Summary Of King Leopold's Ghost

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Colonialism in “King Leopold’s Ghost”
Colonialism is “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically”. King Leopold did just this. From 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium took over Congo, and is responsible for over ten million African deaths. So how did a man from Belgium take over Congo and maintain it without anyone stopping him? Leopold did this through money, torture, and help from agents, because he didn’t do it alone.
Leopold “bought” Congo by investing his own money and buying out other investors. He convinced everyone that he wanted to help Africans, and hosted conferences to receive donations. But it was all a scam. It …show more content…

Families were put to hard work for little or no pay. Even children were whipped if not done what they were told. Men were brutally beaten if they failed to retrieve a certain amount of ivory or rubber. Sometimes King Leopold would even have soldiers hold their families hostage, have their hands cut off, or killed. "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." His idea was that he would “scare” the others into working harder, and they would get more supplies, and more profit. “A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a big net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river.... Rubber caused these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.” The emotional and physical pain that Africans endured even caused death. Some died from disease, others died from getting appendages cut off(heads,legs,arms). All of this was happening in Congo when the rest of the world was completely oblivious to it. Other forms of torture included shooting holes into their

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