Leopold: The Man Far Worse Than Hitler, But You Rarely Hear About — And Why
By Sidoc Haytu
There's a photograph from around 1904 that a lot of people have seen without ever learning the story behind it: a Congolese man named Nsala, sitting on a porch, staring down at a small severed hand and foot laid out in front of him. They belonged to his five-year-old daughter, Boali. Soldiers killed her, and her mother, because Nsala's village hadn't collected enough rubber that week. The hand and foot were brought back as proof — receipts, in a system where human limbs were the currency of accounting.
That wasn't a rogue soldier having a bad day. That was policy, in a colony owned outright, personally, by one European king. His name was Leopold II of Belgium, and by the time the world forced him to give it up, somewhere between 10 and 15 million Congolese were dead — a population collapse of roughly half.
You were taught about Hitler in school. You've probably never heard Leopold's name at all. I want to spend a few minutes with you asking why.
Say this clearly, before anything else
I need to be completely honest with you here, because I'm not interested in playing games with something this serious: this is not an argument that Hitler wasn't evil. He was. The Holocaust murdered six million Jews and millions more Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, and Slavic civilians in an act of industrialized genocide that deserves every ounce of horror and remembrance it gets. Nothing in this piece is trying to shrink that.
What this piece is asking is a different, and I'd argue more uncomfortable, question: why does a regime that killed a comparable number of people — by the most conservative estimates, roughly as many as died in the entirety of the Nazi genocide, and by higher estimates, considerably more — barely register in most people's education at all? Why do we build museums, films, curricula, and annual days of remembrance for one, and let the other fade into a paragraph most people skip?
That gap isn't an accident of history. It's a decision, made and remade for over a century, about which atrocities are safe to remember and which ones are not.
What actually happened in the Congo
Leopold never set foot in the territory he owned. In 1885, European powers at the Berlin Conference handed him personal, private ownership of the Congo — not Belgium's ownership, his own, like a man owns a house. He ran it as a business, and the product was rubber, fueling the booming demand for tires and insulated wire in a world falling in love with the bicycle and the automobile.
To extract that rubber, Leopold's private army, the Force Publique, imposed brutal quotas on every village in the territory. When a village fell short, soldiers took women and children hostage in stockades until the men brought back enough rubber. If the quota still wasn't met, people were killed. Soldiers had to account for every bullet they fired, so when a round was wasted, a hand was cut off — sometimes from someone still alive — to make the ledger balance. Baskets of severed hands became a literal unit of proof, carried back to colonial officers like a receipt.
Whole regions were emptied. Villages that once held thousands were found reduced to a fraction of their size, survivors missing hands or feet, children orphaned by a system that treated their parents' bodies as collateral for a rubber quota. It took a Liverpool shipping clerk named Edmund Dene Morel, who noticed ships going out to the Congo loaded with weapons and coming back loaded only with rubber and ivory — never trade goods — to start pulling the thread that eventually forced Belgium to strip Leopold of his private colony in 1908.
He was never tried. He was never punished. He died a wealthy man, having built parks, palaces, and monuments across Belgium with the profits.
Why one gets remembered and the other gets erased
Here's the actual answer, and it isn't complicated once you say it out loud: condemning Hitler costs the modern world nothing. Nazi Germany no longer exists. No living institution benefits from defending it. Every government on earth can point at it, call it evil, and lose absolutely nothing by doing so — no economic interest is threatened, no royal family is embarrassed, no corporation's supply chain gets questioned.
Leopold is a different problem entirely. Belgium's monarchy still exists. The wealth extracted from the Congo helped build the institutions, boulevards, and museums of modern Belgium, and reckoning with that honestly means reckoning with an unbroken line from a king's private profit machine to a country's present-day prosperity. Worse, for the people who'd have to do the reckoning: the Congo's minerals didn't stop being valuable in 1908. They just changed hands, and changed names, and today they're called cobalt instead of rubber.
Fully exposing Leopold doesn't just indict a dead man. It indicts a system of extraction that never actually stopped running — it indicts the idea that a resource-rich African country can be treated as a private supply chain for wealth that flows somewhere else, which is a business model plenty of very current, very powerful institutions still profit from. That's the difference. Hitler is safe to condemn because Nazi Germany is gone. Leopold is dangerous to fully condemn because the machine he built is, in a modernized form, still running.
The machine never actually stopped
Researcher Siddharth Kara has documented roughly 35,000 children working in Congo's cobalt mines today — the same region Leopold's quotas once terrorized — digging by hand for the mineral that powers the phone you're probably reading this on. Kara, who has spent two decades studying modern slavery, called the gap between what these children earn and what the industry built on their labor is worth the most severe asymmetry he has ever documented — children paid a dollar or two a day, mining the raw material for products sold by some of the wealthiest companies that have ever existed.
In 2019, families of children killed or maimed in those mines sued Apple, Google, Tesla, Microsoft, and Dell, arguing the companies knowingly profited from a supply chain built on forced child labor. In March 2024, a federal appeals court threw the case out — ruling that simply buying cobalt from a supply chain known to run on child labor wasn't enough to establish legal responsibility. The court didn't dispute that children were dying in those mines. It ruled that the distance between the mine and the corporation was legally sufficient protection.
Sit with that. A court, in the same year you're reading this, ruled that profiting from a supply chain built on children's bodies is legally acceptable as long as the paperwork puts enough middlemen in between. That's not an accident of law. That's the entire function Leopold's original model was built to perform: create enough distance between the person profiting and the person suffering that no court, no conscience, and no headline ever has to connect the two directly.
This is not ancient history with new packaging
This is the honest, uncomfortable center of the argument: colonialism didn't end in 1908, or 1960, or whenever your country's flag changed. It changed form. A private king's quota system became a corporate supply chain's sourcing agreement. Severed hands as proof of extraction became underage tunnel deaths as an accepted cost of doing business. The Congo's minerals still flow outward, the wealth still lands somewhere else, and the people digging them out of the ground still see almost none of it.
This is what anti-imperialism actually means, stripped of theory: refusing to let a system rename itself out of accountability every time the century changes. The same logic that let Leopold treat an entire country as personal property lets a modern supply chain treat a mining region as an acceptable sacrifice zone for battery production. Different paperwork. Same relationship between the people who extract the wealth and the people who are extracted from.
What reparations actually means here
Belgium's royal family has offered "regret." King Philippe expressed regret for colonial-era violence in 2020 — a word carefully chosen to fall short of an apology, and much further short of restitution. No reparations have been paid. No wealth extracted from those decades has been returned. The country that was hollowed out to build Belgian palaces remains, by most measures, one of the poorest on earth, despite sitting on some of the most valuable mineral reserves on the planet.
Reparations, in this context, isn't a symbolic gesture. It's the plain acknowledgment that wealth currently sitting in European and American institutions has a traceable origin in Congolese bodies, and that a debt that old doesn't expire just because the people who are owed it were never in a position to collect. It means treating the Congo's mineral wealth as something owed to the people who live on top of it and die extracting it — not as a resource pool for supply chains that get to walk away clean every time a court finds enough legal distance to hide behind.
What this means for you
If you're African, or from anywhere the same machine has ever run through, you already know this story in your bones even if you never learned Leopold's name. The pattern is the same one your own country's history probably rhymes with: outside powers deciding your land's wealth belongs to someone else's ledger, and calling the arrangement progress.
If you're not African, this still isn't someone else's history. The phone in your hand very likely contains cobalt from the same ground Leopold's soldiers once terrorized, mined under conditions a US federal court just ruled were too legally distant to hold anyone accountable for. That distance is the entire trick. It always has been.
Leopold's name should be as widely known as Hitler's — not to rank atrocities against each other, but because the silence around his isn't an accident of history class. It's a maintenance decision, made by institutions that are still standing, still profiting, and still counting on you never asking who's cutting the hands off the ledger today.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, join the movement at https://t.me/SiraPress.
