Forgotten for over 50 years, this true and astonishing story describes how King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into a private colony between 1885 and 1908.

Posing as a protector of Africans fleeing Arab slave-traders, King Leopold II carved out an empire based on terror to harvest rubber; families were held hostage and starved to death if the men fail to produce enough wild rubber and children’s hands were cut off as punishment for late deliveries.

The Belgian government denounced this documentary as a “tendentious diatribe” for depicting King Leopold II as the moral forebear of Adolf Hitler, responsible for the death of 10 million people in his rapacious exploitation of the Congo.

However, it is agreed today that the first Human Rights movement was spurred by what happened in the Congo, and Peter Bate’s reconstruction of those days – featuring footage of Congolese villages – is a memorable example of great storytelling.