leopold's agents of whom the mythical kurtz was one, raided, slaughtered, mutilated, and pressed into forced labor much of the population, in a bloodthirsty quest for first ivory and then rubber. when independence finally came, the belgians trashed what they could, and left behind a completely unprepared tribally divided and largely ungovernable land mass, filled with stuff that everybody in the world wanted. and things pretty much went downhill from there. ♪