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Several men in history; Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Jenghis Khan, to name a few, have conquered huge territories, but no man has owned outright such a large piece of the earth as Leopold II, King of Belgium, one of the more inconsequential countries in Western Europe. So inconsequential, it has no recognisable language of its own. It’s greatest claim to fame is that because of the flatness of its topography, it has been the theatre of many famous battles, perhaps none more so than the battle of Waterloo which marked the end of the domination of Europe by Napoleon, Emperor of the French.

It may also be worth noting that it was the invasion of neutral Belgium by Germany that precipitated the British declaration of war against Germany at the beginning of the Second World War. In other words, Belgium has never been able to defend herself against her neighbours who were in the habit of trampling all over her at will.

When in 1885, Leopold declared an area covering more than two million square kilometres called the Congo Free State as his personal estate, it was estimated that more than seven million souls called that territory home. Twenty years later when Leopold was forced to pass on the sovereignty of his estate to Belgium, as much as half of the population could no longer be accounted for. Such was the ferocity of Leopold’s stewardship. The only truly functional public institution in the Congo Free State was the Force Republique, the private army which was the instrument used by the King of the Belgians in imposing himself on his colossal estate. This private army was used to terrorise the people half to death, forcing them to exploit the Congo’s natural resources mainly ivory and wild rubber on which Leopold built a formidable financial empire. The people were forced to venture forth into the heart of the forest to forage for ivory and tap the wild vines which produced rubber latex. A quota was set for each district and failure to meet the published quota attracted savage reprisals which included the loss of limbs, ears eyes and distressingly often, life itself. To avoid the loss of body parts including the head, people had to abandon their farms to go in search of the vines that produced precious rubber and the ivory which Leopold and his agents demanded of them. As a result, they abandoned their farms and starved to death enmasse which is one reason why the population of the Congo was halved within twenty years in the same way that slaves were negligently killed off, overworked and starved on American plantations.

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The situation in the Congo was even worse since Leopold had no responsibility whatsoever to the people he used as slaves. They could all starve to death as many of them did ultimately as far as he was concerned. Being so far away he was not touched in any way by the devastation which his rapaciousness had brought about. The situation in the Congo was as much about land as the holding of slaves since everybody within that huge territory was a de facto slave to the king of the Belgians. The New World plantation system had been transferred to Africa removing the need for the torrid middle passage by which slaves were taken to America.

The popular picture of that Berlin conference was that the Europeans sat around the table and carved up Africa in the manner of carving up a turkey at a Christmas dinner. No such carving was actually done but some ground rules were agreed upon and some principles which guided the process of delineating their respective territories were laid out and subsequently adhered to. Without the conference therefore, it is unlikely that the partition of Africa into European colonies would not have been marked by conflicts within Europe.

Still, some historians have argued quite convincingly that one of the remote causes of the First World War was the struggle for colonies in Africa with Germany, for example insisting that she deserved to have her own place in the sun and Italy which was hardly a country at the time attempted unsuccessfully to colonise Abyssinia. The Abyssinians led by Menelik II in 1896 defeated the Italians in the battle of Adowa to leave only two independent countries in Africa at that time; Abyssinia now called Ethiopia and Liberia. It is also instructive that the Germans were stripped of all their African territories which were passed on to the British and the French in the aftermath of Germany losing the war in Europe.

Long before the Berlin conference, some drama, the direct consequences of which are still being played out was going on in the southern tip of Africa. As early as 1523, the Dutch, inhabitants of another small European country which had just won her independence from Spain had established a small settlement for the sole purpose of providing fresh water and food to Dutch ships on their way to and from the Dutch East Indies, as by that time they had carved out colonies in that region and were exploiting them to their brutal satisfaction.

At that time, the indigenous population on the Cape were pastoralists who used the area as pasture for their cattle in the summer months. They did not welcome the Dutch and made some puny attempts to defend their land but were unsuccessful. Most of them were killed off by bullets and small pox introduced to the region by the Dutch. The survivors were, according to the tenor of the times enslaved in the same manner that the Spaniards enslaved the people they met in the Americas.

Having gained a foot hold in that region, the Dutch began to spread into the hinterland setting up farms using slave labour provided by the locals as well as those imported from Indonesia, India, Mauritius, Malaysia and Madagascar, making the Dutch colony which was eventually created there a veritable melting pot of races. This is why the modern successor state of South Africa is today referred to as the rainbow nation. At the beginning, the colony was colour blind as some of the leading lights were of mixed race. As time went on however a hierarchy of race which culminated in the hateful system of apartheid was instituted but that subject demands a series of articles all on its own.

The colony on the Cape was set up to produce fresh food for passing ships and emphasis was placed on farming. People came out to the Cape from the Netherlands to set up farms which is why their descendants are today known as Boers, the Dutch word for farmer. In time, however, settlers from other European countries were attracted to the colony, the most important being the British who at various times were at war with the Dutch over trading rights all over the world and in the process seized control of the Dutch colony on the Cape, forcing the Boers to migrate northwards away from British rule and bringing them in contact with Bantu tribes which were on a southward migration from their original homes in West and Central Africa.

Their journey began as long ago as the fourth century and they absorbed the people they encountered along the way. Their migration was largely peaceful until they collided with the Boers on their way from the coast. That encounter threw the whole area into general commotion as the world seemed to shrink around those migrating people and they had to fight for survival.

Many historians laid the responsibility for the turmoil which led to a great deal of death and destruction in that region at the feet of competing Bantu groups but this charge should not be taken seriously. The Bantus had spent thousands of years on their epic journey of migration without any falling out. This suggests that the trouble which precipitated what was called the mfecane or liquafane in the local African languages was brought about by the irritation produced by the outside force provided by the Boers who were at that time trekking away from British interference in their affairs on the Cape.

The Boers relied heavily on slave labour on their farms and since slavery was abolished in British territories in 1833, the Boers intensified their movement into fertile lands which were already occupied by various Bantu groups. This led to a conflagration which destroyed the social, agricultural as well as the spiritual structure of African communities in that region. And yet the Boers kept on coming in their ox-driven wagons and, armed with high powered rifles, drove the Bantus out of their settled lands on which they planted their own farms.

In other cases, they paid some ridiculously low sums of money for vast acreages of fertile land. The stranger thing here was that the Africans from whom these lands were purportedly bought did not operate any system of private land ownership and those Boers who brandished pieces of paper on which treaties with local African chiefs were written were simply lying and trying to cover their own thieving tracks.

The troubles which bedeviled that part of the world should, everything considered, be laid at the feet of the Boers who had nothing on their minds but the theft of African land from which various resources could be derived. The wholesale theft of land in South Africa was intensified after 1886 when gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand and later on, diamonds at Kimberley as this attracted the attention of the pack of hyenas led by Cecil Rhodes.

These vicious animals formed themselves into a company whose purpose was the misappropriation of any parcel of land which could yield anything worth having. In the process, they destroyed anything of note in their path including, if not especially, the people who were occupying those lands. It was not a case of buying land because no more land was being made but to steal land because of the minerals which had lain undisturbed underground for millions of years, most of them peaceful.

The lust for gold drove the two main groups of white men into a frenzy which in turn drove them mad. This made war between Boers and the British inevitable and it duly took place in what has come to be known to history as the Boer wars, the second of which pitched the Boers against the might of the British army.

The whole of Britain was mobilised to fight against the irregular army put into the field by the Boers. On paper, the war should have been over in a few months but it went on for three years and made a great impression in both Britain and South Africa.

Today, we talk of the Kop end at Anfield, home of the Liverpool Football Club from where thousands of fans cheer on their team. Kop, described as a small hill, was a term imported from South Africa by men who fought on a kop and left many of their comrades dead on a kop in South Africa. They called a part of their meeting ground the Kop in honour of their comrades who were buried on a kop in South Africa.

The Boer war was fought bitterly between the Boers and the British, both sides using brutal tactics which changed the face of war in that region. The vastly outnumbered Boers resorted to hit and run tactics which confused the British even though they had no less than half a million men under arms. Still, they could not win any decisive victory to end the war. In the end, the British resorted to the use of concentration camps into which they herded mainly women and children, many of whom died in the camps which formed a template for the concentration camps used to such deadly effect in the heart of Europe by the Germans during the Second World War.

To be continued.