[Quick setup: The Belgian King Leopold II had been running a slave state in the Congo while vehemently insisting to the world that he was working to improve the area and bring the light of civilization to its people. Thanks to eyewitness accounts and materials leaking out of the Congo, the international press started to get wind of what was really happening and had turned against the King. He tried to combat this by setting up what was supposed to be a rigged investigative commission. He quickly lost control of the proceedings under the weight of the atrocities coming to light.]
It is in the raw, unedited testimony given to the Commission of Inquiry that King Leopold II’s rule is at last caught naked. There could be no excuse that this was information gathered by the king’s enemies, for the three commissioners had been sent by Leopold himself. There could be no excuse that people were fabricating stories, for sometimes many witnesses described the same atrocity. And there could be no excuse that witnesses were lazy malcontents, for many risked their lives by even speaking to the commission.
When Raoul Van Calcken, an A.B.I.R. official, found two Africans, Lilongo and Ifomi, traveling to meet the commission, he ordered them seized. “He then told his sentries to tie us to two trees with our backs against the trees and our feet off the ground,” Lilongo told a British missionary. “Our arms were stretched over our heads… Look at the scars all over my body. We were hanging in this way several days and nights… All the time we had nothing to eat or drink, and sometimes it was raining and at other times the sun was out… We cried and cried until no more tears would come – it was the pain of death itself. Whilst we hung there three sentries and the white man beat us in the private parts, on the neck and other parts of the body with big hard sticks, till we fainted.”
Ifomi died, and Van Calcken ordered his body thrown in the river. Lilongo survived, testified before the commission, and was carried home by his younger brother.
Source:
Hochschild, Adam. "No Man is a Stranger" King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 253. Print.
Further Reading:
État indépendant du Congo (Independent State of the Congo) / Congo Free State
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