King Leopold's Outpost VR

In 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium announced a philanthropic mission to the world: he was going to colonize a region in central Africa now known as the Democratic State of the Congo in order to abolish slavery and bring Western civilization to the natives. Instead, he used his private military to force the Africans to farm ivory and rubber for commercial profit. From 1885 to 1908, it is estimated that King Leopold robbed over one billion dollars in today's currency, with casualties of over ten million Africans, or around 50% of the entire population being wiped out due to abysmal living conditions brought upon by profit-seeking military officials under Leopold's reign.

In our VR experience,  published on the Meta Quest app store , the user takes the role of Roger Casement, a British Consular who was sent by the British government to investigate King Leopold's colony in 1904. They find the supply post of a Leopoldian agent, and as they explore the physics-based space with their VR headset (Oculus Quest 2/3) and hand controllers, evidence piles up that reveals the horrors of Leopold's rule based on voice lines triggered by when the player grabs specific items in the space with their hand controllers.

For 23 years, King Leopold's crimes in his "Congo Free State" went unnoticed by the western world. The interior of Africa was hardly visited, and it took a great many years for horrified visitors to spread the word and gain public traction. It was only after the work of prolific social campaigns in the US and Britain (who were not colonizing the Congo specifically but other places in Africa and Asia), that the Belgian government received enough pressure to take control of King Leopold's territory themself. Unfortunately, after all of the social progress made by these campaigns, this part of history has been forgotten a century later, and was only brought back into the modern conversation by the book King Leopold's Ghost (Adam Hoschild, 1998) and the documentary (Pippa Scott, Oreet Rees, 2006) of the same name. Our goal with this project is to bring King Leopold's colonization of the Congo back into the modern conversation in 2024 in an interactive and immersive way through a historical VR room experience. We believe that VR gaming has the unique potential to turn viewers into players and allow them to better understand the agency of historical figures. Our team poured through hundreds of photographs taken place during the time period and scholarly sources like Adam Hoschild's book to create an accurate 3d reconstruction of what an agent's house would look like at the time period, and what items might be inside. Neo Zhou modeled the agent's house in Blender using a reference image from the Alice Seely Harris photo archive. He and Travis Chaplin added props to the room by finding various models on the internet, all of which are cited in the Sources selection below. Using the team's textual research, Cole Cisacowski wrote a script and brilliantly voice acted it to flesh out the perspective of Roger Casement. Neo then added interactivity to the 3D model in Unity, while Travis helped with the game's atmosphere by implementing a fog particle system and curating a soundtrack. We hope this project will help players contend with the following issues:

1. The dangers of racist ideology and dehumanization
2. Colonial exploitation and the extraction of resources for the detriment of the natives
3. What happens when power is given to those without oversight  
4. The voices of the oppressed
5. The power of human rights activism, especially within first world nations, which has the ability to enact change around the globe

The European nations that colonized the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries and exploited their resources grew to become the wealthiest in the world, which inspired other nations to do the same. The 19th century was a time period where many nation were seeking to expand their power by establishing territories and spreading their culture across the world through military force. 

By the late 1800s, Africa held some of the few territories that had yet to be colonized. Most of Africa was unknown to the Europeans until the late 19th century, except for its coastal territory and South Africa (colonized by the Dutch in 1652 and the British in 1806). This gap in knowledge changed once Henry Morton Stanley, a British-born American explorer, was the first to chart the interior of Africa in 1877.

King Leopold of Belgium was eager to establish a colony of his own to increase his personal wealth. However, he knew that other nations would object to his rule over this newly discovered region if they knew his true intentions. The 19th and 20th centuries were a time where it was popular to believe in racist ideology and the supremacy of European culture, which was why Africa was known as "The Dark Continent". Leopold played into the beliefs of the time and announced a philanthropic mission to the world: he was going to colonize the newly discovered region in central Africa in order to abolish slavery and bring light and civilization to the natives.

In 1884, at the Berlin conference, the world superpowers at the time convened to decide how to partition the newly charted Africa among themselves to colonize. No Africans were present at the conference. With support from the US, Britain, France, and Germany, King Leopold established "The Congo Free State" in 1885 and gained a colony he long dreamed of. It wasn't until almost 30 years later that his true intentions were discovered. By that point, 10 million natives had been massacred and 1 billion dollars in resources had been extracted from the region.

King Leopold's agents established military bases and posts for the extraction of resources along the river of the Congo. These agents were soldiers hired from all across Europe who came in with notions of riches and glory. "Belgium was small, the Congo was huge, and the white death rate in the African tropics was still notoriously high (Authorities tried hard to keep such figures secret, but before 1895 fully a third of white Congo state agents died there; some of the others died of the effects of disease after returning to Europe.)" (King Leopold's Ghost, Chapter 8). In order to maintain his territory, Leopold recruited young white men throughout Europe with lucrative commissions for acquiring ivory. "With its opportunities for both combat and riches, to Europeans the Congo was a gold rush and the Foreign Legion combined. This first wave of Leopold's agents included many hard-bitten men fleeing marital troubles, bankruptcy, or alcoholism" (ibid.).

In order to marshal the large amount of labor required to extract the resources of the Congo, agents were instructed to enact campaigns of terror to coerce the natives into harvesting resources for them. They would take hostages and demand food as well as quotas of ivory (and later rubber). Those that missed their quotas or did anything to raise the ire of officials were mercilessly whipped, sometimes to death. Villages that missed their quotas were often gathered and slaughtered at gunpoint to incentivize other villages to comply.

We went through hundreds of photographs taken at the Congo during the time period as well as textual descriptions from the book King Leopold's Ghost to determine what an Agent's house would look like and what items would be inside of them.

Neo Zhou modeled the agent's house in Blender using a reference image from the Alice Seely Harris photo archive. He and Travis Chaplin added props to the room by finding various models on the internet, all of which are cited in the Sources selection below.

Below is part of our scene that we uploaded to Sketchfab. We couldn't upload our full scene due to the website's 50MB size limitation.

Neo Zhou used his previous Unity experience to add VR interactivity to the team's 3D scene.

I imported the .blend file of our scene, which allowed me to get the meshes of our scene into Unity. However, since Blender and Unity have different material systems, I had to retexture every object individually in Unity using a combination of the URP Lit Shaders and URP Autodesk Shaders.

To add VR interactivity to the project, I used the HurricaneVR asset which had a physics based player controller that could track the Oculus Quest's head and hands. I added interactions to the scene by working with Unity components for each object in the scene. All objects have rigidbodies and colliders, which means they obey the laws of physics, and some special objects, like doors and windows, have hinge joints to limit their movement so they behave as expected. For each object, I tried to give them realistic masses so that heavy objects would weigh the hands down when picked up and light objects wouldn't. It took some fine tuning of the physics settings on the player controller as well to make sure the hands weren't unrealistically strong. All objects also have HurricaneVR grabbable components, so they can be picked up by the player controller. I coded a system on top of the objects so that when specific items were grabbed or certain events occurred, they would trigger the appropriate voice line for the story.

Once Cole wrote the script for our project, it became really apparent that we had so much expository dialogue that the user would be standing outside the house for 5 minutes before they got to interact with anything. To remedy this, I worked with Travis Chaplin to create some additional scenes that would match with the dialogue. We had time to add a statue of Leopold, along with animated lights and text, for his quote in the beginning of our experience, and we were working on adding an oval office scene for president Chester A. Arthur's quote. Once I added extra scenes, I had to develop a scene management system that would load and unload scenes with seamless transitions in between.

Travis learned how to work with particle systems in Unity for this project and helped to add fog to the outer bounds of our environment to make sure that users couldn't see that they were actually standing on top of a ground plane floating in the sky. The fog also ended up providing a great sense of atmosphere for the scene. We were on a really tight schedule for the two weeks leading up to submission, and his contributions were a really big help. While I was working on our adaptive music system the night before the presentation, Travis was picking the actual songs to fit with his interpretation of the script, and while I was working on the scene loading system or lighting animation, Travis was finding the models that we would use for our new scenes.

To plan out our VR experience, Cole Cisacowski used our group's research to write and voice act a screen play for our experience. Due to time constraints, we only had time to implement ~50% of the script.

King Leopold: “To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.... “

President Chester A. Arthur: “The rich and populous valley of the Kongo is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is “the president.... Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs, roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established ... under one flag which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade. The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the valley.”

Roger Casement:

It’s been 18 years; 18 years since King Leopold sweet-talked the world into supporting his formation of the Congo Free State. The president of the United States, the chancellor of Germany, the premier of France, the King of England…everyone completely bought in. Nobody stopped to think twice, to second guess. They were all eager: too eager to notice his program parallels colonialism in everything but name. If American reporter George Washington Williams is right, what Leopold said couldn’t be further from the truth. Williams wrote his initial letter in 1890, accusing the king of “crimes against humanity,” yet no one talks about it. I think I know why; it’s something inconvenient, something easy to ignore, something best left unsaid. Be that as it may, Washington Williams was not the only one to suspect Leopold’s mission. Edmund MorelI, once a mere British shipping clerk, found the only imports into the Congo were for military purposes, and huge exports of ivory and rubber were happening at the same time. Now a journalist, his leaked classified documents coming out of the Congo have moved the British government to take action. I can’t just ignore the findings of these two men. Either Leopold is lying, or they are. As a reporter, gathering the facts is part of the job. I’m going down there to collect evidence nobody can ignore.

Needless to say, getting to the Congo was my first order of business. The British government already arranged to make an expedition, and I was their chosen representative. With enough funds to make the trip, I set off. I could only hope I’d be writing in the future about the incredible progress seen in the Congo, but I have a hard time believing Williams would write the way he did if things were truly going well. I … I just can’t think of a reason for him to fabricate any of it. Whatever the case, I know l’ll come to my own conclusions. Upon arriving at the city of Lusambo in the Belgian Congo, most reporters, photographers, and others of the sort are housed with Leopold’s agents, who oversee the territory. After all, the majority are simply there to write a brief overview of the state of affairs without going into much detail. Of course, my goal is very different. I know slinking around behind the agents’ backs while living with them is an easy way to draw unwanted attention, so I decide to rent a riverboat and live separate from them with a single cook. Now, with my own base of operations secured, there’s just one question I need an answer for: what is really happening here?

I’ve been in Lusambo for two days now, and I’ve learned some things in that brief amount of time. For one, the agents I see most are at river outposts, not close enough to the natives for me to see more than a few of them. I know something’s wrong, but with the distance I’ve been keeping, I can’t seem to find anything irrefutable. If I want to figure anything out, I have to do some deeper digging on my own. Next: 6 A.M., 11:45 A.M., and 6:30 P.M. – these are the times all the white officials of the area (around 75 or so) take a trolley to the hotel dining room to have their meals. Taking a look around while the agents aren’t there is something I know I have to do, and these windows are my best opportunities. Finally, I learned this: the name of a particular agent was tossed around by officials I encountered with a higher frequency than any other: Eugène Sauveterre. Apparently, he is rather “proficient” at his work, and just asking about him was all it took to get the location of his house. I won’t leave until I’ve seen it myself. With all this information, I made my plan: tomorrow, at 6 A.M., I’m going to pay Sauveterre’s quarters a little visit while he’s away. I truly hope it’s uneventful.

Player Arrives at the House

Roger Casement: Choosing the morning was the right call; I snuck out at 5 A.M. using the cover of darkness to avoid any detection. After trudging around for an hour, I’ve finally made it here. The sun has yet to rise, and I face Sauveterre’s house under the unlit sky. I feel the cool morning air blow past me as I stare at the modest wooden structure. It’s just a simple house; why do I have this pit in my stomach? Am I … am I afraid? Is this really the right thing to do? Will I die if they find me? Maybe I should just … no! I can’t turn back, not now. Perhaps my intuition is warning me of what’s to come. Perhaps the inside of that house confirms my worst fears and more. Even so, I’ve known it could be this way all along. I have to see it … with my own eyes.

Player Enters the House, Interacts with the Following Objects in Random Order: Mauser Model 1884 Rifle, Hippo Hide Chicote Whip, Agent’s food, Ammunition, Chest of Francs.

Player Finds All Evidence

I can’t deny it anymore: whatever good faith Leopold and his regime claimed to have when starting this venture exists only in their propagandist writings. The true situation in the Congo … is one solely focused on the extraction of resources and profit. Natives are overworked to the point of exhaustion, only to be shot when the impossible demands of their agents aren’t met. They are afforded no values; they are treated as subhuman. Our fellow man is being mercilessly trampled upon. Leopold may say his agents arrived in these lands to bring civilization to savages, but the only savages I see are those wearing his spotless white uniforms. No one is here to reign them in: they act with impunity. The crimes occurring here will set back African development for generations. My measly transcriptions of the happenings here can never do such a horrific amount of suffering true justice, but I must write. I must bring Britain and the rest of the world face-to-face with the truth of Leopold’s reign. The rhetoric of colonial powers must be questioned. The dangers of dehumanization must be known. International attention is the only way I can see terror of this magnitude truly coming to an end.

In addition to writing a screenplay, Cole Cisacowski translated it to a storyboard to visually communicate the flow of the user experience.

To aid in crafting our VR experience's narrative, each team member created a character sheet to represent a few of the important players in this historical experience.

Below are some of the materials we gathered in preparation for the creation of our VR experience.

Alice Seeley Harris encountered the houses of several agents during her time in the Congo. As seen in the images above, there is no one standard design for these houses, allowing us some creative liberty while designing our virtual space. However, there are several common design elements: steps leading up to the entrance, a gable or hipped roof with a dominant front, supportive exposed wooden pillars, and some form of elevation are present throughout different individual examples. This gives us a solid framework to build off of, allowing us to make a design that fits our technological parameters while being faithful to the architectural trends seen in the genuine buildings.

We mean to replicate the wooden and straw materials of the room with earthy tones of brown and tan. The walls and floors will be stained with hints of dark and light brown to enhance realism. Additionally, we'll introduce a subtle bluish hue to evoke the early morning sunrise atmosphere in which the scene unfolds.

Right now, our floor plan will be a 25 x 15 x 15 ft building, with the longer side having the entrance. The floors and walls are made of wood, likely Limba (Terminalia superba), Kambala (Chlorophora excelsa), Mubala (Pentaclethra macrophylla), or sapelli (Entandrophragma cylindricum) (source:  https://zenodo.org/record/1127104/files/10005635.pdf , 1216). There also appears to be carpet on the ground, as seen in the photos above, likely made of woven straw. The ceiling, held up by wooden beams, appears to be a straw exterior and a sheet metal interior.

The images we were able to find, both from Harris and later photographers, give us some evidence of what would be present inside an agent’s house during the timeframe of our project. For one thing, furniture: the types of chairs are not only unique, but varied. In Harris’s captioned photo, the chair the man on the left is in comes close to the ground, reclines, and is not curved. Contrast that with the man on the right, who is sitting on a taller, curved chair. This diversity gives us options as creators. Further examples are pictured below.

The seating options predominantly feature chairs and benches crafted from wood, woven straw, and wicker materials. The use of these materials aligns with the overall theme of the space and color palette.

It is common to find multiple tables serving various purposes within the agent's house. A dining table was typically covered with a tablecloth featuring intricate designs layered overtop. Evidence suggests a variety of table designs, ranging from those with elaborate leg designs to simpler structures, yet all are rectangular and made of wood.

Servants are often employed within these households, responsible for serving tea from white porcelain teapots, cups, and plates, often imported from Belgium. Dark glass bottles are also seen on the dining tables. Side tables provide additional surfaces for decoration, often with photographs or flower decorations.

Interior shots of beds are scarce. The photo from Emile Gorila's first inspection of the Congo presents a bed with a striped padded cloth as the mattress and a thin pillow for the head. The mattress frame appears to be made of wood and slightly elevated off of the ground with a slight incline near the head of the bed.

“The weaponry of the Force Publique also remained mostly outdated due to the tight budgetary constraints on the colonial administraition.” Congolese soldiers were given single shot 11mm Albini-Braendlin rifles, whereas the white Belgian soldiers were given the superior Mauser Model 1889 rifles. (  Force Publique - Wikipedia  )

Of course, agents needed things besides just guns to adorn their living quarters. These tended to consist of paintings, decorative weapons (such as the ones adorning the walls), music players, chicotes (hippo hide whips which they used to punish the natives), and lots of food and ivory extracted from the natives. In addition, the agents tended to drink a lot of alcohol, and so we plan on having a bottle of alcohol and glasses in the room, in addition to general silverware, china, etc

We had lofty goals when we initially wrote our project proposal, but did we actually manage to achieve them?

While we were able to highlight colonial exploitation and the dangers of unsupervised military force, our greatest regret is that we weren't able to address the voice of the oppressed and provide an African perspective. While we were working on this project, we felt that we lacked the scholarly resources on the Congolese people during that time period to create a historically based experience that would do them justice. The greatest addition to our project that we could make would be to collaborate with scholars that are well versed in Congolese history pre and post colonialism to create extra content.

Our second regret was that due to time constraints, interactivity was added as an afterthought over the course of a week rather than designing our experience around specific game mechanics. If we could expand upon the project another way, it would be to add more engaging gameplay, which was way beyond the scope of the class.

• Rifle crate created by MaX3Dd:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/weapon-crate-5826e3dd67e64586a9990cbdf0519fc7 
• Ammo crate created by Geoffroy.Sainte.Catherine:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/old-ammo-crate-320d935472354cc79590bc35ade9d855 
• Rifle ammo created by Guy in a Poncho:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/ammo-collection-31b78afb6f544b0386d02be2d7aad5d8 
• Ammo box created by DjMaesen:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/ammo-box-54d9dfb79f3b40b39ed95a8224126ba0#download 
• Rifle rack created by Big2XG:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/weapon-rack-0921f267541c4dbe971f33c122101d48 
• Treasure chest created by Matt LeMoine:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/treasure-chest-5d37002663ad462eb3008b606e586969 
• Plate created by Valter Medeiros:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/plate-3966eab192da44d7ad1e1c9d0afb08d5 
• Marmalade Preserve Jar created by m31odyr:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/marmalade-preserve-jar-4911919955ff4f788b60950e64c0a61f#download  
• Tin Can created by plaggy:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/cc0-tin-can-4-c3cdfd62aff944e3ae761098db5d3af2 
• French Baguette created by Rainbow:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/french-baguette-b6c483995db04698bf5041c9cef369c0 
• Wine Bottle created by MrDogeSuper:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/wine-bottle-4eafc1b677fa4d6caa9f55045f90ca40  
• Cutlery created by pixmodels31:  https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/household/household-tools/clutery  
• Old window door create by Daniyal Malik:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/old-window-door-5ecf5b2f8ebe4f4fb2dd297fb546e7ac 
• Old door created by Shedmon:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/wooden-door-0643dee368fe4ed983910cf182ff64b8 
• Old Bed created by donnichols:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/old-bed-210be84bcb5449f5a9f66a923c8ae307 
• Tall Dresser Full by neverfollow81:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/tall-dresser-full-dc76cf85a7cf4829a4694d6ba4a570b2 
• Old Wooden Chair by MaX3Dd:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/old-wooden-chair-f7648b43d29944799e31970ea977d38b 
• Old Desk created by FreePoly.org:  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/old-desk-04-freepolyorg-f035ad0da16b4a6d82c287687caeea94 

Le Congo illustré 

Le Congo illustré 1. Brussels: P. Wissenbruch, 1892. Smithsonian Institution. https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/lecongoillustr11892brux. 

Le Congo illustré 13. “Voyages Et Travaux Des Belges Dans L’État Indépendant Du Congo / Publié Sous La Direction De A.- J. Wauters,” A.- J. Wauters, 1895. Gallica  https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k105873k/f5.item .

• Geary, Christraud M, In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960. London: Philip Wilson for Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

• Reception of loads of rubber in the Mayombe region, Congo Free State. c. 1900. Postcard, hand-colored collotype. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, CG 35-32.  https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/focus/colonial1.html  

• National Museum of African Art. "Emile Gorlia photographs, EEPA 1977-001." 2018. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art.  https://sirismm.si.edu/EADpdfs/EEPA.1977-001.pdf  

• Antislavery Usable Past University Archives, Alice Seeley Harris Archive, University of Nottingham, n.d.  http://antislavery.nottingham.ac.uk/solr-search?q=&facet=collection%3A%22Alice+Seeley+Harris+Archive%22 

Anstey, Roger. “The Congo Rubber Atrocities -- A Case Study.” African Historical Studies 4, no. 1 (1971): 59–76.

 https://doi.org/10.2307/216268 .

Brutal Exposure: the Congo. Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool, United Kingdom: International Slavery Museum, 2015. Exhibition Catalog.

 https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/whatson/international-slavery-museum/exhibition/brutal-exposure-congo .

Colard, Sandrine Germaine Marie. “Photography in the Colonial Congo (1885-1960)” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2016.

Daniels, John. “The Congo Question and the ‘Belgian Solution.’” The North American Review 188, no. 637 (1908): 891–902.

 http://www.jstor.org/stable/25106259 . 

Harford, Tim. “The horrific consequences of rubber’s toxic past,” BBC.Com, July 23, 2019,  https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48533964 .

Harris, Dale. “8 Tips for Writing Content About Sensitive Topics.” ArticleCity.com, March 20, 2018. 

 https://www.articlecity.com/blog/8-tips-for-writing-content-about-sensitive-topics/ .

Hawkins, Hunt. “Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 25, no. 2 (1993): 31–45.

 http://www.jstor.org/stable/27746527 .

Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Scott, Pippa and Oreet Rees, dir. King Leopold’s Ghost. 2006; Films Media Group, Journeyman Pictures (Firm), 2016. Films On Demand  https://fod.infobase.com/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=118372 

"Congo Free State." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified March 4, 2024.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State . 

"Force Publique." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified March 3, 2024.  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Force_Publique&action=history .

Our project will be published under the CC-BY license. This license enables users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creators. We want to ensure that our work can be built upon in as many ways as possible to spread awareness about what happened to the people of the Congo.

No user data is collected from our application.

Special thanks to Dr. Wen Yu, who inspired the initial pitch for this project when they assigned the documentary, King Leopold's Ghost to Neo for their Globalization II class.

This project also wouldn't have been possible without the supervision of Dr. Bee Lehman, who taught the class that this project was created for, VR and the Gamification of History. Thank you for providing us a detailed roadmap from start to end on how to finish this project!

Our team as a whole scoured the web and library databases, pouring through hundreds of photographs from the time period. Special thanks to Adam Bischoff, who found the Emile Gorlia archive, did most of our Mood Board, created a sample floorplan of our scene, compiled European furniture references, and was in general a great team member who helped us tackle the assignments in this class week after week.