King Leopold II[i] hired Henry Morton Stanley[ii] to follow the Congo River. The famous explorer was not drawing maps for the King. He was hoodwinking indigenous leaders to sign over all land rights to the great and beneficent Leopold! The King’s reign for the next 23-years was anything but great and beneficent. The Belgian Congo was called the “Crown Jewel” of Leopold’s Empire. It was a bloody gem.

If Bentari were a real person instead of my fictional hero—this true story would apply to Bentari’s tribe, to his kin and to the vast region where they lived. Leopold’s thievery installed him as a sovereign ruler over land that was 76-times larger than his own country. This is the true history of this land—known in the novel as Mbara Land—called, ironically, Congo Free State by the empire builder Leopold.

Hubert Sauper’s new film “We Come as Friends” shows us how modern colonialism is not only alive, it is healthier than ever.[iii] We have become the new King Leopold. He robbed people of land and riches. He conscripted laborers against their will. His enforcement was total, his retribution cruel and uncompromising. Approximately 10-million native deaths, about half the population of the day, are heaped at the feet of Leopold II. The heel of his colonial boot left the tragic footprint for all-time—how cruel can a man, a nation and a world be?

We do this now—all of it. The only change is that now we kill locals and split up families by means of economic and cultural forces instead of bychain, blade, bullet and slave ship.

In my novel, Bentari is only a child. Yet he manages to find a glimmer of hope. He senses the shred of an answer to the impossible global dilemma. How can the poorest people in the poorest lands be lifted onto an equal place with more fortunate humans. How can they bask in freedom instead of suffering the boot heel from military-corporate hell that squashes small communities and swallows up whole nations? Bottom lines rule. Shareholder profits justify the means. Growth, another word for death, excuses collateral damage, another word for genocide. Rape and cruelty defy words let alone our imaginations. It doesn’t matter. We look the other way.

Bentari barely understands his seed of a thought, but he knows that something is up. Something important is amiss. After the deaths are tallied, some of his tribesmen and even their German foes seem to sense it, too. Thanks to a little boy’s eyes, they see beyond their circumstances, and they wonder.

[i] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium

[ii] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morton_Stanley

[iii] See:  http://www.wecomeasfriends.com/us/