"France and the
Congo Free State." Times [London] 16 Aug.
After that, Kongo's share of Angolan rubber exports declined because of regional stagnation, which resulted, in part at least, from the economic policies pursued by the neighbouring
Congo Free State. In particular the construction of the Matadi railway in the 1890s from the tidal lower Congo River to Malebo Pool and Leopoldville, the head of navigation on the vast interior basis of the river, diverted part of the rubber trade that had been carried out through ports in northern Angola.
Harvey Firestone's primary objective was to turn Liberia into a huge slave plantation much the same way King Leopold did in The
Congo Free State. Whether Sirleaf's government will bring the much needed stability to this poor country, where more than ninety percent of its population lives below the poverty line, is too early to say.
Morrison who first translated the Holy Bible into the Baluba dialect spoken by the natives of central Africa, known then as "The
Congo Free State." On June 14, 1906, they married, and twenty-seven days later, they steamed for Africa by way of England on board the British S.S.
It is worthwhile to remember that the first wave of fictional writing about the Congo came into being with the debate about the "Congo atrocities" in King Leopold's
Congo Free State. Beyond the political conflict among the European colonial powers, the testimonial publications of eye-witnesses of colonial violence and the journalistic engagement of the Congo Reform Association (Hochschild 1998), writers all over Europe and in the United States turned the subject into material for literary fiction (Gehrmann 2003, 2005).
The nature of tick fever in the eastern part of the
Congo Free State. BMJ.
It is only appropriate that, in a nearby photograph, an African boy casually urinates on an old rusting boat that holds the fallen statue of Henry Morton Stanley, the Welch-born explorer who helped Leopold found the
Congo Free State.Of particular interest in 'Representations of Africa' is the tale of international intrigue that led in 1907 to a gift of 3500 Congolese objects to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York by Leopold II, King of the Belgians, and owner--literally--of the
Congo Free State. Leopold hoped to sway American public opinion, so that President Theodore Roosevelt, founder of the AMNH, would decrease his criticism of atrocities perpetrated in the Congo (the famous character, Kurtz, of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was far from fictional) and withdraw his call for radical political reform.
In 1905 Mark Twain published King Leopold's Soliloquy, an imaginary rumination by the Belgian king on the troubles caused him by those campaigning against his administration in the
Congo Free State. Part of Leopold's fictional meditation is on the difficulties caused him by the evidence of the camera.
