This article is very drastic and heavy. I am about to introduce a man twice as bad as Adolph Hitler but there is a big chance you do not know about him. A man who wanted to end up owning the Philipines but somehow ended up killing millions of Africans. When we talk about the most cruel leaders from the past we think about Adolph Hitler who killed over six million people but there is another cruel leader that we forgot to put in the history’s hall of shame and he goes by the name of King Leopold II of Belgium. King Leopold II murdered about half of Congo’s population and he was killing these people in unimaginable ways.What I’m about to say is very sensitive. You don’t know King Leopold II because he killed the people of Africa. For some reason the world was less interested in the pain of the African people but because every life should be seen as equal King Leopold II deserves to be put in history’s hall of shame. Here is where this horrible story begins.
King Leopold II knew that congo was rich in rubber, gold and ivory, three of the most expensive resources at that time. That is when in 1885 he decided to own Congo and to convince the Belgian government to give him money, King Leopold II disguised his slavery as a “humanitarian project” to convert the Congolese into “civilized” Christians and it worked. A whole African country became a private property of just one man but what he did as an owner for the next 23 years was far from Christian. He forved natives to dig up gold, kill elephants for ivory and harvest rubber so he could sell them and keep all the profits to himself and he was incredibly heartless in all of these. King Leopold II recruited many Congolese people to torture their own people. He paid a large army of natives to enforce slavery. It didn’t matter if you were a man, woman or a child, if you didn’t work hard enough your hands, arms or legs would be cut off. In 23 years because of King Leopold II’s greed, fifteen million people dien in horrible ways until they finally broke their chains from Belgium in 1960. Sixty years later, Belgium has not formally apologized for all the atrocities King Leopold II did. It’s only expressed regret for the violence Congo suffered
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