Take a look at this picture. Do you know who it is?
Most people haven’t heard of him.
But you should have. When you see his
face or hear his name you should get as sick in your stomach as when you
read about Mussolini or Hitler or see one of their pictures. You see,
he killed over 10 million people in the Congo.
His name is King Leopold II of Belgium.
He “owned” the Congo during his reign as
the constitutional monarch of Belgium. After several failed colonial
attempts in Asia and Africa, he settled on the Congo. He “bought” it and
enslaved its people, turning the entire country into his own personal
slave plantation. He disguised his business transactions as
“philanthropic” and “scientific” efforts under the banner of the International African Society.
He used their enslaved labor to extract Congolese resources and
services. His reign was enforced through work camps, body mutilations,
executions, torture, and his private army.
Most of us aren’t taught about him in
school. We don’t hear about him in the media. He’s not part of the
widely repeated narrative of oppression (which includes things like the
Holocaust during World War II). He’s part of a long history of
colonialism, imperialism, slavery and genocide in Africa that would
clash with the social construction of the white supremacist narrative in
our schools. It doesn’t fit neatly into a capitalist curriculum. Making
overtly racist remarks is (sometimes) frowned upon in polite society,
but it’s quite fine not to talk about genocides in Africa perpetrated by
European capitalist monarchs.
Mark Twain wrote a satire about Leopold called “King Leopold’s soliloquy; a defense of his Congo rule“,
where he mocked the King’s defense of his reign of terror, largely
through Leopold’s own words. It’s an easy read at 49 pages long. Mark
Twain is a popular author for American public schools. But like most
political authors, we will often read some of their least political
writings or read them without learning why the author wrote them
(Orwell’s Animal Farm for example serves to re-inforce American
anti-socialist propaganda, but Orwell was an anti-capitalist
revolutionary of a different kind, and that is never pointed out). We
can read about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but King Leopold’s Soliloquy
isn’t on the reading list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are
created by boards of education in order to prepare students to follow
orders and endure boredom well. From the point of view of the Education
Department, Africans have no history.
When we learn about Africa, we learn
about a caricaturized Egypt, about the HIV epidemic (but never its
causes), about the surface level effects of the slave trade, and maybe
about South African Apartheid (which of course now is long, long over).
We also see lots of pictures of starving children on Christian Ministry
commercials, we see safaris on animal shows, and we see pictures of
deserts in films and movies. But we don’t learn about the Great African
War or Leopold’s Reign of Terror during the Congolese Genocide. Nor do
we learn about what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan,
killing millions of people through bombs, sanctions, disease and
starvation. Body counts are important. And we don’t count Afghans,
Iraqis, or Congolese.
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