A small note in advance: The state of Belgium actually only acquired Congo in 1908 - before, it was a private possession of Leopold II, the Belgian King, who founded the so-called "Congo Free State" as an absolute monarchy administered by a Governor-general.

 

Leopold had already tried to acquire an overseas empire for several decades; and founded the International African Association, an ostensibly philanthropic organisation that actually pursued the King's economic and political goals in the Congo basin with the intention of creating a colony. In 1879, the "International Association of the Congo" (or Congo Society), which would provide the organisational and institutional structure for the Congo Free State, was also created and through this organisational framework, Leopold funded the exploration of the Basin by men such as Henry Morton Stanley, who stayed in the Congo from 1878 to 1885. Leopold funded PR campaigns abroad to paint him in the benevolent light of the civilised humanitarian, i.e. by announcing his intentions to combat slavery. Formal control and the great power’s recognition of Leopold’s ownership of the Congo was achieved at the Berlin conference (or Congo conference) in 1884. Leopold was successful for a number of reasons:

 

• The conference was held at a time of French-British rivalry in colonial matters, owing to France’s rapid expansion in West Africa and especially the growing British presence in Egypt after the Urabi rebellion of 1882. Furthermore, an Anglo-Portuguese agreement gave Portugal control over the mouth of the Congo River in 1883 and, if it had persisted, would have denied access to the Congo to other nation’s traders.
• Leopold promised equal access to the basin and the Congo and Niger Rivers, regardless of nationality and thus made Belgian ownership of the Congo much more attractive to states such as Germany, the USA and France (the US was actually the first nation to recognise Leopold’s claims).
• Leopold’s lofty and idealistic promises of humanitarian and civilising government resonated well with the public opinion and beliefs at the time. His claims gained in credence because of his cooperation with widely known explorers such as Stanley; as well as his activities within the International African Association and the Congo Society.
• During his work for the Congo Society, Stanley had signed treaties with 450 African chiefs who – without knowing the consequences and implications – had ceded their land to the Society. In this sense, Leopold already owned much of the Congo.

 

To sum up, Leopold had been active in the region for decades before the official creation of the Congo Free State. Promises of free trade and neutrality in a rich and potentially prosperous region that would be essentially administered by a company instead of a nation state proved attractive for the European powers at a time of competition and rampant fear of falling behind in the “scramble for Africa” – after all, the primary concern of most colonising nations was economic in nature.

 

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Craven, Matthew: Between law and history: the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and the logic of free trade. London Review of International Law, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2015, 31–59