In Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, sometimes called Cap Ferrat, in France, an unknown buyer has just dropped $220 million (around R3,4 billion) on a rather prime piece of real estate.

That’s a little less than the original asking price, but still a tidy sum.

The Villa Les Cèdres, built in 1830, boasts 18 000 square feet, 14 bedrooms, 35 acres of manicured lawns and private gardens with thousands of exotic plants.

It was also the home of the man described as a “white supremacist extraordinaire” and “Satan and Mammon in one person”, King Leopold II of Belgium.

Mammon refers to the worship of wealth, soo he’s Satan and capitalism all rolled up in one.

The Daily Beast with more:

The ambitious king, who was also reportedly a pedophile, kick-started Europe’s so-called “Scramble for Africa” in the 1880s. He shrewdly convinced the world that his bloody and enormously lucrative land grab in the Congo that led to the murder of 10 million Africans and forced labor of countless others was for humanitarian reasons.

“While he was living there, at Villa Les Cèdres, millions of Congolese were dying as a direct and indirect result of his forced labor system,” Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost, a riveting account of the Leopold’s brutal reign, told The Daily Beast.

If you want a quick breakdown of everything that King Leopold sanctioned in the Congo, the following video sums it up nicely.

Yep, he was a murderous bastard.

Here’s more on how he was also a paedophile:

It’s hard to know how much the new buyer knows about the villa’s past owner—or cares. Leopold is invariably cited in glossy magazine copy about the estate but his heinous, horrifying past is rarely detailed in depth. Writers prefer to say he “exploited” mineral resources and rubber trees in the Congo and gloss over his predilection for young virgins and amputating the hands and feet of helpless African men, women and children.

Leopold had a Jeffrey Epstein-like penchant for underage, preferably virginal girls, according to King Leopold’s Ghost. His last paramour, Caroline Lacroix, whom he met and became besotted with when he was 65, was a 16-year-old Paris prostitute. She gave birth to one of their two illegitimate sons at Villa Les Cèdres.

Gross. I’d have that house exorcised.

Back to the Congo for more horrors.

Because of British weaponry and technology, “a few thousand white men working for the king were able to dominate some twenty million Africans,” according to King Leopold’s Ghost. They turned the Congo into a massive forced labor camp, mainly involving the harvesting of wild rubber.

But they did more than dominate. Their cruelty—casually burning down villages, shooting Africans for sport, torturing them, amputating limbs, forcing them to work until they keeled over or were lashed to death was beyond sadistic. One of the weapons of choice was the chicotte.

“The chicotte was a vicious whip made out of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged cork-screw strip. It was applied to bare buttocks, and left permanent scars.

You can read more revolting tales of Leopold’s white supremacy here.

The house stands as a monument to his cowardice and cruelty, but that didn’t stop the sale.

[source:dailybeast]