Belgian Congo

The Belgian Congo was the Belgian colony in Central Africa from 1908 until 1960. It covered the whole of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about eighty times the size of Belgium. It replaced the Congo Free State, the personal possession of King Leopold II, after international outrage over atrocities there.

Leopold II, determined to acquire a colony, sponsored the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who travelled the Congo river from 1879 and signed treaties with local chiefs. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the European powers recognised Leopold's Congo Free State, under the pretext of humanitarian and free-trade goals. In reality, Leopold claimed vacant land and its resources as state property and granted concessions to companies.

From the 1890s, demand for rubber soared for bicycle and car tyres. Congolese villages were forced to collect wild rubber under quotas. The state's army, the Force Publique, and company agents took women and children hostage, burned villages and cut off the hands of people who failed to meet quotas or of those killed, to prove bullets were not wasted. Famine, disease and violence caused a catastrophic loss of life; estimates of the population decline range widely, up to ten million. Missionaries, such as Alice Seeley Harris, photographed mutilated victims. The British consul Roger Casement reported on the abuses in 1904, and the journalist Edmund Dene Morel founded the Congo Reform Association. Under international pressure, Belgium annexed the colony in 1908.

The Belgian Congo was run by the colonial state, large companies and the Catholic Church, the "colonial trinity". The administration was paternalistic: the Congolese were treated as children who needed guidance, and given almost no political rights. Forced labour and compulsory crop cultivation, such as cotton, continued for decades. The Union Minière du Haut-Katanga mined copper, cobalt, tin and other minerals in Katanga, and the Shinkolobwe mine supplied uranium for the American atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.

Missions ran most schools and hospitals, and the colony had one of the highest rates of primary education in Africa, but higher education was almost absent; at independence, there were fewer than twenty Congolese university graduates. Cities such as Léopoldville, now Kinshasa, and Elisabethville, now Lubumbashi, grew. Congolese music, especially rumba, flourished in the cities. Religious movements, such as Kimbanguism, founded by the prophet Simon Kimbangu, who died in prison in 1951 after thirty years, challenged colonial authority.

After the Second World War, a small Congolese educated class, the évolués, emerged. Political parties formed in the late 1950s, including the Abako of Joseph Kasa-Vubu and the Congolese National Movement of Patrice Lumumba. Riots in Léopoldville in January 1959 shocked Belgium, which, at a round-table conference in Brussels in 1960, agreed to independence within months.

The Congo became independent on 30 June 1960, with Kasa-Vubu as president and Lumumba as prime minister. At the ceremony, Lumumba gave a speech denouncing colonial oppression in front of King Baudouin. Within days the army mutinied, Belgian troops intervened, and Katanga, under Moïse Tshombe with Belgian support, seceded. Lumumba was overthrown and, in January 1961, murdered in Katanga with Belgian involvement; Belgium formally apologised in 2002 and returned one of his teeth to his family in 2022. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu took power in 1965 and later renamed the country Zaire.

Our maps show the Belgian Congo from 1914 to 1945, with an outline of about 2.3 million square kilometres, matching today's Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa, then called Léopoldville, lies inside it. On the 1960 map, the region is the independent Republic of the Congo.