A memorial unlike any!

 

In the bustling European city of Brussels that houses the parliament of European Union, there stands the "Monumental Arcade du Cinquantenaire: built by severed human hands.

Shocked? Curious? Read on.

From freedom fighters to Independent Nation to Colonizers to Democracy to The Seat of the European Union, Belgium has seen it all, silently witnessed by and to an extent involuntarily funded by DRC.

DRC - Democratic Republic of Congo, was a thriving force of Nature back when Belgium was fighting for independence from Netherlands.

In 1830 when Belgium became a free Nation,  people of this far away African swathe of land around the mighty Congo river had no idea about how their future would become a pawn in the hands of a Belgian Man called Leopold II; King Leopold II.

Leopold II was the Monarch of Belgium in the 1800s.

After the French Revolution, it was "The times a changin" for monarchs everywhere. They yielded power and control of their lands to elected constitutions and played the roles of wealthy influencers (with veto power in some cases). 

Leopold II was a restless and angry Monarch because literally not much money was left in his private coffers post such a Democratic shift in Belgium.

Trade winds were the hottest things with European Monarchs who were spreading out their control to all lands that trade winds carried their navies.

Leopold II might have been left out from the "Great Scramble for Africa", when his cousins from England, France and elsewhere were carving out the great African continent into royal parcels.

A Quote from Brittanica:

"In 1870 more than 80 percent of Africa south of the Sahara was under the rule of indigenous chiefs or kings. Forty years later virtually all of it had been transformed into European colonies, protectorates, or territories ruled by white settlers."

Having watched all his neighbour monarch cousins and relatives becoming uber wealthy on their African scramble, Leopold II decided to join the party.

But he had some more shortcomings apart from a lack of wealth; his small country  neither had Navy nor Merchant Marine forces.

So he fashioned himself as a religious philanthropist with an intent to bring the benefits of western civilization and commerce to the poor africans. He hosted famous european explorers and geographers in a royal conference to "get to know" the nuts of bolts of their work and later hired an explorer, Henry Morton Stanley as his "eyes" of Africa.

Henry zeroed in on Congo basin, set up carefully planned trading posts and infrastructure on behalf of Leopold II and also executed a series of treaties with many Native heads of Congo basin, most of them illiterate, to allow Leopold II to do business.  Those treaties were subsequently doctored on instructions from Leopold II to allow him to basically do whatever he wanted in their lands. 

His first target was Ivory from Congo. By the time he exhausted what dead and alive elephants could supply, he found a new target.

Rubber it was. 

Modern world just found a way to use inflatable tyres to move around and demand for commercial rubber exploded everywhere.

There was a problem though; rubber tree cultivation takes years to yield rubber.

Explorers and scientists soon discovered the wilder rubber tree varieties found in abundance in African forests. Congo had the lions share of these trees in its lush forests.

What followed was unbridled greed fuelled plunder of forests everywhere in Congo. Native women were held hostage and men were driven into forests to collect rubber. Each man was given a deadline driven quota to fill. If a man fails to deliver on such a task, hands of his wife / children were severed and sent to him as a friendly reminder of what was at stake. (See pic1 of a devastated man squatting next to the severed hands of his girls child for a missed quota. Pic 2 shows women of Congo with some limbs missing due to purported inefficiency of their man's labour.

Rebelling men were shot and killed, lucky few escaped to deepest crevices of Congolese jungles and never returned.

Men and women thus separated and living constantly in fear, caused a drastic reduction in birth rate. Coupled with an abandoned agrarian system, abandoned due to lack of able bodied people to work on the fertile lands, multiple famines stuck killing many more. As a result of these, their population was halved within a short span. 

Oblivious to the gargantuan suffering of the people of Congo, rich world lopped up Congolese rubber and filled Leopold's coffers.

Emboldened by the new fame and the power that comes with it, Leopold successfully persuaded another flidgling democracy, The United States of America, to formally accept his private ownership of Congo - modern world's first privately owned country. The new gained legitimacy was accepted en mass by rich countries as it meant friendly trade partnerships and boatloads of free slaves that fuelled their coffee / rubber / tea / sugarcane plantations everywhere.

Ironically, Leopold named his newly owned property as "Congo Free State"!!!

Welcome to the "Future Past of our Modern world", Neo!

Those rich nations are still richer. The poorer colonized nations still carry the label " third world countries" because of the deep surgical fissures in every layer of their lives.

Currently our world is occupied with yet another war. Sooner or later it will become  "Commodity grab of the middle Asia"; mind you, there are no permanent friends or enemies for the rich nations.

For the rest of the world, we do have issues that are "one too many" that will keep us generations occupied tying ourselves into more and more intricate knots marvelling our genius all the while.

By the way, Belgians have woken up to their past and have been demanding removal of King Leopold II statues in their country with a further demand to melt those statues and make memorials for Congo victims. I imagine a severed hand as the most telling memorial for our world to remember what it was all about.