A European king once owned an African country as his private property: more than seventy times the size of his own kingdom, and he never once set foot in it.
King Leopold II of Belgium dressed up his ambitions as charity, used Henry Morton Stanley's treaties and the Berlin Conference to claim the Congo for himself, and called it the Congo Free State. To feed the world's hunger for rubber, his private army held families hostage, burned villages and punished whole communities. Famine, disease and flight followed, and millions of people died; some historians estimate the loss at around ten million.
Then a historian, a shipping clerk, a diplomat and a missionary's camera exposed him, in one of the first international human rights campaigns. Forced to give up the Congo in 1908, he burned his archives, and when he died his own people booed his coffin.
This episode deals with violence and mass death. We have chosen not to show graphic photographs.