I was nosing around a bookstore recently - one of my favorite things to do - and ran across the book King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.
King Leopold II was the king of Belgium from 1865 to 1909 and is most well-known for his gruesome and murderous regime of forced labor for the rubber harvest in the Congo, from around 1890 to 1910.
Famously, his militia had to account for every bullet that they used with a severed right hand (to prove that they weren't hunting with the bullets). So that they actually COULD hunt with the bullets, they cut the hands off living people with machetes. Talk about incentives gone wrong...
And also - history doesn't repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes. So many aspects of this story are occurring now in many areas of the world. The murders, and also the cover-up with paid lackeys given specific news to promote (of how the Congolese were being civilized, etc).
Rough estimates are that around 10 million people died during this period. There's horrific stories like these, but there's also the story of the resistance and public protest against this genocide.
One of the main activists against the slavery and genocide was Edmund Morel, an employee of a Liverpool shipping line.
Because Morel speaks fluent French, his company sends him to Belgium every few weeks to supervise the loading and unloading of ships on the Congo run. Although the officials he works with have been handling this shipping traffic for years without a second thought, Morel begins to notice things that unsettle him. At the docks of the big port of Antwerp he sees his company's ships arriving filled to the hatch covers with valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory.
But when they cast off their hawsers to steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager young men in uniform line the ships' rails, what they carry is mostly army officers, firearms, and ammunition. There is no trade going on here. Little or nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory.
As Morel watches these riches streaming to Europe with almost no goods being sent to Africa to pay for them, he realizes that there can be only one explanation for their source: slave labor.
It's definitely a page-turner.
Also, I previously included an excerpt from another book in this post: A short excerpt from the book Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo. (I got that book because it was mentioned in King Leopold's Ghost.)
Here's part of the excerpt: "After exchanging most of our American money for cowrie shells, beads, salt and brass wire-these were our future currency"
And in reviewing some items in King Leopold's Ghost, I learned some more about this. Apparently the natives were actually not allowed to have money! From KLG:
They received only small amounts of cloth, beads, and the like, or the brass rods that the state decreed as the territory's main currency. For Africans, transactions in money were not allowed. Money in free circulation might undermine what was essentially a command economy.
So they didn't choose the inferior money. It was forced on them.
This book is so fucking good. It will almost certainly make you see the world differently, in a way you might not like.
Onto the list it goes.
Edmund Morel’s realization was powerful precisely because he looked beyond what was being said and focused on what was actually happening in the flow of goods and capital. That skill is critical today as well because propaganda and selective narratives continue to obscure exploitation. Watching where the value moves and who controls it often tells a far more accurate story than official accounts ever will.
It was not simply a rubber boom. It was the building of a system that extracted wealth and prevented resistance by denying people economic agency. That is a pattern we would do well to recognize whenever and wherever it appears.