Word: congos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...readers now over 50, the name of Leopold II of Belgium on the cover of a book will connote one thing-the Congo atrocities. They will remember appalling stories of hacked-off hands, of burned women, of forced labor. They will recall, perhaps dimly across the abyss of the World War, that the Belgian king who preceded Albert made millions out of "red rubber" and they may recollect that of a population of some 20,000,000 blacks living along the Congo when Henry M. Stanley first traced the river from source to sea only 10,000,000 were left...
Ludwig Bauer, in reanimating these old horrors, darts back & forth continually between two points of view: the things which Leopold II tacitly approved in the Belgian Congo were unspeakable; Leopold was admirable as a great organizer, a promoter in the grand manner, a veritable tycoon among kings, a political genius of the "rarest and most dangerous kind-the genius which does not wish to reveal itself as such." When Herr Bauer is taking morality as his touchstone, Leopold shrivels before one's eyes; when he is taking energy as his talisman, his subject swells to the proportions...
...that Belgium, a buffer state, was in no position to carve out a dominion in Africa. Leopold worked well in twilight zones; he knew how to make weakness into strength when he had strong neighbors who were jealous of each other. In the end he possessed himself of the Congo because Bismarck did not want France to get it and because Britain thought Belgium would be a lesser evil in the middle of Africa. The people of Belgium, a thrifty, home-loving lot, did not want the Congo, but Leopold was working on his own. He formed a vague sort...
...into soap. Unlike Harley Procter who had a soap before he had a name,* William Lever had a registered name (Sunlight) before he had the soap. By 1888 he was breaking ground for Port Sunlight, the first of his countless adventures in "enlightened self-interest." The biggest was his Congo adventure into which, in his restless search for raw materials, he plunged in 1910. He acquired from Belgium millions of acres of palm-fertile jungle which the late great imperialist King Leopold II had opened for exploitation...
...undergraduates were spending the summer in Alaska with scientific and mountain climbing expeditions, a third outfit went to the opposite end of the earth in search of information on tropical diseases. The Medical School's Department of Tropical Diseases sent an expedition to the Katanga district of the Belgian Congo...