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Congo Free State Quotes

Browse 133 quotes about Congo Free State.

Congo Free State Quotes

“White Man, Apex Predator of Earth (Sonnets 2399-2400) You know how the dinosaurs went extinct - they committed suicide when they saw the white man coming. They said to themselves, clearly white men are the apex predator of earth, so there's no point of us being! Asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs, caucasteroids wiped out civilizations. Colonialism was a mass extinction event, yet no textbook has the spine to bear the burden. You demonize hitler for his measly 6m white body count! Americas were radiant with life, love and wonder, then columbus happened, and population dropped 90%, bengal had the world's finest silk industry, then churchill happened, and industry collapsed, 4 million starved to death, millions massacred across india, like australia, like leopold-infestation in congo. Everywhere the white man has laid his eyes on, plague, famine and massacre has followed, and they had the gall to send missionaries to the south - ubuntu, advaita, aztecs and mayans, each could eat eurotheologies for breakfast and still have room for a 50 course meal. In a way we should be thanking the cannibals, they were doing humanity great service, if only the africans, indians, native americans, aboriginal australians had done the same, earth would have been spared the brutalest extinction event in the history of life.”

GenocideHolocaustColonialismWhite SupremacyCongo Free StateColonial HistoryNeonaziMassacreMass ExtinctionBengal Famine
Book:Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat
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“It is the King who supports the State from his pocket, to challenge the State for the products of his estates is to force the King from his pocket to cover deficits, a good part of which will come from the free abandonment of the land. 'exploitation of State estates to commercial houses to fatten them on a voluntary basis, houses which not only do nothing for the progress of civilization but which have delayed it with all their might and would like to delay it further in order to be States, tyrants in the State.”

CongoLeopold IiBelgiumCongo Free StateIndependant State Of The Congo
Author:Edmund Van Eetvelde
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“Hochschild is at pains to convince the reader that anyone opposing the EIC was good, whether brutal slave trader, inveterate cannibal, fetish priest, or ethnic-cleansing warlord. His treatment of the 1895 rebellion by native soldiers at a military camp named Luluabourg in the southern savannah strains to portray the rebels as noble savages pining for freedom and a return to pastoral life. In his telling, the Belgian commander Mathieu Pelzer was a “bully” who “used his fists” and thus got his comeuppance at breakfast with a knife to the throat. Actually, Pelzer had nothing to do with it. The rebels were former soldiers for a black slave king. The EIC had brought them to the southern camp to reintegrate them as government soldiers. But their loss of royal prerogatives to whore, steal, and maim caused them to rebel. The group never exceeded 300 (Hochschild speculates that it reached 2,500) and petered out in the northern jungles in 1897, a rag-tag criminal gang gone to seed.”

CongoLeopold IiBelgiumCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S Ghost
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“Hochschild repeats the urban legend that Léopold burned all the EIC documents, going “to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence.” Quite the opposite: Léopold was proud of the EIC and went to extraordinary lengths to leave behind an extensive record. The testimony of his military aide that Hochschild cites about “burning the State archives” and turning “most of the Congo state records to ash” was a misunderstanding: what the aide saw burning were ruined and unreadable papers among the thousands of documents that came back in crates from the Congo in 1908. Léopold left behind 14 trunks filled with his personal letters and financial statements. Everything was carefully cataloged in “a vast room that looked like a post office,” the aide recalled. Some of it went missing in the turmoil of World War II before resurfacing in the basement of a house in 1983. Just last year, researchers at the Royal Museum for Central Africa who work on the EIC archives published a new book, The Congo Free State: What Could Archives Tell Us?”

CongoLeopold IiBelgiumCongo Free StateAdam HochschildArchibesRoyal Museum For Central Africa
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“I was received with an overwhelming display of military and civilian tributes, all the way to the royal palace where I was to stay, troops were lined up behind which enthusiastic people were chanting their viva, it seemed to me that a major change had come in the Belgian public opinion on the importance of the Congo, when I first went there, the Belgian newspapers spouted nothing but criticism, they were completely dumbfounded, the king was recognized as the great benefactor of the nation.”

CongoLeopold IiBelgiumCongo Free StateLeopold Ii Of BelgiumHenry Morton Stanley
Author:Henry M. Stanley
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“You can find it on almost any tree. As we made our way through the forest, it was literally raining rubber juice. Our clothes were full of it. The Congo has so many tributaries that a well-organized company can easily extract a few tons of rubber per year here. You only have to sail up such a river and the branches with rubber hang almost up to your ship. (In a Letter to King Leopold II of the Belgians)”

CongoLeopold IiBelgiumCongo Free StateBelgian CongoHenry Morton Stanly
Author:Henry M. Stanley
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“These expeditions respond to an extraordinarily civilizing Christian idea: to abolish slavery in Africa, to dispel the darkness that still reigns in part of the world, to get to know the resources that seem gigantic, in short, pouring out the treasures of civilization, that's it. purpose of this modern crusade worthy of our era.”

ExplorationCongoLeopold IiBelgiumCongo Free StateLeopold Ii Of BelgiumHenry Morton StanleyScramble For AfricaEuropean ExpansionLivingstone
Author:Leopold II
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“It is not about Belgian colonies. It is about establishing a new state that is as large as possible and about its governance. It should be clear that in this project there can be no question of granting the Negroes the slightest form of political power. That would be ridiculous. The whites, who lead the posts, have all the power.”

CongoLeopold IiBelgiumCongo Free StateBelgian CongoBelgian ColonialismBelgian Colonial EmpireLeopold Ii Ofbelgium
Author:Leopold II
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“France and Germany, long jealous of the king's lucrative rubber profits, had their eye on pieces of Congo territory. President Roosevelt hinted that he was willing to join Britain in convening an international conference to discuss the Congo’s fate. Three times the British and American ministers in Brussels went, together, to see the Belgian minister of foreign affairs and press for Belgian annexation. But sharply limited as Leopold II’s powers were in Belgium itself, the worried Belgian government had no legal authority over him in his role as ruler of the Congo. In the end, the king held the key cards, and he knew it.”

CongoLeopold IiGreat BritainCongo Free StateJelousy
Book:King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
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“No one can know, of course, accurate population figures from an era before there was a census, but many officials on the ground at the time and later historians, demographers, and anthropologists have made estimates of great loss.”

CongoCongo Free StateLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold IiHoax
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“On another point: King Leopold’s Ghost reproduces some of the photographs of Congo atrocities that fueled the worldwide protests against Leopold’s rule during the first decade of the twentieth century. These “fake photos,” Gilley declares, were “staged” by the photographer. Yes, some images appear posed—something true of most photos everywhere in an era when cameras were bulky contraptions on tripods whose subjects had to remain still for a few seconds.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam HochschildBruce GilleyKing Leopold IiKing Leopold S Ghost
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“Adam Hochschild has enjoyed a long run of success with King Leopold’s Ghost, his distortionary 1998 tale about the État Indépendant du Congo (EIC). So long, in fact, that he appears unable to come clean about its many fabrications. It is not just the doctoring of the quotation that anchors the story of “chopped hands for red rubber” (which I am grateful he has admitted), but the vast skein of distortion in which that little dodge is embedded.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold IiKing Leopold S Ghost
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“Hochschild is correct that the demographer Léon de St. Moulin assayed the 50 percent decline possibility (in 1987 and 1990 works). But Hochschild fails to mention that Moulin, like the later Vansina, believed that the EIC and rubber had nothing to do with it. The causes for Moulin were, in order, sleeping sickness, smallpox, Spanish flu, and venereal diseases. Moulin did not even mention the EIC or rubber in his 1990 chapter. Like the later Vansina, he recognized that these were footnotes in the demographic history of the Congo.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold IiHoax
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“As for the claims by the Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem (“13 million killed” in 1998, then “5 to 10 million killed” in 2008), they are hard to keep track of. Initially, the starting year for his assertions was 1880 (five years before the EIC was founded and ten years before any rubber harvesting) while the latter estimate extended the end year to 1930 (22 years after the EIC). A second edition of the latter estimate, without explanation, moved up the starting date to 1885. Ndaywel cites no data or methods. All three editions of his book merely cite Moulin. It is notable that in a lengthy essay on the EIC published in L’Histoire in 2020, Ndaywel no longer makes any specific population claims, asserting only that the effects of the EIC were “worse than grim” (“plus que macabres”). In the end, Ndaywel is not credible. His works are published by the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium because he is black. This helps them to “decolonize Eurocentric narratives,” which means using blacks as shadow puppets to shield their radical accounts from criticism.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold IiHoaxIsidore Ndaywel è Nziem
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“Hochschild insists on calling the EIC an example of “colonialism”, stretching the term beyond its meaning. European colonies were governed by and accountable to the institutions of a liberal state at home. That was the fundamental structural fact of a European colony, meaning the characteristic that explains its behavior. This fundamental fact was absent from the EIC. This explains its evolution and eventual takeover by Belgium. The EIC was a second-best solution to the absence of colonialism. Hochschild will have none of it because his intention all along was to use his tale as an indictment of European colonialism (“A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa”, as the subtitle put it). A fevered ideological agenda does not collapse a valid conceptual distinction.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“Comparing the EIC to the Nazis is grotesque. Hochschild has nothing to say about this odious rhetorical maneuver, an insult not just to Jews but to the Congolese who fought and remained loyal to the memory of the EIC. Referring to my essay as “polemical” in defense of a book that makes regular references to Auschwitz is rich indeed.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“Hochschild’s sweet reason in his letter on the complex question of European colonialism appears to have abandoned him while writing the book (or is newfound). “Communism, Fascism, and European colonialism each asserted the right to totally control its subjects’ lives,” he wrote grandly in the book. How is it possible that he now writes about the “subtle and complex business” of assessing colonialism?”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“I am glad that Hochschild admits that the photographs in his book are fake. Still, to his point, I do not doubt that the traditional African hippo whip was used by EIC officials. Nor do I doubt that chains were used to confine prisoners in the EIC when prisons were not available. Nor do I doubt that the Arab tradition of chopping off the hands of fallen enemies persisted well into the EIC era, even among natives employed by the government or concession companies. So what? If Hochschild’s argument is that the area should have been colonized from the start (as his hero Edmund Morel argued), I would agree. If his argument is that the EIC should have been financed by liquor imports or village hut taxes rather than the 40 hours per month labor requirement for those who could not pay individual taxes, I will side with the King.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“I wish that Hochschild would come clean on the litany of other errors I catalogue in my essay: Conrad could not have seen any of the alleged rubber atrocities; Léopold did not burn his archives, and nothing was “locked away from outside view”; Kurtz’s head-strewn compound was not based on a Belgian official but on African warlords; Léon Fiévez’s African troops killed 100 warriors of local tribal chiefs who had reneged on a promise to supply food, not 100 hapless villagers who failed to turn in rubber; the trade surplus of the EIC reflected payments that went for infrastructure, administration, and security, not a slave economy.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“As I wrote, despite the malicious craft practiced by Hochschild and others, I am glad that an extensive documentary record of the EIC and of European colonies more generally survives, not that I expect any honest use of them in our current moral panic. Hochschild was merely an early entry into a genre that has since blossomed into an industry of scholars who “interrogate” the archives to cough up evidence of the evils of the West. There is of course no such documentary record of the horrific conditions the Europeans replaced, and in any case most Western readers would not buy a book on endemic venereal disease in Africa or stool disputes among the Kuba. A salacious tale on the Belgian king and his mistresses torturing black people to pay for their follies? Now you’re talking!”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“I also do not begrudge Hochschild his millions, although, unlike him, I have untold praise for the capitalist system that produced them (he recently compared Amazon warehouses to slave plantations and in a 2016 book he lamented the failure of a socialist revolution in Spain). But to write history requires an immersion in the context, constraints, and worldviews of those involved.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“Hochschild just can’t seem to get over the fact that life was very, very different long ago. I, for one, am less ready to leap to condemnation for the petty abuses of the EIC, especially against people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. If he wants to join the Congo Reform Movement, so be it. It has been going on for over 100 years and is not likely to stop. When I call this white guilt porn, I do not intend it as polemic, but merely description.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“Much is at stake. In giving Hochschild its Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award in 2008, the American Historical Association claimed that King Leopold’s Ghost “broke through one of the most impenetrable silences of history” by revealing the “mass death” and “rampant atrocities” in the EIC. Be reminded that the AHA is the representative of professional historians in the United States, not the editorial board of Dissent magazine. The AHA went on to call the book “a key text in the historiography of colonial Africa for college and graduate students.” The AHA and Hochschild are also agreed on the really excellent quality of the 1619 Project, which Hochschild calls (micro-aggression notwithstanding) “masterful.” He has described the writing of history as uncovering “shame.” The AHA, warming to the idea, praised Hochschild’s “humanist agenda” with its mission “to combat inhumanity.” History should have no agenda other than uncovering the truth. It should combat only ignorance about the past. If this is the state of public history in the West, we are in a very bad place indeed.”

ColonialismCongoCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold Ii
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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