Before we start, this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence.

If you're listening around kids or just don't feel like hearing that, consider skipping this one.

By the start of the 1960s, Belgium had been ruling huge swaths of the Congo for nearly eight decades.

First, as private private property and then

as a colony under the infamous King Leopold II in one of the most notoriously horrific colonial

regimes of the era. Professor George Zongola Talaja grew up in the Congo towards the end of this

racist regime. Today he is a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill,

but he still has vivid memories from that time.

Even at my age 16, I had seen the colonial officials whipping prisoners.

As a matter of fact, it was done at 6 a.m. in the morning and at 12 noon, they would raise

a Belgian flag and prisoners would be taken close to the flagpole and whipped with this

Cape Potamus hide that was used to whip people, which was very, very dangerous.

Even though he was only 16 at the time, George remembers one particular day very clearly,

June 30, 1960. The independence of Congo constitutes the abutisman of the work

conceived by the genie of the Roy Leopold II. He remembers it because it's the day his country gained independence,

and because of two speeches given at the handover ceremony,

one by the newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba,

and the other by the outgoing Belgian king, King Baudouin.

The Belgian king spoke first, and he used his time on the podium to deliver this fawning, gross mischaracterization of Belgium's rule in the Congo.

He basically gave himself the Belgian king, the colonizer, credit for the Congo's independence,

not the Congolese people who fought and died

for liberation. Then, the newly appointed Prime Minister Patrice Lamumba took the stage and gave

...