Henry Morton Stanley has returned to the…

Henry Morton Stanley has returned to the Congo from 1879 to 1884, this time not as a reporter, but as an envoy from Leopold II, and under the guise of the Belgian Committee, with the secret mission to organize a Congo state.

Stanley had been approached by the ambitious Belgian king, who in 1876 had organized a private holding company disguised as an international scientific and philanthropic association, which he calls the International African Society.

The king had spoken of his intentions to introduce Western civilization and bring religion to that part of Africa, but did not mention he wants to claim the lands.

Leopold commissions Stanley to undertake additional explorations of the Congo River basin and establish stations along its course.

The organization had been created at the 1876 Brussels Geographic Conference to which Leopold had invited nearly forty well-known experts, mainly schooled in the geographic sciences or wealthy philanthropists.

They hailed from a number of European countries.

As a result, the Association had originally been conceived as a multi-person, scientific, and humanitarian assembly but it had quickly become dominated by Leopold and his economic interests in Africa.

Originally, the stated goal of the group had been to "discover" the largely unexplored Congo and civilize its natives.

The Association was intended to be a joint effort on the parts of all European countries present at the Conference, however, each nation formed its own national committee for exploration which would, in theory, share information with the whole of the Association, hence, a cooperative effort.

However, national economic interests had quickly taken precedence over the group's supposedly philanthropic ideals.

Each of these committees has organized nationalized expeditions into the African interior and there is very little sharing of information, resulting in each nation claiming certain portions of African land for themselves.

Despite the failure of the initial committee, the Belgian Committee that the Association generated continues to sponsor "humanitarian" missions into the bush.

In 1879, the International Congo Society is also formed, having more economic goals, but still closely related to the former society.

Leopold has secretly bought off the foreign investors in the Congo Society, which is turned to imperialistic goals, with the Association serving primarily as a philanthropic front.