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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (122)	2/18/2001 2:17:57 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 51713

The Congo is about the worst example of the West doing a job on Africa. The inspiration for Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but the real story is probably worse, and it continues to this day. It's hard to know what conclusion to draw from that. A bit from a review of KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. By Adam Hochschild., in the NYT , 9/20/98 Much of the death toll was the result of killing, pure and simple. Villages were dragooned into tapping rubber, and if they refused to comply, or complied but failed to meet European quotas, they were punished. The hands of dead Congolese were severed and kept by militias to account to their quartermasters for spent ammunition. And, as Morel said, the practice of mutilation was extended to the living. By far the greatest number of deaths, however, were caused by sickness and starvation. The effect of the terror was to drive communities from their sources of food. A Belgian Government commission estimated that from the late 1870's, when the explorer Henry Morton Stanley made his first forays into the Congo on King Leopold's behalf, until 1919, the year the commission published its findings, the population of the Congo Basin had been reduced by half. In 1924 there were thought to be some 10 million inhabitants -- which means, Hochschild says, that ''during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately 10 million.'' That's one way to deal with a population problem. Of course, the US did much better when it got involved in the Cold War era and installed Mobutu. That sure helped with the post-colonial transition. -Win.