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Leopold II was most certainly a vain, pompous, and cruel tyrant. During the prime of his regency, he was known as the the 'Builder King'. He built numerous grand palaces and monuments to enhance Belgium's 'national prestige' on the broken, scarred backs of between 2 and 15 million Congolese. It is incredible to consider the enormous disparity between the two figures at top and bottom. Colonizer and Colonized stand before you, subject to the judgement of history and common decency. It is rather pathetic indeed for a man to be so out of touch with basic morality and still claim such an exalted status for himself. The Parc du Cinquantenaire seems but a feeble stand of whitewashed pillars next to the brutal reality of human death and suffering that enabled its creation.
However, it also true that Leopold II was used as a scapegoat by other Western European colonial powers. He was named as an insidious, greedy murderer of African innocents by European nations seeking to 'wash their hands' of the whole affair. It is clear that the real problem was/is systemic, there is an obvious denial and reworking of reality when it comes to imperial and colonial history. In fact, much of the splendor of Western Europe is a physical manifestation of the spoils of imperial conquest. All of those grand monuments, boulevards, and plazas did not simply materialize out of thin air; millions of human beings died producing the wealth that was used to build these enduring 'symbols of grandeur'.
In my own research I found it shocking to learn that Africa went from being only 10% under the control of European and other foreign powers in 1881 to 90% by 1914. By comparison it took about fifty years for the United States to loosely control its borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Scramble for Africa was truly a race for land with no real thought put into the natives living there or even truly forming new cities. The continent of Africa was seen as a fresh piece of meat which needed to be sucked dry.
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