CONGO: WHITE KING, RED RUBBER, BLACK DEATH
Peter Bate, Belgium, 2003
Wednesday 4 April 2007 10pm-11.50pm
The story of King Leopold II of Belgium's brutal colonisation of central Africa, turning it into a vast rubber-harvesting labour camp in which millions died.
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Nick Fraser
Storyville Series Editor
What the Belgians did in the Congo was forgotten for over 50 years. It's a shocking, astonishing story. In a way, it's a horrifying prelude in European history to the Holocaust.
Between 1870 and 1900 the Congo was pillaged - it was valuable as a source of rubber. King Leopold created his own colony in the Congo over which he ruled unchecked. Peter Bate's film is a marvellously made reconstruction of those days - it features footage of Congolese villages and explains with actors exactly what happened.
It's really a memorable film - the painfulness of what is described is counterbalanced by the great skill in the storytelling.
