The Red Paint on Leopold II

Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a man obsessed with the profits that came with colonization. Using smokescreens of charities and shell corporations, he claimed a private landholding 76x larger than his own nation, and unleashed decades of horror on the land's inhabitants.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkie. Listener discretion is advised.
In eighteen eighty nine, an American journalist named George Washington
Williams was granted an opportunity to sit down informally with

(00:25):
King Leopold the second of Belgium. Williams was a groundbreaking
published historian, but his life was a done fascinating history.
He was a black man born free in Pennsylvania who
enlisted to fight for the Union during the Civil War
when he was just fourteen years old. From there, he

(00:45):
went to Mexico and joined the army fighting to overthrow
the European Emperor Maximilian. Later, he became a college graduate
of Baptist minister and the first black man to serve
in the Ohio State legislature. By this point, Leopold Drain
he had become an expert in the trappings of monarchy.
He was a master of charm. He was friendly, self effacing, modest,

(01:09):
and above all diplomatic. He remembered names of wives and children,
and he always asked after them. He welcomed Williams into
his palace in Brussels and told him with obvious relish
about all of the philanthropic work he had been doing
in the Congo Free State. The meeting went incredibly well.

(01:32):
One side note, one has to imagine that maybe William's
youthful military service in Mexico didn't come up. After all,
the imperialist queen he had been fighting against, Carlotta of Mexico,
was Leopold's sister. But for Williams, it was difficult not
to be impressed with Leopold and with Belgium It's clean, wide,

(01:54):
sweeping avenues and open national parks and the stately facades
of palaces. It was a new country and a new monarchy.
The Belgian people had installed Leopold's father as the first king,
imported him from a line of German royals back when
Belgium had gained its independence from Holland in eighteen thirty.

(02:17):
But under Leopold the Second, the nation had become a
center of international affairs in Europe, thanks a note small
part to Leopold's passion for developing the Congo. What had
been a blank spot on the map of Africa just
a few decades ago was now, as Leopold told Williams,
a quote benevolent enterprise of local programs seeking to increase

(02:42):
the knowledge of the natives and secure their welfare. And so,
as Williams left the meeting and strolled down the marble
steps of the palace, he reflected on what an impressive
man the young king was. Leopold the Second was a
paradig for a new kind of compassionate modern imperialism. Out

(03:04):
of his own pocket, the king had funded stations along
the Congo River that were stocked with scientists, linguists, and researchers.
He built infrastructure to help missionaries spread Christianity, all while
helping establish a system in which black tribal leaders could
establish their own local dominions as part of a larger

(03:25):
organized coalition. At least that's what Leopold said he was doing.
Fascinated by Leopold's description of the Congo Free State George Washington,
Williams decided to visit for himself. What he found both
sickened and outraged him. It was a slave state in

(03:50):
all but name. Men, women and children who had had
their land stolen from them, either by trickery or by violence,
who are then forced to work grueling hours gathering rubber
that would be shipped back to Europe to pay for
Belgium's beautiful roads and parks. Men, women and children who

(04:13):
failed to meet their quota for rubber production were either
whipped or killed under the capricious and brutal authority of
black soldiers also enslaved. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away sat
civilized Leopold the Second charmingly asking about your wife by name.

(04:35):
George Washington Williams became the first person to interview Native
Africans about the horrific abuses they were suffering under imperialism.
From an outpost at Stanley Falls, he wrote an open
letter which he addressed to his serene Majesty Leopold, the
second King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State,

(04:59):
in which will Ms wrote in clear detail every one
of the atrocities in the so called Congo free State
that he came across. He consulted his notes and echoed
back the very words that Leopold had used to describe
his endeavor, the so called fostering care and benevolent enterprise

(05:21):
and effort to ensure the native's welfare. Williams wrote against
the deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave rating and general
policy of cruelty of your Majesty's government. To the natives
stands their record of unexampled patience, long suffering and forgiving spirit,

(05:46):
which puts the boasted civilization and professed religion of your
Majesty's government to the blush. Leopold had not claimed the
Congo as a colony for Belgium. Using smoke screens of
shell corporations and meaningless charity committees, he became the sole

(06:07):
owner of the largest private landholding in history. Belgium did
not own the Congo. Leopold did. It was banal, bureaucratic evil,
ignored and then accepted by the rest of the world
out of sheer apathy. Leopold exploited the flimsiness of the

(06:28):
institutions that hold up the civilized world and the veneer
of respectability that comes from a royal title. Williams's open
letter sparked the first wave of international interest in Leopold's
Congolese endeavor, But of course Belgian officials would attempt to
discredit Williams, and Williams would die of disease before returning

(06:52):
home to America. It would be decades before the international
community reckoned with the stress machine of Leopold the Second, congo,
if indeed it ever really has, I'm Danis Schwartz, and
this is noble blood. Leopold the Second was not a

(07:19):
boy of great promise. He was gangly and awkward boy
who looked like a scarecrow in his military uniform. He
has such a nose, said Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister,
as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who
has been banned by a malignant fairy. From an early age,

(07:41):
Leopold's parents decided not to bother with much affection for him.
In a letter while he was off at military school,
his mother wrote, I was disturbed to see in the
colonel's report that you had again been so lazy, and
that your exercises had been so bad. Your father was
as disturbed as I by this last report. Leopold had

(08:03):
no expectation that he would hear directly from his father.
If you wanted to speak with his father, the King,
he was required to request a formal audience and go
through his father's secretary. When Leopold was eighteen, he was
married to Marie Henrietta and Austrian Habsburg archduchess. They hated

(08:23):
each other almost immediately. Marie Henrietta was athletic and an
active horsewoman, and Leopold was well, in the words of
Queen Victoria, very odd and in the habit of saying
disagreeable things to people. He was narrow minded, interested in geography,
and fastidious about keeping track of money, and exactly as

(08:46):
fun of a person as those two interests make him sound.
The pair honeymooned in Venice, and Marie Henrietta wept in
public because her new husband refused to let her ride
in a gondola. If God hears my prayers, she wrote
to a friend, I shall not go on living much
longer still, Even though by all accounts they barely tolerated

(09:10):
one another, the royal couple managed to have four children,
though their one son died at age nine from pneumonia
after falling in a pond. At his son's funeral, Leopold
broke down publicly for the first and only time, although
he did regain enough composure to ask members of Parliament

(09:32):
to make sure that the funeral costs would be handled
by the state. Leopold was so uninterested in his daughters
that he tried to make himself an exception to the
law in Belgium that requires one's assets to be passed
on to one's children. From that point on, Leopold simply
had no use for his wife, or really for the

(09:54):
Belgian government Petipe petition. Leopold would say, small coun tree,
small people. He would have no more sons, and so
his legacy would need to become something greater. Leopold became
king at thirty years old, but being king in Belgium

(10:15):
in the nineteenth century wasn't anything close to the power
a king would have had in Europe a few hundred
years earlier. Their family was a symbolic monarchy who served
at the pleasure of parliament, not because they were granted
absolute authority by God. Even Leopold's title was restrictive and awkward.
He wasn't the King of Belgium technically, he was the

(10:38):
King of the Belgians, a formality that just reinforced the
notion that his leadership was more for show than anything else.
And so Leopold decided to turn his gaze beyond his
small country and begin to focus his energy on his
earliest passion profits, but not just any prophets the profits

(11:01):
that came from owning a colony. Even before he had
become king, Leopold's interest in colonialization bordered on obsession. He
spent a month in Spain going through the dusty archives
in the old Exchange Building page by page to calculate
the revenue they made from their colonies in America. Unfortunately,

(11:24):
the people of Belgium didn't really share their king's imperialist dreams.
Their nation was new and small, Focusing on a colony
seemed like an expensive luxury, especially when they didn't have
a merchant fleet, let alone in navy. But Leopold wouldn't
be deterred, even as they elected officials with the real

(11:46):
power in the country continued to demure when Leopold approached
in the halls of the Palace with a new idea
for a place to plant the Belgian flag. After returning
from one of his many scouting trips, Leopold brought the
finance minister two gifts, a piece of marble from the
Acropolis and a locket with his portrait. Inside the locket,

(12:11):
Leopold wrote, Belgium must have a colony if Belgium was
ever going to be a world power. If Leopold was
ever going to have any real power, he needed to
claim land from somewhere else on the globe. The power
was by the end of the eighteen hundreds, unclaimed land
would become harder to find. Leopold scoured maps of the world.

(12:36):
Could someone buy those tiny islands off the coast of
South America is Fiji for sale? Could he buy the
Philippines from Spain. Leopold even floated the idea of buying
lakes in the Nile Delta so that he could drain
them and claim the land. For the moment, he wrote,

(12:57):
neither the Spanish, nor the Portuguese, nor the Dutch are
inclined to sell. I intend to find out discreetly if
there's anything to be done in Africa. It's at this
point in the story that we need to introduce another character,

(13:18):
a writer turned explorer born in Wales with the name
John Rowlands. Rowlands had a miserable childhood, born out of wedlock,
abandoned by his mother, and bounced around among extended family
until he landed at a workhouse for the poor, like
a character in a Charles Dickens novel. But as soon

(13:39):
as he turned eighteen, like a character in a Mark
Twain novel, John Rowlands made his way to the Mississippi River.
He eventually settled in New Orleans, and this is where
Rowland's story becomes more myth than fact. According to him,
he saw the wealthy trading magnet, Henry Hope Stanley, sitting

(14:01):
on his porch and boldly asked if he could have
a job. The man became such a mentor to the
younger boy that he eventually adopted him, and Rowlands took
on his new father's name, rechristening himself Henry Morton Stanley.
Henry Morton Stanley wrote all about his unconventional upbringing in

(14:23):
his autobiography. He wrote about how tragically the senior Stanley
died just two years after his adoption, but Henry Hope
Stanley wouldn't actually die for another twenty years, and there
are no records of any adoption. In fact, Henry Morton
Stanley gets so many strange details wrong that some historians

(14:46):
argue that he didn't even meet the wealthy trader, let
alone become his protegee. But the truth didn't matter as
much as a good story. That was the real lesson
learned Henry Morton Stanley would be come a master of
reworking and mythologizing his own narrative until the truth was unknowable.

(15:07):
Stanley would go on to fight on both sides of
the American Civil War, first for the South and then
for the North, and then after the war was over,
he began to work as a journalist. It was an
assignment for the New York Herald in that catapulted Henry
Morton Stanley to international fame. You see, four years earlier,

(15:31):
Europe had lost touch with a Scottish geologist by the
name of doctor David Livingston. Stanley made it his mission
to go find Livingston, alive or dead, all while sending
back columns to be published in the New York Herald.
It took two years and a seven hundred mile trek

(15:51):
outfitted with one hundred and eleven porters, but in present
day Tanzania, Stanley found the scientists and, according to Stanley,
greeted him with a line that is now iconic. Dr Livingston.
I presume it's a great line, but in all actuality,

(16:12):
not one that he actually said at the time. It
doesn't appear anywhere in his contemporary journals, but that doesn't matter.
Stanley was a writer, and he knew that the most
important part of a story was the way you tell it.
In a way, He's right, we all remember that line
a hundred and fifty years later. In some ways, Stanley

(16:33):
was the prototype for the type of self conscious travel
on luxury blogs and outdoorsy Instagram accounts, in which the
experience itself only exists through its presentation to the outside world.
Stanley's accounts of his adventure and the book he wrote
about the experience, turned him into an overnight international celebrity.

(16:58):
He also got a lucky break, its Livingstone, dying of
malaria and dysentery before they both returned to Europe, so
there wouldn't be another white man who could contradict any
of his accounts. It was Stanley's word against no one's,
and the world loved it. They devoured his tales of
rebellious porters and vicious barbarian African tribes, wild animals, and

(17:24):
most terrible of all, the brutal quote Arab slave trade,
which Europe was free to Scoff and gas Bat having
mostly banned their own massive industrial transatlantic slave trade operations.
Oh about thirty years earlier after his incredible Livingston mission,

(17:46):
Stanley set out again, this time to trace the Great
Lakes of Africa, the unmapped heart of what he Stanley
called the Dark Continent, and to trace the Lualaba River
to see if it fed into the Nile or if
it horses shoot around and became the Congo River. This time,
Stanley was sponsored by both the New York Herald and

(18:09):
the Daily Telegraph in London, and his caravan was more
than twice the size of the one that had accompanied
him to find Livingstone. There were over three hundred people
traveling with him, although only three other white men and
Henry Morton Stanley being Henry Morton, Stanley didn't want anyone
with him who might upstage him, so the men he

(18:32):
chose to accompany him had no experience exploring, and all
three of them died before the journey was complete. For
his hundreds of Zanzibari porters, the trip was months of
carrying incredibly heavy loads on their heads and backs, while
Stanley riddled them with abuse. If they mutinied or attempted

(18:55):
to flee, he punished them either with lashes or by
keeping in chains to humiliate them. But the natives that
Stanley ran into fared if possible. Even worse villages armed
only with spears, arrows, or a few ancient traded for
muskets were no match for Stanley, outfitted with rifles and

(19:18):
an elephant gun. Unfortunately, the only source we have to
go on about these encounters is Stanley himself, Yet reading
his words, he doesn't mask his own pettiness or brutality.
Attacked and destroyed twenty eight large towns and three or
four score villages, he wrote. He went on to describe

(19:40):
a river coast where mockers shook their spears at him.
Stanley opened fire with a Winchester repeating rifle. Quote six
shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking.
Stanley's columns did lead to shock and criticism from anti
slavery society and humanitarians around the world, but James Gordon Bennett,

(20:05):
his newspaper editor, dismissed their criticisms as the pearl clutching
of elites who had never been in the metaphorical trenches. Critics,
Bennett wrote, are safe in London philanthropists whose impractical view
is that a leader should permit his men to be
slaughtered by the natives and should be slaughtered himself and

(20:29):
let discovery go to the dogs, but should never pull
a trigger against the species of human vermin. One European
read every single update from Stanley with rapturous fascination. King
Leopold the Second who asked his servants to bring any
newspaper with any dispatch from Henry Morton Stanley up to

(20:53):
his chambers right away. When Stanley finally completed his mission,
emerging at the Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the
Congo River, he became the second white man ever to
traverse Africa from east to west, and the first white
explorer to trace the source of the Congo. The Congo

(21:15):
was perfect for Leopold's purposes. It was a massive area
laced with waterways for easy transportation once roads were built
to traverse the most dangerous sections of rapids. Best of all,
as Stanley's writings had made clear, the local inhabitants were
no military threat. Thanks to centuries of slave raids from

(21:38):
both coasts, the few large kingdoms around the Congo were
significantly weakened. The diverse population consisted of two hundred different
ethnic groups who spoke over four hundred languages and dialects,
which meant that the risk of them uniting against colonialists
was small. Leopold had found the answer to the question

(22:01):
he had been asking his entire adult life, but actually
claiming the undeveloped region encircled by the Congo River would
be more challenging than just willing it. The Belgian people
were completely uninterested, and any European country that put down
a flag could ignite the scrambling of other jealous countries

(22:24):
who could simply refuse to recognize their neighbor's colony or
claim it for themselves. And so even before Stanley's mission
was over, Leopold had begun to orchestrate a meticulous global
propaganda campaign that, through a combination of subterfuge, flattery, and

(22:45):
sheer force, would make him the sole owner of a
piece of land over seventy six times larger than the
tiny nation in which he was The King. Leopold would
rule a new population with an iron, merciless fist, claiming
the blood soaked profits from his comfortable throne on the

(23:06):
other side of the world, all while white men praised him.
In eighteen seventy six, King Leopold the Second organized a
geographical conference to be held in Brussels. Being a monarch
at the end of the nineteenth century meant that Leopold
had a very specific type of capital, the magnetic allure

(23:31):
of the monarchy itself and all of the legitimacy it
provides in a vacuum. The formalities of the monarchy are
arbitrary and useless, but in Leopold's hands they became very
weapons he would use to conquer the congo. So decorum
and formality were the chief objectives of his Geographical Conference.

(23:56):
The goal was to dazzle his visitors, the redozen of
the world's most famous explorers and military men, including a
rear admiral and the president of the Paris Geographical Society.
Leopold sent Belgian ships to pick up British guests in Dover,
who were then escorted onto an express train to zip

(24:17):
them the rest of the way to Brussels, with special
instructions for them to pass through the Belgian border without customs.
Leopold knew how impressive it would be for his guests
to stay at the Royal Palace. The only problem was
the Royal Palace in Brussels wasn't actually really a residence.
It was more of an administrative office. Leopold and his

(24:40):
family actually lived in a chateau on the outskirts of
the city, but that wouldn't do, and so for the
weekend the royal Palace was transformed into a residence. Servants
frantically converted offices into guest bedrooms. In the end, everything
to draper, the betting, the ink, even the toilet paper

(25:04):
was read. As each guest entered, Leopold greeted them in French,
German or English, and one by one they filed up
a white marble staircase to the throne room, which glistened
in the flickering light of seven thousand candles. Leopold opened

(25:25):
the conference with an effusive speech about the importance of
their purpose to open to civilization the only parts of
our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce
the darkness which hangs over entire people's is dare I say,
a crusade worthy of this century of progress. The practical

(25:50):
purpose for the conference was for the experts to work
together to select locations for bases along the Congo, which
could serve as hubs or scientists, linguists, and artisans. These bases,
Leopold said, would be non political, working only to abolish
the slave trade and established peace among chiefs, and each

(26:14):
one would be well equipped with medicine and extra supplies
for explorers passing through. At the end of the weekend,
the men in attendance voted to establish the International African Association. Leopold,
of course, would be the association's first chairman, but he
modestly promised to step down after a year. The association

(26:38):
gave itself a flag, a yellow star on a blue backdrop,
meant to represent the bright hope of civilization in the
darkness of Africa. Each new member of the Association was
awarded the Cross of Leopold. Throughout Europe, prominent men began

(26:59):
to send me a called donations, including the Viscount Ferdinando Lessons.
Leopold was undertaken to less Us declared the greatest humanitarian
work of this time. A side note, if the name
Count de Lessup sounds familiar, it's because he is an
ancestor of the man who would go on to marry

(27:20):
Real Housewives star Countess lou An. The idea with the
International African Association was that the men would return back
to their home countries and start their own national chapters
and that there would be a big meeting in Brussels
every year. In actuality, the organization fizzled after its bombastic inauguration.

(27:45):
It only ever had one more meeting, where they elected
Leopold as chairman for the second time despite his earlier pledge,
and then the group all but disappeared forever its purpose
had been served. Leopold had established the foundations for legitimacy
where his future endeavors in the Congo. The great men

(28:05):
of Europe were behind him. After Henry Morton Stanley had
completed his truck along the Congo and floated back to
Europe on a raft of acclaim and medals and book money,
Leopold dispatched one of his officers to get Stanley to
come to a meeting in Brussels. King Leopold had a
proposition for the explorer, a five year contract in which

(28:29):
Leopold would pay the equivalent of two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars a year, plus the cost of an expedition
for Stanley to go back to Africa and begin to
establish Leopold's foothold in the Congo. The plan that was
for Stanley to first set up a base and then
build roads around the most dangerous parts of the Congo River,

(28:51):
where they would be able to take a steamboat apart,
carry it on land, and then bring it back to
the river. Leopold's goal was to stay out several stations
along the thousand mile main stretch of the Congo River
so he could claim the land profit. Ben would be easy.
The Congo was incredibly resourced tents, especially with regards to

(29:15):
valuable ivory, which could be shaped into anything from chess
pieces to piano keys to fake teeth. African elephants had
tusks far larger than their Asian counterparts. Stanley had reported
that ivory was so accessible in Africa that it was
used for door posts. Who exactly was Stanley claiming the

(29:37):
land for even Stanley wasn't sure. He thought at first
it was the International African Association, or was it the
vaguely named Committee for the Study of the Upper Congo,
which was a private business whose shareholders included a Belgian
banker secretly acting as Leopold's proxy. Leah Pold would go

(30:01):
on to buy out the other shareholders and the company
would legally cease to exist, but both he and others
would continue to refer to it as if it did
still exist. Even Stanley didn't realize that the company had folded.
The subterfuge was deliberate. All of Stanley's European staff on

(30:21):
the ground in Africa were required to sign a contract
of secrecy. And it was around this time that King
Leopold organized something called the International Association of the Congo.
If that sounds similar to that pointless but idealistic International
African Association, that was on purpose. The former even adopted

(30:44):
the exact same flag as the latter, a gold star
against a blue backdrop. Care must be taken, Leopold said,
not to let it be obvious that the Association of
the Congo and the African Association two different things. The
public doesn't grasp that. Leopold framed the Association of the

(31:11):
Congo a sort of a new Red Cross, and wealthy
men all over the world sent donations. Leopold was an
expert at manipulating the message depending on his audience. Two Germans,
he framed the enterprise as akin to the divine mission
of the Night of the Crusade. Two Americans, he stressed

(31:33):
that he would establish in Africa a union of free cities,
each led by local African tribe leaders, not dissimilar to
the Union of American States. But in his letters to Stanley,
Leopold dropped the facade. There is no question, he wrote
of granting the slightest political power to Negroes. That would

(31:56):
be absurd. The white men heads of the stations retain
all of the powers. While continuing to promote his smoke
screen charity organizations, Leopold reached out to an Oxford scholar
and a lawyer to handle the legal details of acting
as a corporation and claiming sovereignty of territories for individuals

(32:21):
in Africa. Henry Morton Stanley worked not only as a
brutal taskmaster, berating his crews of workmen as they filled ravines,
built trails, and put together steamships, but also on Leopold's behalf,
tricking African leaders into signing treaties that gave Leopold their

(32:41):
land and gave him an exclusive trading monopoly. Using trick
bullets and small electric buzzers, Stanley convinced leaders who hadn't
interacted with Western technology that white men possessed superhuman strength
and invulnerability, and then it was only a matter of
some clothes, a few left over uniforms, and a couple

(33:03):
of bottles of gin to trade, and the leaders signed
the treaties that Stanley put in front of them. As
historian Adam Hopeshelled writes in his excellent biography King Leopold's Ghost,
the concept of signing your land away would have been
completely for it. The tribe leaders would have been familiar

(33:26):
with the idea of a contract of friendship, but someone
across an ocean owning their land was absurd and outside
the realm of contemplation. They just put an x where
they were told at the bottom of a contract in
a foreign language they didn't understand. And these contracts also
included a clause even more sinister than you can imagine.

(33:49):
They granted not just the land, but an agreement that
the tribe would quote assist by labor or otherwise any works,
improvement or expeditions which the said associations shall cause at
any time to be carried out in any part of

(34:09):
these territories. In short manpower. The Congo would become, in
effect a slave state. The United States became the first
to recognize Leopold's claim to the land of the Congo
and in his speech the Secretary of State conveniently confused

(34:31):
the International African Association and International Association of the Congo.
The dominoes were falling into place. The next year, Leopold
formally declared his landholdings to be the Congo Free State,
operating under his exclusive private control. King Leopold of the

(34:53):
Belgians was now the owner of the world's largest private
landholding in history, seventies six times larger than the country
you ruled over. From this point on, the details become horrific.
It turns out the real profit to be made in
the Congo wasn't in ivory, it was in a rubber.

(35:15):
Leopold established a private army, the Force Publique, to enforce
rubber gathering quotas in the native populations through brutal torture.
The police force would arrive in a village, hold the
women and children hostage, and whip workers with a bull
whip called the chicot made from dried elephants hide. The

(35:36):
penalty for not gathering enough rubber was death. In order
to make sure that the police officers were using their
bullets on people and not on animals to hunt for food,
the hands of victims were required as trophies. Hands and
feet of children would be severed if parents weren't productive enough.

(35:58):
Even the act of gathering the rubber was violent. Once
the viands were split open, the worker would slather his
body in the soft latex, which would then harden. Once hard,
the latex would be stripped painfully from the body, taking
hair along with it. Men were worked to death, hostages starved.

(36:20):
Some estimate that as many as ten million people were
killed during King Leopold's bloody twenty three year long reign
in the Congo. Ten million people slaughtered in his name
as the rubber and ivory came on chips back to Belgium,
and he gleefully sent only soldiers and bullets back. In Europe,

(36:44):
they called him the Builder King for the urban projects
and buildings and parks he erected using his profits. Leopold
never actually went to the Congo himself, but he did
bring the Congo to him in and when he opened
a temporary exhibition at his country estate that would become

(37:05):
the Royal Museum for Central Africa. The heart of the
exhibit was a human zoo where two hundred and sixty
seven Congolese men, women, and children were kidnapped and brought
to a mock African village set up on the Royal
Estates grounds. When the prisoners got sick because of visitors
throwing candy over the fences, they put up a sign

(37:28):
that said the blacks are fed by the organizing Committee.
In other words, don't feed the animals. For twenty three years,
Leopold was the sole owner of the Congo Free State,
and his atrocities were largely ignored by the rest of

(37:50):
the world out of convenient apathy. How much easier was
it to believe that charming Leopold actually was fronting a
pilanthropic endeavor. It would only be through the tireless work
of missionaries that things would eventually change, people like George
Washington Williams, who wrote his open letter, and like Alice

(38:11):
see Lee Harris, a documentary photographer who captured the gruesome
dismemberments on film. It would actually be a shipping officer
named Edmund Dinney Morrell who would provide one of the
largest public pushes for the world to recognize Leopold's horrific exploitation.
Morrell noticed that it was ivory and rubber arriving on

(38:34):
ships from the Congo, but only bullets going back. He
realized there was no trade happening, and so he enlisted
thinkers and celebrities of the day like Arthur Conan Doyle
and Mark Twain, and eventually, in night, Leopold the Second
was forced to sell the Congo Free State to Belgium

(38:57):
to make it actually an official bell Rgian colony. Let
that sink in the Congo wasn't actually made free, it
was just not personally owned by Leopold anymore. That was
the humanitarian victory. Leopold died the next year at age

(39:17):
seventy four. His funeral procession was met by booze from
Belgian people. But as soon as Leopold was gone, his
legacy in the Congo began to be whitewashed. He was dead,
so the international fervor died out. Statues of Leopold were
erected in the parks he helped build. They taught in

(39:38):
school that colonialism might have gotten too violent under the
Builder King, but colonialism was always bad. People in other
European countries try to make Leopold look worse to make
themselves feel better, you see. Besides, sure, there was some blood,
but he was bringing civilization to Africa. It's so easy

(39:59):
sometimes to believe the lies and to enjoy the pretty statues,
the comforting facade of authority and dignity and civilization. And
the statues of Leopold remained in Belgium until June twenty twenty.
During the international Black Lives Matter March following George Floyd's

(40:23):
death in the United States, protesters in Belgium coated statues
of Leopold the Second in red paint in Antwerp and
in Ghent and in Brussels. Some of the statues have
already been taken down, but I think it's worth asking
ourselves what had been keeping them up for so long?

(40:44):
All this time. That's the story of King Leopold the
Second and how he used the symbolic power of his
monarchy to enact horrific realities. Keepless ning after a brief
sponsor break, to hear a little bit more about the
legacy he left in literature. After Henry Morton Stanley built

(41:17):
the roads and base camps along the Congo, steamboats began
to appear on the river, delivering supplies and taking rubber
and ivory off to the coasts. One of those steamboats
a boat called the King of the Belgians was piloted
by a man named Joseph Conrad. Conrad's experience in the

(41:37):
Congo and all of the horrors he saw first hand,
would lead him to write his most famous novel, Heart
of Darkness. If you haven't read it yet, you might
have at least seen the movie adaptation. Although the movie
doesn't take place in nineteenth century Africa, Francis Ford Coppola
decided to set it in Vietnam. The movie, of course,

(41:59):
is a acalypse. Now there's another important literary legacy from
the Congo worth pointing out. Remember George Washington Williams, the
Civil War soldier turned journalists who wrote the open letter
to King Leopold. He also wrote a pamphlet for the
international community advocating action, and he coined a phrase to

(42:20):
describe what Leopold had done, a phrase that we still
use to this day, Crimes against Humanity. Noble Blood is
a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild
from Aaron Minkey. The show was written and hosted by
Dani Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,

(42:44):
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble blood Tales dot com. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
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