[DanaC]

yes it was. The Scramble for Africa was a very shameful period in European history. In the Congo, Leopold's regime committed crimes of epic proportion ( as did many other nations including my own). Women were taken hostage in incredible numbers to force their men to work harvesting rubber. The men were chained, and flogged and generally treated like slaves. If they didn't hit their targets, the inhabitants of whole villages were dragged out and had their right hands chopped off. It was so prevalent that in Belgian museums, statues of black people often had a hand missing. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their hands. men, women and children.

Leopold even had a fake village made in belgium within a zoolike enclosure and transported some congalese to live in it. Visitors used to come and watch the congalese in their 'natural habitat' There was a keeper and signs telling visitors not to throw peanuts at the exhibits.

because the men of the villages were busy harvesting rubber and the women were being held prisoner, nobody was able to fulfil the usual tasks of tending crops and animals, so there was huge famine. Tens of millions of congalese died across a period of about 25 years because of these policies.

It's an unfortunately common story for the European Scramble for Africa. The forgotten genocides. The germans' first concentration camps were in Africa. They decapitated their victims and used their heads to try and prove racial suprmemacy. Many heads ended up in european museums or in private collections.

We quite rightly remember the Holocaust. With good reason we say 'Never Forget'. But at the same time we seem to have the attitude of 'never remember' when it comes to the millions upon millions of africans who died at european hands during that dreadful era. Not so long ago. Congolese men were still harvesting rubber and being flogged or having their hands cut off in the early part of the 20th century. German scientists were perfecting their theories of racial hierarchy using african subjects a little over twenty years before Auschwitz was liberated. Incidentally, one of the 'scientists' who worked in the field over there, set up an institute (can't recall the name now) dedicated to investigating eugenics. The institute was partially funded by American money.

Perhaps we remember the Holocaust because it was something white europeans did to other white europeans. But the crimes against humanity in Africa were committed by White Europeans against non white Europeans.

The American writer Adam Hochschild, in his book about Leopold, refers to it as the Great Forgetting

Then we all pulled out in with varying degrees of incompetance across a fairly long period and left the continent to sort out its own problems. Whilst moralising about how corrupt they are and how they have shouldn't have so many children if they can't feed em :P

There ya go. There's an unpopular opinion.