from the latest post by the Very Lost Tribesman
Take, for instance, King Leopold of Belgium, who claimed the entire Congo as his own personal fiefdom during the 19th century and along with his successors plundered it remorselessly for rubber and helped condemn both it and its neighbors to a century of misery and whose name has become a byword for European colonial rapaciousness. It turns out (from John Reader’s “Africa: Biography of a Continent”) that before settling on the Congo, Leopold had been shopping all over the globe for a territory to provide some breathing room for his small and densely populated European state. Along the way he negotiated with Turkey to buy Crete and with Spain to buy Cuba, with Denmark over the Faeroe Islands and the French over Vietnam. All fell through. But the deal that perhaps came closest was an offer by the fledgling Republic of Texas to sell two tracts of land to Belgium in return for a $7 million loan. Alas, the United States government worked itself up into a Monroe Doctrine frenzy and protested, and Leopold was told the U.S. planned to annex Texas soon anyway. Thus he turned his attention to the Congo, essentially setting in motion the scramble for Africa among the major European powers.
Just picture, for a moment, if the Texas deal had gone through. For one thing, it might well have turned out — it could hardly have turned out worse. True, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which the European powers don’t eventually end up fighting over and dividing up Africa anyway, and perhaps they would have failed just as miserably as they did in actuality. Still, it was certainly Leopold’s ambitions in the Congo that set things off, and the behavior of the Belgians and their monarchs there in the century that followed was by all accounts, against strong competition, in its own category of horror (See Conrad, Joseph). Consider also how central a role the Congo played in the miseries of many of its now neighbors (notably what is now Rwanda, currently a relative success story, but where the Belgians had the fateful idea to divide the population into the then-barely extant categories of Hutu and Tutsi in order to more effectively control them). Considering those factors, it’s hard to escape the conclusion Africa’s chances would have been marginally better if Leopold had carved out an annex for himself in the Lone Star State and let it go at that.
That prospect, of course, is the more amusing counterfactual to imagine: an enclave of Belgium in the middle of Texas (Reader’s book doesn’t mention where in Texas the tracts were or how big they were, but I’d certainly be curious). It’s not inconceivable the United States would have been forced to honor the agreement when it later absorbed Texas. More far-fetched, perhaps, that enclave could have survived in some form until the present, as a colony or a Quebec-like state (Texas, you may recall, still maintains the right to divide itself into up to five states if it ever so chooses. That will probably never happen for reasons including the negative effect on the University of Texas football team’s recruiting prospects. But if it ever did happen it would certainly be highly propitious for the Republican party’s prospects of retaking the Senate). Or perhaps “Belgian Texas” might even persist, Lesotho-like, as an independent state within the U.S. Imagine a stretch of open country populated by proud immigrant Belgians speaking some form of Flemish-Spanish with a Texan twang, wearing cowbody hats, munching on BBQ and chocolate, and living in towns named after Belgian counterparts but now pronounced with hard consonants (“Bruges“ rhymes with “Tortugas“; “Ypres” rhymes with “diapers”). One constant would be you’d still find a Waffle House at every highway interchange — only the waffles would be much fluffier.
