Force Publique enforced cheap rubber collection and cheap labour with violence, killing those who refused to work or punishing those who resisted by cutting off limbs for minor infringements: its units even had a Keeper of Hands since some soldiers were paid bonuses for hands collected (and bullets saved); others collected them as trophies. Leopoldine officers sometimes shot Africans for fun, killed their mistresses if they slept with other men, raped women and traded chained ‘volunteers’, effectively slaves. Though the number of deaths is now impossible to calculate, millions died. But this
...more
