Noble Blood - The Red Paint on Leopold II

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a man obsessed with the profits that came with colonization. Using smokescreens of charities and shell corporations, he claimed a private landholding 76x larger than his own nation, and unleashed decades of horror on the land's inhabitants. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. In 1889, an American journalist named George Washington Williams was granted an opportunity to sit down informally, with King Leopold I of Belgium. Williams was a groundbreaking, published historian, but his life was its own fascinating history. He was a black man born free in Pennsylvania, who enlisted to fight for the Union during the Civil War when he was just 14 years old. From there, he went to Mexico and joined the army fighting to overthrow the European Emperor Maximilian.

Later, he became a college graduate, a Baptist minister and the first black man to serve in the Ohio State Legislature. By this point in Leopold's reign, he had become an expert in the trappings of monarchy. He was a master of charm. He was friendly, self-effacing, modest, and above all, diplomatic. He remembered names of wives and children, and he always asked after them. He welcomed Williams into his palace in Brussels and told him, with obvious relish. about all of the philanthropic work he had been doing in the Congo Free State.

The meeting went incredibly well. One side note, one has to imagine that maybe Williams' youthful military service in Mexico didn't come up. After all, the imperialist queen he had been fighting against Carlotta of Mexico was Leopold's sister. But for Williams, it was difficult not to be impressed with Leopold and with Belgium. its clean, wide, sweeping avenues and open national parks and the stately facades of the palaces. It was a new country and a new monarchy. The Belgian people had installed Leopold's father as the first king, imported him from a line of German royals back when Belgium had gained its independence from Holland in 1830.

But under Leopold II, the nation had become a center of international, affairs in Europe, thanks a no small part to Leopold's passion for developing the Congo. What had been a blank spot on the map of Africa just a few decades ago was now, as Leopold told Williams, a, quote, benevolent enterprise of local programs seeking to increase the knowledge of the natives and secure their welfare. And so, as Williams left the meeting and strolled down the marble steps of the palace, he reflected on what an impressive man the young king was. Leopold II was a paradigm for a new kind of compassionate, modern imperialism. Out of his own pocket, the king had funded stations along the Congo River that were stocked with scientists, linguists, and researchers. He built infrastructure

to help missionaries spread Christianity, all while helping establish a system in which black tribal leaders could establish their own local dominions as part of a larger organized coalition. At least, that's what Leopold said he was doing. Fascinated by Leopold's description of the Congo Free State, George Washington Williams decided to visit for himself. What he found both sickened and outraged him. It was a slave state in all but name. Men, women, and children who had had their land stolen from them either by trickery or by violence, who were then forced to work grueling hours, gathering rubber that would be shipped back to Europe, to pay for Belgium's beautiful roads and parks. Men, women, and children who

failed to meet their quota for rubber production were either whipped or killed under the capricie. and brutal authority of black soldiers also enslaved. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away sat civilized Leopold II, charmingly asking about your wife by name. George Washington Williams became the first person to interview Native Africans about the horrific abuses they were suffering under imperialism. From an outpost at Stanley Falls, he wrote an open letter, which, he addressed to, his serene majesty, Leopold II, king of the Belgians, and sovereign of the

independent state, in which Williams wrote in clear detail every one of the atrocities in the so-called Congo-free state that he came across. He consulted his notes and echoed back the very words that Leopold had used to describe his endeavor, the so-called fostering care and benevolent prize and effort to ensure the natives' welfare. Williams wrote, Against the deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave rating, and general policy of cruelty of Your Majesty's Government to the natives stands their record of unexampled patience, long-suffering, and forgiving spirit, which puts the boasted civilization and professed

religion of your majesty's government to the blush. Leopold had not claimed the Congo as a colony for Belgium. Using smokescreens of shell corporations and meaningless charity committees, he became the sole owner of the largest private landholding in history. Belgium did not own the Congo. Leopold did. It was banal bureaucratic evil, ignored. and then accepted by the rest of the world out of sheer apathy. Leopold exploited the flimsyness of the institutions that hold up the civilized world and the veneer of respectability that comes from a royal title. Williams' open letter sparked the first wave of international interest in Leopold's Congolese endeavor.

But of course, Belgian officials would attempt to discredit Williams, and William, would die of disease before returning home to America. It would be decades before the international community reckoned with the monstrous machine of Leopold II Congo, if indeed it ever really has. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Leopold II was not a boy of great promise. He was gangly and awkward, a boy who looked like a scarecrow in his military. uniform. He has such a nose, said Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, as a young prince

has in a fairy tale who has been banned by a malignant fairy. From an early age, Leopold's parents decided not to bother with much affection for him. In a letter while he was off at military school, his mother wrote, I was disturbed to see in the colonel's report that you had again been so lazy and that your exercises had been so bad. Your father was as disturbed as I by this last report. Leopold had no expectation that he would hear directly from his father. If he wanted to speak with his father, the king, he was required to request a formal audience

and go through his father's secretary. When Leopold was 18, he was married to Marie Henrietta in Austrian-Habsburg Archduchess. They hated each other almost immediately. Marie Henrietta was athletic and an active horsewoman, and Leopold was, well, in the words of Queen Victoria, very odd and in the habit of saying disagreeable things to people. He was narrow-minded, interested in geography, and fastidious about keeping track of money, and exactly as fun of a person as those two interests make him sound. The pair honeymooned in Venice, and Marie Henrietta wept. in public because her new husband refused to let her ride in a gondola.

If God hears my prayers, she wrote to a friend, I shall not go on living much longer. Still, even though by all accounts they barely tolerated one another, the royal couple managed to have four children, though their one son died at age nine from pneumonia after falling in a pond. At his son's funeral, Leopold broke down publicly from her. the first and only time, although he did regain enough composure to ask members of parliament to make sure that the funeral costs would be handled by the state. Leopold was so uninterested in his daughters that he tried to make himself an exception to the law in Belgium that requires one's assets to be passed on to one's children. From that point on, Leopold simply

had no use for his wife, or really for the Belgian government. Petipé Petit Jean, Leopold would say. Small country, small people. He would have no more sons, and so his legacy would need to become something greater. Leopold became king at 30 years old, but being king in Belgium in the 19th century wasn't anything close to the power a king would have had in Europe a few hundred years earlier. Their family was a symbolic. monarchy who served at the pleasure of parliament, not because they were granted absolute authority by

God. Even Leopold's title was restrictive and awkward. He wasn't the king of Belgium. Technically, he was the king of the Belgians, a formality that just reinforced the notion that his leadership was more for show than anything else. And so Leopold decided to turn his gaze beyond his small country and begin to focus his energy on his earliest passion, profits. But not just any prophets, the profits that came from owning a colony. Even before he had become king, Leopold's interest in colonialism ordered on obsession. He spent a month in Spain going through the dusty archives in the old exchange building page by page to calculate the revenue they made from their colonies in America.

Unfortunately, the people of Belgium didn't really share their king's imperialist dreams. Their nation was new and small. Focusing on a colony seemed like an expensive luxury, especially when they didn't have a merchant fleet, let alone a navy. But Leopold wouldn't be deterred, even as the elected officials with the real power in the country continued to demure when Leopold approached in the halls of the palace with a new idea for a place to plant the Belgian flag. After returning from one of his many scouting trips, Leopold brought the finance minister two gifts, a piece of marble from the Eccropolis, and a locket with his portrait.

Inside the locket, Leopold wrote, Belgium must have a colony. if Belgium was ever going to be a world power, if Leopold was ever going to have any real power, he needed to claim land from somewhere else on the globe. The power was, by the end of the 1800s, unclaimed land would become harder to find. Leopold scoured maps of the world. Could someone buy those tiny islands off the coast of South America?

Is Fiji for sale? Could he buy the Philippines from? Spain. Leopold even floated the idea of buying lakes in the Nile Delta so that he could drain them and claim the land. For the moment, he wrote, neither the Spanish nor the Portuguese nor the Dutch are inclined to sell. I intend to find out discreetly if there's anything to be done in Africa. It's at this point in the story that we need to introduce another character. A writer turned explorer born in Wales with the name John Rowlands. Rawlins had a miserable childhood, born out of wedlock, abandoned by his mother, and bounced

around among extended family until he landed at a workhouse for the poor, like a character in a Charles Dickens novel. But as soon as he turned 18, like a character in a Mark Twain novel, John Rowland made his way to the Mississippi River. He eventually settled in New Orleans. He eventually settled in New Orleans. And this is where Roland's story becomes more myth than fact. According to him, he saw the wealthy trading magnate Henry Hope Stanley sitting on his porch and boldly asked if he could have a job. The man became such a mentor to the young boy that he eventually adopted him, and Roland took on his new father's name, rechristening himself Henry Morton Stanley. Henry Morton Stanley wrote all about his unconventional upbringing in his autobiography.

He wrote about how tragically the senior Stanley died just two years after his adoption. But Henry Hope Stanley wouldn't actually die for another 20 years. And there are no records of any adoption. In fact, Henry Morton Stanley gets so many strange details wrong that some historians argue that he didn't even meet the wealthy trader, let alone become his protege. But the truth didn't matter as much as a good story. That was the real lesson learned. Henry Morton Stanley would become a master of reworking and mythologizing his own narrative

until the truth was unknowable. Stanley would go on to fight on both sides of the American Civil War, first for the South and then for the North. and then after the war was over, he began to work as a journalist. It was an assignment for the New York Herald in 1771 that catapulted Henry Morton Stanley to international fame. You see, four years earlier, Europe had lost touch with a Scottish geologist by the name of Dr. David Livingston. Stanley made it his mission to go find Livingston, alive or dead, all while. sending back columns to be published in the New York Herald. It took two years and a 700-mile trek

outfitted with 111 porters, but in present-day Tanzania, Stanley found the scientist and, according to Stanley, greeted him with a line that is now iconic. Dr. Livingston, I presume? It's a great line, but in all actuality, not one that he actually said at the time. It doesn't appear anywhere in his contemporary journals, but that doesn't matter. Stanley was a writer, and he knew that the most important part of a story was the way you tell it. In a way, he's right, we all remember that line 150 years later.

In some ways, Stanley was the prototype for the type of self-conscious travel on luxury blogs and outdoorsy Instagram accounts, in which the experience itself only exists through its presentation to the outside world. Stanley's accounts of his adventure and the book he wrote about the experience turned him into an overnight international celebrity.

He also got a lucky break with Livingston dying of malaria and dysentery before they both returned to Europe, so there wouldn't be another white man who could contradict any of his accounts. It was Stanley's word against no one's, and the world loved it. They devoured his tales of rebellious porters and vicious, barbarian African tribes, wild animals, and most terrible of all, the brutal, quote, Arab slave trade, which Europe was free to scoff and gas bat, having mostly banned their own massive industrial transatlantic slave trade operations,

oh, about 30 years earlier. After his incredible Livingston mission, Stanley set out again, this time to trace the great lakes of Africa, the unmapped heart of what he, Stanley, called the Dark Continent, and to trace the Lulaaba River to see if it fed into the Nile or if it horshoed around and became the Congo River. This time, Stanley was sponsored by both the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London, and his caravan was more than twice the size of the one that had accompanied him to find Livingston. There were over 300 people traveling with him, although only three other white men. And Henry Morton Stanley, being Henry Morton Stanley, didn't want anyone with him who might upstage him.

So the men he chose to accompany him had no experience exploring, and all three of them died before the journey was complete. For his hundreds of Zanzibari porters, the trip was months of carrying incredibly heavy loads on their heads and backs while Stanley riddled them with abuse. If they mutinied or attempted to flee, he punished them, either with lashes or by keeping them in chains to humiliate them. But the natives that Stanley ran into fared, if possible, even worse. Villages armed only with spears, arrows, or a few ancient traded-for muskets were no match for Stanley, outfitted with rifles and an elephant gun. Unfortunately, the only source we have to go on about these encounters is Stanley himself. Yet reading his words, he doesn't mask his own pettiness or brutality.

Attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four-score villages, he wrote. He went on to describe a river coast where mockers shook their spears at him. Stanley opened fire with a Winchester repeating rifle. Quote, six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking. Stanley's columns did lead to shock in criticism from the anti-slavery society and humanitarians around the world, but James Gordon Bennett, his newspaper editor, dismissed their criticisms as the pearl clutching of elites who had never been in the metaphorical trenches. Critics, Bennett wrote, are safe in London, philanthropists whose impractical view is that a leader

should permit his men to be slaughtered by the natives and should be slaughtered himself and let discovery go to the dogs, but should never pull a trigger against the species of human vermin. One European read every single update from Stanley with rapturous fascination, King Leopold II, who asked his servants to bring any newspaper with any dispatch from Henry Morton Stanley up to his chambers right away. When Stanley finally completed his mission, emerging at the Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Congo River, he became the second white man ever to traverse the city. Africa from east to west, and the first white explorer to trace the source of the Congo.

The Congo was perfect for Leopold's purposes. It was a massive area, laced with waterways for easy transportation, once roads were built to traverse the most dangerous sections of rapids. Best of all, as Stanley's writings had made clear, the local inhabitants were no military threat. thanks to centuries of slave raids from both coasts, the few large kingdoms around the Congo were significantly weakened. The diverse population consisted of 200 different ethnic groups who spoke over 400 languages and dialects, which meant that the risk of them uniting against colonialists was small. Leopold had found the answer to the question he had been asking his entire adult life. but actually claiming the undeveloped region encircled by the Congo River would be more challenging than just willing it.

The Belgian people were completely uninterested, and any European country that put down a flag could ignite the scrambling of other jealous countries, who could simply refuse to recognize their neighbor's colony or claim it for themselves. And so even before Stanley's mission was over, Leopold had begun to orchestrate a meticulous global propaganda campaign that, through a combination of subterfuge, flattery, and sheer force would make him the sole owner of a piece of land over 76 times larger than the tiny nation in which he was the king. Leopold would rule a new population with an iron merciless fist, claiming the blood-soaked prophets from his comfortable throne on the other side of the world, all while white men praised him. In 1876, King Leopold II organized a geographical conference to be held in Brussels. Being a monarch at the end of the 19th century meant that Leopold had a very specific

type of capital. The magnetic allure of the monarchy itself and all of the legitimacy it provides. In a vacuum, the formalities of the monarchy are arbitrary and useless. But in Leopold's hands, they became the very weapons he would use to conquer the Congo. So decorum and formality were the chief objectives of his geographical conference. The goal was to dazzle his visitors, three dozen of the world's most famous explorers and military men, including a rear admiral and the president of the Paris Geographical Society. Leopold sent Belgian ships to pick up British guests in Dover, who were then escorted onto an express train to zip them the rest of the way to Brussels,

with special instructions for them to pass through the Belgian border without customs. Leopold knew how impressive it would be for his guests, to stay at the Royal Palace. The only problem was the Royal Palace in Brussels wasn't actually really a residence. It was more of an administrative office. Leopold and his family actually lived in a chateau on the outskirts of the city.

But that wouldn't do. And so for the weekend, the Royal Palace was transformed into a residence. Servants frantically converted offices into guest bedrooms. In the end, everything, the drapery, the bedding, the ink, even the toilet paper, was red. As each guest entered, Leopold greeted them in French, German, or English, and one by one, they filed up a white marble staircase to the throne room, which glistened in the flickering light of 7,000 candles. Leopold opened the conference with an effusive speech about the importance of their purpose.

To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples is, dare I say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress. The practical purpose for the conference was for the experts to, to work together to select locations for bases along the Congo, which could serve as hubs for scientists, linguists, and artisans. These bases, Leopold said, would be non-political, working only to abolish the slave trade and establish peace among chiefs, and each one would be well equipped with medicine and extra supplies for explorers passing through. At the end of the weekend, the men in attendance voted to establish the International African Association.

Leopold, of course, would be the association's first chairman, but he modestly promised to step down after a year. The association gave itself a flag, a yellow star on a blue backdrop, meant to represent the bright hope of civilization in the darkness of Africa. Each new member of the association, the Association was awarded the Cross of Leopold. Throughout Europe, prominent men began to send Leopold donations, including the V-Count Ferdinand de Leszips. Leopold was undertaken, DeLessips declared, the greatest humanitarian work of this time. A side note, if the name Count DeLessupes sounds familiar, it's because he is an ancestor of the man who would go on to marry, Real Housewives star, Countess Luam.

The idea with the International African Association was that the men would return back to their home countries and start their own national chapters and that there would be a big meeting in Brussels every year. In actuality, the organization fizzled after its bombastic inauguration. It only ever had one more meeting where they elected Leopold as chairman for the second time, despite his earlier pledge, and then the group all but disappeared forever.

Its purpose had been served. Leopold had established the foundations for legitimacy for his future endeavors in the Congo. The great men of Europe were behind him. After Henry Morton Stanley had completed his trek along the Congo and floated back to Europe on a raft of acclaim and medals and book money, Leopold dispatched one of his officers to get Stanley to come to a meeting in Brussels. King Leopold had a proposition for the Explorer, a five-year contract in which Leopold would pay the equivalent of $250,000 a year

plus the cost of an expedition for Stanley to go back to Africa and begin to establish Leopold's foothold in the Congo. The plan was for Stanley to first set up a base, and then build roads around the most dangerous parts of the Congo River, where they would be able to take a steamboat apart, carry it on land, and then bring it back to the river. Leopold's goal was to stake out several stations along the thousand-mile main stretch of the Congo River,

so he could claim the land. Profit, then, would be easy. The Congo was incredibly resource dense, especially with regards to valuable ivory, which could be shaped into anything from chess pieces to piano keys to fake teeth. African elephants had tusks far larger than their Asian counterparts. Stanley had reported that ivory was so accessible in Africa that it was used for doorposts. Who exactly was Stanley claiming the land for?

Even Stanley wasn't sure. He thought at first it was the International African Association. or was it the vaguely named Committee for the Study of the Upper Congo, which was a private business whose shareholders included a Belgian banker secretly acting as Leopold's proxy. Leopold would go on to buy out the other shareholders, and the company would legally cease to exist. But both he and others would continue to refer to it as if it did still exist. Even Stanley didn't realize that the company had forced.

old bit. The subterfuge was deliberate. All of Stanley's European staff on the ground in Africa were required to sign a contract of secrecy. And it was around this time that King Leopold organized something called the International Association of the Congo. If that sounds similar to that pointless but idealistic international African association, that was on purpose. The former even adopted the exact same flag as the latter, a gold star against a blue backdrop. Care must be taken, Leopold said, not to let it be obvious that the Association of the Congo and the African Association are two different things. The public doesn't grasp that. Leopold framed the Association of the Congo as sort of a new Red Cross, and wealthy men all over the world

sent donations. Leopold was an expert at manipulating the message depending on his audience. To Germans, he framed the enterprise as akin to the divine mission of the Knights of the Crusade. To Americans, he stressed that he would establish in Africa a union of free cities, each led by local African tribe leaders, not dissimilar to the Union of American States. But in his letters to Stanley, Leopold dropped the facade. There is no question, he wrote, of granting the slightest political power to Negroes. That would be absurd. The white men, heads of the stations, retain all of the powers. While continuing to promote his smokescreen charity organizations, Leopold reached out to an Oxford scholar and a lawyer to handle the legal details of acting as a

corporation and claiming sovereignty of territories for individuals. In Africa, Henry Morton Stanley worked not only as a brutal taskmaster, berating his crews of workmen as they filled ravines, built trails, and put together steamships, but also on Leopold's behalf, tricking African leaders into signing treaties that gave Leopold their land and gave him an exclusive trading monopoly. Using trick bullets and small electric buzzers, Stanley convinced leaders who hadn't interacted with Western technology that white men possessed superhuman strength and invulnerability.

And then it was only a matter of some clothes, a few leftover uniforms, and a couple of bottles of gin to trade, and the leaders signed the treaties that Stanley put in front of them. As historian Adam Hochschild writes in his excellent biography, King Leopold's ghost, the concept of signing your land away would have been completely foreign. The tribe leaders would have been familiar with the idea of a contract of friendship, but someone across an ocean owning their land was absurd and outside the realm of contemplation. They just put an X where they were told at the bottom of a contract in a foreign language they didn't understand.

And these contracts also included a clause even more sinister than you can imagine. They granted not just the land, but an agreement that the tribe would, quote, assist by labor or otherwise any works, improvements, or expeditions, which the said associations shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories. In short, manpower. The Congo would become, in effect, a slave state. The United States became the first to recognize Leopold's claim to the land of the Congo. And in his speech, the Secretary of State conveniently confused the International African Association

and International Association of the Congo. The dominoes were falling into place. The next year, Leopold was falling into place. formally declared his land holdings to be the Congo Free State, operating under his exclusive private control. King Leopold of the Belgians was now the owner of the world's largest private landholding in history, 76 times larger than the country you ruled over. From this point on, the details become horrific. It turns out the real profit to be made in the Congo wasn't in ivory. It was in rubber. Leopold established a private army, the force public, to enforce

rubber-gathering quotas in the native populations through brutal torture. The police force would arrive in a village, hold the women and children hostage, and whip workers with a bullwhip called a chakot made from dried elephants hide. The penalty for not gathering enough rubber was death. In order to make sure that the police officers were using their bullets on people and not on animals to hunt for food, the hands of victims were required as trophies. Hands and feet of children would be severed if parents weren't productive enough. Even the act of gathering the rubber was violent. Once the vines were split open, the worker would slather his body in the soft latex, which would then harden. Once hard, the latex would be stripped painfully from the body, taking hair along with it.

Men were worked to death, hostages starved. Some estimate that as many as 10 million people were killed during King Leopold's bloody 23-year-long reign in the Congo. Ten million people slaughtered in his name as the rubber and ivory came on ships back to Belgium. and he gleefully sent only soldiers and bullets back. In Europe, they called him the builder king for the urban projects and buildings and parks he erected using his prophets. Leopold never actually went to the Congo himself,

but he did bring the Congo to him in 1897 when he opened a temporary exhibition at his country estate that would become the Royal Museum for Central Africa. The heart of the exhibit was a human zoo where 267 Congolese men, women, and children were kidnapped and brought to a mock African village set up on the royal estate's grounds. When the prisoners got sick because of visitors

throwing candy over the fences, they put up a sign that said, the blacks are fed by the organizing committee. In other words, don't feed the animals. For 23 years, Leopold was the sole owner of the Congo Free State, and his atrocities were largely ignored by the rest of the world, out of convenient apathy. How much easier was it to believe that charming Leopold actually was fronting a philanthropic endeavor? It would only be through the tireless work of missionaries that things would eventually change.

people like George Washington Williams who wrote his open letter, and like Alice Seeley Harris, a documentary photographer who captured the gruesome dismemberments on film. It would actually be a shipping officer named Edmund Dine Morel, who would provide one of the largest public pushes for the world to recognize Leopold's horrific exploitation. Morel noticed that it was ivory and rubber arriving on ships from the Congo, but only bullets going back. He realized there was no trade happening. And so he enlisted thinkers and celebrities of the day

like Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain. And eventually, in 1908, Leopold II was forced to sell the Congo free state to Belgium, to make it actually an official Belgian colony. Let that sink in. The Congo wasn't actually made free, It was just not personally owned by Leopold anymore. That was the humanitarian victory.

Leopold died the next year at age 74. His funeral procession was met by booze from the Belgian people. But as soon as Leopold was gone, his legacy in the Congo began to be whitewashed. He was dead, so the international fervor died out. Statues of Leopold were erected in the parks he helped build. They taught in school that colonialism might have gotten too violent under the Builder King. But colonialism was always bad. People in other European countries tried to make Leopold look worse to make themselves feel better, you see?

Besides, sure, there was some blood, but he was bringing civilization to Africa. It's so easy sometimes to believe the lies and to enjoy the pretty statues, the comforting facade of authority and dignity and civilization. And the statues of Leopold remained in Belgium until June 2020. During the International Black Lives Matter March following George Floyd's death in the United States, protesters in Belgium coated statues of Leopold II in red paint in Antwerp and in Ghent, and in Brussels. Some of the statues have already been taken down, but I think it's worth asking ourselves, what had been keeping them up for so long all this time? That's the story of King Leopold II,

and how he used the symbolic power of his monarchy to enact horrific realities. Keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about the legacy he left in literature. know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Farrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah.

He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be.

Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks dad on the IHeartRadio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be the odds. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers

as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Longoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings. account and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make a hundred dollars a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with

Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. After Henry Morton-Stanley built the roads and base camps along the Congo, steamboats began to appear on the river, delivering supplies and taking rubber and ivory off to the coasts. One of those steamboats, a boat called the King of the Belgians, was piloted by a man named Joseph Conrad. Conrad's experience in the Congo and all of the horrors he saw firsthand would lead him to write his most famous novel, Heart of Darkness. If you haven't read it yet, you might have at least seen the movie adaptation, although the movie doesn't take place in 19th century Africa.

Francis Ford Coppola decided to set it in Vietnam. The movie, of course, is Apocalypse Now. There's another important literary legacy from the Congo worth pointing out. Remember George Washington Williams, the Civil War soldier turned journalist who wrote the open letter to King Leopold? He also wrote a pamphlet for the international community advocating action, and he coined a phrase to describe what Leopold had done, a phrase that we still use to this day.

Crimes Against Humanity Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales And you can learn more about the show over at noblebloodtales.com For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everyone, I'm Egovodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.

It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.