Young shipping clerk Edmund Dene Morel was working as for the Liverpool firm Elder Dempster when he noticed what appeared to be a discrepancy in the figures. What Morel found in his investigation of that discrepancy would expose one of the most notorious systems of violence of the colonial era: the Congo Free State, ruled personally by King Leopold II of Belgium.
Leopold founded the Congo Free State in 1885. It was his private colonial possession, not a Belgian colony. During Leopold’s 23-year rule, millions of Congolese died amid widespread atrocities – murder, torture, mutilation, forced labour – driven by the extraction of ivory and rubber.
