Father stares at the hand and foot of his five-year-old, severed as a punishment for failing to make the daily rubber quota. Belgian Congo, 1904.
Father stares at the hand and foot of his five-year-old, severed as a punishment for failing to make the daily rubber quota. Belgian Congo, 1904.
Was reading about this on Wikipedia and the truth is even more insane. The caption on Wikipedia is
“A congolese man, Nsala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, cooked, and cannibalized by members of the Force Publique”
All in the name of profits
My first thought was, if I was in that situation, I would be planning how to kill whoever did this. Makes sense them being an army would be a pretty big deterrent. I wonder if there was a guerilla resistance of some kind at the time.
Not much. The peoples of the Congo were very isolated from one another, and the Belgians put significant effort in keeping them that way. You had small uprisings, but they were generally local, and dealt with... extremely brutally.
I'd become the fucking punisher if you did this to me. I would make sure to kill you slow and make you watch as I eat you. Being a parent makes your irrational, and I'd do irrational things to get revenge for my kids.
The past is often fascinating - but we must also never forget its brutality. No colonial power of the turn of the century was saintly - all were brutal, and often genocidal. But the Belgians in the Congo beat everyone for sheer, pointless cruelty.
I don’t understand how someone could do this to a defenseless child and sleep at night.
It’s because they convinced themselves that people who aren’t the same color as them aren’t actually people
They didn't convince themselves. They were convinced of it. By the people in power who had the most money to make based off of the exploitation of the Congolese people and their natural resources. Once they were convinced, they had to keep believing it, so that they could sleep at night.
Many of these atrocities were carried out by their 'fellow' Africans in the employ of the Belgians, though the atrocities were generally ordered (or, gruesomely, regulated) by the Europeans. Sadly, people can seemingly dehumanize anyone, regardless of how they look.
As an atheist, it's stories like these than make me wish hell was real.
Perhaps Hell is as real as we make it.
Fucking awefull, may history never forget wimp king leopold ii and the Belgian people that helped destroy the Congo and its people. A kid was mutilated because his father did not meet his slave quota.
Truth is a little different. They didn't chop off your hands for failing to meat a quota. You can't work without hands, see, so that wouldn't really help. Naw, they just fucking killed ya. The hands were supposed to be what the soldiers brought back to count how many they killed, to prove they hadn't wasted ammo. Seriously. The photos of people with just hands cut off were from soldiers cheating the system and just cutting off hands of random people so they could shoot more later. It was fucking barbaric.
Awful. Let's never forget that.
Behind the bastards did a few episodes on the sheer scale of horror perpetrated on these people.
Jfc.