There are few colonial enterprises as infamous as the Belgian King Leopold II’s Congo Free State. While most people have a vague understanding of the atrocities that took place there, many don’t know the strange story of international fraud that led to the founding of the state. King Leopold successfully convinced the world that he was a great humanitarian and anti-slavery advocate, while he was secretly operating one of the planets most brutal slave states. In this episode we look at colonialism in the late 19th century and try and set the scene for one of the era’s most audacious cover-ups. Tune in and find out how murderous cyclops explorers, infamous poetry, and a guy who hates music in general all play a role in the story.  

Works Cited

Ascherson, Neal. The King Incorporated: Leopold II in the Age of Trusts. Doubleday, 1974. Bierman, John. Dark Safari: the Life behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley. Hodder & Stoughton, 1990. Forbath, Peter. The River Congo: the Dictionary, Exploration and Exploitation of the World’s Dramatic River. Secker & Warburg, 1978. Hochschild, Adam. “In the Heart of Darkness.” The New York Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/10/06/in-the-heart-of-darkness/. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: the Plunder of the Congo and the Twentieth Century’s First International Human Rights Movement. Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Jeal, Tim. Stanley: the Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. Faber, 2008. Rappoport, A. S. Leopold the Second, King of the Belgians. Hutchinson, 1910. Renton, Dave, et al. The Congo: Plunder and Resistance. Zed Books, 2013. Reybrouck, David Van, and Sam Garrett. Congo: the Epic History of a People. Fourth Estate, 2015.Stanard, Matthew G. Selling the Congo: a History of European pro -Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian … Imperialism. Univ Of Nebraska Press, 2015.