Congo

Ben gave me this book for Xmas and I just finished it:

It has the great virtue of being quite short (about 150 pages). The author is the Sherlock Holmes guy and it as written in early 20th century; long before the Congo became the country that is is today.

I have had a thought more than once that before reading a book like this, I should jot down my preconceived notions and compare them afterwards. I didn't do that. But here is my post-reading attempt:

"The Belgians ran the Congo for a while in the 1800's and are notorious for having treated the local population horribly, a lot hands chopped off, mostly motivated by rubber."

That description is very roughly accurate. It motivated me to peruse Wikipedia a bit to fill in some blanks:

1. Although Germans, British, French, Portuguese were all involved in treating Africa badly to various degrees, what we know today as the Congo was only colonized by Belgium. There was also a French Congo, which today is a separate country, the "Democratic Republic of the Congo", much smaller and to the north. It did not suffer nearly as did the so-called Belgian version.

2. Though all of this started in the 1800's, it didn't really end until 1960, when Congo achieved independence; with lots of chaos and terribleness, of course, but since 1960, it hasn't been a Belgian colony. That is much later than I thought. This was almost happening in my lifetime.

3. Today, Congo has lots of resources that we as well as China are eager to exploit (cobalt is often mentioned). But at the time, rubber was indeed the only real target. Natural rubber comes from a vine. The rubber we use today is made from oil.

4. Indeed, baskets of severed hands were a thing; roughly speaking, if 100 bullets were used, 100 severed hands were expected as proof. (Usually hands were chopped off post-shooting, but sometimes this was done while the victim was alive; sometimes the process killed them, sometimes it didn't). Execution / hand chopping could be a punishment for some sort of attempt at rebellion, but it was also a common punishment for simply not having produced enough rubber.

5. To get this rubber, the native population were forced to walk 300 miles (ish) each way and then collect a given quantity. This whole process took several weeks.

These killings wiped out entire villages and regions and the book claims it to be the greatest crime in human history. It was written before the holocaust and the holodomor, as well as the purges in Cambodia, but I guess it could still be the greatest crime on a % basis.

This book is fairly critical of the whole of Europe for largely turning a blind eye to all of this, but reserves its greatest criticism for the Belgian King (Leopold). For the first part of the occupation, the Congo was considered the private property of the king; only later on, it became a colony of Belgium.