Featured in Princeton University's "Audacious Bets" Video:

This really nice video was recently produced by Princeton University for its Venture Forward: "Audacious Bets." Proud to be featured in this program and for the recognition of my work at the university.  

Full video: 

On Belgium's Kind Leopold II and the "Congo Holocaust."

In preparation for my seminar course on Kongo Art this semester, I have been reading new stuff and revisiting filed materials on the history of the Kingdom of Kongo, the Congo Free State, and the Congo DRC. And I keep coming back to the 20 years that did what 400 years of industrial slavery could not do to a vast land and its people.

Men with severed hands

I refer to the sometimes-called “Congo Holocaust” perpetrated by the Belgian King Leopold II (between about 1885 and 1905), which by some accounts reduced the population of the Congo by half. With the initial support of the US Congress, and subsequent approval of the European powers Leopold had claimed the Congo territory--ironically called "Congo Free State"--as his personal property at the Berlin-Congo Congress of 1884-85. Below is an excerpt from John Daniels’ 1908 comment on the 1905 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into King Leopold of Begium’s Congo Free State. That report was the basis for the successful international human rights campaign that forced Leopold to hand over the territory to the Kingdom of Belgium, which in turn colonized and voraciously exploited the territory until 1960. The Congo region never recovered from King Leopold’s crime.

“The [1905] Report of the Commission of Inquiry shows that the great underlying iniquities in the Free State are: first, the wholesale theft by the "State" of all the land except the merest hut spaces, leaving the natives landless in their own country; second, as a necessary concomitant of the theft of the land, the seizure of all the produce of the land with which the natives might and should engage in legitimate trade for their own betterment, and by the almost total lack of which they are rendered possessionless in their own country; third, the enforcement upon the natives of a so-called tax in labor (that being, as the Congo officials naïvely contend, the only commodity left to the natives with which to pay taxes) which is so enormous, as actually enforced, that it keeps the natives at work for the State almost incessantly, making of them at last slaves in their own country.”

John Daniels, “The Congo Question and the "Belgian Solution" The North American Review, Vol. 188, No. 637 (Dec., 1908), pp. 891-902.