In theory the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) should be among the richest countries on earth. Its vast territory virtually brims with cobalt, copper, cadmium, oil, industrial and gem diamonds, coltan,gold, silver, zinc, manganese, tin, germanium, uranium, radium, bauxite, iron ore, timber, coal, and hydroelectric potential. And yet the DRC consistently ranks in the bottom ten of the Human Development Index. In its northeastern region the deadliest conflict since WWII continues to claim about 1,000 lives a day. Not inappropriately then, the name of the capital Kinshasa, where nearly 80% dwell in slums or squatter settlements, comes from the word ‘kinsasa,’ meaning “why are things happening this way?”
This series of entries on Congolese history seeks to shed some light on the reasons why. The second installment looks at the forgotten holocaust that played out between 1885 and 1908, when the equitorial rain forest became the private labor camp of a European playboy king – the so-called Congo Free State.
A rerun from dKos. This series will eventually have four parts. In February this year a bizarre incident was reported in news media the world across: a 20-foot statue of King Léopold II (1835-1909) on horseback was reerected near Kinshasa’s central station after having spent four decades in an open-air dump. The statue was removed a few hours later, but will, according to the Culture Minister, be restored to a prominent location in a ‘grand ceremony’ sometime in the near future.
Culture Minister Christophe Muzungu said people should not just see the negative side of the king – they should also look at the positive aspects.
“We are restoring the history of our country because a people without history is a people without a soul,” he said.
That is one way of looking at it. Another was succintly put by Richard H. Davis in his book The Congo and Coasts of Africa (1907), based on travels in the country that was then King Léopold’s personal fiefdom: “Happy is the country without a history!”
The Congo has had no such luck. As recounted in the first installment of this series, four centuries of slave trade had already left a devastating impact on the societies of the Congo at the dawn of the colonial period. Yet the worst was still to come. The historian Robert Egderton:
The Congo was not paradise but it was a place where most of its people led rewarding, meaningful lives, helped by their gods and religious rituals, but also by their hard work and their family-based cooperation. By the time that Henry Morton Stanley brought the Congo to the world’s attention in 1877, most of that good life had disappeared, and by the time Leopold’s brutal regime ended three decades later, the Congo had become perhaps the most dreadful place on earth.
Who then was this tyrant of the rain forest, now to be honored with statues by the descendants of his hapless victims? Léopold II of Belgium, a first cousin of Queen Victoria known for his sly and deceitful nature, was an unlikely imperial ruler. He was, after all, the purely titular monarch of a tiny country barely four decades old, composed of two ethnic factions and faced with a constant threat of annexation by greater powers. Despite this, or perhaps rather because of it, he kept harping on the boons of overseas expansion: “[S]ince history teaches that colonies are useful, that they play a great part in that which makes up the power and prosperity of states, let us strive to get one in our turn.” But his countrymen flatly refused.
For the Parliament, colonies meant huge investments in administration, education, infrastructure, and health care, with at best uncertain prospects of return, especially as economic analysis had shown free trade to be as profitable. Leopold’s dreams of empire by purchase – buying land on Fiji and Formosa; buying lakes on the Nile and draining them out; buying an island from Argentina; buying land in China, Vietnam, and Japan; buying the Philippines – all came to nought. Until, that is, he on January 7 1876 came across a brief note on the bottom of page six in The Times, which cited the explorer Verney Lovett Cameron on the ‘unspeakable richness’ awaiting an ‘enterprising capitalist’ in the Congo.
To get “a slice of this magnificent African cake,” which due to its inaccessability had still escaped European conquest, Léopold concocted a plan in three steps.
The first step came later that year as he hosted a conference in Brussels, gathering the leading explorers, scientists, and geographers of the day. Proposing to “open to civilisation the only part of our globe where it has yet to penetrate, to pierce the darkness that envelopes entire populations,” he secured the founding of an international philantropic society to be known as the ‘Association Internationale Africaine’ (AIA). Léopold became the chair and only shareholder of what was in effect a private holding company with its own flag – a bright star shining in the center of a dark blue surface – and funded by a multinational banking consortium.
The next step, undertaken in 1878, was to hire as his agent the legendary Henry M. Stanley, just returned from his epic quest for David Livingstone. Stanley had for some time been trying to interest the British government in colonizing the land he had been mapping, without success. The King’s instructions were clear: “It is not a question of Belgian colonies. It is a question of creating a new State, as big as possible, and of running it [without] granting the slightest political power to the negros. That would be absurd.” Stanley, a ruthless man considered by the notorious Tippu Tip a worse slave driver than any Arab, set to work using trinkets; even cheaper tricks like an electric handshake to suggest supernatural strength; and as a last resort, naked force. Thus he persuaded 450 chiefs to sign away their lands, and the labor of their peoples, “for all posterity.”
Stanley’s compass pointing out the course of the Congo upon his water-stained map, photographed at Christie’s, 2002
Five expeditions later, in 1885, the AIA had established a string of trading stations along the Congo River. The uppermost one, the ‘Inner Station’ in Joseph Conrad’s immortal novella Heart of Darkness, was located at Stanley Falls by agreement with Tippu Tip who had his own bases there. Tip, the last of the great Zanzibari slave traders, would in fact be made a district governor of the entity created by Leópold’s final step.
In this brilliant move, Léopold had the AIA morph into a sovereign state with himself as chef d’état. By deft maneuvers centered on free trade guarantees, the ‘treaties’ collected by Stanley, and a vow to combat the slave trade, he won diplomatic acceptance for this absurdity. (Portugal’s claim to the Congo based upon Cão’s 1482 ‘discovery’ was defused by a public campaign in Britain highlighting the crimes of the past, and the other powers were pitched against each other.) In April 1884, after relentless lobbying in Washington, the US recognized the AIA’s flag as that of a friendly government. 13 nations followed suit at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, where most of Africa’s current borders were drawn up with a pen and a ruler.
Thus Léopold had pulled off what reason would suggest to be impossible: acquiring a region the size of India as the only private colony in history, for good measure baptized ‘The Congo Free State.’ Generous loans from Belgium enabled the new absolute monarch to get his enterprise up and going.
The Berlin Act called for ‘effective occupation’ of the territory, a requirement to which Leópold had no objection. The key to this was the creation in 1886 of the ‘Force Publique,’ a mercenary-led ‘conscription army’ based upon levies placed on local chiefs and on forced recruitment of children it rendered orphans. Led by European officers, armed with modern weaponry and peaking at nearly 20,000 men, it brutally quashed all resistance (‘pacification’), forcing the Congolese to do their new master’s bidding. Between May and October 1887 alone some 60,000 porters carried almost 1,000 tons of freight, mostly disassembled steamers, the 250 miles from Boma to the capital Léopoldville (now Kinshasa). Thousands died from the strain. In 1890 the slaves started on a railroad over the Crystal Mountains, completed eight years later. Now the Congo was open for business.
Hitherto the chief commodity pursued by Léopold’s men had been ivory. Unforgettably described in Conrad’s novella, which is inspired by the author’s stint as a steamer captain on the river in 1890, this trade was not all that profitable; the King ran up a troubling deficit. Over the next decade, however, the red numbers would turn a shiny black as the focus shifted to another natural resource of the Congo’s forests. The invention of the inflatable tire led to an insatiable demand for the sap from rubber wines.
Stock certificate issued in 1898 by the company L’Ikelemba SA, which owned an estate of 1000 hectars in the Ikelemba valley, planting cocoa, coffee, and most profitably, rubber
This rubber boom would bear out a wry observation made by some American in 1885: Léopold related to the Congo just as Rockefeller did to Standard Oil. Incidentally, Rockefeller capital was itself involved via the American Congo Company, one of the numerous private contractors granted local monopolies on extracting rubber in return for half the proceeds. Such concessions were Léopold’s way of circumventing the Berlin Act’s ban on “a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters of trade.” Though trade was nominally free, Léopold declared by fiat that all rubber belonged to ‘the State’; thus there was nothing to buy or sell. He controlled many of the private companies himself and even reserved the better part of the Congo for his exclusive exploitation.
Yet this was by far the least unethical side of his operation. Influenced by a book called Java, or How to Manage a Colony by a British attorney named Money, he had realized from the start that only a liberal use of slavery would return a handsome profit. He therefore unleashed a reign of terror upon his 20 million subjects to, as he put it, instill in them “a higher idea of the necessity of labour.” The slavery was imposed in the guise of ‘taxation.’ Bertrand Russell sums it up well:
Each village was ordered by the authorities to collect and bring in a certain amount of rubber – as much as the men could collect and bring in by neglecting all work for their own maintenance. If they failed to bring the required amount, their women were taken away and kept as hostages in compounds or in the harems of government employees. If this method failed, native troops, many of them cannibals, were sent into the village to spread terror, if necessary by killing some of the men; but in order to prevent a waste of cartridges, they were ordered to bring one right hand for every cartridge used. If they missed, or used cartridges on big game, they cut off the hands of living people to make up the necessary number.
Bertrand Russell: Freedom and Organization 1814-1914. Chapter XXXI: ‘Imperialism.’ London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934.
In the words of a stunned missionary, Léopold had created “a system of devilry hitherto undreamed of by his victims.” A late 19th century native song goes like this: “We are tired of living under this tyranny. We cannot endure that our women and children are taken away and dealt with by the white savages. We shall make war…. We know that we shall die, but we want to die. We want to die.”
The royal slave army, with its artillery and machine guns, unfailingly fulfilled such wishes. It even found the time to defeat the forces of the remaining Afro-Arab slavers, on whom it waged ferocious wars concluded by 1894. This was not necessarily to the advantage of the Congolese, however:
The difference between the slavery under Leopold and the slavery under the Arab raiders is that the Arab was the better and kinder master…. He purposed to return. And he did not wish to so terrify the blacks that to escape from him they would penetrate farther into the jungle. His motive was purely selfish, but his methods, compared with those of Leopold, were almost considerate. The work the State to-day requires of the blacks is so oppressive that they have no time, no heart, to labor for themselves.
Richard Harding Davis: The Congo and Coasts of Africa, p. 96.
One of said blacks is on recording as lamenting: “No, we are not even slaves.”
On the bright side, profits could reach up to 700%. Léopold’s exorbitant returns, which he reinvested to make at least a billion in present-day dollars, financed lavish villas for his prostitute teenage mistress. He spent the equivalent of $6 million to enhance his palace at Laeken. To the 1897 World Fair in Brussels he contributed three artificial villages showcasing 267 Congolese who would sing, dance and conduct mock ‘tribal battles’ for the spectators. By the toil of their countrymen the site of this human zoo would eventually become the sumptuous Cinquantenaire park with its Triumphal Arc, one of many public works that now grace the EU capital and have earned their donor a nice cognomen: ‘the Builder King.’
His underlings in the Free State had their own decoration projects. Like Conrad’s Kurtz, Force Publique commander Léon Rom ornated the fence posts around his flowerbeds with human heads on poles; he also had a rock garden full of rotting heads. An agent named Moray recounts the butchery of a village deemed insufficiently busy at work: “Thereupon [the officer] ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, and to hang the women and children on the palisades in the form of a cross.” This was, after all, a Christian civilizing mission.
As mentioned above, troops were ordered to bring back a right hand for each cartridge fired. American missionary Joseph Clark reports in a letter of April 12 1895 that “it is blood-curdling to see them returning with hands of the slain and to find the hands of young children, amongst bigger ones, evidencing their ‘bravery.'” Indeed, hands and other limbs were routinely hacked off the living, smoked, and brought forth in baskets at the feet of officers to extract more bullets or prove that native ‘sloth’ had been duly punished. Many units on patrol had a designated ‘keeper of the hands.’
Children mutilated by the soldiers. Photo: Lachlan Vass
Then there were certain other vices of the royal gendarmerie.
The father of the little girl said his name was Nsala… On the previous day, although it was three days before they were due to take in the rubber, fifteen sentries came from Lifinda, all except two being armed with Albini rifles, and they were accompanied by followers. They began making prisoners and shooting, and killed Bongingangoa, his wife; Boali, his little daughter of about five years of age; and Esanga, a boy of about ten years. These they at once cut up, and afterwards cooked in pots, putting in salt which they had brought with them, and then ate them.
Excerpt from a letter from Edgar Stannard of the Congo Balolo Mission, May 21 1904; printed in E. D. Morel: King Leopold’s Rule in Africa. London: William Heinemann, 1904.
Click here for a famous photograph of Nsala staring at the scant remains of his daughter.
Unlike mass mutiliation, cannibalism did have a precedent in pre-colonial Congo, but it was not as widespread and brutal as it turned after the Arab slave trade had unraveled traditional societies. In the Free State period things deteriorated further. Much of the Force Publique was recruited from the most savage peoples of the Upper Congo, where the slave trade had hit the hardest; now cannibals with breechloading rifles were unleashed on the entire region. On occasion it was used as a means of terror: one would seal off a recalcitrant village and send in the cannibals, who were known to consume their victims more or less alive. White officers too ate human flesh. Meanwhile, Léopold, who never set foot in his fiefdom but kept informed, exulted in his newsletter: “The many horrors and atrocities which disgrace humanity give way little by little before our intervention.”
Léopold’s big lie did not go long unchallenged. The expression ‘crimes against humanity’ was coined as early as 1890 in a 16-page open letter to the King from George Washington Williams, an Afro-American minister and reporter whom the Belgian state had sent on an investigative tour. Though long extracts of his letter were published on both sides of the Atlantic, Williams’ account was largely ignored and he died the following year. His mantle was however donned by another Afro-American, William Sheppard,a Presbyterian missionary and himself the son of a slave. Sometimes known as ‘the black Livingstone,’ Sheppard made pioneering use of photographic evidence. The Congo Free State sued him for libel and lost.
In time, such whistle-blowers would rally around the Englishman Edmund D. Morel. A shipping agent working in Antwerp for a major Liverpool line, Morel had made some intriguing observations. First, ships arrived from the Congo crammed with valuables (the difference between the real and the official value amounted to tens of millions in 2005 dollars.) Second, the Free State imported chiefly guns and ammo. Inferring that he had “stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a [partner],” Morel quit his job in 1901 to found an activist newspaper. For the next twelve years he devoted his every waking hour to attacking “the system that is eating into the vitals of Africa.”
In 1904 Morel established the Congo Reform Association along with Roger Casement, the former British consul in the Congo, whose vivid accounts of flogging, murder, and the wholesale annihilation of villages outraged the British public. However, the Association was shunned by most European governments and the US, neither of whom wanted diplomatic unpleasantries. It was also fiercely resisted by Léopold’s international propaganda machine. For instance, a book-length shilling effort published in 1905 by a certain H. W. Wack concludes on this lofty proposition:
[T]he native is now incomparably more healthful [sic], cleaner, better fed, and better housed than at any previous period of his history. Thirty years ago what is now the Congo Free State was a wild tangle of luxuriant tropical growth through which hordes of black savages roamed, fought, and practised their unspeakable barbarities… The white magician has waves [sic] his wand and the scene has transformed… It thus appears that, as the guardian of the welfare of it’s [sic] people, the Congo Free State has nothing to learn, either in theory or practise [sic], from the most enlightened governments of the world.
That appearance notwithstanding, the Congo Reform Association grew, enlisting such celebrity champions as Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The first mass human rights movement in the 20th century, it was instrumental in shaming the Belgian Parliament into annexing the territory in 1908 – two years before it was contract-bound to do so anyway and eight years after it could have. Though the murders and slavery continued for a few more years, claiming an additional million lives, they had by the end of WWI been replaced with a kinder, gentler form of exploitation.
There were also less uplifting yet arguably more important reasons for the said transition. For one thing, industrial demand for wild rubber was being eclipsed by that for cultivated rubber, so that looting the Congo ceased to be as profitable. For another, labor was becoming a resource too scarce to waste by the methods which, together with the ensuing humanitarian disaster, had slashed the population in half in 23 years. The estimated death toll of ten million exceeds that of WWI.
One might expect this Holocaust-scale crime firmly to establish Léopold II and his business associates in the ‘monsters of history’ hall of infamy, but this has not really happened, especially not in Belgium. Upon annexing the Congo the Belgian Parliament not only compensated the previous owner with ample funds to be drawn from there; it also commended his “grands sacrifices en faveur du Congo.” Indeed, a mere decade after his death the following year, his compatriots had mostly forgotten about the scandal, of which there is still no mention at the colonial Tervuren museum. In 1995 Gerard Jacques, a former top diplomat who had just retired as head of the King’s ceremonial office, published a book which unabashedly charges: “The vicious campaign against Leopold II was caused by the greed of his adversaries [whose] campaign against the Congolese ‘atrocities’ culminated in the establishment of the Congo Reform Association in England.” And the airing in April 2004 of a BBC documentary film on the horrors was protested by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Louis Michel, who denounced it as ‘biased and unnuanced’; the Belgian royal house, which usually stands aloof from such matters nowadays, expressed ‘concern.’
Even among historians the story was largely unknown until the 1970s when Jules Marchal, then the Belgian ambassador to Liberia, saw a passing reference to a democide of ten million people in a local newspaper – ironically mirroring how King Léopold ‘discovered’ the Congo a century before. Looking into this preposterous claim in order to refute it, he learned that the few surviving documents not burned by Léopold in a week-long bonfire had been classified by Belgian authorities. This spurred Marchal to produce a trailblazing four-volume work that rescued the atrocities from the memory hole, making him a successor to Edmund Morel. His treatise became the basis of Adam Hochschild’s best-selling King Leopold’s Ghost, in turn leading R. J. Rummel, the noted historian of modern genocides, to significantly revise upwards the sum total of people murdered by government in the 20th century.
Statue or no statue, King Léopold’s ghost keeps haunting the Congo. Currently in its 45th year of independence, what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a treasury plundered by private armies to benefit wealthy foreigners, often through non-voluntary labor. So it was perhaps darkly fitting when on independence day June 30 1960, King Baudouin of Belgium, himself a major stockholder in a mining company established by his grand-uncle, declared: “The independence of the Congo is the result of the undertaking conceived by the genius of King Léopold II.”
These inflammatory words drew an impassioned reply from the infant nation’s first prime minister, to this day the only democratically elected leader in the history of the Congo. But less than 7 months later, Patrice Émery Lumumba had been literally liquidated by Belgian government agents in the wake of a CIA-sponsored coup.
And that is the focus of the next installment in this series.
