Except that this is no monk. The man on the horse is Leopold II – the Belgian king who ran Congo as his personal fiefdom for more than two decades at the turn of the twentieth century. Under his rule, millions of people in Congo died as their colonial overlords became exceptionally rich, from the rubber exported to become tyres in the first automobiles, from the ivory from slaughtered elephants and, most of all, rich from the proceeds of this country’s extraordinary mineral wealth.
