first holocaust happened here when belgium's king leopold managed to bamboozle giving him personal title to the congo. leopold's agents of whom the mythical kurtz was one, raided, slaughtered, mutilated and pressed into forced labor much of the population, in a bloodthirsty quest for first ivory and then rubber. when independence finally came, the belgians trashed what they could, and left behind a completely unprepared tribally divided and largely ungovernable land mass, filled with stuff that everybody in the world wanted. and things pretty much went downhill from there. ♪