“A secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader”. In 1885 King Leopold of Belgium; an awkward, ruthless, selfish man, was recognised as the sovereign of the Congo. Long determined to carve out his very own private colonial domain, he had alighted upon the Congo - Africa’s vast and unplundered interior. With the help of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who had found a way to circumnavigate the Congo’s formerly insurmountable rapids, he concocted a cunning scheme to legally make it his own, while casting himself as a civilising saviour. Yet, despite his ostensibly philanthropic motivations, Leopold’s goal was always profit. More specifically, ivory, and later rubber, and before long a thriving hub of industry had been established in the Congo, bustling with soldiers, traders and missionaries. Meanwhile and most significantly, tens of thousands of Congolese people were being beaten, coerced and essentially enslaved into harvesting and carrying the riches of their land for their European oppressors. Their treatment was barbaric, the conditions in which they were made to live grotesque, and their suffering unimaginable. It was there, in King Leopold's Congo, that for years some of the worst violations of human life in all of human history were perpetrated. A terrible, secret heart of darkness, Until, at last, a young shipping clerk in Antwerp stumbled across something that would change the course of history forever... Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss Western history’s most brutal and barbaric colonial conquest: King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo Free State and her people. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Editor: Jack Meek Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the opening thoughts on King Leopold's Congo?
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A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. I could see every rib. The joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope. Each had an iron collar on his neck.
and all were connected together with a chain whose bites swung between them, rhythmically clinking. All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete death-like indifference of unhappy savages.
Behind this raw matter, one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off, and seeing a white man on the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be.
He was speedily reassured and with a large, white, rascally grin and a glance at his charge seemed to take me into partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings. Joseph Conrad, of course, writing in Heart of Darkness, which he wrote in 1899. And he sat down to write that nine years after he himself died.
had visited the Congo Free State as a merchant seaman, captaining a steamer, the roi de Belge, the king of the Belgians, up the Congo deep into the interior, just as Marlowe in Heart of Darkness will do. And Marlowe is describing their experiences that Conrad himself, we know, definitely had.
He saw scenes like that, preparatory to taking the steamer up the river to meet the mysterious and enigmatic, charismatic Mr. Kurtz.
And what he's seeing, of course, is a chain gang of porters escorted by an armed African officer building the railway that will facilitate Leopold II's control of this vast expanse of the Congo that he's been given at a conference in Berlin where no Africans were in attendance. And Conrad, when he went to the Congo, initially was a true believer.
He trusted the philanthropic intentions of Leopold II, but by the time he left, he had a very, very different perspective. The last line, Dominic, of that passage that we read, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings. I mean, a deep and painful sense of irony there. Very
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Chapter 2: How does 'Heart of Darkness' relate to the Congo Free State?
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Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair. They were dying slowly, it was very clear.
They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom, brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.
So Conrad again in Heart of Darkness, 1899, and his narrator Marlow has arrived in the Congo and is climbing up the hills that lead to the Congo that is navigable. And he is witnessing workers who are building the railway that will expedite European access to the highlands. And he is not exaggerating there, is he?
I mean, there were hundreds, thousands of people who died during the construction of that railway.
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