Erin ’s Reviews > King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa > Status Update

Within a few decades the Western Hemisphere became a huge lucrative nearly insatiable market for African slaves.

Belgium is less than half the size of West Virginia.

Slavery's demise in Britain had been hastened by large slave revolts in the British West Indies.

Just as Europeans would be long obsessed with African cannibalism, so Africans imagined Europeans practicing the same thing.

For Europeans, Africa remained the supplier of valuable raw materials, human bodies and elephant tucks.

The first elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba declared that Congo's wealth belonged to her people.

The nature of African slavery varied from one area to another and changed overtime but most slaves were people captured in warfare.

Ranulf Higden a Benedictine monk who mapped the world around 1350, claimed that Africa contained one eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads.