fascinating. We're going to try to understand
the machinery of this con, because that's really
what it was, right? A geopolitical con job. It
absolutely was. And to understand the con, you
really have to understand the con artist. Because
Leopold II wasn't, you know, born a monster.
He was born a very frustrated, a very ambitious
second son. Okay, so let's get into that backstory.
He was born in 1835. And usually second sons
in royal families have a bit more freedom, maybe
a military career. But Leopold's life took a
sharp turn and it happened early on. Right. He
was never meant to be king. His older brother,
Louis Philippe, was the heir apparent. But Louis
Philippe died in infancy. So suddenly Leopold
is thrust into this position of immense pressure.
And by all accounts, he wasn't exactly. His mother,
Queen Louise, died when he was 15. So a teenager.
Yeah. And the sources describe him as incredibly
withdrawn. He had this long nose that he was
very self -conscious about. He had a limp and
he was just socially awkward. He wasn't the guy
working the room at the party. Not at all. No.
He was the guy in the corner taking notes on
everyone else's assets and his marriage. Well,
that's a whole other tragedy. Marriage of a stableman
and a nun. That was the public joke. It was cruel,
but pretty accurate. At 18, he marries Marie
Henriette of Austria. Now, she was this vibrant,
outdoorsy woman who absolutely loved horses.
She practically lived in the stables. And Leopold
was this stiff indoor intellectual who just obsessed
over maps and ledgers. They had absolutely nothing
in common. It was a miserable match from day
one. And the tragedy that really seems to seal
his fate, or at least his psychological trajectory,
happens in 1869. Yes. They had three daughters
and one son, also named Leopold. The boy was
everything, the future of the dynasty. But at
age nine, he falls into a pond, catches pneumonia,
and dies. And for a monarch in the 19th century,
that isn't just a personal loss. It's a professional
catastrophe. It's a disaster. It's severed the
direct mail line. Leopold never had another legitimate
son. And the sources say he became incredibly
cold toward his daughters and his wife after
that. You can't help but psychoanalyze that a
bit. Well, you can't. And many historians argue
that this is the moment where his ambition really
shifted. He couldn't build a biological legacy,
a dynasty, so he decided to build a material
one. He needed something that couldn't die of
pneumonia. And he decided that something was
an empire. I was reading his letters from before
he was even king. when he was just the Duke of
Brabant. He was traveling all over India, China,
Egypt. And he wasn't just sightseeing. He was
shopping. He was shopping. And he was incredibly
jealous. He looked at the British Empire, the
Dutch in the East Indies, and he felt that Belgium
was just suffocating. He famously wrote to his
brother, the country must be strong, prosperous,
therefore have colonies of her own, beautiful
and calm. Beautiful and calm. It's so ironic
given what he eventually created. But he didn't
start with Africa, did he? I read that he actually
tried to buy the Philippines. He was desperate.
He looked at the Spanish Empire, which was crumbling,
and the Portuguese, and he thought, I can just
buy a fixer -upper. He made serious inquiries
about buying the Philippines from Spain. He looked
at purchasing bits of Argentina. He even looked
at, like, renting territory. And nobody was selling.
Nobody was selling. And the Belgian parliament
had zero interest. They were a small, neutral
country. They didn't want the headache of a nervy
or a colonial administration. So he realizes.
I can't buy one and my government won't conquer
one for me. If I want a colony, I have to go
out and make one myself. Exactly. And this is
where the genius, and I use that word very darkly,
of his plan comes in. He realized that in the
late 19th century, you couldn't just invade somewhere
without the other European powers getting angry.
You needed a cover story. And enter the International
African Society. which sounds like a very prestigious,
you know, NGO. And that was precisely the point.
In 1876, he hosts this massive geographical conference
in Brussels. He invites all the big names, explorers,
scientists, geographers from all over. And he
pitches this organization as a purely humanitarian
and scientific mission. What were the stated
goals? The stated goals were to abolish the Arab
slave trade in East Africa, to bring civilization
or Christianity to the natives, and to map the
interior of the continent. It was the perfect
philanthropic front. We're just here to help.
And everyone bought it. He was the chairman,
but he claimed he had no political ambitions
whatsoever. And it was under this banner that
he hired Henry Morton Stanley. The Dr. Livingston,
I presume, guy? The celebrity explorer. The most
famous celebrity explorer of the era. Leopold
hired him in 1878, and his job was essentially
to be a mercenary real estate agent. He sent
Stanley up the Congo River to establish stations
and, crucially, to sign treaties with local chiefs.
I want to dig into these treaties because this
is the legal bedrock of the whole catastrophe,
isn't it? Mm -hmm. Stanley goes into these villages,
meets with local leaders and gets them to sign
papers. But what were they actually signing?
It was a total fraud. I mean, the chiefs often
couldn't read the European languages the treaties
were written in. Of course not. Stanley would
use these cheap tricks like a battery that gave
electric shocks or a magnifying glass to light
cigars to convince them he had magic. And in
exchange for some cloth or brass wire or a bottle
of gin, these chiefs were unknowingly signing
over the sovereignty of their land. And not just
the land. No. they were signing over the exclusive
rights to all labor and all resources to Leopold's
organization forever. And Stanley came back with
over 450 of these so -called treaties. That's
a lot of paperwork. It gave Leopold the paper
trail he needed, but he still needed the great
powers of Europe to recognize it. And this brings
us to the Berlin Conference of 1884 -1885. This
is the moment the scramble for Africa is formalized.
Leopold plays this room like a fiddle. He just
pits everyone against everyone else. It's a master
class in diplomatic manipulation. He knew the
British didn't want the French to have the Congo.
He knew the French didn't want the British to
have it. Right. So he goes to the French and
says, look, support my claim. And I promise that
if I ever have to sell the Congo, I will sell
it to you first. He gives them the right of first
refusal. So France thinks, great, this guy is
going to go bankrupt in a few years and we'll
just inherit the whole territory. Precisely.
Then he goes to the Germans under Bismarck and
says, I'll be a useful buffer zone between the
big powers. And then he goes to the United States,
specifically President Chester Hay Arthur, and
he plays the humanitarian card big time. The
free trade card. The free trade card. He promises
that the Congo will be a free trade zone, no
tariffs, open to merchants from all countries,
a paradise for capitalists. That was the key,
right? The name. It wasn't Leopold Empire. It
was the Congo Free State. The branding was impeccable.
And the U .S. was actually the first country
to recognize his claim. By the end of the conference,
14 European nations and the U .S. recognized
Leopold II, not the Belgian government, but Leopold
personally, as the sovereign of the Congo Free
State. I just want to pause and let the scale
of that sink in for a moment. A single man, a
constitutional monarch in Europe, is given personal
title to 2 .3 million square kilometers of land
in Africa. It's 76 times the size of Belgium.
It's just I can't wrap my head around. It's unprecedented.
He didn't have to answer to a parliament. He
didn't have to answer to a constitution. In the
Congo, he was an absolute monarch. God on earth.
So he has the land. He has the international
recognition. Now he has to make it pay. And initially,
that wasn't going so well, was it? He was actually
burning through his personal fortune. Oh, he
was on the verge of bankruptcy. For the first
few years, the main export was ivory. And ivory
is valuable, sure, but it's heavy, it's hard
to transport, and you only get it once per elephant.
The cost of building the railway and maintaining
the steamboats were eating him alive. He was
borrowing money from the Belgian state just to
keep the lights on. And then technology changes
everything. In the 1890s, John Boyd Dunlop invents
the pneumatic tire. And boom! Suddenly the bicycle
craze hits Europe and America. Then the automobile
industry starts to rev up. The world needs rubber.
And as luck would have it, the Central African
rainforest is teeming with Landolphia oweriensis
wild rubber vines. Now this distinction is really
important. Wild rubber versus cultivated rubber.
Because I think people imagine these neat rows
of rubber trees like you'd see in a plantation
in Southeast Asia. That is not what this was.
Not at all. And that difference is the root of
the terror. Cultivated rubber, the hevia trees,
took years to grow. And Leopold didn't have years.
He needed cash now. The Congo had wild vines
that wound their way up giant trees hundreds
of feet in the air. So how do you even harvest
that? It's dangerous, exhausting work. You have
to go deep into the jungle, find these vines,
slash them, and then catch the sap. And the sap
coagulates really quickly. Right. So often, the
collectors had to smear the sap on their own
bodies to dry it, then peel it off later, which
would tear out all their hair and skin. It was
miserable work. Nobody would do it voluntarily
for the pittance Leopold was willing to pay.
So the Free State stopped being free pretty quickly.
Leopold issued a series of decrees that basically
nationalized the entire territory. He declared
that all vacant land belonged to the state. And
since the Congolese legal concept of land ownership
was about farming plots, village land, Leopold
argued that the vast forests were vacant. Therefore,
the rubber in the forests belonged to him. Exactly.
So if a Congolese man gathered rubber and then
tried to sell it to, say, a British merchant,
he was now stealing from the king. And to enforce
this monopoly and, you know, to make people...
go into the forest, he created the force public.
The public force. This was his private mercenary
army. The officers were white, mostly Belgians,
but also some Scandinavians and Italians. Basically,
any adventurer looking for a fat paycheck and
no oversight. And the rank and file. The rank
and file were African. And this is a particularly
tragic layer of it all. Many of the soldiers
were recruited. by raiding villages, kidnapping
children, and then raising them in Catholic mission
schools to be soldiers. So they were completely
cut off from their own cultures. Stripped of
their identity and turned into instruments of
the state, it was a machine designed to turn
terror into rubber. And the mechanism for that
was the quota system. Right. So each village
was given a quota. A quota of rubber to bring
in every two weeks. If the quota wasn't met,
the consequences were medieval. The forced public
would arrive armed with modern rifles and the
shakut, a whip made of sun -dried hippopotamus
hide that could flay a man to the bone. And the
hostage -taking. That seems to have been standard
operating procedure. It was systematic. The soldiers
would enter a village, seize the women and children,
and hold them in stockades, often in horrible
conditions with little food or water. And they'd
tell the men. If you want to see your wife and
children again, you go into the forest and you
don't come back until you have your 50 kilos
of rubber. This must have just destroyed the
local economy, the whole social fabric. If the
men are in the forest hunting for vines and the
women are being held hostage, nobody is farming.
Nobody is hunting for food. Exactly. And this
is why the death toll is so incredibly high.
It wasn't just the direct executions. It was
mass starvation. It was a complete collapse of
the agricultural cycle. People were dying of
famine and exhaustion. And disease, I imagine.
Oh, absolutely. Because their immune systems
were shot. Diseases like smallpox and sleeping
sickness just ravaged the population. We have
to talk about the hands. It is the defining,
horrifying image of this entire regime. And what
shocked me in the research was that it wasn't
just sadism, though I'm sure it was that too.
It was accounting. It was bureaucracy. That's
the banality of evil aspect of it. The cartridges,
the bullets were imported from Europe. They cost
money. Leopold's administration was paranoid
that the soldiers were using the expensive bullets
to hunt for food or maybe were selling them.
So they issued a strict order. Every bullet fired
must be accounted for. One bullet, one dead rebel.
Right. And the proof of a kill was a severed
right hand. So if a soldier fired at a fleeing
villager and missed, or if he used a bullet to
shoot a wild boar for dinner, he had a deficit
in his ledger. He had to produce a hand to show
his officer. So they would find a living person,
a child. And cut off their hand to balance the
books. Men, women, children, it didn't matter.
Missionaries reported seeing baskets of smoked
hands being delivered to the post commanders.
It even became a kind of currency. In some horrific
cases, villages that couldn't meet their rubber
quota would attack neighboring villages just
to gather hands to pay off the forced public.
It turned the entire society in on itself. Completely.
The numbers are always debated in genocides and
atrocities, but what is the modern consensus
on the human cost here? It's hard to be precise
because obviously Leopold wasn't taking a careful
census of the people he was killing. But looking
at the population data we have from before and
after, historians like Adam Hochschild and Jan
van Siena estimate the population dropped by
about 10 million people. 10 million. That's roughly
50 percent of the population of the Congo Basin,
wiped out in roughly 20 years. 50 percent. And
while this is happening, while the baskets of
hands are being counted, in the Congo, the money
is flowing back to Belgium. And this is where
we get the builder king. This is the disconnect
that is so hard to swallow. Leopold was using
this blood money to literally pave the streets
and build monuments in Brussels. And he was clever
about how he moved the money, right? He didn't
just deposit checks from the rubber companies.
He created the royal trust. The donation royale.
This was his way of laundering the profits and
securing his legacy. He transferred ownership
of his private estates and properties to the
Belgian nation, but, and this is the key part,
he retained the usufruct. Which means? The right
to use them and control them until his death.
This also meant the properties couldn't be sold
off or divided among his daughters, whom he detested.
It was a way to control his wealth from beyond
the grave. And what did he build with this money?
I mean, the list is extensive. The massive triumphal
arch at the Cinquantenaire Park that was built
to celebrate Belgian independence, but it was
funded by Congolese slavery, the expansion of
the royal palace at Laken. The Japanese tower
and the Chinese pavilion, too. Yes, these odd
exotic follies on the outskirts of Brussels.
And of course, the Antwerp Central Station, often
called the Railroad Cathedral, one of the most
beautiful train stations in the world. It was
finished in 1905, right at the peak of the rubber
terror. So it effectively means that the tourist
map of Brussels is a map of colonial exploitation.
You can't separate the stones from the source
of the money. You can't. And at the same time
he was doing all this, he was playing the role
of the benevolent constitutional monarch at home.
In Belgium, his government was actually passing
some progressive laws. They legalized trade unions.
They passed laws restricting child labor and
Belgian factories. Wait, so he's protecting Belgian
children while enslaving and mutilating Congolese
children. The compartmentalization is, frankly,
psychopathic. He viewed Belgium as his family
home, a place to be protected and improved. He
viewed the Congo as his plantation, a thing to
be harvested. He even invested heavily in building
massive fortresses at Liege and Namur to protect
Belgian neutrality against the Germans. He was
obsessed with the safety of Belgium. But the
secrets couldn't stay hidden forever. The world
started to notice. And it really started with
a shipping clerk in Antwerp, didn't it? Edie
Morrell. This is one of the great detective stories
of modern history. Edmund D. Morrell was a British
clerk working for a shipping line that had the
monopoly on all Congo transport. So he saw the
manifests. He saw the manifests. He was standing
on the docks in Antwerp day after day watching
the ships come and go, and he noticed a glaring
anomaly. What was it? He saw ships arriving from
the Congo filled to the brim with incredibly
valuable goods rubber and ivory and millions
and millions of francs worth. But when he looked
at the manifest for what was being shipped back
to the Congo, it wasn't trade goods. It wasn't
cloth or tools or anything to pay for that rubber.
It was guns, ammunition and chains. And he just
did the math. If nothing of value is going in
and a fortune is coming out. Then the labor must
be forced. It had to be slavery. Morell realized
the whole free state was a lie. He quit his job
and launched the Congo Reform Association. He
became a one -man media machine, publishing the
West African Mail, dumping data and whistleblower
accounts into the public sphere. And he wasn't
alone. The literary world got involved in a huge
way. Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan
Doyle. It was the first major international human
rights campaign of the 20th century. And the
Kodak camera played a huge role here. Missionaries
like Alice Seeley Harris took photos. Oh, the
photos are just unforgettable. There's one famous
photo, you've probably seen it, of a man named
Nasala looking at the severed hand and foot of
his five -year -old daughter, who was killed
because his village failed to meet its rubber
quota. That photo changed everything. You couldn't
deny it when you saw the grief on that man's
face. Right. And Morell projected these photos
on huge screens and lecture halls across Britain
and America. It made the abstraction of imperialism
completely visceral. Leopold tried to fight back,
though. He poured millions into a propaganda
war. He bribed journalists. Bribed newspaper
editors in Paris and Germany. He sent lobbyists
to Washington, D .C. to smear Morel. He even
tried to use a sort of celebrity influencer strategy,
didn't he? He did. He sponsored an American author
named May French Sheldon to take a luxury tour
of the Congo. She traveled on his private steamboats.
She drank champagne with the force public officers.
And then she came back and wrote glowing articles
about how. happy and symbolized everyone was.
A completely staged Potemkin village tour. Total
propaganda. But the Casement report was the real
nail in the coffin. Roger Casement. He was the
British consul. Right. He traveled deep into
the interior in 1903, not on Leopold's boats,
but renting a missionary steam launch. He interviewed
the refugees. He saw the mutilated bodies. His
report was official. It was detailed. And it
was absolutely damning. The British government
couldn't ignore it. And at the same time, Leopold's
personal reputation in Belgium was just imploding.
We mentioned he was unloved, but he became a
laughingstock because of his love life. The Baroness
Devon. Her real name was Caroline Lacroix. She
was a 16 -year -old French prostitute when Leopold,
then 65, met her. 65 and 16, that is struck.
He was completely infatuated. He bought her villas,
gave her millions of francs, and they had two
illegitimate sons. The Belgian public was scandalized,
not so much by the genocide in Africa, sadly,
but by the fact that their aging king was acting
like a senile fool with a teenager. And there
was a particularly brutal cartoon from that time
involving their child. Yes, their second son
was born with a deformed hand. A cartoonist drew
Leopold holding the baby, surrounded by the spectral
figures of Congolese victims holding up their
stumps. The caption was, Vengeance from on high.
Wow. It showed that the public was finally starting
to connect the domestic sin with the colonial
sin. So the pressure becomes too much. Politically,
everyone at home, the Catholics, the liberals,
the socialists, everyone wants him out of the
Congo business. Exactly. In 1908, the Belgian
parliament finally acted. They forced Leopold
to relinquish the Congo Free State to Belgium.
But and this is the real kicker. It wasn't a
seizure. It was a purchase. They paid him to
stop the genocide. Essentially, yes. The Belgian
state assumed 110 million francs of debt that
Leopold had racked up running the place. And
then they agreed to pay him another 50 million
francs personally as a mark of gratitude for
his great sacrifices. Gratitude. That is just
nauseating. He walked away one of the richest
men in Europe, but he was bitter about it. He
felt the country had stolen his personal property.
And this leads to the final act that really brings
us to the theme of memory. Just before the handover,
he ordered the archives of the Congo Free State
to be destroyed. He burned the evidence. For
eight days, the furnaces in the government offices
in Brussels were burning, 247. The smoke hung
over the district, and he allegedly told his
aide, I will give them my Congo, but they have
no right to know what I did there. They have
no right to know. He wanted to curate his own
history. he wanted to be remembered as the builder
not the butcher and for a very long time he succeeded
He died a year later, in 1909. And while the
crowds at his funeral procession booed, the state
machinery quickly moved to rehabilitate his image.
This is what some call the Great Forgetting.
Exactly. In the 1930s, his nephew, King Albert
Well, started inaugurating statues of Leopold
II all over Belgium. They rewrote the history
books. For decades, Belgian schoolchildren were
taught that Leopold II was a philanthropic genius
who saved the Congo from Arab slavers and built
up the country. And the violence. Completely
erased. The archives were gone, so the state
wrote its own truth. It wasn't until fairly recently,
1998 really, that the ghost came back in a big
way. Adam Hochschild published King Leopold's
Ghost. Now, he didn't discover new archives that
Leopold had missed, but he took the work of earlier
historians and the incredible first -person accounts
of people like Morel and Casement, and he wove
them into a narrative that became a global bestseller.
It forced Belgium to look in the mirror in a
way it hadn't before. And we saw the climax of
that tension in 2020. We did. During the global
Black Lives Matter protests following the murder
of George Floyd, the anger in Belgium just crystallized
around those statues. The statue in Antwerp was
doused in red paint and set on fire so many times
the city finally used a crane to take it away.
And the current king, King Philip, actually sent
a letter to the Congolese president. He did.
On the 60th anniversary of Congolese independence,
he expressed his deepest regret for the acts
of violence and cruelty committed during the
colonial period. Now, legally, regret is very...
different from an apology. Oh, very different.
An apology implies liability and opens the door
to reparations. Regret is an emotional state,
but it was still the first time a reigning Belgian
monarch had acknowledged the suffering in any
way. And yet the debate continues. You still
have people in Belgium, sometimes prominent politicians,
who say he built the country. He was a man of
his time. And that excuse. A man of his time
is the one that always crumbles under scrutiny
because Mark Twain was a man of his time. Roger
Casement was a man of his time. The Belgian socialists
who booed his funeral were men of their time.
They all knew it was wrong then. Leopold wasn't
acting according to the standards of the 19th
century. He was violating them and he knew it.
That's why he burned the archives. He burned
the archives because he knew history would judge
him. And it has. It absolutely has. We're going
to wrap up there. But as you walk through your
own cities, look at the grand old buildings,
look at the banks, the museums, the statues.
Leopold tried to burn the evidence. But in a
way, the evidence is actually standing right
there in the skyline of Brussels. Makes you wonder,
how many other monuments around the world are
just beautiful tombstones for crimes we've all
agreed to forget? That is a question worth digging
into. Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive.
We'll catch you next time.