Oppressive Speech by King Leopold the II (2nd) of Belgium

Oppressive Speech by King Leopold the II (2^nd) of Belgium: before the Belgian missionaries departing to Africa in 1883.

“Reverend fathers and dear compatriots:

The task entrusted to you is very delicate to fulfil and requires some tact. Priests, you will go of course to evangelize, but evangelization must be inspired above all by the interests of Belgium.

The main goal of your mission in Congo (Africa) is therefore not to teach the Negroes to know God, because they know him already. They speak about and submit themselves to a Mundi, a Mungu, a Diakomba, and what else I don’t know. They know that to kill, to rob, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to slander and to insult is bad.

Let us have the courage to admit it. You are not going to teach them what they already know.

Your essential role is to facilitate the task of our administrators and industrialists. This means you will interpret the gospel in the way that it will serve and protect our interests in that part of the world (in Africa).

For that purpose, you will make sure among other things that our savages (Black Africans) lose interest in the overflowing wealth of their soil, in order to avoid that they get interested in it, compete to death with us and dream one day to dislodge us.

Your knowledge of the gospel will allow you to find easily texts recommending the faithful to love poverty, such as, for example: ‘Blessed are the poor because the kingdom of heaven is theirs’.  ‘It is difficult for a rich person to enter heaven’. You will do everything so that Negores are afraid to get rich in order to deserve heaven. You must detach them from that and make them despise everything that could give them courage to confront us. I refer here mainly to their war fetishes. Do not let them claim they are not renouncing them. And you will make sure that they disappear.

Your action will be directed essentially towards the youth so that they won’t revolt. If the father’s commandment is contradictory to their parent’s teachings, the children have to learn to obey to what the missionary, who is the father of their soul, recommends them.

You must particularly insist on their submission and obedience. Avoid developing critical minds in your schools. Teach pupils to believe and not to reason.

There, dear compatriots are some of the ‘principles you must apply. You will find many more in the books that will be given to you at the end of this meeting. Evangelize Negores the African way, so that they stay forever in submission to white colonialists, so that they never rebel against injustices they will have to suffer from us.

Do them meditate every day ‘Blessed are those who weep because the kingdom of heaven is theirs’, always convert Backs by using the whip.

Keep their women for nine (9) months into submission and have them working freely for you. Then force them to pay you as a gesture of gratitude, goats, chickens or eggs- every time you visit their villages.

Do make sure that Blacks never become rich.

Sing every day that it is impossible for the rich to enter heaven. Make them pay a tax each week at the Sunday mass. Then use this money normally destined for the poor and transfer your missions into flourishing commercial centres.

Institute for them a confessional system allowing you to be good detectives to denounce to the authorities with power of decision, any Black who has a sudden awakening of consciousness.

Source: [Afric- Nature, No 005. Oct 1994, Journal Carmerounais, in cc Le reformateur chretien>> no 004 pg 11.