page_title: Landolphia owariensis
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Landolphia owariensis / History
caption_attribution_description: English: "In The Rubber Coils. Scene - The Congo 'Free' State" Linley Sambourne depicts King Leopold II of Belgium as a snake entangling a congolese rubber collector.
context_page_description: Landolphia owariensis is a species of liana from the family Apocynaceae found in tropical Africa. Latex can be extracted from this plant for the manufacture of natural rubber. Other names for this vine are eta, the white rubber vine and the Congo rubber plant. Congo rubber was a commercial rubber exported from the Congo Free State starting in 1890, most notable for its forced harvesting under conditions of great human suffering, in the Congo Free State, detailed in the 1904 Casement Report. From 1885 to 1908, millions died as a result of murder, deprivation, and disease, with population falling by millions in this period; some writers estimate this loss to be as high as 10 million people.
context_section_description: In 1885, Leopold II established the Congo Free State under the auspices of the International Association of the Congo, by securing the European community's agreement with the claim that he was involved in humanitarian and philanthropic work. To monopolize the resources of the entire Congo Free State, Leopold issued three decrees in 1891 and 1892 that stripped control of resources from the native populations and required them to work. Collectively, these forced the natives to deliver all ivory and rubber, harvested or found, to state officers or to the state's monopoly concession companies, thus nearly completing Leopold's monopoly of the Congo's ivory and rubber trade. The rubber came from wild vines in the jungle, unlike the rubber from Brazil (Hevea brasiliensis), which was tapped from trees. To extract the rubber, instead of tapping the vines, the Congolese workers would slash them and lather their bodies with the rubber latex. When the latex hardened, it would be scraped off the skin in a painful manner, as it took off the worker's hair with it. The Force Publique, the Free State's military, was used to enforce the rubber quotas. During the 1890s, the Force Publique's primary role was to enforce a system of corvée labour to promote the rubber trade. Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte—a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide—the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages, slaughtered families of rebels, and flogged and raped Congolese people. Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Recalcitrant villages were burned and Force Publique soldiers were sometimes required to provide a severed hand from their victims as proof that they had not misused their weapons. A Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of a hated state official, Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river 500 kilometres (300 mi) north of Stanley Pool:
  All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator...From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets...A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river...Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.
caption: A 1906 cartoon from the British satirical magazine Punch, depicting King Leopold II as a rubber vine curled around the body of a Congolese man
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