the CIA page is slightly out of date
That's right. It's now officially
Pepsi Presents The Belgian Congo. But otherwise the information is generally accurate.
Nobody colonizes like the belgians, that's for sure. Good old King Leopold II, and his colonial regime of slave labor, rape and mutilation, is still quite the hero to francophone Belgians, though. I think they call him le Roi-Bâtisseur.
Here's an old joke told among the French:
One day, the Belgians told their King they were fed up with the French making jokes about the stupid Belgians. So the Belgian king met with the French president and said, "We have to do something about this... how about you do something stupid so we can laugh about it?"
The French president said, "Okay, we shall build a bridge in the desert."
The Belgian king went home with news that the French had built a bridge in the desert, and the Belgians were laughing and laughing. In fact, they couldn't stop laughing.
Eventually, the Belgian king had put a stop to this. He went back to France and told the president, "Okay, that was funny but we really need to end this. You can destroy the bridge now..."
The French president replied, "Well we would except for all the Belgians fishing on it."
