WHEN YOU KILL TEN MILLION AFRICANS YOU AREN’T CALLED
‘HITLER’
Take a look at this picture.
Do you know who it is?
Most people haven’t heard of
him.
But you should have. When you
see his face or hear his name you should get as sick in your stomach as when
you read about Mussolini or Hitler or see one of their pictures. You see, he
killed over 10 million people in the Congo.
He “owned” the Congo during
his reign as the constitutional monarch of Belgium. After several failed
colonial attempts in Asia and Africa, he settled on the Congo. He “bought” it
and enslaved its people, turning the entire country into his own personal slave
plantation. He disguised his business transactions as “philanthropic” and
“scientific” efforts under the banner of the International African
Society. He used their enslaved labor to extract Congolese resources and
services. His reign was enforced through work camps, body mutilations, torture,
executions, and his own private army.
Most of us aren’t taught about
him in school. We don’t hear about him in the media. He’s not part of the
widely-repeated narrative of oppression (which includes things like the
Holocaust during World War II). He’s part of a long history of colonialism,
imperialism, slavery, and genocide in Africa that would clash with the social
construction of a white supremacist narrative in our schools. It doesn’t fit
neatly into school curriculums in a capitalist society. Making overtly racist
remarks is (sometimes) frowned upon in ‘polite’ society; but it’s quite fine
not to talk about genocide in Africa perpetrated by European capitalist
monarchs.1
Mark Twain wrote a satire
about Leopold called “King Leopold’s
Soliloquy; A Defense of His Congo Rule”, where he mocked the King’s
defense of his reign of terror, largely through Leopold’s own words. It’s an
easy read at 49 pages and Mark Twain is a popular author in American public
schools. But like most political authors, we will often read some of their
least political writings or read them without learning why the author wrote
them in the first place. Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, serves
to reinforce American anti-socialist propaganda about how egalitarian societies
are doomed to turn into their dystopian opposites. But Orwell was an
anti-capitalist revolutionary of a different kind—a supporter of working class
democracy from below—and that is never pointed out. We can read about Huck Finn
and Tom Sawyer, but “King Leopold’s
Soliloquy” isn’t on
the reading list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are created by boards
of education in order to prepare students to follow orders and endure boredom.
From the point of view of the Department of Education, Africans have no
history.
When we learn about Africa, we learn about a
caricatured Egypt, about the HIV epidemic (but never its causes), about the
surface level effects of the slave trade, and maybe about South African
Apartheid (the effects of which, we are taught, are now long, long over). We
also see lots of pictures of starving children on Christian Ministry
commercials, we see safaris on animal shows, and we see pictures of deserts in
films and movies. But we don’t learn about the Great African War or Leopold’s
Reign of Terror during the Congolese Genocide. Nor do we learn about what the
United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing millions of people
through bombs, sanctions, disease, and starvation. Body counts are important.
And the United States Government doesn’t count Afghan, Iraqi, or Congolese
people.
Though the Congolese Genocide isn’t included on
Wikipedia’s “Genocides in History” page, it does mention the Congo. What’s now
called the Democratic Republic of the Congo is listed in reference to the
Second Congo War (also called Africa’s World War and the Great War of Africa),
where both sides of the regional conflict hunted down Bambenga people—a
regional ethnic group—and enslaved and cannibalized them. Cannibalism and
slavery are horrendous evils which must be entered into history for sure, but I
couldn’t help thinking whose interests were served when the only mention of the
Congo on the page was in reference to regional incidents where a tiny minority
of people in Africa were eating each other (completely devoid of the conditions
which created the conflict, and the people and institutions who are responsible
for those conditions). Stories which support the white supremacist narrative
about the subhumanness of people in Africa are allowed to enter the records of
history. The white guy who turned the Congo into his own personal
part-plantation, part-concentration camp, part-Christian ministry—and killed 10
to 15 million Congolese people in the process—doesn’t make the cut.2
You see, when you kill ten million Africans, you
aren’t called ‘Hitler’. That is, your name doesn’t come to symbolize the living
incarnation of evil. Your name and your picture don’t produce fear, hatred, and
sorrow. Your victims aren’t talked about and your name isn’t remembered.
Leopold was just one of
thousands of things that helped construct white supremacy as both an
ideological narrative and material reality. I don’t pretend that he was the
source of all evil in the Congo. He had generals, and foot soldiers, and
managers who did his bidding and enforced his laws. He was at the head of a
system. But that doesn’t negate the need to talk about the individuals who are
symbolic of the system. But we don’t even get that. And since it isn’t talked
about, what capitalism did to Africa, all the privileges that rich white people
gained from the Congolese genocide, remain hidden. The victims of imperialism
are made, like they usually are, invisible.