San Antonio College Library

This documentary describes how King Leopold II of Belgium turned the Congo into its private colony between 1885 and 1908. Under his control, the Congo became a gulag labor camp of shocking brutality. Leopold posed as the protector of Africans fleeing Arab slave-traders but, in reality, he carved out an empire based on terror to harvest rubber. Families were held as hostages, starving to death if the men failed to produce enough wild rubber. Children's...

"Human zoos, forgotten symbols of the colonial era, have been totally repressed in our collective memory. In these 'anthropo-zoological' exhibitions, 'exotic' individuals were placed alongside wild beasts and presented behind bars or in enclosures. Human zoos were a key factor, however, in the progressive shift in the West from scientific to popular racism. Beginning with the early nineteenth-century European exhibition of the Hottentot Venus, this...