It was Henry Morton Stanley. This Welshman who claimed to be an American suffered in delusion of grandeur and struggled with women at the same time, yet it is shame to acknowledge that he was the first westerner to get to the interior of the Congo basin in 1874 and survived to tell the story. His major accomplishment to the king Leopold was to create Leopold's Congo Free State and British possessions on the upper Nile in the 1880s.
After Stanley's effort to open for entering the Congo was succeeded, task was forwarded to Henry Shelton Sanford, who lobbied the government of the United States. As a result, it became the first country do recognize King Leopold II's claim to the Congo. As Stanley said, "the recognition of the United States was the birth unto new life of the Association."(p82). Only thing that became differed was that the claim changed from a federation of states under the benevolent protection of a charitable society to one colony ruled by one man (p83). Gradually other major European powers acknowledged the claim under their own reason: giving their approval to a sort of international colony would open to traders from all of Europe. Finally, on May 29, 1885, the new sate was named as the Etat Independant du Congo, the Congo Free Sate. .
However, it was not long after the Congo became someone's personal colony when there was second spotlight on the Congo although this time was due to brutalism and mistreatment of the African. Everybody became known of what was really happening: forcing labor till death, taking women and children as hostages, the brutal whipping, mass murder simply for pleasure or punishment for disobedience, and the white officers of the military Force Publique. .
Since the beginning of the colony, thousands of African had taken as porters who had to follow the explorers or conquerors on foot carrying heavy loads. Without enough food and rest, they had to walk till death relieved them.