Between King Leopold II and Africans: When will justice be served

Letter from King Leopold II of Belgium to Colonial Missionaries, 18831

“Reverends, Fathers and Dear Compatriots: The task that is given to fulfill is very delicate

and requires much tact. You will go certainly to evangelize, but your evangelization must inspire

above all Belgium interests. Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already. They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don't know. They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else's wife, to lie and to insult is bad. Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already. Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world. For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty [in their underground. To avoid that, they get interested in it, and make you murderous] competition and dream one day to overthrow you.

Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering, and encouraging your

followers to love poverty, like “Happier are the poor because they will inherit the heaven” and, “It's very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us. I make reference to their Mystic System and their war fetish – warfare protection – which they pretend not to want to abandon, and you must do everything in your power to make it disappear.

Your action will be directed essentially to the younger ones, for they won't revolt when the

recommendation of the priest is contradictory to their parent's teachings. The children have to learn to obey what the missionary recommends, who is the father of their soul. You must singularly insist on their total submission and obedience, avoid developing the spirit in the schools, teach students to read and not to reason. There, dear patriots, are some of the principles that you must apply.

You will find many other books, which will be given to you at the end of this conference. Evangelize the niggers so that they stay forever in submission to the white colonialists, so they never revolt against the restraints they are undergoing. Recite every day – “Happy are those who are weeping because the kingdom of God is for them.”

Convert always the blacks by using the whip. Keep their women in nine months of

submission to work freely for us. Force them to pay you in sign of recognition-goats, chicken or

eggs-every time you visit their villages. And make sure that niggers never become rich. Sing every day that it's impossible for the rich to enter heaven. Make them pay tax each week at Sunday mass.

Use the money supposed for the poor, to build flourishing business centres. Institute a confessional system, which allows you to be good detectives denouncing any black that has a different consciousness contrary to that of the decision-maker. Teach the niggers to forget their heroes and to adore only ours. Never present a chair to a black that comes to visit you. Don't give him more than one cigarette. Never invite him for dinner even if he gives you a chicken every time you arrive at his house.

“The above speech which shows the real intention of the Christian missionary journey in

Africa was exposed to the world by Mr. Moukouani Muikwani Bukoko, born in the Congo in 1915, and who in 1935 while working in the Congo, bought a second hand Bible from a Belgian priest who forgot the speech in the Bible. – Dr. Chiedozie Okoro

We should note:

1] that all missionaries carried out, and still carry out, that mandate. We are only lucky to

have found King Leopold's articulation of the aim of all Christian imperialist missionaries to Africa.

2] Even the African converts who today manage the older churches in Africa (the priests,

bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals etc of the Roman and Protestant sects), and especially also those

who evangelize Born-Again Christianity, still serve the same mandate. Which is why they

demonize African gods and Anglicize African names, and drop the names of African deities which form part of African names; and still attack and demolish the African shrines that have managed to survive, e.g. Okija.

3] Those Africans who voluntarily converted to Christianity before the colonial conquest

such as Affonso I of the BaKongo in the 15th century probably did not discern the purpose of the

brand of Christianity that was supplied to them. Which was probably why they fell easy prey to the missionaries and the white traders and pirates who followed them.

But their Japanese counterparts probably did discern the game, even without access to some

version of Leopold's letter. But even if the Japanese Shoguns did not intuit what Leopold makes

explicit, they clearly realized the danger of Japanese converts to Christianity forming a fifth column within Japanese society and state, a fifth column loyal to their co-religionists in Europe.

To rid Japan of that danger, in the late 16th century, the Shoguns began their expulsion of Portuguese and Spanish missionaries on the grounds that they were forcing Japanese to become Christian, teaching their disciples to wreck temples, taking and trading slaves, etc. Then, in 1596, it became clear to the Japanese authorities that Christianization had been a prelude to Spanish conquest of other lands; and it quickly dawned on them that a fifth column loyal to Rome and controlled by the priests of a foreign religion was a clear and present danger to the sovereignty of a newly unified Japan.

Soon after, the persecution and suppression of Japanese Christians began. Early in the 17th century, sensing the danger from a creed that taught obedience to foreign priests rather than the Japanese authorities, all missionaries were ordered to leave and all Japanese were ordered to register at the Buddhist temples. When Japanese Christians took part in a rebellion, foreign priests were executed, the Spanish were expelled and Japanese Christians were forbidden to travel abroad.

After another rebellion, largely by Christians, was put down, the Japanese Christians were suppressed and their descendants were put under close state surveillance for centuries thereafter. In the 1640s all Japanese suspected of being Christians were ruthlessly exterminated. Thus did Japan, by 1650, save itself from the first European attempt to mentally subvert, conquer and colonize it.

4] The African captives who were taken abroad and enslaved, and the Africans at home after

the European conquest, having already been forcibly deprived of their autonomy, were in no

political position to resist Christianization. Thus the Christianity still practised in all of the African American diaspora, just as that in the African homeland since the start of the 20th century, continues to carry out the Leopoldian mandate.

Hence, for example, whereas the White Born-Agains of the USA, when in the US Navy

ships in WWII, sang:

“Praise the Lord,

And pass the ammunition,”

the attitude of African Born-Again converts today is best

summed up as:

“Praise the Lord,

And lie down for the manna.”

Thanks to a century or more of this Leopold-mandated missionary mind control, African

Christians are not an activist, self-helping, economically engaged, politically resolute, let alone

militant bunch. Hence their putting up with all manner of mistreatment and exploitation by their

misrulers, white and black. The most they are disposed to do to their misrulers is to admonish them to “Fear God!” – as one protester's miserable placard read in last week's Lagos demonstration against the latest of the murderous fuel price hikes by the OBJ Misgovernment. The idea of an uprising to tame their misrulers is alien to the religiously opiated frame of mind of the Nigerians.

5] The lesson in the contrast between an Africa that the Christian missionaries brainwashed

and subverted, and a Japan where this brainwashing and subversion was forcibly prevented, is stark and clear. What then must Africans of today begin to do to save themselves from brainwashing by their White World enemies here on earth? – That is the question.

King Leopold's legacy of DR Congo violence

Of the Europeans who scrambled for control of Africa at the end of the 19th century, Belgium's King Leopold II left arguably the largest and most horrid legacy of all.

King Leopold II left arguably the largest and most horrid legacy
While the Great Powers competed for territory elsewhere, the king of one of Europe's smallest countries carved his own private colony out of 100km2 of Central African rainforest.

He claimed he was doing it to protect the "natives" from Arab slavers, and to open the heart of Africa to Christian missionaries, and Western capitalists.

Instead, as the makers of BBC Four documentary White King, Red Rubber, Black Death powerfully argue, the king unleashed new horrors on the African continent.

Torment and Molestation

He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people.


I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit
John Harris
Missionary in Baringa
What is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo has clearly never recovered.

"Legalized robbery enforced by violence", as Leopold's reign was described at the time, has remained, more or less, the template by which Congo's rulers have governed ever since.

Meanwhile Congo's soldiers have never moved away from the role allocated to them by Leopold - as a force to coerce, torment and Molestation an unarmed civilian population.

Chopping hands

As the BBC's reporter in DR Congo, I covered stories that were loud echoes of what was happening 100 years earlier.


Men who failed to bring enough rubber for agents were killed
The film opens with the shocking images of some of Leopold's victims - children and adults whose right hands had been hacked off by his agents.

They needed these to prove to their superiors that they had not been "wasting" their bullets on animals.

This rule was seldom observed as soldiers kept shooting monkeys and then later chopping off human hands to provide their alibis.

'Foreign correspondents'

Director Peter Bate uses documented accounts of such atrocities to present an imaginary court case against the monarch who he compares to a subsequent European tyrant, Adolf Hitler.

He has an actor play the bearded, heavily-set Leopold, fidgeting nervously as damning testimonies are read out, compiled by the foreign correspondents of the day, the missionaries.

John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he felt moved to write a letter to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo.

"I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit."

Positive legacy

In the film's most powerful sequences we see reconstructions of the terror caused by Leopold's enforcers and agents.

We see a village burnt without warning and its people rounded up; its men sent off into the forests, and its women tied up as hostages and helpless targets of abuse until their husbands return with enough wild rubber to satisfy the agent.

This, we are told, was the "moment of truth" for the whole community.

If the men did not bring back enough and the agent lost his commission, he would order the deaths of everyone.


Children and adults had their hands chopped off
There is no doubt that Congo's history, and White King, Red Rubber, Black Death are almost too upsetting to bear, however Leopold did leave, albeit unwittingly, one positive legacy - the birth of modern humanitarianism.

The campaign to reveal the truth behind Leopold's "secret society of murderers," led by diplomat Roger Casement, and a former shipping clerk ED Morel, became the first mass human rights movement.

Its successors like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Kinshasa-based Voix des Sans Voix and Journaliste En Danger mean abuses in modern day DR Congo can never be hidden for long.

Here's an excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia, (Yes!You read right,Catholic Encyclopedia!)though they tried to water down the devious activities of the Christian missionaries & made it look like it was a necessary evil in order to save the Congolese from himself;

The natives

The irreligion and ignorance of the Congolese have often been exaggerated and misrepresented. They are not so debased as many pretend. They recognize a supreme God, Creator of all things, but they seem very largely to ignore His immediate Providence and His interventions in the affairs of this world. They believe in the existence of spirits, and admit to a metempsychosis more or less happy in a future life. 

Their worship is a species of gross fetishism, propagated by the sorcerers, whose influence is very great and often most pernicious. These sorcerers are the "wise men" of the Congo; they are consulted about everything. If misfortune comes or crime is committed, it is to them that recourse must be had, and whoever is designated by them as the cause of the evil must pass through the test of fire or of casque (poison drink).

The State forbids such tests under most severe penalties. Superstitious fears and slavish attachments to amulets are the chief obstacles to conversion. Others are the practice of polygamy, largely due to the custom which prevents the wife from having any relations with her husband during the period of lactation — from two to three years — lest she should make her child unhappy; the cannibalism which exists in certain parts; ingrained habits of idleness; gross egoism; the worship of might as confounded with right — in short that sum of differences which separates, as by an abyss, the essentially pagan soul of the Congolese from the Christian conception of right and wrong which the missioners try to impart. 

The excesses and the evil example of the Europeans themselves render the missionary's even more difficult. Add to this the abuse which, in the district where the rubber trade flourishes, or in the neighbourhood of towns, imposes a hard task of from fifteen to twenty days per month of forced labour instead of the forty hours fixed by the law; the unfortunate division between the Christian churches and the acts of petty opposition consequent thereon — and the problem is still further complicated. 

Nor is all ended when the Congolese is converted; he must be continually urged to hold fast to the gift he has received, for his fickleness is very great. Often he imagines that his obligation to remain a Christian ceases with the contract which binds him to a mission or to the service of Europeans. In the eastern part of Upper Congo the Arabs, who frequently make slave raids, have managed to win over to their religion many of the intelligent tribes of the Bakusus. These proselytes regard all their workmen as slaves for life; they are immoral, fanatic, and very hostile to the Gospel.

The noble work of evangelization in the Congo, however, is far from being fruitless. As formerly under the Portuguese rule, so today the missionaries find souls in which their teaching takes firm root. Mgr. Augougard gives the example of a catechist of the tribe of Babois who, seeing the resources of the mission failing, undertook to feed and clothe the children of his school with the profits of his sewing-machine. 

The most intelligent part of the population inhabits the Domaine de la Couronne and is well disposed toward Christianity. Until 1908 these people were shut off from all immediate missionary influence; they were evangelized, however, by some of their countrymen who had become Christians while serving in the army.

Many travelled long distances to see and speak with Catholic missionaries, and both men and women, nothing daunted, undertook perilous journeys in order to reach the missionary stations. It is not surprising therefore that the missionaries have been received everywhere with enthusiasm, and that the natives have offered to build their simple habitations and schools.