The Democratic Republic of Congo covers a million square miles of the heart of Africa, while the Republic of the Congo, otherwise known as Congo-Brazzaville, is a much smaller curl of territory on the north-west side of the river basin. The former was the personal fiefdom of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, claimed and seized for him by Henry Morton Stanley, one of the more remarkable and terrifying Welshmen ever to walk the earth. Ten million people died for Leopold’s profit in the Congo Free State, a giant sort of labour camp which the monarch himself never visited. On the other bank, the British having failed to exploit it, Congo-Brazzaville was colonised by France. While Leopold employed a Welshman who changed his name and pretended to be an American, France’s pioneer was born of Italian descent in Brazil and became a naturalised French citizen: Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. While Stanley deployed murder, coercion and torture, de Brazza loathed slavery and believed in the values of France: freedom, fraternity and equality.
