Leopold II and the Congo Free State

King Leopold II of Belgium, monarch of a small country with no official state colonial ambitions, pursued from the 1870s a strictly personal colonial project in the Congo River basin, acting outside the control of the Belgian government and parliament. In 1876 he founded the International African Association, publicly presented as a philanthropic and scientific organization dedicated to exploration and the fight against the slave trade, but in reality conceived as a covert instrument of his personal colonial project. In 1879 the king hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to establish trading stations and sign treaties with hundreds of local chiefs along the Congo basin, laying the territorial foundations of his future domain.