“My rights to the Congo are not for sharing; they are the fruits of my labours and my expenditures . . . The adversaries of the Congo are pressing for immediate annexation. These persons no doubt hope that a change of regime would sabotage the work now in progress and would enable them to reap some rich booty.”
“China has gone on a logging orgy outside its borders, often illegally, to procure logs from Indonesia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and Siberia. And now Chinese logging firms are moving into the Amazon and Congo Basin.”
Source: Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
“We were children in struggle, of the sun in crimson soil.”
Source: In the midst of the womb
“I taught myself that a South African woman does not carry her baby with a kitenge. That I stay in a township, that there were Sangomas and not Kimbanguism… I got used to the fact that my bible was my bible. God was God, that I had that home.”
Source: In the midst of the womb
“Zo cultiveer je in Afrika de haat tegen alles wat blank, Europees en Westers is: door te beweren dat Antwerpse chocolade handjes symbool zouden staan voor de afgehakte handen van zwarten tijdens de koloniale tijd in Congo. ‘Diabolisch’ om zoiets te beweren…”
“The first and biggest deceit at the heart of King Leopold’s Ghost is the attempt to equate Léopold’s “État indépendant du Congo” or EIC (long mistranslated as the Congo Free State) with Western colonialism. Yet the EIC was a short-term solution to the absence of colonial government in the Congo river basin.”
Source: King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
“The deal was simple: Léopold was to open the area to trade and eliminate endemic Arab slave empires and African tribal wars. In return, he hoped to bring glory to the Belgian people for having done what no other European ruler dared (one in three Europeans who traveled to the Congo died, usually of illness). The EIC had nothing to do with the Belgian government. To the extent that limited abuses and misrule occurred in some parts of his domain, this was a direct result of its not being controlled by a European state. As no less than Morel insisted (not quoted by Hochschild), “Let us refrain from referring to the Congo as a Belgian colony, let us avoid writing of ‘Belgian misrule.”
Source: King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
“I make an appeal to the people of the civilized world, whose representatives signed the Berlin Act of 1885, and the Brussels Act of 1890, to unite in putting pressure upon their respective Governments to take the territories known as the independant Congo State out of the hands of King Leopold II, now ruler over a million square miles in Africa, inhabited by twenty million negroes; and by such measures as may be decided upon at a new Conference, to ensure that the provisions of the Berlin and Brussels Acts shall be effectively carried out in those territories.”
Source: The Congo Slave State: A Protest Against the New African Slavery
“The second, but more visible, untruth is the claim that for 23 years, EIC officials throughout the territory sponsored violent actions such as chopping off hands to force natives to collect rubber, leaving millions dead in a horror that should be directly compared to the Holocaust. There are about a dozen little cheats here, one embedded in the other like Russian nesting dolls.”
Source: King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
“The rubber quotas imposed on natives in this 15 percent of the territory were enforced by native soldiers working for the companies or for the EIC itself. In many areas, the rubber came with ease and the natives prospered. The rubber station at Irengi, for instance, was known for its bulging stores and hospitable locals, whose women spent a lot of time making bracelets and where “no one ever misses a meal,” noted the EIC soldier George Bricusse in his memoirs. Elsewhere, however, absent direct supervision, and with the difficulties of meeting quotas greater, some native soldiers engaged in abusive behavior to force the collection. Bricusse noted these areas as well, especially where locals had sabotaged rubber stations and then fled to the French Congo to the north. In rare cases, native soldiers kidnapped women or killed men to exact revenge. When they fell into skirmishes, they sometimes followed long-standing Arab and African traditions by cutting off the hands or feet of the fallen as trophies, or to show that the bullets they fired had been used in battle. How many locals died in these frays is unclear, but the confirmed cases might put the figure at about 10,000, a terrible number.”
Source: King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.