The European officer in command “ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades… and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross”. One junior European officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets…A village that refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean.Īs a young man, I saw soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river…Rubber causes these torments that’s why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighboring villages to gather hands since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill.Ī Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river 500 kilometers (300 mi) north of Stanley Pool: All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator…From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. Meanwhile, the Force Publique (the gendarmerie / military force) was required to provide the hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting.Īs a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in chopped-off hands.
However, this came at a cost to the human rights of those who couldn’t pay the tax with imprisonment, flogging, and other corporal punishment recorded.īritish missionaries with men holding hands severed from victims Bolenge and Lingomo by ABIR militiamen, 1904.įailure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. ABIR enjoyed a boom through the late 1890s, by selling a kilogram of rubber in Europe for up to 10 fr which had cost them just 1.35 fr. The ABIR Congo Company (founded as the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company and later known as the Compagnie du Congo Belge) was the company appointed to exploit natural rubber in the Congo Free State.
Under Leopold II’s administration, the Congo Free State became one of the greatest international scandals of the early 20th century. The ironic part of this story is that Leopold II committed these atrocities by not even setting foot in the Congo. In the 23 years (1885-1908) Leopold II ruled the Congo he massacred 10 million Africans by cutting off their hands and genitals, flogging them to death, starving them into forced labor, holding children ransom, and burning villages. The Congo Free State was a corporate state in Central Africa privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium founded and recognized by the Berlin Conference of 1885. Leopold had not given any thought to the idea that these African children, these men, and women, were our fully human brothers, created equally by the same Hand that had created his own lineage of European Royalty. All of this filth had occurred because one man, one man who lived thousands of miles across the sea, one man who couldn’t get rich enough, had decreed that this land was his and that these people should serve his own greed. They had partially destroyed it anyway by forcing his servitude but this act finished it for him. And they presented Nsala with the tokens, the leftovers from the once living body of his darling child whom he so loved. Then they killed his wife too.Īnd because that didn’t seem quite cruel enough, quite strong enough to make their case, they cannibalized both Boali and her mother.
Here is part of her account (from the book “Don’t Call Me Lady: The Journey of Lady Alice Seeley Harris”): He hadn’t made his rubber quota for the day so the Belgian-appointed overseers had cut off his daughter’s hand and foot. The photograph is by Alice Seeley Harris, the man’s name is Nsala. A Congolese man looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, and allegedly cannibalized, by the members of Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company militia.
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