Leopold’s colonial state was a machine of random, licensed atrocity

Evidence

No woman was young enough to avoid rape (one especially infamous administrator, the cruel Major Lothaire, traveled nowhere in the territory without carrying with him a harem of around forty women, randomly killing or licensing the killing of countless Congolese), Men were removed of hands for failing to deliver impossible quotas of raw by the Congo Free State writes that, though he had observed few atrocities by whites himself, he had heard many reliable stories “of revolting atrocities committed by State officials, who if they were not acting under the orders of a superior, at least escaped any punishment, and were decorated by the King on their arrival in Brussels,” — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 69

Categorization

• QUESTION: The text itself is garbled/OCR-corrupted mid-passage — the hands-removal and rape accounts deserve verification against the original Cookey/Nelson sources before being relied upon.