French Equatorial Africa

AD – MPE: 0.8

On his website “Necrometrics” White cites two estimates for the number of people killed in French Equatorial Africa, which range from 0.8 to 12 million. But the high estimate seems to be a wild guess. Adam Hochschild documents in “King Leopold’s Ghost” that the French rubber exploitation regime in the rain forest was smaller, but not less brutal than the Belgian system in the Congo Free State. He writes that the population loss in the French territories have also been estimated at 50 percent.

Plausible estimates for the number of people killed by the colonial regime in French Equatorial Africa range from 0.5 to 8 million. I choose 0.8 million as the most plausible estimate.