The Congo Free State

The Congo Free State's most interesting implications are those it raises in argument against the idea that people are inherently good. As Heart of Darkness would argue, the people who went into the Congo in service of Leopold as part of the Congo Free State, as well as Leopold himself, said that they had come to civilize and improve the Congo, but instead ended up making the African natives work in appalling conditions, giving them no medicine or sanitation and killing them in huge numbers primarily in order to avoid the threat of violence.
At first, I thought about arguing that this disproved the idea that anarchism could work, but the fundamental problem here was not an absence of the state, it was the presence of a large group of people with vastly less power and knowledge than another, as well as the separation of individuals from the more powerful group. Essentially, the Congo became an area that drew in all sorts of people who could achieve large amounts of wealth and avoid the pressures of society, and, when they became so free, they ended up enslaving and abusing the natives.