aries, but in 1888 these were transformed into the "Force Publique" and at it's peak there were members of 19,000 conscripted African soldiers and 420 white officers. The soldiers were slaves who had been press-ganged through hostage taking, or stolen as children and brought up in child colonies founded by Leopold and the Catholic Church.The Congo region was turned from a preservation society into a grotesque forced-labor camp on behalf of Leopold, running on slave labor, enforced by mostly Belgians driving the local population into slavery as porters, road and railroad builders, ivory hunters and rubber gatherers. A typical tactic was to burn down a village and kidnap the women and hold them until the men agreed to whatever demands were made of them. Discipline was arbitrary, fickle and often fatal. Hochschild identifies in the text that, "the soldiersattacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were kept as hostages until the chief of the district brought in the required number of kilograms of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected." (p161) Those that refused to cooperate with the officers faced a punishment installed by the officer known as "Fievez" the text give the example of this stating that, "a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies ever since." (p.166) It saddened my heart and practically swept he breath from my lungs to grasp the mental picture of theses traumatized men, possibly haven starved for days and severely malnutrition, strapped, chained, and bound to one another, walking in syncopation, all the while straining their necks and possibly giving themselves a headache for the sake of possibly saving a limb, or a family member.Another horror of this was the during the expeditions, force publique soldiers ...
