Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.
--Vachel Linday, The Congo (1914)
King Leopold II of Belgium operated his own colony in Africa
in the area we now know as the Congo Free State. While he could not convince politicians in the country to establish a colony, they did vote to lend Leopold money to establish the colony--which he then turned into a personal fiefdom to extract wealth from. Initially, his army forced the natives to harvest ivory, but by the 1890s, his attention turned to harvesting rubber, initially used to help construct the electrical grid in the developed countries, and later to manufacturing automobile tires. Each village was given a quota, and those that failed to meet their quotas suffered severe consequences--including having the hands and feet of villagers chopped off. This episode was largely forgotten until author Adam Hochschild re-discovered it. Hochschild's book, King Leopold's Ghost, is the basis for the film presented in class
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