Een staat van terreur. Kongo rond de eeuwwisseling

Samenvatting

A State of Terror. Congo at the Turn of the Century. The rubber tax introduced in the last decade of the 19th century by king Leopold II of Belgium when Congo was still his personal property was particularly brutal. Recently new sources, for a long time secreted away in colonial archives, have surfaced. They describe the horrors to which the inhabitants of regions in which the collection of wild rubber took place were exposed. The article discusses, following up on Taussig’s work on a similar regime along the Amazon river in South America, the reasons for the violence practiced against Africans in a colonial milieu of racism.