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The industrial era with the invention of the steam engine made it more possible to travel down the African rivers to the interior of Africa and obtain raw materials and wealth. The discovery of quinine helped fight malaria and the breech loading rifles overpowered the African weapons. “The British and French were the most significant European imperialists”, but also were the Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States to a lesser extent (Reilly, p316). These primary sources are documents giving us insight into King Leopold of Belgium desire to acquire raw materials and wealth. In 1878, Leopold II of Belgium sent Henry Stanley into the Congo to scope it out.
Leopold II saw an opportunity to gain personal wealth. The King first requested that the nations let him ratify the Congo claiming he would improve their life. He said, “Each step forward by our people should mark an improvement in the condition the natives. In those vast (huge) regions of land, mostly uncultivated (unused) and mainly unproductive, where the natives hardly knew how to get their own daily food, European experience, knowledge, resources, and enterprise (skills) have brought to light unimaginable wealth.
Exploration of virgin (new) lands goes on, communications are established, highways are opened, and legitimate trade and industry are established” (King Leopold’s Public Letter Document A) The language King Leopold II used made people think he really cared about the welfare of the native people. . The letter he wrote to the Belgium agents sounded like Leopold was there to make their life better.
Instead, King Leopold brutally took advantage of the people. He captured the woman and made the men work gathering the rubber he wanted for his personal wealth.
The people who did not comply, even the children, had their right hand cut off. He treated the people the exact opposite from the “kind” tone he portrays in this document. The second document shows more of his true feelings. Document B from King Leopold shows his true feeling of the people. He says to the missionaries, “You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us”( King Leopold’s Public Letter to the Missionaries Document B). I have trouble stomaching the things he did to these helpless people.
One of the tricks of the King mentioned in George Washington William’s letter to king Leopold II was taking out a cigar and biting off the end of it. Then he held up his glasses to the sun to get the cigar to lite. The natives were amazed because they of course had never seen this and thought he did magic.
George Washington Williams names so many atrocities but one example given in his letter to the King was taking the women and selling them to a white man as mistresses or enslaving them for seven years. But his conclusion sums up the crimes committed to the people. He says, “ Against the deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave-raiding, and general policy of cruelty of your Majesty’s Government to the natives” and he says that ‘. Your Majesty’s Government is excessively cruel to its prisoners, condemning them, for the slightest offences, to the chain gang, the like of which cannot be seen in any other Government in the civilized or uncivilized world”(George Washington Williams). King Leopold had promised to ‘foster care” but there was no ‘honest and practice effort made to increase their knowledge and secure their welfare”(Letter from George Washington Williams).
He continued by saying that the King never spent one franc for educational purposes, nor instituted any practical system of industrialism” as he had promised.
I think the tone of George Washington Williams is professional and very businesslike but very pointed and angry and you can tell that he is appalled by what this horrible King did to the native people.
Bibliography
Letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to all government agents in the Congo, June 16, 1897
Leopold’s Public Letter
Leopold’s Letter to Colonial Missionaries
George Washington Williams’s Open Letter to King Leopold
