A popular claim floating around the internet is that King Leopold II, between the years 1885 and 1908 when he ruled the area of the modern Democratic Republic of Congo, killed 10 million people. This area was known as the “Congo Free State”, and in 1908 the Belgian government formally took over the area. This is based on claims in a book by Adam Hochschild, who is a co-founder of the publication Mother Jones. If there was a massive genocide, it appears to have been lower than the natural population growth rate. The population growth rate of the Congo from 1950 to 2016 has been around 2.8%. This results in a doubling roughly every 27 years. G-B’s estimate for year on-year growth averages to 2.3%.
And another reason to think this is that the Congo’s share of the population of Africa has increased from 1950 to 2016. And so the Congo’s population relative to the rest of Africa was probably lower in 1885 to 1900 than it is today. If someone was given an assignment to estimate the population of the Congo Free State in 1900, and didn’t know about the “10 million” killed by Leopold and thus what the population had to have been for that to be possible, they wouldn’t come anywhere near 20 million. They would come to a mid-range estimate of 7 million, with the highest plausible being around 10.7 million, with an absolute maximum of 15.2 million, a low estimate of around 4 million, and an absolute minimum of 3.1 million.
There are two more important facts to consider. The first is that there were roughly 200 Europeans in the Congo Free State administration at any one time, versus around 13,000 black FP troops at any one time. And so the mutilating, raping and killing that was done had to have been done overwhelmingly by the black FP troops. Secondly, there were no orders or policy to mutilate, rape or kill without cause any of the Congolese. And while there may have been some white people who engaged in these acts, it was almost certainly lower on a per-capita basis, but even if all 200 of the whites were vicious killers and sadists who traveled to the Congo because they knew they could get away with it there, there’s only so much 200 men could have done.
Between 1892 and 1894, the Congo Free State was at war with Tippu Tip, and had begun advancing westward, using an incident at a fort in which Tips forces attacked and defeated an FP garrison due to a dispute over a slave girl. And so if a dishonest or ignorant newspaper editor got some pictures or description of a battle in that war, he would have plenty of gory pictures and gruesome details, and he could then say, “this is Leopold’s Congo” to dishonestly seed the idea that this was normal Congo Free State policy for all Congolese.
In addition, if say some men in the FP chopped off the hands of 20 people, well, 20 images can fill up an entire page, and would make it look like mutilation is happening all the time; and he could then say, “this is Leopold’s Congo”. Leopold’s Congo did not have any form of population statistics. And so there is no record of how many people died in the Congo; this makes it easy for people to pull numbers out of there. Moreover, it is the Congo, it is a place where people die all the time for horrible reasons and live in conditions that Europeans even at that time would consider torture. 200 Belgian administrators are not going to change that.
In addition, some journalists can come in and take photos of people with their hands cut off, and then say “look, this is going on in King Leopold’s Congo” and the reader is then to make assumptions. The rubber quota was just a form of taxation. In fact, throughout history, labor rendered to the state was the most common way in which people paid taxes, since most people didn’t have currency. And that is how most of the Congolese paid their taxes, and Leopold’s policy was that no man’s tax should be over 40 hours per month.
In terms of cutting off limbs, that was a practice that predates and postdates Leopold’s Congo. In addition, several of the photos of Africans with limbs chopped off have Europeans posing with them; do you imagine that they would pose with them if they had done it themselves? Do you think they would want to take photos because they were proud of doing that themselves?
And activists, looking for a flashy number, say “10 million” and quickly cobble together imagery, anecdotes and personal accounts, without doing the first level of research and ask “is this possible” or try to figure out if indicators of past population showed a decline or increase in population over the period. A similar thing happened in Britain during the industrial revolution as politicians learned of the frightful conditions of factories, ignorant of the fact that it was an improvement of the even more frightful conditions of peasant life.
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