5. King Leopold's Ghost
Roger Casement
A diplomat and Irish nationalist. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat and later became a humanitarian activistIn Africa as a young man, he first worked for commercial interests before joining the British Colonial Service. In 1891 he was appointed as a British consul, a profession he followed for more than 20 years. Influenced by the Boer War and his investigation into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples, he grew to distrust imperialism. After retiring from consular service in 1913, he became more involved with Irish republicanism and other separatist movements. During World War I he made efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising that sought to gain Irish independence.
Chicotte
A long knotted whip with a wooden handle, formerly used as a punishment in the Congo and Portuguese Africa.
Central Intelligence Agency
An agency created after World War II to coordinate American intelligence activities abroad
Patrice Lumumba
First Prime Minister of Democratic Republic of Congo - eventually arrested and murdered
William Henry Sheppard
Honored for his work as one of the earliest African Americans to become a Christian missionary for the Presbyterian Church. He spent 20 years in Africa, primarily in and around the Congo Free State, and is best known for his efforts to publicize the atrocities committed against the Kuba and other Congolese peoples by King Leopold II's Force Publique. After his humanitarian successful work abroad, he returned to the Jim Crow South where a white woman recalled "He was such a good darky. When he returned from Africa he remembered his place and always came to the back door." It would be years before humanitarian issues in the United States would be addressed in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
ED Morel
Morel observed a fortune in rubber returning from the Congo while only guns and manacles were being sent in return. He correctly deduced that these resources were being extracted from the population by force and began to campaign to expose the abuses. In collaboration with Roger Casement, Morel led a campaign against slavery in the Congo Free State, founding the Congo Reform Association and running the West African Mail. With the help of celebrities such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain, the movement successfully pressured the Belgian King Leopold II to turn over the Congo to the Belgian government, ending some of the human rights abuses perpetrated under his rule.
Force Publique
The __________ ___________ was initially conceived in 1885 when King Leopold II ordered his Secretary of the Interior to create military and police forces for the State. The officers were entirely European. They comprised a mixture of Belgian regular soldiers and mercenaries from other countries who were drawn by the prospect of wealth or simply attracted to the adventure of service in Africa.
George Washington Williams
an American Civil War soldier, Baptist minister, politician, lawyer, journalist, and writer on African-American history. In the late 1880s, met King Léopold II of Belgium, he traveled in 1890 to the Congo Free State (then owned by the king) to see its development. Shocked by the widespread, brutal abuses and near-slavery imposed on the Congolese, he wrote an open letter to Leopold in 1890 about the suffering of the region's native inhabitants at the hands of the king's agents. This letter was a catalyst for an international outcry against the regime running the Congo, which had caused millions of deaths
Belgium
small country in Europe that borders France and Germany
Congo
territory controlled by Belgium
Mobutu
the military dictator and President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which he renamed Zaire in 1971) from 1965 to 1997. The United States CIA, deposed the nationalist democratically elected government of Patrice Lumumba in 1960.
Joseph Conrad
wrote the book Heart of Darkness, where he criticized the Europeans in their civilizing of Africa
