The World Remembered One Genocide and Erased Another

Opinion & Investigation

Ten million Africans were worked to death, mutilated, and starved under King Leopold II of Belgium. Hollywood made zero films about it. The silence was not an accident — it was a choice. And we are still making it.

~10M

Congolese killed under Leopold

0

Hollywood feature films made

200+

Feature films about the Holocaust

There is a test you can run right now. Walk into any high school in Europe or North America and ask a student about the Holocaust. They will tell you about Auschwitz, about Anne Frank, about six million dead. They may cite Schindler’s List, or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, or Night and Fog. They will have seen at least one film. Many will have visited a museum. Some will have read a survivor’s memoir assigned as homework.

Now ask them about King Leopold II of Belgium and what he did to the Congo between 1885 and 1908. Expect silence. Perhaps a vague flicker of recognition — wasn’t there a book? The odds are overwhelming that they have never seen a single film, visited a single dedicated museum, or been assigned a single page of reading on a genocide that, by conservative historical estimates, killed as many people as the Holocaust.

This is not a gap in knowledge. It is a gap in will. And the film industry sits at the center of it.

The numbers that should shame us

Wikipedia’s catalogue of Holocaust films lists more than 209 narrative feature films — and that figure does not include documentaries, of which there are more than a hundred. Films about the Holocaust have won multiple Academy Awards. They have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List alone was seen by 100,000 people in Germany in its first week of release. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds grossed over $320 million worldwide.

Against this, Leopold’s Congo has produced exactly two documentaries in the entire history of cinema. Two. The first, the BBC’s Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death, was not made until 2003 — nearly a century after Leopold’s reign of terror ended. The second, King Leopold’s Ghost, appeared in 2006, based on Adam Hochschild’s 1998 book. Not one narrative feature film exists. A planned Hollywood adaptation starring Ben Affleck was announced in 2019 and remains, six years later, unproduced.

The record in numbers — a direct comparison

“Leopold died one of the wealthiest men on earth. He funded the construction of grand buildings, parks, and museums across Belgium using money extracted from a slave empire. Those buildings still stand. The slaves have no memorial.”

— The Global Record

What Leopold actually did

Let us be precise, because precision is what the history has been denied. Leopold II, King of the Belgians, personally owned the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908 — not as a colony of Belgium, but as his private property. He had lobbied European powers and the United States at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, presenting himself as a humanitarian philanthropist who would bring civilization and Christianity to central Africa. It was one of the most successful lies in the history of diplomacy.

What he built instead was a slave empire optimized for rubber extraction. As global demand for rubber surged with the invention of the pneumatic tyre, Leopold’s administrators drove Congolese men into the jungle to harvest wild rubber vines. Those who failed to meet their quotas were punished by the amputation of their hands — a practice so systematic that soldiers were required to present severed hands to their commanders as proof that bullets had not been wasted. Women and children were taken hostage to coerce compliance. Villages that resisted were burned. Famine spread as men were forced away from their farms.

The population of the Congo, estimated at around 20 million in 1885, had fallen to approximately 10 million by 1920. Historians dispute the precise figures — as they always do when the victims are African — but even the most conservative estimates place the death toll in the millions. Some put it at ten million or more.

Historical recordAlice Seeley Harris, a British missionary, photographed the severed hand of a Congolese man named Nsala, whose five-year-old daughter had been killed and mutilated as punishment for his failure to meet a rubber quota. The photograph, taken in 1904, helped ignite the first international human rights campaign in history. It appeared in newspapers across Britain and the United States. It did not appear in any film for another 99 years.

The cover-up that succeeded

Leopold knew what he had done. When international pressure finally forced him to hand the Congo to the Belgian state in 1908, he ordered the palace furnaces in Brussels stoked for more than a week, burning incriminating documents. “I will give them my Congo,” he reportedly said, “but they have no right to know what I did there.” He succeeded more completely than he could have imagined. He died in 1909, enormously rich, officially mourned, his crimes largely unknown to the Belgian public and almost entirely invisible to the world.

Belgium did not merely fail to reckon with Leopold’s legacy — it actively celebrated him. His monuments stood untouched for over a century. The museum he built to display his African plunder, the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, operated without serious critical context until a controversial rebranding in 2018 that many historians considered inadequate. No Belgian leader has ever issued a full formal apology. No reparations have been paid to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

•   •   •

Hollywood’s selective conscience

The film industry likes to tell itself that it is in the business of truth. It has made this claim most loudly and most lucratively in relation to the Holocaust, which has become — through no fault of its victims — the most cinematically documented genocide in history. This is appropriate. But it is also, by stark contrast, an indictment.

The same industry that has produced Schindler’s List, Sophie’s Choice, The Pianist, Life is Beautiful, Son of Saul, The Zone of Interest, and hundreds of other films about European Jewish suffering has found no commercial appetite, no artistic urgency, and apparently no moral obligation to make even a single feature film about the deliberate murder of up to ten million Africans. The question of why requires an honest answer, and the honest answer is not flattering to anyone.

The victims of the Holocaust were largely European. They had relatives in America and in the Western countries where films are financed and distributed. They had community institutions, political influence, and the proximity — geographic and cultural — to the people who make cultural decisions. Their suffering was documented in the perpetrators’ own meticulous records, and those records survived because the Allies captured them and used them at Nuremberg.

The victims of Leopold’s Congo were African. They had no such proximity. Their records were burned by Leopold himself. Their descendants have less economic and political power in the West. And the story of their suffering requires a Western audience to accept not merely that a monster existed far away, but that their own civilization — its diplomatic structures, its financial systems, its taste for rubber tyres and bicycle parts — made that monster possible and chose, for a century, to look away.

“The Holocaust tells the West a story it can bear: that evil came from within Europe but was defeated. Leopold’s Congo tells a story the West cannot bear: that the evil was the West, and it was never punished.”

— The Global Record

The silence is still speaking

None of this is to diminish Holocaust remembrance. That history must be told, retold, and taught to every generation without apology. The question is not whether the Holocaust deserves its films, its museums, its mandatory school curricula, and its Nuremberg trials. Of course it does. The question is why a comparable atrocity, perpetrated over 23 years against millions of human beings in central Africa, has been consigned to the footnotes of colonial history and the shelves of specialist libraries.

The answer implicates race. It implicates the structure of the global cultural industries. It implicates the Belgian state, which has never been held to account the way Germany was. And it implicates every film producer, studio executive, and curriculum designer who has looked at the history of the Congo Free State and decided, year after year, that there was no story there worth telling.

There are ten million reasons they are wrong. Those reasons have no graves that Western tourists visit, no museum on the Mall in Washington, no equivalent of a Schindler’s List to make their suffering visible to the world. They have two documentaries that most people will never watch, and a Hollywood film that has been in development for six years and may never be made.

Leopold died in a palace. His victims died in the jungle, their hands cut off, their names unrecorded, their story untold. Eighty years on from Nuremberg, that is still the state of play. The most successful cover-up in modern history is not the one Leopold ordered. It is the one the rest of us have been quietly maintaining ever since.Editor’s note: This article draws on historical research from Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), the Wikipedia List of Holocaust Films, IMDb, and reporting by the BBC, Reuters, and Deadline Hollywood. Death toll estimates for the Congo Free State period vary significantly among historians; figures cited reflect the range of credible scholarly estimates. The Global Record is a fictional publication creat