The Congo - Leopolds Downfall - Part Three

In the final chapter of our Congo series, King Leopold’s dark empire begins to unravel. From the Antwerp docks, a young shipping clerk named Edmund Dene Morel uncovers a deadly secret, a trade built not on goods, but on guns, blood, and severed hands. His relentless campaign, joined by the voice of Roger Casement and the pen of Mark Twain, turns the Congo into the first great human rights scandal of the twentieth century.

But Leopold fights back, with lobbyists, bribery, and sham commissions, until even his own allies break under the weight of testimony too harrowing to silence. Scandal consumes him, America turns against him, and the Belgian state is forced to strip him of his personal colony.

This is the story of whistleblowers and reformers, of a king’s downfall, and of the Congo’s grim inheritance, where exploitation did not end, but merely changed hands.

Join me as we bring the curtain down on King Leopold, exposed at last as one of history’s great thieves of human life.