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King Leopold

 

" (p.2) With his newfound revelation at hand Morel does not sit still. Demonstrating that he refused to turn a blind eye to what fortune had allowed him to see, he soon becomes active with his newfound knowledge. Soon afterward Morel devoted his life to stopping slavery in the Congo. From the early 1900's until after the death of Leopold in 1909, Morel, having become a radical human rights campaigner, used the information smuggled out of the Congo by missionaries and Leopold's employees, to set up the Congo Reform Association (CRA) and mount a campaign that won the support of prominent politicians and churchmen, both in Britain and in the United States. Among these supporters was the highly respected Joseph Conrad (author of Heart of Darkness). So what about this Mr. King Leopold? As of now you must understand that he has done something far worse than inhabit slave labor and import ivory and rubber to have caused such a controversy across the world? Simply, Leopold wanted a colony, any colony to give his position some leverage; he felt that by owning more than just his small country, that he'd somehow be validated as a King. Since he'd noticed the world flying by him quickly with new developments and technological advancements, not to mention anyone who was anyone owned a piece of the colonialism pie, Leopold just had to have his piece. Leopold feeling squeezed out by the British, French Empires, and the rising power of Germany, studied forms of colonialism from the Dutch East Indies, to the British possession in Indian and Africa. Leopold's regime, despite his studies, differed from those of those of his fellow colonialists. Leopold schemed to build himself a forced labor camp on a massive expanse of central Africa and was quite smooth with pulling all of this off. Through methods of bribery, chicanery, brute force and almost supernatural sense of cunning, Leopold had acquired an enormous private colony in Africa and gotten the rest of the worked to accept his claim as legally binding.


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