King Leopold II Of Belgium Was An Imperial Power

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Recommended: Slavery and colonial rule in africa

By: Cora-Beth Morran, Juliann Morgenstern Sarah Myruski, and Sophia Goff

I. Overview of the Conflict:
• Brief Overview of what happened.
• King Leopold II of Belgium wanted to make money and be an imperial power. He used the people of the Congo to force them to work for him and get him the materials he wanted, which was mostly rubber. To make sure the men worked, he would take women hostage until the men met their requirement for the amount of rubber they were required to get. As a punishment for not meeting their quota the king’s soldiers also cut off the hands of their live victims to give to their officers (Hochschild, Britannica).
• What was the historical background that led to this conflict? o The Slave Trade in the 1600s and 1700s. …show more content…

 Created the prejudice among the Europeans and the Americas against the Africans o Because of the slave trade, King Leopold II used this as an excuse to the public to claim that he was going to end slave trade to conquer Congo. With the help of his agencies, he got away with the killings because that is what the people believed.
• King Leopold II of Belgium wanted to make sure that Belgium was an imperial power.
• “I believe that the time has come to spread ourselves outwards; we cannot afford to lose more time, under penalty of seeing the best positions, which are already becoming rae, successively occupied by nations more enterprising than our own.”- King Leopold II (Colonialism in the Congo...9)
• He felt the way to do this was to have an African colony.
• At this time the Berlin Conference was taking place in 1884 in order to prevent a war from breakout among Europe about which territory in Africa.
• King Leopold II then gained control of the Congo and persuaded the chiefs to sign treaties, however most of the chiefs were illiterate and did not know what they were signing (Hochschild, …show more content…

• King Leopold II claimed that he could help the Congolese because they were not as advanced as Belgium and most of Europe and some of Asia was. At the time, this is called white man’s burden. King Leopold told the Belgian people he was helping them and introducing them to Christianity and help bring industrialism to Congo, which was not true. The Congolese people, in reality, were forced to work to get materials like rubber for the king (Hochschild, Britannica).
• The Congolese were innocent, they were human beings, just like everyone else, but their skin color was black. They also did not have stronger weapons to fight back.
• To what extent did scapegoating occur?
• King Leopold II claimed he was helping the Congolese people and bringing Christianity and end the slave trade to Africa. But it was not true. What he was really doing was he was forcing the men to do extremely harsh and cruel work, holding women as hostages, killing millions (including children) and many other terrorizing acts. This is White Man’s Burden. It was used to justify the European control of Africa, and of why it was needed (Hochschild,

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