Belgian Congo

A colony created to end an atrocity, and never entirely separable from it. The Congo Free State had been the personal property of Leopold II from 1885, run as a rubber and ivory extraction operation whose quota system was enforced by mutilation, hostage-taking and killing on a scale that reduced the population by millions. The campaign of E. D. Morel and Roger Casement made it the first great international human rights scandal, and in November 1908 the Belgian parliament, reluctantly, took the territory off its own king. The worst of the violence stopped. The structure underneath it did not change as much as the transfer implied. Rule rested on a compact between the colonial administration, the Catholic Church and a handful of enormous companies - Union Minière above all, which held the Katangan copper and later the uranium that went into the first atomic bombs. Congolese were given more primary schooling than in most African colonies and almost no higher education, on a paternalist theory that a well-fed, well-catechised population would not develop politics. In 1959 there were fewer than twenty Congolese university graduates and no African officers in the army. When riots in Léopoldville in January 1959 caught Brussels unprepared, it reversed course completely and set independence for 30 June 1960, barely eighteen months later. The state collapsed within two weeks: the army mutinied, Katanga seceded with Belgian and corporate backing, Patrice Lumumba was deposed and murdered in January 1961, and the crisis ran until Mobutu's second coup in 1965.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration