Importance Of Preserving Archives

1470 Words6 Pages
Historical documents play a pivotal role in contemporary civilisation and the loss of this valuable information could result in harsh consequences. I will draw on the incidents in the Congo Free State and Chile that have insufficient evidence regarding their past atrocities thus rendering them as just a few of many historically scarred nations. It is therefore imperative that archives across the globe be protected. ‘I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there’, were the famous words of King Leopold II after burning the state archives in Brussels.1Leopold was born in Brussels and succeeded the crown on 17 December 1865.2 He was the first ruler to colonise the Congo Free State and proved to be a brutal ruler. What started off as greed for colonial territory, escalated into greed for wealth which included enslavement and abuse of human rights. Mineral resources of the Congo were the driving economic force. Initially, the the sale of ivory was popular which later changed to the sale of rubber, since rubber was in high demand at the time. Upon being a greedy, manipulative and deceitful ruler, he is also one of the most cowardly men of his time. He tactfully used his agent Henry Morton Stanley to resolve any issues in the Congo that were a cause for concern. He was certainly guilty for the crimes he had committed seeing that he destroyed all documented evidence by burning the documents of the Congo Free State. What was he trying to hide? What could have been so dreadful that would cause a man to erase an entire chunk of history? One will never know. Without solid proof, one can only make assumptions based on what they hear from what older generations have passed down by word of mouth. I feel it is of utmost importance that we have background knowledge on rubber in the Congo for it is the discovery of this raw material that sparked the
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