title: Michael Jackson albums discography

text: American singer Michael Jackson released 10 studio albums, 3 soundtrack albums, 1 live album, 39 compilation albums, 10 video albums and 8 remix albums. Since his death, 2 albums of unreleased tracks have been posthumously released. Jackson made his debut in 1964 at the age of five with The Jackson 5 (later known as The Jacksons), who were prominent performers during the 1970s. Jackson is one of the best-selling music artists in history with over 400 million records sold worldwide. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Jackson has sold 89 million certified albums in the United States, making him the sixth top-selling album artist in the country.


title: Michael Jackson albums discography

text: In 1972, Jackson released his debut studio album "Got to Be There" through Motown Records, while still part of The Jackson 5. It peaked at number 14 on the US "Billboard" Top LP & Tapes chart and was certified Gold by the RIAA. The same year, he released another album, "Ben", which peaked at number five on the "Billboard" Top LP & Tapes chart and was certified Silver by the British Phonographic Industry. The album's title track was a commercial success on the music charts, topping both the U.S. and the Australian ARIA charts, giving Jackson his first number 1 single on the "Billboard" Hot 100 as a solo artist. Jackson's next two studio albums were "Music & Me" (1973) and "Forever, Michael" (1975). In 1975, Jackson signed to Epic Records, and released his fifth studio album, "Off the Wall", in 1979. It peaked at number three on the "Billboard" Top LPs & Tapes chart and spawned two number-one singles on the US "Billboard" Hot 100. "Off The Wall" made Jackson the first solo artist to have four singles from the same album peak in the top 10 on the "Billboard" Hot 100. The album was certified 9× Platinum by the RIAA and has sold over 20 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. At the 1980 Grammy Awards, it was nominated for two awards, with Jackson winning Best R&B Vocal Performance, Male.


title: Michael Jackson albums discography

text: Jackson's sixth studio album, "Thriller", was released in 1982. It became his first number one album on the "Billboard" Top LPs & Tapes chart. "Thriller" spent a record 37 non-consecutive weeks at number one, from February 26, 1983, to April 14, 1984. Seven singles were released and all reached the top 10 on the U.S. "Billboard" Hot 100 chart. This feat set the record for the most top 10 singles from an album, with "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" reaching number one. It was the best-selling album worldwide in 1983 and was also the first to become the best-selling album in the United States for two years, in 1983 and 1984. The album broke racial barriers in popular music, enabling Jackson's appearances on MTV and meeting with US President Ronald Reagan at the White House. The album set the standard for the music industry with its music videos, and promotion strategies. It influenced artists, record labels, producers, marketers, and choreographers. "Thriller" was certified 34× Platinum by the RIAA and remains the best-selling album of all time, with sales of 70 million copies worldwide. It won a record-breaking eight awards at the 1984 Grammy Awards (where it won Album of the Year) and the 1984 American Music Awards. In 1987, Jackson released his seventh studio album, "Bad". It debuted at number one on the "Billboard" Top Pop Albums chart in the US. The album also reached number one in 25 other countries. Seven singles charted in the top 20 of the "Billboard" Hot 100, including a record-breaking five number one singles. With a certification of 11× Platinum by the RIAA and sales of over 35 million copies worldwide, "Bad" is one of the best-selling albums of all time.


title: Michael Jackson albums discography

text: Jackson entered the 1990s with the release of his eighth studio album, "Dangerous", in 1991. The album was Jackson's first since "Forever, Michael" to not be produced by longtime collaborator Quincy Jones. "Dangerous" debuted at number one on the U.S. "Billboard" Top Pop Albums chart and in thirteen other countries. The album sold five million copies worldwide in its first week and was the best-selling album worldwide of 1992. "Dangerous" was certified 8× Platinum by the RIAA and is one of the best-selling albums of all time having sold over 32 million copies worldwide. Jackson's ninth studio album "HIStory" (1995) debuted at number one on the U.S. "Billboard" 200, along with nineteen other countries. The album was certified 8× Platinum by the RIAA and has sold over 20 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. Jackson released his remix album "" in 1997. It has sold over six million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling remix album of all time. Jackson's tenth and final studio album, "Invincible", was released in 2001 and topped international charts, with total confirmed sales of 8 million copies worldwide. Following Jackson's death in 2009, sales of his previous work soared, with his compilation albums "Number Ones" (2003) and "The Essential Michael Jackson" (2005) becoming the first catalog albums to outsell any new album and becoming international best-sellers. These two were later certified 5× times Platinum by the RIAA. Following the surge in sales, in March 2010, Sony Music signed a $250 million deal with the Jackson estate to extend their distribution rights to Jackson's back catalog until at least 2017. As part of this deal, two posthumous albums of previously unreleased tracks were released: "Michael" (2010) and "Xscape" (2014). In 2017, Sony renews their deal for $250 million that went into effect in January 2018.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Charles Ponzi (, ; born Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi; March 3, 1882 – January 15, 1949) was an Italian swindler and con artist who operated in the U.S. and Canada. His aliases included "Charles Ponci", "Carlo", and "Charles P. Bianchi".


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Born and raised in Italy, he became known in the early 1920s as a swindler in North America for his money-making scheme. He promised clients a 50% profit within 45 days or 100% profit within 90 days, by buying discounted postal reply coupons in other countries and redeeming them at face value in the U.S. as a form of arbitrage. In reality, Ponzi was paying earlier investors using the investments of later investors. While this type of fraudulent investment scheme was not invented by Ponzi, it became so identified with him that it now is referred to as a "Ponzi scheme". His scheme ran for over a year before it collapsed, costing his "investors" $20 million.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi may have been inspired by the scheme of William F. Miller (also known as "520% Miller"), a Brooklyn bookkeeper who in 1899 used a similar deception to take in $1 million (approximately $35 million in 2022).


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Charles Ponzi was born in Lugo, Emilia-Romagna, on March 3, 1882. He told "The New York Times" he had come from a family in Parma. Ponzi's ancestors had been well-to-do, and his mother continued to use the title "donna", but the family had subsequently fallen upon hard times and had little money. Ponzi took a job as a postal worker early on, but soon was accepted into the University of Rome La Sapienza. His richer friends considered the university a "four-year vacation", and he was inclined to follow them around to bars, cafés, and the opera. This resulted in Ponzi spending all his money, and four years later he was broke and without a degree. During this time, a number of Italian boys were migrating to the U.S. and returning to Italy as rich people. Ponzi's family encouraged him to do the same, thereby returning his family to its lost glory.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: On November 15, 1903, Ponzi arrived in Boston aboard the S.S. "Vancouver". By his own account, Ponzi had $2.50 in his pocket, having gambled away the rest of his life savings during the voyage. "I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me", he later told "The New York Times". He quickly learned English and spent the next few years doing odd jobs along the East Coast, eventually taking a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant, where he slept on the floor. Ponzi managed to work his way up to the position of waiter, but was fired for theft and shortchanging customers.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: In 1907, after some years of failing to do well in the U.S., Ponzi moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada and became an assistant teller in the newly opened Banco Zarossi, a bank located on Saint Jacques Street started by Luigi "Louis" Zarossi to service the influx of Italian immigrants arriving in the city. By this time, Ponzi had a winning personality and spoke English, Italian, and French, which Zuckoff says helped him get the job at Banco Zarossi.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: It was at Banco Zarossi that Ponzi first saw the scheme of "robbing Peter to pay Paul" (which subsequently would be called a Ponzi scheme). Zarossi paid 6% interest on bank deposits—double the going rate at the time—and was growing rapidly as a result. Ponzi eventually rose to bank manager. However, he found out that the bank was in serious financial trouble because of bad real estate loans, and that Zarossi was funding the interest payments not through profit on investments, but by using money deposited in newly opened accounts. The bank eventually failed and Zarossi fled to Mexico with a large portion of the bank's money.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi stayed in Montreal and, for some time, lived at Zarossi's house helping the man's abandoned family while planning to return to the U.S. and start over. As Ponzi was penniless, this proved to be very difficult. Eventually, he walked into the offices of a former Zarossi customer, Canadian Warehousing, and finding no one there, wrote himself a check for $423.58 in a checkbook he found, forging the signature of Damien Fournier, a director of the company. Confronted by police who had taken note of his large expenditures just after the forged check was cashed, Ponzi held out his wrist up and said, "I'm guilty". He ended up spending three years at St. Vincent-de-Paul Federal Penitentiary, a bleak facility located on the outskirts of Montreal [Inmate #6660]. Rather than inform his mother of his imprisonment, he posted her a letter stating that he had found a job as a "special assistant" to a prison warden.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: After his release in 1911, Ponzi decided to return to the U.S., but got involved in a scheme to smuggle Italian illegal immigrants across the border. He was caught and spent two years in Atlanta Prison. Here he became a translator for the warden, who was intercepting letters from mobster Ignazio "the Wolf" Lupo. Ponzi ended up befriending Lupo. Another prisoner, Charles W. Morse, became a true role model to Ponzi. Morse, a wealthy Wall Street businessman and speculator, fooled doctors during medical exams by eating soap shavings to give the appearance of ill-health. Morse was soon released from prison. Ponzi completed his prison term following Morse's release, having an additional month added to his term due to his inability to pay a $50 fine.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: After Ponzi's release from prison, he made his way back to Boston. While working at a mining camp as a nurse, he came up with the idea of going to another mining camp, starting a utility there that would supply water and power, and selling its stock. During this time, a fellow nurse called Pearl Gosid had suffered severe burns in an accident. Despite not knowing her, Ponzi volunteered for two major operations to donate of his skin from his back and legs to Pearl. This resulted in pleurisy and similar complications, and Ponzi losing his job.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Thereafter Ponzi continued to travel around looking for work, and in Boston, he met Rose Maria Gnecco, a stenographer, to whom he proposed marriage. Gnecco came from a family of Italian-American immigrants who had a small fruit stall in downtown Boston. Though Ponzi did not tell Gnecco about his years in jail, his mother sent Gnecco a letter telling her of Ponzi's past. Nonetheless, she married him in 1918. For the next few months, Ponzi worked at a number of businesses, including his father-in-law's grocery, and the import-export company JR Poole before hitting upon an idea to sell advertising in a large business listing to be sent to various businesses. He was unable to sell this idea to businesses, and his company failed soon after. Ponzi took over his wife's family's fledgling fruit company for a short time, but to no avail, and it also failed shortly thereafter.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi set up a small office at 27 School Street, Boston, in the summer of 1919 attempting to sell business ideas to contacts in Europe. He received a letter from a company in Spain asking about the advertising catalog which included an international reply coupon (IRC), leading Ponzi to find a weakness in the system which, at least in principle, gave him an opportunity to make money.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Postal reply coupons allowed a person in one country to pay for the postage of a reply to a correspondent in another country. IRCs were priced at the cost of postage in the country of purchase, but could be exchanged for stamps to cover the cost of postage in the country where redeemed; if these values were different, there was a potential profit. Inflation after World War I had greatly decreased the cost of postage in Italy expressed in U.S. dollars, so that an IRC could be bought cheaply in Italy and exchanged for U.S. stamps of higher value, which could then be sold. Ponzi claimed that the net profit on these transactions, after expenses and exchange rates, was in excess of 400%. This was a form of arbitrage, or profiting by buying an asset at a lower price in one market and immediately selling it in a market where the price is higher, which was (and is) legal.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Seeing an opportunity, Ponzi quit his job as a translator to set his IRC scheme in motion, but needed a large capital outlay to buy IRCs at lower performing European currencies. He first tried to borrow money from several banks, including the Hanover Trust Company, but they were not convinced, and its manager, Chmielinski, turned him down.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Subsequently, Ponzi set up a stock company to raise money from the public. He also went to several of his friends in Boston and promised that he would double their investment in 90 days. Ponzi later increased this to 45 days at 50% interest, thus doubling investments in three months, in an environment when banks were paying only 5% annual interest. The great returns available from postal reply coupons, he explained to them, made such incredible profits easy. Some people invested and were paid off as promised, receiving $750 interest on initial investments of $1,250.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: In January 1920, Ponzi started his own company, the "Securities Exchange Company", to promote the scheme. In the first month, 18 people invested in his company with a total of $1,800. He paid them promptly, the very next month, with the money obtained from the newer set of investors.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi set up a larger office, this time in the Niles Building on School Street. Word spread, and investments increased rapidly. Ponzi hired agents and paid them generous commissions. Between February and March 1920, the total amount invested had risen from $5,000 to $25,000 ($ to $ in , respectively). As the scheme grew, Ponzi hired agents to seek out new investors in New England and New Jersey. At that time, investors were being paid impressive rates, which subsequently encouraged others to invest. By May 1920, he had made $420,000 (). By June 1920, people had invested $2.5 million in Ponzi's scheme (). By July, he was raking in a million dollars per week and rising. By the end of July, he was approaching a million dollars per day.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi began depositing the money in the Hanover Trust Bank of Boston (a small bank on Hanover Street in the mostly Italian North End), in the hope that once his account was large enough he could impose his will on the bank or even be made its president; he bought a controlling interest in the bank through himself and several friends after depositing $3 million. By July 1920, Ponzi had made millions. People were mortgaging their homes and investing their life savings. Most did not take their profits but reinvested. Ponzi's company, meanwhile, had set up branches from Maine to New Jersey.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Even though Ponzi's company was bringing in fantastic sums of money each day, the simplest financial analysis would have shown that the operation was running at a large loss. As long as money kept flowing in, existing investors could be paid with the new money. This was the only method Ponzi had to continue providing returns to existing investors, as he made no effort to generate legitimate profits.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi's initial investors consisted of working-class immigrants like himself. Gradually, news travelled upwards, and many well-to-do Boston Brahmins also invested in his scheme. In its heyday, nearly 75% of Boston's police force had invested in the scheme. Ponzi's investors even included those closest to him, like his chauffeur John Collins and his own brother-in-law. Ponzi was indiscriminate about whom he allowed to invest, from young newspaper boys investing a few dollars to high-net-worth individuals, like a banker from Lawrence, Kansas, who invested $10,000.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Though Ponzi was still paying back investors, mostly from money from subsequent investors, he had not yet figured out a way to actually change the IRCs to cash. He also subsequently realized that changing the coupons to money was logistically impossible. For example: for the initial 18 investors of January 1920, for their $1,800 investment, it would have taken 53,000 postal coupons to actually realize the arbitrage profits. For the subsequent 15,000 investors that Ponzi had, he would have had to fill "Titanic"-sized ships with postal coupons just to ship them to the U.S. from Europe. However, Ponzi found that all the interest payments returned to him, as investors kept re-investing.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi lived luxuriously: he bought a mansion in Lexington, Massachusetts, and he maintained accounts in several banks across New England besides Hanover Trust. He bought a Locomobile, the finest car of that time. He had initially bought two first-class tickets to Italy for a delayed honeymoon with Rose but instead decided to change them to bring his mother from Italy to the U.S. in a first-class stateroom on an ocean liner. She lived with Ponzi and Rose for some time in Lexington, but died soon after. On July 31, 1920, Ponzi told Father Pasquale Di Milla, the director of the Italian Children's Home in Jamaica Plain, that he would donate $100,000 in honor of his mother. Ponzi also bought a macaroni company and part of a wine company in an attempt to gain profits that could be used to repay the investors of his IRC scheme.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi's rapid rise naturally drew suspicion. When a Boston financial writer suggested there was no way Ponzi could legally deliver such high returns in a short period of time, Ponzi sued for libel and won $500,000 in damages. As libel law at the time placed the burden of proof on the writer and publisher, this effectively neutralized any serious probes into his dealings for some time.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Nonetheless, there were still signs of his eventual ruin. Joseph Daniels, a Boston furniture dealer who had given Ponzi furniture which he could not afford to pay for, sued Ponzi to cash in on the gold rush. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, but it did prompt people to begin asking how Ponzi could have gone from being penniless to being a millionaire in a short span of time. There was a run on the Securities Exchange Company, as some investors decided to pull out. Ponzi paid them and the run stopped.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: On July 24, 1920, "The Boston Post" printed a favorable article on Ponzi and his scheme that brought in investors faster than ever. At that time, Ponzi was making $250,000 a day. Ponzi's good fortune was increased by the fact that just below this favorable article, which seemed to imply that Ponzi was indeed returning 50% return on an investment after only 45 days, was a bank advertisement that stated that the bank was paying 5% returns annually. The next business day after this article was published, Ponzi arrived at his office to find thousands of Bostonians waiting to give him their money.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Despite this reprieve, "Post" acting publisher Richard Grozier (who was running the paper in the absence of his father Edwin, its owner and publisher) and city editor Eddie Dunn were suspicious and assigned investigative reporters to look into Ponzi. He was also under investigation by Massachusetts authorities, and, on the day the "Post" printed its article, Ponzi met with state officials. He managed to divert the officials from checking his books by offering to stop taking money during the investigation, a fortunate choice, as proper records were not being kept. Ponzi's offer temporarily calmed the suspicions of the state officials.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: On July 26, the "Post" started a series of articles that asked hard questions about the operation of Ponzi's money machine. The paper contacted Clarence Barron, the financial journalist who headed Dow Jones & Company, to examine Ponzi's scheme. Barron observed that though Ponzi was offering fantastic returns on investments, Ponzi himself was not investing with his own company.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Barron then noted that to cover the investments made with the Securities Exchange Company, 160 million postal reply coupons would have to be in circulation. However, only about 27,000 actually were in circulation. The United States Post Office stated that postal reply coupons were not being bought in quantity at home or abroad. The gross profit margin in percent on buying and selling each IRC was colossal, but the overhead required to handle the purchase and redemption of these items, which were of extremely low cost and were sold individually, would have exceeded the gross profit. Barron noted that if Ponzi really was doing what he claimed to do, he would effectively be profiting at the expense of a government—either the governments where he bought the coupons or the U.S. government. For this reason, Barron argued that even if Ponzi's operation was legitimate, it was immoral to take advantage of a government in this manner.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: The "Post" articles caused a panic run on the Securities Exchange Company. Ponzi paid out $2 million in three days to a wild crowd outside his office. He canvassed the crowd, passed out coffee and doughnuts, and cheerfully told them they had nothing to worry about. Many changed their minds and left their money with him. However, this attracted the attention of Daniel Gallagher, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. Gallagher commissioned Edwin Pride to audit the Securities Exchange Company's books—an effort made difficult by the fact Ponzi's bookkeeping system consisted merely of index cards with investors' names.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: In the meantime, Ponzi had hired a publicist, William McMasters. However, McMasters quickly became suspicious of Ponzi's endless talk of postal reply coupons, as well as the ongoing investigation against him. He later described Ponzi as a "financial idiot" who did not seem to know how to add. The "denouement" for Ponzi began in late July, when McMasters found several highly incriminating documents that indicated Ponzi was merely "robbing Peter to pay Paul". McMasters went to Grozier, his former employer, with this information. Grozier offered him $5,000 for his story, which was printed in the "Post" on August 2, 1920. McMaster's article declared Ponzi hopelessly insolvent, reporting that while he claimed $7 million in liquid funds, he was actually at least $2 million in debt. With interest factored in, McMasters wrote, Ponzi was as much as $4.5 million in the red. The story touched off a massive run, and Ponzi paid off in one day. He then sped up plans to build a massive conglomerate that would engage in banking and import/export operations.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Massachusetts Bank Commissioner Joseph Allen became concerned that if major withdrawals exhausted Ponzi's reserves, it would bring Boston's banking system to its knees. Allen's suspicions were further aroused when he found out a large number of Ponzi-controlled accounts had received more than $250,000 in loans from Hanover Trust. This led Allen to speculate that Ponzi was not nearly as well-financed as he claimed, since he was getting large loans from the bank he effectively controlled. He ordered two bank examiners to keep an eye on Ponzi's accounts.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: On August 9, the bank examiners reported that enough investors had cashed their checks on Ponzi's main account there that it was almost certainly overdrawn. Allen then ordered Hanover Trust not to pay out any more checks from Ponzi's main account. He also orchestrated an involuntary bankruptcy filing by several small Ponzi investors. The move forced Massachusetts Attorney General J. Weston Allen to release a statement that there was little to support Ponzi's claims of large-scale dealings in postal coupons. State officials then invited Ponzi noteholders to come to the Massachusetts State House to furnish their names and addresses for the purpose of the investigation. On the same day, Ponzi received a preview of Pride's audit, which revealed Ponzi was at least $7 million in debt.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: On August 11, it all came crashing down for Ponzi. First, the "Post" came out with a front-page story about his criminal activities in Montreal 13 years earlier, including his forgery conviction and his role at Zarossi's scandal-ridden bank. That afternoon, Bank Commissioner Allen seized Hanover Trust due to numerous irregularities. The commissioner thus inadvertently foiled Ponzi's plan to "borrow" funds from the bank vaults as a last resort in the event all other efforts to obtain funds failed.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: By the morning of August 12, Ponzi's certificate of deposit at Hanover Trust, which had been worth $1.5 million, was reduced to $1 million after bank officials tapped into it to cover the overdraft. Even if he had been able to convert it into cash, he would have had only $4 million in assets. Amid reports that he was about to be arrested any day, Ponzi surrendered to federal authorities that morning and accepted Pride's figures. He was charged with mail fraud for sending letters to his marks telling them their notes had matured. He was originally released on $25,000 bail and was immediately re-arrested on state charges of larceny, for which he posted an additional $10,000 bond. After the "Post" released the results of the audit, the bail bondsman feared Ponzi might flee the country and withdrew the bail for the federal charges. Attorney General Allen declared that if Ponzi managed to regain his freedom, the state would seek additional charges and seek a bail high enough to ensure Ponzi would stay in custody.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: The news brought down five other banks in addition to Hanover Trust. Ponzi's investors were practically wiped out, receiving less than 30 cents to the dollar. They lost about $20 million in 1920 dollars (approximately $ million in dollars). By comparison, Bernie Madoff's similar scheme that collapsed in 2008 cost his investors about $18 billion, 53 times the losses of Ponzi's scheme.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: In two federal indictments, Ponzi was charged with 86 counts of mail fraud and faced life imprisonment. At the urging of his wife, Ponzi pleaded guilty on November 1, 1920, to a single count before Judge Clarence Hale, who declared before sentencing, "Here was a man with all the duties of seeking large money. He concocted a scheme which, on his counsel's admission, did defraud men and women. It will not do to have the world understand that such a scheme as that can be carried out ... without receiving substantial punishment." Ponzi was sentenced to five years in federal prison.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi was released after three-and-a-half years and was almost immediately indicted on 22 state charges of larceny, which came as a surprise to Ponzi; he thought he had a deal calling for the state to drop any charges against him if he pleaded guilty to the federal charges. He sued, claiming that he would be facing double jeopardy if Massachusetts essentially retried him for the same offenses spelled out in the federal indictment. The case, "Ponzi v. Fessenden", made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. On March 27, 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that federal plea bargains have no standing regarding state charges. It also ruled that Ponzi was not facing double jeopardy because Massachusetts was charging him with larceny while the federal government charged him with mail fraud, even though the charges implicated the same criminal operation.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: In October 1922, Ponzi was tried on the first 10 larceny counts. Since he was insolvent, Ponzi served as his own attorney and, speaking as persuasively as he had with his duped investors, was acquitted by the jury on all charges. He was tried a second time on five of the remaining charges, and the jury deadlocked. Ponzi was found guilty at a third trial, and was sentenced to an additional seven to nine years in prison as "a common and notorious thief". Remarkably, during his various prison terms, Ponzi continued to receive Christmas cards from some of his more gullible investors, as well as requests from others to invest their money—from his prison cell. There were efforts to have him deported as an undesirable alien in 1922.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: In September 1925, Ponzi was released on bail as he appealed the state conviction. He fled to the Springfield neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida, and launched the Charpon Land Syndicate ("Charpon" is an amalgamation of his name), seeking to capitalize on the Florida land boom. He offered investors tiny tracts of land, some underwater, and promised 200% returns in 60 days. In reality, it was a scam that sold swampland in Columbia County. Ponzi was indicted by a Duval County grand jury in February 1926 and charged with violating Florida trust and securities laws. A jury found him guilty on the securities charges, and the judge sentenced him to a year in the Florida State Prison. Ponzi appealed his conviction and was freed after posting a $1,500 bond.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi traveled to Tampa, where he shaved his head, grew a mustache, and tried to flee the country as a crewman on a merchant ship bound for Italy. However, he revealed his identity to a shipmate. Word spread to a deputy sheriff, who followed the ship to its last American port of call in New Orleans and placed Ponzi under arrest. After Ponzi's pleas to Calvin Coolidge and Benito Mussolini for deportation were ignored, he was sent back to Massachusetts to serve out his prison term. Ponzi served seven more years in prison.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: In the meantime, government investigators tried to trace Ponzi's convoluted accounts to figure out how much money he had taken and where it had gone. They never managed to untangle it and could conclude only that millions had gone through his hands.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi was released in 1934. With the release came an immediate order to have him deported to Italy. He asked for a full pardon from Massachusetts Governor Joseph B. Ely. However, on July 13, Ely turned the appeal down. Ponzi's charismatic confidence had faded, and when he left the prison gates, he was met by an angry crowd. He told reporters before he left, "I went looking for trouble, and I found it." On October 7, Ponzi was officially deported.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Rose stayed in the U.S. and divorced Ponzi in 1937. She had not wanted to leave Boston, and Ponzi was in no position to support her in any event.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: In Italy, Ponzi jumped from scheme to scheme, but little came of them. He eventually got a job in Brazil as an agent for Ala Littoria, the Italian state airline. During World War II, however, the airline's operation in the country was shut down after the British intelligence services intervened and Brazil sided with the Allies. During that time, Ponzi also wrote his autobiography.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Ponzi spent the last years of his life in poverty, working occasionally as a translator. His health deteriorated and in 1941 a heart attack left him considerably weakened. His eyesight began failing, and by 1948 he was almost completely blind. A brain hemorrhage paralyzed his left leg and arm. Ponzi died in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro, the Hospital São Francisco de Assis of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, on January 18, 1949.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: Supported by his last and only friend, Francisco Nonato Nunes, a barber who spoke English and had notions of Italian, Ponzi granted one last interview to an American reporter, telling him, "Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought, I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over."


title: Charles Ponzi

text: A fourth-season episode of Comedy Central's Drunk History, "Scoundrels," included the story of Ponzi and McMasters, with Jesse Plemons portraying Ponzi and Ed Helms portraying McMasters, with an inebriated Chris Romano recounting the story.


title: Charles Ponzi

text: In discussing a solution to this money problems, the Earl of Grantham mentions Ponzi's promise of huge returns as a possible course of action to his family in "Downton Abbey".


title: Charles Ponzi

text: On Murdoch Mysteries Home for the Holidays special Inspector Brankenreid is conned by Ponzi and The Inspector and Constable Crabtree work to get the money back.


title: Ben Harper

text: Benjamin Chase Harper (born October 28, 1969) is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Harper plays an eclectic mix of blues, folk, soul, reggae, and rock music and is known for his guitar-playing skills, vocals, live performances, and activism. He has released twelve regular studio albums, mostly through Virgin Records, and has toured internationally.


title: Ben Harper

text: Harper is a three-time Grammy Award winner and seven-time nominee, with awards for Best Pop Instrumental Performance and Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album in 2004 and Best Blues Album in 2013.


title: Ben Harper

text: At the 40th Blues Music Awards ceremony, Harper's joint composition with Charlie Musselwhite, "No Mercy in This Land", was named Song of the Year.


title: Ben Harper

text: Harper was born in Pomona, California. His late father, Leonard Harper, was of African-American and Cherokee ancestry, and his mother, Ellen Harper Verdries ( Chase), is Jewish. His maternal great-grandmother was a Russian-Lithuanian Jew. His parents divorced when he was five years old, and he grew up with his mother's family. Harper has two brothers, Joel and Peter Harper.


title: Ben Harper

text: Harper began playing guitar as a child. His maternal grandparents' music store, the Folk Music Center and Museum, laid a foundation of folk and blues for the artist, complemented by regular patrons Leonard Cohen, Taj Mahal, John Darnielle, and David Lindley and quotes of William Shakespeare and Robert Frost made often by his grandfather.


title: Ben Harper

text: In 1978, at the age of 9, Harper attended Bob Marley's performance in Burbank, California, where Marley was joined by former bandmate Peter Tosh for the encore. It was, according to Harper, an important influence.


title: Ben Harper

text: At the age of twelve, Harper played his first gig. During the 1980s, in his teen years, Harper began to play the slide guitar, mimicking the style of Robert Johnson. Harper refined his style, taking up the Weissenborn slide guitar. Harper escaped from the Inland Empire after being offered an invitation by Taj Mahal to tour with the artist. They recorded Taj Mahal's album "Follow the Drinking Gourd", released in November 1990, and toured Hawaii.


title: Ben Harper

text: In 1992, Harper recorded the LP "Pleasure and Pain" with folk multi-instrumentalist Tom Freund. After this limited-edition record, Harper secured a lifetime record deal with Virgin Records, which released his debut album, "Welcome to the Cruel World", in 1994. This allowed him to be invited to the Rencontres Trans Musicales of Rennes in France in December 1993 where he went up on a large stage for the first time. His first album was followed by "Fight For Your Mind" in 1995, with Juan Nelson on bass, which became a college radio favorite and included several songs that Harper still plays live regularly.


title: Ben Harper

text: In 1999, at the Santa Barbara Bowl, Harper met Jack Johnson and sent a demo tape of Johnson's songs to his producer, J. P. Plunier, who then produced Johnson's first album, "Brushfire Fairytales", in December 2000. Jack Johnson became the opening act in late February 2001 for the last 23 cities of Ben Harper's “Innocent Criminals” tour of the United States.


title: Ben Harper

text: Early in Harper's career, his music received more attention in Europe and was widely played in Australia (first on Triple J radio). Harper has made comments on a number of occasions that his career was kicked off in Australia. While he was a well-known and respected figure in the United States, he was also a star in countries like Australia, New Zealand, France, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, receiving a great deal of airplay and critical acclaim. His popularity in Europe became wide enough that he was French "Rolling Stone" magazine's Artist of the Year ("Artiste De L'Année") in 2003, and his Australian tour that year for "Diamonds on the Inside" was highly successful with record sales.


title: Ben Harper

text: In 2002, Harper was one of the featured singers covering Motown hits by Marvin Gaye in the documentary, "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" (a history of The Funk Brothers). Harper was featured on the album "True Love" by Toots and the Maytals, which won the Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Reggae Album, and showcased many notable musicians including Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Trey Anastasio, Gwen Stefani / No Doubt, Bonnie Raitt, Manu Chao, The Roots, Ryan Adams, Keith Richards, Toots Hibbert, Paul Douglas, Jackie Jackson, Ken Boothe, and The Skatalites.


title: Ben Harper

text: On April 3, 2004, Harper and Jack Johnson performed with Toots and the Maytals on Saturday Night Live (season 29, episode 16), a show hosted by Donald Trump.


title: Ben Harper

text: In October 2004, Harper participated in the Vote for Change concert tour organized to benefit Moveon.org and encourage people in the swing states to vote during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. In the same month, Harper contributed a live recording of the song "Oppression" to "For The Lady", a benefit album for jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner and Burmese pro-democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi. In 2006, Harper released the double album "Both Sides of the Gun" which debuted at number 7 on the "Billboard" 200. Though uncredited, he appears briefly in the 2006 David Lynch film "Inland Empire", alongside his wife Laura Dern.


title: Ben Harper

text: Harper is part of the No Nukes group which is against the expansion of nuclear power. In 2007 the group recorded a music video of a new version of the Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth". Harper's collaboration "Boa Sorte/Good Luck" with Brazilian singer Vanessa da Mata peaked at #1 in Brazil and Portugal. In Brazil it also won a highly coveted Prêmio Multishow for "Best Song" in 2008. Also in 2008, Harper participated in the benefit album "Songs for Tibet".


title: Ben Harper

text: On August 27, 2010, it was reported that Harper had formed a band called Fistful of Mercy with Dhani Harrison and Joseph Arthur. Fistful of Mercy released their debut record, "As I Call You Down", on October 5, 2010.


title: Ben Harper

text: On May 17, 2011, Harper's official site posted that his next album was released, entitled "Give Till It's Gone". The album is a continuation of recording with Relentless7.


title: Ben Harper

text: On October 1, 2012, a new album from Harper with Charlie Musselwhite was announced entitled "Get Up!" on Stax Records / Concord Music Group. The official release date for the album was January 29, 2013. "Get Up!" was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Harper. It is Harper's 12th studio album and first new recording since 2011's "Give Till It's Gone" (Virgin).


title: Ben Harper

text: In December 2012, it was announced that Harper had co-produced lead vocalist Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks first solo rock album "Mother". It was released on May 7, 2013.


title: Ben Harper

text: In early 2015, it was announced that Harper and The Innocent Criminals would perform at the Boston Calling Music Festival in May 2015.


title: Ben Harper

text: Harper has five albums and one single that have been certified Gold by the RIAA: "Welcome The Cruel World"/Virgin, "Burn To Shine"/Virgin, "Fight For Your Mind"/Virgin, "Live From Mars"/Virgin, "Diamonds On The Inside"/Capitol-Virgin and "You Found Another Lover"/Stax (single)


title: Ben Harper

text: On February 12, 2016, Harper released (as a YouTube video) his new single "Call It What It Is", the first track taken from his upcoming new studio album "Call It What It Is" due for release on April 8, 2016.


title: Ben Harper

text: On April 8, 2019, Harper performed as a guest artist on the seventeenth season of "American Idol" during the second night of the “Top 20 Duets” episode. Harper sang with contestant Alejandro Aranda, playing "There Will Be a Light".


title: Ben Harper

text: At the 40th Blues Music Awards ceremony, Harper's joint composition with Charlie Musselwhite, "No Mercy In This Land", was named as 'Song of the Year'.


title: Ben Harper

text: On March 20, 2019, Mavis Staples announced a new album "We Get By", featuring eleven tracks written and produced by Harper. The title track, which features Harper on vocals and in the music video, was released on May 15, 2019.


title: Ben Harper

text: In 2020 Harper released "Winter Is for Lovers", an album recorded with solo Monteleone lap steel songs. "It started out as an exploration of steel guitar," Harper told "Acoustic Guitar" magazine in a 2020 interview, ""Winter Is for Lovers" is written as one piece of music; let's define that in the way that the old classical guitarists would have, on a single guitar (the Monteleone lap steel)."


title: Ben Harper

text: On June 9, 2021, Harper's longtime bassist, collaborator, and Innocent Criminals member, Juan Nelson, died at the age 62. Harper paid tribute to him, stating on Twitter: "Beloved husband, father, musical genius, BHIC band member of 27 years, and the finest man I've ever known. It's near impossible for me to put words to this pain and loss. Rest in Glory our beloved Reverend Juan." No cause of death has been confirmed.


title: Ben Harper

text: On July 22, 2022, Harper released the album "Bloodline Maintenance". The album is dedicated to the memory of Juan Nelson.


title: Ben Harper

text: In 1996, Harper married his first wife, Joanna. They have two children together, son Charles (born circa 1997) and daughter Harris (born circa 2000). Harper and Joanna separated in 2000, and were divorced in 2001.


title: Ben Harper

text: Harper began dating actress Laura Dern after they met at one of his concerts in fall 2000. Harper and Dern married on December 23, 2005, at their home in Los Angeles. They have two children, son Ellery Walker (born August 2001) and daughter Jaya (born November 2004).


title: Ben Harper

text: In October 2010, Harper filed for divorce from Dern, citing irreconcilable differences. They briefly reconciled and attended the 2012 Golden Globe Awards together, but Dern reactivated the divorce by filing a legal response in July 2012. The divorce was finalized in September 2013.


title: Ben Harper

text: Harper married his third wife, social advocate Jaclyn Matfus, on January 1, 2015. Their son Besso was born in June 2017.


title: Ben Harper

text: Harper is a skateboarder who has trained with Rodney Mullen and he also owns a warehouse for his personal skateboarding. Harper co-owns the skateboarding brand Roller Horror with professional skateboarder Mike York. In September 2016, Harper appeared on "The Nine Club" skateboard podcast, hosted by Chris Roberts, where he discussed his relationship and history with skateboarding. On "The Nine Club", he also reveals that he went to school and began skateboarding with Chris Miller in Pomona, California.


title: Ben Harper

text: Harper supports Little Kids Rock, a national nonprofit organization that works to restore and revitalize music education in disadvantaged U.S. public schools. In 2013, he donated items to their San Francisco Bay Area benefit concert.


title: Ben Harper

text: On December 11, 2016, he played an acoustic benefit concert at Bimbos in San Francisco supporting New Light India's "Boys Home Project". Founded in 2000 by Urmi Basu, New Light India provides shelter, educational opportunities, recreational facilities, healthcare and legal aid for the girls and women in Kalighat, notorious for its red light district.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Redbone is an American rock band founded in 1969 by brothers Pat and Lolly Vegas. All band members during their commercial peak were of Mexican American and Native American heritage, which was reflected in their songs, stage costumes, and album art.


title: Redbone (band)

text: They reached the Top 5 on the U.S. "Billboard" Hot 100 chart in 1974 with their single, "Come and Get Your Love". The single went certified Gold selling over a million copies. It also made Redbone the first Native American band to reach the top five on the "Billboard" Hot 100, with the song reaching number 5. Redbone achieved hits with their singles "We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee", "The Witch Queen of New Orleans", "Wovoka", and "Maggie" in the United States, although these singles were more successful overseas.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Born in Coalinga, California, near Fresno, brothers Patrick (bass and vocals) and Candido "Lolly" Vasquez-Vegas (guitar and vocals) moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and played for ten years in clubs under the name of Pat and Lolly Vegas. Pat won Coca-Cola's first singing competition in 1958 at age 17. He also won a recording contract, which he put off to move to Los Angeles with Lolly. They performed at local clubs on Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard (such as Gazzari's) while writing and playing on records by Tina Turner, Sonny & Cher, James Brown, Little Richard, and Elvis, among other legendary artists.


title: Redbone (band)

text: The word "redbone" is a Cajun term for a mixed-race person, which the band adopted to signify their mixed ancestry. The Vasquez-Vegas brothers were of Yaqui, Shoshone, and Mexican heritage. The band often alluded to Cajun and New Orleans culture in their lyrics and performing style. The brothers began by performing and recording surf music as the "Vegas Brothers", "because their agent told them that the world was not yet ready to embrace a duo of Mexican musicians playing surfing music". First as the Vegas Brothers, then later as the Crazy Cajun Cakewalk Band, Pat and Lolly performed throughout the 1960s at venues on the Sunset Strip.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Before forming Redbone, Pat and Lolly released an album in the mid-1960s entitled "Pat & Lolly Vegas at the Haunted House" (Mercury MG 21059/SR 61059). Of the twelve songs on the album, six were originals by the Vasquez-Vegas brothers which earned them some early success. Pat and Lolly also appeared on the '60s hit show Shindig! repeatedly, becoming regular performers. They also released several singles from 1961 to the mid-1960s, one titled "Robot Walk" / "Don't You Remember" (Apogee Records A-101), helping to make a name for themselves in their early years.


title: Redbone (band)

text: In 1967, P.J. Proby recorded his only Top-30 hit, "Niki Hoeky", written by Jim Ford, Lolly Vegas, and Pat Vegas. The next year, Bobbie Gentry performed the Cajun-influenced song on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and included it on her smash-hit album, "Ode to Billie Joe". Pat Vegas also wrote songs for legendary names like Aretha Franklin amongst others.


title: Redbone (band)

text: According to Pat Vegas, Jimi Hendrix, himself part Cherokee, inspired the musicians to form an all-Native American rock group. (Hendrix himself stated that Lolly Vegas was his favorite guitarist and biggest influence in music). They signed as the band "Redbone" to Epic Records in 1969. The band then consisted of Pat Vegas, Lolly Vegas, Peter DePoe and Robert Anthony Avila, a Yaqui-Mexican American, better known by his stage name Tony Bellamy. Their debut album "Redbone" was released in 1970.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Redbone played primarily rock music with R&B, Cajun, blue-eyed soul, funk, country, tribal, and Latin roots. Their first world commercial success came with the single "The Witch Queen of New Orleans" that peaked at No. 21 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and followed by the single "Maggie" from their second album, "Potlatch". "Come and Get Your Love" followed as a big No. 5 hit for Redbone and remained on the chart for 24 weeks being certified gold by the R.I.A.A. on April 22, 1974. Redbone was also the opening act introducing the first Earth Day to the world in Philadelphia along with Senator Edmund Muskie. Their opening song was "Chant 13th Hour" from the "Potlatch" album.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Redbone's music was characterized by the Leslie rotating speaker effect that Lolly Vegas used for his electric guitar amplifier and a "King Kong" style of drumming developed by drummer Peter DePoe. This Leslie effect was developed while rehearsing at Dress Revue Sound Studios in Hollywood, California in the early 1970s.


title: Redbone (band)

text: The first self-titled album by Redbone was released as a double album in North America. In Europe, it was released both as a double (EPC 67242) and as a single album (BN 26280) on the Epic label.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Their third album, "Message from a Drum", was released in Europe (except Spain) with the title "The Witch Queen of New Orleans" and a different cover than the one released in the U.S. and Canada.


title: Redbone (band)

text: In 1973, Redbone released the politically oriented "We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee", recalling the massacre of Lakota Sioux Indians by the 7th Cavalry Regiment in 1890. The song ends with the subtly altered sentence "We were all wounded 'by' Wounded Knee". It charted in several European countries and reached the No. 1 position in The Netherlands but did not chart in the U.S. where it was initially withheld from release due to lyrical controversy and then banned by several radio stations due to its confrontation of a sore subject. DePoe had left this band in 1972. He was replaced by Arturo Perez (1939- ), but later by Bellamy's Filipino-Chicano cousin, Butch Rillera around that point. Following this the band achieved much of their commercial success. Tony Bellamy (guitar, piano and vocals) left the band in 1977, with Rillera leaving shortly after.


title: Redbone (band)

text: The band's current remaining membership is led by Pat Vegas, although an array of new members have joined Redbone since then due to Lolly Vegas suffering a stroke that left him unable to tour with the band. No member has been official other than Pat Vegas after the original members were not present. A proposed reunion tour in 2003 did not occur. There is evidence that suggests the existence of an "imposter band" (one of many who try to gain recognition) who was illegally touring the United States and posing as Redbone under the name (or alias) "Denny Freeman". Freeman - who Pat Vegas confirmed to be unaffiliated with Redbone in an interview with the "Montana Standard" - defrauded the county fair board of the Butte Silver-Bow County Fair in Butte, Montana, under pretenses of being a co-founding member of Redbone, yet he was never a band member.


title: Redbone (band)

text: On December 25, 2009, Tony Bellamy died of liver failure at a hospital in his hometown of Las Vegas, at age 63. Less than three months later, Lolly Vegas died of lung cancer at his family home in Reseda, California, on March 4, 2010, at age 70.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Redbone headlined the Inaugural Indigenous Peoples Day event along with Pat Vegas's son PJ Vegas, daughter Frankie Vegas, and The Black Eyed Peas at Los Angeles City Hall on October 8, 2018, Grand Park. This was the first indigenous celebration commemorating this change that took two years to complete. Spearheaded by LA Council member Mitch O'Farrell, they honored the largest native community in the United States, Los Angeles, and the native people who first inhabited LA, the Tongva people.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Pat Vegas continues to tour in the United States and Canada in support of his solo albums, "Ambergris", "Peacepipe", "Speed of Sound", and "Buffalo Bluz". He also is part of a touring version of Redbone that plays both his solo efforts and the hits from the band's heyday.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Redbone's music was primarily rock music, but incorporated elements of rock and roll, funk, folk music, blues, swamp funk, Tex-Mex, rhythm and blues, indigenous music of North America, soul music, soft rock, hard rock, Cajun music, jazz and Latin music. The band's style was classified as swamp rock.


title: Redbone (band)

text: Redbone was inducted into the Native American Music Association Hall of Fame in 2008, as well as the legendary NY Smithsonian in 2013. They were also honored with vein painted on the largest mural in the U.S. in Fresno, California. On August 30, 2014, Pat Vegas was honored with the Lifetime Achievement "Legend" Award from the "West Coast American Indian Music Awards."


title: Redbone (band)

text: In 2014, "Come and Get Your Love" experienced a resurgence in popularity when it was featured in the Marvel Studios film "Guardians of the Galaxy" as one of the songs on a mixtape made for the protagonist, Peter Quill. It was also included on the film's soundtrack album, which reached the top spot on the "Billboard" 200 chart.


title: Redbone (band)

text: In 2015, "Come and Get Your Love" was used as the intro theme to Netflix produced cartoon series "F is for Family".


title: Redbone (band)

text: In 2018, in France, "Come and Get Your Love" was featured in a Bouygues Telecom television commercial showing three successive generations appreciating the song.


title: Redbone (band)

text: In 2018, Pat Vegas was awarded with the "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Indigenous Music Awards.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The Belgian Congo (, ; ) was a Belgian colony in Central Africa from 1908 until independence in 1960. The former colony adopted its present name, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in 1964.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Colonial rule in the Congo began in the late 19th century. King Leopold II of the Belgians attempted to persuade the Belgian government to support colonial expansion around the then-largely unexploited Congo Basin. Their ambivalence resulted in Leopold's establishing a colony himself. With support from a number of Western countries, Leopold achieved international recognition of the Congo Free State in 1885. By the turn of the century, the violence used by Free State officials against indigenous Congolese and a ruthless system of economic exploitation led to intense diplomatic pressure on Belgium to take official control of the country, which it did by creating the Belgian Congo in 1908.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Belgian rule in the Congo was based on the "colonial trinity" ("trinité coloniale") of state, missionary and private-company interests. The privileging of Belgian commercial interests meant that large amounts of capital flowed into the Congo and that individual regions became specialised. On many occasions, the interests of the government and of private enterprise became closely linked, and the state helped companies to break strikes and to remove other barriers raised by the indigenous population. The colony was divided into hierarchically organised administrative subdivisions, and run uniformly according to a set "native policy" ("politique indigène"). This differed from the practice of British and French colonial policy, which generally favoured systems of indirect rule, retaining traditional leaders in positions of authority under colonial oversight.


title: Belgian Congo

text: During the 1940s and 1950s, the Belgian Congo experienced extensive urbanisation and the colonial administration began various development programs aimed at making the territory into a "model colony". One result saw the development of a new middle-class of Europeanised African ""évolués"" in the cities. By the 1950s the Congo had a wage labour force twice as large as that in any other African colony.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In 1960, as the result of a widespread and increasingly radical pro-independence movement, the Belgian Congo achieved independence, becoming the Republic of the Congo under Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and President Joseph Kasa-Vubu. Poor relations between political factions within the Congo, the continued involvement of Belgium in Congolese affairs, and the intervention by major parties (mainly the United States and the Soviet Union) during the Cold War led to a five-year-long period of war and political instability, known as the Congo Crisis, from 1960 to 1965. This ended with the seizure of power by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu in November 1965.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Until the later part of the 19th century, few Europeans had ventured into the Congo Basin. The rainforest, swamps and accompanying malaria and other tropical diseases, such as sleeping sickness, made it a difficult environment for European exploration and exploitation. In 1876 King Leopold II of Belgium organized the International African Association with the cooperation of the leading African explorers and the support of several European governments for the promotion of the exploration and colonization of Africa. After Henry Morton Stanley had explored the region in a journey that ended in 1878, Leopold courted the explorer and hired him to help his interests in the region.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Leopold II had been keen to acquire a colony for Belgium even before he ascended to the throne in 1865. The Belgian civil government showed little interest in its monarch's dreams of empire-building. Ambitious and stubborn, Leopold decided to pursue the matter on his own account.


title: Belgian Congo

text: European rivalry in Central Africa led to diplomatic tensions, in particular with regard to the Congo River basin, which no European power had claimed. In November 1884 Otto von Bismarck convened a 14-nation conference (the Berlin Conference) to find a peaceful resolution to the Congo situation. Though the Berlin Conference did not formally approve the territorial claims of the European powers in Central Africa, it did agree on a set of rules to ensure a conflict-free partitioning of the region. The rules recognised ("inter alia") the Congo Basin as a free-trade zone. But Leopold II emerged triumphant from the Berlin Conference and his single-shareholder "philanthropic" organization received a large share of territory () to be organized as the Congo Free State.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The Congo Free State operated as a corporate state, privately controlled by Leopold II through a non-governmental organization, the International African Association. The state included the entire area of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, and existed from 1885 until 1908, when the government of Belgium reluctantly annexed the area. Under Leopold II's administration, the Congo Free State became a humanitarian disaster. The lack of accurate records makes it difficult to quantify the number of deaths caused by the ruthless exploitation and the lack of immunity to new diseases introduced by contact with European colonists – like the 1889–90 flu pandemic, which caused millions of deaths on the European continent, including Prince Baudouin of Belgium, who died in 1891. William Rubinstein wrote: "More basically, it appears almost certain that the population figures given by Hochschild are inaccurate. There is, of course, no way of ascertaining the population of the Congo before the twentieth century, and estimates like 20 million are purely guesses. Most of the interior of the Congo was literally unexplored if not inaccessible."


title: Belgian Congo

text: Leopold's "Force Publique," a private army that terrorized natives to work as forced labour for resource extraction, disrupted local societies and killed and abused natives indiscriminately. The "Force Publique" also became involved in the 1892–1894 Congo–Arab War against African and Arab slavers like Zanzibari/Swahili strongman Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi (Tippu Tip).


title: Belgian Congo

text: Following the 1904 Casement Report on misdeeds and conditions, the British, European and American press exposed the conditions in the Congo Free State to the public in the early 1900s. In 1904 Leopold II was forced to allow an international parliamentary commission of inquiry entry to the Congo Free State. By 1908, public pressure and diplomatic manoeuvres led to the end of Leopold II's personal rule and to the annexation of the Congo as a colony of Belgium, known as the "Belgian Congo".


title: Belgian Congo

text: On 18 October 1908, the Belgian Parliament voted in favour of annexing the Congo as a Belgian colony. A majority of the socialists and the radicals firmly opposed this annexation and reaped electoral benefits from their anti-colonialist campaign, but some believed that the country should annex the Congo and play a humanitarian role to the Congolese population. Eventually, two Catholic MPs and half of the Liberal MPs joined the socialists in rejecting the Colonial Charter (forty-eight votes against) and nearly all the Catholics and the other half of the Liberal MP's approved the charter (ninety votes for and seven abstentions). This way, on 15 November 1908 the Belgian Congo became a colony of the Belgian Kingdom. This was after King Leopold II had given up any hope of excluding a vast region of the Congo from the government's control by attempting to maintain a substantial part of the Congo Free State as a separate crown property.


title: Belgian Congo

text: When the Belgian government took over the administration in 1908, the situation in the Congo improved in certain respects. The brutal exploitation and arbitrary use of violence, in which some of the concessionary companies had excelled, were curbed. The crime of "red rubber" was put to a stop. Article 3 of the new Colonial Charter of 18 October 1908 stated that: "Nobody can be forced to work on behalf of and for the profit of companies or privates", but this was not enforced, and the Belgian government continued to impose forced labour on the natives, albeit by less obvious methods.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The transition from the Congo Free State to the Belgian Congo was a turning point, but it was also marked by a considerable continuity. The last Governor-General of the Congo Free State, Baron Wahis, remained in office in the Belgian Congo, and the majority of Leopold II's administration with him. While conditions were improved somewhat relative to rule under King Leopold, reports by doctors such as Dr. Raingeard show the low importance the Belgian government placed on healthcare and basic education of the natives. Opening up the Congo and its natural and mineral riches for the Belgian economy remained an important motive for colonial expansion, but other priorities, such as healthcare and basic education, gradually gained in importance.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The governance of the Belgian Congo was outlined in the 1908 Colonial Charter. Executive power rested with the Belgian Minister of Colonial Affairs, assisted by a Colonial Council ("Conseil Colonial"). Both resided in Brussels. The Belgian Parliament exercised legislative authority over the Belgian Congo.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The highest-ranking representative of the colonial administration residing in the Belgian Congo was the Governor-General. From 1886 until 1926, the Governor-General and his administration were posted in Boma, near the Congo River estuary. From 1923, the colonial capital moved to Léopoldville, some 300 km further upstream in the interior. Initially, the Belgian Congo was administratively divided into four provinces: Congo-Kasaï, Equateur, Orientale and Katanga, each presided over by a Vice-Governor-General. An administrative reform in 1932 increased the number of provinces to six, while "demoting" the Vice-Governors-General to provincial Governors.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The territorial service was the true backbone of the colonial administration. The colony was divided into four provinces (six after the administrative reforms of 1933). Each province was in turn divided into a few districts (24 districts for the whole Congo) and each district into a handful of territories (some 130–150 territories in all; some territories were merged or split over time). A territory was managed by a territorial administrator, assisted by one or more assistants. The territories were further subdivided into numerous "chiefdoms" ("chefferies"), at the head of which the Belgian administration appointed "traditional chiefs" ("chefs coutumiers"). The territories administered by one territorial administrator and a handful of assistants were often larger than a few Belgian provinces taken together (the whole Belgian Congo was nearly 80 times larger than the whole of Belgium and was roughly twice the size of Germany and France combined). The territorial administrator was expected to inspect his territory and to file detailed annual reports with the provincial administration.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In terms of the legal system, two systems co-existed: a system of European courts and one of indigenous courts ("tribunaux indigènes"). These indigenous courts were presided over by the traditional chiefs, but had only limited powers and remained under the firm control of the colonial administration. In 1936 it was recorded that there were 728 administrators controlling the Congo from Belgium. Belgians living in the Congo had no say in the government and the Congolese did not either. No political activity was permitted in the Congo whatsoever. Public order in the colony was maintained by the "Force Publique", a locally recruited army under Belgian command. It was only in the 1950s that metropolitan troops—i.e., units of the regular Belgian army—were posted in the Belgian Congo (for instance in Kamina).


title: Belgian Congo

text: The colonial state—and any authority exercised by whites in the Congo—was often referred to by the Congolese as "bula matari" ("break rocks"), one of the names originally given to Stanley. He had used dynamite to crush rocks when paving his way through the lower-Congo region. The term "bula matari" came to signify the irresistible and compelling force of the colonial state.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The Belgian Congo was directly involved in the two world wars. During the First World War, an initial stand-off between the "Force Publique" and the German colonial army in German East Africa (Tanganyika) turned into open warfare with a joint Anglo-Belgian invasion of German colonial territory in 1916 and 1917 during the East African campaign. By 1916 the Belgian commander of the "Force Publique", Lieutenant-General Charles Tombeur, had assembled an army of 15,000 men supported by local bearers – Reybrouck indicated that during the war no less than 260,000 native bearers were called upon – and advanced to Kigali. Kigali was taken by 6 May 1916, and the army went on to take Tabora on 19 September after heavy fighting. In 1917, after Mahenge had been conquered, the army of the Belgian Congo, by now 25,000 men, controlled one-third of German East Africa.


title: Belgian Congo

text: After the war, as outlined in the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forced to cede "control" of the Western section of the former German East Africa to Belgium. On 20 October 1924, Ruanda-Urundi (1924–1945), which consisted of modern-day Rwanda and Burundi, became a Belgian League of Nations mandate territory, with Usumbura as its capital.


title: Belgian Congo

text: During the Second World War, the Belgian Congo served as a crucial source of income for the Belgian government in exile in London after the occupation of Belgium by the Nazis. Following the occupation of Belgium by the Germans in May 1940, the Belgian Congo declared itself loyal to the Belgian government in exile in London. The Belgian Congo and the rest of the Free Belgian forces supported the war on the Allied side in the Battle of Britain with 28 pilots in the RAF (squadron 349) and in the Royal South African Air Force (350 Squadron) and in Africa. The "Force Publique" again participated in the Allied campaigns in Africa. Belgian Congolese forces (with Belgian officers) notably fought against the Italian colonial army in Italian East Africa, and were victorious in Asosa, Bortaï and in the Siege of Saïo under Major-general Auguste-Eduard Gilliaert during the second East African campaign of 1940–1941. On 3 July 1941, the Italian forces (under General Pietro Gazzera) surrendered when they were cut off by the "Force Publique". A Congolese unit also served in the Far Eastern Theatre with the British army in the Burma campaign.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The economic exploitation of the Congo was one of the colonizer's top priorities. An important tool was the construction of railways to open up the mineral and agricultural areas.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Rubber had long been the main export of the Belgian Congo, but its importance fell in the early 19th century from 77% of exports (by value) to only 15% as British colonies in Southeast Asia like British Malaya began to farm rubber. New resources were exploited, especially copper mining in Katanga province. The Belgian-owned Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, which would come to dominate copper mining, used a direct rail line to the sea at Beira. World War I increased demand for copper, and production soared from 997 tons in 1911 to 27,462 tons in 1917, then fell off to 19,000 tons in 1920. Smelters operated at Lubumbashi. Before the war the copper was sold to Germany; but the British purchased all the wartime output, with the revenues going to the Belgian government in exile. Diamond- and gold-mining also expanded during the war. The British firm of Lever Bros. greatly expanded the palm oil business during the war, and output of cocoa, rice and cotton increased. New rail and steamship lines opened to handle the expanded export traffic. During the First World War (1914–1918), the system of "mandatory cultivation" ("cultures obligatoires") was introduced, forcing Congolese peasants to grow certain cash crops (cotton, coffee, groundnuts) destined as commodities for export. Territorial administrators and state agronomists had the task of supervising and, if necessary, sanctioning those peasants who evaded the hated mandatory cultivation.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Two distinct periods of investment in the Congo's economic infrastructure stand out during the period of Belgian rule: the 1920s and the 1950s.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In 1921 the Belgian government provided 300 million francs of loans to the Belgian Congo, to fund public infrastructure projects in support of the boom of the private companies in the colony. The Belgian government also privatised many of the government-owned companies that were active in the colony (the Kilo-Moto mines, La Société Nationale des transport fluviaux..). After the First World War, priority was given to investments in transport infrastructure (such as the rail lines between Matadi and Léopoldville and Elisabethville and Port Francqui). From 1920 to 1932, 2.450 km of railroads were constructed. The government also invested heavily in harbour infrastructure in the cities of Boma, Matadi, Leopoldville and Coquilhatville. Electricity and waterworks in the main cities were also funded. Airports were built and a telephone line was funded that connected Brussels with Leopoldville. The government accounted for about 50% of the investments in the Belgian Congo; commercial companies accounted for the other 50%. The mining industry—with the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (U.M.H.K.) as a major player—, attracted the majority of private investments (copper and cobalt in Katanga, diamonds in Kasai, gold in Ituri). This allowed, in particular, the Belgian Société Générale to build up an economic empire in the Belgian Congo. Huge profits were generated by the private companies and for a large part siphoned off to European and other international shareholders in the form of dividends.


title: Belgian Congo

text: During the economic boom of the 1920s, many young Congolese men left their often impoverished rural villages and were employed by companies located near the cities; the population of Kinshasa nearly doubled from 1920 to 1940, and the population of Elizabethville grew from approximately 16,000 in 1923, to 33,000 in 1929. The necessary work-force was recruited by specialised recruiting firms (Robert Williams & Co, Bourse du Travail Kasaï..) and was in some cases supported by governmental recruiting offices (Office de Travail-Offitra..). In Katanga the main labour force were seasonal migrant workers from Tanganyika, Angola, Northern Rhodesia and after 1926 also from Ruanda-Urundi.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In many cases, this huge labour migration affected the economic viability of rural communities: many farmers left their villages, which resulted in labour shortages in these areas. To counter these problems, the colonial government used maximum quotas of "able-bodied workers" that could be recruited from every area in the Belgian Congo. In this way, tens of thousands of workers from densely populated areas were employed in copper mines in the sparsely populated south (Katanga). In agriculture, too, the colonial state forced a drastic rationalisation of production. The state took over so-called "vacant lands" (land not directly used by the local population) and redistributed the territory to European companies, to individual white landowners ("colons"), or to the missions. In this way, an extensive plantation economy developed. Palm-oil production in the Congo increased from 2,500 tons in 1914 to 9,000 tons in 1921, and to 230,000 tons in 1957. Cotton production increased from 23,000 tons in 1932 to 127,000 in 1939.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The mobilization of the African workforce in the capitalist colonial economy played a crucial role in spreading the use of money in the Belgian Congo. The basic idea was that the development of the Congo had to be borne not by the Belgian taxpayers but by the Congolese themselves. The colonial state needed to be able to levy taxes in money on the Congolese, so it was important that they could make money by selling their produce or their labour within the framework of the colonial economy.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The economic boom of the 1920s turned the Belgian Congo into one of the leading copper-ore producers worldwide. In 1926 alone, the Union Minière exported more than 80,000 tons of copper ore, a large part of it for processing in Hoboken (Belgium). In 1928 King Albert I visited the Congo to inaugurate the so-called 'voie national' that linked the Katanga mining region via rail (up to Port Francqui) and via river transport (from Port Francqui to Léopoldville) to the Atlantic port of Matadi.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The Great Depression of the 1930s affected the export-based Belgian Congo economy severely because of the drop in international demand for raw materials and agricultural products (for example, the price of peanuts fell from 1.25 francs to 25 centimes (cents)). In some areas, as in the Katanga mining region, employment declined by 70%. In the country as a whole, the wage labour force decreased by 72,000 and many such labourers returned to their villages. In Leopoldville, the population decreased by 33%, because of this labour migration. In order to improve conditions in the countryside, the colonial government developed the so-called "indigenous peasantry programme", aimed at supporting the development of a stronger internal market that was less dependent of fluctuations in export demand, but also to combat the disastrous effects of erosion and soil exhaustion brought about by the mandatory cultivation scheme. This policy began to be implemented on a large scale throughout the Congo after the Second World War, by the colonial government. The scheme aimed to modernize indigenous agriculture by assigning plots of land to individual families and by providing them with government support in the form of selected seeds, agronomic advice, fertilizers, etc. The National Institute for Agronomic Study of the Belgian Congo, established in 1934, with its large experimental fields and laboratories in Yangambe, played an important role in crop selection and in the popularization of agronomic research and know-how.


title: Belgian Congo

text: During World War II industrial production and agricultural output increased drastically. The Congolese population bore the brunt of the "war effort" – for instance, through a reinforcement of the mandatory cultivation policy. After Malaya fell to the Japanese (January 1942), the Belgian Congo became a strategic supplier of rubber to the Allies. The Belgian Congo became one of the major exporters of uranium to the US during World War II (and the Cold War), particularly from the Shinkolobwe mine. The colony provided the uranium used by the Manhattan Project, including in atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.


title: Belgian Congo

text: After World War II the colonial state became more active in the economic and social development of the Belgian Congo. An ambitious ten-year plan was launched by the Belgian government in 1949. It put emphasis on house building, energy supply, rural development and health-care infrastructure. The ten-year plan ushered in a decade of strong economic growth, from which, for the first time, the Congolese began to benefit on a substantial scale. At the same time, the economy had expanded and the number of Belgian nationals in the country more than doubled, from 39,000 in 1950 to more than 88,000 by 1960.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In 1953 Belgium granted the Congolese the right – for the first time – to buy and sell private property in their own names. In the 1950s a Congolese middle class, modest at first, but steadily growing, emerged in the main cities (Léopoldville, Elisabethville, Stanleyville and Luluabourg).


title: Belgian Congo

text: There was rapid political development, forced by African aspirations, in the last years of the 1950s, culminating in the 1960 Belgian Congo general election.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Justifications for colonialism in Africa often invoked as a key argument that of the civilizing influence of the European culture. This self-declared "civilizing mission" in the Congo went hand-in-hand with the goal of economic gain. Conversion to Catholicism, basic western-style education, and improved health-care were objectives in their own right, but at the same time helped to transform what Europeans regarded as a primitive society into the Western capitalist model, in which workers who were disciplined and healthy, and who had learned to read and write, could be allocated more efficiently on the labour market.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The educational system was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church—as was the case for the rest of Belgium at the time—and, in some rare cases, by Protestant churches. Curricula reflected Christian and Western values. Even in 1948, 99.6% of educational facilities were run by Christian missions. Indigenous schooling was mainly religious and vocational. Children received basic education such as learning how to read, write and some mathematics. The Belgian Congo was one of the few African colonies in which local languages (Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba and Swahili) were taught at primary school. Even so, language policies and colonial domination often went hand in hand, as evidenced by the preference given to Lingala—a semi-artificial language spread through its common use in the "Force Publique"—over more local (but also more ancient) indigenous languages such as Lomongo and others.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In 1940 the schooling rates of children between 6 and 14 years old was 12%, reaching 37% in 1954, one of the highest rates in sub-Saharan Africa. Secondary and higher education for the indigenous population were not developed until relatively late in the colonial period. Black children, in small numbers, began to be admitted to European secondary schools from 1950 onward. The first university in the Belgian Congo, the Catholic Jesuit Lovanium University, near Léopoldville, opened its doors to black and white students in 1954. Before the foundation of the Lovanium, the Catholic University of Louvain already operated multiple institutes for higher education in the Belgian Congo. The "Fomulac" (Fondation médicale de l'université de Louvain au Congo), was founded in 1926, with the goal of forming Congolese medical personnel and researchers specialized in tropical medicine. In 1932 the Catholic University of Louvain founded the "Cadulac" (Centres agronomiques de l'université de Louvain au Congo) in Kisantu. Cadulac was specialized in agricultural sciences and formed the basis for what was later to become Lovanium University. In 1956 a state university was founded in Elisabethville. Progress was slow though; until the end of the 1950s, no Congolese had been promoted beyond the rank of non-commissioned officer in the Force Publique, nor to a responsible position in the administration (such as head of bureau or territorial administrator).


title: Belgian Congo

text: In the late 1950s, 42% of the youth of school going age was literate, which placed the Belgian Congo far ahead of any other country in Africa at the time. In 1960, 1,773,340 students were enrolled in schools around the Belgian Congo, of which 1,650,117 in primary school, 22,780 in post-primary school, 37,388 in secondary school and 1,445 in university and higher education. Of these 1,773,340 students, the majority (1,359,118) were enrolled in Catholic mission schools, 322,289 in Protestant mission schools and 68,729 in educational institutions organized by the state.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Health care, too, was largely supported by the missions, although the colonial state took an increasing interest. In 1906 the Institute of Tropical Medicine was founded in Brussels. The ITM was, and still is, one of the world's leading institutes for training and research in tropical medicine and the organisation of health care in developing countries. Endemic diseases, such as sleeping sickness, were all but eliminated through large-scale and persistent campaigns.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In 1925 medical missionary Dr. Arthur Lewis Piper was the first person to use and bring tryparsamide, the Rockefeller Foundation's drug to cure sleeping sickness, to the Congo. The health-care infrastructure expanded steadily throughout the colonial period, with a comparatively high availability of hospital beds relative to the population and with dispensaries set up in the most remote regions. In 1960 the country had a medical infrastructure that far surpassed any other African nation at that time. The Belgian Congo had 3,000 health care facilities, of which 380 were hospitals. There were 5.34 hospital beds for every 1000 inhabitants (1 for every 187 inhabitants). Great progress was also made in the fight against endemic diseases; the numbers of reported cases of sleeping sickness went from 34,000 cases in 1931 to 1,100 cases in 1959, mainly by eradicating the tsetse fly in densely populated areas. All Europeans and Congolese in the Belgian Congo received vaccinations for polio, measles and yellow fever. Vast disease prevention programmes were rolled out, aimed at eradicating polio, leprosy and tuberculosis. In the primary schools, disease prevention campaigns were implemented and disease prevention classes were part of the curriculum.


title: Belgian Congo

text: There was an "implicit apartheid". The colony had curfews for Congolese city-dwellers and similar racial restrictions were commonplace. Though there were no specific laws imposing racial segregation and barring blacks from establishments frequented by whites, "de facto" segregation operated in most areas. For example, initially, the city centers were reserved to the white population only, while the black population was organized in "cités indigènes" (indigenous neighbourhoods called 'le belge'). Hospitals, department stores and other facilities were often reserved for either whites or blacks. In the Force Publique, black people could not pass the rank of non-commissioned officer. The black population in the cities could not leave their houses from 9 pm to 4 am. This type of segregation began to disappear gradually only in the 1950s, but even then the Congolese remained or felt treated in many respects as second-rate citizens (for instance in political and legal terms).


title: Belgian Congo

text: Because of the close interconnection between economic development and the 'civilizing mission', and because in practice state officials, missionaries and the executives of the private companies always lent each other a helping hand, the image has emerged that the Belgian Congo was governed by a "colonial trinity" of King-Church-Capital, encompassing the colonial state, the Christian missions, and the Société Générale de Belgique.


title: Belgian Congo

text: The paternalistic ideology underpinning colonial policy was summed up in a catch-phrase used by Governor-General Pierre Ryckmans (1934–46): "Dominer pour servir" ("Dominate to serve"). The colonial government wanted to convey images of a benevolent and conflict-free administration and of the Belgian Congo as a true model colony. Only in the 1950s did this paternalistic attitude begin to change. In the 1950s the most blatant discriminatory measures directed at the Congolese were gradually withdrawn (among these: corporal punishment by means of the feared chicote—Portuguese word for whip). From 1953, and even more so after the triumphant visit of King Baudouin to the colony in 1955, Governor-General Léon Pétillon (1952–1958) worked to create a "Belgian-Congolese community", in which blacks and whites were to be treated as equals. Regardless, anti-miscegenation laws remained in place, and between 1959 and 1962 thousands of mixed-race Congolese children were forcibly deported from the Congo by the Belgian government and the Catholic Church and taken to Belgium.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In 1957 the first municipal elections open to black voters took place in a handful of the largest cities — Léopoldville, Élisabethville and Jadotville.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Congolese opposition against colonialism was continuous, sustained and took many different forms. It became more likely as modern ideas and education spread. Armed risings occurred sporadically and localized until roughly the end of the Second World War (e.g., revolt of the Pende in 1931, mutiny in Luluabourg 1944). From the end of the Second World War until the late 1950s, the era of what colonial propaganda called a ""Pax belgica"" prevailed. Until the end of colonial rule in 1960, passive forms of resistance and expressions of an anti-colonial sub-culture were nevertheless manifold and widespread (e.g., Kimbanguism, after the 'prophet' Simon Kimbangu, who was imprisoned by the Belgians).


title: Belgian Congo

text: Apart from active and passive resistance among the Congolese, the colonial regime over time also elicited internal criticism and dissent. Already in the 1920s, certain members of the Colonial Council in Brussels (among them Octave Louwers) voiced criticism regarding the often brutal recruitment methods employed by the major companies in the mining districts. The stagnation of population growth in many districts—in spite of spectacular successes in the fight against endemic diseases such as sleeping sickness—was another cause for concern. Low birth rates in the countryside and the depopulation of certain areas were typically attributed to the disruption of traditional community life as a result of forced labour migration and mandatory cultivation. Response was often made that that had been the point of the policies, and pointed to the increase of population in the cities, as well as the improvement in health and lifespan due to modern medicine and living conditions. Many missionaries who were in daily contact with Congolese villagers, took their plight in the transition at heart and sometimes intervened on their behalf with the colonial administration (for instance in land property questions).


title: Belgian Congo

text: The missions and certain territorial administrators also played an important role in the study and preservation of Congolese cultural and linguistic traditions and artefacts. One example among many is that of Father Gustaaf Hulstaert (1900–1990), who in 1937 created the periodical "Aequatoria" devoted to the linguistic, ethnographic and historical study of the Mongo people of the central Congo basin. The colonial state took an interest in the cultural and scientific study of the Congo, particularly after the Second World War, through the creation of the "Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale" (IRSAC, 1948).


title: Belgian Congo

text: In the early 1950s, political emancipation of the Congolese elites, let alone of the masses, seemed like a distant event. But, it was clear that the Congo could not forever remain immune from the rapid changes that, after the Second World War, profoundly affected colonialism around the world. The independence of the British, French and Dutch colonies in Asia shortly after 1945 had little immediate effect in the Congo, but in the United Nations pressure on Belgium (as on other colonial powers) increased. Belgium had ratified article 73 of the United Nations Charter, which advocated self-determination, and both superpowers put pressure on Belgium to reform its Congo policy; the Belgian government tried to resist what it described as 'interference' with its colonial policy.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Colonial authorities discussed ways to ameliorate the situation of the Congolese. Since the 1940s, the colonial government had experimented in a very modest way with granting a limited elite of so-called "évolués" more civil rights, holding out the eventual prospect of a limited amount of political influence. To this end "deserving" Congolese could apply for a proof of "civil merit", or, one step up, 'immatriculation' (registration), i.e., official evidence of their assimilation with European civilisation. To acquire this status, the applicant had to fulfill strict conditions (monogamous matrimony, evidence of good behaviour, etc.) and submit to stringent controls (including house visits). This policy was a failure. By the mid-1950s, there were at best a few thousand Congolese who had successfully obtained the civil merit diploma or been granted "immatriculation". The supposed benefits attached to it—including equal legal status with the white population—proved often more theory than reality and led to open frustration with the "évolués". When Governor-General Pétillon began to speak about granting the native people more civil rights, even suffrage, to create what he termed a "Belgo-Congolese community", his ideas were met with indifference from Brussels and often with open hostility from some of the Belgians in the Congo, who feared for their privileges.


title: Belgian Congo

text: It became increasingly evident that the Belgian government lacked a strategic long-term vision in relation to the Congo. 'Colonial affairs' did not generate much interest or political debate in Belgium, so long as the colony seemed to be thriving and calm. A notable exception was the young King Baudouin, who had succeeded his father, King Leopold III, under dramatic circumstances in 1951, when Leopold III was forced to abdicate. Baudouin took a close interest in the Congo.


title: Belgian Congo

text: On his first state visit to the Belgian Congo in 1955, King Baudouin was welcomed enthusiastically by cheering crowds of whites and blacks alike, as captured in André Cauvin's documentary film, "Bwana Kitoko". Foreign observers, such as the international correspondent of "The Manchester Guardian" or a "Time" journalist, remarked that Belgian paternalism "seemed to work", and contrasted Belgium's seemingly loyal and enthusiastic colonial subjects with the restless French and British colonies. On the occasion of his visit, King Baudouin openly endorsed the Governor-General's vision of a "Belgo-Congolese community"; but, in practice, this idea progressed slowly. At the same time, divisive ideological and linguistic issues in Belgium, which heretofore had been successfully kept out of the colony's affairs, began to affect the Congo as well. These included the rise of unionism among workers, the call for public (state) schools to break the missions' monopoly on education, and the call for equal treatment in the colony of both national languages: French and Dutch. Until then, French had been promoted as the unique colonial language. The Governor-General feared that such divisive issues would undermine the authority of the colonial government in the eyes of the Congolese, while also diverting attention from the more pressing need for true emancipation.


title: Belgian Congo

text: Congolese participation in World War II and news of changes in other colonies resulted in their organising to gain more power. As a result of the inability of the colonial government to introduce radical and credible changes, the Congolese elites began to organise themselves socially and soon also politically. In the 1950s two markedly different forms of nationalism arose among the Congolese elites. The nationalist movement—to which the Belgian authorities, to some degree, turned a blind eye—promoted territorial nationalism, wherein the Belgian Congo would become one politically united state after independence.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In opposition to this was the ethno-religious and regional nationalism that took hold in the Bakongo territories of the west coast, Kasai and Katanga. The first political organisations were of the latter type. ABAKO, founded in 1950 as the "Association culturelle des Bakongo" and headed by Joseph Kasa-Vubu, was initially a cultural association that soon turned political. From the mid-1950s, it became a vocal opponent of Belgian colonial rule. Additionally, the organization continued to serve as the major ethno-religious organization for the Bakongo and became closely intertwined with the Kimbanguist Church, which was extremely popular in the lower Congo.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In 1955, Belgian professor Antoine van Bilsen published a treatise called "Thirty Year Plan for the Political Emancipation of Belgian Africa". The timetable called for the gradual emancipation of the Congo over a 30-year period—the time Van Bilsen expected it would take to create an educated elite who could replace the Belgians in positions of power. The Belgian government and many of the "évolués" were suspicious of the plan—the former because it meant eventually giving up the Congo, and the latter because Belgium would continue to rule for another three decades. A group of Catholic "évolués" responded positively to the plan with a moderate manifesto in a Congolese journal called "Conscience Africaine"; they raised issues as to the extent of Congolese participation.


title: Belgian Congo

text: In 1957, by way of experiment, the colonial government organised the first municipal elections in three urban centres (Léopoldville, Elisabethville and Jadotville), in which Congolese people were allowed to stand for office and cast their vote. Events in 1957–58 led to a sudden acceleration in the demands for political emancipation. The independence of Ghana in 1957 and President De Gaulle's August 1958 visit to Brazzaville, the capital of the French Congo, on the other side of the Congo river to Léopoldville, in which he promised France's African colonies the free choice between a continued association with France or full independence, aroused ambitions in the Congo. The World Exhibition organised in Brussels in 1958 (Expo 58) proved another eye-opener for many Congolese leaders, who were allowed to travel to Belgium for the first time.