Jaksokuvaus
We break away in this episode from our account of events in Britain’s ever-troubled relationship with Ireland, to look instead at Africa, where things were about to get a lot worse even than they were for the Irish. From 10% of the landmass being controlled by European colonial powers in 1870, by 1914 the figure had grown to nearly 90%. Some of the drive to extend European possessions had been driven by individuals, such as Cecil Rhodes in British South Africa, or the even more extraordinary character, Leopold II, not a private individual, since he was king of the Belgians, but acting in a private capacity in Africa. He eventually controlled as his own personal domain the whole of what he called the ‘Congo Free State’ (there’s an unintended irony in the word ‘free’), a territory 75 times larger than Belgium where he was king. We follow the exciting events that led to his incorporating the still-troubled region of Katanga into his holdings, as a telling example of how the Europeans behaved in that unfortunate Congo. Leopold’s rule over the Congo was particularly appalling, but the other colonial powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain), though less awful than he was, had little enough to be proud of either. Illustration: Cartoon by François Maréchal in Le Frondeur, (Liège, Belgium), 20 December 1884, showing Leopold II carving up the Congo with Bismarck to the right and a crowned bear for Russia on the left. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.