Mark Twain on the Congo Free State

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 – 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist, who wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter called "the Great American Novel."

In 1905, Twain published King Leopold's Soliloquy, a pamphlet whose subject is King Leopold's rule over the Congo Free State. Twain’s Soliloquy is a work of political satire harshly condemning Leopold and his Congo Free State by way of a narrative in which Leopold himself is giving a defense of his actions.

In it, King Leopold raves madly about the good things that he says he has done for the people of the Congo, including the disbursement of millions of dollars on religion and art in an attempt to “civilize” them. He says he had come to Congo with piety "oozing" from "every pore," that his real intention was to convert the people to Christianity, and to stop the slave trade.  Leopold claims that he has not personally benefited from profits made in the rubber and ivory trade, and that such claims by the "meddlesome American missionaries", "British consuls", and "Belgian-born traitors" are wholly false. Leopold asserts that for a king to be criticized is blasphemy because all king’s rule by divine right and are in effect carrying out the will of God.