the size of all western europe combined. it should be africa's wealthiest nation. but people forget, or never even knew, that the 20th century's first holocaust happened here when belgium's king leopold managed to bamboozle the world into 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