The Guardian –

Was Belgium’s King Leopold II a mass murderer on a par with Hitler or a greedy despot who turned a blind eye to a few excesses? A new book has ignited a furious row in a country coming to grips with its colonial legacy. Stephen Bates reports

Thu 13 May 1999

As the sun sank slowly over Brussels, its fading rays glinted off the glass domes and towers of the magnificent Victorian greenhouses in the grounds of the royal palace at Laeken. Built to celebrate King Leopold II’s acquisition of the Congo a century ago, the greenhouses stretch for more than half a mile and are among the most visible and grandiose remaining symbols of a once enormous African empire, 60 times the size of Belgium. The colony was the largest private estate ever acquired by a single man – and one he never saw.
It is said that when he showed his nephew the greenhouses, the youth gasped that they were like a little Versailles. ‘Little?’ snorted the king.

Leopold always did think big. But the row over the king’s notorious stewardship of his African territories still has the ability to evoke raw emotions in a country trying to come to terms with a brutal colonial past.
The question is: was the spade-bearded old reprobate a mass-murderer, the first genocidalist of modern times, responsible for the death of more Africans than the Nazis killed Jews? Was his equatorial empire, the setting for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the terrible Kurtz with the human heads dangling round his garden, the scene of a largely forgotten holocaust? The old wounds have been re-opened by the publication of a book called King Leopold’s Ghost, by the American author Adam Hochschild, which has brought howls of rage from Belgium’s ageing colonials and some professional historians even as it has climbed the country’s best-seller lists.

The debate over Belgium’s colonial legacy could not be more timely. In the realm beyond the palace walls where Leopold’s great grandson Albert II is now king, the openly racist extreme rightwing Vlaams Blok, which blames much of the country’s ills on coloured immigrants from Africa, is bidding to become one of the biggest parties in next month’s elections.

And the planes which soar over the greenhouses as they depart Brussels sometimes carry human cargo – black asylum seekers being unceremoniously deported, occasionally naked and still bleeding, back to Africa. Last September, the Belgian immigration service succeeded in suffocating one of them, a Nigerian woman called Semira Adamu, 20, on board the plane that was to take her home, by shoving her head under a pillow. The police videoed themselves chatting and laughing while they pushed her head down. It took them 20 minutes to kill her.

The history of Leopold’s rule over the Congo has long been known. It was first exposed by American and British writers and campaigners at the turn of the century – publicity which eventually forced the king to hand the country which had been his private fiefdom over to Belgium.

But Hochschild’s book has hit a raw nerve for a new generation with its vividly drawn picture of a voracious king anxious to maximise his earnings from the proceeds of rubber and ivory.

It is clear that many of Leopold’s officials in the depots up the Congo river terrorised the local inhabitants, forcing them to work under the threat of having their hands and feet – or those of their children – cut off. Women were raped, men were executed and villages were burned in pursuit of profit for the king.

But what has stuck in the gut of Belgian historians is Hochschild’s claim that 10 million people may have died in a forgotten holocaust. In outrage, the now ageing Belgian officials who worked in the Congo in later years have taken to the internet with a 10-page message claiming that maybe only half a dozen people had their hands chopped off, and that even that was done by native troops.

They argue that American and British writers have highlighted the Congo to distract attention from the contemporary massacre of the North American indians and the Boer War.

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