WHEN HARMONY WENT TO HELL
March 31, 2017 6:59 PM   Subscribe

Then all of a sudden came the crash! That is to say, the incorruptible kodak –and all harmony went to hell! The only witness I couldn’t bribe.
Alice Seely Harris was a missionary in the Congo Free State who photographed the horrors and atrocities[PDF] perpetrated in the colonization led by King Leopold of Belgium. The photos were part of a lecture, the Harris Lantern Slideshow used by the Congo Reform Association to shed light on the brutality of the rubber and ivory extraction in the Congo Free State.
This post most certainly contains some disturbing images.

Alice Seeley Harris' Photos Exposed the Horrors of Colonialism in the Congo - "We talked to the director of the International Slavery Museum about how the power of shocking images can put an end to colonial rule."
posted by the man of twists and turns (4 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thank you for posting this. All my usual sort of jocular comments fade in the face of these photos.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:31 PM on March 31, 2017


The image of that man with his daughter's tiny extremities will haunt me forever.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 7:51 PM on March 31, 2017 [5 favorites]


In the book "King Leopold's Ghost", it said that the origin of that flavor of atrocity was, the Belgian authorities got annoyed that their men were using ammunition to hunt game. So, they issued an order that a hand had to be returned for every bullet used. Since the soldiers wanted to continue to hunt, they found a workaround.....really you can't overstate the horror and evil of this period.
posted by thelonius at 8:03 PM on March 31, 2017 [2 favorites]


In the book "King Leopold's Ghost", it said that the origin of that flavor of atrocity was, the Belgian authorities got annoyed that their men were using ammunition to hunt game.

This was also mentioned in the recent PBS series, Africa's Great Civilizations. Previous to this disaster, there was the mounting problem of Africa being the primary gold source of Europe's gold-based economy, which encouraged the European powers to carve it up over a conference table in 1884, leading to Leopold's free trade zone of dehumanization, and destruction, since they were destroying the rubber trees in the process.
posted by Brian B. at 9:33 PM on March 31, 2017 [3 favorites]


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