Of all the Western imperialists and their colonial governments, none was as terrifying as King Leopold II of Belgium, and none was as brutal as his African colony, the so-called Congo Free State.
In The King Incorporated, Neal Ascherson recounts King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congolese – he enslaved, tortured, terrorized, and eventually killed an estimated 20 million – and his efforts to conceal these atrocities from the rest of the world.
