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Tragic Discoveries from the Canadian Indigenous Schools and other Events

Khalid Elhassan July 27, 2021 37 min

Painting by Kent Monkman of the tragic seizure of Indigenous children by the RCMP to place in mandatory boarding schools. Pintrest

A contemporary cartoon's depiction of the tragic carving up of Africa by European powers — A contemporary cartoon’s depiction of the tragic carving up of Africa by European powers. Wikimedia

10. The Tragic Fate of the Congo Under King Leopold II

King Leopold II of Belgium is not one of the first names most people associate with massive atrocities. However, his name belongs in the same league as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao: from 1885 to 1908, Leopold ran a colonial empire so vile and cruel that it rivals or exceeds the worst of most twentieth-century monsters. The Belgian king’s colonial victims numbered in the millions, with ten million dead the most commonly cited figure, although some scholarly estimates go as high as fifteen million.

Contemporary cartoon about the tragic lot of the Congolese under the rule of Leopold II. ThoughtCo

It began in 1885 when Leopold painted himself as a humanitarian philanthropist and convinced other European powers then gathered at the Berlin Conference to award him a large state in central Africa. So they gave him what is today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. That was tragic for the locals. Leopold named the new colony the Congo Free State. It did not belong to Belgium but was Leopold’s private property, and he squeezed the locals hard to enrich himself. He did not uplift the natives and develop the region as he had promised. Instead, he transformed his African possession into a living nightmare that claimed millions of lives in widespread atrocities that came to be known as the “Congo Horrors“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.