Death and Domination in the Congo: The First Global Shout-Out

 

“Everywhere I hear the same news of the Congo Free State – rubber and murder, slavery in its worst form.” E. J. Glave, Congo Free State administrator, Century Magazine (1897).

On November 15, 1908 Leopold II, King of Belgium formally renounced his personal control of the Congo Free State which immediately was placed under the administration of the Belgian Parliament and renamed the Belgian Congo. Leopold had no intention of surrendering his personal property without a long and arduous fight but changed his mind after he became the object of  such intense hatred and negative publicity that he succumbed to the political pressure and gave in. Even after he had signed away all rights to his possession a host of British and American newspapers continued to post headlines exposing new atrocities reported to have taken place in the Congo. Numerous articles and an outpouring of “Letters to the Editor” called for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to try him as a criminal and hang him for his “heinous offenses”.   Unfortunately the ICC was a fledgling judicial institution  in the early 1900’s and did not have the legal authority to render an official verdict or impose a sentence but numerous citizens around the world felt that it was time to give the court “some teeth” and allow it to formally try King Leopold II of Belgium and convict him for his “crimes against humanity”.

But how was it that the good citizens of the world came to hear about Leopold and his systemized exploitation of the Congo in the first place?  Reports about the “horrid enslavement of the natives” began to surface in official mission communications handed to a Dr. H. Gratton Guinness and then sent back to the Harley Missionary Training Institute in East London. These were the same missionaries who had been invited into the Congo Free State by Leopold himself to “Christianize the natives.”  Dr Henry Grattan Guinness became particularly outspoken about the horrendous abuses described to him by the missionaries in the region who were outraged by the methods employed by the Force Publique against the villagers especially the use of torture and dismemberment. Although the Belgian authorities challenged the accuracy of Dr. Guinness’ claims, the eye-witness accounts would not be dismissed so easily and were eventually turned over by the Mission Society to British journalists in London. Dr. Guinness was a highly respected physician, missionary, protestant preacher, evangelist, and author who had a large following of supporters both in England and in Ireland. He had spent a full year traveling a 3, 600 mile course on the Congo River and its tributaries charged with investigating the conditions and potential of  missionary service in that region. In his role as Mission Secretary he made visits to all of the missionary stations belonging to the Congo Balold Mission.

http://www.historicism.com/Guinness/legacy.htm

In 1877 The Livingstone Inland Mission to the Congo was first envisioned by the Baptist minister Alfred Tilly after he heard about Stanley’s journey into this area of Africa. Henry and his wife were members of the Mission Committee and ran the East London Training Institute for Home and Foreign Missions so they were charged with preparing the first recruits. Fifty missionaries along with Guinness and his wife left for the Congo. In 1878 the Livingston Inland Mission was the first mission to be established in this region. It had originally been planned that the mission would be self-supporting but this failed to happen. The first missionaries suffered from a host of tropical diseases, inadequate equipment, and a lack of support from the Belgian administrators in the area even though Leopold himself  had pledged his support at the beginning of the project. By1884 the lack of resources and the illness of Mrs. Guinness forced Dr. Guinness to hand the mission over to the care of the American Baptist Missionary Union and the Swiss Missionary Fellowship.

 Edmund Dene Morel was the Head of Congo Trade for the Liverpool shipping company, Elder Dempster which had been awarded the shipping contract between Antwerp, Belgian and the port city of Boma located in the Congo Free State. Morel who had been educated in France as a child was fluent in the French language and so the company sent him to  Belgium to serve as Elder Dempster’s  business agent there. Once he had settled into their offices he was able to study the Congo accounts and cargo manifests in detail. After a careful examination of these records he uncovered the exploitative nature behind Leopold’s business practices especially in regards to his collection of rubber and ivory.  While in this position he was also privy to the first –hand accounts told to him by English traders and seamen sent by Elder Dempster to the Congo export stations to collect the shipments. They described in detail the abusive conditions endured by the villagers under the corvee system imposed upon them by Leopold’s business agents. Corvée is an unpaid labor practice used with individuals required to pay taxes but with no cash or coin with which to settle their debts. It was usually imposed upon them by a state or  ruler. It was first used in feudal times where the taxee agreed to work a certain number of days without compensation in order to pay off what was owed to the ruler or administrator. Leopold had amended this system so that  his laborers were required to work non-stop every day of their lives for  no monetary compensation whatsoever. And if they refused to comply with  his demands he killed them off or mutilated members of their families. Not only did he  distort the system but he eventually reshaped it into one of the cruelest forms of enslaved labor ever implemented by a ruler.

 Morel’s outrage over Leopold’s uncontested domination of  the Congolese people eventually led him to begin writing about the injustice of it all. In 1900, Morel repeatedly lashed out against Leopold’s polices in articles published in a weekly magazine called Speaker. By1902, Morel retired from Elder Dempster then dedicated his life to exposing the human rights abuses taking place in the Congo Free State. His articles were so well received that he was soon hired as an editor of a new periodical, called West Africa. In 1903 he founded his own magazine, The West African Mail, an illustrated weekly journal in which he conducted a relentless campaign against Leopold, his Belgian Colonialists, and the actions of the Force Publique. Morel also published several pamphlets and his first book, Affairs of West Africa. He became a passionate watchdog who alerted the British Empire to the extent of Leopold’s inhumanity to his  subjects. His horrendous descriptions so outragesd the citizens of Europe and the United States that they began to  formally petition their governments to intervene on  behalf of these “innocents” to stop the torture and the slaughter.

As certain of his articles were reprinted byAmerican and London dailies Morel became a “Man of Influence” around London. Eventually  he agreed to take part in public lectures speaking out against Leopold in community halls and private homes. He proved to be a gifted and persuasive orator and  became so popular throughout Europe that even King Leopold II was forced to acknowledge his scathing diatribes. The King was so unsettled by Morel’s relentless condemnation of him in the world press that he begged the owners of certain British tabloids to intercede on his behalf and see to it that Morel was “stopped” from defaming “his good name”.

Eventually the Aborigines’ Protection Society acted on the “disturbing news” brought back to them by the surviving members of the Congo missions. This Quaker- initiated Society was the first international human rights organization, founded in 1837 to protect the health and well-being as well as the sovereign, legal, and religious rights of indigenous peoples subjected by the colonial powers. By1832 Britain had formally abolished the slave trade and by the 1880’s there was a large population of Brits and Americans of both sexes firmly devoted to the eradication of any form of slavery around the world. The APS continued until 1909 when it became known as the Anti–Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society. It is currently called Anti- Slavery International and can be accessed at 

http://www.antislavery.org/english/

The APS sponsored the creation of written materials such as tracts, pamphlets, annual reports and a widely- respected journal entitled The Colonial Intelligencer. By 1889 ,the writer Henry Richard Fox-Bourne had been named editor of the Intelligencer and Chair of the Society. Bourne began collecting private testimonies about the atrocities committed in the Congo and in 1902 published his book, Civilization in Congoland: A Story of International Wrongdoing. The book was well accepted in literary circles around London and New York City and went on to further fuel the righteous indignation of more and more of the citizenry living on the Continent. Also in 1902 Joseph Conrad, a Polish-born novelist who had immigrated to England published a three part series called “Heart of Darkness” in Blackwood Magazine causing an uproar of criticism against Leopold’s brutal treatment of the Congolese villagers. In it, his hero arrives  in the Congo and observes the abject poverty and the inhuman conditions imposed on the tribes living along the river by the white colonialists  engaged in trade there. Soon after it was published as a novella and was read by thousands more in Europe and the United States.

In 1903 the British House of Commons passed a resolution in response to the recommendations of some very influential members of Parliament and at the behest of the Aborigines’ Protection Society to investigate the disturbing headlines pasted across the front pages of London newspapers and magazines at the time. The British consul at Boma, a Roger Casement, was assigned the task of investigating the charges of inhumane practices leveled against Leopold and his administrators. This was no easy task. Leopold had spies everywhere and in time all of the white traders in the area had to have been aware of why Casement was making regular visits to the surrounding villages. The Congo was full of natural dangers and the Belgians stationed around Casement had alreadydemonstrated that they were more than comfortable with causing mayhem and murder. Casement must have feared for his own life on many occasions. But in a heroic effort he pushed on and in 1904 submitted his final report which confirmed Morel’s accusations and further inflamed an already exasperated population  of sympathizers in the United States and Europe.

The entire summary was about forty pages long.  He added another twenty pages to the report filled with first-hand testimonials describing in great detail the murders, mutilations, kidnappings, and beatings of the villagers by the Force Publique in their attempt to enforce the policies established by Leopold and his colonial regulators. After the British Parliament received his original report a copy was sent to the Belgian Parliament and to the other 12 nations who were the original signatories at the Berlin Agreement of 1885. The British Parliament along with the United States of America demanded another meeting of the 14 signatory powers right away in order to review the original Berlin Agreement. When the report was made public, the Congo Reform Association headed by Morel and vigorously supported by Casement demanded that the Belgian government take legal action at once. The Belgian officials complied by forcing an outraged Leopold to establish a Belgian Committee of Inquiry. While the world waited this commission reviewed all of the evidence and ultimately agreed with Casement’s findings. In 1905 they ordered the immediate arrest and imprisonment of the colonial official who had been convicted of murdering hundreds of native workers during a rubber-collection expedition in 1903.

Despite the 1904 report and the subsequent investigation in 1905, Leopold retained official control of his Congo Free State for three more years. It took until November 15,1908 for the Parliament of Belgium to annex Leopold’s Congo Free State and assume legal responsibility for all administrative services. Leopold II, King of Belgium died in December of 1909. Several of his household staff testified that he refused to let go of the anger he felt at being made to “give away” his personal property and that he showed no remorse for his actions. Whatever the reason, the man  who had personally engineered the death of so many finally joined the ranks of his victims and by 1912 the members of the Congo Reform Association were able to disband once and for all.

In spite of or maybe because of his humanitarian efforts, Sir Roger Casement, who had been knighted by the King of England for his noble actions on behalf of the Congolese people, was hanged for sabotage and espionage against the Crown on August 3rd, 1916. It was proven  that the Irish Nationalist had met with German officials to elicit their support in a rebellion against the British government in order to free Ireland. The plot behind the revolution called the  Easter Rising was uncovered by British agents in Dublin and Casement was captured then quickly jailed.  He was subsequently tried and convicted of treason. And the British parliament who had so highly praised his actions in the service of humanity branded him a “dirty homosexual” and purposefully released his diaries. Today these are known as  the Black Diaries. Discrete entries from his diaries were released during the trial by British authorities who deliberately used them to seal his fate and ensure that he would receive the death penalty for his crimes. The mercy and respect for all human beings that Casement had worked so hard to establish during his lifetime was withheld from him by the very country he had once served so well.  And in the end Roger Casement, human rights activist,  hung from a rope on the gallows in Pentonville prison for intefering with the course of British rule while Leopold of Belgium, murderer of millions died  peacefully in his bed.

Kat Nickerson   Kingston    USA

A Legacy of Pain: King Leopold II

 

 

 Ntaganda Update: President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has announced that General Bosco Ntaganda should be arrested and face a military tribunal in the DRCongo instead being made to stand trial at the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands.  (Washington Post, 4/11/2012)

The term, “colonialism” means “domination of a superior power over a weaker one” and suitably describes the exploitation and indoctrination that occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1885 until World War II. Most of the civil wars that continue to plague East Africa as well the systemized rape of women, torture, and dismemberment regularly practiced by rebel militia groups and even the standing armies in the DR Congo today were initially introduced as effective domination strategies by the most powerful countries in Europe beginning in the late 1900’s as a way to “introduce and maintain order”.

It all began with the birth of “African Colonialism” at the Berlin Conference of 1885.  At this formal gathering, representatives from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, as well the small country of Belgium sat down together to divide up and section off all of the land south of Sub-Saharan Africa except for the lands previously awarded to the countries of Ethiopia and Liberia. Belgium was a relatively new monarchy at the time having only just established its independence from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830. Great Britain and France clearly were in need of raw materials and trade alliances with which to support their countries’ growing domestic industries while Italy had joined together with Germany in 1871 forming an imposing alliance.

The “Congo Conference” was hosted by Germany and the resulting General Act of the Berlin Conference was established to regulate trade and settlement practices within the colonies. In order to do this a committee of European  leaders agreed to impose new borders onto existing tribal kingdoms – many times separating centuries- old ethnic groups in the process and distorting territorial boundaries that had previously served to divide feuding clans. Each country pledged to launch immediate settlement plans, man and staff their colonial governments, and headed out to take control of their new possessions; completing this task in 10 short years between 1880 and 1890. And as for the claims and the rights of the peoples and ethnic groups already living on these lands, you ask?  Well their rights and claims were never considered at all. The residents of these lands were deemed to be incapable of ruling themselves and so as part of the colonization agreement each nation pledged to “end the slave trade, bring God to the local residents, and establish order throughout the colonies” but it was clear as one Ugandan colleague so eloquently stated that their purpose in coming was “not to elevate but to dominate”.

And no one person managed to do so with as much cruelty or avarice as King Leopold II of Belgium. It is important that the reader understand that by the conclusion of the Berlin Conference Leopold had been granted exclusive rights to the region of the world now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo- not his country, his government, nor his people. The Congo Free State as he called it belonged to him and him alone. He set to work organizing his colony for one purpose only – to  increase his personal wealth. He hired the services of none other than Henry Morton Stanley of, “Dr. Livingston, I presume” to sign treaties with the kings of the most important tribes in the Congo in order to present undeniable evidence that they had accepted his sovereign authority over them and their people.

He then concentrated on building a private army that would enforce his rules throughout the Congo Free State which he named the Force Publique.  He presented commissions to a wide range veteran officers and mercenaries from around the world. His officers had to be white Europeans while his enlisted men, dressed in blue uniforms and red fezzes were selected from among other African tribal groups in North Congo, Zanzibar, and other countries around West Africa like Ghana and Cameroon. Leopold only hired seasoned military officers, who had actually fought in battle and he assembled a force of war- hardened troops accustomed to killing and punishing to accomplish their goals. The Force Publique resurrected a well- known set of military strategies based on the art of intimidation and subjugation. These procedures had been commonly used in European warfare when a smaller force sought to intimidate civilians living in the area into submission in order to eliminate the possibility of a whole -scale rebellion against them. The smaller force deliberately employed terrifying procedures and specific forms of psychological torture known to be so repugnant to their enemies that they would immediately “cease and desist” preventing any further threat of retaliation.

These soldiers were deliberately trained to carry out the most atrocious acts imaginable towards the Congolese people  in order to remove any semblance of self-efficacy or control and to destroy any confidence the villagers’ once had in their ability to strike back.  Lastly, the Force Publique used what was most valuable to their victims such as the threat of harm to wives and children to further control Leopold’s workers. These strategies had first been designed for use in European conflicts where troops had found themselves outnumbered in enemy territory but now they would be customized and reworked by the Force Public in order to allow them to effectively manage large groups of enslaved laborers.

“Colonial regulations” were applied with impunity against a people whom the soldiers had already determined were inferior and replaceable. Despite all of their advanced weaponry and superior military strength the Force Publique did not have the tactical advantage and they knew it. They were a small number of men residing in a foreign country surrounded by a superior force of combatants capable of waging war on them at any time. They had heard reports that some of the villages in the outer bush practiced  Cannibalism and that information further intiminated them. So they took the offense and systematically broke the “spirit of the people” around them in order to protect themselves from the threat of rebellion and to ensure that Leopold’s obsessive demands would be carried out to the letter.

Do these tactics sound familiar then? They should. These are the same techniques used by any number of rebel militia forces in the Ugandan Civil War, the First and Second Congo Wars, Darfur, and in the War for Independence in Rwanda.  Kony and his Lords Liberation Army did not create these methods but they certainly have applied them successfully.  All of East Africa has mastered subjugation procedures especially well and use them whenever they need to render a group of civilians submissive and compliant. Congolese warlords use them  as effectively today as the Force Publique did over a century ago.

Leopold’s first economic endeavor was the accumulation of ivory. His marksmen, in their quest for wealth, slaughtered thousands of male and female elephants just to hack off their tusks. The ivory itself would be eventually fashioned into jewelry and other decorative objects such as pipes, billiard balls, and piano keys. There are reports that his hunters trapped and slaughtered upwards of two hundred elephants at a time leaving their carcasses to swell and rot in the intense, tropical sun.  The train that Stanley had built had not been completed so Leopold needed a way to transport his ivory tusks to the coast. He began using local tribesmen as porters to hand-carry these tusks along dangerous pathways that had been cut through the thick rain forests in order to deliver them to his seaport where they would be loaded on ships and taken back to Belgium.  If a man became sick or overcome with exhaustion on the trip he would be left to die on the path while his friends were forced to move on without him. Leopold demanded that his ivory shipments be transported in the dry and wet seasons causing his porters to die from a host of life-threatening maladies such as mud slides, snake bites, malaria, blood infections, and wild animal attacks.

 At the dawn of the 20^th century the vulcanization of rubber helped establish the bicycle and automobile industry. There was an immense need for raw rubber from which to make things such as tires, hot water bottles, and rain coats. Leopold intended to capitalize on his second opportunity to increase his wealth.

As enormous region of the Congo Free State was covered by a vast tropical rainforest that contained rubber trees. These trees could be harvested by laborers for the sap they contained.  Leopold found himself doubly blessed with an unlimited supply of raw rubber to export and an enormous work force  of tribesmen that could be used to collect the sap.  He ordered his native populations into the rain forests and if they objected he killed them and/or maimed their wives and children sometimes putting entire villages to the torch. Within a decade Leopold’s rubber extraction operation became a especially lucrative business so much so that the French in their colonies in the northwest Congo, the Portuguese in Angola, and the Germans in Cameroon developed similar rubber extraction enterprises based on Leopold’s use of enslaved labor.

Leopold was such a severe taskmaster that even his own troops were subject to stringent quota systems.  Each soldier was made to account for the use of every bullet fired by submitting one hand from the villager he had killed as proof. Many soldiers were unable to account for all of their spent bullets and so feared that their salaries would be docked for these omissions. They solved this problem by cutting off the hands of live villagers instead then turning those in to balance their accounts. Over time mutilations became the accepted mode of punishment for even minor infractions. Hands and feet were cut off in retribution for real as well as imagined offenses or because the workers had not met their rubber quotas for the month. One of the most painful photographs I have ever seen from that period was of a Congolese worker who sits looking down at five hands that have been laid out in front of him, one hand had been amputated from each one of his five daughters as punishment for not meeting his rubber quota.  

One of the reasons the Force Publique became so outrageous in the number of people it killed was the fact that it never lacked for more laborers; if one man died, another could replace him. It has been reported that when Leopold was finally made to sell the Congo Free State  to the Belgium government, a mere 10 years later between 10 and 13 million people were dead from murder, mutilation, starvation, exhaustion, or disease. 

The deliberate use of mutilation to subdue a larger group should also sound familiar. The use of torture, mutilation and rape  is currently being used by rebel armies, guerillas, and terrorists throughout East Africa. “There is nothing that crushes the human spirit so irrevocably as having to endure a piece of your body being hacked off,” stated one of my dear Ugandan friends. “I would like to see just how well Mandela (referring to Nelson Mandela) would have carried on after they hacked his nose and lips off! These are primal fears that overwhelm the simple people who have have been subjected to such atrocities. Things like that change you forever and you would do anything at all to stop it. Those soldiers know this and still they do it to innocent men, women, and children. Damn them! May they never be forgiven!”

And as one of my other sources confided, “What better way to crush a woman for good than to impregnate her with the enemy’s child?”

What should scare us even more is the reason these atrocities were committed in the first place. If I could get Kony to speak truthfully about why he harms the people of his Acholi villages, I am sure that he would not mention emotions such as hatred or revenge- he only ever acted out of fear. He struck first just as the Force Publique did a century ago.  He knows that he does not have a sufficient number of men to fend off an attack by all of the people living in an area at once so he prevents that from happening by systematically crushing them before the group realizes that it had the power to retaliate all along. But the subjugation techniques so well developed and applied  by the Force Publique never really went away.  They were perserved in detailed accounts passed down from grandfather to son to grandson around the village campfires in the evening. The horrendous tortures and brutal massacres of the Congolese people were never really forgotten and eventually were remembered best by the young men; the ones who most recently ressurected the violence and intimidation in order to wage their own unique brand of  civil war. 

I truly wish I could reassure you that once King Leopold II had been removed from power and the Belgium government took control conditions improved for the people of the Belgian Congo but that did not happen. Although the name of the colony changed- the lives of the people did not. But that explanation will have to wait until my next post

Kat Nickerson    Kingston       RI       USA

For those of you who would like to know more about this topic read  

King Leopold’s Ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa

By  Adam Hochschild, ©1998,  Pan MacMillian    ISBN – 0-330-49233-0