The Greatest Fake News of All Time Quotes

“This heroism was also that of the first missionaries. They had a life expectancy of about 5 years in Congo, and some were given extremely anointing at the time of their journey to Africa. There were many young idealists. Their graves are still lined up in the Mpala locality, which overlooks Lake Tanganyika. The Catholic mission was a fort where people who fled slavers and brutality took refuge.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“The obsession with seeking in Africa's colonial past the causes of all its miseries today is the work of people intimately convinced that Africa is doomed, that it is unable to take care of itself today, and that, finally, the fate of the Black will only improve if the White comes back to repair what he has done wrong: these “hidden Afro- pessimists “ are hiding, under gratuitous accusations, anger, or demand for reparation, their own disarray. This explains why their words are sterile, never accompanied by proposals for solutions to the problems they evoke. They are doing a lot of harm to Africa because they divert issues that have worth.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“Millions of dead' appears nowhere in the rich oral tradition of my ancestors, nor in Lumumba's speeches. Nor does it appear with Mobutu, who was born and raised in the Equator province, where the ABIR and the Anversoise exploited rubber.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“Jules Marchal, Adam Hochschild, Lucas Catherine and Daniel Vangroenweghe deliberately did not publish reliable figures and did not read the 1905 investigation report, set by Leopold II. They are spreaders of fake news.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“The French's acts of violence did not exonerate Leopold, but they did not make it into the Angelo-International press: Brazza's 1905 report was not published until 1965.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“Demographer Jean-Paul Sanderson, estimated the decline of the Congolese population during the reign of Leopold II and after, between 1885 and 1920 at several hundred thousand, and there were several reasons for this: diseases, malnutrition (including because men worked in the rubber harvest rather than farming), fewer births. Professor Anatole Romaniuk of the University of Alberta in Canada wrote a study on this, showing that almost half of the women in Congo in the second half of the 19th century suffered from Afro-Arab slavery and did not give birth to a single living child because of 'une stérilité massive pathologique d'origine vénérienne', i.e. because of massive infertility due to venereal disease. This factor trumped all other causes.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“The much-criticised rubber regime of Leopold II had only a brief heyday and disappeared from the tables of Congolese resources shortly after 1900 in favour of palm oil and palm nuts. The production tables also show that the population increased from 1890 onwards and was not exterminated. In 1888, And revenue from the 'red' rubber largely went to the Free State for public expenditure, including road construction and the army. These budgets, too, are never cited by the narrators, ever. Ditto for the rubber tables, which show that far more rubber arrived in Antwerp from French Congo and Angola than from the Free State in the early period. Rubber from Congo Free State accounted for barely 10 per cent of world production. The big supplier was the Amazon with 70%.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“Congo Free State had an annual 'Bulletin Officiel' from 1885 to 1908, it was a member of the Universal Postal Union and one Congolese franc was worth one Reichsmark. The Bulletin had 9,777 pages in 23 editions from 1885 to 1908. The Free State's income rose from 0.6 million Congolese francs in 1891 to 35 million in 1908. So by no means all the money went to Leopold II. These figures are hushed up by all critics.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“It was only in 1926, long after Leopold II, that the whip was introduced in local courts with Congolese chieftains and dignitaries as judges. In 1959 the use had completely disappeared, but Laurent Kabila reintroduced it in 1997 and now the whip is a common torture of the police.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“Lumumba praised Leopold as a genius and builder of the Congo; in his fierce speech of June 30, 1960, he denounced 9 forms of violence, but the "severed hands" and the "chicotte" (whip) were not among them. The chicotte was part of the sharia and the Arab slave traders, but it was banned in the law that was introduced by Leopold after 1885 for Congolese citizens.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“Human zoos existed in many countries (France, Norway, USA), but only Leopold II was accused of bringing Congolese to Belgium in 1885, 1894 and 1897.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“The anti-clericalism of some Belgians falsified history by attributing the low level of education to "the racism of the missionaries", while it was they who provided education and educated the African elite with the first university priest Stefano Kaoze in 1917”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“The rubber production only took place in the northwest of the Congo, in the Equateur province, a very small part of the huge country.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“The Chinese who mine cobalt mines in the Congo are now whipping Congolese workers with impunity. A video of this went viral, but no action group or government reacted to it.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“The current problems in Congo (poverty, 27 million people in famine, enrichment by the top, brutal rapes, murders, ...) receive much less attention than those during the time of Leopold II.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“The powers of the time had first rushed to the city of the most powerful man in the world, the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. But five years later, they came to Leopold II. In 1890, Brussels became the capital of colonizing Europe. The city held an anti-slavery conference, to strengthen Berlin-1885 and "to put an end to the Negro Slave Trade by land as well as by sea, and to improve the moral and material conditions of the natives". It was, in accordance with the mentalities of the time, a proclamation of "fundamental rights of populations", starting with the most basic: the right to life. Berlin-1885 had already expressed similar rights in the search for " the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being, and to help in suppressing slavery, and especially the slave trade". The Treaty of Brussels-1890 was also contracted "in the name of God Almighty". It ordered to put an end to the crimes and devastation of the slavers and to provide the benefits of peace and civilization on the continent.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“It was put in the books that Thomas Kanza was the first university graduate, but he was a secular and a Congolese from Belgium (1956). The very first graduate was Paul Panda Farnana, an agronomist trained in Belgium (1907). But considering post-secondary education, it is father Stefano Kaoze (1917) who is the first graduate trained in Congo.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“In Belgium, secularism manifested itself in anticlericalism allied to the Freemasons. This led to the establishment of a secular university in Lubumbashi to counter the launch of the Catholic University, Lovanium, in Kinshasa. The first university courses were taught during the Second World War; this event is cut from the history of the country because it was the initiative of Catholic missionaries. For the same reasons, Jef Van Bilsen and the Manifesto of African Conscience of 30 June 1956 are cited as precursors of independence, without any mention of the Catholic bishops who had previously taken some distance from the Colony by calling for the political emancipation of Blacks and by condemning racism in all its forms. Such political rebellion by missionaries were common in Africa and it is still perpetuated within episcopal conferences.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“Adam Hochschild caused a stir with 10 million people killed in the Leopold Holocaust. He clearly says in the introduction of his book that he had learned on a plane, the estimated population of Congo in 1880 and that he had subsequently discovered, in a library, that the figure had diminished after the red rubber episode. But he then invented and maintained the intangible toll of 10 million disappeared people by a simple calculation of subtraction between two uncertain and changing censuses.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“Ludo De Witte states that Lumumba was the only intelligent and respectable Congolese and that all the others were only children and puppets of whites. Only a white man, even subordinated to Blacks, is an adult, conscious and responsible. These are true little racist opinions.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“Stanley raamde met wat hij zag langs de Congostroom en zijrivieren het bewonersaantal van het bekken op 40 miljoen, een cijfer dat hij in de Franse vertaling halveerde, en die gefantaseerde bevolkingsberg is medio de twintigste eeuw, door ernstig demografisch onderzoek, geslonken tot 10 à 15 miljoen.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba

“White American, Adam Hochschild, with no solid Africa knowledge, purveyed the horror book King Leopold's ghost, 1998, from Stanley's English-language travelogue, and Ben Affleck further presses the lie, based on Hochschild's fabrications, in a film soon to be released.”
― Marcel Yabili, The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba