The Belgian conquest of northern Congo was brutal and protracted, taking several decades as African populations strove to retain their independence. The systematic and ruthless exploitation of the land and people which had begun with Afro-Arab traders in the 1860s and 1870s was further developed by the Belgians, first under the flag of the Congo Free State and then under that of the Belgian Congo. This chapter will provide the background necessary to understand how disruptions to African populations and their physical environment resulted in an ‘ecological disaster’ in northern Congo early this century. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing for some decades into the twentieth, African populations located in what are today the southern Sudan and northern Zaire were subjected to a series of frightful events which, for many of them, resulted in severe malnutrition and lowered resistance to disease. For many, sleeping sickness increased in incidence becoming epidemic in large areas of the north. During the period of their occupation of the Congo, the Belgians believed that most of the northern region of the territory remained free of epidemic sleeping sickness unlike other parts of the colony. This was not true and I will show that for many years a large portion of the north was severely afflicted by epidemic sleeping sickness.

There is no doubt that Belgian conquest and occupation of the Congo was violent and destructive in the early decades of this century and that for many residents of the north the violence continued well into the 1920s.