1

missionaries and traders

The history of the Congo long precedes contact with those Europeans who claimed to have first ‘discovered’ the country. The archaeological evidence has allowed some writers to describe a Sangoan people, who inhabited the region of central Africa some 50,000 years ago. They worked with choppers and scrapers and travelled between caves lit by fire.¹ The first known inhabitants, however, were pygmies, hunters and gatherers living in the forests of the north and north-east. The Egyptians knew of pygmies in Africa probably from the time of the fifth dynasty (c. 2500 BCE) when an expedition brought back ‘a dwarf’ from the land of Punt. Pharaoh Pepi II of the sixth dynasty (around 2300 BCE) had images of pygmies drawn on his tomb. By the last centuries BCE, small numbers of Bantu-speaking people had migrated into Congo from the north and west (today’s Nigeria and Cameroon) and settled in the south. The Bantu were agriculturalists who employed Iron Age technology.

The linguist David Lee Schoenbrun suggests that the population of the Eastern Congo was part of a trading bloc that extended from present-day Katanga to Lake Victoria. The peoples of the Great Lakes ‘represented an enormous variety of historical traditions in ancient Africa’. They included hunters and gatherers, fishermen and settled farmers, potters and ironworkers, merchants and traders. The evidence of their settlement includes Stone Age sites on Lake Kivu, as well as ceramic ‘Urewe ware’, from around 700 BCE. Many different languages were spoken. Farmers used pottery and metal, settling on lands with good soil and rainfall. Deposits of charcoal have been found from smelting furnaces, dating back to around 200 CE. ‘Forests were larders where communities could trap animals, collect medicines, produce lumber and find fibres for clothing from sources like the bark cloth-bearing Ficus tree. The dense, wet landscape provided people with a rich diet, and useful tools.²

Although the first settled farmers may already have been working the land, agriculture only took off after the use of iron became widespread. Later farmers used pottery and metal, settling on lands with good soil and rainfall. Agricultural innovation took place: around 500 CE we have evidence of local peoples eating millet and cowpeas. People also learned to keep cattle for their milk and blood. Cattle herding encouraged the creation and appropriation of surpluses, and the rise of hierarchical societies. So too did control of the trade in valuable minerals.

The Mongo, who remain in the Great Forest area of the Congo today, inhabited the forest regions east of Mbandaka from at least the first century CE, when they left traces of their life as hunters and yam farmers. Their main strategies for gathering food included gathering, trapping and hunting. Their diet included fruit, palm kernels, mushrooms, caterpillars, snails, termites, spices, root drinks, monkeys, antelopes, boars, elephants, fish, maize, groundnuts, beans, yams, bananas and oil palms.³ The dense, wet landscape provided people with a rich diet, and useful tools. ‘Forests were larders where communities could trap animals, collect medicines, produce lumber and find fibres for clothing from sources like the bark cloth-bearing Ficus tree.⁴ Bananas were especially important in the central Congo: they thrived in wet, dense rainforests, where the main alternative crops (yams) often rotted. By around 700 CE copper was being traded on a 1,500-mile journey between the Katanga region and the northern lakes. Its use was a badge of leadership. Cattle herding encouraged the rise of monarchies and even empires.

Relatively little is known about the development of the more complex societies but a more complex division of labour, into chiefs, diviners, doctors and mediums had evolved in the region by around 1000 CE.⁵ Early kingdoms included the empire of the Luba, founded in the early sixteenth century and based around lakes Kisale and Upemba in central Shaba. The empire of the Bakongo was founded around the fourteenth century at the mouth of the river and included parts of today’s Angola as well as today’s Congo. This empire came about as the Bakongo migrated south across the Congo river. Their main commerce was in ivory and hides.

After the fifteenth century, food crops, such as manioc, increased the range of agricultural products, but population densities were never high and agriculture remained based, for the most part, on shifting cultivation rather than settled agriculture. Even today, population density in the Congo is relatively low, about 22 people per square kilometre, and unevenly distributed. Population density in the Great Forest is only about half of the national average, with stretches of several tens of thousands of square kilometres virtually empty because of the dense forest cover. It is here that the pygmies still mainly live, although other groups also inhabit the forest areas. At the edges of the forests, where the trees have been cleared for settlement, population densities are often higher than the national average. At the northern edge of the Great Forest population densities increase up to twenty people per square kilometre and then drop to one or two per square kilometre only in the extreme north of the country towards the Central African Republic. The extreme south is also sparsely populated, with between one and three people per square kilometre.

The land upon which the Bakongo settled was at the western tip of a vast country, little of which they claimed. Its geography included savannas, high plateaus, volcanoes, lakes, rivers and rainforest. The most important feature was the River Congo itself. Its waters are drained from a plateau deep in the African interior. From the edge of this plateau, the river descends 1,000 feet in 220 miles of falls, rapids and cascades. So powerful is the river that on joining the ocean, it carves a canyon in the ocean bed, 100 miles long, and up to 4,000 feet deep. We can understand, then, why the Bakongo held mainly to the west, and knew little of the interior. It was simply impossible to travel upstream by canoe. The land that locals knew was remarkable enough. Even now, the diminished wildlife of the Congo still includes numerous varieties of birds and insects, along with, lions, elephants, okapi, chimpanzees, hippos, gorillas, bonobos, antelope, bushrat and crocodile – a diversity of species. The Congo also holds, of course, a vast mineral wealth.

For the history of the Congo, we have to rely on written sources, and for earlier periods these are rare. We are forced to depend on accounts produced from the outside. Our problem is that Europeans in particular knew little of Africa’s historical development. Trying to use these sources is like peering into a shallow river: images come back to us, but they are vague and distorted, and we struggle to make sense of the real history beneath them. In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus reports a story told of ‘a group of wild young fellows’ who travelled south from Libya into the African interior and, after crossing the desert and travelling far to the west, came to a ‘vast tract of marshy country’ inhabited by ‘little men, of less than middle height’, and to ‘a town, all the inhabitants of which were of the same small stature, and all black. A great river with crocodiles in it flowed past the town from west to east’. The description may refer to the Niger river or to the Bodele Depression northeast of Lake Chad, now dry. Herodotus also reports Phoenician sailors circumnavigating the continent in a clockwise direction around the end of the seventh century or beginning of the sixth century BCE, and another voyage in the fifth century BCE down the west coast of Africa by Sataspes the Achaemenian, who reported to the Persian king Xerxes that, ‘at the most southerly point they had reached, they found the coast occupied by small men, wearing palm leaves’.⁶ Although Herodotus and his contemporaries usually named the whole continent ‘Libya’, the name ‘Africa’ is usually said to derive from the Greek word aphrike, meaning without cold.⁷

The Romans were familiar with the Mediterranean regions of North Africa, and with the trans-Saharan trade, which brought valuable goods from beyond the desert; but they knew little of the lands to the south. In the period after the decline of the Roman Empire, European knowledge of the continent remained limited, in part as a result of the Christian preoccupation with the Scriptures and with a world centred on Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and in part by force of political geography. Hostile Muslim rulers occupied the north of Africa and in any case European ships were incapable of travelling far to the south. Rumours filled the void. Sailors spoke of a Sea of Darkness, breathing with giant serpents. Other stories hinted of lands where gold, spices and precious stones might easily be found. One powerful tale was the twelfth-century legend of Prester John, a fabulously wealthy Christian ruler living on the east side of the Islamic empire. Stories of his empire were used to justify the Second and Third Crusades. Marco Polo even reported Prester John’s death.⁸ The destruction of the Mongol empire, and the rise of the Ming dynasty put a temporary end to these stories, as trading links between Europe and China were broken.

Africa was not unknown to Europeans at this time, particularly the coastal regions of the Maghreb and of Egypt, but there was virtually no knowledge of the vast regions south of the Sahara. Beyond the familiar world of the Mediterranean coastal areas and the Near East, few ventured to go. Rumours abounded, however, and the trans-Saharan trade revealed to the European merchants established in the cities of North Africa the wealth (in gold and ivory) of ‘black’ Africa, far to the south. Books described the incredible wealth of lands beyond the seas, the extraordinary challenges that awaited explorers and the strange people and monsters lying in wait to attack them. The storytellers usually had little first-hand knowledge of these exotic regions. Typical were the descriptions given by Mandeville’s Travels, fanciful accounts of travels in strange lands by an English squire who had never visited any of them. The legend of Prester John was also relocated to Africa.

In 1415, a Portuguese invasion captured the Moroccan city of Ceuta. Following this conquest, and increased access to the trans-Saharan trade, stories began to circulate in Europe of kingdoms south of the Sahara, in Mali, Ghana and Songhai, and cities in Timbuktu, Gao and Cantor. Into the middle years of the fifteenth century, Dom Henrique, the Portuguese ruler of Ceuta, still determined to find Prester John’s descendants.

As late as the early fifteenth century, the Venetian fleet, probably the most powerful in Europe at the time, consisted of boats dependent on rowers and was effectively confined to the Mediterranean. New developments in shipbuilding by the Portuguese and Spaniards, however, made further exploration into the Atlantic possible. From the 1440s onwards, the development of a 100-foot long ship, the caravel, enabled Portuguese sailors to travel greater distances. In 1482 Diogo Cão became the first European to visit the area of the modern Congo, when he reached the mouth of the Congo river and sailed a few miles upstream. It was the river that drew his interest. The Congo was the greatest river that any European had seen. For 20 leagues it emptied fresh water into the ocean. The waves breaking on the beach were an astonishing yellow colour, and the ocean was muddy-red as far as the eye could see. Cão recognized the importance of the Congo river as a possible source of transport and trade. He set up a stone pillar marking this Portuguese ‘discovery’. He claimed the river and lands around it for the Portuguese king.⁹

Cão regarded himself as the man who discovered these territories, yet the empire of the Bakongo already possessed a ruler, Nzinga Nkuwu, who led some 2–3 million people. The population of the capital Banza (later São Salvador) was around 40,000. Its citizens traded shells, sea-salt, fish, pottery, wicker, raffia, copper and lead.¹⁰ Nkuwu’s authority was semi-feudal in character. Local lords had the right to control land, in return for which they paid taxes to their king. His people were skilled in iron- and copper-working and especially weaving. They grew bananas, yams, and fruit; they kept goats, pigs and cattle and fished. From palm trees, they manufactured oil, wine, vinegar and a form of bread. The society was prosperous and self-sufficient. Yet the Bakongo were said to lack any concept of seasons, or a calendar, and the wheel had not been discovered. Cão met Nzinga Nkuwu, and encouraged him to send ambassadors to meet the King of Portugal. Cão then continued on his travels, heading south.¹¹

In the aftermath of Cão’s visit, Nkuwu opened up his kingdom to Portuguese influences, and soon missionaries, soldiers and noblemen could be found at his court. Following further visits in 1491 and 1500, Nzinga Nkuwu even agreed to convert to Catholicism, starting Africa’s first Catholic dynasty. In 1506, Nzinga Mbemba Affonso succeeded him to the throne. Affonso was an intelligent, literate man, who understood that his country might gain from certain forms of European learning, their science, woodworking and om masonry, their weapons and their goods.¹² The challenge was to allow selective modernisation, to take the best parts of Western knowledge, while declining the worst parts, the cruelty and the greed.

Over time, the actions of the Portuguese began to alarm the Bakongo. Their worries grew as the Portuguese extended and professionalised the slave trade. Prior to then, slaves had been part of the domestic economy, and were even sometimes exchanged, but the trade had never been central to the economy of the region. Under Portuguese rule, the number of slaves increased, and their economic role grew. As well as holding lands in today’s Morocco, the Portuguese were also settled in today’s Brazil, where they set Africans to work, digging and working mines, and harvesting coffee. Slaves were also sent to the plantations of the Caribbean. In order to work these lands at their full capacity, a regular supply of new labour was needed. In the land of the Bakongo, Portuguese traders began to promote feuds between neighbours, knowing that any conflict would result in greater numbers of slaves. Young men set out to work as masons, teachers or priests; but then, faced with the actual dynamics of the existing Portuguese economy, they soon realised that their fortune would be made more quickly if they learned to trade in slaves instead.

Nzinga Affonso was a remarkable, learned man. In 1518 his son was consecrated as a Roman Catholic bishop, the last black man to hold such a position for four centuries. Affonso became a great witness to the horror of sixteenth century Portuguese colonialism. Many of his letters survive, including one sent to King João III of Portugal in 1526:

Each day the traders are kidnapping our people … children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family…. We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass…. It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.¹³

The ruler of the Bakongo understood that many of the richest of his people were complicit in the slave trade. So taken were they by these new Western goods that they were willing to sell even their relatives. The only way to stop his people from doing this was to limit their access to the West. Of course, Affonso was no better than his times. He did not argue that all slavery should be abolished. He felt rather that it should be regulated, and conducted with respect to the society in which it took place. The Portuguese system horrified him because it was incapable of recognising any limit. In 1526, Affonso reported that the Portuguese were inciting his nobles to rise against the throne. By the mid-1530s, 5,000 Bakongo slaves were being sent west each year. Some used the passage to rise up against the traders.¹⁴ In their absence, the society from which the slaves had been taken was reduced almost to penury. It was no longer able to defend itself from its rivals, descending from lands to the east.

One particular group, the Yakas, or Gagas, or Jagas, attacked the Bakongo from the mid-1500s onwards. Andrew Battell, a sailor originally from Leigh in Essex, observed these fierce warriors at close quarter. He came to Africa having been captured by the Portuguese. Battell described the Yakas as a bellicose people, harvesting palms for wine, pillaging and raiding, quite unlike the urbanised and more peaceful Bakongo. Battell lived among the Yakas for two years as a prisoner, before escaping, and later publishing his memoirs. He reported:

The Yakas spoile the Countrie. They stay no longer in a place, than it will afford them maintenance. And then in Harvest time they arise, and settle themselves in the fruitfullest place they can find; and doe reape their Enemies Corne, and take their Cattell. For they will not sowe, nor plant, nor bring up any Cattell, more then they take by Warres.¹⁵

In 1571, the Bakongo, perhaps by virtue of their more productive economic base and better-organised state system, or possibly as a result of access via the Portuguese traders to muskets and gunpowder, finally defeated the Yakas. In the years that followed, a number of attempts were made to rebuild their society and to establish a new relationship with the West, based on fairer relations of trade. Western rugs, beads, mirrors, knives, swords, muskets, gunpowder, copper, tin and alcohol have all been found in the ruins of the towns.¹⁶ Yet the series of wars between the Bakongo and their neighbours served to undermine the older, more urban civilisation of the Bakongo. Soon the Bakongo were neither secure nor free.

One legacy of the Portuguese conquests was a diminution of the power of the Bakongo kings in relation to other regional rulers, who had previously recognised their sovereignty. The seventeenth century saw many wars between the different peoples of the region. Lisbon made a series of attempts to re-establish a base at the capital São Salvador, which failed. The city itself was destroyed in 1678. Another Capuchin mission was expelled in 1717. In 1857 the German traveller Dr. Bastian found São Salvador ‘an ordinary native town’, with few monuments of its past.¹⁷

New societies flourished on the ruins of the Kongo and Yaka societies. The kingdom of Kuba was founded in the sixteenth century by a federation of immigrants, the Bushong. They settled in the area along the Kasai and Sankuru rivers. Beside the Bushong groups, the Kuba federation incorporated among its members the previous inhabitants of the region, the Twa and the Kete, who continued to live alongside the new arrivals. The Kuba monarch was elected for a limited, four-year term. Women were eligible to stand for office. The kingdom lasted till 1910.¹⁸ Further south, there were several large civilisations, based in present-day Katanga. A Luba state was formed by clan fusion perhaps before 1500, a Lunda state before 1450. The Luba had four kingdoms by the seventeenth century: Kikonja, Kaniok, Kalundwe and Kasongo. The Lunda state arose to Luba’s south-west, covering about 400 by 800 miles with two tributary states by 1760, Yaka and Kazembe, each with a capital so named. A Bemba empire began to form towards the end of the eighteenth century under Lunda pressure. These civilisations traded with the Portuguese but were not conquered. The Luba empire broke into Yeke and Swahili–Arab spheres in the 1870s and 1880s, while Yeke and Chokwe broke up the Kazembe and Lunda states.¹⁹

Despite the destruction of their main allies and their own defeat, the Portuguese retained an interest in the region. In the late eighteenth century, Lisbon-backed African and mulatto traders ( pombeiros) traded with the kingdom of the Kazembe to the south. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Arab, Swahili and Nyamwezi traders from present-day Tanzania also penetrated the highlands of the Congo from the east, and began a trade there in slaves and ivory. A lively Arabic literature began, describing travels through northern and central Africa.²⁰ Some traders established their own states. One merchant, Muhammad bin Hamad, or Tippu Tip, from Zanzibar ruled much of eastern Congo, into the 1890s.²¹

As late as the 1870s, the region remained a patchwork of disparate tribes and rulers with no political coherence. This last point is of great importance. For while the British and the French empires in Africa were secured at the cost of great battles, in several of which the colonisers were defeated, the later Belgian empire of the Congo seems to have been achieved without the same military costs. The future rulers of the country were able to capture it without significant conflict, or, more accurately, without their wars ending in the sorts of defeats that would have been noticed in the West. Indeed, in doing so, the new Belgian rulers of the Congo convinced many people that theirs was a new, different and consensual empire. Outside the Congo, it took many years before the true horrors of the conquest became known.

Livingstone and Stanley

By the start of the nineteenth century, Portuguese power had long been in decline. New imperial nations had come to the fore, including Britain, France and Germany. America held its own African colony, the semi-independent state of Liberia. The greatest of all these powers were the British, for they not only possessed the territorial advantage of established naval bases in many regions, they were also the most important industrial power of their day. As the British explorers finally made headway into the interior of Africa, they searched for river routes. Mungo Park travelled through Gambia and Niger seeking the origins of the Nile.²² Other explorers developed an idea that the Niger river flowed south into the sea. One claim was even that it ended at the mouth of the Congo. Attempts were made to prove this theory. In 1816, Captain J.K. Tuckey lost seventeen men upstream of Boma on an ill-fated expedition. The survivors succeeded in mapping just 150 miles of new territory. Further exploration was discouraged. Public interest was renewed, however, following the successful exploration of the Niger. A new goal was needed, and dreams of discovering the White Nile’s source encouraged a new fever of exploration. Some geographers argued that Lake Victoria was its source, while others spoke up for Lake Tanganyika. Richard Burton advanced as far as Matadi in 1863. The explorer Dr David Livingstone set out to resolve the dispute.

Livingstone had been born to a poor family in Lanarkshire, Scotland. A prospector, missionary and occasional British consul, Livingstone made his name by exploring southern Africa, from the early 1840s onwards. As he progressed with missionary work he developed a desire to travel further and deeper into the continent. Livingstone’s mission was driven by a complex series of motives: philanthropy, a belief in the civilising work of commerce, the idea also that Africa was some new space with its history waiting to begin.²³ The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sponsored his expedition. The government’s hope was that any discovery would make vast new tracts of land available to religion and trade. Although Livingstone never saw Africans as his equal, he loved them with the Christian charity of a true Victorian. ‘We do not believe in any incapacity of the African in either mind or heart’, he wrote. ‘Reverence for royalty sometimes leads the mass of the people to submit to great cruelty, and even murder, at the hands of a depot or a madman; but on the whole, their rule is mild, and the same remark applies in a degree to the religion.’²⁴

Livingstone portrayed his work as a great civilising mission: to rescue the peoples of central and eastern African from being held as slaves by Arab traders. This mission resonated with the children of those who had supported previous campaigns against the British slave trade. For different reasons, the message also had an appeal to the propertied classes, the former slave-traders and their descendants. As may happen, the leading industrial power in the world, on reaching its position of sovereignty, had come to the conclusion that all trade should now take place on a footing of complete freedom. There should be as few tariffs as possible; the exploitation of slave labour was immoral and commercially unfair. From 1811 onwards, British agents had opposed the international trade in slaves, and the last slave market was closed in Zanzibar in 1873.²⁵ The British project was to demonstrate that there were other ways of relating to the continent. Considerable attention therefore focused on the Arab slavers of East Africa, a visible target, in contrast to the allied Spanish and Portuguese traders, who were tolerated even as they still sent slaves to Brazil.²⁶ Many Arab traders were of African descent. They were most active in the Swahili-speaking territories of modern Kenya and Tanzania. Having captured people there, the slavers sold them on in Persia or Madagascar, or in the Arabian Peninsula, or compelled them to work plantations in Africa itself.

In 1866, Livingstone set off on one further voyage of discovery. In the course of his travels, he discovered the Lualaba river, located in the south-east of modern-day Congo. Yet he had no means to report his find to the West. Three years passed, and there was no news. Rumours suggested that Livingstone had been killed. It was at this stage that James Gordon Bennett, the owner of the New York Herald saw the opportunity for a major scoop. He instructed a 28-year-old reporter, Henry Morton Stanley, to search for Livingstone. Stanley’s expedition would kindle a lifelong need for expedition in its author. Over the course of the next twenty years, this journalist did as much as anyone to found the later Belgian Empire in the Congo.

Stanley’s origins, like those of Livingstone, were obscure. One of five illegitimate children of a housemaid, Stanley had the name John Rowlands when he entered the workhouse, aged 6. At 18, he left Britain for America, where he served both sides and without distinction in the American Civil War. Certain traits of Stanley’s character were now evident: a pathological fear of women, an inability to work with talented co-workers, and an obsequious love of the aristocratic rich. In 1867, he reported the Indian wars for the Northern press. The following year, he was sent by the Herald to report on a British war with Abyssinia. Stanley had the foresight to bribe the clerks in Suez, ensuring that only his reports were sent back. Within days, he had converted a temporary posting into a permanent career.

Stanley’s claim was that his editor met him in Paris in 1869, where he was told, ‘Do what you think best, but find Livingstone!’ In fact, he spent the next twelve months dawdling, before taking 190 men with him into Africa. His book How I Found Livingstone records that Stanley picked up the track of Livingstone at Lake Tanganyika and followed them into unknown territory. His following narrative records the peril of swamps, crocodiles, disease and Arab slavers. Stanley was the only journalist to cover his own adventure. His two white companions both died on the journey. So did an uncounted number of black porters and guides, starved and whipped by their leader, or victims of the hostile environment. Stanley finally caught up with Livingstone at Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in 1871. When found, Livingstone was suffering from acute pneumonia and coughing blood. Stanley’s first apocryphal words were ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’

David Livingstone died in Zambia in 1873 without solving the mystery of the Nile. Yet his failure had produced a greater discovery. The Lualaba river led Europeans to the source of the Congo, the best road to central Africa. In 1874, Stanley returned, exploring the Congo from its upper reaches. He worked his followers at an extraordinary rate, as they trekked through the jungle. It was a hostile and unforgiving world. ‘The trees kept shedding their dew upon us like rain in great round drops’, Stanley wrote;

Every leaf seemed to be weeping. Down the boles and branches, creepers and vegetable cords, the moisture trickled and fell on us. Overhead the widespread branches in many interlaced strata, each branch heavy with broad thick leaves, absolutely shut out the daylight. We knew not whether it was a sunshine day or a dull, foggy, gloomy day, for we marched in a feeble, solemn twilight.²⁷

Stanley ordered deaths recklessly. He boasted of the nickname that the frightened Congolese gave him, Bula Matari, or the Breaker of Rocks.²⁸

Stanley finished his 11,000-kilometre journey in 1877. What astonished him was the realisation that the Lualaba, a north-flowing river, then turned west and became the Congo. Stanley told the readers of the Daily Telegraph, ‘This river is and will be the grand highway of commerce to West Central Africa.’²⁹ Despite the bluster, Stanley was inconsistent in his attitude. Sometimes he described the region of the Congo to his readers as an empty territory. At other times he wrote as if the problem was not the emptiness of the land, but the inability of the locals to work it fruitfully:

A five-mile march across that intervening stretch of plain between Kinshasa and Kintamo may cause our Europeans to reflect upon the prodigious waste which this madcap population by whom they are surrounded is guilty of. Eight hundred muscular slaves, retainers, followers of the nine Kintamo chiefs, absolutely doing nothing. Nay, they are almost starving, only one day from it at least, and here, round about them, are nearly 50,000 square acres of the richest alluvium it would be possible to find in any part of the world! At Kinshasa there are some five hundred stalwart bodies just as lazy. Mikungu, Kimbangu, Kindolo, Lema and other places, can show over fifteen hundred more, whose most industrious employment is sitting down, while they are being rubbed all over with palm-oil and ochre by their females, or having their beautiful chignons or hair top-knots dressed.³⁰

Stanley described even the land as glutted:

there exists on this immense waste of fat earth, enough virtue, if solicited, to raise half a million tons of rice annually, and wheat, sugar, yams, potatoes, millet, Indian corn ad infinitum. The lower slopes, too, of those ridges, which lovingly shield the plain from the cold winds of the South Atlantic, would permit the remunerative growth of tea, coffee, sago and other spices.

His dream was to convert of the people of the Congo into wage labourers.

In every cordial-faced aborigine whom I meet I see a promise of assistance to me in the redemption of himself from the state of unproductiveness in which he at present lives. I look upon him with much of the same regard that an agriculturalist views his strong-limbed child; he is a future recruit to the ranks of soldier-labourers. The Congo basin, could I have but enough of his class, would become a vast productive garden.³¹

Some parts of the Congo were ill developed, of course. In the rainforests, paths had to be cut through thick and fast-growing foliage. Semi-nomadic peoples kept the white traveller at a distance. Yet in the savannah, by contrast, there were large towns and established kingdoms. To these areas, Stanley brought the eye of a commercial surveyor.

Among the many items available which commercial intercourse would teach the natives to employ profitably, are monkey, goat, antelope, buffalo, lion and leopard skins; the gorgeous feathers of the tropic birds, hippopotamus teeth, bees-wax, frankincense, myrrh, tortoise-shell, Cannabis sativa, and lastly ivory, which to-day is considered the most valuable product.³²

At times, Stanley’s eye for profit was extraordinary:

It may be presumed that there are about 200,000 elephants in about 15,000 herds in the Congo basin, each carrying, let us say, on an average 50 lbs. weight of ivory in his head, which would represent, when collected and sold in Europe, £5,000,000.

He even acknowledged the skills of the Congolese, in order to count them on his balance sheet:

In minerals this section is by no means poor. Iron is abundant. The Yalulima, Iboko, Irebu and Ubangi are famous for their swordsmiths. The Yakusu and Basoko are pre-eminent for their spears. In the museum of the [International African] Association at Brussels are spear-blades six feet long and four inches broad, which I collected among those tribes.³³

Stanley attempted to interest the British government in the commercial exploitation of the region, without great success. Indeed he was not alone in this failure. Another rival explorer, Lieutenant Cameron, had followed Livingstone’s route. He signed treaties with various chiefs, and had in 1875 declared that the lands of the Congo Basin now belonged to the British Crown. The obstacle facing both Cameron and Stanley was the hegemony of Gladstone’s Liberals in Parliament.³⁴ These were the middle years of the nineteenth century, a period before empires or trusts. The ruling class of Britain remained converted to a policy of expansion by trade, without tariffs, annexations or slavery. It was a moment of peace. The idea that the European powers could achieve progress without conquest was still dominant.

‘The king with ten million murders on his soul’³⁵

Searching for a patron, Stanley turned his attention to another rich and powerful man, King Léopold II of the Belgians. Léopold’s title, with its emphasis on the peoples he ruled rather than the land of his dominion, pointed to a basic insecurity in his state. Belgium had only acquired independence as recently as 1830, and its society contained two distinct linguistic groups, speakers of French and of Flemish. In the period of Léopold’s reign, the mood of the majority was also notably secular and republican. There was no natural bond of loyalty between the people and their king. In a position of weakness, Léopold’s strategy was to build up his own private power. He was clever enough to see that progress could be achieved most quickly outside Belgium, even outside Europe. Long before he claimed the Belgian throne, Léopold had been an adventurer. As Duke of Brabant, Léopold had studied the Dutch Empire in Java, a system of government that produced a strong surplus to the exchequer. Another of his schemes was for the purchase of islands off the coast of Argentina.

In 1876, Léopold used the occasion of a geographical conference in Belgium to found an International African Association (AIA). This would be an international organisation of explorers and phil-anthropists. Supported by grants from Brussels, the Association would propagandise for the abolition of the Arab slave trade. Local committees would be established in each country, electing upwards to an international committee. Léopold volunteered to act as the Association’s first chair. His address made much of the philanthropic motives behind African exploration:

The subject which brings us together today is one of the most important facing humanity. To open up to civilisation the only part of the world which has not been discovered, to pierce the shadows which envelope entire peoples…. Do I need to remind you that in bringing you all to Brussels, I have not been guided by any egotistic purpose? No, Gentlemen, if Belgium is small, she is happy and satisfied with her lot. I have no ambition other than to serve her well. But I will insist on the pride it brings me to think that a progress essential to our age has begun in Brussels. I hope that in this way Brussels may become the headquarters of a civilising mission.³⁶

In the resolutions that followed, the Association pledged itself to a programme of discovery, education and trade. Its leading figures included aristocrats, geographers, humanitarians and a number of Léopold’s fellow royals. Britain’s Anti-Slavery Society and the Church Missionary Society sent delegates to the conference; the Rothschilds gave a generous donation to its funds. Few of these famous names were actually involved in the series of Léopold’s later projects. Yet the king never hesitated to blur the boundaries between his projects, using the good name of the International Association later to confer legitimacy on other schemes.

On Stanley’s next return to Europe, Léopold succeeded in recruiting the American explorer. Stanley’s ambition was vast, and while other backers had greater military or financial power, none demonstrated Léopold’s manic urge to acquire new territories. Stanley met Léopold for the first time in June 1878. By the end of the year he was employed on a contract worth up to 50,000 francs a year (around £125,000 in today’s money). Stanley returned to Africa, this time to found an empire.

The main part of Stanley’s 1879 expedition was spent hacking through hostile jungle, while the people of the Congo kept their distance, as best they could. Jules Marchal records that thirty-three white men serving under Stanley died in the course of this journey. We should set this death toll against Stanley’s argument that colonialism would improve the European racial stock, ‘Hundreds of raw European youths have been launched into the heart of the “murderous continent”, and the further we sent them the more they improved in physique.’³⁷ It was not just Africans, then, whose manifold destiny was to die if they were yet going to be saved.

Meanwhile, Léopold set out to win the backing of the powers for his Association. America was the first to accept, persuaded that Belgium would leave the territory open for free trade. The British felt that they possessed enough territories already. The French were persuaded that if Léopold’s adventures succeeded in bankrupting the entire Belgian state, then they could purchase the lands at knock-down prices. The veteran Prince Bismarck saw through Léopold in an instant. Yet his banker Gerson Bleichröder was sufficiently enthusiastic to force a deal. Unknown to the European powers, Stanley was already on the ground, persuading the various Congolese kings to sign treaties giving Léopold sovereign power over their territory. Adam Hochschild places these agreements in context:

Many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their X’s to documents in a foreign language and in legalese. The idea of a treaty of friendship between two clans or villages was familiar; the idea of signing over one’s land to someone on the other side of the world was inconceivable. Did the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela, for example, have any idea of what they agreed to on April 1, 1884? In return for ‘one piece of cloth per month to each of the under-signed chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand,’ they promised to ‘freely of their own accord, for themselves, and their heirs and successors for ever give up to the said Association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories … and to assist by labour or otherwise, any works, improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at any time to have carried out in any part of these territories.³⁸

On Stanley’s return to Europe in 1884, he produced nearly five hundred treaties signed with local chieftains. Stanley could also boast of having founded Vivi, the first capital of Congo (opposite Matadi) and the town of Léopoldville (today Kinshasa). The 1884–85 Congress of Berlin, called to settle disputes between the European powers, recognised Léopold as the lawful head of the International Association of the Congo, soon to be known as the Congo Free State. In return for achieving such recognition, this ‘Congo’ committed itself to the abolition of slavery, free trade and neutrality in war. France took the north bank of the river.

It is striking that Léopold’s private empire should declare itself a ‘state’. Few African nations were then recognised as sovereign for the purposes of international law. The Congo Free State was even recognised as independent by the majority of the powers present at Berlin. The naming of the country was a nuanced decision. The Congo could not be a colony, for that would call into question the relationship of the new ‘state’ not just to King Léopold but, behind him, to Belgium. But in giving this society the form of a judicially sovereign independent state, we could say that Léopold, was quite despite himself, placing a marker before history. At some future point, he seemed to be saying, the Congo would be both independent and free.³⁹

For all of King Léopold’s evident success, certain obstacles remained. One problem the Belgian administration faced was the challenge of occupying the hinterlands. The declared boundaries of the state were roughly the same as those of the present-day country, but it was not until the mid-1890s that Léopold’s control was finally established over the entire region. Successful occupation depended on military campaigns. The most vital instrument was the armed steamboat, from whose protection European troops could blast African villages into submission. In 1891–92, the southern lands of modern Shaba were conquered, and between 1892 and 1894 other territories were wrested from African, Arab and Swahili traders.

The costs of the project soared. Léopold spent around 10 million Belgian francs on the Congo between 1880 and 1890. (For comparison: in 1900, there were 25 Belgian francs to the British pound. The pound sterling, meanwhile, was very roughly worth £60 in today’s prices.⁴⁰) In 1890 and 1895, the Belgian parliament was bullied into approving loans to the king totalling some 32 million Belgian francs. This public money, however, was awarded as a loan and for ten years only. Indeed, one of the clauses of the contract gave the Belgian government the power to annexe the Congo, if Léopold could not repay the debt on time. King Léopold had to fight to have this clause withdrawn. He was able to receive slightly more generous terms from the French government, a loan of 80 million Belgian francs, but with the same clause. If Léopold defaulted, Paris would have a claim on ‘his’ new state.⁴¹

Red rubber

Although he never visited his private colony, King Léopold held absolute political, judicial and legislative power in the Congo, which he then devolved to a governor-general and a vice-governor. All ‘unoccupied’ land was claimed as property of his Association, both unexplored lands and fields lying fallow. Even settled farm lands were subject to his orders. Léopold also claimed a large private estate in the region of Lake Léopold II (north-east of Kinshasa). Meanwhile, Léopold also set about confusing the question of legitimacy. In place of the old International African Association, which was now moribund, Léopold constructed a new International Association of the Congo. Holding power always in his own hands, but often in the name of this distinct corporation, with its own flag, Léopold was also able to mask his private empire with some of the veneer of his former ‘humanitarian’ promises.

In order to fund the project of colonisation, the Association took control of the rubber and ivory trades. Much of the land was given to concessionary businesses, which in return were expected to build railroads or simply to occupy a specific, disputed region. Concessions were granted the power to tax Congolese villages at rates of between 6 and 24 francs annually per head, an almost meaningless figure in a country where there were no large stocks of cash in circulation. Africans then had to work to produce crops in kind. Companies were also set up to exploit the mineral resources, as well as human labour. The Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, established in 1905, was soon joined by the Compagnie de Fer du Congo, the Compagnie du Katanga, the Compagnie des Magasins Généraux, the Compagnie des Produits du Congo, the Syndicat Commercial du Katanga, and so on. Many of these were owned directly by Léopold, or indirectly, through his appointed proxies.

European officers and administrators were recruited to manage the logistics of running a large country as an empire. By 1906 there were 1,500 civil servants, and established transport routes between the coast and the interior. Missionaries were sent, with the explicit blessing of a Vatican keen to counteract earlier Protestant missions. Local troops were organised into a nascent army, the Force Publique. Although this detachment claimed 19,000 troops in 1888, such high numbers could only be maintained through the conscription of un-willing local people. In 1892 one judge wrote to the governor-general asking why it was that three-quarters of his soldiers died between conscription and arrival in the cities?

Similar patterns of forced labour were employed to recruit porters, carriers and other workers. In 1896, the surviving members of the Force Publique were sent out to capture 10,000 unskilled labourers, who were then set to work on the building of the Congo’s first railway. We do not know how many survived. Yet we do know that by the time it was finished the track was little more than a short tramline. One critic pointed out that just a few miles of rail had cost 40 million francs; but no one counted the human cost. The waste of people and resources was typical of Léopold’s rule. Bill Berkeley observes that for all the kleptocratic dictators of the Congo, there has been one model, Léopold.⁴² According to historian Neal Ascherson:

Like one of those last dinosaurs at the end of the saurian age whose very size or length of fang or desperate elaboration of armour sought to postpone the general decline of their race, Léopold developed in his own person into a most formidable type of King, designed for the environments of the late nineteenth century, which used the new forms of economic growth to strengthen and extend royal authority. Other monarchs watched the growth of modern trust capitalism with mixed feelings of suspicion, incomprehension and contempt. Léopold understood that the private fortunes of a King remained as much a measure of his power to act freely as they had been in the Middle Ages.⁴³

Léopold would not even allow the Belgian state any authority over his kingdom. His concern was precisely the limits to his power that existed in free, constitutional Belgium. Private ownership of a giant colony allowed him to escape from the limitations of his situation and live out long-buried fantasies of holding great power.

The second striking feature of this period was Léopold’s dependence on a small range of strategies for the accumulation of wealth. In its first years, the colony proved to be extremely costly. It did possess one enormously valuable ‘crop’, ivory, a versatile material that could be worked to make piano keys, carvings and the like. It was a profitable business. In the late 1890s, Congolese ivory exports reached 1,000 tons per year.⁴⁴ The only problem with ivory was that the product’s future was limited. Contrary to Stanley’s calculation, no ruler could kill the entire herd in one stroke, without bringing the entire trade to a sudden end. The herd had to be managed. The resource could not be exhausted too fast. In his colony’s first decade, Léopold was compelled to adopt cost-cutting measures in his own court, and at his own table. Léopold’s adventure threatened to bankrupt him and undermine the future of his rule.

What changed everything was William Dunlop’s 1890 discovery that cheap inflatable bicycle tyres could be manufactured from rubber. Other uses of rubber were soon patented, in tubing, insulation and wiring. Eventually, the greatest use for rubber would be found in car tyres. The sources of Léopold’s wealth were more modest, a Dunlop-inspired cycling boom. Forests of cultivated rubber were eventually to be planted in Southeast Asia, but in the years before these came to maturity, the greatest source of rubber was equatorial Africa, where rubber grew wild.

In March 1890 Léopold quadrupled the export duty on ivory.⁴⁵ Eighteen months later, he announced that his representatives in the Congo would now enjoy a monopoly of the trade in rubber and ivory.⁴⁶ An 1891 decree compelled the Congolese to supply these goods to Léopold’s representatives. No trade was required. ‘Labour’ was accumulated along perceived family and tribal lines.⁴⁷ Villages were presented with terrible demands, which could only be paid if the men of the village gave themselves over to forced labour. Where villages refused, Léopold’s army, the Force Publique, was employed. Homes were burned and the hands of the victims were taken for payment, as evidence of successful kills.⁴⁸

Karl Marx famously described the importance of economic production for social organisation. ‘The hand-loom gives you a society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, with the industrial capitalist.’⁴⁹ In the context of the Congo, we might rather say that rubber production created a slave society, dependent on the mass levy of village labour, under the auspices of an authoritarian colonial administration; later, copper would be the source of independently run state growth, depending as it did on a network of mines, transport, machinery and a thriving state apparatus. Eventually, as we shall see, the production of diamonds for export would be able to continue profitably whether under regular government or in conditions of extreme deprivation, in malign anarchy, through the collapse of the state and civil war.

Conan Doyle provided a vivid account of the conditions under which the rubber was taken. White agents were paid 150 to 300 francs per month, a lower salary than many European workers. But the greater the rubber harvest in their area, the more money they received by way of bonuses, and the greater was their own chance of securing enough money to buy their own passage home. The agents employed black foremen, ‘Capitas’, to live among villagers, imposing discipline on them. These newly appointed ‘local officials’ were often former members of the Force Publique. They had been trained to commit acts of the most extreme brutality:

Imagine the nightmare which lay upon each village while this barbarian squatted in the middle of it. Day or night they could never get away from him. He called for palm wine. He called for women. He beat them, mutilated them, and shot them down at his pleasure. He enforced public incest in order to amuse himself by the sight…. The more terror the Capita inspired, the more useful he was, the more eagerly the villagers obeyed him, and the more rubber yielded its commission to the agent.

Not surprisingly, the Capitas were extremely unpopular: in one period, various rebellions killed some 142 of them in just seven months. But resistance was often fatal. Learning of the death of one of their representatives, white agents would only come with arms and destroy the village. Black people managed the tyranny, but they did so under white orders. ‘Often too the white man pushed the black aside, and acted himself as torturer and executioner.’⁵⁰ Other critics dubbed this system ‘red rubber’, as if the trees grew on the blood of Léopold’s dead.

This economic system contained something of the feudal system. There was a military power. The structure of authority was like a pyramid, with King Léopold at the top, appointing subordinates downwards. As in conditions of feudal breakdown, little thought was given to the feeding of the people, but force was everything. Yet to see this system as a reversion to the ‘backward’ conditions of past times, or of some pre-European pre-industrial system, would be quite mistaken. The rubber and ivory taken in this fashion was all exported, for exchange purposes, on the global market. Subsistence agriculture was not recognised in this system, lest this encourage the people of the Congo to concentrate on feeding themselves. The extracted ‘surplus’ was everything they could harvest. Few goods were traded within the local economy. The people were forced to live at a subsistence minimum; many starved to death.

Along with theft and hierarchy, a third striking feature of this period is the similarity between the Belgian colony and other imperial conquests of the same time in their adoption of various forms of what Marx referred to as ‘primitive accumulation’. Under direct European or American rule, forced labour became widespread throughout the continent, and an ‘economy of pillage’ became the norm.

The term chibalo (or chibaro) was used commonly in central and southern Africa from the late nineteenth century onwards to describe a variety of oppressive forms of labour introduced by the Europeans. The Portuguese in Mozambique stipulated that all adult males had to perform chibalo for six months a year. Commonly used for compulsory labour services on large colonial plantations in Mozambique, it stipulated that all adult males had to perform chibalo.⁵¹

In 1900, French Equatorial Africa (today Chad, Gabon, Central African Republic and the Republic of the Congo) was divided up between forty French concession companies. Coquery-Vidrovitch has described the result as ‘an economy of pillage’. The companies were parasitical on African life and labour. They did not provide machinery or investment. Even the state was dependent on such private profits.⁵² A web of loans and debts tied these competing empires together. King Léopold invested in the French scheme. French bankers invested back in the Belgian empire. Concessions were held by and in British firms.

Many commentators have studied the economic processes that drove the conquest of Africa. In his book Imperialism: The Hightest Stage of Capitalism, the Russian Marxist Vladimir Lenin maintained that the conquests were linked to an internal, economic process, the centralisation of capital, the merging of banks and industry.⁵³ Colonialism was simply another expression, in a grander form, of the general tendency towards competition between businesses that was typical of a capitalist system. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued that Léopold was motivated rather by a search for consumers, to purchase excess Belgian goods. With bitter irony, Hobsbawm records that Léopold’s ‘favourite methods of exploitation by forced labour was not designed to encourage high per capita purchases, even when it did not actually diminish the number of customers by torture and massacre’.⁵⁴ It is possible that such explanations are in fact too complex. Hobsbawm’s model fits the system that Livingstone desired to create, not the one that Léopold actually made. Meanwhile Lenin argued that under capitalism the colonial powers would tend to export capital. This process did happen in the Congo, but only systematically after 1908. All production was for the market, but in the early years the most striking feature of Léopold’s conquest was its similarity to an older form of accumulation, simple theft.

Resistance

‘The most potent symbol of colonialism’s brutality’, writes Charlie Kimber, ‘was the severed hands.’

African soldiers in the pay of their Belgian masters were sent out to smash opposition. To demonstrate that they had not wasted their bullets they hacked the hands from their victims, alive or dead. The novelist Joseph Conrad wrote that it was extraordinary that a world that no longer tolerated the slave trade could blithely ignore the Congo. It was, he said, ‘as if the moral clock had been put back’.⁵⁵

According to the British philosopher and humanitarian Bertrand Russell,

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 … 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.⁵⁶

For the historian Peter Forbath,

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber…. They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace … the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.⁵⁷

In 1906, the Belgian anti-slavery activist Alphonse Jacques warned of the ‘complete extinction’ of the Congolese people. Such language may seem extreme, yet there is no doubt that the advent of Léopold’s colonialism was a disaster for the local population. Famine combined with disease and the introduction of forced labour. The demographic evidence shows an extraordinary rate of killing. Citing Belgian sources, Adam Hochschild writes that the population of the region fell from over 20 million people in 1891 to 8.5 million in 1911, only to recover somewhat over the next decade to 10 million in 1924.⁵⁸ As a proportion of the total population (the numbers that could have been killed) such a number is comparable to the well-known genocides of the twentieth century, the Nazi Holocaust, the murders in Rwanda. As an absolute number of deaths, the figure in the Congo may be higher than each.

Yet Léopold’s capture of the Congo had been based on the most fair-sounding of promises. In 1889–90, for example, Brussels hosted eight months of humanitarian meetings, culminating in an Anti-Slavery Conference of the major powers. Under Belgian direction, Léopold indicated, the Congolese were proceeding quickly in the direction of prosperity, public education and eventual self-government. Such a language was required if the other European powers (and indeed the Belgian public) were to acquiesce in his schemes. As late as 1898, in a widely circulated letter from ‘the King-Sovereign of the Congo Free State to the State agents’, Léopold encouraged his admirers to regard the project as both a moral crusade and a programme of economic and social development. ‘The task which the State agents have to accomplish in the Congo is noble and elevated’, he wrote. ‘It is incumbent upon them to carry on the work of the civilisation of Equatorial Africa, guided by the principles set forth in the Berlin and Brussels resolutions.’ (The Berlin resolution was the final document of the 1884–85 Berlin congress; the Brussels resolution was the founding document of Léopold’s previous International Association).

The aim of all of us, I desire to repeat it here with you, is to regenerate, materially and morally, races whose degradation and misfortune it is hard to realise. The fearful scourges of which, in the eyes of our humanity, these races seemed the victims, are already lessening, little by little, through our intervention. Each step forward made by our people should make an improvement in the condition of the natives. In those vast tracts, mostly uncultivated and many unproductive, where the natives hardly knew how to get their daily food, European experience, knowledge, resource and enterprise, have brought to light unthought-of-wealth. If wants are created they are satisfied even more liberally. Exploration of virgin lands goes on, communications are established, highways are opened, the soil yields produce in exchange for our varied manufactured articles. Legitimate trade and industry are established. As the economic state is formed, property assumes an intrinsic character, private and public ownership, the basis of all social development, is founded and respected instead of being left to the law of change and of the strongest. Upon this material prosperity, in which the whites and blacks have evidently a common interest, will follow a desire on the part of the blacks to elevate themselves.⁵⁹

Beneath the high-flowing rhetoric, financial calculations were evidently being made. Yet to see only this side of Léopold would be to misunderstand the public impression that he gave. By loudly trumpeting the glorious future facing the black Africans, by holding out the distant possibility of tutelage leading to self-government, by declaring his new country a ‘Free State’, Léopold successfully presented himself as the inheritor of the liberal ideal. From empire would come freedom. Stanley made a similar point in response to published scepticism of Léopold’s motives:

He is a dreamer, like his confrères in the work, because the sentiment is applied to the neglected millions of the Dark Continent. [The critics] cannot appreciate rightly, because there are no dividends attaching to it, this ardent, vivifying and expansive sentiment, which seeks to extend civilising influences among the dark races, and to brighten up with the glow of civilisation the dark places of sad-browed Africa.⁶⁰

The problem both men faced was that the promises always threatened to prove empty. All that was required was that witnesses should come forward.

The greatest victims of Léopold’s actions were the people of the Congo. They were also the first to criticise and to resist. A number of Congolese peoples responded with war to Belgian incursions. They included Msiri’s Garenganze, the Zande federation of King Gbudwe and the people of the Swahili-speaking region under Tippu Tip. The most developed, settled populations were least likely to rebel: towns always fall first to an invader. The initiative passed to smaller, more martial kingdoms, often those that had accumulated resources in the aftermath of the Portuguese slave trade. The most famous such rebellion was that led by King Msiri in the Katanga region. Msiri refused to recognise Belgian sovereignty. His people were then crushed in 1891. There were also rebellions of troops from Léopold’s army, including an uprising at Kananga garrison in July 1895, the Ndirfi mutiny of February 1897 and the Shinkakasa mutiny at Boma in April 1890. The first of these was a guerrilla movement triggered by the state’s failure to pay bonuses owed. Drawing on alliances made with other Congolese people living between the Lulua and Lualaba rivers, the Kananga mutineers were able to hold out for several years.

The 1895 rebellion coincided with the end of a previous bout of fighting between Léopold’s army and his Arab rivals in the east of the country. Employing Congolese auxiliaries, and to much fanfare in the West about the defeat of the slave trade, Léopold’s supporters declared victory in 1894. Yet this victory led almost immediately to further challenges. ‘After the Arab campaign’, records the official Encylopedia of Belgian Congo, ‘Batetela soldiers were concentrated in Luluabourg. Already angry at being paid late’, they then learned that General Duchesne, following what the Encylopedia termed ‘an unfortunate error’, had executed Gongo Lutete, their leader.

The Batetela rose and took control of their camp, killing on 4 January 1895 Captain Peltzer. Lieutenants Lassaux and Cassart could preserve their lives only by fleeing. The mutiny became a revolt and soon covered the whole region of Lomami. Officers Gillain, Lothaire and Michaux confronted the rebels, with mixed success.

In October 1896, some 4–5,000 Batetela took arms and headed towards Gandu. General Michaux harried them. Eighteen Batetela were captured in April 1900 and executed. A thousand escaped and took to the mountains around Lake Kisale, living ‘as brigands’. Major Malfey is described as successfully ‘pacifying’ the region in April 1902, but the last of the rebels were captured only in 1908. Colonial accounts such as these, with their soothing assurances of European invincibility, tend to obscure the fact that this revolt lasted thirteen years, securing large areas of land and the temporary freedom of several thousand people.⁶¹

The Ndirfi revolt began after a 150-day forced march through the north-east regions; 2,500 troops were involved. These rebels held out for ‘only’ three years. They eventually gave themselves up, not to Léopold or his allies, but to German troops on the other side of Lake Tanganyika.⁶² Several uprisings were able to take large areas of land. Another revolt from 1905 broke out with the desperate words, ‘The rubber is finished. You have no more to do here.’⁶³

The great problem in making sense of these movements is that few Congolese voices were heard outside the country, and few others have been recorded for posterity. In recent decades, historians and anthropologists have tried to get round this absence of written sources by consulting the oral traditions of different Congolese peoples. We are forced to depend on scraps of writing, stories passed down between generations, and sometimes the evidence of songs.

Many of the people living in the eastern jungles had a culture that emphasised the continuity between generations, and the link between the people and the land where they lived. ‘The forest’, according to the Mongo peoples, ‘is a relic of the ancestors. It stays with the family.’ Equivalent sayings in the Lower Congo included: ‘Those who decide to act alone, must live in the same house.’ ‘Don’t think of the planter when you touch his trees, but of his successor.’ Proverbs such as these, or ‘It is better to hunger than to steal’, acted in place of legal precedents. In a society based on limited agriculture, notions of authority depended on ideas of earned rule, rather than inherited status. ‘Before the Belgians, we had no chiefs as they later became. Our villages used to be led by famous warriors.’⁶⁴ In 1904, one missionary went about the people of this region, and recorded their contemporary feelings about the dispossession that was under way:

It is interesting to hear the Bongandanga people tell of the beginning of the rubber trade. How wonderful they thought it was that the white man should want rubber, and be willing to pay for it. How they almost fought for baskets in order to bring them in and obtain the offered riches. But they say, ‘We did not know, we never understood what it would become in the future.’ Now it is looked upon as the equivalent of death; they do not complain so much of want of payment, as there is no rest from the work, and no end to it except death.⁶⁵

Occasionally a more substantial memory has come down to us, and with an individual’s name attached. A white functionary recorded Ilanga’s story:

Our village is called Waniendo, after our chief Niendo…. It is a large village near a small stream, and is surrounded by large fields of mohago (cassava) and muhindu (maize) and other foods…. Soon after the sun rose over the hill, a large band of soldiers came into the village, and we all went into the houses and sat down. We were not long seated when the soldiers came rushing in shouting, and threatening Niendo with their guns. They came to my house and dragged the people out. Three or four came to our house and caught hold of me, also my husband Oleka and my sister Katinga. We were dragged into the road and were tied together with cords about our necks, so that we could not escape…. On the sixth day we became very weak from lack of food and from constant marching and sleeping in the damp grass, and my husband, who marched behind us with the goat, could not stand up longer, and so he sat down beside the path and refused to walk more. The soldiers beat him on the head with the end of his gun, and he fell upon the ground. One of the soldiers caught the goat, while two or three others stuck the long knives they put on the ends of their guns into my husband … Many of the young men were killed the same way, and many babies thrown on the grass to die … After marching ten days we came to the great water … and were taken in canoes across to the white man’s town at Nyangwe.⁶⁶

For every person such as Ilanga, whose history was recorded, there were millions more whose suffering left no written record for posterity.

In the absence of sustained Congolese voices, we have to make do with Western sources. The first significant protest to find its way into the newspapers came in 1890, when George Washington Williams, significantly a black American lawyer, historian and missionary, dedicated an Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Léopold II. The contents were less flattering than the title. Williams had actually travelled to the region, initially believing that the Congo was an area of human advance. On his expected return to America, he hoped to establish a movement of black people to travel back to Africa. What Williams actually found in the Congo dismayed him. He learned from the people he met that Stanley had cheated his way into acquiring these territories, with gin, threats and fake magic tricks. Prisoners were jailed. White traders had kidnapped black women for concubines. Good government and public services were non-existent. Far from bringing an end to slavery, Léopold’s agents had made the system endemic.⁶⁷ Williams’ Open Letter was printed widely discussed by the press in Europe and America. Only its author’s death, in England in 1891 of tuberculosis, prevented the furore from engulfing the entire colony.

Another early critic, the Swedish missionary Edward Wilhelm Sjöblom arrived in the Congo on 31 July 1892. Within days, he had witnessed a terrible beating, on the steamer in which he travelled. The instrument employed was the chicotte, a whip of trimmed hippo hide with edges like knife blades. The captain of the steamer was under orders to catch 300 boys, who might serve in the Force Publique. One boy was indeed found, and then bound to the steam engine, the hottest part of the boat. Sjöblom took up the story of what happened to the child.

The captain showed the boy the chicotte, but made him wait all day before letting him taste it. However, the moment of suffering came. I tried to count the lashes and think they were about sixty, apart from the kicks to the head and back. The captain smiled with satisfaction when he saw the boy’s thin garb soaked with blood…. I had to witness all this in silence. At dinner, they talked of their exploits concerning the treatment of the blacks. They mentioned one of their equals who had flogged three of his men so mercilessly that he had died as a result. This was reckoned to be valour. One of them said, ‘The best of them is too good to die like a pig.’⁶⁸

Sjöblom’s reports were published in his home country of Sweden. By 1897, he was speaking at meetings of the Aborigines Protection Society in London.

Who gained?

The stated purpose of intervention was that the Congolese would prosper under European rule. It is even possible that some young Congolese welcomed the arrival of Stanley, hoping that the people of the region too would benefit from the evident wealth of the Europeans. There was, however, no process by which wealth or skills were allowed to ‘trickle down’.⁶⁹ The exploitation of the local population intensified; the misery increased. The population declined sharply, as a result of disease, massacre and the toll of forced labour. Some of the winners were more obvious: Léopold’s family, the share owners and the banks. Exports from the Congo Free State rose from 11.5 million francs in 1895 to 47.5 million in 1900. Exports of rubber rose from 580 tons to 3,740 in the same years. Between 1896 and 1905, just one concession the Domaine de la Couronne, earned Léopold 70 million Belgian francs in profit.⁷⁰

King Léopold’s private empire soon established links with other blocs of mining capital. The American mining groups Ryan and Guggenheim also had interests in the region. The most important firm in the mineral-rich region of Katanga was the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga. This giant business was itself an alliance between Léopold and a consortium of British mining interests, represented by Robert Williams, owner of Tanganyika Concessions Limited (TCL). At different times, between one-seventh and one-half of the Union Minière shares were owned by TCL, itself financed by such British-based banks as Barclays, Midlands, Barings and Rothschilds. Tanganyika Concessions controlled one of the main export routes, the rail-link west through Angola. It was a conduit to existing mining and engineering works, including the copper mines of Zambia, and a source of revenues in its own right.⁷¹

Beyond Léopold, there stood a network of acolytes, allies and place-keepers, all of whom received shares in the great enterprise. Vast profits were made. Company Abir, one concession in the Belgian Congo, possessed capital of just one million Belgian francs, yet in 1897 it returned an annual profit of 1,247,455 francs: more than a 100 per cent turnover on the initial stake.⁷² Léopold also used the vast profits he made to build palaces at Laeken, the Arch of the Cinquantenaire, and a colonial museum at Tervuren. He even succeeded in cooking the books, to make the rich empire look like a money-loser. Eventually, in 1908, the Belgian government agreed to pay Léopold the sum of 110 million francs to release him from his ‘debt’. Even this vast sum does not convey the extraordinary profits that Léopold was able to make, as a result of his conquest. In November 1909, a month before his death, Léopold bought fifty-eight large properties worth at least 12 million francs. Another front company, the Fondation de Niederfüllbach possessed assets worth 45 million francs, including jewels. Yet Léopold’s estate was worth just 15 million francs.⁷³ The rest had been spent on parks, mistresses and other extraordinary, personal greed.

Further critics

The Belgian parliament did not originally plan to annex the Congo, but reports of the brutal treatment of Africans in the Congo, especially those forced to collect rubber for the companies, led to a popular campaign for Belgium either to allow the people of the Congo to reclaim self-government or to take over the ruling of the colony from Léopold. By the late 1890s, a new generation of Western travellers had finally learned to treat Africa with fraternity, not as a place where the people deserved pity, nor as a commercial property waiting for the market, but as a region that was fruitful, interesting and good in itself. Mary Kingsley’s account of her Travels in West Africa described a visitor living in harmony with the social and natural environment that she found. Although Kingsley did not describe the Belgian Congo, her travels helped to change people’s ideas of the relationships that were possible. One group of people among whom Kingsley lived were the Krumen:

I have always admired men for their strength, their courage, their unceasing struggle for the beyond, the something else, but not until I had to deal with the Krumen did I realise the vastness to which this latter characteristic of theirs could attain.

The ideal remained benign imperialism: ‘Would not a very hopeful future for West Africa regarding the labour question be possible, if a régime of common sense were substituted for our present one?’ Yet compared to the awful present, such words were read as a call for reform.⁷⁴ The demand for reform of the Belgian Congo was raised in America, where politicians threatened to investigate King Léopold. Other critics included the novelist Mark Twain and the black activists Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. British opponents of the private empire included E.D. Morel, Roger Casement, Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad. The Belgian deputy Émile Vandervelde toured the region and defended the critics of the empire in the Congo’s courts.⁷⁵

The most surprising of these dissidents was perhaps Morel. A successful trader of French extraction, Morel’s full name was Georges Edmond Pierre Achille Morel-de-Ville. He was employed from 1891 at Elder Dempster, the Liverpool shipping company that controlled the trade between Britain and the Congo.⁷⁶ An occasional visitor to Belgium, Morel also worked as a freelance journalist. He started to write about Africa from 1893. One early article, published in the Pall Mall Gazette on 16 July 1897, defended King Léopold’s Free State. Contrary to the accounts that were then coming out in other British papers, Morel insisted that there was no slavery in Léopold’s colony. Black workers were paid the equivalent of 30 s per month, more than many unskilled workers in Britain. Some 4,000 tonnes of goods were sent out from the Congo each year. The colony was evidently not bankrupt. If there were problems with the Congo, this was because the people were still degenerate, ignorant and backward. The Belgian experiment deserved ‘fair play’.

So far, there was nothing untypical about Morel. But one day in 1897 or 1898, a strange thought occurred to him. Morel took to studying the goods loaded and unloaded from the Congo ships. He saw vast quantities of rubber and ivory being unloaded in Antwerp, but nothing of any substance was sent out, beyond officers and firearms. What did that mean? The realisation then dawned on him that there could only be one answer. For all the wealth produced in Africa, the people of the country must receive nothing in return. Their wealth was simply being stolen from them.

On 24 March 1900, Morel penned his first critical article, ‘Belgium and the Congo State’, in The Speaker. He described the Free State as a system of private theft. Morel left his post with Elder Dempster, devoting his energies full-time to the anti-Belgian cause. He established a paper, the West African Mail, which filled its columns with exposés of Léopold’s ‘system’.⁷⁷ Morel made contact with Roger Casement, the British consul to the region. They met for the first time on 10 December 1903, with Casement recording in his diary: ‘Grattan Guinness called on me in afternoon and then Ed. Morel. First time I met him. The man is honest as day. Dined at Comedy together late and then to chat till 2 am. Morel sleeping in study.’ It was an eventful meeting. Casement persuaded Morel to launch a new public campaign, the Congo Reform Association. Through the next ten years, Morel’s Association campaigned for reform. Hundreds of meetings were held each year.

The campaign grew in size. It also suffered many setbacks. One of Morel’s best sources was a Nigerian trader, Hezekiah Andrew Shanu, an independent-minded person, with strong business links across the region. Shanu’s letters of criticism had to be shipped out from the Congo in great secrecy. They were then published in the British press, but always under a pseudonym. In 1904, Léopold’s agents revealed that Shanu was the source. Facing ruin, Shanu killed himself.

From 1903 onwards, Morel did not campaign just for the reform of the Belgian Congo, but also for the transformation of the French Congo. He argued that the French rulers of the neighbouring territory had witnessed the success of Léopold’s empire, and were now determined to copy it themselves. The intensive competition between French and British traders had been to the detriment of British interests: ‘The factories of British merchants are broken into; native traders in British employ are flogged; produce paid for by British merchants is openly appropriated.’⁷⁸ This last observation highlights an important contradiction within the reform movement. Morel and his closest friends closest to the reality of European colonialism were radicalised by the campaign. They also learned of widespread abuses in British Africa, and realised that more was wrong than simply the Belgian ownership of the Congo Free State and the actions of French traders. From being simply a middle-of-the-road businessman, Morel became a critic of all imperial adventures. Yet, even while Morel and Casement were pushed leftwards, their campaign still received considerable support from Liverpool businessmen and Conservative bishops. In May 1903, the House of Lords unanimously passed a motion accusing the Belgian rulers of the Congo of ill-treating the black population.⁷⁹ The message was directed towards the rulers of imperial Britain. Morel described his cause as ‘the British Case’. Only after 1908 did Morel’s full radicalism become evident. Following the success of this campaign, his next cause would be the struggle to expose the secret treaties, and the pernicious role they played in the outbreak of the Great War. After 1914, Morel blamed European colonial adventurism for the outbreak of war.⁸⁰ By then, however, Morel was taking positions far to the left of the ones that he had held before 1908.⁸¹

Morel’s ally Roger Casement was an Anglo-Irish diplomat. Arriving in Africa in 1885 he briefly worked for Elder Dempster, which also employed Morel. Casement then served as a civil servant on Léopold’s project. This experience of the Congo in the 1880s served Casement well. It meant that he possessed vivid memories of the situation before Léopold’s empire had been fully established; against which he could then contrast the system at its height. In 1891 Casement was appointed to a post at the Colonial Office, working for the Niger Coast Protectorate. Then in autumn 1900 Casement was sent back to the Congo as British Consul. It was a position of some considerable authority. Sent by the government to answer the colony’s critics, Casement found everywhere the signs of a people dying. Fields were deserted. The surviving people complained bitterly of floggings and of the rubber tax. Casement was convinced that Léopold’s whole project was unjust. His ‘Congo Report’ was submitted to the Marquess of Lansdowne on 11 December 1903, the day after his first meeting with Morel. ‘The trade in ivory’, Casement wrote, ‘has entirely passed from the hands of the natives of the Upper Congo, and neither fish nor any other outcome of local industry now changes hands on an extensive scale or at any distance from home’. One Belgian expedition of 1900 had resulted in seventeen deaths and loss of much livestock. Compensation was paid to chiefs at a rate of 1,000 brass rods per head (50 francs), ‘not probably an extravagant estimate for human life, seeing that the goats were valued at 400 rods each (20 francs).’ The population of Lukolela, he observed, had fallen from 6,000 in January 1891 to 719 in December 1896. Another Town, ‘O’, had comprised 4,000 people in 1887.

Scores of men had put off in canoes to greet us with invitations that we should spend the night in their village. On steaming into O [in 1903] … I found that this village had entirely disappeared, and that its place was occupied by a large ‘camp d’instruction’, where some 800 native recruits, brought from various parts of the Congo State, are drilled into soldier-hood by a Commandant and a staff of seven or eight European officers.

The population of Lake Mantumba had fallen by 60 per cent as a result of forced labour.

During the period 1893–1902, the Congo State commenced the system of compelling the native to collect rubber and insisted that the inhabitants of the district should not go out of it to sell their produce to traders…. This great decrease in population has been, to a very great extent, caused by the extreme measures resorted to by officers of the State, and the freedom enjoyed by the soldiers to do just as they pleased.

On his return to England, Casement devoted his energies to the Reform Association. It was launched following a meeting in the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool on 24 March 1904. Earl Beauchamp was elected president, Edmund Morel the honourary secretary. Other early supporters included the Bishops of Durham, Liverpool, Rochester and St Asaph. In June 1905 Casement became a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. The award was made in recognition of his services to the reform of the Congo. It raises an awkward point. Casement was well aware that a part of the campaign’s support relied on the reformers’ refusal to criticise similar adventures conducted by the British throughout Africa. Indeed, while some supporters of the campaign argued that the best solution would be the full freedom of the Congolese people, others could join it believing that the only alternative to Belgian control was British rule. Casement and Morel were radicalised by their experiences into the adoption of a more fundamental critique of imperialism. Yet they made few efforts initially to distance themselves from mainstream support.

Support for reform eventually led Casement to a position of total and principled opposition to all colonialism. Following his retirement from the British consulate, he became increasingly aware of his own Irish background. ‘In those lonely Congo forests where I found Léopold’, he wrote, ‘I also found myself.’ The history of the British occupation of Ireland no longer seemed very different to him from the history of the Belgian Empire in the Congo. In 1916, Casement was discovered in Ireland, leading a mission to recruit soldiers to an Irish Brigade. The courts convicted him of treason, yet a movement led by George Bernard Shaw remembered Casement’s role in the Congo and demanded that his life should be spared. The British government was forced to resort to subversion. The cabinet leaked details of Casement’s same-sex affairs from his diaries, in order to secure his execution.⁸²

The novelist Arthur Conan Doyle joined the campaign relatively late, publishing his book The Crime of the Congo in 1909. It was dedicated to E.D. Morel, ‘The unselfish champion of the Congo races’. Of Belgium, Conan Doyle wrote: ‘Her colony is a scandal before the whole world. The era of murders and mutilations has, as we hope, passed by, but the country is sunk into a state of cowed and hopeless slavery. It is not a new story, but merely another stage of the same.’ Was it fair to put so much emphasis on Belgian rule? What about British territories? Conan Doyle, a self-declared patriot, rejected the comparison: ‘Where land has so been claimed, it has been worked by free labour for the benefit of the African community itself, and not for the purpose of sending the proceeds and profits to Europe. That is a vital distinction.’ The main theme of his pamphlet was Léopold’s greed:

During the independent life on the Congo State all accounts have been kept secret, that no budgets of the last year but only estimates of the coming one have been published, that the State has made huge gains, in spite of which it has borrowed money, and that the great sums resulting have been laid out in speculations in China and elsewhere, that sums amounting in the aggregate to several million pounds have been traced to the King, and that this money has been spent partly in buildings in Belgium, partly in land in the same country, partly in building on the Riviera, partly in the corruption of our public men, and of the European and American Press … and finally, in the expense of such a private life as has made King Léopold’s name notorious throughout Europe.⁸³

Another critic of Belgian rule was the novelist Joseph Conrad. A friend of Roger Casement, Conrad had piloted a Congolese steamboat in his youth, and the experience of the first decades of Belgian rule informs his best-known novel, Heart of Darkness.⁸⁴ Conrad accepted the myth that colonialism was intended as a form of benign tutelage. He argued, however, that Western intervention could never succeed. The Belgian project was ‘a sordid farce acted out against a sinister back-cloth.’ His protagonist Marlow observes the motivating force of conquest, which was profit. He describes the company agents as ‘a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word “ivory” is in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying for it.’ The key figure in Heart of Darkness is Kurtz. A trader and anthropologist, half-English, half-French, he represents the pride and conviction of conquest. Kurtz persuades the Congolese to follow him, like a god. In the process, though, he becomes lost. A profound madness infects his soul. ‘Exterminate the brutes’, Kurtz shouts. He hoards a row of Congolese skulls. His voyage ends in madness, ‘the horror, the horror’ are his last words. Finding the older man convinces Marlow that the result of colonialism must be disaster.⁸⁵

The subsequent success of Joseph Conrad’s novel has given it a special status. Many read Conrad as if he understood better than anyone the horror of the Western colonial system. Yet Conrad’s novel ‘points in opposite directions’.⁸⁶ Its argument against empire is that Africans are incapable of progress. As in the books of Livingstone and Stanley, the black Africans appear as savages, good or bad.⁸⁷ Long ago Chinua Achebe indicted Conrad’s work for its complicity in racism, and in ‘the dehumanisation of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world’.⁸⁸ Many passages of Conrad’s novel confirm this reading. The men and women of the Congo appear mute, degraded, something alien. Yet their otherness is linked to their degradation and sub-ordination. At the beginning of his trip, Marlow sees six black men advancing in a file.

They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps … I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope, each had an iron collar on his neck and all were connected together with a chain whose bights sung between them, rhythmically clinking.

Marlow’s complex narrative stands in for an authorial voice. He describes the people of the Congo rather as inoffensive. He refers to the ‘pure, uncomplicated savagery’ of the Africans, ‘something that had a right to exist, obviously, in the sunshine’. The people of the region ‘still belong to the beginning of time, had no inherited experience to teach them, as it were’. In later passages, the Congolese appear as howling mobs. They do not appear as thinking, speaking and rational people. Other reformers shared both his concern and his distance from the Congolese people.

The end of Léopold’s empire

The most important movement against Léopold’s rule was the resistance of the Congolese themselves. In December 1899, another Congolese revolt against the agents of the Société Anversoise and the Force Publique began to fuel widespread criticism of the Belgian regime. But if Léopold was ever going to be defeated, some demand for the ending of the empire would also have to emerge within Belgium. The reform campaign in that country was dominated by the figure of Émile Vandervelde. He was a lawyer, a parliamentarian and a leading member of the Socialist International. Born in 1866 to a magistrate and a factory manager, Vandervelde was the first Belgian socialist to campaign against Léopold’s empire. In 1895, Vandervelde described Léopold’s project as ‘the Congolese corpse’. In June of the same year, he led the opposition in parliament to Léopold’s loan. ‘What remains is a choice between the enterprise of the Congo and workers’ pensions’, he declared. ‘You propose to grant to the king what you refuse to the workers.’ Émile Vandervelde began to speak of Africans not as an economic burden but as important potential allies of Belgian labour. In one powerful speech from April 1900 he told the white masses: ‘The cause of the blacks is your cause … not only because you are men, but because you are workers. In the end [Léopold’s] politics will threaten you as well.’ This was the highpoint of Vandervelde’s personal crusade.

After 1900, however, Vandervelde’s approach slowly changed. Having previously advocated Belgian withdrawal from the Congo, he now began to argue that it would be better not to desert the people of Africa. Instead, a benign imperialism should remain, under conditions of democratic public ownership. The shifts in Vandervelde’s argument were subtle, and it was some time before his comrades in the Socialist Party realised that his position had changed. Yet from July 1901, Vandervelde encouraged a Belgian takeover of the Congo from Léopold and a fundamental reform of the regime there, arguing that ‘European civilisation is destined to conquer the world’. On 1 July 1903 Vandervelde attacked existing systems of colonialism as the source of slavery abroad and militarism at home. As long as the empire remained ‘in the forms that it takes under the capitalist regime’, then such exploitation would continue. Working closely with Morel, Vandervelde told the Belgian parliament on 7 December 1906: ‘We cannot be responsible before world opinion without having acted ourselves, without having reformed the institutions of the Congo.’ After 1906, he took part in a commission to draft a new treaty for the Congo. Finally, in June 1907, the Socialist Party debated Vandervelde’s new position. His critics to the left included Louis de Brouckère, who argued that imperialism of any kind would inevitably lead to further exploitation. Eugène Hins argued Vandervelde’s earlier position, that colonialism would reduce the living standards of Belgian workers. Vandervelde lost the vote, and then argued that he would resign unless he was granted the right to vote independently in parliament. This freedom he won. Later that same year, the Belgians were criticised at the Stuttgart Conference of the Second International. Despite backing from socialists in other colonial states, including France, a majority argued for an unconditional anti-imperialist position.⁸⁹

Vandervelde was undoubtedly a brave opponent of King Léopold. As late as 1908 Léopold’s allies sought to try a black American minister, Sheppard, whose accounts of the horrors had encouraged the reform movement. Morel wired Vandervelde asking for the name of a young lawyer who might be persuaded to voyage out to Africa and defend Léopold’s critics. To general surprise, Vandervelde took on the case on a pro bono basis, travelling out to the Congo at his own expense, defending the minister, even risking his own life, but eventually securing Sheppard’s release. For all Vandervelde’s appealing personal qualities, though, his politics were shaped by the same compromises as those of Morel or Casement. His biographer Janet Polasky presents her subject as standing Between Reform and Revolution. This is too generous: Vandervelde’s argument that the reform of empire was better than deserting the people to stand alone meant in reality that the Congolese should remain under outside dominance. Such rule may have been reformed, but it was still a form of empire. Had the leaders of Belgian parliamentary socialism clearly demanded self-government for the people of the Congo, such was the crisis, the demand could have been won. In its place, Vandervelde’s own scheme was adopted. After 1908, Léopold’s private empire was ‘nationalised’ by the Belgian state.

The end, when it came, was rapid indeed. In the Congo, Léopold had succeeded in establishing absolute rule. The nature of a private empire meant that its security depended ultimately on the personality of its ruler. King Léopold was determined to hold on to his conquests; yet he lacked the means to force Europeans to accept his will. Increasingly threatened by the campaign of Morel and the others, Léopold resorted to bribery and other ruses. In 1905, he set up a handpicked Commission of Inquiry, composed of loyal judges, to prove that his regime was sound. Criticised on all sides, even such a man as the chief judge of the Congo was forced to admit that crimes had been committed. In the words of the final report:

The Congo Free State is not a colonising state, it is barely a state at all: it is a financial enterprise. The colony has been administered neither in the interests of the natives nor even in the economic interest of Belgium: to obtain for the King-Sovereign a maximum of resources, this has been the objective of government activity.⁹⁰

As Léopold aged, he was ever more despised at home. He was seen as a philanderer and a wastrel. One of his last acts was to give his mistress 6 million francs, plus an even greater fortune in Congolese bonds. The movement for the reform of the Congo grew each year in numbers and support. The feeling was widespread that something had to he done. After a long parliamentary debate, the Belgian parliament annexed the region in 1908. The king died in December of the following year. Surely, people hoped, something better would now begin.