Leopold II's Sale & the Belgian Congo

The World’s First International Human Rights Campaign

Leopold II could not forever conceal the awful truth about his brutal activities in Africa. The atrocities committed in the CFS would be the focus of the world’s first international human rights campaign, drawing the interest of internationally renowned figures such as Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ironically, many of those who would become Leopold II’s most vocal detractors came to the CFS looking for the utopian colony Leopold II advertised. Author and historian George Washington Williams (Figure 5.2) was most excited for the six months he was to stay in the CFS during his tour of the African continent. Williams was born in Pennsylvania in 1849, and at the age fifteen, he enlisted in the 41st U.S. Colored Troops Infantry of the Union Army. During the American Civil War, Williams was wounded in combat, and he would go on to fight for Mexico, stunningly against King Leopold II’s brother-in-law’s attempted colonial conquest.[1] Williams was a pioneer as a historian by being one of the earliest to include the voices of the disenfranchised in his historical works. Disenchanted with the lack of progress for African Americans following the Civil War, Williams attempted to get appointed as a delegate to Leopold II’s Anti-slavery conference. He planned to recruit African Americans and other oppressed blacks to work and thrive in the CFS.

What Williams saw on his visit to the CFS left him in complete dismay. The atrocities prompted him to prepare a report for U.S. President Benjamin Harrison and write an open letter to Leopold II.[2] His letter to Leopold begins with Williams humbly appealing to Leopold II and gradually pivots to a condemnation of Leopold II’s colony, “All the crimes perpetrated in the Congo have been done in your name, and you must answer at the bar of Public Sentiment for the misgovernment of a people, whose lives and fortunes were entrusted to you by the august Conference of Berlin, 1884-1885.”[3] Williams’s letter ends with an appeal to all anti-slavery activists, Christians, and pacifists to call upon European governments to put a stop to the atrocities in the Congo. Williams witnessed what he called ‘crimes against humanity.’ As a result, he provided the world with the first account of what Congolese author and scholar Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja calls “King Leopold’s holocaust of the Congolese people.”[4] Leopold II responded to the accusations by attempting to besmirch Williams’s character, focusing on Williams’s previous false claims of obtaining a doctoral degree.[5] Upon completing his tour of Africa, Williams went to England, where he contracted tuberculosis. He died shortly after that in Blackpool at the age of forty-one before he could write a book on his experience in CFS.[6]

Another individual whose CFS experience left them distraught was Joseph Conrad (Figure 5.3). Born Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland, Conrad dreamed of exploring Africa as a child.[7] He left his native Poland searching for adventure and ended up in Brussels, looking for work. Conrad was enthusiastic about helping King Leopold II’s civilizing mission when he landed a job as an apprentice officer in the Congo.[8] He would leave the Congo bitterly disappointed. He contracted malaria on his way down the Congo River and then caught dysentery at a missionary camp at the end of the upriver journey. He was severely weakened by sickness, and this was compounded by having his faith broken in humanity by the atrocities he witnessed. After his journey back down the Congo River, Conrad canceled his contract. He returned to Europe, where he spent eight years brooding before releasing his most famous work, the short novel Heart of Darkness, much of which is an account of what he witnessed in the CFS in a fictional setting.[9]

         The most famous and enduring character from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is Kurtz, the commander of an ivory trading post. Kurtz is a legendary ivory collector rumored to have sunk into savagery. Like Conrad, many men coming to the Congo for fortune and adventure were lower-middle-class, and many were fleeing something, be it marriage, children, or the law.[10] Upon arrival, most of these men were shocked by the rough conditions ahead. This, combined with the prevalent social Darwinistic attitude of most Europeans, set the stage for many of the atrocities perpetrated against the Congolese people. Many scholars have tried deciphering Conrad’s real-life inspiration(s) behind the Kurtz character. Edmund Barttelot went mad while in charge of the rear of the Emin Pasha expedition and began beating, biting, whipping, and murdering Congolese porters until he was killed. As Kurtz does in Conrad's novel, Georges Klein was a French ivory collector who fell ill and died on his ship.[11] Hochschild makes the case for Leon Rom (Figure 5.5) in King Leopold’s Ghost. Rom went to the Congo at age twenty-five in search of adventure and rapidly progressed to the position of administrator of the Mutadi province and commander in the Force Publique.[12] A British journalist reported that Rom used the heads of African rebels he subdued to decorate his flower bed, just like the Kurtz character in Conrad’s novel.[13]

Leopold II's Sale

         After 1900, the increasing number of human rights abuse reports began to turn public opinion against Leopold II. It would be an unlikely trio of men who would play a significant role in Leopold II’s decision to hand his colony to the Belgian parliament. William Sheppard (Figure 5.6) was the first black missionary in the CFS and helped establish the first Southern Presbyterian mission in the CFS in the region of Kasai.[14] Roger Casement (Figure 5.7) was the British Consul assigned to the CFS city of Boma. Edmund Morel (Figure 5.8) was a clerk for a shipping company in Belgium. These three men discovered the atrocities in the CFS in different ways. Their courage to expose those atrocities in the face of powerful companies and the sovereign rulers of two countries helped expose the lies on which the CFS was built.

         During the Red Rubber Terror, Sheppard’s mission was situated next to a forest in Kasai rich in rubber. The region was plundered, causing a flood of refugees to Sheppard’s station. Sheppard was ordered to investigate and, to his shock, found a local chief who boastfully showed him a collection of over eighty hands being smoked to preserve them for payment from white officials.[15] As a clerk, Edmund Morel noticed that increasing hauls of ivory and rubber were coming into the Belgian ports, with little going back to the Congo except guns and ammunition.[16] In addition, Morel noticed that the shipping records did not match the statistics the CFS released to the public. Through investigation, Morel found that arms sent to the Congo were not the exception; they were the rule. Morel discovered evidence of embezzlement through the underreporting of imports and a large percentage of exports that had no value to the Congolese people.[17] As Leopold II created a system of slavery and violence without setting foot in the Congo, Morel was able to expose that system of plunder from his office in Europe.

Spurred on by discovering a system of plunder and slave labor, Morel began to lobby the British Parliament to act on his findings.[18] The British dispatched Roger Casement to commission a report on labor conditions in 1904.[19] Leopold II had survived reports of atrocities in his colony to this point. Still, Casement’s report, bolstered by his stellar reputation as a diplomat, would turn British and American opinion against the King. Many found it hard to ignore his accounts of sliced-off hands and penises.[20] Knowing the report would be watered down by Parliament and distressed by what he witnessed, Casement began interviewing the London press.[21] In a later meeting with Morel, Casement urged him to found the Congo Reform Association (CRA) and gave him a month’s salary to help him get started.[22] Morel would dedicate himself to using the CRA to expose King Leopold II’s colony for what it was and played a prominent role in its downfall. This would lead him to reprint an article detailing atrocities in Kasai by William Sheppard. The Compagnie du Kasai, a rubber monopoly, demanded that both Morel and Sheppard retract the article, which both refused to do. Instead, another British consul was sent to report on labor conditions in Kasai, who sent in another damning report about the brutality and starvation the people in the region faced.[23] The report's release caused the company’s stock to plummet, and Sheppard was sued for libel. Facing jail time in the CFS, Sheppard was defended pro bono by the leader of Belgium’s socialist party, Emile Vandervelde.[24] Sheppard’s acquittal was expected, with the American consulate present at the trial, sending a message that a guilty verdict would cause the United States to hold up the power transfer from Leopold II to the Belgian Parliament.[25]

         By the time of Sheppard’s trial, Leopold II knew his time at the head of the profit machine, which was the CFS, was all but over. Even his handpicked investigative committee sent to the CFS in response to Casement’s report came back with a report just as scathing and indicting as Casement’s.[26] Ever the profit-monger, Leopold II would not simply give the CFS to the Belgian government. Few other solutions were proposed besides the Belgian government stepping in for Leopold II. Finally, in 1908, a deal was struck. For all the death and destruction Leopold II’s actions brought to the Congolese, he was rewarded by the Belgian government assuming all of the debt of the CFS (including loans the government made to Leopold II), paying forty-five-and-a-half million francs to complete Leopold II’s building projects and fifty million francs for the gratitude of Leopold II’s services to be extracted from the Congolese people.[27] Shortly before the colony was officially handed over, Leopold II ordered the CFS archives to be burned, erasing an unknown amount of incriminating evidence.[28]

         The amount of psychological terror from a generation of slavery, rape, terror, mutilation, and murder is incalculable. Conservative estimates put Leopold II’s total profits from the CFS at over a billion dollars adjusted for modern inflation. He spent these profits on his expansive real estate portfolio, building projects within Belgium like the Arch of the Severed Hands and funding an extravagant lifestyle for his young mistress, Caroline LaCroix. This came at the expense of the depopulation of the CFS. Murder, starvation, exhaustion, exposure, disease, and a plummeting birth rate resulted in a fifty percent reduction in population in the CFS.[29] The population dropped from twenty to ten million in just over twenty years so one man could fund an extravagant lifestyle.

The Belgian Congo

         Mounting international pressure and the mindset of paternalism caused the Belgian government to assume colonial responsibility for the Congo. While labor conditions would slightly improve, the era of the Belgian Congo continued to exploit the Congo’s resources, kept the Congolese population in an inferior socio-economic status, and further facilitated the erosion of native cultures. A strict, highly centralized bureaucracy replaced sheer brutality to subdue the Congolese people. Some monopolies were broken up, but the power of concession companies, the “trusts” granted by Leopold II, was left largely unchecked. Colonial science based on European racial ideologies of the time played an essential role in the deeper penetration of rural areas, resulting in a colonial organization of those areas.[30] The Congo was first and foremost meant to support Belgium, and the Congolese people had no say in their government and faced oppression in their everyday lives. The continued oppression of the Congolese people virtually guaranteed the failure of government after independence and the political chaos that led to Mobutu.

         The Belgian Congo’s exploitative practices amount to what Ngonzola-Ntalaja refers to as a “colonial trinity” of repression.[31] Economic exploitation continued through resource extraction by concession companies. The Congo financed the Belgian government through both world wars while the governments were exiled. Forced labor continued, and during WWII, the number of forced labor days increased from sixty to one hundred twenty a year. Political repression helped to accelerate cultural erosion as the Belgians absorbed the remaining local trading routes.[32] The remaining chiefs and nobles were placed into low-level authoritative positions to reinforce the state's authority. The Belgian government's policies left the Congo under what amounted to company rule through repressive tasks.[33] Order was maintained by the Force Publique, which the Belgians used to suppress uprisings and act as a standing military and police force throughout the colony. Cultural oppression took many forms and was prevalent during this era. The Europeans kept the Congolese in an inferior position socially. Belgium’s status as a victim of World War I led to a collective forgetting/forgiving of Leopold II in Europe.[34] Christian missionaries who were mainly in charge of education had attitudes consistent with white supremacy, and a renewed veneration of Leopold II as a savior further eroded Congolese culture and morale. Segregation laws similar to the United States legalized restrictions on Africans, including consumption of hard liquor, restrictions on being in European neighborhoods, limited property rights, and bans on inter-racial sex (only applicable to African men), demonstrate the paternalistic approach of the Belgian colony. Colonialism and missionary work combined to undermine Congolese cultural autonomy through the promotion of colonial domination through education, religion, and government.

         Science and an improved sense of humanity were important in the Belgian government’s attempts to repair its image after Leopold II and the Red Rubber Terror.[35] Science and anthropology, still in its infancy, would leave lasting negative legacies in the Congo and neighboring countries. Superior medical knowledge facilitated the European domination of the African continent; in the Belgian Congo, it would be an agent of cultural erosion. In response to malaria and sleeping sickness crises, the Belgians decreed that all Congolese people would be given medical documentation cards.[36] These cards tracked and restricted the movements of the Congolese population and gave physicians in the colonies who issued the cards a great deal of power.[37] They were the people who could grant travel exceptions and restrictions. According to Van Reybrouck, this system of classification had five negative consequences: the restriction of the Congolese to move as they pleased, an eroded sense of belonging in native communities, a class of intermediaries under colonial auspices that furthered ethnic tensions, dissolution of larger ethnicities due to spatially restricted areas, and a tighter bureaucratic grip on the Congolese population.[38]

         The Belgians were determined to avoid making the same mistake as Leopold II when he did not attempt to understand the people whose labor and lives provided his fortune. Belgian government encouraged ethnographic studies in the Congo, and the Bureau International d’Ethnographe eventually compiled over six thousand research pages.[39] Many of these ethnographies were clouded by white supremacy views of Africans, and anthropology was not entirely divorced from Christianity’s desire to win converts and justify colonialism.[40] The rise in popularity of ethnographies resulted in entire wings of museums dedicated to separating people into categories based on colonial science inspired by social Darwinism. The policies developed by science and anthropology during this era significantly affected the Congo by dividing the population into races and ethnic groups that the Congolese would broadly adopt as their identities. The social merit cards the colony would hand out to those they deemed culturally evolved eerily resemble the identification cards that were an essential component of how the Rwandan genocide was carried out.[41]

         Paternalism in the era of the Belgian Congo led to a largely uneducated populace. Attitudes of white supremacy dictated that Congolese people not be given too much responsibility, only receiving basic literacy and broadly being trained in Christian morals and prepared for working in the colony. Some Congolese who showed aptitude were allowed to study in Belgian seminaries or were educated to become office clerks or assistant nurses. This produced a small but influential class of Congolese intelligentsia. Educated in Europe, many men who would make up this class developed a sense of Pan-African nationalism.[42] Major economic transformations in urban and mining centers began to expose colonialism's contradictions, and peasant and worker classes began to embrace the Congo intelligentsia to form an anti-colonial alliance.[43]