When was belgian congo colonized

Attended by the colonial powers of Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium, among others, the Conference created artificial state boundaries as well as a colonial system that was in effect for the next sixty years. Among these territories, the Congo was a unique case. The King, not the Belgian government, effectively owned and controlled the Congo.

Leopold administered the Congo in a notoriously brutal manner, using it to augment his own personal wealth. This rubber was then exported to fuel the industrial growth of both nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and America.

Despite his growing reliance on the wealth of the Congo, Leopold never visited this territory himself. By , the territory was so poorly managed that an international furor condemning Leopold had erupted.

That same year, in an attempt to stem this furor, the Congo was ceded to Belgium and placed under the control of the Belgian government, not its king. Belgium then administered the Congo as a colony until independence in Rather, it turned the responsibility for education over to missionaries.

Mobutu ruled the Congo until he was overthrown in For more information and to see the sources used in this post, check out the Enough Project's Congo Pinterest Board.

Skip to content. What Are Upstanders? Take Action Join Events. EIN: Africa is sometimes nicknamed the "Mother Continent" as it's the oldest inhabited continent on Earth. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Photograph courtesy Wikimedia. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Background Info Vocabulary. Rather than control the Congo as a colony , as other European powers did throughout Africa, Leopold privately owned the region.

Colonizing other peoples, regardless of the justification, is wrong. The people being colonized are robbed of their land, resources, and freedom. Leopold financed development projects with money loaned to him from the Belgian government. Believing one people is more civilized than another is wrong.

The people of the Congo were forced to labor for valued resources, including rubber and ivory, to personally enrich Leopold. Estimates vary, but about half the Congolese population died from punishment and malnutrition.

Each was headed by an administrator-general who was obligated to enact the policies of the sovereign or else resign. Leopold pledged to suppress the east African slave trade; promote humanitarian policies; guarantee free trade within the colony; impose no import duties for twenty years; and encourage philanthropic and scientific enterprises. Beginning in the mids, Leopold first decreed that the state asserted rights of proprietorship over all vacant lands throughout the Congo territory.

In three successive decrees, Leopold promised the rights of the Congolese in their land to native villages and farms, essentially making nearly all of the Congo Free State state-owned land. Additionally, the colonial administration liberated thousands of slaves. Shortly after the anti-slavery conference he held in Brussels in , Leopold issued a new decree which said that Africans could only sell their harvested products mostly ivory and rubber to the state in a large part of the Free State.

Suddenly, the only outlet a large share of the local population had for its products was the state, which could set purchase prices and therefore control the amount of income the Congolese could receive for their work. On arriving in the Congo, they recruited men from Zanzibar and west Africa, and eventually from the Congo itself.

In addition, Leopold actually encouraged the slave trade among Arabs in the Upper Congo in return for slaves to fill the ranks of the FP. Many of the black soldiers were from far-off peoples of the Upper Congo, while others had been kidnapped in raids on villages in their childhood and brought to Roman Catholic missions, where they received a military training in conditions close to slavery.

Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte—a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide—the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages, slaughtered families of rebels, and flogged and raped Congolese people.

They also burned recalcitrant villages, and above all, cut off the hands of Congolese natives, including children. The report of the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who were responsible for killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in From —, millions of Congolese died as a consequence of exploitation and disease.

In some areas, the population declined dramatically; it has been estimated that sleeping sickness and smallpox killed nearly half the population in the areas surrounding the lower Congo River. Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the FP was required to provide the hands of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed they would otherwise use the munitions imported from Europe at considerable cost for hunting.

As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid in severed hands. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the FP and sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighboring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill. One junior European officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested.

The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service. Mutilated Children From the Congo: Congolese children and wives whose fathers or husbands failed to meet rubber collection quotas were often punished by having their hands cut off. Increasing public outcry over the atrocities in the CFS moved the British government to launch an official investigation.