The Sunday Mail
Ibo Foroma
Rastafarian Perspectives
WHEN we celebrate calendar days, many simply follow suit and barely know the reason(s) why they are doing so. The cause of celebration is engulfed by the urge to celebrate and hence the purpose of the celebration becomes null and void.
The Movement of Jah People is against such lame practices and strongly cautions comrades and cadres from wasting away the efforts of liberation war heroes and heroines. Jah Army, non-violent whatsoever, must uphold what our fathers and mothers fought for.
Independence was not delivered on a silver platter and to illustrate the holocausts and genocides attached to this dark age of the European colonisation of the Motherland/Promised Land Africa, let us dissect the evil acts of one vile Leopold II of Belgium.
Leopold II (9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the second King of the Belgians, chiefly remembered for the founding and exploitation of the Congo Free State as a private venture.
The DRCongo’s total area is a whopping 2 345 410 square kilometres (905 568 square miles) compared to Belgium, a mere 30 528 square kilometres (11 787 square miles).
Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his behalf. He used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.
At the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the colonial nations of Europe authorized his claim by committing the Congo Free State to improving the lives of the native inhabitants. From the beginning, however, Leopold totally ignored these conditions.
Under his regime, millions of Congolese people died; modern estimates range from one to 15 million, with a consensus growing around 10 million. This figure is by far much higher than the figure Adolf Hitler massacred Jews in Germany.
In the ‘Free State’, very much similar to the Orange Free State in apartheid South Africa, colonialists brutalised the local population to produce rubber, for which the spread of automobiles and development of rubber tyres created a booming international market.
The sale of rubber made an astronomical fortune for Leopold. To enforce the continuous syphoning of milk and honey from abundant Africa to dry and thirsty Europe, the army or Force Publique was called in and would cut off the limbs of the natives.
It is sad to note that at its peak, the Force Publique had around 19 000 black African soldiers led by only 420 white European officers. This is greatly attributed to the following approach revealed in a letter written by this “Belgian Hitler” (or should Hitler be labeled the “Germanic Leopold”) to his accomplices:
“Reverends, Fathers and Dear Compatriots;
The task that is given to fulfil is very delicate and requires much tact. You will go certainly to evangelise, but your evangelisation must inspire above all Belgium interests.
Your principal objective in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already. They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don’t know.
They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie and to insult is bad. Have courage to admit it, you are not going to teach them what they know already.
