Leopold’s rubber regime soon degenerated into mass violence and murder. A Punch cartoon in 1906 shows him as a serpent with rubber coils crushing the life of the people of the Congo.
A photograph of Nsala, the father of a five-year old girl, staring at her only remains, a severed hand and foot, was used in a 1904 book exposing the terror prevalent in Leopold’s Congo Free State.
A Punch cartoon in 1890 shows the German eagle swooping over Africa. Germany’s occupation of vast areas of east Africa and south-west Africa provoked uprisings that were met with brutal repression. More than three quarters of the Herero people and half of the Nama people of south-west Africa were annihilated.
In the name of ‘progress’, Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, ordered the conquest of Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia in 1936, using aerial bombardment, poison gas and half a million troops to accomplish it.
Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta.
Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.
Malawi’s Hastings Banda.
Congo’s Patrice Lumumba.
Côte d’Ivoire’s Felix Houphouet-Boigny in Washington with President John F. Kennedy.
Senegal’s Leopold Senghor.
South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 79
