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the hacking off of hands and feet were routine
I can't find a source right now, but to my knowledge this was also routine in the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola. Used as a punishment to instil discipline on rubber plantations. If you brought back rubber liquid that was messy/impure you'd be likely to have a finger or hand chopped off to teach you a lesson.
Also, you're Swiss. I recall being part of a pub conversation in London where the people from non-colonializing nations knew of the horrors of colonialization in quite a lot of detail, having been taught this in school, whilst the people from larger European nations such as Britain and Spain only vaguely knew of there being "both good and bad", but had little specific detail.
starfish&coffee-
It was more than that in Congo I think. When they gave bullets to their police they had to prove that each one was accounted for and not used for hunting - hence returning hands as proof. This escalated horrifically, there's rabbit hole wiki entries for it, but it's incredibly bleak reading.
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Come on, the Swiss were hardly innocent.
christianSpaceman
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I think you do (well not really, no congratulations to be had by anyone there), but it's an extremely, extremely low bar. Many people don't appreciate how truly shocking the Belgian devastation of Congo was. Most who know something about it know that many people died and there was a lot of forced labour. But that does not come close to describing the horrors. Millions died, the hacking off of hands and feet were routine, and that includes children specifically as a means of punishing the parents. I'm quite interested in history and you come across a lot of extremely nasty human behaviour, but this is one of those that really made me sick reading about it. I first heard about it when I came across a text by Mark Twain and that left quite a deep impression on me (probably because I was quite young too).
The determined viciousness and complete and utter disregard for any possible inherent worth of the victims' lives even as a concept is rather reminiscent of the Holocaust, even though of course the actual circumstances were very different and you can't directly compare it.