(The following partial article is from http://www.milesmevers.com. The letter from King Leopold II, follows the article)
This section returns to the empirical puzzle: how did King Leopold II acquire the most lucrative colony on the African continent in 1885?
I argue that in face of overwhelming odds—significant disparities in power, weak domestic support, and a legitimacy crisis—Leopold II created a conflictual and hypocritical political environment to garner international support for the Congo Free State at the Berlin Conference in 1885.
The goal of this section is not to test alternative theories for the formation of the Congo Free State but rather to show that organizational hypocrisy was used as an active, not a responsive, strategy to shape the political environment.
At the beginning of his reign, Leopold II was determined to establish a Belgian Colony (“Leopold II to E. de Borchgrave,” n.d.).
He proposed schemes in China, Indonesia, Mozambique, Angola, the Philippines, New Guinea, Tongking, and the Transvaal, each time finding opposition from one of the Great Powers or wrestling for a favorable agreement that would never come (Emerson 1979, 58–61).
By 1876, Leopold II had found his opportunity.
The Times published the letters of Verney Lovett Cameron, the first explorer to cross equatorial Africa from coast to coast, which detailed the abundant minerals and commercial opportunities of the Congo as well as the horrors of the slave trade (Emerson 1979, 74) (Emerson 197749).
This new region presented an opportunity to establish a Belgian colony. However, Leopold learned from his previous, direct attempts that the great powers nor the Belgian populace would not allow Belgium become a colonial power
Two main actions allowed Leopold to overcome this problem and prevent a coordinated response against him at the Berlin Conference in 1885.
First, to realize a Belgian colony in Africa, Leopold actively cultivated humanitarian and commercial obligations to develop a unique and complex institutional structure in the Congo.
Between late May and early June, 1876, Leopold travelled incognito to London, Berlin, and Paris to acquire the tacit approval of prominent geographers and philanthropists, particularly the English Protestant Missionaries, to organize the conference on the exploration and the civilizing mission of Africa (Emerson 1979, 78).
The three-day International Geographical Conference in Brussels brought together representatives from Austria, Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Russia to “discuss in common the actual situation in Africa”, including the establishment of medical and scientific posts, and the abolishment of the slave trade (Wack 1905, 7).
The conference ended as a stunning success for Leopold.
Not only did the delegates characterize him as an idealist leader but they positioned him at the head of an institution with national committees in each of the major great powers tasked simply with lobbying powers.
The Assocaition Internationale Africaine (AIA) would united the major geographical societies in all six nations, upon which Leopold would serve as President.
With the AIA as a philanthropic front, Leopold “decoupled” the professed humanitarian goals from his commercial intentions.
In 1876, he secretly established a commercial syndication comprised of wealthy Belgian and Dutch businessmen—the Comité d’Etudes du Haut Congo (CEHC) and later reorganized as the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC)—to fund expeditions to the Congo and explore the formation of two construction and navigation companies to develop the region into a colony.
The CEHC and AIC were created without the knowledge of the AIA.
Yet Leopold enlisted the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley to establish three stations between the Lower Congo and Stanley Pool on behalf of the AIA, as well as to explore commercial opportunities in the Upper Congo on behalf of the CEHC.
When Stanley left for Zanzibar in June 1879, only a few months later did a letter from Leopold make this hypocrisy clearer: to actively acquire commercial concessions for the possible establishment of a confederation of African states (Grieken 1954).
Moreover, the similarity in name between the AIC and AIA was not unintended. Leopold’s position in both and use of the both organizations in his discussions with other diplomats meant to mask AIC activities and legitimize it as inherently philanthropic.
Leopold commented on this confusion in a letter in 1884: “Care must be taken not to let it be obvious that the AIC and the AIA are two different things. The public doesn’t grasp that. It concludes that there are two phases, the first being disinterested” (Ewans 2002, 79).
When Leopold sought American recognition of the AIC, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee discussed a resolution to recognize AIC territorial claims but found themselves supremely confused between the AIA, the CEHC, and the AIC. (Emerson 1979, 104).
Discussants often used the AIA and AIC interchangeably, which Sanford made no attempt to resolve.Leopold’s representative, Sanford, described the CEHC as a “branch of the AIA…formed for the special enterprise in the Congo, under the standard of the Association and financed by special contributions made by philanthropists, friends of the Association” (Ewans 2002, 85).
All of which was patently false.
Connecting the AIA, CEHC, and AIC masked Leopold’s commercial intentions in an aura of internationalism and humanitarianism.
No wonder then, on April 11, 1884 the Senate passed a resolution recommended to recognize the AIA as a friendly government on the mistaken belief that the philanthropic AIA, not the commercial AIC, acquired treaties with local chiefs.
Second, Leopold dispensed the “right of first preference” to the Congo territories to both France and Germany in order to divide the states and generate support around the Congo Free State prior to the Berlin Conference.
The right of first preference gave those states the right to take over the territory should the venture end in failure—a factor that threatened to give one state an advantage over another.
Leopold dispensed these rights rather ambiguously in an exchange with Jules Ferrt, the French Premier and Foreign Minister Struach, acting as President of the AIC, wrote the outcome of these discussions in April 1884, in a rather redundant letter (Ewans 2002, 87)
“The [AIC], in the name of the stations and territories which it has founded in the Congo and the Niari-Kwilu valley, formally declares that it will not cede them to any power, except as a result of special conventions which might be made between France and the Association to fix the limits and conditions of their respective activities.
However, the Association, wishing to give a fresh proof of its friendly feelings towards France, pledges itself to give her right of preference, if through any unforeseen circumstances, the Association were one day led to realize its possessions.””
(End of Miles M. Evers partial article)
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE MINAS GERAIS Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas Departamento de História História Contemporânea Prof. Luiz Arnaut Textos e documentos
Letter from one of the most evil Kings; Leopold II of Belgium to Colonial Missionaries,1883
Reverends, Fathers and Dear Compatriots:
The task that is given to fulfill is very delicate and requires much tact.
You will go certainly to evangelize, but your evangelization must inspire above all Belgium interests.
Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the niggers to know God, this they know already.
They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don’t know.
They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie and to insult is bad.
Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already.
Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world.
For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty [in their underground.
To avoid that, they (will) get interested in it, and make you murderous] competition and dream one day to overthrow you.
Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find texts ordering, and encouraging your followers to love poverty, like “Happier are the poor because they will inherit the heaven” and, “It’s very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
You have to detach from them and make them disrespect everything which gives courage to affront us.
I make reference to their Mystic System and their war fetish – warfare protection – which they pretend not to want to abandon, and you must do everything in your power to make it disappear.
Your action will be directed essentially to the younger ones, for they won’t revolt when the recommendation of the priest is contradictory to their parent’s teachings.
The children have to learn to obey what the missionary recommends, who is the father of their soul.
You must singularly insist on their total submission and obedience, avoid developing the spirit in the schools, teach students to read and not to reason.
There, dear patriots, are some of the principles that you must apply.
You will find many other books, which will be given to you at the end of this conference.
Evangelize the niggers so that they stay forever in submission to the white colonialists, so they never revolt against the restraints they are undergoing.
Recite every day – “Happy are those who are weeping because the kingdom of God is for them.”
The letter which follows is Courtesy of Dr. Vera Nobles and Dr. Chiedozie Okoro.
“Convert always the blacks by using the whip.
Keep their women in nine months of submission to work freely for us.
Force them to pay you in sign of recognition-goats, chicken or eggs-every time you visit their villages. 
And make sure that niggers never become rich.
Sing every day that it’s impossible for the rich to enter heaven.
Make them pay tax each week at Sunday mass.
Use the money supposed for the poor, to build flourishing business centers.
Institute a confessional system, which allows you to be good detectives denouncing any black that has a different consciousness contrary to that of the decision-maker.
Teach the n..gers to forget their heroes and to adore only ours.
Never present a chair to a black that comes to visit you.
Don’t give him more than one cigarette.
Never invite him for dinner even if he gives you a chicken every time you arrive at his house.”
“The above speech which shows the real intention of the Christian missionary journey in Africa was exposed to the world by Mr. Moukouani Muikwani Bukoko, born in the Congo in 1915, and who in 1935 while working in the Congo, bought a second hand Bible from a Belgian priest who forgot the speech in the Bible. –
Dr. Chiedozie Okoro We should note: 1] that all missionaries carried out, and still carry out, that mandate.
We are only lucky to have found King Leopold’s articulation of the aim of all Christian imperialist missionaries to Africa.
2] Even the African converts who today manage the older churches in Africa (the priests, bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals etc of the Roman and Protestant sects), and especially also those who evangelize Born-Again Christianity, still serve the same mandate.
Which is why they demonize African gods and Anglicize African names, and drop the names of African deities which form part of African names; and still attack and demolish the African shrines that have managed to survive, e.g. Okija.
3] Those Africans who voluntarily converted to Christianity before the colonial conquest such as Affonso I of the BaKongo in the 15th century probably did not discern the purpose of the brand of Christianity that was supplied to them.
Which was probably why they fell easy prey to the missionaries and the white traders and pirates who followed them.
But their Japanese counterparts probably did discern the game, even without access to some version of Leopold’s letter.
But even if the Japanese Shoguns did not intuit what Leopold makes explicit, they clearly realized the danger of Japanese converts to Christianity forming a fifth column within Japanese society and state, a fifth column loyal to their co-religionists in Europe.
To rid Japan of that danger, in the late 16th century, the Shoguns began their expulsion of Portuguese and Spanish missionaries on the grounds that they were forcing Japanese to become Christian, teaching their disciples to wreck temples, taking and trading slaves, etc.
Then, in 1596, it became clear to the Japanese authorities that Christianization had been a prelude to Spanish conquest of other lands; and it quickly dawned on them that a fifth column loyal to Rome and controlled by the priests of a foreign religion was a clear and present danger to the sovereignty of a newly unified Japan.
Soon after, the persecution and suppression of Japanese Christians began.
Early in the 17th century, sensing the danger from a creed that taught obedience to foreign priests rather than the Japanese authorities, all missionaries were ordered to leave and all Japanese were ordered to register at the Buddhist temples.
When Japanese Christians took part in a rebellion, foreign priests were executed, the Spanish were expelled and Japanese Christians were forbidden to travel abroad. After another rebellion, largely by Christians, was put down, the Japanese Christians were suppressed and their descendants were put under close state surveillance for centuries thereafter. In the 1640s all Japanese suspected of being Christians were ruthlessly exterminated. Thus did Japan, by 1650, save itself from the first European attempt to mentally subvert, conquer and colonize it. 
4] The African captives who were taken abroad and enslaved, and the Africans at home after the European conquest, having already been forcibly deprived of their autonomy, were in no political position to resist Christianization. Thus the Christianity still practised in all of the African American diaspora, just as that in the African homeland since the start of the 20th century, continues to carry out the Leopoldian mandate. Hence, for example, whereas the White Born-Agains of the USA, when in the US Navy ships in WWII, sang: “Praise the Lord, And pass the ammunition,” the attitude of African Born-Again converts today is best summed up as: “Praise the Lord, And lie down for the manna.” Thanks to a century or more of this Leopold-mandated missionary mind control, African Christians are not an activist, self-helping, economically engaged, politically resolute, let alone militant bunch. Hence their putting up with all manner of mistreatment and exploitation by their mis-rulers, white and black. The most they are disposed to do to their mis-rulers is to admonish them to “Fear God!” – as one protester’s miserable placard read in last week’s Lagos demonstration against the latest of the murderous fuel price hikes by the OBJ Misgovernment. The idea of an uprising to tame their mis-rulers is alien to the religiously opiated frame of mind of the Nigerians. 5] The lesson in the contrast between an Africa that the Christian missionaries brainwashed and subverted, and a Japan where this brainwashing and subversion was forcibly prevented, is stark and clear. 
What then must Africans of today begin to do to save themselves from brainwashing by their White World enemies here on earth? – That is the question.
PLO Lumumba 
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Click below to ‘read’ the complete article. Thanks.
https://chiniquy.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/false-image-of-jesus/
Read the autobiography of my first 13 years living in America, after leaving Jamaica. Then I served over 23 years in the US military.
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