Belgian King arrives in DR Congo for key visit

King Philippe of Belgium landed in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday as part of a historic visit to the central African country. The visit comes two years after the Belgian king wrote to Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi to express his “deep regrets” for the “wounds of the past”. Belgium’s colonisation of the Congo was one of the harshest imposed by the European powers that ruled most of Africa in the late 19th and 20th centuries. King Leopold II, the brother of Philip’s great-great-grandfather, oversaw the conquest of what is now the DRC, ruling the territory as his personal property between 1885 and 1908 before it became a Belgian colony.