In reality, Leopold II's administration extracted ivory, rubber, and minerals from the upper Congo basin for sale on the world market through a series of international concessionary companies that brought little benefit to the area.

By 1908, public pressure and diplomatic manoeuvres led to the end of Leopold II's absolutist rule; the Belgian Parliament annexed the Congo Free State as a colony of Belgium.

"[18] Leopold began to create a plan to convince other European powers of the legitimacy of his claim to the region, all the while maintaining the guise that his work was for the benefit of the native peoples under the name of a philanthropic "association".

The king launched a publicity campaign in Britain to distract critics, drawing attention to Portugal's record of slavery, and offering to drive slave traders from the Congo basin.

He also secretly told British merchant houses that if he was given formal control of the Congo for this and other humanitarian purposes, he would then give them the same most favoured nation (MFN) status Portugal had offered them.

[20] He also enlisted the aid of the United States, sending President Chester A. Arthur carefully edited copies of the cloth-and-trinket treaties that Stanley (a Welsh-American) claimed to have negotiated with various local authorities, and proposing that, as an entirely disinterested humanitarian body, the Association would administer the Congo for the good of all, handing over power to the natives as soon as they were ready for that responsibility.

Determined to look for a colony for himself and inspired by recent reports from central Africa, Leopold began patronizing a number of leading explorers, including Henry Morton Stanley.

[25] Leopold established the International African Association, a charitable organization to oversee the exploration and surveying of a territory based around the Congo River, with the stated goal of bringing humanitarian assistance and civilization to the natives.

Britain was uneasy at French expansion and had a technical claim on the Congo via Lieutenant Cameron's 1873 expedition from Zanzibar to bring home Livingstone's body, but was reluctant to take on yet another expensive, unproductive colony.

[40] The Free Trade Zone in the Congo was open to entrepreneurs of any European nation, who were allowed to buy 10- and 15-year monopoly leases on anything of value: ivory from a district or the rubber concession, for example.

In 1893, Leopold excised the most readily accessible 259,000 km2 (100,000 sq mi) portion of the Free Trade Zone and declared it to be the Domaine de la Couronne, literally, "fief of the crown".

In Belgium, the Belgian Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1888, mainly by Catholic intellectuals led by Count Hippolyte d'Ursel, aimed at abolishing the Arab slave trade.

[47] The expedition was composed of two columns: the first, under Belgian war hero Baron Dhanis, consisted of a sizeable force, numbering around three-thousand, and was to strike north through the jungle and attack the rebels at their base at Rejaf.

[48] Although Leopold II had initially planned for the expedition to carry on much farther than the Lado Enclave, hoping indeed to take Fashoda and then Khartoum, Dhanis' column mutinied in February 1897, resulting in the death of several Belgian officers and the loss of his entire force.

[49] Nonetheless, Chaltin continued his advance, and on 17 February 1897, his outnumbered forces defeated the rebels in the Battle of Rejaf, securing the Lado Enclave as a Belgian territory until Leopold's death in 1909.

But frequent raids outside of Lado territory by Belgian Congolese forces based in Rejaf caused alarm and suspicion among British and French officials wary of Leopold's imperial ambitions.

After widespread criticism, this "primes system" was substituted for the allocation de retraite in which a large part of the payment was granted, at the end of the service, only to those territorial agents and magistrates whose conduct was judged "satisfactory" by their superiors.

Early on, the FP was used primarily to campaign against the Arab slave trade in the Upper Congo, protect Leopold's economic interests, and suppress the frequent uprisings within the state.

Many of the black soldiers were from far-off peoples of the Upper Congo, while others had been kidnapped in raids on villages in their childhood and brought to Roman Catholic missions, where they received a military training in conditions close to slavery.

Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte—a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide—the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages, slaughtered families of rebels, and flogged and raped Congolese people with a reign of terror and abuse that cost millions of lives.

"[67] When sending out "punitive expeditions" against villages unwilling or unable to fulfil the government's exorbitant rubber quota, Free State officials repeatedly turned a blind eye both to arbitrary killings of those considered guilty as well as to the "cannibal feast[s]" celebrated by native soldiers that sometimes followed.

[68][69] Particularly infamous were groups of Songye fighters "known as Zappo Zaps after the sound of their rifles" and employed by the Free State to enforce its tax policies: "Whenever a village failed to produce enough rubber, these men would attack, raping and eating their victims before cutting off their hands" (to prove the success of their operations).

[74] Another time, while stationed in Riba-Riba (today Lokandu) in the eastern Maniema region, Burrows rescued a young slave boy from becoming the "pièce de résistance" of a banquet planned by his master.

It turned out that the local corporal had been aware of the planned banquet too, but had not considered it worthy of mention because "the same thing had often occurred in the neighbouring villages, and the white men at the post had never bothered about it.

[11] However, Jan Vansina returned to the issue of quantifying the total population decline, and revised his earlier position, criticizing Hochschild for extrapolating the 50% death toll from the rubber provinces to the entirety of the Congo.

[94] Sheppard's documented cases of cruelty or violence were in direct violation of the Berlin Act of 1885, which gave Leopold II control over the Congo as long as he "care[d] for the improvements of their conditions of their moral and material well-being" and "help[ed] in suppressing slavery."

[95] Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, originally published in 1899 as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine, inspired by his service as a captain on a steamer on the Congo 12 years before, sparked an organized international opposition to Leopold's exploitational activities.

The Congo Reform movement's members included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Booker T. Washington, and Bertrand Russell.

[102] Leopold II offered to reform his Congo Free State regime, but international opinion supported an end to the king's rule, and no nation was willing to accept this responsibility.

Leopold II lost the absolute power he had had there, but the population now had a Belgian colonial regime, which had become heavily paternalistic, with church, state, and private companies all instructed to oversee the welfare of the inhabitants.