Are we children of a lesser god to be under this sort of leadership?

Tee Ngugi reflects on Congo’s cultural and spiritual beauty and how its name has become a symbol of Africa’s dehumanisation through colonial and post-colonial greed. In the 1880s, Belgian King Leopold II made the Congo his private property and named it the Congo Free State; workers who failed to meet rubber-harvesting quotas faced amputation, and their children could also have their hands cut off. Ngugi recalls Joseph Conrad’s depiction of this brutality in *Heart of Darkness*, where the fictional Kurtz encounters the savagery within himself.