Counting the Cost: The Congo Population Debate

How many people died under Leopold's rule is one of the most debated questions in colonial history. No census was taken before or during the Free State, so all figures are estimates. In his 1998 book King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild drew on earlier estimates that the population may have fallen by about half between roughly 1880 and 1920, a loss he put at around 10 million people.

Other historians and demographers argue that the evidence cannot support a precise figure and that deaths were caused by a combination of violence, forced labor, famine, falling birth rates and epidemic disease such as sleeping sickness, which also spread in areas outside the Free State. What is not disputed is that the regime caused enormous suffering and loss of life. Under international pressure, the Belgian state annexed the Congo in 1908, and the Belgian Congo ended many of the worst practices, though forced labor continued in other forms.