Congo, Then and Now A father stares at the hands of his five
year-old daughter, which were severed as a punishment for having
harvested too little caoutchouc/rubber (This is an unnaturally
long post for this blog, but even if you skim, please pay
attention to last two paragraphs). The largest private estate
ever ‘owned’ by man in history was perhaps a chunk of Africa as
big as Europe acquired by the Belgian King in 1885. Between 1885
and 1908, Leopold II of the Belgians was the de facto owner —
not merely an administrator, trustee, company director, colonial
overlord or even king, but an owner in his own personal capacity
— of over a million square miles of central Africa, in the form
of Congo Free State, with its capital at Leopoldville. Belgium
never had interest in joining the so-called Scramble for Africa,
but seeing a boom in demand for rubber (which Congo had plenty),
Leopold decided to do the job himself. In 1876, he founded the
Association Internationale Africaine, a strictly humanitarian
organization