Letter of the Day | The suffering of black peoples - the Congolese experience
Published:Thursday | April 27, 2023 | 12:19 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
My pen is constantly arrested every time I try to write about the evil cast upon my Congolese people by the Belgian king, Leopold ll.
To think that, half a century following our freedom in 1838, a Belgian king could trespass upon mainland Africa in 1885, take over, and literally enslave its black population, is totally heart-rending. Within a 23-year period while The Congo became Leopold’s personal property, over 10 million enslaved Congolese died. The people of The Congo were forced to labour for valuable resources, including rubber and ivory, to personally enrich this Belgian king. In the process, half of the Congolese population died from punishment and malnutrition. King Leopold II, was the king of Belgium, but was best known as the ‘Butcher of The Congo’.
Soldiers would cut off the hands of living persons, even children, to terrorise the Congolese people into satisfying quotas set by their officers. Belgian colonists collected and smoked these severed hands for later counting and recording. This fear of amputation succeeded in forcing workers back to collecting rubber. For those who can stomach looking at them, photos of amputees may be easily found on various media sites, like the BBC. ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53017188 ).
As a result of this constant threat of military torture, King Leopold II, the personal owner of The Congo, derived 70 million Belgian francs in profit between 1886 and 1905. It was not until 2020, over a century later, that the Congolese people managed to have these atrocities accepted as crimes against humanity and worthy of reparation. By scandalous contrast, the Jewish holocaust gained worldwide publicity within days of the liberation of prisoners from concentration camps. History records that the last concentration camps were liberated in 1945, in places such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The Jews, thereafter, hunted down Nazi war criminals, throughout the ‘4 corners’ of the globe, and made them account for their wrongs in the well-known Nuremberg trials.
International support for the Jews’ fight for justice is well documented. The suffering of the Congolese people, by contrast, has been placed on the back burner for over a century. This is so even though the atrocities heaped on our African brothers and sisters preceded the atrocities suffered by Jews by half a century.
On the 30th of June 2020, the 60th anniversary of Congolese independence, King Phillipe, the current Belgian monarch, sent a letter to the Congolese president expressing “deepest regret” “for acts of violence and cruelty committed during the colonial period”. This means, for the first time, that Belgians showed an expression of admission of wrong. This was a mere three years ago.
We must not forget that it was in 1885, the very year King Leopold II took the Congo as his personal property, that 14 European countries and the United States of America attended a conference in Berlin, Germany where they divided and shared African states among themselves.
As the coronation of the British king, Charles III, approaches on May 6, 2023, we should examine the role that monarchy played in our three-century suffering as former enslaved peoples of the Caribbean. The painful lesson learned from all of this is that the suffering of black people is internationally discounted. Yes, 10 million Congolese lives taken and forgotten by the entire world! It is a shame that, in a world where we have made such great contributions to wealth building, we still have to keep shouting “Black Lives Matter”.
BERT SAMUELS
Pan Africanist Attorney-at-law