Lost Worlds Read Online Free Page B

themselves. They also began to destroy one another.” He sighed. To him, Zaire’s history was still something very alive and tangible.
    “So how did King Leopold get into all this?”
    “Leopold? Ah—well. That was another Englishman, your Mr. Stanley, who came here looking for Livingstone, you remember, and then he seeked—searched for—someone—someone very rich—to invest in developing this place—this ‘Amazonia of Africa.’ In the 1880s Europe was carving up Africa—deciding who would have which bits. King Leopold had made a lot of money with his shares in the Suez Canal and was angry that Belgium didn’t seem to be getting much in the way of colonies in Africa. Somehow—I don’t know how—Stanley persuaded the European governments to let Leopold start a private company to collect ivory and rubber—and anything else that made a profit. So the king now had his own private colony—the whole Congo, eighty times the size of little Belgium—all his, to do with what he wanted.”
    “And what did he do?”
    “He made a lot more money. That’s what he did. He killed or starved eight million Africans; he cut off the hands of workers who gathered the rubber if they did not collect enough. His soldiers made fortunes too. The more hands they brought to him—they smoked the hands to preserve them and put them in big straw baskets—they more they got paid. I think that is what inspired the writer Conrad—another one of your Englishmen—to write that famous story ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
    “Yes—I know the story well.”
    “Then you know what I’m talking about. It was unbelievable what happened. Unbelievable! A whole country of this size, at the mercy of this tyrant—this idiot—in Belgium.”
    “Didn’t Britain put a stop to it all?”
    “And France. France too protested. Oh—and Mark Twain too. He wrote a vicious satire about Leopold. In 1908 the country was taken over by the Belgian government. Leopold was discredited. It became the Belgian Congo and for a while things got better. New cities were built. Many mines were dug for copper, diamonds—later uranium. Many got rich. The Belgians—even some of the natives.”
    “Did the tribes have any political power?”
    “None. And that, of course, was the problem. The Belgians kept promising them power but did nothing.”
    “So—what happened?”
    “Patrice Lumumba. That’s what happened. He created riots and demanded freedom. That was in 1958. And”—Paul laughed loudly—“he got it. In a year or so the Belgians were gone. They took everything. Just walked—or maybe they ran—away.”
    “And left a hell of a mess behind.”
    “And left a mess. Yes. And a hell. That’s exactly what they did. Maybe they thought that if things got really bad they’d be invited back. Who knows? But they certainly left a mess. A few days after independence in 1960 the place went crazy. The whites who had stayed were murdered or driven out, the country started dividing itself up, back into the old tribal regions. Roads, machinery, towns—all were destroyed. The Belgians sent troops back in—there were more massacres. Then the United Nations took over for a while and tried to bring the tribes together—then the tribes started using mercenaries and within a year you had a bloody—very bloody—civil war. Lumumba was murdered—some say by people paid by American CIA. Mobutu tried to establish himself as leader but was forced to resign. Dag Hammarskjöld tried to stop the fighting between the UN troops and the mercenaries, but he was killed—very mysteriously—in a plane crash. It was terrible. The country was destroying itself. Then the Simba terrorists came along—believing they were immune to bullets. Doing terrible things. So more mercenaries came—‘Mad Mike’ Hoare and others as mad as he was. They were as cruel as the Simbas—killing everyone, anything. The massacre of the whites—the ‘mateka’ of Stanleyville [Kisangani] was one of