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Racism with a difference

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THERE is a painful forgotten history about
the deep racism in Africa.
It is a sad human history of how imperialists
treated Africans worse than animals.
For example, black people being captured
in Africa and eventually being kept
in human zoos in Europe.
The case of that little black girl back in
1958 in Belgium who was kept in a zoo,
attracting an estimated one million white
spectators who would constantly feed her
with bananas like a monkey is one such
incident.
And Belgium which is described by
some as the ‘land of milk and honey’ has
arguably the worst record when it comes
to colonisation and atrocities committed
against the African race.
Of all the Europeans who scrambled
for control of Africa at the end of the 19th
century, Belgium’s King Leopold II left arguably
the largest and most horrid legacy
of all.
Surprisingly in his 23-year reign he never
set foot in the Congo where his atrocities
were concentrated, but he brutally
killed an estimated 10 million Africans
between 1885 and 1908.
In what is considered in history as the
greatest crime against humanity, Hitler’s
Nazi regime in what is known as the ‘Holocaust’
killed approximately six million
Jews, but this is nothing compared to King
Leopold II killings in the Congo.
The grandson of King Louis Philippe of
France and the first cousin of Queen Victoria
of England, King Leopold II is chiefly
remembered as the ‘personal owner’ of
the Congo Free State.
He colonised Congo which officially
became ‘his’ personal property in 1876.
Under the false pretence of protecting
the Congolese, the world witnessed the
slaughter of men, women and children.
The Congo Free State population was
reduced by half, as more than 10 million
innocent people lost their lives.
Some were beaten or whipped to death
for failing to meet the rigid production
quotas for ivory and rubber harvests imposed
by King Leopold II.
Others were worked to death, forced to
labour in slavery conditions as porters,
rubber gatherers or miners for little or
no pay while some died of the diseases
introduced to (and spread throughout) the
Congo by Europeans.
And still others died from the increasingly
frequent famines that swept the
Congo basin as King Leopold’s army rampaged
through the countryside, appropriating
food and crops for its own use while
destroying villages and fields.
At 2 344 million square kilometres,
Congo Free State was an area 76 times
larger than Belgium.
If imposed on the map of Europe, it was
bigger than England, France, Germany,
Spain and Italy combined.
To King Leopold II, Congo Free State
was a private project to extract rubber and
ivory, relying on human slavery.
He fervently believed that overseas colonies
were the key to a country’s greatness,
and worked tirelessly to acquire natural
resources from Belgium’s colony.
Dreaming of becoming the world’s
richest king and to supply the demand of
rubber in Europe for the auto and bicycle
industry, King Leopold’s brutal colonial
regime operated to maximise profitability.
Africans were required to provide state
officials with set quotas of rubber and ivory
at a fixed government-mandated price,
to provide food to the local post, and to
provide 10 percent of their number as fulltime
forced labourers – slaves in all, but
name — and another 25 percent part-time.
To enforce the rubber quotas, King
Leopold II’s Force Publique (FP), an army
whose purpose was to terrorise the local
population was called in.
Armed with modern weapons and
the chicotte, a bull whip made of hippopotamus
hide, the FP routinely took and
tortured hostages (mostly women and
children), flogged, and raped them.
Those unable to supply King Leopold II’s
demands had their villages burned down,
men were hanged, starved to death and
others mutilated.
Children’s hands were chopped off as
punishment for late deliveries.
The rebellious rubber tappers who tried
to fight King Leopold II’s men were killed
and their right hands were chopped as
proof and trophies.
In the words of author Pater Forbath,
one junior white officer described a raid to
punish a village that had protested.
The officer in command: “ordered us
to cut off the heads of the men and hang
them on the village palisades, also their
sexual members, and to hang the women
and the children on the palisade in the
form of a cross….The baskets of severed
hands, set down at the feet of the European
post commanders, became the symbol
of the Congo Free State…. The collection of
hands became an end in itself. FP soldiers
brought them to the stations in place of
rubber; they even went out to harvest them
instead of rubber… They became a sort of
currency…and the FP soldiers were paid
their bonuses on the basis of how many
hands they collected.”
There is no doubt that King Leopold II is
the moral forebear of Adolf Hitler, responsible
for the death of an estimated 10 million
people in his rapacious exploitation of
the Congo between 1885 and 1908.
And yet in Belgium today, he is perceived
as the ‘King Builder’ as he commissioned
a great number of buildings
and urban projects in Antwerp, Brussels,
Ostend and elsewhere in Belgium.
He funded the buildings with the wealth
generated by the exploitation of the Congo.
And not too long ago, as late as 1958,
the Belgians locked up Africans in cages,
exhibited them in front of large audiences.
Some people even shared zoos with
animals.
Ironically, Adolf Hitler was the one
to ban these human zoos, but Belgium
resisted the ban and held the Brussels
World Fair in 1958 which is infamous for
showcasing the caged African girl being
fed bananas by white spectators like a
monkey.
Remarkably the colonial Royal Museum
for Central Africa (Tervuren Museum) in
Belgium does not mention anything at all
about the atrocities committed in the Congo
Free State.
The Tervuren Museum has a large
collection of colonial objects, but of the
largest injustice in Congo, there is no sign
whatsoever.
Despite King Leopold II and the Belgian
colonial officials’ extraordinary lengths
to erase incriminating evidence from the
historical records, what is now called the
Democratic Republic of Congo has clearly
never recovered from these atrocities.
No matter how hard they try to cover
up this heinous crime, this historical sin
remains indelible.
There can’t be any deeper racism!
Racism with a difference
In 1906, the amateur anthropologist

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