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I'KAISI. I( )K
KiNCi I.KOMi.trs CitlOST
LLA superb synoptic history of European misdemeanor in central Africa.13
—Jeremy Hxrdm^NtwYark't'inux Book Review i(An absorbing ;md horrifying account.'
'
Luc Santi.% San Fraudsea Chronicle
''Carefully researched and vigorously told, King Leopold's Ghost does what good
history always does — expands the memory of the human race" — I ;ritz L;mhiim
7 Houston Chronicle
LlA superb, engrossing chronicle" — Publishers. Weekly
"Hoehschild s book is a rare thing in possessing both scholarly worth and the
virtues of a novel. This is an extraordinary book" — - Uoston Sunday Clohe
"[HochschikiJ spins engrossing yarns of kings and colonels, of distant station
chiefs and feverish missionaries"
— James /Aig. Philath: Î h in hajuircr
"A remarkably engaging work of popular history: extensively researched, well
written and difficult to put down. 5 '
Scott McLcmee, Newsdtty
'Spellbinding/'
— Kobm hiylor, Seattle Posf-httt'ltiyendcr
"Hochschild has produced a history like none other. A hundred years ago, en- lightened people in the Western world were outraged by a holocaust in Africa
which left millions dead . . .Yet today not one person in a thousand could say
what the fuss was all about, unless, of course, they have already read this amaz-
ing book."
Tariq Aih Finartrial Times
"A fascinating account of the creation of the Belgian Congo by that strange, greedy cruel monarch Leopold, king of the Belgians r , ,A ha tinLing book" — K. Anthmiy Appinh, \!eu f York Review of Hooks
"A book of terrible beauty . King Leopolds Ghost is essential reading for the new ccnhiry."
'Ibm S:ni{[lioriK tfutmtw Sun
L
l loehschild has assembled the most remarkable (litres and dramatis person a e,
added a keen appreciation for sociopolitical nuances in turn-of-the-eeiHury
1 m rope and America, and produced a splendid new popular history" —
(_ I a i f C.i e rh a r c H l'\w -j# 1 1. A ffairs
"Hoehsch.ild has written a moving and important book about wickedness
trittinphant and defeated. His Leopold liter its a place amontj the s^reat
modern enemies of civilization "
— A\g\xVM\\miw t Aritvriuvt Spcctafov
:
'Adam Hochschild tells the story of the Belgian colonization in Africa with
die talent of a great journalist arid the verve of a passionate partisan. jHc|
shows the birth, around .1900. of the idea that independent, press Lire, exerted in
the name of human rights, can make die powerful give way. Something which is important to us all."
-- Je^iii Soiablin, [j: A-lorulv
"Engrossing and homtyiny . . .The book begins as an account of evil; it ends as
an account of" people of conscience."
— Philip Kennieott, Sl Li>ui$ I\^t-l)i<jytttt-h t(An awesome tale, very well researched And well told, and as I loehschild makes clear, k was a tragedy with continuing consequences
"
—M art in K 1 ein , ' to rot t to (Jh j he as \d Mail
^Kino Leopold's Ghost has a riveting cast of characters: heroes, villains and bit
players, all extraordinary all compelling unifies of neuroses and ambitions, all
wonderfully drawn^ — RoiKin bennect, Okwvrr
"This is a harmwing story, toid with a crisp i nc is i veriest . . .We knew-- of tins skeleton in the colonial cupboard . . . but we did not know u was quite so
— Charles Nidi oil. Daily 'R'kyjuph
i
BOOKS BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD
Half the Way Home: A Memoir ofFather and Son
The Mirror at Midnight: A South AfricanJourney
The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits^ Travels
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
wm^smmm^mm^i^". ^ ^ ^
A STORY of GREED,
TERROR, and HEROISM
in COLONIAL AFRICA
^ A MARINER BOOK
Houghton Mifflin Company
BOSTON NEW YORK
KING
LEOPOLD'S
GHOST
-«lf
First Mariner Books edition 1999 FOR
. , ^ DAVID HUNTER Copyright © 1998 by Adam Hochschild All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, NewYork, NewYork 10003 •
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hochschild, Adam.
King Leopold's ghost : a story of greed, terror, and heroism in
colonial Africa / Adam Hochschild. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-395-75924-2
isbn 0-6 1 8-00 190- 5 (pbk.)
1 . Congo (Democratic Republic)— Politics and government — 1885-1908. 2. Congo (Democratic Republic)— Politics and govern- ment. 3. Forced labor—Congo (Democratic Republic)— History
—
19th century. 4. Forced labor—Congo (Democratic Republic)— History— 20th century. 5. Indigenous peoples—Congo (Democratic Republic)— History— 1 9th century. 6. Indigenous peoples—Congo ' (Democratic Republic)— History—20th century 7. Congo (Democratic Republic)—Race relations—History— 1 9th century. 8
.
Congo (Democratic Republic)—Race relations— History— 20th cen- tury. 9. Human rights movements— History— 19th century. 10. Human rights movements—History— 20th century. I . Tide. DT655.H63 1998
967.5 DC2I 98-16813 CIP
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
QUM 15 14 13 12
Book design by Melodie Wertelet Map by Barbara Jackson, Meridian Mapping, Oakland, California Photo credits appear on page 352.
In somewhat different form, portions of chapters 9 and 19 appeared
in The New Yorker, and portions of chapters 5 and 16 in TheAmerican Scholar.
^rrsmgF-'T
CONTENTS
Introduction i
Prologue: "The Traders Are Kidnapping Our People" 6
PART i: WALKING INTO FIRE i. "I Shall Not Give Up the Chase" 21
2. The Fox Crosses the Stream jj
3. The Magnificent Cake 47
4. "The Treaties Must Grant Us Everything" 61
5. From Florida to Berlin 75
6. Under the Yacht Club Flag 88
7- The First Heretic 101
8. Where There Aren't No Ten Commandments 115 9- Meeting Mr. Kurtz 140
10. The Wood That Weeps i5o
11. A Secret Society ofMurderers 167
CONTENTS
PART II: A KING AT BAY
12. David and Goliath 183
13. Breaking into the Thieves' Kitchen 193
14. To Flood His Deeds with Day 209
15. A Reckoning 223
16. "Journausts Won't Give You Receipts*' 235
17. No Man Is a Stranger 233
18. Victory? 27$
19. The Great Forgetting 292
Notes 309
Bibliography 338
Acknowledgments 331
Index 333
KING
LEOPOLD'S
GHOST
INTRODUCTION
The beginnings of this story lie far back in time, and its reverbera- tions still sound today. But for me a central incandescent moment,
one that illuminates long decades before and after, is a young man's flash
ofmoral recognition.
The year is 1897 or 1898. Try to imagine him, briskly stepping off a
cross-Channel steamer, a forceful, burly man, in his mid-twenties, with a
handlebar mustache. He is confident and well spoken, but his British speech is without the polish of Eton or Oxford. He is well dressed, but the clothes are not from Bond Street. With an ailing mother and a wife and growing family to support, he is not the sort of person likely to get
caught up in an idealistic cause. His ideas are thoroughly conventional.
He looks— and is— every inch the sober, respectable businessman. Edmund Dene Morel is a trusted employee of a Liverpool shipping
line. A subsidiary of the company has the monopoly on all transport of cargo to and from the Congo Free State, as it is then called, the huge
territory in central Africa that is the world's only colony claimed by one
man. That man is King Leopold II of Belgium, a ruler much admired throughout Europe as a "philanthropic" monarch. He has welcomed Christian missionaries to his new colony; his troops, it is said, have fought and defeated local slave-traders who preyed on the population; and for more than a decade European newspapers have praised him for investing
his personal fortune in public works to benefit the Africans.
Because Morel speaks fluent French, his company sends him to Bel-
gium every few weeks to supervise the loading and unloading ofships on
INTRODUCTION
the Congo run. Although the officials he works with have been handling
this shipping traffic for years without a second thought, Morel begins to
notice things that unsettle him. At the docks of the big port ofAntwerp
he sees his company's ships arriving filled to the hatch covers with valu-
able cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when they cast off their hawsers to
steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager
young men in uniform line the ships' rails, what they carry is mosdy army
officers, firearms, and ammunition. There is no trade going on here. Little
or nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory. As Morel watches
these riches streaming to Europe with almost no goods being sent to
Africa to pay for them, he realizes that there can be only one explanation
for their source: slave labor.
Brought face to face with evil, Morel does not turn away. Instead, what
he sees determines the course of his life and the course of an extraordi-
nary movement, the first great international human rights movement of
the twentieth century. Seldom has one human being— impassioned, eloquent, blessed with brilliant organizing skills and nearly superhuman
energy— managed almost single-handedly to put one subject on the world's front pages for more than a decade. Only a few years after stand-
ing on the docks of Antwerp, Edmund Morel would be at the White
House, insisting to President Theodore Roosevelt that the United States
had a special responsibility to do something about the Congo. He would
organize delegations to the British Foreign Office. He would mobilize
everyone from Booker T. Washington to Anatole France to the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury to join his cause. More than two hundred mass
meetings to protest slave labor in the Congo would be held across the
United States. A larger number of gatherings in England— nearly three hundred a year at the crusade's peak— would draw as many as five thousand people at a time. In London, one letter of protest to the Times
on the Congo would be signed by eleven peers, nineteen bishops, sev-
enty-six members of Parliament, the presidents of seven Chambers of
Commerce, thirteen editors of major newspapers, and every lord mayor
in the country. Speeches about the horrors of King Leopold's Congo
would be given as far away as Australia. In Italy, two men would fight a
duel over the issue. British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, a man not
given to overstatement, would declare that "no external question for at
least thirty years has moved the country so strongly and so vehemendy."
This is the story of that movement, of the savage crime that was its
target, of the long period of exploration and conquest that preceded it,
INTRODUCTION
and of the way the world has forgotten one of the great mass killings of
recent history.
I knew almost nothing about the history of the Congo until a few years
ago, when I noticed a footnote in a book I happened to be reading.
Often, when you come across something particularly striking, you re-
member just where you were when you read it. On this occasion I was sitting, stiffand tired, late at night, in one of the far rear seats ofan airliner
crossing the United States from east to west.
The footnote was to a quotation by Mark Twain, written, the note said,
when he was part of the worldwide movement against slave labor in the
Congo, a practice that had taken five to eight million lives. Worldwide
movement? Five to eight million lives? I was starded.
Statistics about mass murder are often hard to prove. But ifthis number
turned out to be even halfas high, I thought, the Congo would have been
one ofthe major killing grounds ofmodern times.Why were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of our century's horrors? And why
had I never before heard ofthem? I had been writing about human rights
for years, and once, in the course ofhalf a dozen trips to Africa, I had been
to the Congo.
That visit was in 1961. In a Leopoldville apartment, I heard a CIA man, who had had too much to drink, describe with satisfaction exacdy how and where the newly independent country's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, had been killed a few months earlier. He assumed that any American, even a visiting student like me, would share his relief at the
assassination of a man the United States government considered a dan- gerous leftist troublemaker.In the early morning a day or two later I left
the country by ferry across the Congo River, the conversation still ring-
ing in my head as the sun rose over the waves and the dark, smooth water slapped against the boat's hull.
It was several decades later that I encountered that footnote, and with
it my own ignorance ofthe Congo's early history. Then it occurred to me that, like millions of other people, I had read something about that time
and place after all:Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness, However, with my college lecture notes on the novel filled with scribbles about Freudian
overtones, mythic echoes, and inward vision, I had mentally filed away
the book under fiction, not fact.
I began to read more. The further I explored, the more it was clear that
Pfg?:w,iwi^p iMttoDiicrroN INTRODUCTION
the Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust
dimensions. At the same time, I unexpectedly found myself absorbed by
the extraordinary characters who had peopled this patch of history Al-
though it was Edmund Dene Morel who had ignited a movement, he
was not the first outsider to see King Leopold's Congo for what it was
and to try hard to draw the world's attention to it. That role was played by
George Washington Williams, a black American journalist and historian,
who, unlike anyone before him, interviewed Africans about their experi-
ence of their white conquerors. It was another black American, William
Sheppard, who recorded a scene he came across in the Congo rain forest
that would brand itself on the world's consciousness as a symbol of
colonial brutality There were other heroes as well, one of the bravest of
whom ended his life on a London gallows. Then, of course, into the middle ofthe story sailed the young sea captainJoseph Conrad, expecting
the exotic Africa of his childhood dreams but finding instead what he
would call "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of
human conscience." And looming above them all was King Leopold II, a
man as filled with greed and cunning, duplicity and charm, as any of the
more complex villains of Shakespeare.
As I followed the intersecting lives of these men, I realized something
else about the terror in the Congo and the controversy that came to
surround it. It was the first major international atrocity scandal in the age
of the telegraph and the camera. In its mixture of bloodshed on an
industrial scale, royalty, sex, the power of celebrity, and rival lobbying and
media campaigns raging in half a dozen countries on both sides of the
Adantic, it seemed strikingly close to our time. Furthermore, unlike many
other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish con-
quistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop ofblood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that,
too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the
clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh. Although Europe has long forgotten the victims ofLeopold's Congo, I
found a vast supply of raw material to work with in reconstructing their
fate: Congo memoirs by explorers, steamboat captains, military men; the
records of mission stations; reports of government investigations; and
those peculiarly Victorian phenomena, accounts by gendeman (or some-
times lady) "travelers." The Victorian era was a golden age of letters and
diaries; and often it seems as if every visitor or official in the Congo
kept a voluminous journal and spent each evening on the riverbank
writing letters home.
One problem, of course, is that nearly all of this vast river of words is
by Europeans or Americans. There was no written language in the Congo
when Europeans first arrived, and this inevitably skewed the way that
history was recorded.We have dozens ofmemoirs by the territory's white officials; we know the changing opinions of key people in the British
Foreign Office, sometimes on a day-by-day basis. But we do not have a
full-length memoir or complete oral history of a single Congolese dur-
ing the period of the greatest terror. Instead of African voices from this
time there is largely silence.
And yet, as I immersed myself in this material, I saw how revealing it
was. The men who seized the Congo often trumpeted their killings, bragging about them in books and newspaper articles. Some kept surpris-
ingly frank diaries that show far more than the writers intended, as does a
voluminous and explicit instruction book for colonial officials. Further-
more, several officers of the private army that occupied the Congo came
to feel guilty about the blood on their hands. Their testimony, and the
documents they smuggled out, helped to fuel the protest movement.
Even on the part of the brutally suppressed Africans, the silence is not
complete. Some of their actions and voices, though filtered through the
records of their conquerors, we can still see and hear.
The worst of the bloodshed in the Congo took place between 1890
and 19 10, but its origins lie much earlier, when Europeans and Africans
first encountered each other there. And so to reach the headwaters of our
story we must leap back more than five hundred years, to a time when a
ship's captain saw the ocean change its color, and when a king received
news of a strange apparition that had risen from inside the earth.
PROLOGUE
"THE TRADERS ARE
KIDNAPPING OUR PEOPLE"
When Europeans began imagining Africa beyond the Sahara, the continent they pictured was a dreamscape, a site for fantasies of
the fearsome and the supernatural. Ranuif Higden, a Benedictine monk
who mapped the world about 1350, claimed that Africa contained one-
eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads.A geographer in the next century announced that the continent held people with one leg,
three faces, and the heads of lions. In 1459, an Italian monk, Fra Mauro,
declared Africa the home of the roc, a bird so large that it could carry an
elephant through the air.
In the Middle Ages, almost no one in Europe was in a position to
know whether Africa contained giant birds, one-eyed people, or anything
else. Hostile Moors lived on Africa's Mediterranean coast, and few Euro-
peans dared set foot there, much less head south across the Sahara. And as
for trying to sail down the west African coast, everyone knew that as soon
as you passed the Canary Islands you would be in the Mare Tenebroso, the
Sea ofDarkness.
In the medieval imagination [writes Peter Forbath], this was a
region of uttermost dread , . . where the heavens fling down
liquid sheets offlame and the waters boil . . . where serpent rocks
and ogre islands lie in wait for the mariner, where the giant hand
of Satan reaches up from the fathomless depths to seize him,
where he will turn black in face and body as a mark of God's
THE TRADERS ARE KIDNAPPING OUR PEOPLE
vengeance for the insolence of his prying into this forbidden
mystery. And even ifhe should be able to survive all these ghasdy perils and sail on through, he would then arrive in the Sea of
Obscurity and be lost forever in the vapors and slime at the edge
of the world.
It was not until the fifteenth century, the dawn of the age of ocean navigation, that Europeans systematically began to venture south, the
Portuguese in the lead. In the 1440s, Lisbon's shipbuilders developed the
caravel, a compact vessel particularly good at sailing into the wind. Al- though rarely more than a hundred feet long, this sturdy ship carried
explorers far down the west coast of Africa, where no one knew what gold, spices, and precious stones might He. But it was not only lust for
riches that drove the explorers. Somewhere in Africa, they knew, was the source of the Nile, a mystery that had fascinated Europeans since antiq-
uity. They were also driven by one of the most enduring of medieval myths, the legend of PresterJohn, a Christian king who was said to rule a vast empire in the interior of Africa, where, from a palace of translucent
crystal and precious stones, he reigned over forty-two lesser kings, in ad-
dition to assorted centaurs and giants. No traveler was ever turned away from his dinner table of solid emerald, which seated thousands. Surely
PresterJohn would be eager to share his riches with his fellow Christians
and to help them find their way onward, to the fabled wealth of India.
Successive Portuguese expeditions probed ever farther southward. In
1482, an experienced naval captain named Diogo Cao set offon the most ambitious voyage yet. As he sailed close to the west African coast, he saw
the North Star disappear from the sky once his caravel crossed the equa-
tor, and he found himselfmuch farther south than anyone from Europe nad ever been.
One day Cao came upon something that astounded him. Around his ship, the sea turned a dark, slate-tinged yellow, and brownish-yellow
waves were breaking on the nearby beaches. Sailing toward the mouth of an inlet many miles wide, his caravel had to fight a current of eight to nine knots. Furthermore, a taste of the water surrounding the ship re-
vealed that it was fresh, not salt. Cao had stumbled on the mouth of an enormous silt-filled river, larger than any a European had ever seen. The impression its vastness made on him and his men is reflected in a contem- porary account:
PROLOGUE
For the space of 20 leagues [the river] preserves its fresh water
unbroken by the briny billows which encompass it on every side;
as if this noble river had determined to try its strength in pitched
battle with the ocean itself, and alone deny it the tribute which
all other rivers in the world pay without resistance.
Modern oceanographers have discovered more evidence of the great river's strength in its "pitched battle with the ocean": a hundred-mile-
long canyon, in places four thousand feet deep, that the river has carved
out of the sea floor.
Cao went ashore at the river's mouth and erected a limestone pillar
topped with an iron cross and inscribed with the royal coat of arms and
the words: "In the year 6681 of the World and in that of 1482 since the
birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most serene, the most excellent and
potent prince, King Joao II of Portugal did order this land to be discov-
ered and this pillar of stone to be erected by Diogo Cao, an esquire in his
household."
The river where he had landed would be known by Europeans for most ofthe next five hundred years as the Congo. It flowed into the sea at
the northern end of a thriving African kingdom, an imperial federation
of two to three million people. Ever since then, geographers have usually
spelled the name of the river and the eventual European colony on its
banks one way, and that of the people living around its mouth and their
indigenous kingdom another.
The Kingdom of the Kongo was roughly three hundred miles square, comprising territory that today lies in several countries. Its capital was the
town ofMbanza Kongo— mbanza means "court"— on a commanding hilltop some ten days' walk inland from the coast and today just on the
Angolan side ofthe Angola-Congo border. In 1 491, nine years and several
voyages after Diogo Cao 's landfall, an expedition of awed Portuguese
priests and emissaries made this ten-day trek and set up housekeeping as
permanent representatives of their country in the court of the Kongo
king. Their arrival marked the beginning of the first sustained encounter
between Europeans and a black African nation.
The Kingdom of the Kongo had been in place for at least a hundred years before the Portuguese arrived. Its monarch, the ManiKongo, was
chosen by an assembly of clan leaders. Like his European counterparts,
he sat on a throne, in his case made of wood inlaid with ivory. As sym-
'THB TRADERS ARE KIDNAPPING OUR PEOPLE'
bols of royal authority, the ManiKongo carried a zebra-tail whip, had
the skins and heads of baby animals suspended from his belt, and wore a
small cap.
In the capital, the king dispensed justice, received homage, and re-
viewed his troops under a fig tree in a large public square. Whoever
approached him had to do so on all fours. On pain of death, no one was allowed to watch him eat or drink. Before he did either, an attendant
struck two iron poles together, and anyone in sight had to he face down
on the ground.
The ManiKongo who was then on the throne greeted the Portuguese warmly. His enthusiasm was probably due less to the Savior his unex-
pected guests told him about than to the help their magical fire-spouting
weapons promised in suppressing a troublesome provincial rebellion. The
Portuguese were glad to oblige.
The newcomers built churches and mission schools. Like many white
evangelists who followed them, they were horrified by polygamy; they thought it was the spices in the African food that provoked the dreadful
practice. But despite their contempt for Kongo culture, the Portuguese
grudgingly recognized in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-devel-
oped state— the leading one on the west coast of central Africa. The ManiKongo appointed governors for each ofsome half-dozen provinces,
and his rule was carried out by an elaborate civil service that included
such specialized positions as mani vangu vangu, or first judge in cases of
adultery. Although they were without writing or the wheel, the inhabi-
tants forged copper into jewelry and iron into weapons, and wove cloth-
ing out of fibers stripped from the leaves of the raffia palm tree. Accord-
ing to myth, the founder of the Kongo state was a blacksmith king, so
ironwork was an occupation of the nobility. People cultivated yams, ba-
nanas, and other fruits and vegetables, and raised pigs, cattle, and goats.
They measured distance by marching days, and marked time by the lunar
month and by a four-day week, the first day ofwhich was a holiday. The
king collected taxes from his subjects and, like many a ruler, controlled
the currency supply: cowrie shells found on a coastal island under royal
authority.
As in much of Africa, the kingdom had slavery. The nature ofAfrican
slavery varied from one area to another and changed over time, but most
slaves were people captured in warfare. Others had been criminals or
debtors, or were given away by their farnilies as part of a dowry settle-
PROLOGUE
merit. Like any system that gives some human beings total power over
others, slavery in Africa could be vicious. Some Congo basin peoples
sacrificed slaves on special occasions, such as the ratification of a treaty
between chiefdoms; the slow death of an abandoned slave, his bones
broken, symbolized the fate of anyone who violated the treaty. Some
slaves might also be sacrificed to give a dead chief's soul some company
on its journey into the next world.
In other ways, African slavery was more flexible and benign than the
system Europeans would soon establish in the New World. Over a gen-
eration or two, slaves could often earn or be granted their freedom, and
free people and slaves sometimes intermarried. Nonetheless, the fact that
trading in human beings existed in any form turned out to be cata-
strophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready to buy endless
shiploads of slaves, they found African chiefs willing to sell.
Soon enough, the slave-buyers came. They arrived in small numbers at
first, but then in a flood unleashed by events across the Adantic. In 1500,
only nine years after the first Europeans arrived at Mbanza Kongo, a
Portuguese expedition was blown off course and came upon Brazil.
Within a few decades, the Western Hemisphere became a huge, lucrative,
nearly insatiable market for African slaves. They were put to work by the
millions in Brazil's mines and on its coffee plantations, as well as on the
Caribbean islands where other European powers quickly began using the
lush, fertile land to grow sugar.
In the Kingdom of the Kongo, the Portuguese forgot the search for
Prester John. Slaving fever seized them. Men sent out from Lisbon to be
masons or teachers at Mbanza Kongo soon made far more money by
herding convoys of chained Africans to the coast and selling them to the
captains of slave-carrying caravels.
The lust for slave profits engulfed even some of the priests, who
abandoned their preaching, took black women as concubines, kept slaves
themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery. The priests
who strayed from the fold stuck to their faith in one way, however; after
the Reformation they tried to ensure that none of their human goods
ended up in Protestant hands. It was surely not right, said one, 'Tor
persons baptized in the Catholic church to be sold to peoples who are
enemies of their faith."
A village near Diogo Cao s stone pillar on the south shore of the
Congo River estuary became a slave port, from which more than five
10
"the traders are kidnapping our people"
thousand slaves a year were being shipped across the Adantic by the 1 530s.
By the next century, fifteen thousand slaves a year were exported from
the Kingdom of the Kongo as a whole. Traders kept careful records of
their booty One surviving inventory from this region lists "68 head" of
slaves by name, physical defects, and cash value, starting with the men,
who were worth the most money, and ending with: "Child, name un- known as she is dying and cannot speak, male without value, and a small
girl Callenbo, no value because she is dying; one small girl Cantunbe, no
value because she is dying."
Many of the slaves shipped to the Americas from the great river's
mouth came from the Kingdom of the Kongo itself; many others were
captured by African slave-dealers who ranged more than seven hundred miles into the interior, buying slaves from local chiefs and headmen.
Forced-marched to the coast, their necks locked into wooden yokes, the
slaves were rarely given enough food, and because caravans usually trav-
eled in the dry season, they often drank stagnant water. The trails to the
slave ports were soon strewn with bleaching bones.
Once they were properly baptized, clothed in leftover burlap cargo
wrappings, and chained together in ships' holds, most slaves from this
region were sent to Brazil, the nearest part of the New World. Starting in the 1600s, however, a growing demand tempted many ship captains
to make the longer voyage to the British colonies in North America.
Roughly one of every four slaves imported to work the cotton and
tobacco plantations of the American South began his or her journey
across the Adantic from equatorial Africa, including the Kongo kingdom.
The KiKongo language, spoken around the Congo River's mouth, is one
of the African tongues whose traces linguists have found in the Gullah
dialect spoken by black Americans today on the coastal islands of South
Carolina and Georgia.
When the Atlantic slave trade began decimating the Kongo, that nation was under the reign of a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who had gained the throne in 1 506 and ruled as Affonso I for nearly forty years. Affonso s life spanned a crucial period. When he was born, no one in the kingdom knew that Europeans existed. When he died, his entire realm was threatened by the slave-selling fever they had caused. He was a man of tragic self-awareness, and he left his mark. Some three hundred
it
s^pp^'^'TYrr' riULUOUB
years later, a missionary said, "A native of the Kongo knows the name of
three kings: that of the present one, that of his predecessor, and that of
Affonso."
He was a provincial chief in his early thirties when the Portuguese first arrived at Mbanza Kongo, in 1491. A convert to Christianity, he took on the name Affonso and some Portuguese advisers, and studied for ten years
with the priests at Mbanza Kongo. One wrote to the king of Portugal that Affonso "knows better than us the prophets, the Gospel ofour Savior
Jesus Christ, all the lives of the saints and all that has to do with our holy
mother Church. IfYour Highness saw him, You would be astonished. He speaks so well and with such assurance that it always seems to me that the Holy Spirit speaks through his mouth. My Lord, he does nothing but study; many times he falls asleep over his books and many times he forgets
to eat or drink because he is speaking of our Savior." It is hard to tell how
much of this glowing portrait was inspired by the priest s attempt to
impress the Portuguese king and how much by Affonso 's attempt to
impress the priest.
In the language of a later age, King Affonso I was a modernizer. He urgendy tried to acquire European learning, weapons, and goods in order
to strengthen his rule and fortify it against the destabilizing force of the
white arrival. Having noticed the Portuguese appetite for copper, for
example, he traded it for European products that would help him buy the
submission of outlying provinces. Clearly a man of unusual intelligence,
Affonso tried to do something as difficult in his time as in ours: to be a
selective modernizer. He was an enthusiast for the church, for the written word, for European medicine, and for woodworking, masonry, and other
skills to be learned from Portuguese craftsmen. But when his fellow king
in Lisbon sent an envoy to urge the adoption ofPortugal's legal code and
court protocol, Affonso wasn't interested. And he tried hard to keep out prospectors, fearing total takeover ofhis land ifEuropeans found the gold
and silver they coveted.
Because virtually everything we know about this part ofAfrica for the
next several hundred years comes to us from its white conquerors, King
Affonso I provides something rare and valuable: an African voice. Indeed,
his is one of the very few central African voices that we can hear at all
before the twentieth century. He used his fluency in Portuguese to dic- tate a remarkable series of letters to two successive Portuguese kings, the
first known documents composed by a black African in any European
language. Several dozen of the letters survive, above his signature, with its
mra-mMW www wmvm :.'"T*I|H
regal flourish of double underlinings. Their tone is the formal one of monarch to monarch, usually beginning "Most high and powerful prince and king my brother . . ." But we can hear not just a king speaking; we hear a human being, one who is aghast to see his people taken away in ever greater numbers on slave ships.
Affonso was no abolitionist. Like most African rulers of his time and later, he owned slaves, and at least once he sent some as a present to his "brother" king in Lisbon, along with leopard skins, parrots, and copper anklets. But this traditional exchange of gifts among kings seemed greatly different to Affonso from having tens of thousands of his previously free subjects taken across the sea in chains. Listen to him as he writes King Joao 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. . . . This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. . . . We need in this king- dom 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.
Later the same year:
Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many ofour- alack free subjects They sell them . . . after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secredy or at night. ... As soon as the captives are in the hands ofwhite men they are branded with a red-hot iron.
Again and again Affonso speaks about the twin themes of the slave trade and the alluring array of cloth, tools,jewelry, and other knickknacks that the Portuguese traders used to buy their human cargoes:
These goods exert such a great attraction over simple and igno-
rant people that they believe in them and forget their belief in God. . . . My Lord, a monstrous greed pushes our subjects, even Christians, to seize members oftheir own families, and of ours, to do business by selling them as captives.
13
PROLOGUE
While begging the Portuguese king to send him teachers, pharmacists,
and doctors instead of traders, Affonso admits that the flood of material
goods threatened his authority. His people "can now procure, in much
greater quantity than we can, the things we formerly used to keep them
obedient to us and content." Affonso's lament was prescient; this was not
the last time that lust for Europe's great cornucopia ofgoods undermined
traditional ways of life elsewhere.
The Portuguese kings showed no sympathy. King Joao III replied:
"You ... tell me that you want no slave-trading in your domains, because
this trade is depopulating your country. ... The Portuguese there, on the
contrary, tell me how vast the Congo is, and how it is so thickly popu-
lated that it seems as ifno slave has ever left."
Affonso pleaded with his fellow sovereigns as one Christian with
another, complete with the prejudices of the day. Of the priests turned
slave-traders, he wrote:
In this kingdom, faith is as fragile as glass because of the bad
examples of the men who come to teach here, because the lusts
of the world and lure ofwealth have turned them away from the
truth.Just as the Jews crucified the Son ofGod because of covet-
ousness, my brother, so today He is again crucified.
Several times Affonso sent his appeals for an end to the slave trade direcdy
to the Pope in Rome, but the Portuguese detained his emissaries to the
Vatican as they stepped off the boat in Lisbon.
Affonso's despair reached its depth in 1539, near the end of his life,
when he heard that ten of his young nephews, grandsons, and other
relatives who had been sent to Portugal for a religious education had
disappeared en route. "We don't know whether they are dead or alive,"
he wrote in desperation, "nor how they might have died, nor what news
we can give of them to their fathers and mothers." We can imagine the
king's horror at being unable to guarantee the safety even of his own
family. Portuguese traders and sea captains along the long route back to
Europe sidetracked many a cargo between the Kongo kingdom and
Lisbon; these youngsters, it turned out, ended up in Brazil as slaves.
His hatred for the overseas slave trade and his vigilance against its
erosion of his authority won Affonso the enmity of some of the Portu-
guese merchants living in his capital. A group of eight made an attempt
on his life as he was attending Mass on Easter Sunday in 1 540. He escaped
14
"the traders are kidnapping our people"
with only a bullet hole in the fringe of his royal robe, but one of his nobles was killed and two others wounded.
After Affonso's death, the power of the Kongo state gradually dimin- ished as provincial and village chiefs, themselves growing rich on slave sales, no longer gave much allegiance to the court at Mbanza Kongo. By the end of the 1500s, other European countries had joined in the slave trade; British, French, and Dutch vessels roamed the African coast, look- ing for human cargo. In 1665, the army ofthe weakened Kingdom ofthe Kongo fought a battle with the Portuguese. It was defeated, and the ManiKongo was beheaded. Internal strife further depleted the kingdom, whose territory was all taken over by European colonies by the late 1800s.
Except for Affonso's letters, the written record of these times still shows
them entirely through white men's eyes. How did the Europeans, begin- ning with Diogo Cao and his three ships with faded red crosses on their sails, appear to the people living at the great river s mouth? To see with their eyes, we must turn to the myths and legends that have filtered down over the centuries.At first, Africans apparendy saw the white sailors not as men but as vumbi— ancestral ghosts— since the Kongo people believed that a person's skin changed to the color ofchalk when he passed into the land of the dead. And it was obvious that this was where these menacing white vumbi had come from, for people on the shore saw first the tips of an approaching ship's masts, then its superstructure, then its hull. Clearly
the ship had carried its passengers up from their homes beneath the surface of the earth. Here is how the Portuguese arrival was recounted by Mukunzo Kioko, a twentieth-century oral historian of the Pende people:
Our fathers were living comfortably. . . . They had catde and crops; they had salt marshes and banana trees.
Suddenly they saw a big boat rising out of the great ocean.
This boat had wings all of white, sparkling like knives.
White men came out ofthe water and spoke words which no one understood.
Our ancestors took fright; they said that these were vumbi, spirits returned from the dead.
They pushed them back into the ocean with volleys ofarrows.
15
PROLOGUE
But the vumbi spat fire with a noise of thunder. Many men were
killed. Our ancestors fled.
The chiefs and wise men said that these vumbi were the for-
mer possessors ofthe land. . . .
From that time to our days now, the whites have brought us
nothing but wars and miseries.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade seemed further confirmation that Euro-
peans had come from the land of the dead, for after they took their
shiploads of slaves out to sea, the captives never returned. Just as Europe-
ans would be long obsessed with African cannibalism, so Africans imag-
ined Europeans practicing the same thing. The whites were thought to
turn their captives' flesh into salt meat, their brains into cheese, and their
blood into the red wine Europeans drank. African bones were burned,
and the gray ash became gunpowder. The huge, smoking copper cooking
kettles that could be seen on sailing vessels were, it was believed, where all
these deadly transformations began. The death tolls on the packed slave
ships that sailed west from the Congo coast rose higher still when some
slaves refused to eat the food they were given, believing that they would
be eating those who had sailed before them.
As the years passed, new myths arose to explain the mysterious objects
the strangers brought from the land of the dead. A nineteenth-century
missionary recorded, for example, an African explanation of what hap-
pened when captains descended into the holds of their ships to fetch
trading goods like cloth. The Africans believed that these goods came not
from the ship itself but from a hole that led into the ocean. Sea sprites
weave this cloth in an "oceanic factory, and, whenever we need cloth, the
captain . . . goes to this hole and rings a bell." The sea sprites hand him up
their cloth, and the captain "then throws in, as payment, a few dead
bodies ofblack people he has bought from those bad native traders who
have bewitched their people and sold them to the white men." The myth
was not so far from reality. For what was slavery in the American South,
after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via
cotton plantations, into cloth?
Because African middlemen brought captives direcdy to their ships, Por-
tuguese traders seldom ventured far from the coast. For nearly four cen-
turies, in fact, after Diogo Cao came upon the Congo River, Europeans
16
"the traders are kidnapping our people'*
did not know where the river came from. It pours some 1.4 million cubic feet of water per second into the ocean; only the Amazon carries more water. Besides its enormous size and unknown course, the Congo posed another puzzle. Seamen noticed that its flow, compared with that ofother tropical rivers, fluctuated relatively little during the year. Rivers such as the Amazon and the Ganges had phases ofextremely high water and low water, depending on whether the land they drained was experiencing the rainy or the dry season. What made the Congo different?
The reason several centuries' worth of visitors failed to explore the Congo's source was that they couldn't sail upstream. Anyone who tried found that the river turned into a gorge, at the head of which were impassable rapids.
Much ofthe Congo River basin, we now know, lies on a plateau in the African interior. From the western rim of this plateau, nearly a thousand feet high, the river descends to sea level in a mere 220 miles. During this tumultuous descent, the river squeezes through narrow canyons, boils up in waves 40 feet high, and tumbles over 32 separate cataracts. So great is the drop and the volume of water that these 220 miles have as much hydroelectric potential as all the lakes and rivers of the United States combined.
For any sailor bold enough to get out of his ship and walk, the land route around the rapids wound uphill through rough, rocky country feared for its treacherous cliffs and ravines and for malaria and the other diseases to which Europeans had no immunity. Only with enormous difficulty did some Capuchin missionaries twice manage to get briefly inland as far as the top of the great rapids. A Portuguese expedition that tried to repeat this trek never returned. By the beginning of the nine- teenth century, Europeans still knew nothing about the interior of central Africa or about where the river began.
In 1 8 16, a British expedition, led by Captain James K. Tuckey of the Royal Navy, set off to find the Congo's origins. His two ships carried a wonderfully odd assortment ofpeople: Royal Marines, carpenters, black- smiths, a surgeon, a gardener from the royal gardens at Kew, a botanist, and an anatomist. The anatomist was directed, among other things, to make a careful study of the hippopotamus and to "preserve in spirits and if possible in triplicate, the organ of hearing of this animal." A Mr. Cranch was entered on the ship's log as Collector of Objects of Natural History; another expedition member was simply listed as Volunteer and Observant Gendeman.
17
PROLOGUB
When he arrived at the Congo's mouth, Tuckey counted eight slave
ships from various nations at anchor, awaiting their cargoes. He sailed his
own ships as far up the river as he could and then set off to skirt the
thunderous rapids overland. But he and his exhausted men grew discour-
aged by endless "scrambling up the sides of almost perpendicular hills,
and over great masses of quartz." These came to be called the Crystal
Mountains. The river was a mass of foaming rapids and enormous whirl-
pools. At a rare calm stretch Tuckey observed, rather provincially, that
"the scenery was beautiful and not inferior to any on the banks of the
Thames.'* One by one, the Englishmen began to suffer from an unknown
illness, most likely yellow fever, and after about 150 miles, Tuckey lost
heart. His party turned around, and he died shordy after getting back to
his ship. By the time the shaken survivors of the expedition made their
way back to England, twenty-one of the fifty-four men who had set out
were dead. The source of the Congo River and the secret of its steady
flow was still a mystery. For Europeans, Africa remained the supplier of
valuable raw materials— human bodies and elephant tusks. But other- wise they saw the continent as faceless, blank, empty, a place on the map
waiting to be explored, one ever more frequendy described by the phrase
that says more about the seer than the seen: the Dark Continent.
I
WALKING
into Fire
18
I SHALL NOT GIVE UP THE CHASE"
On January 28, 1841, a quarter-century after Tuckeys failed expedition, the man who would spectacularly accomplish what
Tuckey tried to do was born in the small Welsh market town ofDenbigh. He was entered on the birth register of St. Hilarys Church as "John Rowlands, Bastard"— an epithet that was to mark the boy for the rest of his life, a life obsessively devoted to living down a sense of shame. Young John was the first of five illegitimate children born to Betsy Parry, a housemaid. His father may have been John Rowlands, a local drunkard who died of delirium tremens, or a prominent and married lawyer named James Vaughan Home, or a boyfriend ofBetsy Parry's in London, where she had been working.
After giving birth, Betsy Parry departed from Denbigh in disgrace, leaving her baby behind in the home of his two uncles and his maternal grandfather, a man who believed a boy needed a "sound whipping" ifhe misbehaved. When John was five, his grandfather died, and the uncles immediately got rid of their unwanted nephew by paying a local family half a crown a week to take him in. When the family asked for more money, the uncles refused. One day the foster family told youngJohn that their son Dick would take him to visit his "Aunt Mary" in another village:
The way seemed interminable and tedious. ... At last Dick set me down from his shoulders before an immense stone building, and, passing through tall iron gates, he pulled at a bell, which I
21
WALKING INTO PIRB
could hear clanging noisily in the distant interior. A sombre-
faced stranger appeared at the door, who, despite my remon-
strances, seized me by the hand and drew me within, while Dick
tried to sooth my fears with glib promises that he was only going
to bring Aunt Mary to me. The door closed on him and, with the
echoing sound, I experienced for the first time the awful feeling
of utter desolateness.
Six-year-old John Rowlands was now an inmate of the St. Asaph Union
Workhouse.
Records oflife at St. Asaph's are generally covered by a veil ofVictorian
euphemism, but a local newspaper complained that the master of the
workhouse was an alcoholic who took "indecent liberties" with women
on his staff. An investigative commission that visited the workhouse in
1847, about the time John Rowlands arrived, reported that male adults
"took part in every possible vice," and that children slept two to a bed, an
older child with a younger, resulting in their starting "to practice and
understand things they should not." For the rest of his life, John Row-
lands would show a fear of sexual intimacy in any form.
Whatever John may have endured or seen in the workhouse dormi-
tory, in its schoolroom he thrived. For his achievements he won a prize
Bible from the local bishop. He was fascinated by geography. He had an
unusual ability to mimic someone else's handwriting after studying it for
a few minutes. His own penmanship was strikingly graceful; his youthful
signature was stylish and forward-leaning, with the stems and tails of the
letters sweeping dramatically far above and below the line. It was as if,
through his handwriting, he were trying to pull himself out of disgrace
and turn the script of his life from one ofpoverty to one of elegance.
One evening, when John was twelve, his supervisor "came up to me
during the dinner-hour, when all the inmates were assembled, and, point-
ing out a tall woman with an oval face, and a great coil of dark hair
behind her head, asked me if I recognized her.
"'No, sir,' I replied.
'"What, do you not know your own mother?'
"I started, with a burning face, and directed a shy glance at her, and
perceived she was regarding me with a look ofcool, critical scrutiny I had
expected to feel a gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression was
so chilling that the valves ofmy heart closed as with a snap."
Adding to his shock was the fact that his mother had brought two new
"I SHAtt NOT GIVB UP THfi CHASE"
illegitimate children to St. Asaph's with her, a boy and a girl. Some weeks later, she left the workhouse. For John, it was the latest in a chain of
abandonments.
At fifteen,John left St. Asaph's and stayed with a succession ofrelatives,
all of whom seemed queasy about sheltering a poorhouse cousin. At seventeen, while he was living with an uncle in Liverpool and working as
a butcher's delivery boy, he feared he was about to be turned out once
more. One day he delivered some meat to an American merchant ship at the docks, the Windermere. The captain eyed this short but sturdy-looking young man and asked, "How would you like to sail in this ship?"
In February 1859, after a seven-week voyage, the Windermere landed in
New Orleans, where the young newcomer jumped ship. He long re- membered the city's fascinating array of smells: tar, brine, green coffee, rum, and molasses. Roaming the streets in search ofwork, on the porch of
a warehouse he spied a middle-aged man in a stovepipe hat, a cotton broker, as it turned out, and approached him: "Do you want a boy, sir?"
The cotton broker, impressed by John's only reference, the prize Bible with the bishop's inscription, took on the Welsh teenager as an employee.
Soon after, youngJohn Rowlands, now living in the New World, decided to give himselfa new name. The procedure was gradual. In the i860 New Orleans census, he is listed as "J. Rolling." A woman who knew him at this time remembered him as John Rollins: "smart as a whip, and much given to bragging, big talk and telling stories." Within a few years, how-
ever, he began using the first and last name of the merchant who had given him his job. He continued to experiment with the middle names, using Morley, Morelake, and Moreland before finally settling on Morton.
And so the boy who had entered the St. Asaph Union Workhouse asJohn Rowlands became the man who would soon be known worldwide as Henry Morton Stanley.
Stanley gave himself not only a new name; he tried for the rest of his life to give himself a new biography. The man who would become the most famous explorer ofhis time, renowned for his accurate observations
ofAfrican wildlife and terrain, was a world-class obfuscator when it came to his early life. In his autobiography, for example, he tells of leaving the
Welsh workhouse in melodramatic terms: he leaped over a garden wall
and escaped, he claims, after leading a class rebellion against a cruel
supervisor named James Francis, who had viciously brutalized the entire senior class. '"Never again,' I shouted, marvelling at my own audacity. The words had scarcely escaped me ere I found myself swung upwards into
23
WALKING INTO FIRE 'I SHALL NOT GIVB UP THB CHASB'
the air by the collar ofmy jacket and flung into a nerveless heap on the
bench. Then the passionate brute pummelled me in the stomach until I
fell backward, gasping for breath. Again I was lifted, and dashed on the
bench with a shock that almost broke my spine." Stanley was then a
vigorous, healthy fifteen-year-old and would not have been an easy vic-
tim for Francis, a former coal miner who had lost one hand in a mining
accident. Other students later recalled no mutiny, much less one led
by Stanley; they remembered Francis as a gende man and Stanley as a
teachers pet, often given favors and encouragement and put in charge of
the class when Francis was away. Workhouse records show Stanley leaving
not as a runaway but to live at his uncle's while going to school.
Equally fanciful is Stanley's account of his time in New Orleans. He
lived, he says, at the home ofthe benevolent cotton broker, Henry Stanley,
and his saindy, fragile wife. When a yellow fever epidemic struck the city,
she sickened and died, in a bed curtained with white muslin, but at the
moment of death "she opened her mild eyes, and spoke words as from
afar: 'Be a good boy. God bless you!"'
Soon after, her sorrowing widower clasped his young tenant and em-
ployee to his breast and declared that "in future you are to bear my name"
What followed, Stanley claims, were two idyllic years of traveling on
business with the man he refers to as "my father." They took river boats
up and down the Mississippi, walking the decks together, reading aloud to
each other, and talking about the Bible. But sadly, in 1861, Stanley's
generous adoptive father followed his beloved wife into the next world.
"For the first time I understood the sharpness of the pang which pierces
the soul when a loved one lies with folded hands icy cold in the eternal
sleep. As I contemplated the body I vexed myself with asking, Had my
conduct been as perfect as I then wished it had been? Had I failed in
aught? Had I esteemed him as he deserved?"
A poignant story— except that records show that both the elder Stanleys did not die until 1878, seventeen years later. Although they did
adopt two children, both were girls. According to city directories and
census reports, young Stanley lived not in their home but in a series of
boarding houses. And Stanley the merchant had an angry quarrel and
permanent rupture with his employee, after which he asked that the
young man's name never again be mentioned in his presence.
Stanley's wishful description ofhis youth clearly owes something to his
contemporary Charles Dickens, similarly fond of deathbed scenes, saindy
women, and wealthy benefactors. It also owes much to Stanley's feeling
that his real life was so embedded in disgrace that he would have to
invent whatever selflie presented to the world. Not only did he make up
events in his autobiography, but he created journal entries about a dra-
matic shipwreck and other adventures that never happened. Sometimes
an episode in his African travels appears in strikingly different form in his
journal, in letters, in the newspaper articles he sent home, and in the
books he wrote after each trip. Psychohistorians have had a feast,
One of the more revealing episodes Stanley describes or invents took
place soon after he arrived in New Orleans, when he was sharing a bed in a boarding house with Dick Heaton, another young man who had come over from Liverpool as a deckhand. "He was so modest he would not
retire by candle-light, and . . . when he got into bed he lay on the verge
of it, far removed from contact with me. When I rose in the morning I found that he was not undressed " One day Stanley awoke and, looking at
Dick Heaton asleep at his side, was "amazed to see what I took to be two
tumours on his breast. ... I sat up .. . and cried out . . . 'I know! I know!
Dick, you are a girl.'" That evening Dick, who by then had confessed to
being Alice, was gone. "She was never seen, or heard of, by me again; but I have hoped ever since that Fate was as propitious to her, as I think it was
wise, in separating two young and simple creatures who might have been
led, through excess of sentiment, into folly."
Like his Dickensian deathbed scene, this has an echo of legend— of the girl who disguises herself as a boy so that she can enlist as a soldier or
run away to sea. Whether real or made up, the episode's emotional mes-
sage is the same: Stanley's horror at the idea of finding himselfso close to
a woman.
When the American Civil War began, Stanleyjoined the Confederate Army, and in April 1862 went into combat with his regiment ofArkansas
Volunteers at the battle of Shiloh, in Tennessee. On the second day of fighting he was surrounded by half a dozen Union soldiers and soon
afterward found himself in a crowded, typhus-ridden prisoner-of-war
camp outside Chicago. The only way out of this miserable place, he
discovered, was to enlist in the Union Army, which he prompdy did, only
to fall ill with dysentery and receive a medical discharge. After working
his way back and forth across the Adantic as a sailor, in 1 864 he enlisted in
the Union Navy. His fine handwriting got him a post as ship's clerk on
the frigate Minnesota. When the ship bombarded a Confederate fort in North Carolina, Stanley became one ofthe few people to see combat on
both sides ofthe Civil War.
24 25
The Minnesota returned to port in early 1865, and the restless Stanley
deserted. Now the pace of his movements accelerates. It is as ifhe has no more patience for confining, regulated institutions like the workhouse, a
merchant ship, or the military. He goes first to St. Louis, signs on as a
free-lance contributor to a local newspaper, and sends back a series of
florid dispatches from ever farther west: Denver, Salt Lake City, San Fran-
cisco. He writes disapprovingly of "debauchery and dissipation" and the
"whirlpool ofsin" ofthe Western frontier towns.
After an adventure-seeking trip to Turkey, Stanley returned to the
American West, and his career as a newspaperman took off. For most of
1867 he covered the Indian Wars, sending dispatches not only to St. Louis
but to East Coast papers as well. It did not matter that the long, hopeless
struggle of the southern Plains Indians against the invaders of their land
was almost at an end, that the expedition Stanley accompanied saw litde
combat, or that most of the year was devoted to peace negotiations;
Stanley's editors wanted war reporting about dramatic battles, and this he
gave them: "The Indian War has at last been fairly inaugurated. . . . the
Indians, true to their promises, true to their bloody instincts, to their
savage hatred ofthe white race, to the lessons instilled in their bosoms by
their progenitors, are on the warpath."
These dispatches caught the eye of James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the
flamboyant, hard-driving publisher of the New York Herald. He hired
Stanley to cover an exotic little war that promised to sell many newspa-
pers: a punitive expedition the British government was organizing against
the Emperor ofAbyssinia. At Suez, on his way to the war, Stanley bribed
the chief telegraph clerk to make sure that when correspondents' reports
arrived from the front, his would be the first cabled home. His foresight
paid off, and his glowing account ofhow the British won the war's only
significant battle was the first to reach the world. In a grand stroke ofluck,
the trans-Mediterranean telegraph cable broke just after Stanley's stories
were sent off The dispatches ofhis exasperated rivals, and even the British
army's official reports, had to travel part of the way to Europe by ship. In
a Cairo hotel, in June 1868, Stanley savored his scoop and the news that
he had been named a permanent roving foreign correspondent for the
Herald. He was twenty-seven years old.
Now based in London, Stanley could hear around him the first rumblings ofwhat would before long become known as the Scramble for Africa. In
26
a Europe confidently entering the industrial age, brimming with the
sense of power given it by the railroad and the oceangoing steamship,
there now arose a new type of hero: the African explorer. To those who had lived in Africa for millennia, of course, "there was nothing to dis-
cover, we were here all the time" as a future African statesman would put it. But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for "dis-
covering" some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.
In a Europe ever more tighdy knit by the telegraph, the lecture circuit,
and widely circulating daily newspapers * African explorers became some
of the first international celebrity figures, their fame crossing national
boundaries like that of today's champion athletes and movie stars. From
Africa's east coast, the Englishmen Richard Burton andJohn Speke made
a boldjourney to the interior to find Lake Tanganyika, the longest fresh-
water lake in the World, and Lake Victoria, the continent's largest body of
water, and capped their adventure with a spectacle the public always
enjoys from celebrities, a bitter public falling-out. From Africa's west coast, the Frenchman Paul Belloni Du Chaillu brought back the skins and skeletons of gorillas, and told riveted audiences how the great hairy beasts abducted women to their jungle lairs for purposes too vile to be spoken of.
Underlying much of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source ofraw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution,just
as the search for rdw materials— slaves— for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe's earlier dealings with Africa. Ex-
pectations quickened dramatically after prospectors discovered diamonds
in South Africa in 1867 and gold some two decades later. But Europeans
liked to think of themselves as having higher motives. The British, in
particular, fervendy believed in bringing "civilisation" and Christianity to
the natives; they were curious about what lay in the continent's unknown interior; and they were filled with righteousness about combating slavery
Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of
slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838
had slavery's vestiges been abolished in the British Empire. But the Eng-
lish quickly forgot all this, just as they forgot that there had been slave
revolts in the West Indies and that economic factors had hastened slavery's
end by making it less profitable. In their opinion, slavery had come to an
end throughout most of the world for one reason only: British virtue.
When London's Albert Memorial was built in 1872, one of its statues
27
WALKING INTO FIRE
showed a young black African, naked except for some leaves over his
loins. The memorial s inaugural handbook explained that he was a "rep-
resentative of the uncivilised races" listening to a European woman's
teaching, and that the "broken chains at his feet refer to the part taken by
Great Britain in the emancipation of slaves."
Significandy, most British and French antislavery fervor in the 1860s
was directed not at Spain and Portugal, which allowed slavery in their
colonies, or at Brazil, with its millions of slaves. Instead, righteous denun-
ciations poured down on a distant, weak, and safely nonwhite target: the
so-called Arab slave-traders raiding Africa from the east. In the slave
markets of Zanzibar, traders sold their human booty to Arab plantation
owners on the island itself, and to other buyers in Persia, Madagascar, and
the various sultanates and principalities of the Arabian peninsula. For
Europeans, here was an ideal target for disapproval: one "uncivilised" race
enslaving another.
Arab was a misnomer; Afro-Arab would have been more accurate.
Although their captives often ended up in the Arab world, the traders on
the African mainland were largely Swahili-speaking Africans from terri-
tory that today is Kenya and Tanzania. Many had adopted Arab dress and
Islam, but only some ofthem were ofeven partly Arab descent. Nonethe-
less, from Edinburgh to Rome, indignant books and speeches and ser-
mons denounced the vicious "Arab" slavers— and with them, by impli- cation, the idea that any part of Africa might be colonized by someone
other than Europeans.
All these European impulses toward Africa— antislavery zeal, the search for raw materials, Christian evangelism, and sheer curiosity
— were embodied in one man, David Livingstone. Physician, prospector,
missionary, explorer, and at one point even a British consul, he wandered
across Africa for three decades, starting in the early 1840s. He searched for
the source ofthe Nile, denounced slavery, found Victoria Falls, looked for
minerals, and preached the gospel. As the first white man to cross the
continent from coast to coast,* he became a national hero in England,
In 1866, Livingstone set off on another long expedition, looking for
slave-traders, potential Christians, the Nile, or anything else that might
* Unfortunately for the apostles of European civilization, the first recorded crossing of
central Africa, unacknowledged by Stanley and almost all the other white explorers, had
been made halfa century earlier by two mulatto slave traders, Pedro Baptista and Anastasio
Jose. Theirs was also the first round trip.
28
I SHALL NOT GIVE UP THE CHASE
need discovering. Years passed, and he did not return. As people began to
wonder about his fate, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett saw a great opportunity. In 1869, or so went the story Stanley would tell,
Stanley received an urgent telegram from Bennett, his boss: come to paris on important business. A journalist, Stanley wrote with the self-importance that had now become part of his public persona, is "like a gladiator in the arena. . . . Any flinching, any cowardice, and he is lost.
The gladiator meets the sword that is sharpened for his bosom— the . . . roving correspondent meets the command that may send him to his doom." He dashed to Paris to meet his publisher at the Grand Hotel. There, a dramatic conversation about Livingstone climaxed with Ben-
nett s saying, "I mean that you shall go, and find him wherever you may
hear that he is, and to get what news you can ofhim, and perhaps . . . the
old man may be in want:— take enough with you to help him should he require it ... do what you think best— but find Livingstone!"
This scene provided a splendid introduction for Stanley's first book,
How I Found Livingstone, and it made Bennett, to whom the volume is dedicated, appear the far-sighted initiator of the great adventure. But
nothing like this conversation seems to have happened. The pages of
Stanley's journal for the dates around the alleged meeting with Bennett
have been torn out, and in fact Stanley did not even begin looking for
Livingstone until well over a year later.
However inflated, Stanley's story of Bennett's dramatic summons to
Paris sold plenty of books, and to Stanley that mattered. He was after more than fame as an explorer; his melodramatic flair made him, as
one historian has remarked, "the progenitor of all the subsequent profes-
sional travel writers." His articles, books, and speaking tours brought him
greater riches than any other travel writer of his time, and probably ofthe
next century as well. With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned
how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.
To leave no clues for possible competitors in the search for Living-
stone, Stanley carefully spread the word, as he headed for Africa, that he
was planning to explore the Rufiji River. He first went to Zanzibar to recruit porters to carry his supplies, and from there wrote a stream of
letters to Katie Gough-Roberts, a young woman in his home town of Denbigh. Theirs had been a brief, stiff", nervous courtship, punctuated by
Stanley's many departures forjournalistic assignments, but in his letters he
poured out his heart to her, confessing the painful secret of his illegiti-
29
WW"'
WALKING INTO PISB
mate birth. Stanley planned to marry her on his return from finding
Livingstone.
At last, in the spring of 187 1, accompanied by a dog named Omar and
porters, armed guards, an interpreter, cooks, a guide carrying the Ameri-
can flag, and two British sailors— some 190 men in all, the largest Afri- can exploring expedition to date— Stanley marched inland from the east coast in search ofLivingstone, who by now had not been seen by any
European for five years. "Wherever he is," Stanley declared to his New
York newspaper readers, "be sure I shall not give up the chase. If alive,
you shall hear what he has to say; if dead I will find and bring his bones
to you."
Stanley had to trek for more than eight months before he found the
explorer and was able to utter his famous "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
The long search was shaped into legend by his stream of dispatches and
Bennett's realization that his newspaper had one of the great human-in-
terest scoops of the century. Because Stanley was the only source of
information about the search (his two white companions died during the
expedition, and no one ever bothered to interview the surviving porters),
the legend remained heroic. There were the months ofarduous marching,
the terrible swamps, the evil "Arab" slaye-traders, the mysterious deadly
diseases, the perilous attacks by crocodiles, and finally Stanley's trium-
phant discovery of the gende Dr. Livingstone.
Livingstone was haloed in Stanley's prose, for he was the noble father
figure the younger man had long been looking for and, to some extent,
had actually found. According to Stanley, the experienced sage and the
bold young hero became fast friends as they explored together for several
months. (They sailed around the northern end ofL^ke Tanganyika, hop-
ing to find the Nile flowing out, but to their disappointment found only
another river flowing in.) The older man passed on his wisdom to the
younger before they sadly bade each other farewell and parted forever.
Conveniently for Stanley, Livingstone remained in Africa and died soon
afterward, before he could come home to share the spotlight or to tell the
story at all differendy. Stanley cannily sprinkled his tale with picturesque
chiefs, exotic sultans, and faithful servants, and he introduced it with the
sweeping generalizations that allowed his readers to feel at home in an
unfamiliar world: "The Arab never changes"; "The Banyan is a born
trader"; "For the half-castes I have great contempt."
Unlike the uncombative and paternalistic Livingstone, who traveled
without a huge retinue of heavily armed followers, Stanley was a harsh
jo
I
"i SHALL NOT GIVE UP THE CHASE*' -^
and brutal taskmaster. "The blacks give an immense amount of trouble;
they are too ungrateful to suit my fancy" he wrote while on the journey.
Although they are softened by successive revisions, his writings show him
given to explosive rage. He drove his men up hills and through swamps
without letup. "When mud and wet sapped the physical energy of the
lazily-inclined, a dog-whip became their backs, restoring them to a sound
— sometimes to an extravagant— activity." Only half a dozen years earlier Stanley had deserted from the U.S. Navy, but now he noted with
satisfaction how "the incorrigible deserters . . . were well flogged and
chained " People in the villages that the expedition marched through
may well have mistaken it for another slave caravan.
Like many whites who would follow him, Stanley saw Africa as essen-
tially empty. "Unpeopled country," he called it. "What a settlement one
could have in this valley! See, it is broad enough to support a large
population. Fancy a church spire rising where that tamarind rears its dark
crown of foliage, and think how well a score or two of pretty cottages
would look instead of those thorn clumps and gum trees!" And again:
"There are plenty of . . . Pilgrim Fathers among the Anglo-Saxon race
yet, and when America is filled up with their descendants, who shall say
that Africa . . . shall not be their next resting place?"
To him and to his public, Stanley's future was now firmly linked to
Africa.On his return to Europe, the French press compared his finding Livingstone to Hannibal's and Napoleons crossing the Alps. Even more
apdy, given Stanley's boasts about shooting anyone who got in his way,
General William Tecumseh Sherman met the explorer for breakfast in
Paris and likened Stanley's trip to his own scorched-earth march to
the sea.
The British were more hostile. The Royal Geographical Society had
belatedly sent an expedition to find Livingstone, and its members had
been appalled to cross paths with Stanley in Africa just as he was trium-
phantiy boarding a ship to return home. Between the lines of huffy
statements from the society's officials was their exasperation that their
native son had been found by someone who was neither a proper ex-
plorer nor a proper Englishman, but a "penny-a-liner," writing for the
American yellow press. Furthermore, some in England noticed, Stanleys
American accent tended to change to a Welsh one whenever he got
excited. The rumors about his Welsh birth and illegitimacy worried Stan-
ley deeply, because, writing for a jingoistic and anti-British New York newspaper, he was vigorously claiming to be American born and bred.
31
WALKING INTO PIRB
(He sometimes implied that he came from New York; sometimes from St.
Louis. Mark Twain sent congratulations to his "fellow Missourian" for
finding Livingstone.)
Stanley, quick to feel rejected, especially by upper-crust Englishmen,
now found himself rejected also by his fiancee. During his travels, he
discovered, Katie Gough-Roberts had married an architect named Brad-
shaw. Stanley was desperate to retrieve the letters he had sent her, particu-
larly the one in which he had told her about his origins. But when he
wrote to ask for them, she refused to give them back except in person. At
a lecture he gave in Manchester, she and her husband were in the audi-
ence. Afterward, she came to the house where he was staying and asked
the butler to tell him she had the letter with her. Stanley sent the butler
back to the door to collect it; once again she refused to hand it over to
anyone but Stanley. He would not go to the door, and she departed, letter
in hand. His hurt pride remained like an open wound. Before long he
would once again seek solace in Africa.
32
THE FOX CROSSES
THE STREAM
When word that Stanley had found Livingstone flashed over the telegraph wires in the spring of 1872, one person who followed
such news with avid interest was a tall, august thirty-seven-year-old man
with a spade-shaped beard, living in the rambling chateau of Laeken on a
low hill on the outskirts ofBrussels.
Seven years earlier, on the death of his father, Leopold II had inher-
ited the distinctive tide by which his country's monarchs were known,
King of the Belgians. Belgium itself was barely older than its young
monarch. After spells of Spanish, Austrian, French, and Dutch rule, it
had only become independent in 1830, following a revolt against Hol-
land. Any respectable country of course needed a king, and the infant
nation had gone looking for one, finally settling on a German prince,
related to the British royal family, who had taken the Belgian throne as
Leopold I.
The small nation was an uneasy amalgam of speakers of French and
speakers of Flemish, as the Dutch spoken in Belgium's northern half was
then called. In his father's court, the future Leopold II spoke French and
German from childhood and soon became fluent in English. However,
although he tossed a few phrases of it into speeches now and then, he
never bothered to learn Flemish, spoken by more than halfhis subjects. In
this snobbery Leopold was not alone, for at this time his country's bitter
language division marked class as well as region. Even in the north,
business people and professionals tended to speak French and to look
33
WALKING INTO FIRE
down on the impoverished Flemish-speaking farmworkers and factory
laborers.
The marriage of Leopolds parents had been a loveless one of politi-
cal convenience. Their older son was a gangling child who seemed ill at
ease in the world, and his parents clearly preferred his younger brother
and sister. When he was fourteen, Leopold's mother wrote to him, "I
was very disturbed to see in the Colonel's report that you had again
been so lazy and that your exercises had been so bad and careless. This
was not what you promised me, and I hope you will make some effort
to do your homework better. Your father was as disturbed as I by this
last report." The young heir took little interest in his studies, with the
notable exception of geography. From the age of ten on, he was given
military training; by fifteen, he held the rank of lieutenant in the Bel-
gian Army, at sixteen captain, at eighteen major, at nineteen colonel,
and by the time he was twenty he was a major general. A formal por- trait painted in his late teens shows him with sword, crimson sash,
and medals. The awkward young Leopold's body is pencil-thin; his
gold epaulettes seem too big for his shoulders; his head too big for his
torso.
If Leopold wanted to see his father, he had to apply for an audience.
When the father had something to tell the son, he communicated it
through one of his secretaries. It was in this cold atmosphere, as a teenager
in his father's court, that Leopold first learned to assemble a network of
people who hoped to win his favor. Court officials proved eager to
befriend the future monarch, to show him documents, to teach him how
the government worked, to satisfy his passion for maps and for informa-
tion about far corners of the world.
Even though there was little affection between father and son, the old
king was a shrewd observer. "Leopold is subde and sly," he told one of his
ministers. "He never takes a chance. The other day ... I watched a fox
which wanted to cross a stream unobserved: first of all he dipped a paw
carefully to see how deep it was, and then, with a thousand precautions,
very slowly made his way across. That is Leopold's way!" Leopold would
not always be cautious; at times he would overreach himself or reveal
too much about what prey he was after. But there was something fox-
like about the manner in which this constitutional monarch of a small,
increasingly democratic country became the totalitarian ruler of a vast
empire on another continent. Stealth and dissembling would be his
34
THE FOX CROSSES THE STREAM
trusted devices, just as the fox relies on these qualities to survive in a world of hunters and larger beasts.
In 1853, when Leopold turned eighteen, his father took him to Vienna and, eager for ties with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, betrothed him to an eligible young Hapsburg, Archduchess Marie-Henriette.
No match could have been more disastrous. The sixteen-year-old bride was best known for her passion for horses and for a most unroyal raucous laugh. Leopold had a distinct tendency to fall off horses and no visible sense of humor. He was an ungainly, haughty young man whom his first cousin Queen Victoria ofEngland thought "very odd" and in the habit of "saying disagreeable things to people." Then known as the Duke of Brabant, Leopold had a pedantic obsession with trade matters, which
baffled everyone. In Vienna, one lady observed that this puzzling engage-
ment was "between a stable-boy and a nun, and by nun I mean the Duke of Brabant
"
Leopold and Marie-Henriette loathed each other at first sight, feelings
that apparently never changed. Everything possible went wrong with the wedding. Leopold got scarlet fever. The train bringing the royal entourage to a carefully timed elaborate welcoming ceremony for Marie-Henriette
at the Belgian border was half an hour late, because a teenage railway
telegraph operator had left his post to listen to a band concert celebrating
the day. Marie-Henriette 's barnyard laugh startled town hall receptions all
over Belgium. On their honeymoon in Venice, she wept in public when Leopold would not let her ride in a gondola for which boatmen and
musicians had already been hired. Leopold went for days at a time with-
out speaking to her. "If God hears my prayers," she wrote to a friend a month after the wedding, "I shall not go on living much longer."
Like many young couples of the day, the newlyweds apparendy found sex a frightening mystery. Like few others, however, they were enlight-
ened about it by the woman who gave her name to the age. When they paid a visit to Cousin Victoria in England, the queen delicately expressed
some doubt, in a letter to Leopold's father, as to whether the marriage
had been consummated. Taking Marie-Henriette aside, she explained
what was expected of her, as did her husband, Prince Albert, with the
eighteen-year-old future king. This may have been the first time anyone had bothered to do so, for when Marie-Henriette became pregnant,
35
WALKING INTO FIRE THE FOX CROSSES THE STREAM
several years later, Leopold wrote to Albert that "the wise and practical
advice you gave me ... has now borne fruit." But the marriage remamed
miserable. Marie-Henriette fled the royal chateau ofLaeken to go horse-
back riding for most of each day. Leopold was to find respite from his
frustrations on a wider stage.
When he thought about the throne that would be his, he was openly
exasperated. "Petit pays, petits gens" (small country, small people), he once
said of Belgium. The country, less than half the size ofWest Virginia, lay
between Napoleon Ill's much grander France and the fast-rising empire
ofGermany. The young heir acted peeved and impatient. The country he
was to inherit seemed too small to hold him.
His eyes turned abroad. Even before he was twenty, Leopold, pen and
notebook in hand, visited the Balkans, Constantinople, the Aegean, and
Egypt, traveling in style on British and Turkish warships, and, returning
home, gave tedious speeches on Belgium's potential role in world trade.
Everywhere he went, he looked for imperial opportunities. He got the
Khedive of Egypt to promise to form a joint steamship company con-
necting Alexandria with Antwerp. He tried to buy lakes in the Nile delta
so that he could drain them and claim the land as a colony. He wrote,
"One could purchase a small kingdom in Abyssinia for 30,000 francs. . .
.
Ifinstead of talking so much about neutrality Parliament looked after our
commerce, Belgium would become one of the richest countries in the
world."
1
In the nineteenth century, as is true today, Seville was a magnificent array
of fountains and walled gardens, of red-tile roofs and white-stucco walls
and windows covered by wrought-iron grillwork, of orange and lemon
and palm trees. Threading through the Spanish city were narrow cobble-
stone streets filled with visitors come to look at one of the largest Gothic
cathedrals in Europe. m
When the twenty-seven-year-old Leopold arrived in Seville, in March
1862 his purpose was not to see the cathedral or the famous mosaics and
courtyards of the brighdy tiled Alcazar palace. Instead, he spent a full
month in the Casa Lonja, or Old Exchange Building, a massive, square
structure opposite the cathedral.
For two centuries Seville was the port through which colonial gold,
silver and other riches had flowed back to Spain; some eighty years
before Leopold's visit, King Carlos III had ordered that there be gathered
36
I
in this building, from throughout the country, all decrees, government and court records, correspondence, maps and architectural drawings, hav- ing to do with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Collected under one roof, these eighty-six million handwritten pages, among them the supply manifest for one of Columbus's ships, have made the General Archive of the Indies one of the great repositories of the world. Indiffer- ent to his schoolwork as a boy, with no interest whatever in art, music, or literature, Leopold was nonetheless a dedicated scholar when it came to one subject, profits. During the month he spent in Seville, he wrote home to a friend, "I am very busy here going through the Indies archives and calculating the profit which Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies." The man whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the re- cords of the conquistadors.
The research whetted his appetite and made him resdess. He claimed that his doctors had prescribed long cruises in hot climates, and, escaping his miserable home life, he headed farther afield. In 1864, now twenty- nine and more obsessed with colonies than ever, he set off to see the British possessions of Ceylon, India, and Burma. He also visited the East Indian islands owned, to his irritation, by Belgium's next-door neighbor, Holland, whose small size had not prevented it from acquiring lucrative colonies.
The future king's interest in the Dutch East Indies was stimulated by a curious two-volume treatise called Java; or, How to Manage a Colony. Fascinated by the book, Leopold began corresponding with the author, an English lawyer aptly named
J.WB. Money Money had been impressed by the coffee, sugar,indigo, and tobacco plantations ofJava, whose profits had paid for railroads and canals back in Holland.Judging from Leopold's later actions, we can guess which features of the book might have caught his eye. Money described, for example, a monopoly trading concession given to a private company, one of whose major shareholders was the Dutch king. To stimulate production, Dutch plantation owners paid bo- nuses to supervisors on Java in relation to the size of the crop harvested. And finally Money noted that the huge Dutch profits from Java de- pended on forced labor. Leopold agreed, remarking that forced labor was "the only way to civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples of the Far East."
Few Belgians shared Leopold's dreams ofcolonies. They were deterred by practical considerations— such as their country's lack of a merchant
37
WALKING INTO FIRE
fleet or navy— that seemed petty to him.When he returned from one of his trips he presented to the finance minister, a vocal
opponent of coloni-
alism, a gift: a piece of marble from the ruins of the Acropolis, with a
locket holding Leopold's portrait, around which was the legend Ilfaut a la
Belgique une colonic (Belgium must have a colony).
Where was it to be found? Throughout his twenties, he scoured the
world. He wrote to an aide:
I am specially interested in the Argentine Province ofEntre Rios
and the very small island of Martin Garcia at the confluence of
the Uruguay and the Parana. Who owns this island? Could one
buy it, and establish there a free port under the moral protection
ofthe King of the Belgians? . . . Nothing would be easier than to
become the owner of lands in the Argentine states three or four
times as big as Belgium.
He invested in the Suez Canal Company. He asked an aide to try to
acquire Fiji, because one should not "let such a fine prey escape." He
looked into railways in Brazil and into leasing territory on the island of
Formosa. /
Leopold's letters and memos, forever badgering someone about ac-
quiring a colony, seem to be in the voice of a person starved for love as a
child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute,
the way someone becomes embroiled in an endless dispute with a
brother or sister over an inheritance, or with a neighbor over a property
boundary. The urge for more can become insatiable, and its apparent
fulfillment seems only to exacerbate that early sense of deprivation and to
stimulate the need to acquire still more.
During the nineteenth-century European drive for possessions in Af-
rica and Asia, people justified colonialism in various ways, claiming that it
Christianized the heathen or civilized the savage races or brought every-
one the miraculous benefits of free trade. Now, with Africa, a new ration-
alization had emerged: smashing the "Arab" slave trade. At this early stage
of his career, however, the future Leopold II did not try to cloak his
ambitions with such rhetoric. For him, colonies existed for one purpose:
to make him and his country rich. "Belgium doesn't exploit the world,"
he complained to one ofhis advisers. "It's a taste we have got to make her
learn."
Leopold did not care whether the colonial wealth he wanted came
38
THE FOX CROSSES THE STREAM
from the precious metals sought by the Spaniards in South America, from
agriculture, or— as would turn out to be the case— from a raw material whose potential was as yet undreamed of. What mattered was the size of the profit. His drive for colonies, however, was shaped by a desire not only
for money but for power. In western Europe, after all, times were fast changing, and a king's role was not as enjoyable as it once had been. Most
annoying to him was that in Belgium, as in surrounding countries, royal
authority was gradually giving way to that of an elected parliament.
Someone once tried to compliment Leopold by saying that he would
make "an excellent president of a republic." Scornfully, he turned to his
faithful court physician, Jules Thiriar, and asked, "What would you say,
Doctor, if someone greeted you as *a great veterinarian'?" The ruler of a colony would have no parliament to worry about.
After ascending the throne, in 1865, Leopold was even more resdess
than before. A French marshal who saw him at a reception in Paris in 1867 thought him conspicuous "by his great height, his great nose, and
his great beard; with his sword, which banged his legs, he looked like a
functionary who had put on his uniform without knowing how to wear it." Everyone was struck by the nose. "It is such a nose," Disraeli wrote,
"as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who has been banned by a malig- nant fairy."
At home, life went from bad to worse. In 1869, the king's nine-year-
old son fell into a pond, caught pneumonia, and died. At the funeral, for
the only time in his life, Leopold broke down in public, collapsing to his knees beside the coffin and sobbing uncontrollably. He had the presence of mind, however, to ask Parliament to pass a law requiring the state to
pay the expenses of the royal funeral.
What made the loss of his only son especially devastating was the king's firm belief that thrones and royal property were for men only. In the course of their marriage, however, Queen Marie-Henriette gave
birth to three daughters, Louise, Stephanie, and Clementine, but to no
more sons. When the last daughter, Clementine, was born, according to her sister Louise, "the King was furious and thenceforth refused to have
anything to do with his admirable wife." From the beginning, she wrote,
"the King paid little attention to me or my sisters." Leopold unsuccess- fully tried to have himselfmade an exception to a Belgian law requiring
assets to be bequeathed to one's children.
Marie-Henriette found solace with her beloved horses, which she
trained herself. Princess Louise once watched as, obeying the queen's
39
WALKING INTO FIRE
commands, a horse entered the chateau of Laeken, climbed the staircase
to the queen's rooms, and descended again. Marie-Henriette befriended
the minister of war, and at maneuvers, to the astonishment of military
attaches, he sometimes invited her to lead cavalry charges.
Still lacking a colony to rule, Leopold focused on building projects at
home. He had a taste for monuments, great parks, broad boulevards, and
grand palaces. Soon after taking the throne he began what turned out to
be a lifelong program of renovations at Laeken. Through purchases and
expropriations, he enlarged the grounds of the royal estate severalfold.
When one local resident refused to move, Leopold ordered an earth embankment built around the reluctant landowner's estate. Among the
new buildings at Laeken was a vast string of greenhouses. When they were finally finished, a person could walk for more than a kilometer
through them, the chateau, and connecting passageways, without going
outdoors. In later years, when the king was showing his nephew, Prince
Albert, some work in progress, Albert said, "Uncle, this is going to be-
come a little Versailles!" Leopold replied, "Little?"
If Leopold were a figure in fiction, his creator might, at this point in the
story, introduce a foil, a minor character whose fate would sound an
ominous warning about where dreams of empire can lead. But Leopold
already had such a character in his life, more appropriate to the role than
one a novelist could have invented. It was his sister.
The Belgian royal family, always eager to form alliances with the
Hapsburgs, had married off Leopold's younger sister Charlotte to Arch-
duke Maximilian, brother of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary. In 1864,
Maximilian and his wife, her name appropriately changed to Carlota,
were installed by Napoleon III of France as the figurehead Emperor and
Empress of Mexico, where Napoleon was maneuvering to establish a
French-aligned regime. Leopold enthusiastically supported his sister's
venture into empire-building. As Maximilian and Carlota set off for their
new dominion, the European public cheered the handsome young cou-
ple, who were portrayed as following in the footsteps of the conquista-
dors. Most Mexicans, understandably, wanted no such rulers imposed on
them, and they rose in rebellion. The nascent empire collapsed, and
in June 1867 rebels captured and executed Maximilian. His death was
inglorious but not inelegant: he shook hands with the members of the
40
THE FOX CROSSES THE STREAM
firing squad, handed them all gold pieces, pointed to his heart, and said,
"Muchachos, aim well."
The previous year, Carlota had returned to Europe to plead for sup-
port for her husband s failing regime. Napoleon III was unwilling to back
up his Mexican ambitions with the necessary military force, so Carlota
went to Rome to beg for help from the Pope. On the way she began behaving strangely. Modern psychiatry would doubtless have a more
precise diagnosis, but the language of her day seems more appropriate:
Carlota went mad. She became convinced that an organ grinder on the
street was a Mexican colonel in disguise, and that spies of every sort were
trying to poison her. As a precaution she ate only oranges and nuts,
checking the peels and shells for signs oftampering. She made her coach-
man stop at Rome's Trevi fountain so that she could fill a crystal pitcher
with water certain not to be poisoned. In her hotel suite she kept a small
charcoal stove and, tied to table legs, several chickens, to be slaughtered
and cooked only in her sight. With her obedient staff in despair, her
rooms slowly filled with feathers and chicken droppings.
Flushed and weeping, Carlota burst in on the Pope one morning as he
was finishing breakfast, dipped her fingers in his hot chocolate, and licked
them hungrily, crying, "This at least is not poisoned. Everything they
gave me is drugged, and I am starving, literally starving!" A cardinal and the commander of the Papal Guards maneuvered her out of the room,
whereupon Carlota gave the guards' commander a list of her staffmem- bers who should be arrested for treachery.
Carlota's aides sent an urgent telegram to Leopold in Brussels. Since
he did not want his sister rattling around Europe in this condition, he
installed her and her keepers in a succession of Belgian chateaux, safely
out ofpublic sight. She was never to appear in the wider world again. For
fear of unhinging her further, no one dared tell her for some months of
Maximilian's execution; when they finally did, Carlota refused to believe
them. She continued to send him letters and presents, believing that he
would soon become Emperor of France, Spain, and Portugal.
The collapse, in so short a time, of his sister's and brother-in-law's
empire did not dampen Leopolds enthusiasm for one of his own. All
around him he saw the stirrings of a new age of colonialism; this was the
era in which the future South African politician and diamond magnate
Cecil Rhodes would say, "I would annex the planets if I could." In 1875,
Leopold tried to buy the Philippines from Spain but was once again
4t
WALKING INTO FIRE
frustrated. "For the moment, neither the Spanish nor the Portuguese nor
the Dutch are inclined to sell," he wrote to one of his officials that year,
and then added, "I intend to find out discreetly if there's anything to be
done in Africa."
In the mid- 1 8 70s, sub-Saharan Africa was a logical place for an aspiring
colonialist to look. The British and the Boers controlled South Africa, and
an enfeebled Portugal claimed most of what used to be the Kingdom of
the Kongo, as well as Mozambique on the east coast. Along Africa's great
western bulge, Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France owned a few islands
and small pockets of territory. Otherwise, about 80 percent of the entire
land area of Africa was still under indigenous rulers. It was ripe for
conquest— or, as Leopold was now learning to say, for protection. Leopold carefully combed the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Soci-
ety for information about the continent and closely followed the treks of
white explorers. He amassed a big file of notes, in nearly illegible hand- writing. When the Scottish explorer Verney Lovett Cameron, about to become the first European to cross Africa from east to west, was reported
in 1875 to be running out ofmoney, Leopold swiftly offered a contribu-
tion of 100,000 francs. The money was not needed, it turned out, but the
king's gesture declared him a patron ofAfrican exploration.
Henry Morton Stanley at this time was in the midst of another expe-
dition in Africa. He and his usual huge caravan of guards and porters had set off in 1874 from the east coast to the interior, heading for the biggest
blank space on the map, the equatorial heart of the continent, where no
European had yet been. On the way, he planned to map several of the great east African lakes and then push on to a large river, west of them,
which might be the start ofthe Nile or the Congo. While he was still near
the coast, messengers brought back Stanley's newspaper dispatches; then
nothing more was heard from him.
Livingstone, Stanley, and the other explorers, Leopold saw, had suc-
ceeded in stirring Europeans by their descriptions of the "Arab" slave-
traders leading sad caravans of chained captives to Africa's east coast.
As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recog-
nized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitar-
ian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement
of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1 876, he
began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and ad-
42
THE FOX CROSSES THE STREAM
vance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and
geographers.
He sent a trusted aide to Berlin to recruit German participants while he himself slipped across the English Channel to London, settling into a
suite at Claridges. By this time, he was far from being the awkward, naive youngster who had visited Queen Victoria on his honeymoon, more than twenty years earlier. As we watch him now moving about London, for the first time in his life he seems polished and cosmopolitan, at ease and
quiedy purposeful. He moves mainly in a world of men, but he remem- bers the names of their wives and children, and always asks about them warmly. His frustrations are concealed, his raw lust for colonies moder-
ated by the knowledge that he must depend on subterfuge and flattery
He pays a visit to dear Cousin Victoria at Balmoral Casde in Scotland, dines twice with her son, the Prince ofWales, and visits eminent geogra-
phers and military men. Shrewdly, he also goes to lunch with Baroness
Angela Burdett-Coutts, a well-known patron of missionaries. Most im- portant, he meets the explorer Cameron, recendy returned from crossing
Africa, and grills him about his travels. To his delight, Leopold finds that the British have little interest in the great swath ofterritory Cameron has just explored. Most of it is believed to be the basin of the Congo River, although Cameron himself traveled far south of the river, and like every- one else in Europe still has no clear idea of its course. This is the land that
now becomes the object of the king's desires. In September 1876, Leopold's Geographical Conference convened in
Brussels. In the orders he gave to subordinates, no detail of protocol,
however minute, escaped his attention: "The names must be spelled just as I have written them. G.C.B. means Grand Cross of Bath. F.R.G.S,
means Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. K.C.B. means Knight
Commander of the Bath. . , . These letters must be written after the names." He sent a Belgian ship across the Channel to Dover for the British guests, and had a special express train bring them the rest of the way. He issued orders that all those coming to the conference should be waved across the Belgian frontier without customs formalities. Repre-
sentatives, who came from all the major European countries, were appro- priately greeted by Leopold in English, French, or German.
Among the thirteen Belgians and twenty-four foreign guests were famous explorers, like France's Marquis de Compiegne,who had gone up the Ogowe River in Gabon, and Germany's Gerhard Rohlfs, who had had himself circumcised so that he could pass for a Muslim while trekking to
43
WALKING INTO FIRE
remote parts of the Sahara; geographers, like Baron Ferdinand von Rich-
thofen, the president of the Berlin Geographical Society; humanitarians,
like Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, president ofBritain's Anti-Slavery Soci-
ety, and SirJohn Kennaway, president of the Church Missionary Society;
business executives, like William Mackinnon of the British India Line;
and military men, like Rear Admiral Sir Leopold Heath ofEngland, who
had headed the Royal Navy's Indian Ocean antislavery patrol, and Vice
Admiral Baron de la Ronciere-le-Noury, president of the Paris Geo-
graphical Society. Never in the nineteenth century had so many eminent
Europeans in the field of exploration gathered in one spot, and the guests
were delighted to become acquainted with one another in the luxurious
surroundings of the Royal Palace. Almost the only notable European
concerned with Africa who was not there was Stanley, whose work the
conference acknowledged with a formal resolution. He was, everyone
hoped, still alive somewhere in the middle of the continent. There had
been no news ofhim for months. >
Leopold knew that even the wealthy and well-born would be de-
lighted to live in a palace. The only complication was that the Royal
Palace, in downtown Brussels, was really the kings office; the royal fam-
ily's home was the suburban chateau ofLaeken. And so the Royal Palace's
staff quarters and offices were hastily converted to guest bedrooms. To
make room for the visitors, some servants slept in linen closets, and desks,
books, and filing cabinets were moved to the basement or the stables. On the opening day, dazzled conference participants filed up a new baroque
grand staircase of white marble to be received by Leopold in a throne
room illuminated by seven thousand candles. The king awarded the Cross
of Leopold to everyone he had invited. "I have a suite of magnificent
apartments to myself— all crimson damask and gold," Major General Sir Henry Rawlinson of the Royal Geographical Society wrote to his wife
the first night. "Everything is red, even the Ink and the Ammunition
[toilet paper]!"
Leopold s welcoming speech was a masterpiece. It clothed the whole
enterprise in noble rhetoric, staked out his own role in what was to come,
and guaranteed his plans a stamp ofapproval by the group he was hosting.
To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has
not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over
entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of
progress. ... It seemed to me that Belgium, a centrally located
44
THE FOX CROSSES THE STREAM
and neutral country, would be a suitable place for such a meet- ing Need I say that in bringing you to Brussels I was guided by no egotism? No, gendemen, Belgium may be a small country, but she is happy and satisfied with her fate; I have no other ambition than to serve her well.
He ended by naming the specific tasks he hoped the conference would accomplish, among them deciding on the "location of routes to be successively opened into the interior, of hospitable, scientific, and pacification bases to be set up as a means of abolishing the slave trade, establishing peace among the chiefs, and procuring them just and impar- tial arbitration."
Between sumptuous banquets, those attending the conference pulled out their maps and marked points in the blank space of central Africa for such "hospitable, scientific, and pacification bases " Each one, the high- minded guests decided, would be staffed by a half-dozen or so unarmed Europeans— scientists, linguists, and artisans who would teach practical skills to the natives. Every post would contain laboratories for studying local soil, weather, fauna, and flora, and would be well stocked with supplies for explorers: maps, trading goods, spare clothing, tools to repair scientific instruments, an infirmary with all the latest medicines.
Chairing the conference— Leopold stayed modestly in the back- ground— was the Russian geographer Pyotr Semenov. In honor of Se- menov's daring exploration of the Tyan Shan Mountains of Central Asia, the tsar had granted him the right to add Tyan-Shansky to his name. Semenov, however, knew next to nothing about Africa— which suited Leopold perfecdy. He was easily able to maneuver Semenov so that the chain of bases endorsed by the conference would stretch across the un- claimed territory of the Congo River basin that interested Leopold most. The British participants had wanted some of these posts nearer to British possessions.
Before the guests dispersed to their respective countries, they voted to establish the International African Association. Leopold magnanimously volunteered space in Brussels for the organizations headquarters. There were to be national committees ofthe association set up in all the partici- pating countries, as well as an international committee. Leopold was elected by acclamation as the international committee's first chairman. Self-effacingly, he said that he would serve for one year only so that the chairmanship could rotate among people from different countries. He
45
•WALKING INTO FIRE
presented each guest with a gilt-framed portrait of himself in dress uni-
form, and the awed dignitaries and explorers headed home.
The new body was welcomed throughout Europe. Prominent citizens,
from the Rothschilds to Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder ofthe
Suez Canal, hastened to send contributions. The national committees,
which sounded impressive, were to be headed by grand dukes, princes,
and other royals, but most of them never got off the ground. The inter-
national committee did meet once in the following year, reelected
Leopold as chairman, despite his earlier pledge not to serve again, and
then evaporated.
Nonetheless, Leopold had, foxlike, gone a step forward. He had
learned from his many attempts to buy a colony that none was for sale; he
would have to conquer it. Doing this openly, however, was certain to
upset both the Belgian people and the major powers of Europe. Ifhe was
to seize anything in Africa, he could do so only ifhe convinced everyone
that his interest was purely altruistic. In this aim, thanks to the Interna-
tional African Association, he succeeded brilliantly. Viscount de Lesseps,
for one, declared Leopold's plans "the greatest humanitarian work of this
time."
If we take a step back and look at Leopold at this moment we can
imagine him the political equivalent of an ambitious theatrical producer.
He has organizational talent and the public's good will, as proven by his
successful Geographical Conference. He has a special kind of capital: the
great public relations power ofthe throne itself. He has a script: the dream
of a colony that had been running through his head since he was a
teenager. But he has as yet no stage, no cast. One day in September 1877,
however, while the king-producer is planning his next move, a bulletin in
the London Daily Telegraph from a small town on the west coast ofAfrica
announces some remarkable news. It is just the opening Leopold has
been waiting for. Stage and star have appeared, and the play can begin.
46
THE MAGNIFICENT CAKE
The town ofBoma lay on the Congo River's north shore, about fifty miles in from the Atlantic Ocean. Besides its African inhabitants,
sixteen whites lived there, most ofthem Portuguese— rough, hardbitten men used to wielding the whip and the gun— who ran a few small trading posts. Like Europeans for several centuries before them, these
traders had never trekked inland through the forbidding jumble of rocks
lining the great river on the tumultuous 220 miles of intermittent rapids that carried it down to sea level. On August 5, 1877, an hour after sunset, four bedraggled black men
walked out ofthe bush at Boma. They had come from a village some two days' walk inland and were carrying a letter addressed "To any Gendeman who speaks English at Embomma."
Dear Sir:
I have arrived at this place from Zanzibar with 115 souls,
men, women, and children. We are now in a state of immi- nent starvation . . . but if your supplies arrive in time, I may be able to reach Embomma within four days . . . better than all would [be] ten or fifteen man-loads of rice or grain. . . . The supplies must arrive within two days, or I may have a fearful time of it among the dying. . . . Yours sincerely, H.M. Stanley, Commanding Anglo-American Expedition for Exploration of Africa.
47
WALKING INTO FIRE
At dawn the next day the traders sent Stanley porters carrying pota-
toes, fish, rice, and canned food. They realized instantly what the letter
meant: Stanley had crossed the entire African continent, from east to west.
But unlike Verney Lovett Cameron, the only European to do this before
him, he had emerged at the Congo's mouth. He must therefore have
followed the river itself, becoming the first white man to chart its course
and to solve the mystery ofwhere it came from.
Resupplied just in time, Stanley and the haggard survivors of his expe-
dition slowly walked the rest ofthe way to Boma. Since leaving Zanzibar,
just off the east coast, they had covered a zigzag course of more than
seven thousand miles and had been traveling for more than two and a
hajfyears.
A Welshman masquerading as a native-born United States citizen, Stanley was both the Anglo and the American of his Anglo-American
Expedition. The name, however, acknowledged that this trip, far more
expensive and ambitious than his search for Livingstone, was financed
both by James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald and Edward Levy-
Lawson's London Daily Telegraph. Stanley's dispatches appeared in both
papers, and he bestowed the names of their owners on his route across
Africa: Mount Gordon-Bennett, the Gordon-Bennett River, the Levy
Hills, Mount Lawson. He left his own name on Stanley Falls in the center
of the continent and on a spot about a thousand miles downstream, at the
head of the rapids, where the Congo River widened into a lake. He
claimed that naming the latter was the idea of his second-in-command,
Frank Pocock, who "cried out, 'Why ... this signal expanse we shall call
Stanley Pool!'" Pocock was not able to confirm this; he drowned in the
river soon after christening, or not christening, this portion of it.
On the eve of his formidable trans-African journey, Stanley had once
again fallen in love, this time with Alice Pike, a seventeen-year-old
American heiress. Falling for a flighty teenager half his age just before
leaving for three years was not the most likely path to wedded bliss,
which may have beenjust what attracted Stanley, who remained fearful of
women. He and Alice agreed to marry on his return, signed a marriage
pact, and fixed the date of the wedding.
It was after his new love that Stanley named the expedition's key
means oftransport. The Lady Alice was a forty-foot boat of Spanish cedar,
divided into five sections. When the sections were fastened together, the
boat could be rowed along African lakes and rivers; when they were
THE MAGNIFICENT CAKE
separated and slung from poles, they could be carried overland by teams
ofporters for hundreds of miles.
Stanley was always uncomfortable with anyone whose talents might outshine his own. From the twelve hundred men who applied to join the expedition, some of them highly experienced travelers, he chose three unsuitable companions: a pair ofsailor-fishermen, the brothers Frank and
Edward Pocock, and a young hotel clerk named Frederick Barker. Ed- ward Pocock's main skill seems to have been playing the bugle. None of the three had had any experience exploring.
When the four white men marched westward into the interior at the head of the Anglo-American Expedition, they led a group close to dou- ble the size of Stanley's expedition to find Livingstone— 356 people all told. Forty-six were women and children, for some ofthe senior Africans had been granted the privilege of taking along their families. This mini-
ature army carried more than sixteen thousand pounds of arms, equip- ment, and goods that could be traded for food along the way. On the march the column stretched for half a mile, a distance so long that halts had to be signaled by Edward Pocock's bugle.
The bugle calls were appropriate; for Stanley, continual combat was always part of exploring. He never bothered to count the dead that the expedition left behind it, but the number must have been in the hun- dreds. Stanley's party carried the latest rifles and an elephant gun with exploding bullets; the unlucky people they fought had spears, bows and arrows, or, at best, ancient muskets bought from slave-traders. "We have attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score villages," he
wrote in his journal. Most of the fighting took place on lakes and rivers, with the explorer and his men flying the British and American flags and firing from the Lady Alice and dugout canoes. The thin-skinned Stanley was remarkably frank about his tendency to take any show of hostility as a deadly insult. It is almost as if vengeance were the force driving him across the continent. As he piloted the Lady Alice toward a spot on Lake Tanganyika, for instance, "the beach was crowded with infuriates and
mockers ... we perceived we were followed by several canoes in some of which we saw spears shaken at us ... I opened on them with the Win- chester Repeating Rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet
the mocking."
In the early months of the journey, Stanley was able to describe such skirmishes in newspaper stories carried by messengers to Africa's east
49
WAltttttf IWfo *t»*
coast, where they were relayed to England by sea and telegraph. There,
they stirred a storm of outrage from humanitarian groups like the Abo-
rigines Protection Society and the Anti-Slavery Society. Stanley "shoots
negroes as if they were monkeys ," commented the explorer and writer
Richard Burton. The British foreign secretary, however, seemed far more
upset that this brash writer for the popular press, who claimed to be an
American, was flying the Union Jack. He sent Stanley a pompous mes-
sage declaring that such display was not authorized.
To the New York Herald's vehemently anti-British publisherJames Gor-
don Bennett, Jr., the controversy brought nothing but delight. He lashed
out enthusiastically at Stanley's critics as "the howling dervishes of civili-
zation . . . safe in London ... the philanthropists . . . [whose] impracti-
cal view is that a leader . . . should permit his men to be slaughtered by
the natives and should be slaughtered himself and let discovery go to
the dogs, but should never pull a trigger against this species of human
vermin."
Among the achievements of this first stage of his travels, Stanley claimed, was telling the Emperor of Uganda about the Ten Command-
ments and converting him to Christianity. However, a French officer who
happened to be visiting Uganda at this time later said that Stanley con-
vinced the emperor only by telling him that Christians had eleven com-
mandments. The eleventh was: "Honor and respect kings, for they are the
envoys of God."
After months of carrying heavy loads, many ofthe expedition's porters
mutinied, pilfered supplies, and fled. Again and again, Stanley dealt out
swift punishment: "The murderer ofMembe . . ." he wrote in his diary, "was sentenced to 200 lashes . . . the two drunkards to 100 lashes each,
and to be kept in chains for 6 months." Later, he wrote of his porters,
"They are faithless, lying, thievish, indolent knaves, who only teach a man
to despise himself for his folly in attempting a grand work with such
miserable slaves."
With his fiancee, Alice Pike, he took a different tone, writing on his
first Christmas of the expedition: "How your kind woman's heart would
pity me and mine. . . . The camp is in the extreme of misery and the people appear as if they were making up their minds to commit suicide
or to sit still inert until death relieves them." Always carrying her photo-
graph with him, wrapped safely in oilskin, Stanley marked on his map an
Alice Island and the Lady Alice Rapids.
"I do love dancing so much. . . ." Alice wrote to him. "I would rather
50
fHE MAGNIFICENT CAKE
go to an opera . . . than a party. . . . Almost every evening some fellows come in— I get awfully tired of them. ... I have the most horrid sore finger all blistered from playing the harp. I am getting along quite well with it, only I never practice." She apparently had little idea of where Stanley was, or that letters from him, if they could be delivered at all, had to be carried through the bush for months. "You never write to me any more" she complained, "and I just want to know why??? I am real angry with Central Africa."
In the book he later wrote about this expedition, Through the Dark Continent, Stanley followed several rules he would use in books to come: stretch the account to two volumes (a total of 960 pages in this case); use "dark" in the title {In Darkest Africa and My Dark Companions and their Strange Stories would follow); and employ every possible medium for telling the story. There are before-and-after photographs of the author showing his hair turned white by the journey; "extracts from my diary" (when compared with Stanleys actual journal, they turn out to be noth- ing of the sort); an elaborate foldout map marked with the route of the trip; more than a hundred drawings— of battles, dramatic meetings, a canoe being sucked into a whirlpool; floor plans ofAfrican houses; street
plans of villages; lists of supplies. A cornucopia of diagrams shows every- thing from the lineages of African kings to the shapes of different canoe paddles. Stanley shrewdly sensed that his readers' ignorance of Africa
would make them all the more fascinated by endless mundane details, such as a chart of prices showing that a chicken cost one bead necklace at Abaddi, while six chickens cost twelve yards ofcloth in Ugogo. Readers got their money's worth. Pre-electronic though they were, Stanley's
books were multimedia productions.
To read Stanley today is to see how much his traveling was an act of appropriation. He is forever measuring and tabulating things: tempera- ture, miles traveled, lake depths, latitude, longitude, and altitude (whkh he calculated by measuring the temperature at which water boiled). Spe- cially trusted porters carried fragile loads of thermometers, barometers,
watches, compasses, and pedometers. It is almost as if he were a surveyor, mapping the continent he crossed for its prospective owners.
It is the second half of Stanley's journey which turns it into an epic feat of exploration. From Lake Tanganyika, where he had found Living- stone several years earlier, he and his diminished band ofporters, includ-
51
WALKING INTO FIRE
ing some rebellious ones who start the trip in chains, trek westward into
the interior for some weeks, until they reach a large river, known locally
as the Lualaba. No European explorer has ever gone downstream beyond this point, and no one knows where the Lualaba leads. Livingstone had
thought it was the long-sought source ofthe Nile, since the Lualaba here
flows north, straight toward Egypt.
Stanley however, is sure the Lualaba is far too big to be the beginning
of the Nile; for a time he thinks it might be the Niger, whose outlet, like
the Nile's, is far to the north. Then, descending the river, he becomes
increasingly convinced that it is the Congo. But he is not certain, for the
estuary where the Congo empties into the Adantic,half a continent away,
is south of the point where his celestial bearings show him to be, on the
shore of the northward-flowing Lualaba. On European maps, everything in between is blank.
According to Stanley, he stands on the banks of the mysterious river
and addresses his assembled followers:
"Into whichever sea this great river empties, there shall we follow
it. . . . On your lives depends my own; if I risk yours, I risk mine. As a father looks after his children, I will look after you. . . .Therefore, my
children, make up your minds as I have made up mine, that, as we are now
in the very middle of this continent, and it would be just as bad to return
as to go on, we shall continue ourjourney, that we shall toil on, and on, by
this river and no other, to the salt sea."
Frank Pocock, the faithful deputy, asks, "Before we finally depart, sir,
do you really believe, in your inmost soul, that we shall succeed?"
To which Stanley replies: "Believe? Yes, I do believe that we shall all
emerge into light again some time. It is true that our prospects are as
dark as this night. ... I believe [this river] will prove to be the Congo;
if the Congo, then there must be many cataracts . . . whether the Congo,
the Niger, or the Nile, I am prepared. . . . Believe? I see us gliding down
by tower and town, and my mind will not permit a shadow of doubt. Good-night, my boy! Good-night! and may happy dreams of the sea,
and ships, and pleasure, and comfort, and success attend you in your
sleep!"
Did Stanley really stand on the riverbank and speak words even re-
motely like these? We will never know, because none of the other three white men on the expedition survived. Long before Frank Pocock
drowned, Fred Barker died of "aguish fits" so severe that "his blood
seemed to stagnate in its veins" until "the congealed blood would not
52
THE MAGNIFICENT CAKE
run, and . . . the poor young man was dead." Edward Pocock became delirious. "I sprang to him," Stanley claims, "— only in time, however, to see him take his last gasp"
If the Lualaba was going to turn out to be the Congo, Stanley knew,
the river had to somewhere make a 180-degree curve. As he and his
expedition floated down it, or at the beginning sometimes marched alongside it, he frequendy measured his latitude and longitude. For sev-
eral hundred miles, the river mystifyingly continued to flow north. But at
last it began to make a wide counterclockwise arc to the west, ending up
flowing southwest toward its fearsome cataracts and the Adantic.
Stanley's journey solved another geographical mystery. The Congo
begins and ends below the equator, but the top part ofits great half-circle
lies above the equator. In central Africa, the equator is the rough dividing
line between the dry and rainy seasons: when it is one above the line, it is the other below. Therefore, whatever the time ofyear, part ofthe Congo's
course passes through land being drenched with rain and part through
dry country This explained why, over the course of a year, the Congo's
flow varied much less than that of other tropical rivers. The gigantic, steadily widening river, Stanley found, was a rich source
of food for the people living near it. Since his time, scientists have
counted more than five hundred species of fish in the river. These feed
on an array of insects, on each other, and on fruit and leaves that fall
into the water, especially during flood seasons, when the river rises above
its banks and sheets of water sweep through the bordering forests and
grasslands.
It is frustrating that the only African voices we hear are those recorded by Stanley himself. Every once in a while he does note or imagine such a
voice, as ifhe had paused to take a quick, half-guilty glance in the mirror.
Here is one such glance from his journal of September 12, 1876, which
was, coincidentally, the very day that dignitaries in evening dress filed up
the Royal Palace's marble staircase for the opening of King Leopold IFs
Geographical Conference in Brussels:
The White man in the opinion ofthe Waguhha:
"How can he be a good man who comes for no trade, whose feet you never see, who always goes covered with clothes, unlike all other people? No, there is something very mysterious about
him, perhaps wicked, perhaps he is a magician, at any rate it is
better to leave him alone and not disturb him."
53
WALKING INTO FIRE
Stanley's bloody progress down the river became part of local oral
history, sometimes taking on the elements of legend, for the range and
accuracy of his rifles seemed supernatural to those who had never seen such weapons.A traveler some years later heard one such account:
The chief of the strangers was covered with cloth, and his face
was white, and it shone like sun-light on the river. . . . The
stranger chief had only one eye. . . . It was in the middle of his
forehead. . . . When the Basoko went out on the river in their war-canoes to fight and capture the strangers, they cried: "Meat!
meat!" for they intended eating their bodies, but they were not to
be captured, and they killed many of the Basoko with sticks,
which sent forth thunder and lightning. They spoke words in a
strange tongue. They . . . drifted on down the river and passed the
strong Basoko with jeers.
This Basoko image of Stanley as one-eyed could be a memory, filtered
through many retellings, ofseeing him squinting through a telescope or a
rifles sights. It also strangely echoes the image of the one-eyed creatures
some medieval European geographers imagined Africans to be.We know from a later scrap of oral tradition that Europeans were often believed to
have hoofs; not having seen shoes before, some Africans along the river
thought them part ofwhite anatomy.
Several hundred miles downstream from his starting point, Stanley had
to portage around rapids, which he named Stanley Falls. After that, there
were no more natural obstacles to his progress for a thousand miles, to
Stanley Pool. It was clear sailing for the Lady Alice and the fleet of about
two dozen canoes the expedition had bought or stolen from people
living along the riverbank.
Stanley and his Zanzibari porters and soldiers watched in awe as the
river grew in size, becoming at times so wide they could barely see across
it. Its expanse was sprinkled with some four thousand islands, many of
them inhabited. In the languages spoken along its banks it was known
not as the Congo but, because of its many tributaries, as the Nzadi or
Nzere,* meaning "the river that swallows all rivers." Stanley did not
* Curiously, it was a Portuguese corruption of this word, Zaire, that Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko picked when he renamed his country in 1971.
54
THE MAGNIFICENT CAKE
venture up these side rivers, but as he passed one after another, each
hundreds of yards across, he was impressed by their size. As well he might
have been. Just one of the Congo's tributaries, the Kasai, carries as much water as the Volga and is half again as long as the Rhine. Another, the
Ubangi, is even longer. Steamboats on this network, Stanley immediately
saw, could travel long distances. It was as ifhe had found the equivalent of
thousands of miles of railroad track, already laid. "The Power possessing
the Congo . . ." he wrote, "would absorb to itself the trade of the whole
ofthe enormous basin behind. This river is and will be the grand highway
ofcommerce to West Central Africa."
The last leg of Stanley's extraordinary journey proved by far the hard-
est. At the head of the 220-mile final stretch of rapids, where the river
bulged out to make Stanley Pool, the explorer's easy floating came to an
end. He was prepared to portage around rapids and waterfalls, but what he did not realize was how much of the river's rush to the sea was through rock gorges that compressed the water into fast-moving,
unnavigable chutes ofwhite foam.
He grew steadily more dismayed. In many places the current, he esti- mated by timing tree trunks that floated past, was thirty miles an hour.
Take a strip of sea blown over by a hurricane . . . and a pretty
accurate conception of its leaping waves may be obtained. . . .
There was first a rush down into the bottom of an immense
trough, and then, by its sheer force, the enormous volume would
lift itself upward steeply until, gathering itself into a ridge, it
suddenly hurled itself20 or 30 feet straight upward, before rolling
down into another trough. . . . The base of either bank, consist-
ing of a long line ofpiled boulders of massive size, was buried in
the tempestuous surf. The roar was tremendous and deafening. I
can only compare it to the thunder ofan express train through a
rock tunnel.
Hoping, usually in vain, for calm stretches ofriver between such rapids,
the explorer ignored the advice oflocal Africans and for an almost fatally
long time did not abandon the Lady Alice and his dugout canoes. It was
particularly agonizing to move the canoes overland, for they could not be
taken apart and carried like the Lady Alice. The largest canoe was fifty-
four feet long and weighed three tons. The men had to cut and pile brush along a rough path, then drag the canoes forward. Sometimes they built
55
WALKING INTO FIRE
tracks oflogs and used other logs crosswise as rollers. It took thirty-seven
days to go one stretch of thirty-four miles. Again and again the jagged
Crystal Mountains threw up barriers; at one point the weary and emaci-
ated men had to pull the boats up twelve hundred feet, then along three
miles of relatively level ground, then down again. The rainy season ar-
rived, with downpours that lasted five or six hours a day.
The perpetual noise of the rapids grew ever more oppressive. Men fainted from hunger. Stanley's last pair of boots disintegrated. One of his
best men lost his mind and raced offinto the bush, carrying only a parrot.
Finally, after wasting months dragging the now-useless boats, the expedi-
tion abandoned them entirely. In Stanley s diary, as he despairingly records
one death, mass desertion, or mutiny after another, his elegant handwrit-
ing becomes almost illegible and his prose incoherent. Altogether, it took
him and his starving, disease-ridden band four and a halfmonths to travel
overland the 250 miles from Stanley Pool to the seaport ofBoma.
The explorer was vague and contradictory in his numbers, but the
death toll among the expedition's members was overwhelming. Many
succumbed to festering wounds, dysentery, smallpox, or typhus, all exac-
erbated by spells of near-starvation. Stanley would not allow porters ill
with smallpox to stay behind and convalesce, or even to walk off into the
forest to die; he made them carry their loads until they dropped. And he
drove himself almost as hard as he did his men; on the journey he lost
more than sixty pounds. Several times the expedition ran perilously short
of water; it endured snake and hippo attacks, spear grass, worms that
bored into the soles of porters' feet, and paths that led over knife-sharp
rocks. By the time the survivors reached Boma, they were numb with
exhaustion, suffering from what today we would call posttraumatic stress
syndrome. Several soon died ofno apparent cause, waiting to sail home.
"What means have I to convey my heart's load oflove to you," Stanley had written Alice Pike from the middle of the continent, "but this letter
which must go through a thousand miles of savages, exposed to all dan-
gers of flood and fire and battle until it reaches the sea? . . . Grant then
that my love towards you is unchanged, that you are in my dream, my stay and my hope, and my beacon, and believe that I shall still cherish you in this light until I meet you."
When he brought his remaining porters and soldiers by sea back to theirjumping-offpoint in Zanzibar, Stanley had a shock. Amid two years'
worth ofmail waiting for him was a newspaper clipping eighteen months
old, announcing that Alice Pike had married an Ohio railway heir named
56
THE MAGNIFICENT CAKE
Albert Barney. Stanley fell into a deep depression and never saw her
again.*
In public statements after his trip, Stanley made the usual condemna-
tions of the "Arab" slave trade, called for missionaries to come to Africa,
fulminated about the way Africans went about in "the general indecency
of their nakedness," and proclaimed that the aim of his journey was "to
flash a torch of light across the western half of the Dark Continent." But
business was never far from his mind. After leaving one district where he
had been plagued by desertions and a flood, he wrote in his journal, "A
farewell to it . . . until some generous and opulent philanthropist shall
permit me or some other to lead a force for the suppression of this stumbling block to commerce with Central Africa."
The opulent philanthropist was waiting.
In fact, the philanthropist was elated. For several months before Stanley
emerged at Boma, Leopold had eagerly scanned the Times ofLondon daily
for news of his fate. At one point he wrote to an aide, "The first thing on
the agenda . . . seems to me to check again if Stanley has reached the Lualaba." As soon as Stanley reappeared, the king sent him a telegram of
congratulations.
Now Leopold could read the long Daily Telegraph articles Stanley wrote about his journey, as well as the voluminous press reports on the
accolades and banquets the explorer received in Cape Town, Cairo, and
his other stops on his way back to England. A joint resolution congratu- lating him came from both houses of the United States Congress, and
fellow explorers hailed his descent of the Congo as the century's greatest
feat of exploration. Leopold was now certain that this vast territory in the
middle of Africa, miraculously still unclaimed by any European power,
could become the colony he craved. At last his long-dreamed-ofproduc-
tion could reach the stage, and Stanley would be its star.
The king instructed his minister in London to keep him au courant
* The explorer never knew that, as she watched his fame grow, the new Mrs. Barney spent
much ofher life regretting that she had not become Mrs. Stanley. Long after his death, in
a highly romanticized unpublished novel-memoir, she claimed credit for his great Congo
journey: "She made it possible for him. Without her spirit animating him, he would never
have accomplished it, not even had the desire to penetrate those abysmal darknesses again,
. . . 'Lady Alice' had conquered Africa!"
57
WALKING INTO FIRE
regarding news about Stanley. Behind the elegant smokescreen of his
International African Association, Leopold was maneuvering with great
subtlety. Be discreet, he told the envoy: "I'm sure if I quite openly charged
Stanley with the task of taking possession in my name of some part of
Africa, the English will stop me. If I ask their advice, they'll stop me just
the same. So I think Til just give Stanley some job of exploration which
would offend no one, and will give us the bases and headquarters which
we can take over later on." Above all, Leopold told his man in London, "I
do not want to risk . . . losing a fine chance to secure for ourselves a slice
of this magnificent African cake."
Firing off telegrams, Leopold mapped a plan to intercept Stanley on
his way home and lure him to Brussels. In Alexandria, where the explorer
stopped for a few days, the king arranged for someone to plant the idea
with Stanley while he was the guest ofhonor at a dinner on board a yacht
carrying former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant. Then, for the next step in
his courtship, Leopold turned for help to an American friend in Brussels,
General Henry Shelton Sanford. It was a brilliant choice: with Stanley so
eagerly passing himself off as American, who better to appeal to him than
a high-born countryman?
General Sanford was eager to take on this glamorous mission for
Leopold. Born to a wealthy Connecticut family, he had been appointed
by Abraham Lincoln as American minister to Belgium, and had stayed on
after his eight-year tenure ended. He and his wife, a famous beauty much
younger than he, entertained lavishly at their turreted, three-story coun-
try house outside Brussels. With his stovepipe hat, gold-headed cane,
pince-nez, and handsome chestnut mustache and beard, Sanford was a
familiar figure in the city's highest social circles. He had never been a
soldier, however; the "General," as well as the sword and blue-and-gold
uniform he wore for some years, were rewards for his having given a
battery ofcannon to an infantry regiment during the Civil War.
Sanford had invested in American railroads and Western real estate and
in huge citrus orchards and other enterprises in Florida, giving the town
that sprang up to house their workers the name of Sanford/ But, as with
* Sanford, Florida, had a briefmoment ofnotoriety three quarters of a century later, when
its police chief, evoking an ordinance banning interracial sports on city property, ordered
Jackie Robinson off the field in the middle of a spring-training exhibition game.
58
THE MAGNIFICENT CAKE
his military rank, Sanford's prowess as a financier was less than met the
eye. He had the elegance of someone who had grown up with a fortune but not the shrewdness needed to make one, and he lost money on
everything he touched. He never recovered the large sums he put into a series ofodd patents— for a wool loom, a new type ofwhiskey still, and a little box designed to lubricate railroad car axles with water instead of
oil.A silver mine in Nevada and a zinc mine in Arkansas proved disastrous. A Minnesota railroad went bankrupt. His cotton crop at a South Carolina plantation was devoured by caterpillars.
As Sanford saw his inherited fortune draining away, his connections at
the Belgian court loomed larger for him. He even named one of his sons Leopold. Always a shrewd judge of people, the king understood what
royal patronage would mean to Sanford, and he flattered him ceaselessly,
knowing that someday he could use him. When Sanford failed in one of many fruidess efforts to win another American diplomatic post, Leopold's
aide BaronJules Greindl wrote to him, "The King is pleased that you will
continue to reside among us where everyone loves and appreciates you."
Like many Americans, Sanford had a fondness for royalty and Leopold
valued him, he felt, in a way that his own country did not. In January 1878, Leopold secretly dispatched Sanford and Greindl to
intercept Stanley in France, where the explorer, still on his way to Lon-
don, was due for another round of medals and banqueting. At the Mar-
seilles railway station, the envoys caught up with Stanley,who was thin, ill, and exhausted, and followed him to Paris, where they formally offered
him a job with the International African Association. He turned down their invitation but clearly was gratified. Always anxious about his recep-
tion in the upper reaches of society, Stanley never forgot that courtiers of
the King of the Belgians— a baron and a general, no less— had sought him out on his return to Europe.
From France, Stanley at last headed home to London and a hero's welcome. Despite his claiming to be American, his heart was still in
England. It was the Union Jack, he said at one banquet or white-tie
dinner party after another, that ought to fly over the territory crossed by
the great river. Stanley's hopes for British interest in the Congo basin rose
when the Prince of Wales came to hear him talk, but all he said to the
explorer afterward was that Stanley was wearing his medals in the wrong
order. Already much of the world's map was filled with British domin-
ions, colonies, and protectorates of one sort or another; with a recession
59
WALKING INTO FIRE
at home and their hands full with various colonial crises and rebellions overseas, few Britons seemed interested in a new territory whose main transportation route was blocked by notorious cataracts.
"I do not understand Englishmen at all," Stanley wrote. "Either they suspect me of some self-interest, or they do not believe me. . . . For the relief ofLivingstone I was called an impostor; for the crossing ofAfrica I was called a pirate" Nor was there enthusiasm in the United States for Congo colonization. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., in New York, now wanted to send Stanley offin search ofthe North Pole.
Leopold continued to press his suit. He had his minister in London invite Stanley to lunch. He sent Sanford across the Channel to talk to the explorer again. And he made sure that Stanley heard a few hints about his possibly making a deal with another explorer instead. Leopold knew his man. Five months after returning to Europe, Stanley accepted an invita- tion to visit Belgium.
60
"THE TREATIES MUST
GRANT US EVERYTHING"
On June 10, 1878, a steamer carried Henry Morton Stanley across the English Channel to his first meeting with the King of the
Belgians. We do not know what Leopold was doing as he waited for the explorer in his office at the Royal Palace, his patient months of wooing
about to bear fruit. But it would not be unreasonable to imagine that this
geographer-king once again looked at his maps.
Such a look would have confirmed that only in Africa could Leopold
hope to achieve his dream of seizing a colony, especially one immensely
larger than Belgium. There was no more unclaimed territory in the
Americas, and Maximilian and Carlota's disastrous adventure in Mexico
was a reminder of what could happen if one tried to take control of an
independent country there. Nor were there blank spaces in Asia: the
Russian Empire stretched all the way to the Pacific, the French had taken
Indochina, the Dutch the East Indies, and most of the rest of southern
Asia, from Aden to Singapore, was colored with the British Empire s pink.
Only Africa remained.
Stanley had followed the Congo River for some fifteen hundred miles.
He had obviously not seen all of it, though, because when he first reached
it, far upstream, it was already nearly a mile wide. Full exploration would
take many years, but after eagerly devouring Stanley's newspaper articles,
Leopold had a rough idea ofwhat the explorer had found.
Eventually the statistics would be known. The Congo River drains
more than 1.3 million square miles, an area larger than India. It has an
estimated one sixth of the world's hydroelectric potential. Most impor-
61
WALKING INTO FIRE
tant of all, for a nineteenth-century empire-builder, the river and its
fan-shaped web of tributaries constitute more than seven thousand miles
of interconnecting waterways, a built-in transportation grid rivaled by
few places on earth. Once disassembled steamboats could be transported
around the great rapids and onto that network, they would find wood to
burn in their boilers growing right at dockside; most of the navigable
rivers ran through the fast-growing rain forest that covered halfthe basin.
Of the people who lived in the Congo basin, Europeans still knew little. When not drawing a bead on them through his gun sights, Stanley had been interested in them mainly as a source of supplies, people with
whom he could trade trinkets or cloth for food. But he had made two important discoveries about the area's inhabitants. One was that they
were no military threat: his nearly three dozen battles showed their spears
and arrows and decrepit muskets to be no match for his new, breech-
loading Snider rifles. His other discovery was that, along the crucial
transportation artery ofthe Congo River, there was no single all-powerful
state that had to be subdued. Further exploring along the river's tributar-
ies would find several large kingdoms, but centuries ofslave-hunting raids
from both the east and west African coasts had severely weakened most of
them. Many of the peoples of the Congo basin were small in population.
As the next round of exploration would soon show, there were more than
two hundred different ethnic groups speaking more than four hundred
languages and dialects. With the potential opposition so fragmented, con-
quest would be relatively easy.
On the day in 1878 when he sat down for his long-anticipated meet- ing with Stanley, Leopold was forty-three. With the pedantic awkward-
ness of his youth far behind him, he had learned to play the royal role
superbly. Although the thirty-seven-year-old Stanley was a head shorter
than the king and uneasy about his rudimentary French, he too had come
into his own. The ne'er-do-well naval deserter of a mere thirteen years
earlier was now a best-selling author, recognized as one of the greatest of
living explorers. His stern, mustachioed face appeared in magazines eve-
rywhere beneath a Stanley Cap, his own invention. It had a high crown
surrounded by ventilation holes, a brim over the eyes, and a havelock, a
cloth to keep the sun off ears and neck. To our eyes the cap looks like a
cross between that of a Foreign Legionnaire and a doorman— which, in a way, summed up Stanley's personality: one part titan ofrugged force and
mountain-moving confidence; the other a vulnerable, illegitimate son of
the working class, anxiously struggling for the approval of the powerful.
62
"the treaties must grant us everything"
In photographs each part seems visible: the explorer's eyes carry both a
fierce determination and a woundedness.
At this first meeting, Leopold immediately put Stanley at ease in fluent
English. The men who met each other that June day at the Royal Palace each represented a class type that would become familiar. The command-
ers of the ground troops in the great African land grab, the whites who
led soldiers into the bush, directed the rifle and machine-gun fire and
wielded the surveyors' instruments, who braved malaria, dysentery, and typhoid, were often, like Stanley, from the lower or lower middle class in
their home countries. For them, Africa was a chance to gain upward
mobility toward wealth and glory. But those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who
had fortunes to begin with.
Although he had lived a pampered life in yachts and palaces, Leopold
was, of the two, the wiser in the ways of the world. He had taken the measure of Stanley's ambition, of his immense capacity for hard work, of
his craving for constant flattery, and of his need for a sponsor. Stanley,
still smarting from British lack of interest in the Congo, was delighted to
meet a monarch who admired what he had done and wanted him to do more.
After that meeting, Stanley traveled about Europe for the rest of 1878,
promoting Through the Dark Continent, meeting members of the new
Stanley Club in Paris, and receiving honors everywhere. Leopold sent
messages and emissaries after him, to keep his man on the hook. Before
the year was out, the two had agreed on the terms of Stanley's return to
the Congo, this time working for the king. Stanley's contract ran for five
years; he would be paid 25,000 francs a year for time spent in Europe and
50,000 francs (roughly $250,000 in todays dollars) a year for time spent in
Africa. And, of course, Leopold would fund the expeditionary force to
accompany him.
They agreed that Stanley would first set up a base near the river's
mouth and then construct a road around the rapids, through the rugged
Crystal Mountains— a precursor to a railway. Over this road porters would carry several steamboats broken down into small pieces, which
Stanley would later assemble and use to travel upstream, building a chain
of trading stations along the thousand-mile navigable main stretch of the
Congo River. Afterward, he could write a book about his experiences— but Leopold would have the right to edit it.
Of the riches Leopold hoped to find in the Congo, the one that
63
WALKING INTO FIRB
gleamed most brightly in his imagination was ivory. European and
American merchants were already eagerly buying African ivory in the
markets of Zanzibar. Because it could be easily carved, ivory in the
nineteenth century was a more rare and expensive version ofwhat plastic
is today, with the added cachet ofhaving an exotic origin— a cachet that grew greater with the public idolization ofAfrican explorers. Ivory from
elephant tusks was shaped into knife handles, billiard balls, combs, fans,
napkin rings, piano and organ keys, chess pieces, crucifixes, snuffboxes,
brooches, and statuettes. In a faint echo of its original use to the elephant,
it was made into false teeth. Despite the long distances ivory had to be
carried from the elephant ranges far inland, it was attractive to dealers all
the way along the line because, like drugs or precious metals, it had high
value and low bulk. The hundred pounds of ivory in an average pair of
African elephant tusks could make hundreds of piano keys or thousands
offalse teeth. Ivory dealers preferred African elephant tusks to Indian, and
the elephants of equatorial Africa, which included the Congo basin,
tended to have the largest tusks of all. Stanley had found ivory so plentiful
that it was used for doorposts in African homes.
For the moment, such riches lay at least several years in Leopolds
future, for first Stanley had to build his road. He left nothing out of the detailed budget he prepared for the king: small boats, wooden buildings
in pieces, rope, tools, African porters, and European supervisors. Among the latter were two young Englishmen who, in the tradition of Stanley s
inept subordinates, had never been out of the country. Having hired
neophytes, he could later rail about their inexperience: "I have had no
friend on any expedition, no one who could possibly be my companion, on an equal footing, except while with Livingstone. . . . How can he who has witnessed many wars hope to be understood by one whose most
shocking sight has been a nose-bleed?"
Stanley was savvy enough to demand his money from Leopold in
advance because, despite a plethora of contracts, whom he was working for remained foggy: was it the king himself, the king's International
African Association, which seemed to be withering away, or a new and
somewhat secretive body called the Committee for Studies of the Upper
Congo? The committee's stockholders officially were a small group of
Dutch and British businessmen and a Belgian banker— who, in fact, was quietly holding a large block of shares as Leopold's proxy. A trusted henchman of the king's, Colonel Maximilien Strauch, was the commit-
tee's president.
64
"THE TREATIES MUST GRANT US EVERYTHING
Ambitious as his and Stanley's plans were, Leopold was intent that
they be seen as nothing more than philanthropy The contracts Stanley
made his European staff sign forbade them to divulge anything about the
real purpose of their work. "Only scientific explorations are intended,"
Leopold assured a journalist. To anyone who questioned further, he could point to a clause in the committee's charter that explicitly prohibited it
from pursuing political ends. The king wanted to protect himself against
the widespread feeling in Belgium that, for a small country, a colony
would be a money-losing extravagance. He also wanted to do nothing to alert any potential rivals for this appetizing slice of the African cake,
especially France, which was starting to show interest.
In February 1879, slipping on board a steamship under the name M.
Henri, Stanley set off again for Africa. Behind him in Europe, another
story was unfolding. A Dutch company that had been a key shareholder in the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo went bankrupt, its
chief reportedly fleeing to New York and going to work as a horse-cab driver. Leopold did not mind; he used the shock of the Dutch company's
collapse to offer, in effect, a buy-out of the committee s other stockhold-
ers. They gratefully accepted, and the committee legally ceased to exist
before the end of the year. But as a smokescreen it was still useful, and the
king continued to refer to the committee as if it were functioning and as
if its former shareholders, and not he alone, were funding Stanley and
making decisions. Stanley himself did not find out about the committee's
demise until more than a year after the fact.
To obfuscate things still further and give his African operations a name
that could serve for a political entity, the master impresario created an-
other new cover organization, the International Association of the
Congo. This was calculated to sound confusingly similar to the moribund
"philanthropic" International African Association of crown princes and
explorers. "Care must be taken not to let it be obvious that the Associa-
tion of the Congo and the African Association are two different things,"
Leopold instructed one of his aides. "The public doesn't grasp that."
Adding to the public's confusion, the new International Association of
the Congo, like the defunct Committee for Studies ofthe Upper Congo,
used the flag of the International African Association, which had been
adopted with much fanfare at that group's first and last meeting— a gold star on a blue background, intended to symbolize a blaze of hope in the
proverbial African darkness.
Even before making his deal with Stanley, Leopold had begun reach-
65
WALKING IffTO JIM
ing for his slice of the African cake from the other side of the table, by
financing an attempt to reach the Congo basin from Africa's east coast.
Three more such expeditions, all well-publicized but inept, followed.
One of them included four baggage-carrying Indian elephants with the
suitably exotic names Sundergrund, Naderbux, Sosankalli, and Pulmalla.
The elephants, it turned out, required fifty laborers with axes and ma-
chetes to precede them, clearing trees and branches so that they and their
loads could pass through.* But before dropping heavily and prematurely
dead of various ailments, the elephants proved a journalist s dream. The
European readers who followed each stage of the animals' unhappy jour- ney failed to realize that the real story lay on Africa's other coast, where
Stanley was quietly working on his road around the Congo River rapids.
Almost imperceptibly, the name Congo now began to refer not just to a river but to an entire territory. When the public finally did start pay- ing attention to the new colony-in-the-making, the king reached new
heights as an illusionist. He or one ofhis stagehands managed to open the curtains on a completely different set each time, depending on the audi-
ence. Henry Shelton Sanford, a board member ofLeopold's venture in its
incarnation as the International African Association, made it sound al-
most like Travelers Aid. In New "¥brk, on a 1879 trip to tend to his money-losing investments, Sanford gave a speech saying that the king's
aim was "to found a chain of posts or hospices, both hospitable and
scientific, which should serve as means of information and aid to travel-
lers . . . and ultimately, by their humanizing influences, to secure the
abolition of the traffic in slaves." His new International Association of
the Congo, Leopold insisted in a piece he wrote and managed to get
published, over the byline "from a Belgian correspondent," in the Lon-
don Times, was a sort of "Society of the Red Cross; it has been formed
with the noble aim of rendering lasting and disinterested services to the
cause ofprogress" When talking to the more military-minded Germans, Leopold nimbly changed the scenery and likened his men in the Congo to the knights of the Crusades. Almost everyone was fooled. Baroness
Burdett-Coutts, the British patron of missionaries, gave him a donation
of 50,000 francs for his humanitarian endeavors. In the United States, one
* Even getting the elephants to land proved a near-disaster. The ship that brought them
from India lowered them over the side in slings, but instead of swimming obediendy to
the beach, the elephants tried to climb back on board.When the ship's boats attempted to tow them toward shore, the elephants started to pull the boats out to sea.
66
writer declared Leopold's great work "enough to make an American
believe in Kings forever."
Meanwhile, Leopold sent word that Stanley was to lay the ground-
work in the Congo for a "confederation of free negro republics," black
tribes whose president would live in Europe and rule under the guidance
of the Belgian king. This particular illusion, echoing the idea of a union
of states, was likely to appeal to an American audience. To Europeans, on
the other hand, the king talked about free cities. "Bremen, Lubeck, Ham- burg were free cities for a long time," one ofhis aides wrote. "Why would there not be some in the Congo?" Those backstage, however, knew that
in either case the free was merely a prop to be removed as soon as the
curtains closed. As one ofLeopolds subordinates bluntly wrote to Stanley:
"There is no question ofgranting the slightest political power to negroes.
That would be absurd. The white men, heads ofthe stations, retain all the
powers."
For five years, Stanley was Leopold's man in the Congo. The explorers combative energy was now directed mainly against the territory's forbid- ding landscape, not its people. His crews of workmen carved a rough
track, more a trail than a road, around the big rapids, using existing paths
in some areas, in others cutting through brush and forest, filling in gullies,
and throwing log bridges over ravines. Then they moved more than firry
tons of supplies and equipment up the trail. Draft animals like horses and
oxen could not survive the Congo's climate and diseases, so supplies
traveled mostly on porters' heads.
After two years of trail building, pulling, and hauling, two small steam-
boats were reassembled at the top of the rapids and puffed their way up
the river to land parties that set up more bases on its banks. Names left no
doubt whose colony this would be. The station established at the top of
the big rapids, within earshot of their thunder, and featuring a heavily
fortified blockhouse and a vegetable garden, was christened Leopoldville.
Above it rose Leopold Hill. Soon maps showed Lake Leopold II and the
Leopold River. One ofthe later-arriving steamboats, which would briefly be piloted by the Congo's most famous ship's officer, would be the Roi des
Beiges (King of the Belgians).
Stanley was a harsh taskmaster. "The best punishment is that of irons,"
he explained in one of his letters to Brussels, "because without wound-
ing, disfiguring, or torturing the body, it inflicts shame and discomfort."
67
WALKING INTO FIRE
(Whites were not put in irons, of course; only blacks.) Illness and other
dangers were even more deadly than Stanley's wrath. In the first year
alone, six Europeans and twenty-two Africans under his command died,
including one eaten by a crocodile.
For the first time we are at last able to see Stanley in Africa through
eyes not his own. A steamboat engineer named Paul Neve fell sick and
wrote home:
Mr. Stanley has taken great care ofme during these bad days . . .
the sort of care a blacksmith applies to repair an implement that
is most essential and that has broken down through too rough
usage . . . teeth clenched in anger, he smites it again and again on
the anvil, wondering whether he will have to scrap it or whether
he will yet be able to use it as before.
Neve died several weeks later.
Stanley himselfmight not have minded the blacksmith analogy. "Every
cordial-faced aborigine whom I meet . . ." he wrote, "I look upon . . .
with much of the same regard that an agriculturist views his strong-
limbed child; he is a nature recruit to the ranks of soldier-laborers." It was
during this period, when he was pushing his men so hard, that Stanley
became known by the Africans who worked for him as Bula Matadi or
Bula Matari, "Breakstones." Stanley himself preferred the grander trans-
lation "Breaker of Rocks," and claimed that it was bestowed on him
when he taught awed Africans how to use a sledgehammer and when
they saw giant boulders dynamited as he built the trail through the
Crystal Mountains
In Stanley's account of his labors, he snorts at Africans,who are lazy by
definition, and at whites who are "weak-minded." He preaches "the
gospel of enterprise," declaring that "the European middleman who
has his home in Europe but has his heart in Africa is the man who is
wanted They are the missionaries ofcommerce, adapted for nowhere
so well as for the Congo basin, where are so many idle hands." And
nowhere does he wax as passionate as when his moneymaking instincts
and his Victorian prudery intersect. Getting the "clothesless and over-
tattooed" Africans out of their "unabashed nudity" and into European
clothes is his continuing obsession:
68
"the treaties must grant us everything"
I foresaw a brilliant future of Africa, if by any miracle of good-
fortune I could persuade the dark millions of the interior to cast
off their fabrics of grass clothing and don . . . second-hand cos-
tumes. . . . See what a ready market lies here for old clothes! The
garments shed by the military heroes of Europe, of the club
lackeys, of the liveried servants of modern Pharaohs, the frock-
coats of a lawyer, merchant, or a Rothschild; or perhaps the grave
garb of these my publishers, might find people of the rank of Congo chieftainship to wear them.
As Stanley shuttled back and forth on foot through the rugged, humid
countryside, supervising construction, he carefully kept up his personal
appearance, shaving and putting blacking on his mustache each day. Dur-
ing this sojourn, as during all his time in Africa, his sturdy, compact frame
survived the diseases that sent so many European visitors to early graves.
Several times he was delirious with fever and twice came near death. One bout of malaria, he wrote, reduced his weight to a hundred pounds, and
he grew too weak to speak or raise his arms. For two weeks he lay in his
tent, convinced that the end was near, then summoned his sun-helmeted
European officers and African workers to give his last instructions, to say
goodbye, and to make— so he claimed— one last profession of loyalty: "Tell the King . . . that I am sorry not to have been able to carry out to a finish the mission he entrusted to me."
He recovered, but some months later fell sick again and, brought downriver, was carried ashore at Leopoldville unconscious. In 1882,
barely able to walk, he went back to Europe to recuperate, traveling on a
slow Portuguese steamer. On this ship, he fulminated, "underbred" sec- ond-class passengers were allowed onto the first-class deck, where they
"expectorated, smoked, and sprawled in the most socialistic manner."
Worse yet was an invasion by third-class "females, and half a score of
half-naked white children."
At last he was rescued from these indignities by the ship s arrival in
Europe. Doctors warned Stanley that it might be fatal for him to return
to the Congo, but Leopold insisted: there was still much to be done. Not only did the king want his colony secured; he also wanted the explorer
out of the way for a few more years because, always a loose cannon in
public, Stanley continued to talk openly about his hopes for a British
Congo. Leopold turned on the royal charm. "Surely, Mr. Stanley," he said,
69
WALKING INTO FIRE
"you cannot think of leaving me now, just when I most need you?"
Simultaneously fighting a painful relapse of illness and firing off orders
for an array of new equipment and supplies, Stanley returned to the
Congo after only two months.
With the great prize almost within his grasp, Leopold wanted as much
land in the Congo as possible, and he wanted it now. His instructions and
letters to Stanley all through these years pulsate with his lust for territory.
I take advantage of a safe opportunity to send you a few lines in
my bad English. ... It is indispensable you should purchase . . . as much land as you will be able to obtain, and that you should
place successively under . . . suzerainty ... as soon as possible
and without losing one minute, all the chiefs from the mouth of
the Congo to the Stanley Falls. . . . Ifyou let me know you are
going to execute these instructions without delay I will send you
more people and more material. Perhaps Chinese coolies.
Although piously assuring the British minister in Brussels that his
venture in Africa "had no commercial character; it did not carry on
trade," Leopold had already written to Stanley, "I am desirous to see you
purchase all the ivory which is to be found on the Congo, and let
Colonel Strauch know the goods which he has to forward you in order
to pay for it and when. I also recommend you to establish barriers and
tolls on the parts of the road you have opened. It is but fair and in
accordance with the custom of every country."
Leopold and Stanley knew that other Europeans were beginning to
nose around the basin. Their chief worry was the French explorer and
naval officer Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who had landed on the
coast north ofthe Congo River and headed inland. One day while he was
still building his trail around the rapids, Stanley was starded to have the
courdy Frenchman, in a white helmet and blue navy coat, show up at his
tent. A still greater shock awaited him at Stanley Pool, where he found that de Brazza had signed a treaty with a chief ceding to France a strip of
the northern shoreline. De Brazza had left a sergeant in command of an outpost there, flying the French flag.
Stanley was a man who brooked no rivals, and over the next few years he and de Brazza carried on a loud feud. Stanley claimed the French
explorer's treaty was based on trickery; his rival called Stanley a warrior
who was no friend to the Africans. The Paris press loved it. While Leopold
70
THE TREATIES MUST GRANT US EVERYTHING
schemed with Stanley about how to outfox de Brazza, behind Stanley's back the king invited the Frenchman to Brussels, gave him the Order of
Leopold, and tried unsuccessfully to hire him.
The comings and goings of Stanley and de Brazza began to arouse interest elsewhere. Doddering Portugal resurrected its old claim to the
land surrounding the Congo River's mouth. Britain, worried by French interest in the Congo, backed the Portuguese. Leopold felt he had no
time to waste.
Stanley, under pressure, drove his men harder. He exploded at white subordinates who were drinking too much or who had let weeds grow around their river stations. "These people had already given me more trouble than all the African tribes put together. They had inspired such
disgust in me that I would rather be condemned to be a boot-black all my life than to be a dry-nurse to beings who had no . . . claim to manhood." Despite his own briefand inglorious career on opposite sides of the American Civil War, Stanley was at heart a military man. He liked order and discipline and was a terrifying but effective commander. By now he had amassed a powerful private army, equipped with a thousand quick-firing rifles, a dozen small Krupp cannon, and four machine guns.
Among his Zanzibari soldiers there was a Swahili saying: Bunduki sultani ya bara bara (The gun is the sultan of the hinterland).
Meanwhile, Leopold had hired an Oxford scholar, Sir Travers Twiss, to
provide a learned legal opinion backing the right ofprivate companies to
act as if they were sovereign countries when making treaties with native chiefs. Stanley was under instructions to lead his well-armed forces up
and down the river and do just that. "The treaties must be as brief as possible," Leopold ordered, "and in a couple of articles must grant us
everything."
They did. By the time Stanley and his officers were done, the blue flag with the gold star fluttered over the villages and territories, Stanley
claimed, ofmore than 450 Congo basin chiefs. The texts varied, but many of the treaties gave the king a complete trading monopoly, even as he
placated European and American questioners by insisting that he was
opening up Africa to free trade. More important, chiefs signed over their land to Leopold, and they did so for almost nothing. At Isangila, near the
big rapids, Stanley recorded, he was able to buy land for a station by
paying some chiefs with "an ample supply of fine clothes, flunkey coats,
and tinsel-braided uniforms, with a rich assortment of divers marketable
wares . . . not omitting a couple of bottles of gin" The conquerors of
71
TALKING INTO FIRE
Africa, like those of the American West, were finding alcohol as effective
as the machine gun.
The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefe 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 ocean was inconceivable. Did the chiefs of Ngombi
and Mafela, for example, have any idea ofwhat they agreed to on April i,
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 Asso-
ciation shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these
territories All roads and waterways running through this country, the
right of collecting tolls on the same, and all game, fishing, mining and
forest rights, are to be the absolute property of the said Association."
By labour or otherwise. Stanley's pieces of cloth bought not just land,
but manpower. It was an even worse trade than the Indians made for
Manhattan.
What kind of societies existed in this land that, unknown to most of its
inhabitants, Stanley was busily staking out for the King of the Belgians?
There is no simple answer, for what would turn out to be the Congo's
borders, if superimposed on the map of Europe, would stretch from
Zurich to Moscow to central Turkey. It was as large as the entire United
States east of the Mississippi. Although mosdy rain forest and savanna, it
also embraced volcanic hills and mountains covered with snow and gla-
ciers, some ofwhose peaks reached higher than the Alps.
The peoples of this vast territory were as diverse as the land. They
ranged from citizens of large, organizationally sophisticated kingdoms to
the Pygmies of the Ituri rain forest, who lived in small bands with no
chiefs and no formal structure of government. The kingdoms, with large
towns as their capitals, tended to be in the savanna, where long-distance
travel was easier. In the rain forest, where paths had to be hacked through
thick, rapidly growing foliage, communities were generally far smaller.
72
THE TREATIES MUST GRANT US EVERYTHING
These forest-dwellers were sometimes seminomads: if a group of Pyg-
mies, for instance, killed an elephant, that site became a temporary settle-
ment for a week or two of feasting, since it was easier to move a village than a dead elephant.
Although some Congo peoples, like the Pygmies, were admirably peaceful, it would be a mistake to see most of them as paragons of
primeval innocence. Many practiced slavery and ritual cannibalism and were as likely to make war on other clans or ethnic groups as people anywhere on earth. And traditional warfare in this part ofAfrica, where a severed head or hand was sometimes proof of an enemy killed in battle, was as harsh as warfare elsewhere. In some areas of the Congo all women were maimed, as still happens today, by forced clitoridectomies, a practice
no less brutal for being a cultural initiation rite.
Like many indigenous peoples, inhabitants of the Congo basin had learned to live in balance with their environment. Some groups practiced what was, in effect, birth control, where couples had to abstain from sex
before the men left on a hunting expedition, for example, or as long as the woman was breast-feeding a baby. Substances found in certain leaves and bark could induce miscarriages or had contraceptive properties. All
these means ofpopulation control, incidentally, were strikingly similar to
those which had evolved in another great rain forest an ocean away, the
Amazon basin.
Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and,
above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really
noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque,
Matisse, and Picasso— who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was pardy inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the
Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries.
It is easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and
his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in
1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated,
some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos be-
come elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond the sight of traditional
European realism.
73
WALKING INTO FIRE
The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser
sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world
and the next, as well as of those between the world of humans and the
world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a
king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to
him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by
roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular
spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that
granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet
discovered.
In June 1884, his work for Leopold done and a sheaf of treaties in his
baggage, Stanley sailed home to Europe. He grumbled a bit about his
employer's greed; the king, he complained, had the "enormous voracity
to swallow a million of square miles with a gullet that will not take in a
herring." But it was Stanley who made the big swallow possible.
As he settled in England to write his usual thousand-page two-volume
account of his travels, Stanley found around him a Europe that had
awakened to Africa. The Scramble had begun. The treaty de Brazza had
made at Stanley Pool would soon lead to a French colony on the north-
west bank of the Congo River. In Germany, Chancellor Otto von Bis-
marck wanted colonies in Africa. The British, the outsiders with the most
substantial foothold on the continent, were beginning to worry about
competitors.
Leopold was certain that none of these larger powers would be eager
to recognize the one-man colony Stanley had staked out for him. Diplo-
matic recognition, however, is pardy a matter of precedent. Once one
major country recognizes another's existence, other nations are likely to
fall into line. If no major European country would take this crucial first
step, Leopold decided, he would look elsewhere. Unnoticed on his home
continent, the king had already quiedy begun making a dazzling end-run
around Europe entirely.
74
FROM FLORIDA TO BERLIN
AN unusually late spring snowfall lay thick on the White House lawn as President Chester A. Arthur, wearing a high silk hat,
boarded a private car lent to him by the Pennsylvania Railroad and
headed south for a vacation. High blood pressure and other complaints
had left him tired, he told his staff, and he wanted a good rest in Florida.
Traveling with the president as he left Washington, on April 5, 1883,
were the secretary of the navy, Arthur's valet, his personal secretary, and
his French chef, whom a journalist on the train described as "a gende- man with a well-developed waist . . . evidendy a good feeder." A friend of the president's was also on board, and several of his late wife's cousins
joined the party as the train rolled south. After Petersburg, Virginia, as
the private car moved onto the tracks of a new railroad, a gray-bearded conductor provoked great hilarity by walking into the car, counting
the passengers, and trying to collect $47.50 in fares. A telegram order- ing him to let the presidential party travel for free was waiting at the
next stop.
In Jacksonville, Florida, the president and his entourage were greeted
by a twenty-one-gun salute. They then boarded a paddlewheel steamer
and headed up the winding St. Johns River, lined with cypress trees and
flocks ofherons and cranes. More friends and relativesjoined the sociable
president along the way, and fireworks shot up from the banks ofthe river.
The following day, the steamer tied up at a spot some thirty-five miles
from today's Disney World, where the party climbed into carriages to visit
75
WALKING INTO FIRE
the elegant mansion of the Belair orange plantation. They tasted different
varieties of the plantations prize oranges, and the secretary of the navy
climbed a tree to pick some that particularly caught his eye. In the
evening, the presidential entourage watched a song-and-dance perform-
ance, with banjo music, by a troupe of six local black boys.
One ofthe more forgettable ofAmerican presidents, Chester A. Arthur
was an amiable man whose highest job, only a few years earlier, had been
as collector ofcustoms revenue for the port ofNew York— a position he had been forced to leave amid charges of corruption and mismanage-
ment. Soon after this, Arthur's ties to the powerful New York State Re-
publican machine won him nomination as candidate for vice president.
To near-universal dismay, he had entered the White House when Presi-
dent James A. Garfield died from an assassin's bullet. A good storyteller
and man about town, fond of whiskey, cigars, and expensive clothes, the
dapper, sideburned Arthur is perhaps best remembered for saying, "I may
be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned
business." On this trip to Florida, however, his private life fitted very
nicely into someone else's business. The owner of the Belair orange
plantation was General Henry Shelton Sanford, the man who had helped
Leopold recruit Stanley.
Sanford did not bother to leave his home in Belgium to be in Florida
for the president's visit. With the self-assurance ofthe very rich, he played
host in absentia. He made sure that the president and his party were
greeted by his personal agent, and that they got the best rooms at the
Sanford House hotel, which stood on a lakeshore fringed with palm trees
in the town of Sanford. When the president and his guests were not out
catching bass, trout, and catfish, or shooting alligators, or exploring the
area by steamboat, the Sanford House was where they stayed for the
better part of a week. There is no record ofwho paid the hotel bill, but
most likely, as with the rail journey south, it was not the president.
Ironically, the huge Sanford orange plantation the Washington visitors
admired was proving as disastrous a venture as Sanford's other invest-
ments. Some Swedish contract laborers found the working conditions
too harsh and tried to leave as stowaways on a steamboat. A slaughter-
house Sanford invested in had a capacity fifty times larger than what the
local market could consume and went bankrupt.A 540-foot wharfwith a
warehouse at the end of it that he ordered built was washed away by a
flood. The manager of one of the hotels in Sanford absconded while
76
FROM FLORIDA TO BERLIN
owing him money. Foremen failed to put up fences, and wandering cattle nibbled at the orange trees. But if everything Sanford touched as a busi- nessman turned to dust, as an accomplice of Leopold he was a grand success.
Sanford was a long-time supporter of President Arthur s Republi- can Party. For two years, he had been corresponding with Arthur and other high United States officials about Leopold's plans for the Congo. Now, after the president s trip to Florida, confident that Arthur would pay attention, he pressed his case with more letters. Seven months later, Leopold sent Sanford across the Adantic to make use of his convenient connection to the White House. The man who had once been American minister to Belgium was now the Belgian king's personal envoy to Wash- ington.
Sanford carried with him to Washington a special code for telegraph- ing news to Brussels; Constance meant "negotiations proceeding satisfac- torily; success expected"; Achille referred to Stanley, Eugenie to France,
Alice to the United States,Joseph to "sovereign rights," and Entile to the key target, the president. Bonheur (happiness) meant "agreement signed today." The agreement Leopold wanted was one that gave full American diplomatic recognition of his claim to the Congo.
Sanford also carried a letter to the president from the king, which he himself had carefully edited and translated. "Entire territories ceded by Sovereign Chiefs have been constituted by us into independent States," Leopold declared, a claim that would have starded Stanley, then finishing up his work on the Congo River. From Arthur, Leopold asked only "the official announcement that the Government of the United States . . . [will] treat as a friendly flag ... the blue standard with the golden star which now floats over 17 stations, many territories, 7 steamers engaged in the civilizing work of the Association and over a population of several millions."
On November 29, 1883, only two days after his ship arrived in New York and he had boarded the overnight train for Washington, Sanford was received by President Arthur at the White House. Leopold's great work of civilization, he told the president and everyone else he met in Washing- ton, was much like the generous work the United States itself had done in Liberia, where, starting in 1820, freed American slaves had moved to what soon became an independent African country. This was a shrewdly chosen example, since it had not been the United States government that
77
WALKING INTO FIRE
had resettled ex-slaves in Liberia, but a private society like Leopold's
International Association ofthe Congo.
Like all the actors in Leopold's highly professional cast, Sanford relied
on just the right props. He claimed, for example, that Leopold's treaties
with Congo chiefs were similar to those which the Puritan clergyman
Roger Williams, famed for his belief in Indian rights, had made in Rhode
Island in the 1600s— and Sanford just happened to have copies of those treaties with him. Furthermore, in his letter to President
Arthur, Leopold
promised that American citizens would be free to buy land in the Congo
and that American goods would be free of customs duties there. In
support of these promises, Sanford had with him a sample copy of one of
Leopold's treaties with a Congo chief. The copy, however, had been
altered in Brussels to omit all mention of the monopoly on trade ceded
to Leopold, an alteration that deceived not only Arthur but also Sanford,
an ardent free-trader who wanted the Congo open to American busi-
nessmen like himself.
In Washington, Sanford claimed that Leopold's civilizing influence
would counter the practices of the dreadful "Arab" slave-traders. And
weren't these "independent States" under the association's generous pro-
tection really a sort ofUnited States of the Congo? Not to mention that,
as Sanford wrote to Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen (Stanley
was still vigorously passing himself off as born and bred in the United
States), the Congo "was discovered by an American." Only a week after
Sanford arrived in Washington, the president cheerfully incorporated
into his annual message to Congress, only slighdy rewritten, text that
Sanford had drafted for him about Leopold's high-minded work in the
Congo:
The rich and populous valley of the Kongo is being opened by
a society called the International African Association, of which
the King of the Belgians is the president. . . . Large tracts of
territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs,
roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the
river and the nuclei of states established . . . under one flag
which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade.
The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim
at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the
valley.
7$
FROM FLORIDA TO BERLIN
Leopold was delighted to hear his own propaganda coming so readily from the president's mouth. His aide Colonel Maximilien Strauch cabled Sanford: enchanted with emile.
Sanford next went to work on Congress. He rented a house at 1925 G Street, a few blocks from the White House, telegraphed for his wife and chef to come over from Belgium, and began wining and dining senators, representatives, and Cabinet members. It was Sanford s finest hour, for the affable personality that made him both a bon vivant and a poor business- man served him wonderfully as a lobbyist. He had an excellent wine cellar, and he was called "the gastronomic diplomat," waging a "gastro- nomic campaign." "What a charming dinner that was at your house and in such a queenly presence too," one visitor wrote to him. Secretary of State Frelinghuysen was a frequent guest; President Arthur and members ofCongress and the Cabinet found themselves receiving boxes ofFlorida oranges.
As he was winning congressional support for Leopold's claim to the Congo, Sanford discovered an unexpected ally. Senator John Tyler Mor- gan of Alabama, a former Confederate brigadier general, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Like most white Southern politicians of the era, he was frightened by the specter of millions of freed slaves and their descendants harboring threatening dreams of equal- ity. The fierce-looking, mustachioed senator, small in stature but loud in bluster, thundered ominously about the clangers of "enforced negro rule," as blacks were "foisted into . . . white families," where they might inflict "a worse fate than death upon an innocent woman." Morgan fretted for years over the "problem" of this growing black population. His solution, endorsed by many, was simple: send them back to Africa!
Always urging a "general exodus" of Southern blacks, at various times in his long career Morgan also advocated sending them to Hawaii, to Cuba, and to the Philippines— which, perhaps because the islands were so far away, he claimed were a "native home ofthe negro"But Africa was always first choice. To Morgan, Leopold's new state seemed heaven-sent. Wouldn't this territory require manpower to develop? And wouldn't the Congolese be eager to trade with the United States ifthe Americans they met had the same skin color? And couldn't the Congo become a market for the South's cotton surplus? Africa, he later said on the Senate floor, "was prepared for the negro as certainly as the Garden of Eden was prepared for Adam and Eve In the Congo basin we find the best type
79
WALKING INTO FIRE FROM FLORIDA TO BERLIN
of the negro race, and the American negro ... can find here the field for
his efforts."*
Sanford completely agreed. Although he was born in Connecticut,
once he invested in the South he quickly assimilated the send-them-
back-to-Africa feelings of white businessmen there. The Congo could
serve, he had said, as "an oudet . . . for the enterprise and ambition ofour
colored people in more congenial fields than politics." To the end of his
life he would promote this new "Canaan for our modern Israelites,"
which could be "the ground to draw the gathering electricity from that
black cloud spreading over the Southern states." Sanford and Morgan
hit it off splendidly, and Morgan, too, began receiving crates of Florida
oranges.
In early 1884, Morgan introduced a Senate resolution in support of
Leopold's Congo claims, first sending a rough draft to Sanford. Like any
lobbyist given the chance, Sanford reached for more. To Morgan's refer-
ence to land "drained by the Congo River" he added the words "its
tributaries and adjacent rivers," a phrase that could be interpreted as
meaning all of central Africa. The Senate toned this down, soon passing a
modified version of Morgan's resolution. It also issued a thousand copies
of a long report on the Congo under Morgan's name, mainly written by
Sanford. "It may be safely asserted," the report declared, "that no barba-
rous people have ever so readily adopted the fostering care ofbenevolent
enterprise as have the tribes of the Congo, and never was there a more
honest and practical effort made to . . . secure their welfare."
Knowing how carefully President Arthur's Republicans listened to
business, Sanford got the New York Chamber of Commerce to pass a
resolution endorsing US. recognition of Leopold's association. Favorable
accounts of the king's philanthropic work began appearing in major
American newspapers, stimulated, in the fashion of the day, by quiet
payments from Sanford. Sanford's multilayered campaign was probably
the most sophisticated piece of Washington lobbying on behalf of a
foreign ruler in the nineteenth century, and on April 22, 1884, it bore
* Morgan gave this speech in support of a bill providing federal funds for the transporta-
tion costs of Southern blacks emigrating abroad. In response, an African-American con-
vention in Chicago passed a resolution urging federal funds for the emigration ofSouth-
ern whites, Senator Morgan in particular.
I
80
fruit. The secretary of state declared that the United States of America recognized King Leopold H's claim to the Congo. It was the first country to do so.
Leopold knew he owed this great coup to Sanford, and knew also that what mattered more than money to the "General" was royal praise. He invited to breakfast Sanford's wife, Gertrude, who had returned to Bel- gium. "I cannot begin to tell you," she wrote to her husband afterward,
"of all the flattering things the King said about you. . . . My dear nothing could have been more flattering to you or tender to me than were both the King and Queen."
During his adroit Washington lobbying, Sanford had passed around documents that thoroughlyjumbled the names ofthe International Asso-
ciation of the Congo, entirely controlled by Leopold, and the Interna-
tional African Association, at this point defunct but still vaguely remem- bered as a philanthropic society of famous explorers, crown princes, and grand dukes. Everyone was left pleasandy confused. In his official state-
ment of recognition, Secretary of State Frelinghuysen actually managed to use both names in the same sentence:
The Government of the United States announces its sympathy with and approval ofthe humane and benevolent purposes ofthe
International Association of the Congo, administering, as it does,
the interests of the Free States there established, and will order
the officers of the United States, both on land and sea, to recog-
nize the flag ofthe International African Association as the flag of
a friendly Government.
Like most such official documents, this one rapidly disappeared into
bureaucrats' filing cabinets. But it was later transformed, in a curious way that no one seems to have noticed. When this very statement was re- printed the following year in Stanley's best-selling The Congo and the
Founding of Its Free State: A Story of Work and Exploration, which was translated into many languages and read all over the world, the wording was different. The key change was that it referred only to Leopold's wholly-owned International Association of the Congo. The editor who made the change was most likely the king himself, who carefully cor- rected Stanley's manuscript, chapter by chapter. Long before Stalin, who
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WALKING INTO FIRE FROM FLORIDA TO BERLIN
also edited writers' manuscripts with his own hand, Leopold knew the
uses of rewriting history.
I
"The recognition of the United States was the birth unto new life of the
Association," wrote Stanley, and he was right. Meanwhile, as Sanford was
preparing to return in triumph to Belgium, Leopold closed a similar deal
in France. As in Washington, the king had his own man in Paris, a well-
connected art dealer named Arthur Stevens. He negotiated direcdy with
Premier Jules Ferry while Leopold paid a large monthly stipend to a
journalist from the influential he Temps to ensure a stream of sympathetic
articles about his activities in the Congo.
The French did not feel threatened by tiny Belgium or by the vast size
of Leopold's claims. Their main fear was that when the king ran out of
money_ ^ they were sure he would— in his expensive plan to build a railway around the rapids, he might sell the whole territory to their main
colonial rival, England. After all, hadn't Stanley repeatedly pressed for a
British Congo?
Leopold calculated that Stanley's impulsive Anglophile fusillades might
now actually be helping him. "It is my judgment," the king had con-
fided to Colonel Strauch some months earlier, after one such salvo from
Stanley, "that we should not try to make a correction. It does no harm
for Paris to fear that a British protectorate could be established in the
Congo." To allay the French anxiety, Leopold offered a remedy. If France
would respect his claim, he would give the country droit de preference over
the Congo— what real estate lawyers today call a right of first refusal. The French, relieved, quickly agreed. Confident that Leopold's planned
railway would bankrupt him and that he would then have to sell them
the land, they thought they were getting an excellent deal.
The Americans had been so charmed by Sanford's bonhomie that they
had not bothered to specify the exact borders ofthe distant territory they
were implicidy recognizing as Leopold's. France, on the other hand, was
willing to draw these boundaries on a map, where they included most of
the Congo River basin.
Leopold had used the words "independent States" in writing to Presi-
dent Arthur. But in his pronouncements over the next few months this
became "State." As for the association, that "was a purely temporary body
and would disappear when its work was completed," said a Belgian
journalist in 1884, explaining the king's thinking. By such sleight ofhand,
82
the entity that came to be recognized by a lengthening list of countries over the following year gradually changed from a federation of states under the benevolent protection of a charitable society to one colony
ruled by one man.
Leopold found that the hardest nut to crack was Chancellor Bismarck
of Germany. At first, the kings greed got him in trouble. Besides the Congo basin, he wrote to Bismarck, he was claiming vaguely defined areas "abandoned by Egypt, where the slave-trade continues to flourish. To allow these [provinces] to be incorporated into and administered by a new State would be the best way to get at the root of the trouble and eradicate it." Bismarck, no fool, scribbled a comment in the margin beside this passage: "Swindle." Beside a passage about a confederation of
free states, he put "Fantasies." When Leopold wrote that the precise frontiers of the new state or states would be defined later, Bismarck said to an aide, "His Majesty displays the pretensions and naive selfishness of
an Italian who considers that his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything"
In the end, though, Leopold outsmarted even the Iron Chancellor,
once again by working through the perfect intermediary. Gerson Bleich-
roder, Bismarck's banker, the financier of the St. Gotthard Tunnel under
the Alps and many other projects, was a man ofmuch behind-the-scenes influence in Berlin. The king had met him some years earlier at the fashionable Belgian beach resort of Ostend and had identified him as someone he could make use of Bleichroder quietly bought good will for Leopold by conveying a 40,000-franc royal contribution to Berlin's Africa
Society He reported to Brussels on the latest doings at court in the city and eventually he brought his friend the chancellor around to accepting
Leopold's claim to the Congo. In return, Bleichroder received some banking business from advisers to Leopold and the chance to invest in the
Congo himself.A woman pianist, thought to be a romantic interest ofhis, was invited to give a recital at the Belgian court, where she was presented
with a medal by Leopold.
The king's negotiations with Bismarck reached a climax soon after Stanley returned to Europe in the summer of 1884. For five days the explorer was the guest of Leopold, now on holiday at Ostend's Royal Chalet, a sprawling seaside villa studded with turrets and towers. The king brought in a special cook to make Stanley a traditional English breakfast each morning, and the two men talked far into the night.Just as Stanley was about to leave came a message from Bismarck with questions about
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WALKING INTO FIRE
the boundaries of the new Congo state, so Stanley remained for a few
hours to draw them in on a large map on the wall of the king's study.
Bismarck let himselfbe convinced that it was better for the Congo to go
to the king ofweak litde Belgium, and be open to German traders, than
go to protection-minded France or Portugal or to powerful England. In
return for guarantees of freedom of trade in the Congo (Hke everyone
else, Bismarck did not know the full text of Leopold's treaties with the
chiefs), he agreed to recognize the new state.
In Europe, the thirst for African land had become nearly palpable. There
were some conflicting claims to be resolved, and clearly some ground
rules were needed for further division of the African cake. Bismarck
offered to host a diplomatic conference in Berlin to discuss some ofthese
issues. To Leopold, the conference was one more opportunity to tighten
his grip on the Congo.
On November 15, 1884, representatives of the powers of Europe as-
sembled at a large, horseshoe-shaped table overlooking the garden of
Bismarck's yellow-brick official residence on the Wilhelmstrasse. The
ministers and plenipotentiaries in formal attire who took their seats be-
neath the room's vaulted ceiling and sparkling chandelier included
counts, barons, colonels, and a vizier from the Ottoman Empire. Bis-
marck, wearing scarlet court dress, welcomed them in French, the diplo-
matic lingua franca, and seated before a large map of Africa, the delegates
got to work.
More than anyone, Stanley had ignited the great African land rush, but
even he felt uneasy about the greed in the air. It reminded him, he said, of
how "my black followers used to rush with gleaming knives for slaugh-
tered game during our travels" The Berlin Conference was the ultimate
expression of an age whose newfound enthusiasm for democracy had
clear limits, and slaughtered game had no vote. Even John Stuart Mill, the
great philosopher of human freedom, had written, in On Liberty, "Des-
potism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,
provided the end be their improvement." Not a single African was at the
table in Berlin.
With his embryonic state already recognized by the United States
and Germany, and with his friendly right-of-first-remsal deal made with
France, Leopold was in a strong position. His International Association
of the Congo was not a government— in fact, conference delegates
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FROM FLORIDA TO BERLIN
seemed confused as to just what it was— so it was not officially repre- sented at Berlin. But Leopold had no problem staying abreast of what went on at the conference. To begin with, keeping a close ear to the ground in the German capital was his friend Bleichroder, who was host to the delegates at an elegant dinner. Further, the king had ties with no fewer than three of the national delegations.
First, the Belgian representatives were his trusted underlings; one of them was appointed secretary of the meeting. Second, Leopold was un- usually well informed about confidential matters in the British Foreign Office, because the foreign secretary's personal assistant owed a large sum ofmoney to a businessman friend of the king's who had been one of his original co-investors in sending Stanley to the Congo. In addition, a legal adviser to the British delegation was Sir Travers Twiss, who had recendy consulted for Leopold about his treaties with the Congo chiefs. Finally, who was appointed as one oftwo American delegates to the conference? None other than Henry Shelton Sanford, who sent Leopold informative dispatches almost daily.And who was "technical adviser" to the American delegation, even as he remained on Leopold's payroll? Henry Morton Stanley. Between sessions ofthe conference, Leopold sent Sanford to Paris and Stanley to London on diplomatic lobbying missions.
Although his role at Berlin was mainly as a figurehead for Leopold's Congo ambitions, Stanley was lionized by everyone and had a splendid time. "This evening I had the honour of dining with Prince Bismarck and his family," he wrote in his journal. "The prince is a great man, a kind father, and excellently simple with his family. . . . The Prince asked many questions about Africa and proved to me that in a large way he under- stood the condition of that continent very well." Bismarck, acquiring the beginnings of a substantial African empire for Germany, was glad to have the famous explorer stimulate German interest in the continent. He arranged for Stanley a round ofbanquets and lectures in Cologne, Frank- furt, and Wiesbaden
.
In snowy Berlin, almost none of trie conference participants except Stanley had seen more of Africa than the drawings of its scenery on the menus for Bismarck's banquets. So when anyone seemed unclear about why Leopold's claim was so grand, Stanley could speak with the author- ity ofsomeone who had just spent five years in the Congo for the king. Early on, reported one diplomat, Stanley went to the big map of Africa "and immediately engrossed the interest of every delegate, by a vivid description of the features of the Congo basin; and finally of the [adja-
*5
WALKING INTO FIRE
cent] country necessary to go with it under the same regime to secure the
utmost freedom of communication ."
Telegrams zipped back and forth between Berlin and Brussels, where
Leopold was following every move. Contrary to myth, the Berlin Con-
ference did not partition Africa; the spoils were too large, and it would
take many more treaties to divide them all. But by resolving some con-
flicting claims, the conference (and a separate pact the king negotiated
with France) did help Leopold in one important way: the king, France,
and Portugal each got land near the Congo River's mouth, but Leopold
got what he most wanted, the seaport of Matadi on the lower stretch of
the river and the land he needed to build a railway from there around the
rapids to Stanley Pool.
More important to Leopold was the web of bilateral agreements he
made with other countries during and after the conference, recognizing
his colony-in-the-making and marking out its boundaries. When talking
to the British, for instance, he hinted that if he didn't get all the land he
had in mind, he would leave Africa completely, which would mean,
under his right-of-first-refusal deal, that he would sell the Congo to
France. The bluffworked, and England gave in.
Europeans were still used to thinking of Africa's wealth mainly in
terms of its coastline, and there was remarkably little conflict over ceding
to Leopold the vast spaces he wanted in the interior. A major reason he
was able to get his hands on so much is that other countries thought that
they were giving their approval to a sort of international colony— under
the auspices of the King of the Belgians, to be sure, but open to traders
from all ofEurope. In addition to perfunctory nods in favor offreedom of
navigation, arbitration of differences, Christian missionaries, and the like,
the major agreement that came out of Berlin was that a huge swath of
central Africa, including Leopold's territory in the Congo basin, would
be a free-trade zone.
The conference ended in February 1885, with signatures on an agree-
ment and a final round of speechmaking. No one benefited more than
the man who had not been there, King Leopold II. At the mention of his
name during the signing ceremony, the audience rose and applauded. In
his closing speech to the delegates, Chancellor Bismarck said, "The new
Congo state is destined to be one of the most important executors of the
work we intend to do, and I express my best wishes for its speedy
development, and for the realization ofthe noble aspirations of its illustri-
ous creator." Two months later, like a delayed exclamation mark at the
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FROM FLORIDA TO BERLIN
end of Bismarck's speech, a United States Navy vessel, the Lancaster, appeared at the mouth of the Congo River and fired a twenty-one-gun salute in honor of the blue flag with the gold star.
Most Belgians had paid little attention to their king's flurry of African diplomacy, but once it was over they began to realize, with surprise, that his new colony was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. It was one thirteenth ofthe African continent, more than seventy-six times the size ofBelgium itself.
To make clear the distinction between his two roles, the King of the Belgians at first considered calling himself "Emperor of the Congo"; he also toyed with the idea of outfitting loyal chiefs with uniforms modeled on those ofthe famous red-clad Beefeaters at the Tower ofLondon. Then he decided to be merely the Congo's "King-Sovereign." In later years, Leopold several times referred to himself— more accurately, for his main interest in the territory was in extracting every possible penny ofwealth — as the Congo's "proprietor." His power as king-sovereign of the col- ony was shared in no way with the Belgian government, whose Cabinet ministers were as surprised as anyone when they opened their newspa- pers to find that the Congo had promulgated a new law or signed a new international treaty.
Even though the entity officially recognized by the Berlin Conference and various governments had been the International African Association or the International Association of the Congo (or, in the case of the befuddled U.S. State Department, both), Leopold decided on yet another change of name. The pretense that there was a philanthropic "Associa- tion" involved in the Congo was allowed to evaporate. All that remained unchanged was the blue flag with the gold star. By royal decree, on May 29, 1885, the king named his new, privately controlled country the Etat Independant du Congo, the Congo Free State. Soon there was a national anthem, "Towards the Future." At last, at age fifty, Leopold had the colony he had long dreamed of.
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YACHT CLUB FLAG
While his power overseas was on the rise, at home Leopold's family life grew worse. He increasingly found refuge in the
beds of various mistresses, one of whom Belgians promptly nicknamed
"Queen of the Congo." In April 1885, only six weeks after his diplomatic
triumph at Berlin, the king was named in a British courtroom as one of
the clients of a high-class "disorderly house" prosecuted at the urging of
the London Committee for the Suppression of the Continental Traffic in
English Girls. Leopold had paid £800 a month, a former servant of the
house testified, for a steady supply ofyoung women, some of whom were
ten to fifteen years old and guaranteed to be virgins. A Paris newspaper
reported rumors that Leopold had secretly crossed to England in his
yacht and paid a royal sum to the house's madam to be sure his name was
not mentioned again. More likely, what made the case close with unusual
speed was that the Prince of Wales was said to be another of the estab-
lishment's customers. The British home secretary sent a special observer
to the court, apparently a veiled message to all concerned that the less
said, the better. After pleading guilty, the madam ofthe house got offwith
a remarkably light fine.
When she was seventeen, Leopold married off his eldest daughter,
Louise, to a much older Austro-Hungarian prince. After citywide festivi-
ties, the couple's wedding night at Laeken was so traumatic that Louise
fled into the chateau gardens in her nightgown and had to be retrieved by
a servant and lectured on wifely duty by her mother. Some years later, she
got caught up in a tangle ofbad debts and an adulterous romance with a
UNDER THE YACHT CLUB FLAG
cavalry officer. After the officer fought a duel with her husband, Austrian
authorities jailed him and gave Louise the choice of going back to her husband or entering an insane asylum. She chose the asylum, and
Leopold refused to speak to her again. Afraid of further embarrassment,
he urged that she be guarded more closely. At last the cavalry officer was released from jail and dramatically rescued Louise from custody, only to
die not long afterward. For the rest of her unhappy life, Louise bought
clothes in the same obsessional way in which her father tried to buy countries, a compulsion that ate up her share of the royal fortune and more. Her exasperated creditors finally managed to seize and auction off a portion of her wardrobe: sixty-eight veils, ninety hats, twenty-seven
evening gowns, twenty-one silk or velvet cloaks, and fifty-eight umbrellas
and parasols.
Nor was Leopold a better father to his middle daughter, Stephanie. When she was only sixteen, he betrothed her to black-bearded Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria-Hungary so that she would one day become the empress. Leopold particularly envied the Hapsburgs because, unlike
him, they were little encumbered by parliaments and constitutions. How- ever, in what proved to be an omen of things to come, Rudolph, arriving in Brussels to meet Stephanie for the first time, brought his current mistress with him.
The king's main relief from domestic misery was his new colony. The Congo, later recalled Louise, "was the one topic of conversation around
me." And compared to his household, for Leopold things in the Congo ran more smoothly. Just as he had found the perfect political moment to acquire his new territory, so he found himself at the right technological moment to consolidate his grip on it. As he prepared to develop the enormous colony, he found a number of tools at his disposal that had not been available to empire builders of earlier times. The tools were crucial, for they would soon allow a few thousand white men working for the king to dominate some twenty million Africans.
To begin with, there was weaponry. The primitive muzzle-loaders which were the best arms that most Congolese could obtain were little
better than the muskets ofGeorge Washington's army. Starting in the late
1 860s, however, Europeans could rely on breech-loading rifles, which had just shown their deadly power on the batdefields of the American Civil War. These shot much farther and more accurately, and, instead of need- ing loose gunpowder, which was useless in the rain, they used quick-
loading waterproofbrass cartridges.
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WALKING INTO FIRE
An even more decisive advance quickly followed: the repeating rifle,
which could fire a dozen or more shots without being reloaded. Soon
after came the machine gun. As the poet Hilaire Belloc wrote:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.
Another tool that allowed Europeans to seize virtually all of tropi-
cal Africa in the two decades that followed the Berlin Conference was
medical knowledge. Midcentury explorers had blamed malaria on every-
thing from "marshy exhalations" to sleeping in the moonlight, but, what-
ever its cause, they learned that quinine was a useful defense. Around
the turn ofthe century malaria and hematuria became better understood;
researchers also mastered yellow fever and other diseases, and the awe-
somely high death rate for Europeans in the African tropics began to
drop.
Finally, because of the Congo's unusual geography, one tool was even
more important to Leopold than to other imperialists, and we have
already seen it in action: the steamboat. It was known to Congo Africans
as "the house that walks on water," or, after its sound, as kutu-kutu. The
steamboat was an instrument of colonization throughout the nineteenth
century, serving everyone from the British on the Ganges in India to the
Russians on the Ob and Irtysh in Siberia. Congo steamboats included
both sidewheelers and sternwheelers; all had awnings against the tropical
sun. Usually they were long and narrow, with the shallow draft needed to
clear the innumerable sandbars on the main river and its tributaries.
Sometimes wire netting hung from the awning to protect the captain and
helmsman from arrows.
By now, steam had also largely replaced sail on the high seas, making
the long voyage from Europe down the coast of Africa far swifter and
closer to a fixed schedule. These steamships carried the next wave of
Leopold's agents to Africa. By the end of 1889, there were 430 whites
working in the Congo: traders, soldiers, missionaries, and administrators
of the kings embryonic state. Fewer than half of them were Belgians, for
Leopold's homeland still showed little interest in its king's new possession.
Significandy, almost all Leopold's agents in the Congo were officers on
extended leave from the Belgian or other European armies.
Staffin place and tools in hand, Leopold set out to build the infrastruc-
ture necessary to exploit his colony.A rudimentary Congo transportation
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UNDER THE YACHT CLUB FLAG
system was the first item on his agenda; without it, the territory's riches,
whatever they might turn out to be, could not be brought to the sea
except on foot. In 1887, a party of surveyors began to chart the route for
a railroad to skirt the notorious 220 miles of rapids. Mosquitoes, heat,
fever, and the rocky landscape laced with deep ravines took a severe toll,
and it was three years before workers could start laying tracks.
As such work began getting under way, a Congo state bureaucracy grew in Belgium as well as in the colony itself. Henry Shelton Sanford tried to get himself a job as a top colonial executive in Brussels, writing
hopefully to his wife, "There is just the sort of work I would like, with
both reputation & money to gain & the satisfaction of doing good. ... I think I will . . . propose a plan of operations, and offer my services." His hopes were in vain, for Leopold knew that Sanford's ability to give sump- tuous Washington dinner parties was not matched by talent as an admin-
istrator or by the ruthlessness the king would require. Instead, Leopold
gave Sanford permission to gather ivory and other products in the
Congo, and the promise of help (not followed through on, as it turned
out) in the form of porters, buildings, and steamboat transportation. But
the Sanford Exploring Expedition, as the venture was euphemistically
called, soon went the way of Sanford's other businesses. As usual, he tried to manage everything from Belgium, where mounting debts forced him
to sell off some of his art collection and move to a smaller chateau. Meanwhile, his man in charge in the Congo took to drink, while steam- boat boilers rusted on the trailside.
Leopold was a far better businessman than Sanford, but he too began
to find himself under financial pressure. He had inherited a sizable for- tune, yet by the late 1 8 80s, explorers, steamboats, mercenaries, armaments,
and other Congo expenses had burned up almost all of it. All these expenses, however, would continue— even increase— if he hoped to turn a profit in exploiting the territory. Where was the money to come from? Getting it from the Belgian government would be difficult, be-
cause a clause in the country's constitution had required parliamentary
approval for Leopold to become monarch of another state. To obtain this
approval, he had to promise that the Congo would never be a financial drain on Belgium. He had convinced skeptical legislators that he had sufficient funds to develop the territory, even though this was not true.
From 1885 to 1890, the king spent much of his time looking for money. For a while, he was able to borrow from bankers, but in time even
his main creditors, the Rothschilds, would not lend him more. Hundreds
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WALKING INTO FIRE
of his letters from this period show an obsessive concern with money. He
lost weight and sleep; his ministers thought he looked gray and distracted.
He was known for his enormous appetite (he often ordered a new entree
after finishing a big meal, and at a Paris restaurant once ate two entire
roast pheasants), and in a bid for public sympathy and funds he let it be
known that to economize he was eating one less course daily at lunch.
One day Queen Marie-Henriette cried out, "Leopold, you're going to
ruin us with your Congo!"
The king raised some money through selling bonds, although far less
than he had hoped. He wrote to the Pope, urging the Catholic Church to
buy Congo bonds to encourage the spread of Christ's word. To the
railway and a few other projects, he was able to attract private investors,
but on terms that diminished his own share ofwhat he was sure would be
vast profits. He decided that the only solution to his financial crisis was a
massive loan. Given his already heavy burden of debt, the most likely
source for such a loan was the Belgian Parliament. As time passed,
Leopold hoped, legislators would forget his earlier promises, so he waited
before approaching Parliament. And as he waited, he worked, once again,
on burnishing his reputation as a philanthropist and humanitarian.
People in Europe continued to feel indignant over the "Arab" slave-trad-
ers based on Zanzibar and Africa's east coast. The slavers were indeed, it
must be said, spreading a wide swath of terror through much of east and
central Africa, and the slaves they captured continued to be sold all along
the northeast shore of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. But
European righteousness over the issue was more intertwined than ever
with a growing desire for African colonies. Conveniendythe slave-traders
were mostly Muslim, which allowed Europeans to feel still more virtuous
about their ambitions. Leopold won much praise for his patronage of
Christian missionaries in his new colony; he so impressed people with his
vigorous denunciations of the slave trade that he was elected honorary
president ofthe Aborigines Protection Society, a venerable British human
rights organization.
To the king's great satisfaction, Brussels was chosen as the location, for
eight months ofintermittent meetings starting in November 1889, for an
Anti-Slavery Conference of the major powers. The "humanitarian" king
happily entertained the delegates, in whose meeting room at the Belgian
Foreign Ministry a forked slave-yoke was on display. "It is hard work," the
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UNDER THE YACHT CLUB FLAG
senior British representative reported back to the Foreign Office; "all the
dinners, receptions and balls." For diplomatic reasons, Turkey had to be
included in the Anti-Slavery Conference, even though slavery was legal
there. Its delegate roared with laughter when speakers denounced the Islamic harem as a stimulus to the slave trade.
For the diplomats, the conference was a long party. Their conference
room looked out on a fashionable downtown street, and one official recalled ofCount von Kevenhuller, the Austro-Hungarian representative:
"Upon the appearance of each woman's hat, he got up and rushed to the window as if moved by a spring. And each time it was the occasion for great joy. Finally, for fear that he would miss a chance for his favorite
sport, people from one end ofthe green-covered table to the other called
out to alert him to the approach of a new pretty woman" The Anti-Slavery Conference was a boon to Leopold, for the delegates
paused from ogling the passersby long enough to approve some plans the
king proposed for fighting the slave-traders— plans that, it happened, bore a striking resemblance to those for the expensive transportation
infrastructure he was hoping to build in the Congo. The king described the need for fortified posts, roads, railways, and steamboats, all of which
would support columns oftroops pursuing the slavers. He grandly offered the services of the new Congo state toward this noble end, and asked in return only that the conference authorize him to levy import duties to finance the attack on slavery The powers eventually agreed, in effect amending in Leopold's favor the Berlin agreement, which had guaran-
teed free trade.
Henry Shelton Sanford,who attended the Anti-Slavery Conference as an American delegate, was horrified. Six years earlier he had won United States recognition for Leopold's Congo in exchange for his own signa- ture on an agreement promising free trade; here was Leopold suddenly
asking for customs duties. His naive admiration shattered, Sanford felt that
the king had betrayed him. Troubled by gout and insomnia, his chestnut
beard now turning gray, and his face showing the effects of age and financial worries, Sanford was a different man from the glamorous top- hatted envoy of half a dozen years before. He died the year after the conference ended, bitterly disillusioned with Leopold and deeply in debt.
His Congo investments came to nothing, and the only sign that remained ofhim there was a six-ton steamboat called the General Sanford.
While the conference was still in session, Leopold invited Stanley to
Belgium for a week. Stanley spoke to the delegates, and Leopold pre-
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WALKING INTO FIRE
sented him with the Grand Cross ofthe Congo, arranged a banquet and a
gala opera performance in his honor, and put him up in the gilt and
scarlet rooms at the Royal Palace normally reserved for visiting royalty. In
return, Stanley praised his host to the Belgians in a speech:
What does the greatness of a monarch consist in? If it is the
extent of his territory, then the Emperor of Russia is the greatest
of all. If it is the splendour and power of military organiza-
tion, then William II [of Germany] takes first place. But if royal
greatness consists in the wisdom and goodness of a sovereign
leading his people with the solicitude of a shepherd watching
over his flock, then the greatest sovereign is your own.
Leopold was using Stanley as a modern American president might
bring a famous movie star on the campaign trail. Stanley's visit to Brussels
was a key part of a carefully planned public relations campaign to mark
the twenty-fifth year of the kings reign. Leopold also gave a garden party
for twenty-five hundred members of the Belgian elite at Laeken, and
opened for the awed partygoers the chateau's enormous new glass-
domed greenhouses, whose exotic array of plants and trees constituted
the largest private botanical collection in the world. Even the Brussels
stock exchange, whose members had long been reluctant to put up
money for the king's African projects, now gave a big reception in his
honor, decorating the exchange hall with African spears and one of the
more unusual flower arrangements on record, a mass of foliage sprouting
four hundred elephant tusks.
Leopold's campaign was directed toward one goal: money. As his efforts
neared a climax, he struck a deal with important members ofthe Cabinet,
who were beginning to realize that the king's African possession might
someday be quite valuable. If Parliament gave him the loan he wanted,
Leopold declared, he would leave the Congo to Belgium in his will. And
so, when this generous monarch, known as an antislavery crusader, praised
by the famous explorer Stanley, feted by his loyal subjects, at last asked
Parliament for a loan of twenty-five million francs (some $125 million in
todays money) to support the philanthropic work he was doing in the
Congo, he got it. Interest-free.
Perhaps nowhere does Leopolds breathtaking arrogance show so
clearly as in the curious document where he blithely bequeaths one of
his countries to the other.
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UNDER THE YACHT CLUB FLAG
We, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, Sovereign of the Etat
Independent du Congo, wishing to secure for Our beloved fa- therland the fruits of the work which, for many long years, We have been pursuing on the African continent . . . declare, by these
presents, to bequeath and transmit, after Our death, to Belgium, all Our sovereign rights over l'Etat Independant du Congo.
There was one added twist. When the king made public his will, it was backdated, so that his bequest looked like an act of generosity instead of
part of a financial bargain.
For Henry Morton Stanley, the five years preceding his red-carpet 1890 visit to Brussels had not been easy. From the time the Berlin Conference ended in 1885, Leopold had been wondering what to do with Stanley. To
ensure that the explorer would not go to work for the British, he kept him on retainer as a consultant. What the king needed now, however, was not explorers but surveyors, mining engineers, railway builders, steamboat
captains, soldiers, and administrators, ^ears earlier, Leopold had promised
to appoint Stanley director general of the future Congo state. Then, however, in return for recognition of his Congo by the French (who resented Stanley for outexploring and belittling their man de Brazza), he had quietly promised them that he would never again employ Stanley in
the Congo. In everything but public relations, the restless Stanley was
now of little use to the king. Leopold, a Belgian prime minister once remarked, "treats men as we use lemons, when he has squeezed them dry he throws away the peel."
Stanley guessed that Leopold had made a secret deal with the French, and, as so often in his life, felt hurt. His African travel equipment was
packed and ready, but there was no mission to go on. He didn't need the money he received from being on Leopold's payroll; he was earning far greater sums from his lectures and books. Nonetheless, he maintained
his starstruck loyalty to the king, even when Leopold continued to put him off by saying, as Stanley complained in an 1886 letter, "We do not know exactly when we shall need you, but we shall let you know, my dear Mr. Stanley, in ample time to prepare."
As always, when he hoped to leave for Africa, Stanley thought about marriage, even though, as he confessed despairingly, "the fact is, I can't
talk to women." For more than a year, he carried on another of his shy,
95
WALKING INTO FIRE
clumsy courtships, this time with a London high society painter named
Dorothy Tennant. She painted Greek nymphs, London street urchins, and
Stanley's own portrait. It seemed an appropriate match, for she was as stiff
and ill at ease with men as Stanley was with women. At the age of
thirty-four she still shared a bedroom with her mother and addressed her
diary to her long-dead father. Stanley confided to Tennant the unhappy
story ofhis abandonment by Alice Pike and then proposed to her. But she
turned him down. Once again rejected, he was convinced that Dorothy
Tennant held his class origins against him. "That woman entrapped me
with her gush," he wrote to a friend, "and her fulsome adulations, her
knickknacks inscribed with 'Remember Me,' her sweet scented notes."
While Stanley was suffering through this experience, Leopold s ambi-
tions had grown. His desire for colonies inflamed, he was now dreaming
of the valley of the Nile. "My dear minister," he once said to the Belgian
prime minister, who was trying to talk him out of this fantasy, "Do you
consider worth nothing the glory of being a Pharaoh?" Compared with
this, he insisted, the Congo was "prosaic" But of the Nile he exclaimed,
"It is my panache, and I will never give it up!" In 1886, an opportunity
appeared that promised Leopold, all in one swoop, the chance to advance
his Nile dreams, to see Stanley put to work again, and to consolidate his
hold on the Congo.
The Sudan, through which the upper branches of the Nile flowed,
was under joint Anglo-Egyptian rule. But distances were vast and con-
trol loose. Members of a rebel Muslim fundamentalist movement, the
Mahdists, staged a rebellion in the mid-i88os, killing the British governor
general and rebuffing the British forces sent against them. England was
shocked, but the country had too many colonial wars under way else-
where and decided, for the moment, not to fight this one. The rebels
pushed to the south, where, holding out against them, was the governor
of the Sudan's southernmost province. Most conveniently for Leopold, it
bordered on the Congo.
The governor, Emin Pasha, asked for help from Europe; one of his
letters was published in the Times, and a movement arose to send a
private expedition to support him. The Times said it would be an "errand
ofmercy and of peril— to rescue Emin Pasha . . . who is surrounded by savage and hostile tribes and cut off from the reach and resources of
civilisation." Fueled by anti-Islamic fervor, the plan won a large follow-
ing. The British were further outraged with the Mahdists when their
96
UNDER THE YACHT CLUB FLAG
leader demanded that Queen Victoria come to the Sudan, submit to his rule, and convert to Islam.
Now the British had not only Muslim villains, but, in Emin, a white hero. For despite his tide (emin means "the faithful one"), the beleaguered
pasha was a slight, short German Jew, originally named Eduard Schnitzer. In photographs, Emin's unmistakably European face, adorned with thick
spectacles and topped with a red fez, looks like that of a nearsighted
delegate to a Shriners' convention. A physician by training, the pasha was a brilliant linguist and an eccentric; besides trying to govern his province,
heal the sick, and hold out against the Mahdist rebels, he was painstak-
ingly gathering specimens of plant and animal life and assembling a
collection of stuffed birds for the British Museum.
Plans for the relief expedition took shape, and donations poured in.
The food merchants Fortnum and Mason contributed cases of delicacies; the inventor Hiram Maxim sent the very latest model of his machine gun; also destined for Emin was a new dress uniform. And to lead the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, who was a more suitable choice than Henry Morton Stanley? The explorer eagerly accepted the invitation. He was particularly delighted by the Maxim gun, which he tried out at its maker s home, satisfying himself that it really could shoot the advertised
six hundred rounds per minute. The new gun, Stanley said, would be "of valuable service in helping civilisation to overcome barbarism."
When Stanley asked Leopold to release him from the consulting con- tract so that he could lead the expedition, the king agreed— on two conditions. First, instead of traveling to Emin by the shorter, easier route leading from the east African coast through German and British highland territory, the expedition was to go through Leopold's Congo, which
would require its crossing the unexplored Ituri rain forest. Second, once
Stanley found Emin Pasha, he would ask him to remain the governor of his province— but as a province of the Congo state.
Leopold would thus get not only an unknown corner of his territory explored and perhaps enlarged; he would have it all done at other peo-
ple's expense. The financing for the venture came from sources ranging
from the Royal Geographical Society to British traders interested in
Emin's rumored stash of £60,000 worth of ivory to press barons who knew that a new Stanley expedition would sell newspapers. As he de- parted in early 1887, the explorer adroidy juggled the demands of his
many sponsors. A surprised witness who later came upon Stanley and his
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WALKING INTO FIRE
huge force marching around the lower rapids ofthe Congo River noticed
that the standard-bearer at the head of the column was carrying— at the request of New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr.— the flag ofthe New York Yacht Club.
Stanley's usual two-volume thousand-page best-seller turned out to be
only one of many books subsequently written about the Emin Pasha
Relief Expedition. (In recruiting his officers, Stanley made each one sign
a contract promising that no book he wrote would appear until six
months after Stanley's "official'* account.) But other than benefiting the
press and the publishing industry, the expedition proved a disaster for
almost everyone involved, except, perhaps, for the New York Yacht Club, which at least had its banner borne across a continent.
Stanley threw his usual temper tantrums. Four times he fired his
personal manservant and four times took him back. He had screaming matches with his white officers— several ofwhom later painted a highly unglamorous picture of Stanley. "The slightest little thing," one wrote, "is
sufficient to work him into a frenzy of rage." He compounded the problems ofHenry Sanford's collapsing Congo business venture by com-
mandeering its partly built steamboat as a barge for his troops and return-
ing it several months later badly damaged. Most important, he made the
strategic mistake of dividing his eight hundred soldiers, porters, and camp
followers into two columns so that he, with a smaller, faster-moving force,
would reach Emin Pasha and accomplish the dramatic, headline-catching
rescue more quickly.
As always, Stanley bungled his choice of subordinates. The officer he
left in charge of the rear column, Major Edmund Barttelot, prompdy lost
his mind. He sent Stanleys personal baggage down the river. He dis-
patched another officer on a bizarre three-thousand-mile three-month
round trip to the nearest telegraph station to send a senseless telegram to
England. He next decided that he was being poisoned, and saw traitors on all sides. He had one of them given three hundred lashes (which proved fatal). He jabbed at Africans with a steel-tipped cane, ordered several dozen people put in chains, and bit a village woman. An African shot and killed Barttelot before he could do more.
Stanley, meanwhile, slogged through the rain forest at the head of the
vanguard column, sentencing a deserter to be hanged and ordering nu-
merous floggings, some of which he administered himself. Supply snafus
meant that much ofthe time his porters and soldiers were near starvation.
To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition felt like an
9S
UNDER THE YACHT CLUB FLAG
invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food. One of Stanley's officers wrote in his diary, "We finished our last plantain to-day . . . the natives do not trade, or offer to, in the least. As a last resource we must catch some more of their women." When it seemed that they might be attacked, another recalled, "Stanley gave the order to burn all the villages round." Another described
the slaughter as casually as if it were a hunt:
It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives
quietly at their day's work. Some women . . . were making ba- nana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running
about, singing. ... I opened the game by shooting one chap
through the chest. He fell like a stone. . . . Immediately a volley was poured into the village.
One member of the expedition packed the severed head of an African in a box of salt and sent it to London to be stuffed and mounted by his
Piccadilly taxidermist.
Of the 3 89 men in Stanley's vanguard, more than half died as they hacked their way with machetes through the Ituri rain forest, sometimes
making only four hundred yards' progress a day. When they ran out of food, they roasted ants. They climbed over giant tree roots and had to pitch camp on swampy ground in the midst of tropical downpours, one
ofwhich lasted seventeen hours without interruption. Men deserted, got lost in the jungle, drowned, or succumbed to tetanus, dysentery, and
gangrenous ulcers. Others were killed by the arrows and poisoned-stake
traps of forest-dwellers terrified by these armed, starving strangers ram-
paging through their territory.
By the time they finally reached Emin, Stanley and his surviving men were hungry and exhausted. Because most of the supplies were hundreds
of miles behind them with the rear column and its mad commander, the explorer could offer the diminutive pasha litde except some ammunition,
fan mail, several bottles of champagne, and the new dress uniform— which turned out to be much too large. In fact, it was Stanley who had to ask Emin for supplies. The pasha met them, Stanley wrote, in "a clean suit ofsnowy cotton drilling, well-ironed and ofperfect fit," his face showing
"not a trace . . . ofill-health or anxiety; it rather indicated good condition
ofbody and peace of mind." Emin, still happily gathering specimens for
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WALKING INTO FIRE
the British Museum, politely declined Leopold's proposal to join his
province to the new Congo state. Most embarrassing of all to the bedrag-
gled vanguard of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, the rebel threat had
eased since Emin's letters of several years earlier, and he turned out not to
be eager for relief.
Stanley gready feared returning home without Emin. The pasha wrote
in his diary, "For him everything depends on whether he is able to take
me along, for only then . . . wonld his expedition be regarded as totally
successful He would rather perish than leave without me! Stanley
did at last succeed in persuading the reluctant pasha to head back to
Europe with him, in part became the very arrival of the Rehef Expedi-
tion's large trigger-happy force stirred up the Mahdist rebels all over
again So Stanley and Emin and their followers trekked for several months
to the east African coast, reaching the sea at a small German post in
today's Tanzania. a nr \
A German battery fired an artillery salute in their honor, and officials
gave the two of them a banquet at the local officers' mess. A naval band
played; Stanley, Emin, and a German major gave speeches. "The wines
were choice and well-selected and iced," writes Stanley. Then the near-
sighted Emin, who had been moving up and down the banquet table,
chatting with the guests and drinking champagne, stepped through a
second-floor window that he apparendy thought opened on a veranda. It
didn't He fell to the street and was knocked unconscious. He had to
remain in a local German hospital for two months, and Stanley was
unable to bring him back to Europe in triumph. Most embarrassing of all
for Stanley was that Emin Pasha, once he recovered, went to work neither
for his British rescuers nor for Leopold, but for the Germans.
For some months after Stanley's return in i89o,a controversy
boiled in
England over the loss ofmore than halfthe expedition's men and over the
atrocities committed under his command. One weekly lampooned him:
And when the heat ofAJric's sun
Grew quite too enervating,
Some bloodshed with the Maxim gun
Was most exhilarating!
The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition had indeed been brutal. But those
who condemned it were unaware that, compared with the bloodshed
beginning just then in central Africa, it was only a sideshow.
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THE FIRST HERETIC
Leopold's will treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited real estate to be disposed of by its owner. In this the
king was no different from other Europeans of his age, explorers,journal-
ists, and empire-builders alike, who talked of Africa as if it were without Africans: an expanse of empty space waiting to be filled by the cities and
railway lines constructed through the magic ofEuropean industry.
To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its
own culture and history, took a leap of empathy, a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make.
To do so would have meant seeing Leopold's regime not as progress, not
as civilization, but as a theft of land and freedom. For the first time,
however, a visitor now arrives in the Congo who sees the colony around him with such eyes. Let us catch up with him at a station on the banks of
the Congo River, on the muggy mid-July day in 1890 when he first puts
his feelings on paper.
There are now a number of Leopold's stations on the river network,
each a combination of military base and collecting point for ivory. Typi-
cally, a few buildings with thatched roofs and shady verandas, sheltered by
palm trees, provide sleeping quarters for white officials. From a pole flies
the blue flag with the gold star. Some food comes from banana trees, a
garden growing manioc and other vegetables, and pens for chickens,
goats, or pigs. A wooden blockhouse with rifle ports atop a small man- made hillock provides defense; often there is a stockade as well. Elephant
tusks He in a shed or in the open, guarded by armed sentries and awaiting
WALKING INTO FIRE
transport to the coast. African dugout canoes are drawn up on the river-
bank beside piles of wood cut in short lengths for steamboat boilers.
One of the most important stations is a thousand miles upstream from
Leopoldville at Stanley Falls, the upper limit of navigation on the main
stretch of the Congo River.
At the Stanley Falls station on this July day, a forty-year-old man sits
down in a white-hot blaze of anger. In a graceful, energetic hand, he
begins writing. Perhaps he sits outside, his back against a palm trunk;
perhaps he borrows the desk of the station clerk. As we can see in the
handful of stiff, formal portrait photos we have ofhim, his hair is cropped
short; his mustache tapers to long tips; he wears a bowtie and a high,
white, starched collar. Maybe it is too hot for the collar and tie this day on
the riverbank, but maybe not: some visitors dress formally in the Congo
at all times.
The document that flows from the man's pen over the next day or two
is a milestone in the literature of human rights and of investigative jour-
nalism. It is entided An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of
the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, by Colonel the
Honorable Geo. W Williams, ofthe United States ofAmerica. George Washington Williams was indeed an American. He was not,
however, a colonel, a claim that was to cause him problems later. And he
was black. Largely because of that, he has long been ignored. Among the
eager throng of visitors drawn to the Congo as Leopold began to exploit
it, Williams became the first great dissenter. And like many travelers who
find themselves in a moral inferno, he had begun in search of something
he hoped would be more like paradise.
Williams had come to the Congo over a route that seems almost as if it
had taken him through several different lives. Born in Pennsylvania in
1849, he had only scanty schooling, and in 1864 he enlisted -— semiliter-
ate, underage, and with an assumed name— in the 41st U.S. Colored Troops of the Union Army. He fought in several battles during the drive
on Richmond and Petersburg in the closing months of the war and was
wounded in combat.
Afterward, like some other Civil War veterans in search of work, he
enlisted in the army of the Republic of Mexico, which was fighting to
overthrow King Leopold IFs ambitious but unlucky brother-in-law, Em-
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THE FIRST HERETIC
peror Maximilian. When he returned home, with no job skills except soldiering, Williams reenlisted in the U.S. Army and passed the better part of a year with a cavalry regiment fighting the Plains Indians. Some-
time during the second half of 1867, when they both spent time at various army posts in Kansas, Williams's path may have crossed that of a
young newspaper correspondent, Henry Morton Stanley.
After leaving the army the next year, Williams studied briefly at
Howard University, which, when he mentioned it in later years, some-
times came out sounding like Harvard University Later in his life, he also
claimed a doctoral degree he had never earned. He was a brilliant student, however, and, moving on to the Newton Theological Institution, outside
Boston, managed to compress a three-year graduate theology curriculum
into two. In letters he wrote just after his army days, barely a word is
spelled correctly, and the sentences are painfully garbled. But a few years
later he could compose fluently in the rolling cadences of the nine-
teenth-century pulpit. A speech he gave when he graduated from New- ton in 1874 sounded the theme that would lead him to the Congo
sixteen years later:
For nearly three centuries Africa has been robbed of her sable
sons. . . . The Negro of this country can turn to his Saxon broth-
ers, and say, as Joseph said to his brethren, who wickedly sold him, "... we, after learning your arts and sciences, might return to
Egypt and deliver the rest of our brethren who are yet in the
house ofbondage." That day will come!
Williams had already begun writing and speaking about a bondage
closer to home— the position of American blacks, enduring the long post-Civil War backlash oflynchings and Ku Klux Klan violence, and the return of white supremacist rule throughout the South. As a veteran, he
was especially angry that so few hopes of the war that ended slavery had
been realized.
The year he graduated from the seminary, Williams married and be-
came pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church, the major black congregation
in Boston. In this job, as in others to come, he did not stay long. His life
seems to have been infused with restlessness, for although he had consid-
erable success in each new profession he took up, he seldom remained
in it.
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WALKING INTO FIRE
After only a year as a minister, he moved to Washington, D.C., and
founded a national black newspaper, the Commoner. The first issue
proudly printed congratulatory letters from the famous Abolitionists
Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, but the paper soon
folded, and Williams returned to the ministry, this time in Cincinnati. He
became a columnist for a local newspaper and once again started a paper
of his own. Then, in another abrupt turn, he resigned his pulpit, studied
law, and apprenticed himself to a lawyer. In 1879, at the age of thirty, he
was elected the first black member ofthe Ohio state legislature, where he
raised hackles by trying to win repeal of a law banning interracial mar-
riages. He left; the legislature after only one term. In his next career, Williams made a much greater mark, and by the
time he again moved on, he left something substantial and lasting behind
him. It was a massive book, History ofthe Negro Race in Americafrom 1619 to
1880. Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens, together with a preliminary
consideration of the Unity of the Human Family and historical Sketch ofAfrica
and an Account ofthe Negro Governments ofSierra Leone and Liberia. Publish-
ed in two volumes, in 1882 and 1883, the book took its readers from early
African kingdoms all the way through the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Williams was a pioneer among American historians in the use of
/ nontraditional sources. He sensed what most academics only began to
acknowledge nearly a hundred years later: that in writing the history of
powerless people, drawing on conventional, published sources is far from
enough. While traveling around the country, Williams did look through
innumerable libraries, but he did much more. He wrote a letter to a
national black newspaper asking readers to send him "minutes of any
colored church organization" and other such documents. He wrote to
General William Tecumseh Sherman, asking his opinion of his black
troops. He interviewed fellow Civil War veterans. And when his 1092-
page book appeared, it was widely and favorably reviewed. Several dec-
ades earlier, wrote the New York Times, patronizing but impressed, "it
would have been very generally doubted if one of that race could be the
author ofa work requiring so much native ability."WE.B.Du Bois would
later call Williams "the greatest historian of the race"
Williams began to travel the lecture circuit, addressing veterans' groups,
fraternal organizations, and church congregations, black and white. He
seemed to have a speech for any occasion, from Fourth ofJuly celebra-
tions to a meeting of the Philomathian Literary Society of Washington,
and he soon signed up with the leading lecture agent of the day, James B.
104
THE FIRST HERETIC
Pond, one of whose clients was Stanley. He managed to meet everyone from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Presidents Grover Cleveland and
Rutherford B. Hayes; and many who met him came away with a positive impression of the earnest young man. Less impressed were many black
Americans, who thought Williams too quick to turn his back on them in his eagerness to consort with the high and mighty.
Despite his successes, money flowed through Williams's fingers, and he
left a string of angry creditors behind him. He continued to pour his immense energy into a variety of projects. He wrote a second book, about the experience ofblack soldiers in the Civil War. He went to New Mexico in search of land for a possible settlement of black farmers. He fired off articles for newspapers. He worked as a lawyer for the Cape Cod Canal Company. He wrote a play about the slave trade. He threw himself into the work of Union veterans' organizations, receiving the honorary
title of colonel from the most important ofthem, the Grand Army ofthe Republic. He testified before Congress in favor of a monument to black Civil War veterans. He was nominated as minister to Haiti by President Chester A. Arthur, for whom he had campaigned. But Arthur left office, and political enemies circulated rumors about Williams's debts, so the
appointment did not take effect.
Once when Williams was meeting with Arthur at the White House,
someone else had chosen the same time to see the president: Henry
Shelton Sanford, then lobbying in Washington for United States recogni-
tion of Leopold s Congo. The president introduced his two visitors to
each other. In the embryonic Congo state that Sanford described, Wil-
liams saw a chance to pursue the dream he had first mentioned in his
seminary graduation speech. He wrote to one ofLeopold's aides, propos- ing to recruit black Americans to work in the Congo. In Africa, surely,
there would be the chance for pioneering and advancement then denied
blacks in the United States. He also submitted a statement to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations urging recognition of the International
Association of the Congo and added the Congo to his list of lecture
topics.
In 1889, Williams won an assignment to write a series of articles from Europe for a press syndicate. He also tried but failed to be appointed an American delegate to the Anti-Slavery Conference in Brussels; nonethe-
less, he passed himself off as a delegate when he visited London. Brussels, he found, was a city filled with Europeans trying to outdo each other in
condemning slavery, and in this atmosphere the young American son of a
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WALKING INTO FIRE
freed slave made a good impression. Yet despite his impressive list of
achievements, Williams could not resist embellishing it:
Colonel Williams [reported the newspaper Llndependance Beige],
who won his rank during the Civil War ... has written at least
five or six works about Negroes. ... He was the first person to
propose official recognition of the Congo state by the United
States and was allowed, to this end, to give a major speech to the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in Washington which
was crowned with complete success.
The first newspaper piece Williams sent home from Belgium was an
interview with Leopold, whom he described as "a pleasant and enter-
taining conversationalist. His hair and full beard were carefully trimmed
and liberally sprinkled with gray. His features were strong and clear cut
and keen; and his eyes, bright and quick, flashed with intelligent interest
from behind a pair of eyeglasses."
When Williams asked what the king expected in return for all the
money he had spent developing the Congo, Leopold replied, "What I do
there is done as a Christian duty to the poor African; and I do not wish to
have one franc back of all the money I have expended " On this first
meeting, Williams, like many others, was dazzled by the man whom he
called "one of the noblest sovereigns in the world; an emperor whose
highest ambition is to serve the cause of Christian civilization, and to
promote the best interests of his subjects, ruling in wisdom, mercy, and
justice"
Leopold clearly saw that the way to charm this particular visitor was to
offer a sympathetic ear to his projects, for in the same article Williams
reported that the king "proved himself a good listener" What he listened
to, apparently, was Williams's long-cherished plan to put black Americans
to work in Africa. Williams struck an agreement with a Belgian company
to sign up forty skilled artisans and take them to work in the Congo, and
also made plans to write a book about the territory.When he returned to
the United States, however, and gave his recruitment pitch at a black
college in Virginia, he found a skeptical audience with many questions
about life in Africa that he could not answer. At that point he postponed
the recruiting plan and decided to go first to the Congo and gather
material for his book.
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THE FIRST HERETIC
That presented him with the job of raising the money for steamship
tickets, food, supplies, and porters for the long trek around the rapids. The
main patron he pursued was the American railroad baron Collis P. Hunt-
ington, who was a minor investor in the planned Congo railway. Williams sought him out and followed the visit with a stream of flattering letters,
which eventually produced a small subsidy for his African travels.
In December 1889, Williams met President Benjamin Harrison at the
White House. It is not clear that Harrison did more than wish him a
good trip to Africa, but, as was often the case in his life, Williams later used
this meeting with a man of power to imply that he was carrying out an important confidential mission for him.
As Williams prepared for his trip, dropping references to his connec-
tion with the president and Huntington, Leopold and his aides grew
suspicious that he might be covertly serving American businessmen in-
tent on moving into the territory.When Williams passed through Brussels on the way to the Congo, he later said:
every possible influence was exerted to turn me aside from my mission. An officer of the King's Household was dispatched to me for the purpose ofpersuading me not to visit the Congo. He dwelt upon the deadly character of the climate during the rainy
seasons, the perils and hardships of travelling by caravans, and the
heavy expenses ofthe voyage. . . . After this the King sent for me [and] said . . . that it was difficult to travel in the country, and
more difficult to obtain wholesome food for white men; that he
hoped I would postpone my visit to the Congo for at least five years; and that all necessary information would be furnished me in Brussels. In reply I told His Majesty that I was going to the
Congo now, and would start within a few days.
Between January 1890 and the beginning of the following year, Wil-
liams sailed around the entire African continent, periodically sending
Huntington urgent requests for more money. He managed to meet eve- ryone from the vice president of the Boers' Transvaal Republic to the
Sultan of Zanzibar to the Khedive of Egypt, as well as to receive an
honorary membership in Zanzibar's English Club and to deliver a lec-
ture at Cairo's Khedival Geographical Society. But his most important
visit was to the Congo, where he spent six months, proceeding on foot
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WALKING INTO FIRE
around the lower rapids and by steamer up the great river, with many
stops, all the way to Stanley Falls.
Traveling the river by steamboat at this time was a matter of progressing
perhaps thirty miles a day, sometimes fewer when heading upstream. Each
day the boat stopped in the late afternoon, sometimes docking at a state
post or mission station, but more often being moored to the riverbank for
the night. The captain posted sentries and sent a crew ofblack woodcut-
ters to chop down trees as fuel for the following day's run. One traveler
described the typical scene:
At dusk huge fires were lit, and by the blaze ofthese the men cut
up the logs into small chunks, three or four feet in length. ... It
was a . . . sight attended with ... the thud, thud of the axes, the
crash of the falling trees, then the firelight scene, with the scrap-
ing of the saw ... the blocks were . . . then tossed from hand to
hand till they were all loaded on to the steamer.
European or American passengers slept in cabins on board, usually on the
upper deck; the woodcutters slept on shore on the ground. At dawn, a
whistle blast brought the crew back on board or into canoes or a barge
towed by the boat, and the paddlewheel at the stern slowly pushed the
boat upstream.
Making his way up the river in these slow stages, Williams had ample
time to take in the Africa he had long dreamed of A keen observer and
experienced interviewer, he had the ability— as rare among journalists as it is among historians— to be uninfluenced by what others had al- ready written. And in the villages and state posts and mission stations
along the banks of the river, he found not the benignly ruled colony
described by Stanley and others, but what he called "the Siberia of the
African Continent." His impressions were distilled in the remarkable
document he wrote at Stanley Falls, when he could contain his rage no
longer.
At the beginning of his Open Letter to the king, Williams is respect-
ful: "Good and Great Friend, I have the honour to submit for your
majesty's consideration some reflections respecting the Independent State
of Congo, based upon a careful study." By the second paragraph, though,
10$
THE FIRST HERETIC
he is referring Leopold to a higher authority, the "King of Kings." And God, it is clear, is nor pleased by what he sees happening in the Congo. The Open Letter is the work of a man who seems doubly horrified:
first by what he has seen, and second by "how thoroughly I have been disenchanted, disappointed and disheartened" after "all the praisefull [sic] things Ihave spoken and written of the Congo country, State and Sover- eign." Almost immediately, Williams gets down to business, assuming the tone ofone of his many professions, that of a lawyer:
"Every charge which I am about to bring against your Majesty's per- sonal Government in the Congo has been carefully investigated; a list of competent and veracious witnesses, documents, letters, official records and data has been faithfully prepared." The documents would be kept "until such time as an International Commission can be created with power to send for persons and papers, to administer oaths, and attest the truth or falsity of these charges." It is easy to imagine Leopold s fury on finding himself addressed in this prosecutorial voice by a foreigner, by someone he had tried to dissuade from going to the Congo in the first place, and, no less, by a black man.
If it were printed as this book is, the Open Letter would run to only about a dozen pages. Yet in that short space Williams anticipated almost all the major charges that would be made by the international Congo pro- test movement of more than a decade later. Although by 1890 scattered criticism ofLeopold s Congo state had been published in Europe, most of it focused on the king's discrimination against foreign traders. Williams's concern was human rights, and his was the first comprehensive, system- atic indictment ofLeopold s colonial regime written by anyone. Here are his main accusations:
• Stanley and his white assistants had used a variety of tricks, such as fooling Africans into thinking that whites had supernatural powers, to get Congo chiefs to sign their land over to Leopold. For example: "A number of electric batteries had been purchased in London, and when attached to the arm under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which passed over the palm of the white brother's hand, and when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of the hand the black brother was greatly surprised to find his white brother so strong, that he nearly knocked him off his feet. . . . When the native inquired about the disparity ofstrength between himselfand his white brother,
109
WALKING INTO FIRE
he was told that the white man could pull up trees and perform the
most prodigious feats ofstrength" Another trick was to use a magnify-
ing glass to light a cigar, after which "the white man explained his
intimate relation to the sun, and declared that if he were to request
him to burn up his black brother's village it would be done." In
another ruse, a white man would ostentatiously load a gun but cov-
ertly slip the bullet up his sleeve. He would then hand the gun to a
black chief, step off a distance, and ask the chief to take aim and shoot;
the white man, unharmed, would bend over and retrieve the bullet
from his shoe. "By such means . . . and a few boxes of gin, whole
villages have been signed away to your Majesty." Land purchased in
this way, Williams wrote, was "territory to which your Majesty has no
more legal claim, than I have to be the Commander-in-Chief of the
Belgian army."
Far from being a great hero, Stanley had been a tyrant. His "name
produces a shudder among this simple folk when mentioned; they
remember his broken promises, his copious profanity, his hot temper,
his heavy blows, his severe and rigorous measures, by which they were
mulcted of their lands " (Note Williams's assumption, so unimaginable
to his white contemporaries, that Africans had a right to African land.)
Of the hundreds of Europeans and Americans who traveled to the
Congo in the state's early years, Williams is the only one on record as
questioning Africans about their personal experience of Stanley.
Leopold's establishment of military bases along the river had caused
a wave of death and destruction, because the African soldiers who
manned them were expected to feed themselves. "These piratical,
buccaneering posts compel the natives to furnish them with fish, goats,
fowls, and vegetables at the mouths of their muskets; and whenever the
natives refuse . . . white officers come with an expeditionary force and
burn away the homes of the natives."
• "Your Majesty's Government is excessively cruel to its prisoners, con-
demning them, for the slightest offenses, to the chain gang. . . . Often
these ox-chains eat into the necks of the prisoners and produce sores
about which the flies circle, aggravating the running wound "
• Leopold's claim that his new state was providing wise government
and public services was a fraud. There were no schools and no hospi-
tals except for a few sheds "not fiMo be occupied by a horse." Virtu-
ally none of the colony's officials knew any African language. "The
no
THE FIRST HERETIC
Courts of your Majesty's Government are abortive, unjust, partial and delinquent." (Here, as elsewhere, Williams provided a vivid example: a
white servant of the governor-general went unpunished for stealing
wine while black servants were falsely accused and beaten.)
White traders and state officials were kidnapping African women and using them as concubines.
White officers were shooting villagers, sometimes to capture their women, sometimes to intimidate the survivors into working as forced laborers, and sometimes for sport. "Two Belgian Army officers saw, from the deck of their steamer, a native in a canoe some distance away. . . . The officers made a wager of £$ that they could hit the native with their rifles. Three shots were fired and the native fell dead,
pierced through the head "
Instead of Leopold's being the noble antislavery crusader he portrayed
himself as, "Your Majesty's Government is engaged in the slave-trade, wholesale and retail. It buys and sells and steals slaves. Your Majesty's
Government gives £3 per head for able-bodied slaves for military service. . . . The labour force at the stations ofyour Majesty's Govern- ment in the Upper River is composed of slaves of all ages and both
Williams was not done. Three months after writing the Open Letter, he produced A Report upon the Congo-State and Country to the President of the Republic of the United States of America. President Harrison probably
had no more expected to hear from him than Leopold had. In writing to the president, Williams repeated his charges, adding that the United
States had a special responsibility toward the Congo, because it had "in-
troduced this African Government into the sisterhood of States." As in the Open Letter, he supported the charges with personal examples. "At
Stanley-Falls slaves were offered to me in broad day-light; and at night I discovered canoe loads of slaves, bound strongly together." Williams called for this "oppressive and cruel Government" to be replaced by a new regime that would be "local, not European; international, not na- tional; just, not cruel."
Whether Williams was calling for self-government or for international trusteeship, it would be many years before anyone else from Europe or the United States would do the same. In a letter Williams wrote to the American secretary of state, he used a phrase that seems plucked from the
WALKING INTO FIRE
Nuremberg trials of more than half a century later. Leopold's Congo
state, Williams wrote, was guilty of "crimes against humanity"
The Open Letter was printed as a pamphlet, and before the end of 1890,
while its author was still completing his circuit of Africa, it was distrib-
uted widely in both Europe and the United States. It is not clear who
arranged for the distribution, but it was probably a Dutch trading com-
pany, the Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handels Vennootschap, which had trading
posts in the Congo and owned the steamboat, the Holland, on which
Williams traveled. Company officials were angry that Leopold was ag-
gressively shutting out foreign traders from his new colony, saving the
lucrative supplies of ivory for himself and his business partners. But Wil-
liams did not allow the company to shape his message: the Open Letter
mentions the issue of free trade only briefly, and far down on the list of
accusations.
After the Open Letter was published, the New York Herald, which
had sent Stanley to Africa, devoted a full column to it under the head-
line, THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE AFRICAN FREE STATE DECLARED
BY AN AMERICAN CITIZEN TO BE BARBAROUS INVESTIGATION DE-
MANDED. The article quoted Stanley who called the Open Letter "a
deliberate attempt at blackmail." What was more ominous for Williams
was that ColHs P. Huntington, his benefactor, thought him grossly unfair
to the king, who was "solicitous of the best welfare of the natives of that
country."
A furious Leopold told the British minister in Brussels not to believe Williams. "Colonel Williams may be all the King says he is," the envoy
reported to his home office, "but I suspect there is a good deal of dis-
agreeable truth in his pamphlets." In his memoirs, one of Leopold's
advisers recalls an urgent meeting held to discuss what to do about "le
pamphlet Williams" ofwhich the Paris press was making "un vrai scandale.
"
Leopold and his aides quickly orchestrated a counterattack. TheJournal
de Bruxelles asked, "First of all, who is Mr. Williams? This man is not a
United States colonel " In subsequent articles the paper referred to him
as "the so-called 'Colonel' ," "the pseudo colonel," "an unbalanced ne-
gro," and "Mr. Williams, who is not a colonel." (The Belgian press, of
course, had never questioned the rank of "General" Henry Shelton San-
ford.) Le Mouvement Giographique, a newspaper closely tied to Leopold's
Congo venture, also attacked Williams and pointed out that, though
112
THE FIRST HERETIC
Congo natives did not always receive full justice, neither did the Ameri- can Indians.
Other Belgian newspapers, however, took Williams's accusations seri- ously "With commercial speculation dominant in the Congo, a personal, absolute and uncontrolled regime, whose chiefautocrat has never set foot in the country he is governing, is fatally bound to produce the majority ofgrave deeds pointed out by the American traveler," wrote the liberal La
Reforme. "We are not inclined to accept as gospel truth everything the Congolese administration wishes to offer in its own defense," declared Le Courrier de Bruxelles. Papers in other countries also picked up the story, reporting Williams's allegations and sometimes printing long excerpts.
By June 1 891, the furor reached the Belgian Parliament, where several deputies and the prime minister rose to speak in the king's defense. Some weeks later, the Etat Independant du Congo issued a forty-five-page report signed by its top administrators. It was clearly aimed, the British
legation in Brussels reported to London, at "refuting the accusations
brought by Colonel Williams and others."
Williams, in the meantime, had completed his circuit ofAfrica and was
in Egypt, where he had fallen seriously ill with tuberculosis. As usual, he was out ofmoney With his customary air ofbeing on urgent business for the powerful, he somehow persuaded the British minister in Cairo, Sir Evelyn Baring, to dispatch a physician to take care of him. Down to his last £*4> he sent desperate pleas for money to Huntington. When he recovered some strength, he wangled free passage to England on a British steamer. On board he met a young Englishwoman who had been a governess in a British family in India, and by the time they arrived in
Britain, the two were engaged. Williams settled in London, despite prob- lems over his debts incurred there on a previous visit. But his tuberculosis grew worse. His fiancee and her mother took him to Blackpool, where they hoped the sea air would cure him so that he could resume working on his book about Leopold's Congo.
Their hopes were in vain. Early on the morning of August 2, 1891, tended by his fiancee, her mother, a minister, and a doctor, George Wash- ington Williams died. He was forty-one years old. In Belgium, Le Mouve- ment Geographique noted his death with satisfaction, comparing him with those who had burned the temple at Delphi. "His early death," writes a modern diplomatic historian, S.J.S. Cookey, "... saved the Congo gov- ernment from what might have been an embarrassingly formidable op- ponent." He was buried in Blackpool in an unmarked grave. Not until
"3
WALKING INTO FIRE
1975 did his grave acquire a proper tombstone— arranged by his biogra- pher, the historian John Hope Franklin.
Only after the funeral, apparently, did Williams's British fiancee learn
that he had abandoned a wife and a fifteen-year-old son in the United
States. In this deception and other ways, from his neglect of debts to his
vaunting a nonexistent doctoral degree, there was something of the hus-
tler about him. But, in a sense, this was the flip side of the extraordinary
boldness that enabled him to defy a king, his officials, and the entire racial
order of the day. By contrast, for example, there was George Grenfell, a
veteran British missionary whom Williams visited on the Congo River.
He too had seen firsthand the full range of abuses, including Leopold's
state employees buying chained slaves, but, he wrote home within a few
days ofmeeting Williams, he did not feel he could "publicly question the
action of the State " And whatever Williams's elaboration of his own
resume, virtually everything he wrote about the Congo would later be
corroborated— abundandy— by others. Williams's Open Letter was a cry of outrage that came from the heart. It
gained him nothing. It lost him his patron, Huntington. It guaranteed that
he could never work, as he had hoped, to bring American blacks to the
Congo. It brought him none of the money he always needed, and in the
few months he had left before his life ended in a foreign beach resort, it
earned him little but calumnyBy the time he went to the Congo in 1890,
close to a thousand Europeans and Americans had visited the territory or
worked there. Williams was the only one to speak out fully and passion-
ately and repeatedly about what others denied or ignored. The years to
come would make his words ever more prophetic.
114
8
WHERE THERE AREN'T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
Leopold established the capital of his new Congo state at the port town of Boma, just upriver from the Adantic, where Stanley had
finished his epic trans-African trek in 1877. As the 1890s began, Boma was complete with a narrow-gauge trolley— a steam engine pulling a couple of cars— that linked the bustling docks and trading-company warehouses to a cooler plateau above. There stood the government offices and houses for the Europeans who worked in them. Boma also boasted a Catholic church made of iron, a hospital for Europeans, a post office, a military base whose cannon fired a salute to any newly arriving VIP, and a two-story hotel. Three times a day— at 6 a.m., 11:45, and 6:30 p.m.— about seventy-five white officials took the trolley down the hill and through a plantation of banana trees for meals in the hotel dining room.
The only European who ate elsewhere was the governor general, who took his meals in his dignified Victorian mansion, complete with a cupola,
French windows, and covered porches. Every year, the king's birthday was
celebrated with such events as a ceremonial review of troops, a target-
shooting contest, and a concert by a Catholic black children's choir.
Despite his impressive mansion, guarded by African sentries with blue
uniforms and red fezes, the Congo's governor general had far less power than did a British, French, or German colonial governor. More than any other colony in Africa, the Congo was administered directly from Europe. The real headquarters of the Etat Independant du Congo were not in Boma but in suites ofoffices in Brussels, one on the grounds ofthe Royal Palace, the others next door or across the street. All the Congo's
"5
WALKING INTO FIRE
high- and middle-level administrators were picked and promoted by the
king himself, and a mini-cabinet of three or four Belgians at the top, in
Brussels, reported to Leopold direcdy.
His one-man rule over this huge territory was in striking contrast to
Leopold's ever more limited power at home. Once, in his later years,
while he was talking in his study with several Cabinet ministers, his
nephew and heir apparent, Prince Albert, opened a window, and a draft
blew some papers onto the floor. Leopold ordered Albert to pick them
up. "Let him do it," the king said to one of the ministers, who had hastily
offered to do so instead. "A future constitutional monarch must learn to
stoop." But in the Congo there was no stooping; Leopold's power was
absolute.
At the lowest level, the king's rule over his colony was carried out by
white men in charge of districts and river stations throughout the vast
territory; some of them were not visited by steamboats for months at a
time. Far in the interior, practice often lagged behind theory, but on
paper, at least, even the humblest station chiefwas allotted a bottle of red
wine per day and a plentiful supply ofEnglish marmalade, Danish butter,
canned meats, soups and condiments, and/o/e gras and other pates from
Fischer's of Strasbourg.
For these functionaries there was a plethora of medals, whose grades
reflected the burgeoning hierarchy of imperial rule. For holders of the
Order ofthe African Star, for instance, there were six classes, ranging from
grands-croix and commandeurs down to mere medailUs. The Royal Order of
the Lion, created by Leopold to "recognize merit and acknowledge serv-
ices rendered to Us," also had six classes. For African chiefs who collabo-
rated with the regime, there was a special medal— bronze, silver, or gold-plated, depending on the degree of "service" rendered. It bore
Leopold's profile on one side and, on the other, the Congo state coat of
arms and the words loyalty and devotion.
The white officials in Leopold's Congo were usually single men, many
ofwhom took on one or more African concubines. But by the turn of
the century a few officials began to bring their wives, and some of those
who didn't turned to an enterprising British matchmaking agency that
supplied mail-order brides from Europe.
Photographs of remote Congo posts from the 1890s generally show
the same pattern. From the long shadows, it appears to be late afternoon.
The two or three white men in the picture wear suits and ties and
elongated sun helmets, like a London bobby's cap in white. They are
116
Leopold as a young man. ff|.
Henry Morton Stanley,
in the "Stanley Cap" he
designed for exploring
in the tropics.
Henry Shelton Sanford, the
wealthy Connecticut aristocrat
who successfully lobbied the
United States into recognizing
Leopold's claim to the Congo.
THE WESTERN TTMOIBT TELEGRAPH CQWPAMY, nsStol^rdou'a^ B«»l'»»t»i Mt«w»«, bojSSi the amount ol toU. p»W Uusnm, uur in aur cue where tne Sttm u nut proamed to wrttUiffwHWn mtj darnm transmission
",Cr Xtota
B *nVSfi«!SEEATJ!D MBSSAOE, ana la delivered bj request of the tender, iwferlhai
THOS. T, BCKEBT, General Manager.
°llfal.c
^^aC^c^-'
Coded telegram from Brussels congratulating Sanford on his Washington lobbying.
"Emile" was President Chester A. Arthur, who had just praised Leopold in a speech
to Congress. "William" was Leopold's top Congo aide, Colonel Maximilicn Strauch.
King Leopold II.
Twa Mwe, a Kwango chief.
Indigenous leaders often faced
the choice of supplying their
people as rubber slaves or
being held hostage or killed.
The British missionary steamboat Goodwill, typical of craft on the river network in the 1890s.
George Washington Williams,
a lawyer, journalist, minister,
and historian, wrote the first
full expose of Leopold's reign
of terror in the Congo.
An ivory gathering post in the Congo, c. 1890. Elephant tusks, bought from Africans for a pit- tance or confiscated at gunpoint, fetched high prices in Europe as raw material for everything
from false teeth to piano keys.
Joseph Conrad.
One prototype for Conrad's Mr. Kurtz: Leon
Rom. This swashbuckling officer was known
for displaying a row of severed African heads
around his garden. He also wrote a book on African customs, painted portraits and land-
scapes, and collected butterflies.
below: Rom (with rifle) after a hunt.
iSiiiisisiiiii^M'
Another Kurtz prototype: Guillaume Van Kerckhoven, who cheerfully told a fellow traveler that he paid his black soldiers "5 brass rods (2 1/£ d.) per human head they
brought him during the course of any military operations he conducted. He said it was to stimulate their prowess in the face of the enemy."
S||iii!l!i||!|lill ^Biiiii|l||i||l|l
E. D. Morel.
below: The docks at Antwerp, where the young E. D. Morel's suspicions about
Congo slave labor were awakened.
Sir Roger Casement, British consul,
activist witness to Congo atrocities, and
Irish patriot.
Hezekiah Andrew Shanu. Although
awarded medals for his service to the re-
gime, he secretly turned against it, sent
important evidence to the reformers
abroad, and was driven to suicide by Leo-
pold's officials when they discovered this.
Reverend William H. Sheppard, Presbyterian missionary, explorer, and the first outsider to visit
the capital of the Kuba kingdom. Sheppard's writings documenting the brutality of the Congo
state made him the object of a lawsuit and trial.
#;;. ///'/ ///;'//*
Nsala, of the district ofWala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old
daughter, Boali, a victim of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (A.B.I.R.) militia.
below: British missionaries with men holding hands severed from victims named Bolenge and Lingomo by A.B.I.R. militiamen, 1904.
Two youths of the Equator district. The hands of Mola, seated, have been destroyed by gangrene after being tied too tightly by soldiers. The right hand ofYoka, standing,
was cut offby soldiers wanting to claim him as killed.
below: The chicotte in use. Note the pile of chain at lower left.
The village of Baringa. The chief is seated on the stool at center; his house is at right. Cooking smoke rises through the roofs of other houses.
below: Baringa after it was razed to make way for a rubber plantation. When wild rubber supplies ran low, the regime ordered more rubber trees planted. It was often cheaper to use an existing clearing, like that of a village, than to cut down the forest.
Women hostages, held under guard in order to force their husbands to go into the rain forest to gather wild rubber.
. GREAT
.
CONGO Demonstration. THE
Protect of (EhrMtan dngknb . AT THE . .
ROYAL ALBERT HALL . .ON. .
Friday, November 19, 1909, AT 7.30 l'.M.
Chairman: HIS GRACE
THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. SPEAKERS ;
The Right Rev. THE LORD BISHOP OF LONDON* Rev. Dr. JOHN CLIFFORD, M.A.
The Right Rev. THE LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD, Rev. J. SCOTT LIDGETT, M.A., D.D. Rev. C. SILVESTER HORNE, M.A.
Supported by
The Lord Bishops of Rochester, Birmingham, Manchester, Carlisle,
Ely, Newcastle, St Asaph, Truro, Wakefield, Exeter, Gloucester,
Lichfield, Liverpool, Durham;
Dr. CAMPBELL MORGAN, Rev. J. E. RATTENBURY, Dr. MONRO GIBSON,
Rev. D. J. HILEY, Rev. SILAS K. HOCKING, Rev. J. H. SHAKESPEARE,
Rev. J. D. JONES, Rev. GEO. HOOPER, Rev, THOMAS YATES,
Prof. A. E. GARVIE, Dr. HORTON, Rev. F. B. MEYER.
RESERVED SEATS, Price 5/. 2/6 and 1/. FREE RESERVED SEAT TICKETS
may be obtained <!>y unclosing Id, Stamp) from TKAVERS BUXTON, Esq. Hon. Treasurer, 51, Denison House, Vauxhall Bridge Koad, S.W., who will gladly woluome offers of financial assistance.
THE ALBERT HALL la Ten minutes' walls from either of the following Stations HIGH STREET KENSINGTON, SOUTH KENSINGTON,
(both on the District Railway.)
BUSES fi*om all parts of London paas the Door.
This cartoon appeared in Germany,
accompanied by some doggerel about
Leopold's zest for cutting off both black
heads and bond coupons.
Congo reformers often pointed to the Berlin agreement of 1885, one
ofmany broken promises regarding the treatment of Africans.
THE APPEAL. 'MM THt NAME OF ALMIGHTY QOD. -AH tftt* owom
•x*nol»ln« •ov.n.lgn rt*ht«t or Having tfiftuonoo In th* Mid tarritorloo uiMtertaktt to w.toh ow th« p**Mf»v*tlOft of tin natlvo mom, and th, amelioration of tho moral and matorial
Arttol* VI, T*# Act «f 8*rUm, I9U,
WHERE THERE AREN'T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
EXPEKT OPINION. Lt»K«j>. "SILLY FUSS THEY'RE MAKIKG ABOUT THESE SO-CALLED ATROCITIES IN MY CONGO PROPERTY." Audcl " ONLY TALK, MY DKAR BOY. THEY WON'T DO ANYTHING. THEY NEVER TOUCHED AM! '
Punch, 1905: One of a number of cartoons where Leopold compares notes with the sultan of Turkey, also condemned for his massacres (ofArmenians).
THE GUILT OF DELAY. Cokgo Suv'e-Diiiveil "I'M ALL HIOHT. THEY'RE STILL TALKING."
seated on wicker chairs, a dog at their feet, in front of a tent or simple thatched-roofed building, smiling. Behind them stand their unsmiling African servants, holding some emblem of their status: a serving tray, a towel draped over an arm, a bottle ready to pour. Wine glasses or tea cups rest on a table, symbols of the comforts of home. The white men are always dressed in white.
Punch, 1906. Punch, 1909.
Underpinning such scenes were a number ofroyal decrees from Brussels. The first and most important had been issued on the very day in 1885 that the existence of the Congo state was formally proclaimed; it declared that all "vacant land" was the property of the state. There was no defini- tion of what made land vacant. All over the world, of course, land that looks vacant has often been deliberately left to lie fallow while crops are planted somewhere else— especially in the tropics, where heavy rainfalls leach nutrients out of the soil.
Leopold was after whatever could be quickly harvested. In that sense,
he treated both vacant and nonvacant land as his property, claiming a
right to all its products. He made no distinction between the tusks of an elephant roaming wild or villagers' vegetables that could feed his soldiers;
it was all his.
He did not, however, have the resources to exploit the entire territory, so another set of decrees carved parts of the Congo into several giant blocks, whose "vacant land" was leased out for long periods as conces- sions to private companies. These concession companies had shareholders — largely, though not entirely Belgian— and interlocking directorates that included many high Congo state officials. But in each of them the state— which in effect meant Leopold himself— usually kept 50 per- cent of the shares. In setting up this structure, Leopold was like the manager of a venture capital syndicate today. He had essentially found a way to attract other people's capital to his investment schemes while he retained half the proceeds. In the end, what with various taxes and fees the companies paid the state, it came to more than half.
Unlike a venture capitalist in the marketplace, however, the king de-
ployed troops and government officials as well as investment funds. He used them ruthlessly to shut out ofthe territory most businesses in which he did not have a piece of the action. The Dutch trading firm on whose steamboat Williams had traveled found itself facing stiff competition for
ivory from Congo state officials who stopped its boats, in one case with
117
WALKING INTO FIRE
gunfire. Once, according to a history ofthe company, "a state-ofsiege was
proclaimed for a certain region which made it closed territory for traders.
When the state of siege was lifted, all the ivory had disappeared." The king, meanwhile, continued to claim that making a profit was the
farthest thing from his mind. "I thank you for having done justice yester-
day to the calumnies spread by enemies ofthe Congo state, to the accusa-
tion of secrecy and the spirit of gain," he wrote to the prime minister
after a parliamentary debate in 189 1. "The Congo state is certainly not a
business. If it gathers ivory on certain of its lands, that is only to lessen its
deficit"
And if Africans were made to help out in the ivory-gathering, why
that too, Heaven forbid, was not to make a profit, but to rescue these
benighted people from their indolence. Talk of the lazy native accompa-
nied the entire European land grab in Africa, just as it had been used to
justify the conquest of the Americas. To an American reporter, Leopold
once declared, "In dealing with a race composed of cannibals for thou-
sands of years it is necessary to use methods which will best shake their
idleness and make them realize the sanctity ofwork."
As the 1890s began, the work whose sanctity Leopold prized most
highly was seizing all the ivory that could be found. Congo state officials
and their African auxiliaries swept through the country on ivory raids,
shooting elephants, buying tusks from villagers for a pittance, or simply
confiscating them. Congo peoples had been hunting elephants for centu-
ries, but now they were forbidden to sell or deliver ivory to anyone other
than an agent ofLeopold.A draconian refinement of the ivory-gathering method, which set the pattern for much that was to come, was a com-
mission structure the king imposed in 1890, whereby his agents in the
field got a cut of the ivory's market value— but on a sliding scale. For ivory purchased in Africa at eight francs per kilo, an agent received 6
percent of the vastly higher European market price. But the commission
climbed, in stages, to 10 percent for ivory bought at four francs per kilo.
The European agents thus had a powerful incentive to force Africans— if necessary, at gunpoint— to accept extremely low prices.
Almost none of these Belgian francs actually reached any Congolese
elephant hunters. They received only small amounts of cloth, beads, and
the like, or the brass rods that the state decreed as the territory's main
currency. For Africans, transactions in money were not allowed. Money
in free circulation might undermine what was essentially a command
economy.
118
WHERE THERE AREN T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
The commands were above all for labor. At the beginning, the state most wanted porters. Like Stanley, any official who ventured away from the river system and into the bush— to collect ivory, set up new posts, put down a rebellion— needed long columns ofporters 1 to carry every- thing from machine-gun ammunition to all that red wine and pate. These
tens of thousands of porters were usually paid for their work, if only
sometimes the food necessary to keep them going, but most of them were conscripts. Even children were put to work: one observer noted seven- to nine-year-olds each carrying a load oftwenty-two pounds.
"A file of poor devils, chained by the neck, carried my trunks and boxes toward the dock," a Congo state official notes matter-of-factly in his memoirs. At the next stop on his journey more porters were needed for an overland trip: "There were about a hundred of them, trembling
and fearful before the overseer, who strolled by whirling a whip. For each stocky and broad-backed fellow, how many were skeletons dried up like mummies, their skin worn out . . . seamed with deep scars, covered with suppurating wounds. . . . No matter, they were all up to the job"
Porters were needed most at the points where the river system was
blocked by rapids, particularly— until the railroad was built— for the three-week trek between the port town ofMatadi and Stanley Pool. This
was the pipeline up which supplies passed to the interior and down which ivory and other riches were carried to the sea. Moving dismanded steamboats to the upper section of the river was the most labor-intensive
job of all: one steamboat could comprise three thousand porter loads.
Here is how Edmond Picard, a Belgian senator, described a caravan of porters he saw on the route around the big rapids in 1896:
Unceasingly we meet these porters . . . black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loin-cloth for clothing, frizzy and bare head
supporting the load— box, bale, ivory tusk . . . barrel; most of them sickly, drooping under a burden increased by tiredness and
insufficient food— a handful of rice and some stinking dried fish; pitiful walking caryatids, beasts ofburden with thin monkey
legs, with drawn features, eyes fixed and round from preoccupa-
tion with keeping their balance and from the daze ofexhaustion.
They come and go like this by the thousands . . . requisitioned by the State armed with its powerful militia, handed over by chiefs
whose slaves they are and who make off with their salaries, trot- ting with bent knees, belly forward, an arm raised to steady the
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WALKING INTO FIRE
load, the other leaning on a long walking-stick, dusty and sweaty,
insects spreading out across the mountains and valleys their many
files and their task of Sisyphus, dying along the road or, the
journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages.
The death toll was particularly high among porters forced to carry
loads long distances. Of the three hundred porters conscripted in 189 1 by
District Commissioner Paul Lemarinel for a forced march of more than
six hundred miles to set up a new post, not one returned.
Stanislas Lefranc, a devout Catholic and monarchist, was a Belgian prose-
cutor who had come to the Congo to work as a magistrate. Early one
Sunday morning in Leopoldville, he heard the sound of many children
screaming desperately.
On tracing the howls to their source, Lefranc found "some thirty urchins, of whom several were seven or eight years old, lined up and waiting their turn, watching, terrified, their companions being flogged.
Most of the urchins, in a paroxysm of grief . . . kicked so frightfully that
the soldiers ordered to hold them by the hands and feet had to lift them
off the ground. ... 25 times the whip slashed down on each of the
children." The evening before, Lefranc learned, several children had
laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all the
servant boys in town be given fifty lashes. The second installment of
twenty-five lashes was due at six o'clock the next morning. Lefranc
managed to get these stopped, but was told not to make any more protests
that interfered with discipline.
Lefranc was seeing in use a central tool of Leopolds Congo, which in
the minds ofthe territory's people, soon became as closely identified with
white rule as the steamboat or the rifle. It was the chicotte— a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged cork-
screw strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim's bare buttocks.
Its blows would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokes
could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more— not an uncom- mon punishment— were often fatal.
Lefranc was to see many more chicotte beatings, although his descrip-
tions of them, in pamphlets and newspaper articles he published in Bel-
gium, provoked little reaction.
WHERE THERE AREN'T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
The station chiefselects the victims. . . . Trembling, haggard, they
He face down on the ground . . . two oftheir companions, some-
times four, seize them by the feet and hands, and remove their
cotton drawers. . . . Each time that the torturer lifts up the chi-
cotte, a reddish stripe appears on the skin of the pitiful victims,
who, however firmly held, gasp in frightful contortions. ... At
the first blows the unhappy victims let out horrible cries which
soon become faint groans. ... In a refinement of evil, some
officers, and I've witnessed this, demand that when the sufferer
gets up, panting, he must graciously give the military salute.
The open horror Lefranc expressed succeeded only in earning him a reputation as an oddball or troublemaker. He "shows an astonishing ignorance of things which he ought to know because of his work. A mediocre agent," the acting governor general wrote in a personnel evalu-
ation. In an attempt to quiet his complaints, Lefranc wrote, officials or-
dered that executions at his post be carried out in a new location instead ofnext to his house.
Except for Lefranc, few Europeans working for the regime left records
of their shock at the sight of officially sanctioned terror. The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use ofthe
chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds ofthousands ofother men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and
Soviet concentration camps. "Monsters exist," wrote Primo Levi of his
experience at Auschwitz. "But they are too few in number to be truly
dangerous. More dangerous are . . . the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions."
What made it possible for the functionaries in the Congo to so blithely watch the chicotte in action and, as we shall see, to deal out pain and death in other ways as well? To begin with, of course, was race. To
Europeans, Africans were inferior beings: lazy, uncivilized, little better
than animals. In fact, the most common way they were put to work was, like animals, as beasts ofburden. In any system of terror, the functionaries
must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas
about race provided such a foundation.
Then, of course, the terror in the Congo was sanctioned by the authorities. For a white man to rebel meant challenging the system that
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WALKING INTO FIRE
provided your livelihood. Everyone around you was participating. By going along with the system, you were paid, promoted, awarded medals.
So men who would have been appalled to see someone using a chicotte on the streets of Brussels or Paris or Stockholm accepted the act, in this
different setting, as normal. We can hear the echo of this thinking, in another context, half a century later: "To tell the truth," said Franz
Stangl of the mass killings that took place when he was commandant
of the Nazi death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, "one did become
used to it."
In such a regime, one thing that often helps functionaries "become
used to it" is a slight, symbolic distance— irrelevant to the victim— between an official in charge and the physical act of terror itself. That
symbolic distance was frequendy cited in self-defense by Nazis put on
trial after World War II. Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, for example, an SS
physician who liked to do his pathology research on human tissue that was still fresh, explained:
WHERE THERE AREN*T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
Soviet gulag. Just as terrorizing people is part of conquest, so is forcing
someone else to administer the terror.*
Finally, when terror is the unquestioned order of the day, wielding it efficiendy is regarded as a manly virtue, the way soldiers value calmness in
battle. This is the ultimate in "becoming used to it." Here, for instance, a
station chiefnamed Georges Bricusse describes in his diary a hanging he ordered in 1895 of a man who had stolen a rifle:
The gallows is set up. The rope is attached, too high. They lift up
the nigger and put the noose around him. The rope twists for a
few moments, then crack, the man is wriggling on the ground.A shot in the back of the neck and the game is up. It didn't make
the least impression on me this time!! And to think that the first time I saw the chicotte administered, I was pale with fright. Africa
has some use after all. I could now walk into fire as if to a wedding.
The patient was put on the dissecting table while he was still
alive. I then approached the table and put several questions to the
man as to such details which pertained to my researches. . . . When I had collected my information the orderly approached the patient and killed him with an injection in the vicinity ofthe
heart. ... I myself never made any lethal injections.
J myself never made any lethal injections. Although some whites in the
Congo enjoyed wielding the chicotte, most put a similar symbolic distance
between themselves and the dreaded instrument. "At first I . . . took
upon myself the responsibility ofmeting out punishment to those whose
conduct during the previous day seemed to warrant such treatment,"
recalled Raoul de Premorel, who worked for a company operating in the Kasai River basin. "Soon ... I found it desirable to assign the execution of
sentences to others under my direction. The best plan seemed to be to have each capita [African foreman] administer the punishment for his
own gang." And so the bulk of chicotte blows were inflicted by Africans on the
bodies of other Africans. This, for the conquerors, served a further pur-
pose. It created ^1 class of foremen from among the conquered, like the
kapos in the Nazi concentration camps and the predurki, or trusties, in the
The framework of control that Leopold extended across his enormous realm was military. After all, without armed force, you cannot make men leave their homes and families and carry sixty-five-pound loads for weeks
or months. The king was particularly happy to run his own army in Africa, since in Belgium he was forever at loggerheads with legislators
who did not share his passion for building great forts, spending more money on the army, and instituting the draft.
Leopold had made use of African mercenaries ever since sending Stanley to stake out his claim from 1879 to 1884. In 1888 he formally
organized them into the Force Publique, an army for his new state. Over the next dozen years, it grew to more than nineteen thousand officers
and men, the most powerful army in central Africa. By the late 1890s, it consumed more than half the state's budget. At once counterguerrilla
troops, an army of occupation, and a corporate labor police force, it was
* If the underlings' allegiance is unreliable, sometimes the conquerors take precautions.
When eighteen mutinous black soldiers were executed in Boma in 1900, a photographer recorded the scene: the condemned rebels are tied to stakes and a firing squad of loyal black troops has just fired a salvo. But in case the loyalists waver, the entire white male
population of Boma is standing in a long row at right angles to both groups, each sun-helmeted white man with a rifle at the ready.
122 123
WALKING INTO FIRE
divided mainly into small garrisons— typically, several dozen black sol- diers under one or two white officers, on a riverbank. The initial handful
of military posts quickly grew to 183 by 1900, and to 313 by 1908.
The Force Publique had its hands full. Many ofthe king's new subjects
belonged to warrior peoples who fought back. More than a dozen differ-
ent ethnic groups staged major rebellions against Leopold s rule. The Yaka
people fought the whites for more than ten years before they were
subdued, in 1906. The Chokwe fought for twenty years, inflicting heavy
casualties on Leopold s soldiers. The Boa and the Budja mobilized more
than five thousand men to fight a guerrilla war from deep within the rain
forest. Just as Americans used the word pacification in Vietnam seventy
years later, so the Force Publiques military expeditions were officially
called reconnaissances pacifiques.
The history of central Africa before the European arrival was as filled
with wars and conquests as Europe's own, and even during Leopold's rule
not all the Congo's violence was between colonizer and colonized. Be-
cause so many Congo peoples had earlier fought among themselves, the
Force Publique was often able to ally itself with one ethnic group to
defeat another. But sooner or later the first group found itself subdued as
well. With their forces stretched thin over a huge territory, Leopolds
commanders made clever use of this shifting pattern of alliances. In the
end, though, their superior firepower guaranteed victory— and a history written by the victors.
Yet sometimes, even through those records, we can glimpse the deter-
mination of those who resisted the king. In Katanga in the far south,
warriors from the Sanga people were led by a chief named Mulume
Niama. Though the state troops were armed with artillery, his forces put
up a stiff fight, killing one officer and wounding three soldiers. They then
took refuge in a large chalk cave called Tshamakele. The Force Publique
commander ordered his men to light fires at the three entrances to the
cave to smoke the rebels out, and after a week he sent an emissary to
negotiate Mulume Niama's surrender. The chief and his men refused.
Soldiers lit the fires again and blocked the cave for three months. When the troops finally entered it, they found 178 bodies. Fearful of leaving any
sign of a martyrs' grave, the Force Publique soldiers triggered landslides to
obliterate all traces of the existence of the Tshamakele cave and of the
bodies ofMulume Niama and his men.
Another rebellion took place along the caravan route around the
lower Congo rapids. A notorious state agent, a Belgian named Eugene
124
WHERE THERE AREN T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
Rommel, built a station there to procure porters for the three-week trek
from Matadi to Stanley Pool, a job for which the state needed fifty
thousand men a year by the mid- 1890s, Unlike the Protestant missionar- ies and some private traders, who hired the porters they used on this route and negotiated wages with them, the Congo state— at Leopold's specific order— used forced labor. Rommel named his station Baka Baka, which means "capture, capture."
A local chief named Nzansu led an uprising, ambushing and killing Rommel on December 5, 1893, and burning his station to the ground. The rebels also burned and pillaged two other nearby state posts, where
they killed two white officials and wounded several more. However,
Nzansu spared Mukimbungu, a Swedish mission on the caravan route. He even gave the missionaries some supplies he had found abandoned on the
trail and returned some goods his men had taken from the mission station. One of the missionaries, Karl Teodor Andersson, wrote to his church members back in Sweden:
If our friends of the Mission at home are worried for our safety
here as a result of letters and newspaper reports about the unrest
in these parts, I wish to reassure them. . . . The leader of the
rebels, Chief Nzansu of Kasi, has let us know that he does not
wish harm to any one of us as we have always shown that we are
friends of the black people. But to the men of the State he has
sworn death. And anyone who knows of the conditions out here
cannot feel surprised.
This rebellion particularly alarmed the state because it completely
stopped traffic on the crucial caravan route to Stanley Pool. To crush the
rebels, the authorities sent out a force of fifteen white officers and two
hundred black soldiers. Another Swedish missionary, C. N. Borrisson,
wrote home a few weeks later, "The rebels have not fled . . . but have
assembled in the leader's village, which they are defending unto death
although their other villages have been burned."
Borrisson goes on to speak powerfully for the rebels whose own voices we cannot hear:
A man sows what he reaps. In reality, the state is the true source of these uprisings. It is strange that people who claim to be civilized think they can treat their fellow man— even though he is of a
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WALKING INTO FIRE
different color— any which way. . . . Without a doubt one of the most disreputable [of the officials] is the late Mr. Rommel.
One should not speak ill of the dead but I must simply men-
tion some smaller matters to prove that the unrest has been
justified. . . . He imprisoned women when the people refused
to transport [supplies] and to sell him goods below market
prices. . . . He was not ashamed to come by our station and
abduct our school girls ... and treat them in despicable ways.
One Sunday morning brother Andersson and I went to a neigh-
boring village and helped release three poor women whom his soldiers had imprisoned because one of them had asked for the
return of a stone jug which had been taken from her. . . .
But what happens to all of the women who are taken pris-
oner? Some are set free . . . when their husbands have done all
they can to regain the one who is dearest to them. Others are
forced to work in the fields and also to work as prostitutes. . . .
Our most respected men here . . . have told us with tears in their
eyes and much vexation in their hearts that they had recently
seen a group of seven hundred women chained together and
transported [to the coast on steamboats]. "And," they said,
"whether they cut off our heads or that of a chicken it is all the
same to them. ..."
So can anyone feel truly surprised that the discontent has
finally come to the surface? Nzansu, the leader of the uprising,
and [Rommels] assassin, only wanted to become the Engelbrekt
ofthe Congo and the GustafWasa ofhis people. His followers are
as loyal to him as Swedes were to their leaders in those times.
The missionary's comparison was to two Swedish patriots ofthe fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, noblemen who led rebellions of Swedish peas-
ants against harsh foreign kings. Wasa was successful and was himself
elected King of Sweden. Nzansu was less fortunate. He and his warriors
fought on against Leopold's Force Publique for eight months, and, despite
several scorched-earth expeditions sent against them, continued to fight
sporadically for five more years. There seems to be no record of
Nzansu's fate.
126
WHERE THERE AREN T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
All the commissioned officers and some sergeants of the Force Publique
were white, mostly Belgian, but from other countries as well. Their own armies were usually happy to give them leave to gain a few years' combat
experience. All the ordinary soldiers were black. Mercenaries from
Zanzibar and the British West African colonies in the army's first few
years were soon outnumbered by soldiers from the Congo itself, most of
whom were conscripts. Even those who volunteered often did so be- cause, as one soldier explained to a European visitor, he preferred "to be
with the hunters rather than with the hunted." Ill paid, ill fed, and flogged
with the chicotte for the slightest offense, many tried to desert, and in the
early days officers had to spend much oftheir time capturing them. Then, to guard against desertions, the state began sending new conscripts far from their home districts. As a soldier finishing your seven-year term, you might then face a journey of several hundred to a thousand miles to get
home. Sometimes even then you would not be allowed to go.
The soldiers' frustrations frequently boiled over into mutinies, large
and small. The first big one erupted at the military base at Luluabourg
in the south-central savanna country in 1895. The base commander,
Mathieu Pelzer, was a notorious bully who used his fists on those under him and routinely ordered soldiers given 125 lashes with the chicotte.
When his African concubine slept with another man, he ordered her killed. At one point Pelzer ordered a soldier punished, but before the man wielding the chicotte could begin, a sergeant named Kandolo went up to
him and snatched the whip out of his hands. When rebellion against Pelzer broke out shortly afterward, it was led by angry black noncommis-
sioned officers with Kandolo at their head.
Soldiers attacked and wounded Pelzer,who fled into the bush and hid. But the rebels tracked him down and killed him. Under Kandolo, dressed
in white and riding on a bull, they set off for other Force Publique posts,
gathering supporters among the black soldiers and killing several Euro-
pean officers. For more than half a year, the rebels controlled most of the
Kasai region. In the bush, they split into small groups, spreading out over
a broad area and successfully evading or fighting off a long series of
heavily armed expeditions sent against them. A year later, worried Force Publique officers estimated that there were still four hundred to five
hundred rebels at large, recruiting new members and allying themselves with local chiefs against the state. Altogether, suppressing the revolt cost
the Force Publique the lives ofseveral hundred black soldiers and porters
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WALKING INTO FIRE
and fifteen white officers or NCOs. One was an American, Lieutenant
Lindsay Burke, a twenty-six-year-old native of New Orleans, who had been in Africa less than a year. He marched into an ambush and died,
along with twenty-seven of his men, in early 1 897. The rebel leader
Kandolo was fatally wounded in battle, but two corporals who played a
major role in the revolt, Yamba-Yamba and Kimpuki, fought on as guer-
rilla leaders; they were killed, still fighting, in 1908, thirteen years after the
uprising began.
At the other end of the country, in the far northeast, a great mutiny
broke out in 1897 among three thousand soldiers and an equal number of
porters and auxiliaries. The men, who had been forced to march for
months through forests and swamps in a renewed reach by Leopold
toward the headwaters ofthe Nile, finally had enough. The fighting went
on for three years, as column after column of loyalist Force Publique
troops fought the rebels over some six hundred miles of forest and sa-
vanna along the chain of lakes on the Congo's eastern border. Beneath
their own red-and-white flag, rebels from different ethnic groups fought
together, maintained military discipline, and staged ambushes to replenish
their supplies ofweapons and ammunition. Sympathetic chiefs gave them
support, including warnings by talking drum ofapproaching troops. Even
the Force Publique's official history acknowledges that in battle "the
rebels displayed a courage worthy of a better cause."
More than two years after the revolt began, the rebels were able to
muster twenty-five hundred soldiers to attack a heavily fortified position.
One contingent ofloyalist Force Publique mercenaries was reduced from
three hundred men to three during the campaign. The rebels were still
fighting in 1900, when two thousand ofthem finally withdrew across the
frontier into German territory, today's Rwanda and Burundi, where they
gave up their arms in return for the right to settle.
This prolonged mutiny is the sole case in the history of Leopold's
Congo where we have an eyewitness account ofwhat it was like behind
rebel lines. In April 1897, these insurgents captured a French priest, Father
Auguste Achte, who unintentionally walked into their hands, assuming
that the "immense camp" he had come upon must be that of a Force
Publique expedition. Finding himself instead among some two thousand
rebels, whose leaders were wearing captured gold-braided officers' uni-
forms and pistols, Achte was terrified, certain that he was going to die.
Some of the mutineers did rough him up and tell him they had sworn to
kill all white people. But the leaders of the group argued them down,
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WHERE THERE AREN T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
making a distinction between those whites who worked for the hated Congo state and those who did not. Mulamba, the chief of this group of rebels, reported Achte, told the priest that they were sparing his life
because "I had no rifle, I taught God s word, I took care of sick natives, and (the decisive argument) I had never hit a black." The rebels had
reached this conclusion after interrogating a dozen young Africans to
whom the priest was giving religious instruction. To Father Achte s surprise, the rebels eventually slaughtered a goat, fed
him, brewed him a cup of coffee, and presented him with a gift of ivory
to compensate for those of his goods they had confiscated, "so you won't
write in Europe that we stole from you." After several days, he was released. The rebels told him they had killed their Belgian officers be-
cause the officers treated them like animals, they hadn't been paid for
months, and soldiers and chiefs alike were flogged or hung for the slight-
est offense. They spoke of one white officer who shot sixty soldiers in a single day because they refused to work on a Sunday, and ofanother who "with his own hands poured salt and pepper on the bloody wounds made by the chicotte and ordered the sick from his post thrown alive into the
Lualaba River."
"For three years I built up a hatred against the Belgians in my heart, and choked it back," Mulamba said to Achte. "When I saw Dhanis [Baron Francis Dhanis, the Force Publique commander in the area] face
to face with my rebelling countrymen, I trembled with happiness: it was the moment of deliverance and vengeance." Other rebels told Achte that they had chosen Mulamba as their king and two others as his deputies,
and that they wanted to set up an independent state free of white rule.
This uprising and the other Force Publique rebellions were more than
mutinies of disgruntled soldiers; they were precursors of the anticolonial
guerrilla wars that shook central and southern Africa starting in the
1960s.
While Leopold grandly issued edicts banning the slave trade, virtually no
visitors except George Washington Williams stated the obvious: not only
the porters but even the soldiers of the Force Publique were, in effect,
slaves. Moreover, under a system personally approved by the king, white
state agents were paid a bonus according to the number of men they turned over to the Force Publique. Sometimes agents bought men from collaborating chiefs, who delivered their human goods in chains. (In one
12Q
WALKING INTO FIRE
transaction, recorded in a district commissioner's notes, twenty-five francs
per person was the price received for a half-dozen teenagers delivered by
two chiefs from Bongata in 1892.) Congo state officials were paid an
extra bonus for "reduction in recruiting expenses"— a thinly veiled invitation to save the state money by kidnapping these men direcdy
instead ofpaying chiefs for them.
Always, however, the slave system was bedecked with euphemisms,
used even by officers in the field. "Two boats . . . just arrived with
Sergeant Lens and 25 volunteers from Engwettra in chains; two men
drowned trying to escape," wrote one officer, Louis Rousseau, in his
monthly report for October 1892. Indeed, some three quarters of such
"volunteers" died before they could even be delivered to Force Publique
posts, a worried senior official wrote the same year. Among the solutions
to the problem of this "wastage" he recommended were faster transport
and lightweight steel chains instead of heavy iron ones. Documents from
this time repeatedly show Congo state officials ordering additional sup-
plies of chain.One officer noted the problem of files of conscripts cross-
ing narrow log bridges over jungle streams: when "Uteris [liberated men]
chained by the neck cross a bridge, if one falls off, he pulls the whole file
off and it disappears"
White officers who bargained with village chiefs to acquire "volun-
teer" soldiers and porters were sometimes dealing with the same sources
that had supplied the east coast Afro-Arab slave-traders. The most power-
ful of these Zanzibar-based slavers was the handsome, bearded, strongly
built Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi, popularly known as Tippu Tip.
His nickname was said to have come from the sound of the slave-traders'
principal instrument, the musket.
Tippu Tip was a shrewd, resourceful man who made a fortune in ivory
as well as slaves, businesses he was able to expand dramatically, thanks to
Stanley's discovery of the route of the upper Congo River.* Leopold
knew that Tippu Tip's power and administrative acumen had made him
* Tippu Tip had supplied porters to Stanley, who had known enough not to ask too many
questions about why they were sometimes in chains. On two of Stanley's expeditions, Tippu Tip and his entourage came along for part of the way. One reason the explorer's
ill-fated Emin Pasha rescue operation drew such criticism in Europe was that at one point
Stanley imperiously commandeered a missionary steamboat to transport his forces up the
Congo River. The aghast men ofGod saw their boat carry off part of an expedition that
included Tippu Tip and his thirty-five wives and concubines.
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WHERE THERE AREN T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
almost the de facto ruler of the eastern Congo. In 1887, the king asked
him to serve as governor of the colony's eastern province, with its capital
at Stanley Falls, and Tippu Tip accepted; several relatives occupied posts
under him. At this early stage, with Leopold's military forces spread thin,
the bargain offered something to both men. (The king also contracted to
buy the freedom of several thousand ofTippu Tip's slaves, but one condi-
tion of their freedom, these "liberated" slaves and many others quickly
discovered, was a seven-year enlistment term in the Force Publique.)
Although Leopold managed for most of his life to be all things to all
people, the spectacle of this antislavery crusader doing so much business with Africa's most prominent slave-dealer helped spur the first murmur-
ings against the king in Europe.
Eventually the two men parted ways. Ambitious white state officials in the eastern Congo, without the approval of their superiors in Brussels,
then fought several victorious battles against some ofthe Afro-Arab war-
lords in the region, fighting that after the fact was converted into a noble
campaign against the dastardly "Arab" slave-dealers. Colonial-heroic lit-
erature elevated it to a central place in the period's official mythology,
echoes ofwhich can be heard in Belgium to this day However, over the
years Congo military forces spilled far more blood in fighting innumer-
able uprisings by Africans, including the rebels from their own ranks. Furthermore, as soon as the rogue campaign against the slavers was over,
Leopold put many ofthem back in place as state officials.
What was it like to be captured and enslaved by the Congo's white conquerors? In one rare instance we can hear an African voice describe the experience. It was recorded by an American Swahili-speaking state
agent, Edgar Canisius, who found himself unexpectedly moved by the story told to him by "a woman of great intelligence, named Ilanga." Later, when he met the officer and soldiers who had captured her, he con- cluded that she had indeed spoken the truth. The events she describes
took place in the eastern part of the territory, near Nyangwe, the town
where Stanley had first seen the giant river that turned out to be the
Congo. Here, as recorded by Canisius, is Ilanga 's story:
Our village is called Waniendo, after our chiefNiendo. ... It is a
large village near a small stream, and surrounded by large fields of
mohago (cassava) and muhindu (maize) and other foods, for we all
*?'
WALKING INTO FIRE WHERE THERE AREN T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
worked hard at our plantations, and always had plenty to eat
We never had war in our country and the men had not many
arms except knives. ...
We were all busy in the fields hoeing our plantations, for it
was the rainy season, and the weeds sprang quickly up, when a
runner came to the village saying that a large band of men was
coming, that they all wore red caps and blue cloth, and carried
guns and long knives, and that many white men were with them,
the chief ofwhom was Kibalanga [the African name for a Force
Publique officer named Oscar Michaux, who once received a
Sword of Honor from Leopolds own hands]. Niendo at once
called all the chief men to his house, while the drums were
beaten to summon the people to the village. A long consultation
was held, and finally we were all told to go quietly to the fields
and bring in ground-nuts, plantains, and cassava for the warriors
who were coming, and goats and fowls for the white men. The
women all went with baskets and filled them, and then put them
in the road Niendo thought that, by giving presents ofmuch
food, he would induce the strangers to pass on without harming
us. And so it proved. . . .
When the white men and their warriors had gone, we went
again to our work, and were hoping that they would not return;
but this they did in a very short time. As before, we brought in
great heaps of food; but this time Kibalanga did not move away
directly but camped near our village, and his soldiers came and
stole all our fowls and goats and tore up our cassava; but we did
not mind that as long as they did not harm us. The next morning
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
rushed into the houses 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.We were all crying, for now we knew that we were to
be taken away to be slaves. The soldiers beat us with the iron
sticks from their guns, and compelled us to march to the camp of
Kibalanga, who ordered the women to be tied up separately ten
to each cord, and the men in the same way. When we were all collected— and there were many from other villages whom we now saw, and many from Waniendo— the soldiers brought bas- kets offood for us to carry, in some ofwhich was smoked human
flesh
We then set off marching very quickly. My sister Katinga had her baby in' her arms, and was not compelled to carry a basket;
but my husband Oleka was made to carry a goat. We marched until the afternoon, when we camped near a stream, where we
were glad to drink, for we were much athirst. We had nothing to eat, for the soldiers would give us nothing. . . . The next day we
continued the march, and when we camped at noon were given
some maize and plantains, which were gathered near a village
from which the people had run away So it continued each day
until the fifth day, when the soldiers took my sister's baby and threw it in the grass, leaving it to die, and made her carry some
cooking pots which they found in the deserted village. On the sixth day we became very weak from lack of food and from
constant marching and sleeping in the damp grass, and my hus- band, 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, but still he refused to move. Then
one ofthem struck 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. I saw the blood spurt out, and then saw him no more, for we passed over the brow of a hill
and he was out of sight. Many of the young men were killed the same way, and many babies thrown into the grass to die. . . . After
marching ten days we came to the great water . . . and were taken
in canoes across to the white men's town at Nyangwe.
Even children were not spared the rigors of Leopold's regime. "I believe
we must set up three children's colonies " the king wrote on April 27, 1890. "One in the Upper Congo near the equator, specifically military,
with clergy for religious instruction and for vocational education. One at Leopoldville under clergy with a soldier for military training. One at
132 133
WALKING INTO FIRE
Boma like that at Leo. . . . The aim of these colonies is above all to
fiarnish us with soldiers. We thus have to build three big barracks at
Boma, Leo, and near the equator . . . each capable of housing 1500 chil-
dren and administrative personnel." Following up on Leopold's orders,
the governor general six weeks later directed his district commissioners
"from now on to gather the most male children possible" for the three
state colonies.
As the years passed, many more children's colonies were established by
Catholic missionaries. Unlike the Congo's Protestant missionaries, who
were foreigners and beyond Leopold's control, the Catholics were mostly
Belgian and loyal supporters of the king and his regime. (One Belgian
order, the Scheut fathers, even named a mission station after a director of
one of the big concession companies.) Leopold subsidized the Catholics
lavishly and sometimes used this financial power to deploy priests, almost
as if they were soldiers, to areas where he wanted to strengthen his
influence.
The children taken in by these missionaries were, theoretically, "or-
phans." But in most intact, indigenous African societies, with their strong
sense of extended family and clan ties, the concept of orphanhood in the
European sense did not exist. To the extent that these children literally
were orphans, it was firequendy because their parents had been killed by
the Force Publique. In the wake of their deadly raids throughout the
territory, soldiers often collected survivors, both adults and children, and
brought them to the Catholic missionaries.
Monsieur Devos furnished us with five prisoners, tied by the
neck, to dig up clay for brick-making, as well as 25 laborers from
Ibembo for gathering wood [a Catholic priest reported to his
superior in 1899]. . . . Since the last convoy of children from
Buta, 25 others have arrived. . . . From time to time we have
baptized some of the littler ones, in case of danger of their dy-
ing. . . . On July 1 st we celebrated the national day of the Etat
Independant du Congo. At 8 o'clock, with all our children and a
flag in front, we were at the bottom of the stairway carved out of
the cliff to welcome Commandant Devos and his soldiers. Re-
turning to the mission, the children marched in front, the soldiers
following. . . . During Mass ... at the moment of the elevation
ofthe host, "present arms!" was sounded by bugles.
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WHERE THERE AREN T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
The children's colonies were usually ruled by the chicotte and the chain.
There were many mutinies. If they survived their kidnapping, transport,
and schooling, most of the male graduates of the state colonies became
soldiers,just as Leopold had ordered. These state colonies were the only
state-funded schools for Africans in Leopold's Congo.
Among the traumatized and malnourished children packed into both the state and Catholic colonies, disease was rife and the death rate high,
often over 50 percent. Thousands more children perished during the long
journeys to get there. Of one column of 108 boys on a forced march to the state colony at Boma in 1 892-1 893, only sixty-two made it to their destination; eight of them died within the following few weeks. The
mother superior of one Catholic colony for girls wrote to a high Congo
state official in 1895, "Several of the little girls were so sickly on their
arrival that . . . our good sisters couldn't save them, but all had the happi-
ness ofreceiving Holy Baptism; they are now little angels in Heaven who are praying for our great king."
Despite such prayers, back home the great king was having more domes-
tic troubles. For one thing, his hopes of seeing his daughter Stephanie
become Empress of Austria-Hungary ended in disaster. Her husband,
Crown Prince Rudolph, turned out to be an alcoholic and a morphine
addict. One day in 1889 he and his mistress were found dead in a hunting lodge, an apparent double suicide— although for years rumors swirled that he had been murdered by political enemies. In any event, Stephanie
could never become empress. Leopold rushed to Vienna, where the Bel-
gian Cabinet sent him its condolences. The king, then in the midst of his
campaign to raise Congo development funds, replied: "We thank you for your kind expressions regarding the disaster which has befallen us. We know the feelings of the ministers, and count upon their sympathy in the
terrible trials which God has laid upon us. Do whatever you can to help Monsieur Van Neuss [the Congo state administrator general for finance]
to place some more shares on the market; this would be most agreeable to
me. Once more, I thank you."
The widowed Stephanie later married a Hungarian count whose
blood was not royal enough for Leopold; the king referred to his son-in-
law as "that shepherd." As with her sister Louise, Leopold refused to
speak to Stephanie again.
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WALKING INTO FIRE
Besides his disobedient daughters to fret over, the king had his mad
sister Carlota, confined to her chateau on the outskirts ofBrussels, appar-
endy believing she was still Empress of Mexico. Her bridal dress, faded
flowers, and a feathered Mexican idol hung on her wall. She was reported
to spend her days talking to a life-size doll dressed in imperial robes.
Rumors of her delusions provided endless reams of copy to tabloid edi-
tors all over Europe. Once when her chateau caught fire, Carlota was said
to have leaned over a parapet and shouted at the flames, "That is forbid-
den! That is forbidden!"
Family problems could not, however, sap Leopolds energy in the
slightest. It was as if he took for granted that this aspect of his life would
be miserable, and he lived for other things, above all for his role as
King-Sovereign of the Congo. And as he looked around himself in the
1 890s, he could see previously uninterested Belgians beginning to share
his dreams of conquest and glory Steeped in the racial imagery of the
time, these fantasies trickled even into stories for schoolboys. One con-
tained this glorification of a young Belgian lieutenant martyred for the
imperial cause in suppressing the 1897 mutiny:
The situation was desperate. All seemed lost. But brave De Le
Court sprang into the breach.
Together with two other Belgian officers and the remnants of
their platoons, he immobilized the black demons who had
rushed into the pursuit of the column. . . . Sinister black heads
seemed to emerge from every corner, grinding their white
teeth. . . .
He fell He understood the supreme moment ofdeath had
come Smiling, disdainful, sublime, thinking of his King, ofhis
Flag ... he looked for the last time upon the screaming horde of
black demons. . . .
Thus Charles De Le Court died in the fullness ofyouth in the
face ofthe enemy
These were years when, to the distress of many a young male Euro-
pean, Europe was at peace. For a young man looking for battle, especially
battle against a poorly armed enemy, the Congo was the place to go. For
a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power.
As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of
Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles
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WHERE THERE AREN'T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you
chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted,
and impose whatever punishments you liked. Ifyou got carried away, the
penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist. A station chief at Manyanga, on the big rapids, who beat two of his personal servants to death in 1890 was only fined five hundred francs. What mattered was keeping the ivory flowing back to Belgium. The more you sent, the more you earned. " Vive le Congo, there is nothing like it!" one young officer wrote to his family in
1894, "We have liberty, independence, and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society. . . . Here one is everything!
Warrior, diplomat, trader!! Why not!" For such people, just as for the humbly born Stanley, the Congo offered a chance for a great rise in status. Someone fated for a life as a small-town bank clerk or plumber in Europe
could instead become a warlord, ivory merchant, big game hunter, and
possessor of a harem.
Leon Rom, for example, was born in the provincial Belgian town of Mons. He enlisted in the army at the age of sixteen, but did not have enough education to become an officer. He then worked as a book- keeper with a firm ofcustoms brokers, but quickly tired of that. He came to the Congo in search of adventure in 1886, at the age oftwenty-five. At a time when there were only a few hundred white men in the entire territory, his progress was rapid. Rom soon found himself district com- missioner at Matadi, and in that capacity presided over the first civil
marriage ceremony of a white couple in the Congo state. He next served briefly as a judge. With so few whites running the vast colony, there was
no clear line between civilian and military functions, and Rom was soon put to work training black troops for the Force Publique. The pay was
good, too; once promoted to captain, he earned 50 percent more than a
colonel in the Belgian Army back home. Acquiring various medals, Rom won some glory for an episode in a
battle against the "Arabs" when he brashly entered an enemy fort to negotiate surrender terms. According to one account: "Rom spontane- ously volunteered. . . . He left unarmed, accompanied only by an inter- preter and, from the spot assigned as a rendezvous, saw all the Arab troops
massed behind their ramparts, their rifles at the ready. An emissary, with the sultan's Koran as a safe-conduct, invited him to enter the fortress. In
spite of the apprehensions of the interpreter, who smelled a trap, Rom penetrated resolutely into the enemy camp. After two hours of negotia-
tions, he left this lair, carrying an Arab flag as proof of surrender" Rom's
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WALKING INTO FIRE
own description is even more dramatic: he prevails over the shifty Arabs
only because of his "attitude decidee" while the terrified, trembling inter-
preter says, "Master, they're going to kill you!" Whether accepting this
surrender was anything that risky to begin with, we do not know. One of
the benefits of service as a Force Publique officer was that the nearest
journalist was usually thousands of miles away, so you and a few friends
could largely shape the record ofyour exploits.
Rom's upward mobility lay in more than just military rank; it also had
intellectual trappings. Each time he returned to Europe he brought with
him many butterfly specimens and in time was elected a member of the
Entomological Society of Belgium. Honors like this, as well as his
officer s sword and his cap with the Congo state star on it, were a far cry
from the life of a provincial bookkeeper.
Beneath the eagerly repeated stories of wealth and glory to be found
by young white men in the Congo usually lay something else: the sly hint
that you could leave your bourgeois morality back in Europe. (As we shall
see, this would be the case for Leon Rom.) For Europeans of the day,
colonies all over the world offered a convenient escape. Kipling wrote:
Ship me somewheres east of Suez,
where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments,
an* a man can raise a thirst.
In the Congo the Ten Commandments were practiced even less than
in most colonies. Belgium was small, the Congo was huge, and the white
death rate in the African tropics was still notoriously high. (Authorities
tried hard to keep such figures secret, but before 1895 fully a third of
white Congo state agents died there; some of the others died of the
effects of disease after returning to Europe.) And so in order to find
enough men to staff his far-flung network of river posts in malaria-rid-
den territory, Leopold had to recruit not just Belgians like Leon Rom,
but young white men from throughout Europe, attracting them by such
get-rich-quick incentives as the lucrative commission structure for ac-
quiring ivory. Many who came out to work in the Congo were like the
mercenaries who joined the French Foreign Legion or the fortune hunt-
ers who flocked to the two great gold rushes of the day, in South Africa
and the Klondike. With its opportunities for both combat and riches, to
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WHERE THERE AREN T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
Europeans the Congo was a gold rush and the Foreign Legion com- bined.
This first wave of Leopold's agents included many hard-bitten men fleeing marital troubles, bankruptcy, or alcoholism. A popular song sums up the mood of the time. One official describes in his memoirs how, newly arrived in the Congo, he was kept awake all night by drunken
agents singing it endlessly in the bar of his seedy seaport hotel. The first verse runs:
Yen a quifont la mauvais } tite
A leurs parents; Quifont les detf, quifont la bite,
InutiVment:
Qui, un beau soir, de leur maitresse
Ontplein ledos.
Ilsfich'le camp,plein de tristesse
Pour le Congo, . . .
(There 're those who blow up at their families, Who run up debts, who play the fool in vain, Who one fine evening are fed up with their girls. They take off, full ofsorrow, for the Congo. . . .)
Africans in the Congo, meanwhile, were singing very different songs.
A missionary transcribed this one:
O mother, how unfortunate we are! . . . But the sun will kill the white man,
But the moon will kill the white man,
But the sorcerer will kill the white man,
But the tiger will kill the white man,
But the crocodile will kill the white man,
But the elephant will kill the white man,
But the river will kill the white man.
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MEETING MR. KURTZ
AT the beginning ofAugust 1890, several weeks after he wrote his furious Open Letter to King Leopold II, George Washington Wil-
liams finished the long return journey down the Congo River to the
station of Kinshasa, on Stanley Pool. Either in the waters of the pool or
when docked on the riverbank at Kinshasa, Williams's steamboat crossed
paths with a boat that was at the start of its voyage upstream, the Roi des
Beiges, a long, boxy sternwheeler with a funnel and pilot house on its
top deck. Had Williams managed to catch a glimpse of the other boat's
crew, he would have seen a stocky, black-bearded officer with eyes that
look, in the photographs we have, as if they were permanently narrowed
against the tropical sun. Newly arrived in the Congo, the young officer
would be at the captain's side for the entire trip upstream, learning the
river in preparation for taking command of a steamer himself.
The apprentice officer was in many ways typical of the whites who
came to the Congo at this time: an unmarried young man, in need of a
job, who had a yen for adventure and some troubles in his past. Konrad
Korzeniowski, born in Poland, had grown up with an image of Africa
based on the hazy allure of the unknown: "When nine years old or
thereabouts . . . while looking at a map ofAfrica of the time and putting
my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of
that continent, I said to myself . . . 'When I grow up I shall go there.'" In
his youth, partly spent in France, he had problems with debts, dabbled, he
claimed, in gunrunning, and made a suicide attempt. He then spent more
than a decade as a ship's officer in the British merchant marine, learning
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MEETING MR. KURTZ
English along the way, although never losing his strong Polish accent. In early 1890, Korzeniowski was looking in vain for a masters berth at sea. While job-hunting in London, a city filled with talk of Stanley's just- completed Emin Pasha expedition, he began thinking again of the exotic land of his childhood fantasies. He went to Brussels, applied for work on the Congo River, and returned to Belgium for his final job interview just as Stanley was finishing his gala visit to the city.
In conversations before he took up his new job, the thirty-two-year- old Korzeniowski showed that, like almost everyone in Europe, he be- lieved Leopolds mission in Africa was a noble and "civilizing" one. He then said goodbye to his relatives and sailed for the Congo on the ship that carried the first batch of rails and ties for the new railway. Like other white men heading for the interior, he first had to make the long trek from Matadi around the rapids, along with a caravan of black porters. Once he reached the river at last, he filled his diary with the notes of a businesslike seaman, making long entries about shoals, refueling points, and other items not included on the primitive navigational charts avail- able. It would be almost a decade before the aspiring steamship captain managed to get down on paper the other features of the Congo not shown on the map, and by that time, of course, the world would know him as Joseph Conrad.
He spent some six months in the Congo altogether, carrying with him the partly written manuscript ofhis first novel, Almayer's Folly. The thou- sand-mile apprenticeship trip upriver, from Stanley Pool to Stanley Falls, took only four weeks, a fast voyage for the time. Sandbars, rocks, and shallow water made navigation tricky, especially far up the river in the dry season, which it then was. "The subdued thundering mutter of the Stanley Falls hung in the heavy night air of the last navigable reach ofthe Upper Congo . . ."he later wrote, "and I said to myselfwith awe, This is the very spot of my boyish boast.' . . . What an end to the idealized realities ofa boy's daydreams!"
At Stanley Falls, both Conrad and the steamer's captain fell ill. Conrad recovered sooner, and on the first part of the return trip downriver— going with the current, the boat traveled almost twice as fast as earlier— he was in command of the Roi des Beiges. But a few weeks after the voyage ended, he canceled his contract and began the long journey back to Europe.
Several bitter disappointments punctured Conrad's dreams. At the start, he hit it off badly with an official of the company he was working for,
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which meant that he would not gain command of a steamer after all.
Then, after corning downstream, he got sick again, with malaria and
dysentery, and had to convalesce at an American Baptist mission station
on Stanley Pool, in the care of a Scotch missionary doctor. He remained
so weak that he had to be carried back to the coast and never My
recovered his health. Finally, he was so horrified by the greed and brutal-
ity among white men he saw in the Congo that his view of human
nature was permanendy changed. Until he spent his six months in Africa,
he once told his friend the critic Edward Garnett, he had had "not a
thought in his head."
After brooding about his Congo experience for eight years, Conrad
transformed it into Heart ofDarkness, probably the most widely reprinted
short novel in English. The nautical jottings in his ship's officer's note-
book_ "Lulonga Passage. . . . NbyE to NNE. On the Port Side: Snags. Soundings in fathoms: 2, 2, 2, i, 1, 2, 2, 2,
2"— now become prose unsurpassed by any of the other literary travelers to the
Congo over
the years:
Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest begin-
nings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the
big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impene-
trable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was
no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the
waterway rati on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed dis-
tances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned them-
selves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob
ofwooded islands. You lost your way on that river as you would
in a desert and butted all day long against shoals trying to find the
channel till you thought yourselfbewitched and cut off for ever
from everything you had known.
Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is
hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed
river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled,
with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country
and its tail lost in the depths of the land" His destination is a post where
the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz
has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the
way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's
1 42
MEETING MR. KURTZ
steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel downstream.
Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories ofmillions ofreaders: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur, his great store ofprecious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out ofthe Africanjungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through bin- oculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fenceposts in front of Kurtz's house— and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids— a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth."
High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.
European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale ofthe killing in Africa at the turn ofthe century, have cast Heart ofDarkness loose from its historical moorings.We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place. Two of the three times the story was filmed, most notably in Francis Ford Cop- pola s Apocalypse Now, it was not even set in Africa. But Conrad himself wrote, "Heart ofDarkness is experience . . . pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case." Whatever the rich levels of meaning the book has as literature, for our purposes what is notable is how precise and detailed a description it is of "the actual facts of the case": King Leopold's Congo in 1890, just as the exploitation of the territory was getting under way in earnest.
In the novel Marlow, as Conrad had done, begins his trip with the long walk around the rapids: "A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps 1 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 swung be- tween them, rhythmically clinking." These were the laborers starting work on Leopold's railway.
A few pages later, Marlow describes a spot where some starving rail-
H3
WALKING INTO FIRE
way workers had crawled away to die. Farther along the trail, he sees
"now and then a carrier dead in harness, at rest in the long grass near the
path, with an empty water-gourd and his long staff lying by his side," and
notes the mysterious "body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in
the forehead." This is simply a record ofwhat Conrad himself saw on his
walk around the rapids to Stanley Pool. In his diary entry forJuly 3 , 1 890,
he noted: "Met an off[ic]er of the State inspecting; a few minutes after-
wards saw at a camp [in]g place the dead body of a Backongo. Shot?
Horrid smell." The following day: "Saw another dead body lying by the
path in an attitude of meditative repose." And on July 29: "On the road
today passed a skeleton tied up to a post."
During the hike around the rapids, Marlow also describes how people
had fled to avoid being conscripted as porters: "The population had
cleared out a long time ago. Well if a lot ofmysterious niggers armed with
all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road [in
England] between Deal and Gravesend catching the yokels right and left
to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts
would get empty very soon. ... I passed through several abandoned
villages." This, too, was what Conrad himself saw. The porters of the
caravan the novelist was with came close to mutiny during the trip. Only
three and a half years later a fierce uprising would break out along this
very route, as ChiefNzansu and his men fought their long, doomed battle
against the Force Publique.
In describing the caravans of porters that walked this trail, Marlow
gives a crisp summary of the Leopoldian economy: "a stream of . . .
rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths ofdarkness and
in return came a precious trickle of ivory." In 1890, this was still the
colony's most prized commodity. "The word 'ivory', rang in the air, was
whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it,"
says Marlow. He even mentions Leopold's commission system for agents:
"The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post
where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages."
Conrad stayed true to life when creating the charismatic, murderous
figure at the center of his novel, perhaps the twentieth century's most
famous literary villain. Mr. Kurtz was clearly inspired by several real
people, among them Georges Antoine Klein, a French agent for an ivory-
gathering firm at Stanley Falls. Klein, mortally ill, died on shipboard, as
Kurtz does in the novel, while Conrad was piloting the Roi des Beiges
down the river. Another model closer to Kurtz in character was Major
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MEETING MR. KURTZ
Edmund Barttelot, the man whom Stanley left in charge of the rear column on the Emin Pasha expedition. It was Barttelot, remember, who went mad, began biting, whipping, and killing people, and was finally murdered. Yet another Kurtz prototype was a Belgian, Arthur Hodister, famed for his harem of African women and for gathering huge amounts of ivory. Hodister eventually muscled in too aggressively on the territory of local Afro-Arab warlords and ivory-traders, who captured and be- headed him.
However, Conrad's legion of biographers and critics have almost en- tirely ignored the man who resembles Kurtz most closely of all. And he is someone we have already met, the swashbuckling Captain Leon Rom of the Force Publique. It is from Rom that Conrad may have taken the signal feature of his villain: the collection of African heads surrounding Kurtz's
house.
The "Inner Station" of Heart of Darkness, the place Marlow looks at through his binoculars only to find Kurtz's collection of the shrunken
heads of African "rebels," is loosely based on Stanley Falls. In 1895, five years after Conrad visited this post, Leon Rom was station chief there. A British explorer-journalist who passed through Stanley Falls that year described the aftermath of a punitive military expedition against some African rebels: "Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house!" If Conrad missed this account, which appeared in the widely read Century Magazine, he almost certainly noticed when The Saturday Review, a magazine he ad- mired and read faithfully repeated the story in its issue of December 17, 1898. That date was within a few days of when Conrad began writing Heart ofDarkness.
Furthermore, in the Congo, Rom and Conrad may have met. On August 2, 1890, Conrad, accompanied by another white man and a
caravan of porters, finished his month-long trek inland from the coast. Five miles before his caravan reached the village of Kinshasa on Stanley Pool, where the Roi des Beiges was waiting, it had to pass through the neighboring post ofLeopoldville. These two collections ofthatch-roofed buildings were only an hour and a half's walk apart. (They soon grew and merged into one city, called Leopoldville by the Belgians and Kinshasa today.) When Conrad's caravan, trudging along a path near the riverbank, passed through Leopoldville, the station chief there was Leon Rom. Con- rad made no entry in his diary on August 2, and Rom's notebook, which
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in a calligraphic hand faithfully records any raid or campaign that could
win him another medal, mentions no expeditions away from Leopold-
ville at that time. IfRom was on hand, he would certainly have greeted a
caravan with European newcomers, for there were only a few dozen
white men at Leopoldville and Kinshasa, and new ones did not arrive
every day. What, if anything, spoken or unspoken, passed between Rom
and Conrad we will never know. Rom's collection oftwenty-one African
heads lay in a different place and a different time, half a decade in the
future, but when Conrad read about Rom in December 1898, it is possi-
ble that he made the connection to a young officer he had met in the
Congo.
Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism
in all literature, but its author, curiously, thought himself an ardent impe-
rialist where England was concerned. Conrad fully recognized Leopold's
rape ofthe Congo for what it was: "The horror! The horror!" his charac-
ter Kurtz says on his deathbed. And Conrad's stand-in, Marlow, muses on
how "the conquest of the earth, which mosdy means the taking it away
from those who have a different complexion or slighdy natter noses than
ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." Yet in
almost the same breath, Marlow talks about how the British territories
colored red on a world map were "good to see at any time because one
knows that some real work is done in there"; British colonialists were
"bearers of a spark from the sacred fire" Marlow was speaking for Con-
rad, whose love ofhis adoptive country knew no bounds: Conrad felt that
"liberty ... can only be found under the English flag all over the world."
And at the very time he was denouncing the European lust for African
riches in his novel, he was an investor in a gold mine nearJohannesburg.
Conrad was a man of his time and place in other ways as well. He was
pardy a prisoner of what Mark Twain, in a different context, called "the
white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages." Heart of
Darkness has come in for some justified pummeling in recent years be-
cause of its portrayal of black characters, who say no more than a few
words. In fact, they don't speak at all: they grunt; they chant; they produce
a "drone ofweird incantations" and "a wild and passionate uproar"; they
spout "strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human
language ... like the responses of some satanic litany." The true message
of the book, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has argued, is: "Keep
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MEETING MR. KURTZ
away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz . . . should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out."
However laden it is with Victorian racism, Heart of Darkness remains the greatest portrait in fiction of Europeans in the Scramble for Africa.
When Marlow says goodbye to his aunt before heading to his new job, "she talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit"* Conrad's white men go about their rape of the continent in the belief that they are uplifting the
natives, bringing civilization, serving "the noble cause."
All these illusions are embodied in the character ofKurtz. He is both a murderous head collector and an intellectual, "an emissary of . . . science and progress." He is a painter, the creator of "a small sketch in oils" of a woman carrying a torch that Marlow finds at the Central Station. And he is a poet and journalist, the author of, among other works, a seventeen- page report— "vibrating with eloquence ... a beautiful piece of writ- ing"— to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Cus- toms. At the end of this report, filled with lofty sentiments, Kurtz scrawls in a shaky hand: "Exterminate all the brutes!"
In Kurtz's intellectual pretensions, Conrad caught one telling feature of the white penetration of the Congo, where conquest by pen and ink so often confirmed the conquest by rifle and machine gun. Ever since Stanley shot his way down the Congo River and then promptly wrote a two-volume best-seller, ivory collectors, soldiers, and explorers had tried to imitate him— in books, and in thousands of articles for the geo- graphical society journals and magazines about colonial exploration that
were as popular in the late nineteenth century as the National Geographic
* The biggest profiteer, King Leopold II, does not appear in Heart ofDarkness, although he does in The Inheritors, the lesser novel that Conrad later co-authored with Ford Madox Ford. One of its central characters is the heavily bearded Due de Mersch, who controls the Greenland Protectorate. The due's Society for the Regeneration ofthe Arctic Regions is dedicated to uplifting the benighted Eskimos by bringing them a railway, proper clothes, and other benefits ofcivilization. The due has invested in an English newspaper in an attempt to buy favorable press coverage ofhis "philanthropic" activities. "We have "he says, "protected the natives, have kept their higher interests ever present in our minds
"
The Greenland of the novel is rich in oil and gold.
W
WALKING INTO FIRE
is in the United States today. It was as ifthe act ofputting Africa on paper
were the ultimate proof of the superiority of European civilization. This
aspect of Kurtz is yet another reason to suspect that, in creating him,
Conrad was partly inspired by Leon Rom. Rom, we saw, was a budding
entomologist. He was also a painter; when not collecting butterflies or
human heads, he did portraits and landscapes, of which five survive in a
Belgian museum today. Most interesting of all, he was a writer.
In 1 899, Rom, by then back in Belgium, published a book of his own.
Le Negre du Congo is an odd little volume —jaunty, arrogant, and sweep-
ingly superficial. Short chapters cover "Le Negre en general," the black
woman, food, pets, native medicine, and so on. Rom was an enthusiastic
hunter who jubilantly posed for one photo atop a dead elephant, and his
chapter on hunting is as long as those on Congolese religious beliefs,
death rituals, and chiefly succession combined.
The voice we hear in Rom's book is very much like the voice in
which we might imagine Mr. Kurtz writing his report to the Interna-
tional Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Of fa race noire,
Rom says, "The product of a mindless state, its feelings are coarse, its
passions rough, its instincts brutish, and, in addition, it is proud and vain.
The black man's principal occupation, and that to which he dedicates the
greatest part of his existence, consists of stretching out on a mat in the
warm rays ofthe sun, like a crocodile on the sand. ... The black man has
no idea of time, and, questioned on that subject by a European, he
generally responds with something stupid."
There is much more in this vein. When Rom describes, for example,
the Congolese conscripted to work as porters, he says they enjoyed
themselves splendidly. As a caravan sets off in the morning, the porters all
busde noisily about, each one eagerly wanting "to succeed in finding a
place in line of his choice, for example beside a friend with whom he can
trade dreams of the previous night or elaborate the menu, more or less
varied and delicious, of the meal they will have at the next stop."
At some point while he was in the Congo, Rom must have begun
planning his book. Did Rom, finding that Conrad spoke perfect French,
confide in him his literary dreams? Did Conrad see one of Rom's paint-
ings on the wall at Leopoldville, just as Marlow sees one of Kurtz's? Or
was it sheer coincidence that the real head-collector Rom and the imagi-
nary head-collector Kurtz were both painters and writers? We will never
know.
There are several other tantalizing parallels between Leon Rom and
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MEETING MR. KURTZ
Mr. Kurtz. In the novel, Kurtz succeeds in "getting himselfadored" by the Africans of the Inner Station: chiefs crawl on the ground before him, the people obey him with slavish devotion, and a beautiful black woman apparently is his concubine. In 1895, a disapproving Force Publique lieu-
tenant confided to his diary a strikingly similar situation involving a
fellow officer:
He makes his agents starve while he gives lots offood to the black women of his harem (for he wants to act like a great Arab chief). . . . Finally, he got into his dress uniform at his house,
brought together his women, picked up some piece ofpaper and pretended to read to them that the king had named him the big chief and that the other whites of the station were only small
fry. ... He gave fifty lashes to a poor little negress because she wouldn't be his mistress, then he gave her to a soldier.
What is significant is how the diarist introduces his account of the officer: "This man wants to play the role of a second Rom."
Finally, the murderousness of Kurtz seems to echo one other detail
about Rom. When Rom was station chief at Stanley Falls, the governor general sent a report back to Brussels about some agents who "have the reputation of having killed masses ofpeople for petty reasons " He men- tions Rom's notorious flower bed ringed with human heads, and then adds: "He kept a gallows permanently erected in front of the station!" We do not know whether Rom was already acting out any of these
dreams of power, murder, and glory when Conrad passed through Leopoldville in 1890 or whether he only talked of them. Whatever the case, the moral landscape of Heart of Darkness and the shadowy figure at its center are the creations not just of a novelist but of an open-eyed ob-
server who caught the spirit of a time and place with piercing accuracy.
*49
^
THE WOOD THAT WEEPS
10
THE WOOD THAT WEEPS
IT WAS raining in London on July 12, 1890, but the crowd gathered
outside Westminster Abbey anyway, ignoring the downpour. Thou-
sands of people surged back and forth on the slick pavement, trying to
glimpse the dignitaries who stepped out of carriages and filed into the
cathedral between lines ofpolicemen: former Prime Minister Gladstone,
the speaker of the House of Commons, the lord chancellor, assorted
dukes and princes, bejeweled women and bemedaled generals. The rich
and famous filled the abbey, even standing in the aisles.
Finally, a carriage pulled up and the man everyone was waiting for
eased himself out, ill, pale, leaning on a walking stick, Henry Morton
Stanley was about to do something more daunting for him than any of
his African adventures. He was getting married.
The bride, Dorothy Tennant, was the eccentric, high-society portrait
painter who had previously rejected him. While the explorer had been
plodding through the jungle in search of Emin Pasha, Tennant had
changed her mind. On his return to England, she had begun sending Stanley startlingly passionate letters. "Suppose a wild, uncultivated tract of
land and suppose that one day this land is ploughed up and sown with
corn. If the field could speak it might say: 'I have never borne corn, I do
not bear corn, I shall never bear corn.' And yet all the while the wheat lies
hidden in its bosom. . . . My love is a flame which will never die, it began so small a spark you could not see it light, now it burns like the altar
flame"
To the altar it was. The news spread, the price of Tennant s paintings
soared, the congratulations poured in from around the world. Queen Victoria gave Tennant a locket with thirty-eight diamonds, and Thomas Edison sent one of his new phonograph machines. From Brussels, Leopold dispatched his representative, the Count d'Aarche, to be best
man.
On the day itself, Stanley was painfully ill with gastritis, an inflamma- tion of the stomach lining. He had suffered from it "before, but its recur- rence now was probably not by chance. He tottered up the aisle of Westminster Abbey but had to sit in an armchair for part ofthe ceremony.
After the wedding, he was helped into the couple s carriage. Protected by
a mounted police escort, it headed of! through a shouting and jostling crowd that almost blocked its passage. During the reception, Stanley lay
on a couch in a separate, darkened room, in agony The illness continued into the honeymoon.
At war in Stanley all his life were the craving for acceptance and the
fear of intimacy. The fear was so strong, believes the explorer's most thorough biographer, Frank McLynn, that Stanley's marriage was never consummated. The evidence is mainly circumstantial. Dorothy Stanley did not produce children, and clearly, despite her letters, had powerful
neuroses of her own. In a most unromantic decision, Stanley insisted that
his young male assistant come along on the couple's honeymoon in Switzerland. Finally, Stanley's diary of the honeymoon period has several passages inked out, apparently by his wife after his death. The end ofone such entry, however, is legible: "I do not regard it wifely, to procure these
pleasures, at the cost ofmaking me feel like a monkey in a cage." Stanley's fear of women was so great, McLynn concludes, that "when he was finally called upon to satisfy a wife, Stanley in effect broke down and confessed that he considered sex for the beasts."
Whether this inference is right or wrong, the inhibitions that caused
Stanley so much pain are a reminder that the explorers and soldiers who carried out the European seizure ofAfrica were often not the bold, bluff,
hardy men of legend, but resdess, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in their past or in themselves. The economic explanations of imperial expansion— the search for raw materials, labor, and markets— are all valid, but there was psychological fuel as well.
Stanley's marriage marked the end of his exploring; he now devoted his time to being famous. Having reached the upper class at last, he
became something of a caricature of its attitudes. He traveled about the world giving lectures and after-dinner speeches, receiving honorary de-
150 J5*
WALKING INTO FIRE
grees, inaugurating railroads, and granting interviews. He fulminated
against sloth, socialism, immorality, "general mediocrity" labor unions,
Irish nationalism, the eight-hour working day, women journalists, and
American hotel servants ("untrained, undisciplined, loutish and ill-
bred"). He received a knighthood and was elected to Parliament. When he made a speaking tour of the United States and Canada, he again took
along his young assistant; his wife took her mother. Doubly chaperoned,
the Stanleys traveled across the continent in royal style in a private rail-
road car complete with grand piano. The car was named the Henry M.
Stanley.
Only two years after Stanley hobbled down the cathedral aisle, another
man accomplished a remarkable feat of exploration in the Congo. Unlike
Stanley's journeys, his was respectful and nonviolent. But William Shep-
pard seldom shows up in the annals of exploration, because he doesn't fit
the conventional image ofthe white explorer in Africa. To begin with, he
wasn't white.
Paradoxically, what allowed Sheppard, a black American, to go to the
Congo at all was pardy the work of the white supremacist Alabama
Senator John Tyler Morgan, who had helped engineer United States
recognition ofLeopolds Congo in the hope that American blacks would
emigrate there. Morgan and his fellow send-them-back-to-Africa enthu-
siasts had long envisaged, as a first step, dispatching black American mis-
sionaries to the continent. They would be a beachhead, Morgan hoped,
for millions ofAmerican blacks to follow, the sooner the better. As early as
1865 — the year white Southerners lost all hope of keeping blacks in their place as slaves— the General Assembly of the Southern Presbyte- rian Church had voted to begin recruiting "missionaries from among the
African race on this continent, who may bear the Gospel of the grace of
God to the homes of their ancestors."
It was some years after the Civil War before such plans could take
effect. For one thing, the Southern Presbyterians, whose enthusiasm for
slavery had made them split off from Presbyterians in the North, not
surprisingly had few black members. Nonetheless, the back-to-Africa
plans of white racist diehards like Morgan in part overlapped with the
interests of some African Americans. Although few were interested in
moving to Africa permanently, George Washington Williams was not the
only black American of his time who wanted to work there. The Rever-
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THE WOOD THAT WEEPS
end William Sheppard had the same ambition, and probably for the same
unspoken reason: this might be a way to escape the humiliating barriers
of segregation.
Born in Virginia in 1865, Sheppard had gone to the states Hampton Institute, one of the few higher educational institutions for blacks in the
South. After further study at the Colored Theological Seminary in Tus-
caloosa, Alabama, he worked as a Presbyterian minister in Montgomery and Adanta, where he acquired a reputation for energy, zest, and physical
courage. At one point, he saved someone from drowning; at another, he
ran up three flights of stairs in a burning house to rescue a woman and got burned in the process. In the late 18 80s, Sheppard began petitioning
the Southern Presbyterian Church to send him to Africa as a missionary. For two years the Presbyterians put Sheppard on hold: church authori-
ties wouldn't let him go to Africa unless a white man was available to be his superior. At last, with encouragement from Senator Morgan himself,
an aspiring white missionary appeared— the Reverend Samuel Lapsley, a year younger than Sheppard and the son ofMorgan's former law partner.
Although one was the descendant of slaves and the other ofslave-owners,
the two young clerics hit it off well and set out together for the Congo.
On the way, with introductions from Morgan and Henry Shelton San- ford, Lapsley met President Benjamin Harrison in Washington and King
Leopold II in Brussels. Sheppard, being black, was not included in these
audiences. Sanford insisted that Lapsley get a silk top hat for his trip to the
Royal Palace to meet Leopold, and the king charmed Lapsley as much as he did other visitors.
In May 1890, Sheppard and Lapsley arrived in the Congo, and for some weeks stayed at a mission station just outside Matadi. As the two of
them assembled porters and supplies for the trip around the lower Congo River rapids, someone else doing the same thing on the streets of this
small hillside town was Joseph Conrad. He and his caravan began walking up the trail to Stanley Pool eleven days after the Americans.
Having conferred with experienced missionaries at Stanley Pool and
upriver, Lapsley and Sheppard decided to establish the first Southern
Presbyterian mission far up the Kasai River. Sheppard went off into the
bush for several weeks to recruit African helpers; Lapsley stayed at an
American mission station in Leopoldville, where he again crossed paths
with Conrad. (The novelist may have braved not just malaria and dysen- tery, but also some evangelizing. Conrad, Lapsley wrote home, "is sick in
a room at the other end ofthe court. As I sit ... I look across the fruit and
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WALKING INTO FIRE
palm trees right into his window. He is a gentlemanly fellow. An English
Testament on his table furnishes a handle I hope to use on him")
Once they completed their preparations, the two young missionaries
headed up the Kasai. The letters Lapsley sent home during these months
ring with an admiration for Sheppard that would have been nearly im-
possible for a white man to voice for a black back home. "The Bateke
think there is nobody like 'Mundele Ndom,' the black white man, as they
call Sheppard. . . . His temper is bright and even— really a man of un- usual graces and strong points of character. So I am thankful to God for
Sheppard" He describes Sheppard as a "born trader. ... I let him do
most of the buying" and speaks admiringly of Sheppard's physical hardi-
ness and his skill at hunting, of his coping with storms that threatened
to blow away their tents, and of Sheppard's pulling himself fifteen feet
down an anchor chain underwater to loosen the snagged anchor. Shep-
pard once shot a hippo, jumped into the water to tie a rope around it,
and narrowly escaped a crocodile who also had an eye on the hippo.
The black man was supposed to be the junior partner in the mission,
but as one reads Lapsley's letters, one is reminded of James Barrie's
play The Admirable Crichton, in which a yacht full of upper-class Britons
is shipwrecked on an island, and the resourceful buder becomes the
leader.
William Sheppard was the first black American missionary in the
Congo. As we listen to him in the book, letters, and magazine articles he
writes over the next two decades, and in speeches given to rapt audiences
at Hampton arid elsewhere while he is on leave, we hear someone strik-
ingly different from almost all the Americans and Europeans who have
been to Africa before him. He is, to be sure, a Christian evangelist, and
remains one for the twenty years he works in Africa. He occasionally
expresses the customary condescension toward "the dense darkness of
heathenism" and the "wild, naked savages, bowing down to idols, filled
with superstition and sin " But his tone is usually far different. "I always
wanted to live in Africa," Sheppard writes to a friend back in the United
States; "I felt that I would be happy, and so I am" He eagerly absorbs his
new surroundings along the Kasai River: "We immediately began to
study their language by pointing at objects and writing down the names
they gave us." He acquires pet parrots and a small black monkey jokingly
named Tippu Tip, after the Afro-Arab slave-trader. His voice, stronger and
more confident, becomes that ofa man who feels, in a way that is perhaps,
politically and religiously, too risky for him to fully explore, that he has
154
THE WOOD THAT WEEPS
come home. He rejoices at being among "my people" in "the country of my forefathers."
In early 1892, Lapsley had to go to Boma, the capital, on mission
business, and left Sheppard alone for some months on the Kasai. When Sheppardjoyfully met the steamer he thought was bringing Lapsley back,
to his shock he found a letter from another missionary:
Dear Bro. Sheppard:
You will be surprised and grieved to know that your friend
and comrade, Rev. S. N. Lapsley, while here at the coast was taken
down with bilious hematuric fever, and on the 26th of March
died."
The Southern Presbyterians, embarrassed to find themselves with a
black man in de facto command of their new Congo mission, dispatched
more white Presbyterians to the Congo. By the time they arrived, Shep-
pard had had several years* experience in the territory, and had become,
according to a Belgian trader, very popular "among the BaKuba whose
language he alone speaks of all the Europeans."
Sheppard continued to thrive. He loved to hunt and was famous for his charismatic oratory and strength. He rode what he cheerfully claimed was the first bicycle in central Africa. His joi de vivre seems to have made
him liked by almost everyone, black and white. It may be a measure of his
popularity that when, later in his life, he strayed from his marriage and
fathered a son with a village woman, the transgression did not end his
career in the church. The boy, called Shapit, as the Africans called his
father, eventually ended up running the mission printing press.
Unlike other missionaries, generally a pretty somber-looking lot, in
photographs Sheppard seems to be enjoying himself, whether posing
with game he has shot or jubilantly displaying a giant dead snake or
strumming a banjo. Tall and husky, he stands among a group of black
warriors with spears and shields, holding a spear himself. Or, with a rifle,
he grins broadly, a row ofmen with bows and arrows arrayed beside him. Again and again, Sheppard strikes a distinctive pose. He is wearing a white sun helmet, white shirt, white tie, white linen suit, even white
canvas shoes. His chest is thrust out, his hands confidendy on his hips, and,
amid a group of Africans, his smile is warm and proud and almost pro- prietary. He has the distinct look of a football coach showing off a winning team.
t55
WALKING INTO FIRE
The area where Sheppard was working bordered on the homeland of
the Kuba people. The Kuba are among Africa's greatest artists, working in
masks, sculpture, textiles, and elaborately carved tools; Sheppard's collec-
tion ofKuba art, much ofwhich ended up at his alma mater in Virginia,
was the first significant one acquired by an outsider. He made ethno-
graphic notes on the Kuba and other peoples of the Kasai region and
recorded ancestral myths, rituals, and crop yields.Although he is frank
to say when some practice— such as human sacrifice, or the killing of women as witches— appalls him, his writings show an empathetic, respectful curiosity about African customs radically different from the
harsh, quick judgments of someone like Stanley. Sheppard was particu-
larly impressed with the Kuba, who "make one feel that he has again
entered a land of civilization. . . . Perhaps they got their civilization from
the Egyptians— or the Egyptians got theirs from the Bakuba!" Sheppard was fascinated when he saw a Kuba ceremonial cup for drinking palm
wine; carved on it was a face with features strikingly similar to those on
ancient Egyptian artifacts. "The cup is made of mahogany" Sheppard
wrote, "and the face on it seems to verify their tradition that many, many
years ago they came from a far-away land."
Because of its location deep in the Congo's interior, the Kuba king-
dom had been largely protected from the slave-raiders of both the east
and west coasts. The Kuba valued their isolation and did all they could to
keep outsiders at bay Their homeland was within the boundaries of the
territory Europe had recognized as Leopold's*, but at this early stage of
colony-building his sovereignty over more remote areas existed only on
paper. For nearly a decade, Belgian traders had been trying to gain access
to the Kuba kingdom and had been repeatedly turned away; gifts they
sent to its king were returned.
Achieving something most anthropologists can only dream of, in 1892
Sheppard became the first foreigner to reach the town of Ifuca, seat ofthe
court of the Kuba king, Kot aMbweeky II. The king had repeatedly
threatened to behead anyone who helped strangers intrude, so no one
dared give Sheppard directions. It took him and a small group ofAfricans
three months to find their way to the capital, which they finally did by
clandestinely following the trail of an ivory caravan. Sheppard was still
dressed all in white, including white canvas shoes, and "what had been,"
he writes ruefully, his white linen suit.
The king angrily ordered Sheppard, his followers, and everyone who
had helped them brought to court for beheading. Then he discovered
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THE WOOD THAT WEEPS
that the intruder had dark skin and could speak some Kuba. This meant,
the elders decided, that he was a reincarnated spirit. Furthermore, they
announced that they knew just who he was: Bope Mekabe, a former king. According to Sheppard, nothing he could say about his greater king
in heaven would convince them otherwise.*
This visit was one of the high points of Sheppard's life and provided a
mine of information for later scholars, for the Kuba had one of central
Africa's most sophisticated political systems. Sheppard remained at the
Kuba court for four months, and, interested in all he saw, made notes
about everything from court rituals to the workings of a royal police
force that dealt with thefts and other crimes. Servants spread leopard skins
for him to walk on whenever he approached the king, who sat on an ivory throne and wore a crown ofbeads and feathers.
"I grew very fond of the Bakuba. . . ." he writes. "They were the
finest looking race I had seen in Africa, dignified, graceful, courageous,
honest, with an open smiling countenance and really hospitable. Their
knowledge of weaving, embroidery, wood carving and smelting was the highest in equatorial Africa" Sheppard attended an annual gathering of
chiefs and headmen from the towns of the kingdom, where each in turn
reported on births, deaths, harvests, and other events in his domain and
did a ceremonial dance. The book he later wrote about his experiences in
Africa is entitled Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo, but the distincdy un-
Presbyterian Kuba run away with the story His is a valuable, firsthand
look at one of the last great African kingdoms unchanged by European
influence. The Kuba creation myth, Sheppard reports, "says that their first
people, man and woman, were let down from the skies by a rope, from
which they untied themselves and the rope was drawn up."
Soon after this first visit to the Kuba, Sheppard headed back to the
United States on leave. On the way he was invited to lecture at Exeter Hall in London. For his travels in the Kuba kingdom and his discovery of
a lake Europeans had not known about, he was made a fellow of the
Royal Geographical Society, the only Presbyterian missionary so honored.
The society also named his discovery Lake Sheppard. In Washington,
Sheppard presented President Grover Cleveland with a Kuba bamboo
* The noted anthropologistJan Vansina has a different interpretation: Since the name Bope
Mekabe is not in the Kuba royal genealogy, he suggests that the Kuba may have under-
stood who Sheppard was, and were simply trying to flatter him into revealing the plans of other Europeans who wanted to enter the kingdom.
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WALKING INTO FIRE
mat; on a later visit, he gave Theodore Roosevelt a pipe and a palm-fiber
coverlet. On these trips home, Sheppard delivered innumerable speeches,
at colleges, universities, and churches throughout the country, and his
fervent preaching about Africa recruited more black missionaries for the
Presbyterians. One of them, Lucy Gantt, a teacher and talented singer
whom he had known while still a theology student, he married. To help
staffwhat eventually became several mission stations, more white Presby-
terians came to Africa as well, and a white man was always in charge. On
the official rolls of the Southern Presbyterian mission society published
in the United States, Sheppard and his new recruits always had "(col-
ored)" or "(c)" after their names. But in Africa itself he did not feel
relegated to second-class citizenship: he called one of his children Max-
amalinge, after a son of the Kuba king.
Not surprisingly, the Kuba were happy with their existing way of life,
and, despite their friendliness toward Sheppard, showed Utde interest in
Christianity. The mission station Sheppard ran among them made few
converts. But Sheppard had become so well known back home for his
discoveries that the Presbyterians were afraid of an adverse public reac-
tion if they closed his mission to the Kuba and stationed him elsewhere.
The entire Kasai region, like the rest of the Congo, in time suc-
cumbed to the tightening grip of the Congo state. Some eight years after
Sheppard's historic visit, Leopold's forces finally reached and looted the
Kuba capital.
The raid on the capital, like many other events in the Congo, was trig-
gered by a discovery far away. One day a few years before William Shep-
pard first embarked for Africa, a veterinary surgeon with a majestic white
beard was tinkering with his son's tricycle at his home in Belfast, Ireland.
John Dunlop was trying to solve a problem that had bedeviled bicyclists
for many years: how do you get a gende ride without springs? Dunlop
finally devised a practical way of making a long-sought solution, an
inflatable rubber tire. In 1890 the Dunlop Company began making tires
— setting off a bicycle craze and starting a new industry just in time, it turned out, for the coming of the automobile.
Europeans had known about rubber ever since Christopher Colum-
bus noticed it in the West Indies. In the late 1700s, a British scientist gave
the substance its English name when he noticed it could rub out pencil
marks. The Scot Charles Macintosh contributed his name to the language
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THE WOOD THAT WEEPS
in 1823 when he figured out a mass-production method for doing some-
thing long practiced by the Indians of the Americas: applying rubber to
cloth to make it waterproof. Sixteen years later, the American inventor
Charles Goodyear accidentally spilled sulfur into some hot rubber on his
stove. He discovered that the resulting mixture did not turn stiff when cold or smelly and gooey when hot— major problems for those trying to make rubber boots or raincoats before then. But it was not until the
early 1890s, half a decade after Dunlop fitted the pneumatic tire onto his
son's tricycle wheel, that the worldwide rubber boom began. The indus- trial world rapidly developed an appetite not just for rubber tires, but for
hoses, tubing, gaskets, and the like, and for rubber insulation for the
telegraph, telephone, and electrical wiring now rapidly encompassing the globe. Suddenly factories could not get enough of the magical commod-
ity, and its price rose throughout the 1890s. Nowhere did the boom have a more drastic impact on people's lives than in the equatorial rain forest,
where wild rubber vines snaked high into the trees, that covered nearly
half ofKing Leopold's Congo.
For Leopold, the rubber boom was a godsend. He had gone danger- ously into debt with his Congo investments, but he now saw that the
return would be more lucrative than he had ever imagined. The world
did not lose its desire for ivory, but by the late 1890s wild rubber had far
surpassed it as the main source of revenue from the Congo. His fortune
assured, the king eagerly grilled functionaries returning from the Congo
about rubber harvests; he devoured a constant stream of telegrams and
reports from the territory, marking them up in the margins and passing
them on to aides for action. His letters from this period are filled with
numbers: commodity prices from world markets, interest rates on loans,
quantities of rifles to be shipped to the Congo, tons of rubber to be
shipped to Europe, and the exact dimensions of the triumphal arch in
Brussels he was planning to build with his newfound profits. Reading the
king's correspondence is like reading the letters ofthe CEO ofa corpora- tion that has just developed a profitable new product and is racing to take
advantage of it before competitors can get their assembly lines going.
The competition Leopold worried about was from cultivated rubber,
which comes not from a vine but a tree. Rubber trees, however, require
much care and some years before they grow large enough to be tapped.
The king voraciously demanded ever greater quantities of wild rubber
from the Congo, because he knew that the price would drop once
plantations of rubber trees in Latin America and Asia reached maturity.
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WALKING INTO FIRE
This did indeed happen, but by then the Congo had had a wild-rubber
boom nearly two decades long. During that time the search knew no
bounds.
As with the men bringing in ivory, those supplying rubber to the
Congo state and private companies were rewarded according to the
amount they turned in. In 1903, one particularly "productive" agent
received a commission eight times his annual salary But the big money
flowed directly back to Antwerp and Brussels, in the capital mosdy to
either side of the rue Brederode, the small street that separated the back
of the Royal Palace from several buildings holding offices of the Congo
state and Congo business operations.
Even though Leopold's privately controlled state got half of conces-
sion-company profits, the king made vasdy more money from the land
the state exploited directly. But because the concession companies were
not managed so secretively, we have better statistics from them. In 1897,
for example, one of the companies, the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and
Exploration Company, or A.B.LR., spent 1.35 francs per kilo to harvest
rubber in the Congo and ship it to the company's headquarters at Ant-
werp— where it was sold for prices that sometimes reached 10 francs per kilo, a profit ofmore than 700 percent. By 1898, the price ofA.B.I.R.'s
stock was nearly thirty times what it had been six years earlier. Between
1890 and 1904, total Congo rubber earnings increased ninety-six times
over. By the turn of the century, the Etat Independent du Congo had
become, far and away, the most profitable colony in Africa. The profits
came swiftly because, transportation costs aside, harvesting wild rubber
required no cultivation, no fertilizers, no capital investment in expensive
equipment. It required only labor.
How was this labor to be found? For the Congo's rulers, this posed a
problem. They could not simply round up men, chain them together, and
put them to work under the eye of an overseer with a ehicotte, as they did
with porters. To gather wild rubber, people must disperse widely through
the rain forest and often climb trees.
Rubber is coagulated sap; the French word for it, caoutchouc, comes
from a South American Indian word meaning "the wood that weeps."
The wood that wept in the Congo was a long spongy vine of the
Landolphia genus. Up to a foot thick at the base, a vine would twine
upward around a tree to a hundred feet or more off the ground, where it
could reach sunlight. There, branching, it might wind its way hundreds of
feet through the upper limbs of another half-dozen trees. To gather the
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THE WOOD THAT WEBPS
rubber, you had to slash the vine with a knife and hang a bucket or
earthenware pot to collect the slow drip of thick, milky sap. You could
make a small incision to tap the vine, or— officially forbidden but widely practiced— cut through it entirely, which produced more rubber but killed the vine. Once the vines near a village were drained dry,
workers had to go ever deeper into the forest until, before long, most
harvesters were traveling at least one or two days to find fresh vines. As
the lengths of vine within reach of the ground were tapped dry, workers
climbed high into the trees to reach sap. "We . . . passed a man on the
road who had broken his back by falling from a tree while . . . tapping
some vines," wrote one missionary. Furthermore, heavy tropical down-
pours during much of the year turned large areas of the rain forest, where
the rubber vines grew, into swampland.
No payments of trinkets or brass wire were enough to make people stay in the flooded forest for days at a time to do work that was so arduous
— and physically painful. A gatherer had to dry the syrup-like rubber so that it would coagulate, and often the only way to do so was to spread the
substance on his arms, thighs, and chest. "The first few times it is not
without pain that the man pulls it off the hairy parts of his body," Louis
Chaltin, a Force Publique officer, confided to his journal in 1892. "The
native doesn't like making rubber. He must be compelled to do it."
How was he to be compelled? A trickle of news and rumor gradually made its way to Europe. "An example of what is done was told me up
the Ubangi [River]," the British vice consul reported in 1899. "This
officer['s] . . . method . . . was to arrive in canoes at a village, the inhabi-
tants of which invariably bolted on their arrival; the soldiers were then
landed, and commenced looting, taking all the chickens, grain, etc., out of
the houses; after this they attacked the natives until able to seize their
women; these women were kept as hostages until the Chiefofthe district
brought in the required number of kilogrammes of rubber. The rubber
having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a
couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until
the requisite amount ofrubber had been collected."
Sometimes the hostages were women, sometimes children, sometimes
elders or chiefs. Every state or company post in the rubber areas had a
stockade for hostages. If you were a male villager, resisting the order to
gather rubber could mean death for your wife. She might die anyway, for
in the stockades food was scarce and conditions were harsh. "The women
taken during the last raid at Engwettra are causing me no end oftrouble,"
161
WALKING INTO PIRB
wrote Force Publique officer Georges Bricusse in his diary on November
22, 1895. "All the soldiers want one. The sentries who are supposed to watch them unchain the prettiest ones and rape them."
Leopold, of course, never proclaimed hostage-taking as official policy;
if anyone made such charges, authorities in Brussels indignantly denied them. But out in the field, far from prying eyes, the pretense was dropped.
Instructions on taking hostages were even given in the semiofficial in-
struction book, the revealing Manuel du Voyageur et du Resident au Congo, a
copy ofwhich the administration gave to each agent and each state post.
The manual's five volumes cover everything from keeping servants obe- dient to the proper firing of artillery salutes. Taking hostages was one
more routine piece ofwork:
In Africa taking prisoners is ... an easy thing to do, for if the
natives hide, they will not go far from their village and must
come to look for food in the gardens which surround it. In
watching these carefully, you will be certain of capturing people
after a brief delay. . . . When you feel you have enough captives, you should choose among them an old person, preferably an old
woman. Make her a present and send her to her chief to begin negotiations. The chief, wanting to see his people set free, will
usually decide to send representatives.
Seldom does history offer us a chance to see such detailed instructions
for those carrying out a regime of terror. The tips on hostage-taking are in the volume of the manual called Practical Questions, which was com- piled by an editorial committee of about thirty people. One member— he worked on the book during a two-year period following his stint as
the head-collecting station chief at Stanley Falls— was Leon Rom.
Hostage-taking set the Congo apart from most other forced-labor re- gimes. But in other ways it resembled them. As would be true decades
later of the Soviet gulag, another slave labor system for harvesting raw
materials, the Congo operated by quotas. In Siberia the quotas concerned cubic meters of timber cut or tons of gold ore mined by prisoners each
day; in the Congo the quota was for kilos of rubber. In the A.B.LR. concession company's rich territory just below the Congo River's great
162
THE WOOD THAT WEEPS
half-circle bend, for example, the normal quota assigned to each village
was three to four kilos of dried rubber per adult male per fortnight— which essentially meant full-time labor for those men. Elsewhere, quotas
were higher and might be raised as time went on. An official in the Mongala River basin in the far north, controlled by another concession
company, the Societe Anversoise du Commerce au Congo, estimated that
to fill their quota, rubber gatherers had to spend twenty-four days a
month in the forest, where they built crude cages to sleep in for protec-
tion— not always successful— against leopards. To get at parts ofthe vine high offthe ground, men frantic to get every
possible drop ofrubber would sometimes tear down the whole vine, slice
it into sections, and squeeze the rubber out. Although the Congo state
issued strict orders against killing the vines this way, it also applied the
chicotte to men who didn't bring in enough rubber. The chicotte prevailed.
One witness saw Africans who had to dig up roots in order to find
enough rubber to meet their quotas.
The entire system was militarized. Force Publique garrisons were
scattered everywhere, often supplying their firepower to the companies
under contract. In addition, each company had its own militia force,
euphemistically called "sentries." In military matters as in almost every-
thing else, the companies operated as an extension of the Congo state,
and when hostages had to be taken or a rebellious village subdued,
company sentries and Force Publique soldiers often took to the field
together.
Wherever rubber vines grew, the population was tightly controlled.
Usually you had to get a permit from the state or company agent in order
to visit a friend or relative in another village. In some areas, you were
required to wear a numbered metal disk, attached to a cord around your
neck, so that company agents could keep track of whether you had met
your quota. Huge numbers of Africans were conscripted into this labor
army: in 1906, the books of A.B.I.R. alone, responsible for only a small
fraction of the Congo state's rubber production, listed forty-seven thou-
sand rubber gatherers.
All along the rivers, columns of exhausted men, carrying baskets of
lumpy gray rubber on their heads, sometimes walked twenty miles or
more to assemble near the houses of European agents, who sat on their
verandas and weighed the loads of rubber. At one collection point, a
missionary counted four hundred men with baskets. After the sap was
163
WALKING INTO FIRE
turned in, it was formed into rough slabs, each the size of a small suitcase, and left to dry in the sun. Then it was shipped downriver, on a barge or scow towed by a steamboat, the first stage of the longjourney to Europe.
The state and the companies generally paid villagers for their rubber with a piece of cloth, beads, a few spoonfuls of salt, or a knife. These cost
next to nothing, and the knives were essential tools for gathering more rubber. On at least one occasion, a chiefwho forced his people to gather rubber was paid in human beings. A legal dispute between two white officials near Stanley Falls put the following exchange on record in 190 1. The witness being questioned was Liamba, chief of a village named Malinda:
Question: Did M. Hottiaux [a company official] ever give you living women or children?
Answer: Yes, he gave me six women and two men. Question: What for?
Answer: In payment for rubber which I brought into the sta-
tion, telling me I could eat them, or kill them, or use them as slaves— as I liked.
The rain forest bordering the Kasai River was rich in rubber, and William Sheppard and the other American Presbyterians there found themselves in the midst of a cataclysm. The Kasai was also the scene of some of the strongest resistance to Leopold s rule. Armed men of a chief allied with the regime rampaged through the region where Sheppard worked, plun- dering and burning more than a dozen villages. Floods of desperate refugees sought help at Sheppard s mission station.
In 1899 the reluctant Sheppard was ordered by his superiors to travel
into the bush, at some risk to himself, to investigate the source of the fighting. There he found bloodstained ground, destroyed villages, and many bodies; the air was thick with the stench ofrotting flesh. On the day he reached the marauders' camp, his eye was caught by a large number of objects being smoked. The chief "conducted us to a framework of sticks, under which was burning a slow fire, and there they were, the right hands, I counted them, 81 in all" The chief told Sheppard, "See! Here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the State how many we have killed." He proudly showed
164
THE WOOD THAT WEEPS
eppard some of the bodies the hands had come from. The smoking
^served the hands in the hot, moist climate, for it might be days or
leks before the chief could display them to the proper official and
:eive credit for his kills.
Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold's
bber system. Like the hostage-taking, the severing of hands was delib-
ite policy, as even high officials would later admit. "During my time in 1 Congo I was the first commissioner of the Equator district," recalled
larles Lemaire after his retirement. "As soon as it was a question of
bber, I wrote to the government, 'To gather rubber in the district . . .
e must cut off hands, noses and ears.'"
If a village refused to submit to the rubber regime, state or company
iops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby
lages would get the message. But on such occasions some European
icers were mistrustful. For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they
manded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone, not
wasted" in hunting or, worse yet, saved for possible use in a mutiny. The
ndard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not
>m a corpse. "Sometimes," said one officer to a missionary, soldiers
lot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a
ing man." In some military units there was even a "keeper of the
nds"; his job was the smoking.
Sheppard was not the first foreign witness to see severed hands in the
mgo, nor would he be the last. But the articles he wrote for missionary
igazines about his grisly find were reprinted and quoted widely, both in
irope and the United States, and it is pardy due to him that people
erseas began to associate the Congo with severed hands. A half-dozen ars after Sheppard's stark discovery, while attacking the expensive public
>rks Leopold was building with his Congo profits, the socialist leader
nile Vandervelde would speak in the Belgian Parliament of "monu-
*ntal arches which one will someday call the Arches of the Severed
inds." William Sheppard s outspokenness would eventually bring down
t wrath of the authorities and one day Vandervelde, an attorney, would
Ld himself defending Sheppard in a Congo courtroom. But that is
tting ahead of our story.
As the rubber terror spread throughout the rain forest, it branded
ople with memories that remained raw for the rest of their lives. A itholic priest who recorded oral histories half a century later quotes a
in, Tswambe, speaking of a particularly hated state official named Leon
165
WALKING INTO FIRE
Fievez, who terrorized a district along the river three hundred mile north of Stanley Pool:
All the blacks saw this man as the Devil ofthe Equator. . . . From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets. ... A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young
man, I saw [Fievez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of
Boyeka, take a big net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big
stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river. . . . Rubber
caused these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.
A Force Publique officer who passed through Fievez s post in 189, quotes Fievez himself describing what he did when the surrounding villages failed to supply his troops with the fish and manioc he hac
demanded: "I made war against them. One example was enough: a hun- dred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies at the statior
ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred peoplt . . . but that allowed five hundred others to live."
With "humanitarian" ground rules that included cutting offhands anc heads, sadists like Fievez had a field day. The station chief at M'Bima usee his revolver to shoot holes in Africans' ear lobes. Raoul de Premorel, ar
agent working along the Kasai River, enjoyed giving large doses of castoi
oil to people he considered malingerers. When villagers, in a desperate attempt to meet the weight quota, turned in rubber mixed with dirt o:
pebbles to the agent Alberic Detiege, he made them eat it. When twe porters failed to use a designated latrine, a district commissioner, Jeai
Verdussen, ordered them paraded in front of troops, their faces rubbec with excrement.
As news of the white man's soldiers and their baskets of severed hand
spread through the Congo, a myth gained credence with Africans tha was a curious reversal of the white obsession with black cannibalism
The cans of corned beef seen in white men's houses, it was said, die not contain meat from the animals shown on the label; they containec
chopped-up hands.
166
II
A SECRET SOCIETY
OF MURDERERS
Once when Leopold and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany were watching a parade in Berlin, Leopold, grumbling about the ero-
sion of royal authority, remarked to the kaiser, "There is really nothing
left for us kings except money!" Rubber would soon bring Leopold
money beyond imagining, but the Congo alone was never enough to
satisfy him. Fantasizing an empire that would encompass the two legen-
dary rivers of Africa, the Congo and the Nile, he imagined linking the
rivers by a great railway, and in the early 1890s dispatched expeditions
northeast from the Congo toward the Nile valley. One of these claimed
the ancient copper mines of Bahr-el-Ghazal, taking care to claim the
mines for Leopold personally while committing the Congo state to pro-
vide military protection.
The French finally blocked the king from further moves toward the
Nile, but he was already dreaming of new colonies elsewhere. "I would
like to make out of our little Belgium, with its six million people, the
capital of an immense empire," he said. "The Netherlands, Spain, Portu-
gal, are in a state ofdecadence and their colonies will one day or another
come on to the market " He asked Prime Minister William Gladstone of
England about the possibility of leasing Uganda.
Leopold was quick to embellish his imperial schemes with any hu-
manitarian sentiment in the air. In 1896, he proposed to another sur-
prised British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, that a Sudanese army under
Congo state officers be used "for the purpose of invading and occupying
167
WALKING INTO FIRE
Armenia and so putting a stop to the massacres [of Armenians by the Turks] which were moving Europe so deeply." (Queen Victoria thought her cousin Leopold was becoming delusional.) When there was a crisis in Crete, he suggested that Congolese troops help restore order. After the United States won the Spanish-American War, he proposed that a corpo- ration lease some of Spain's remaining territories, such as the Canary Islands in the Adantic or the Carolines in the South Pacific. The corpora- tion, he suggested, could be registered in a "neutral" state, such as, for
example, the Etat Independant du Congo.
None of these dreams distracted Leopold from managing his main source of income. He kept the Congo's growing profitability as secret as possible, however, lest it stir up demands that he pay back the Belgian government's big loan. For as long as Leopold could get away with it, the
Congo state did not publish a budget. When at last it did so, it presented revenue figures that grossly understated the state's real profits.
One advantage of controlling your own country is that you can issue bonds. This eventually was to become a source of revenue for Leopold almost equal to that ofrubber. All told, the king issued bonds worth more than a hundred million francs, or roughly half a billion of todays dollars. Some bonds he sold; some he gave to favorites; some he kept for his personal portfolio; some he used in lieu of cash to pay for public works projects in Belgium. Since the bonds were for terms as long as ninety-
nine years, Leopold knew that paying back the principal would be some- body else's problem. Supposedly the bond money was for development in the Congo, but little of it was ever spent there.
Leopold much preferred to spend it, and his Congo rubber profits, in Europe. For such a shrewd and ambitious man, he was notably unimagi- native in his tastes, and used his vast new fortune in ways that would earn him a place less in the history books than in the guidebooks. A string of monuments, new palace wings, museums, and pavilions began going up all over Belgium. At his favorite seaside resort, Ostend, Leopold poured millions of francs into a promenade, several parks, and an elaborately turreted gallery (decorated with eighty-five thousand geraniums for its
opening) for the racetrack he frequented. Rubber earnings also financed a golf course at nearby Klemskerke, a royal chalet at Raversijde, and endless
renovations and the enlargement ofthe chateau ofLaeken. Many ofthese riches Leopold officially gave to his country with much fanfare as a Royal Gift, although he continued to live in the casdes and palaces in the same manner as he always had. His real purposes in bestowing the Royal Gift
168
A SECRET SOCIETY OP MURDERERS
were to have the nation pay for the upkeep of these properties and to
keep them out of the hands of his three daughters, to whom Belgian law required that he leave his personal possessions.
In 1895, Leopold turned sixty, and as he grew older he became a
hypochondriac. Any aide who coughed risked banishment for several
days. Always fearful ofgetting a cold, he wore a waterproofbag around his
beard when he went outside in wet weather or swam in the sea. He
demanded that the palace tablecloths be boiled daily to kill germs.
When not traveling, he lived mosdy at Laeken. He rose early, had a
cold shower, trimmed his great beard, received a massage, read the early
morning mail, and ate a huge breakfast— a half-dozen poached eggs, a stack of toast, and an entire jar of marmalade. Then he spent much of the
day walking around his beloved gardens and greenhouses, often reading
mail and dictating answers while on the move; his secretaries had to learn
to write while walking. Lunch lasted precisely halfan hour; the king read
newspapers and letters while eating and sometimes scribbled instructions
in the margins ofletters in nearly illegible handwriting that his staffspent
anxious hours each day deciphering. Other family members at the table
were expected to remain silent.
In the afternoon, he was driven to the Royal Palace in downtown
Brussels to meet officials and visitors, then back to Laeken for the eve-
ning meal. The high point of his day was the arrival of the Times of
London. Each afternoon a carefully wrapped copy ofthat morning's paper
was tossed from the Ostend-Basel express as the train passed the private
railway station, bearing the royal coat of arms, at Laeken. A footman ironed the paper— germs again— and the king read it in bed at night. (When the Times later joined his chorus of critics, Leopold angrily an-
nounced that he was stopping his subscription. But he secredy sent his
valet to the Brussels railway station each day to buy him a copy.)
Perhaps Leopold liked the Times because it was a newspaper written
not for a small country but for a powerful one. In any case, his lust for
colonies still extended to all corners of the world. In 1897, he started to
invest Congo state profits in a railway in China, eventually making big
money on the deal. He saw that country as he had seen the "magnificent
African cake," a feast to be consumed, and he was as ready as ever to
invite himself to the table. Of the route he hoped to get for his railway
line he said, "This is the spine of China; if they give it to me I'll also take
some cudets." He tried to arrange an exchange— Chinese laborers for the Congo; Congolese soldiers for China— that would give him a mili-
i6g
WAtKING INTO FIRE
tary foot in the door, like the other Western powers now maneuvering in the Far East. He bought several small parcels of land in China in the name of the Etat Independant du Congo. When Leopold sent a Congo state delegation— all Belgians, of course— for negotiations, the Chi- nese viceroy Li Hung-Chang feigned surprise: "Am I right in thinking that Africans are black?"
Back in the Congo, the rubber boom gave added urgency to the terri- tory's major construction job: the narrow-gauge railway from Matadi to
Stanley Pool, around the big rapids. This project required up to sixty
thousand workers at one time. Although the line was only 241 miles long,
and little more than half the width of American standard-gauge tracks,
climate, disease, and terrain made it one of the more daunting railway
construction projects in history. It took three years to build just the first
fourteen miles. An early surveyor of this forbidding stretch of land de- scribed it as "a piling up of enormous stones which, in certain places,
seem to have been thrown on top of each other by the hands of giants."
The whole route required ninety-nine metal bridges, totaling more than
twelve miles in length.
Construction workers were brought in from British and French terri-
tories in West Africa, from Hong Kong and Macao, and from the British West Indies. Leopold remained fascinated with the idea of using Chinese
workers in the Congo. "What would it cost," he wrote to an aide, "to
establish five big Chinese villages in the Congo? One in the North, another in the Northeast, one in the East, another in the South, and one
between Matadi and Leopoldville. Two thousand Chinese to mark our
frontiers, what would it cost?" The idea of five villages vanished, but
Leopold's dream did cost the lives ofmany ofthe 540 Chinese brought to
work on the railway in 1892. Three hundred ofthem died on the job or
fled into the bush. Most of the latter were never seen again, although
several were later found more than five hundred miles in the interior.
They had walked toward the rising sun, trying to get to Africa's east coast
and then home.
Several hundred laborers from the Caribbean island of Barbados had
evidently been told they were being recruited for somewhere else; when
their ship tied up at Boma in September 1892 and they realized they were in the Congo, they rebelled in fury. Soldiers fired at them, killing two and
1 jo
A SECRET SOCIETY OF MURDBRERS
wounding many more; the rest were sent on to the railhead at Matadi the
same day and put to work.
The railway was a modest engineering success and a major human
disaster. Men succumbed to accidents, dysentery, smallpox, beriberi, and malaria, all exacerbated by bad food and relentless floggings by the two-
hundred-man railway militia force. Engines ran of! tracks; freight cars full
of dynamite exploded, blowing to bits workers, black and white. Some-
times there were no shelters for the people to sleep in, and recalcitrant
laborers were led to work in chains. The European construction fore-
men and engineers could cancel their contracts and go home, and a
steady flow did so. The black and Asian workers could not. When bugles sounded in the morning, crowds of angry laborers laid at the feet of
European supervisors the bodies of their comrades who had died during
the night.
In a metaphor that is echoed elsewhere in Africa, local legend along
the railway line has it that each tie cost one African life and each tele-
graph pole one European life. Even in the rosy official figures, the railway
death toll was 132 whites and 1800 nonwhites. Some estimates, how-
ever, place the nonwhite toll close to 1 800 a year in the first two years,
which were the worst. Cemeteries dotted the rail line. Again and again
workers tried to escape; three hundred men from Sierra Leone, brandish-
ing hammers, shovels, and pickaxes, stormed the port ofMatadi and tried
to commandeer a ship at the dock to take them home. Club-wield-
ing guards— themselves recruited from Zanzibar— forced them back. Other workers went on strike or fled to nearby Portuguese territory
In 1898, eight years after construction started, the first short, stumpy
steam engine, bedecked with flags, pulled two railway cars all the way up
the narrow-gauge track from Matadi to Stanley Pool. A large tent deco- rated with flowers awaited its arrival; state officials, military men, officers
of the railway, and a bishop all banqueted and drank to Leopolds health
in champagne. The assembled VIPs ceremonially bolted the last rail, a
cannon fired a twenty-one-gun salute, and all the steamboats in Stanley
Pool blew their whistles. Officials erected a monument on the old cara-
van route that the rail line had replaced: three life-size metal figures of
porters— one carrying a large box on his head, two collapsed in exhaus- tion beside him. The inscription read: the railway freed them from
porterage. It said nothing about who made them become pdr?eT54n
the first place.
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WALKING INTO FIRE
Although it included hairpin turns and steep grades that stretched a
one-way trip to two days, the railway added enormously to the state's
power and wealth. The more than eleven million pounds ofrubber a year the Congo was producing by the turn of the century could now reach the sea from the steamboat docks of Stanley Pool without being carried
for three weeks on men's heads. Rail cars going the other direction
moved steamboats around the rapids in far larger pieces than porters could carry. Leopoldville quickly became the busiest river port in central
Africa, home to steamers ofup to five hundred tons. One sidewheeler on the river, the sixty-ton Ville de Paris, had begun life as an excursion boat
on the Seine.
Except for those employed by the state or on projects like the railway
Leopold was wary of foreigners in the Congo. He was, however, saddled with one group of them, several hundred foreign Protestant missionaries
like William Sheppard and his colleagues. Almost all had come from England, the United States, or Sweden, countries where Leopold hoped
to curry favor. The missionaries had come to the Congo eager to evan- gelize, to fight polygamy, and to impart to Africans a Victorian sense of
sin.* Before long, however, the rubber terror meant that missionaries had
trouble finding bodies to clothe or souls to save. Frightened villagers
would disappear into the jungle for weeks when they saw the smoke of an approaching steamboat on the horizon. One British missionary was asked repeatedly by Africans, "Has the Savior you tell us of any power to
save us from the rubber trouble?" Unexpectedly, certainly without in-
tending to take on such a role, the missionaries found themselves acting as observers on a battlefield, and Sheppard was by no means the only one
who bore witness. In 1894, a Swedish missionary recorded a despairing Congolese song:
We are tired of living under this tyranny.
We cannot endure that our women and children are taken away
And dealt with by the white savages.
We shall make war. ...
* A high state official visiting the Congo River town ofUpoto recorded in astonishment in his diary that a British missionary wanted him to issue "a decree making the natives wear clothes(!?)."
172
A SBCHKT SOCIETY OP MURDERERS
We know that we shall die, but we want to die. We want to die.
Due to the missionaries, from the mid-i890s on Leopold had to deal with scattered protests, like Sheppard s articles, about severed hands and slaughtered Africans. But the critics at first captured litde attention, for they were not as skilled at public relations as the king, who deployed his formidable charm to neutralize them.
As a start, he encouraged mission society officials to talk with him directly, personally urging one French clergyman to do this "instead of having recourse to the press, which is always unpleasant (toujours des- agreable)" Then he artfully used both promise and threat. While cultivat- ing their leaders, he made sure to remind the mission societies of the Congo state s ability to impose taxes or deny permission to build new missions. The Southern Presbyterian mission where Sheppard worked had endless trouble getting new land it wanted to build on. A Swedish Baptist missionary, E.V Sjoblom, was perhaps Leopold's
most forceful critic in the late 1890s, speaking to all who would listen and publishing a detailed attack on the Congo's rubber terror in the Swedish press in 1896, an attack that was picked up by newspapers in other countries. At a public meeting in London the following year, Sjoblom told how African Force Publique soldiers were rewarded for the number of hands they collected. "[An] agent told me that he had himself seen a State officer at one of the outposts pay a certain number of brass rods (local currency) to the soldiers for a number of hands they had brought. One of the soldiers told me . . . 'The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service. I have brought in plenty of hands already, and I expect my time of service will soon be finished.'" State officials threatened Sjoblom in the Congo itself and quickly counterattacked in the Belgian and British press.
Another knowledgeable opponent of Leopold's was H. R. Fox Bourne, secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society, a group that had grown considerably wiser since it had elected Leopold its honorary presi- dent a decade earlier. The king himselfreportedly paid a visit to the office of the Times in London to try to persuade the newspaper not to run Fox Bourne's articles.
Publicly, however, Leopold took the high road, pronouncing himself deeply shocked at reports ofmisdeeds in his domain. Most accusations he was able to survive with little damage, for they concerned atrocities
173
WALKING INTO FIRE
committed against Africans. But in 1895 he faced his first real trouble in
Europe when a particularly brutal Congo state officer, as one shocked
British journalist put it, "dared to kill an Englishman.
"
The victim was actually Irish: Charles Stokes, a colorful, flamboyant
trader who had, as the British liked to say, gone native, marrying an
African woman. Stokes's ivory trading competed with the lucrative mo-
nopoly Leopold was trying to establish in the eastern Congo. He was also
accused of selling arms to the Afro-Arabs. A Force Publique expedition went looking for Stokes near the state's eastern border, found him, and
hanged him on the spot. The London press thundered its outrage. There
was also a wave of protest in Germany, for Stokes's home base was in
German East Africa, and the Congo state was supposedly open to Ger-
man traders. In a vain attempt to dampen the outcry, the Congo govern-
ment admitted its mistake and made large indemnity payments to the
British and German governments. But this was not the end ofthe matter.
One German paper declared that ifthe Congo had so cavalierly executed
a white man, think what4t must do to the natives. The European press
began paying more attention to news ofCongo atrocities.
Leopold had to act. In 1896 he appointed the Commission for the
Protection of the Natives: six prominent Congo missionaries, three of
them Belgian Catholics, three foreign Protestants. The commission was
greeted as a good thing everywhere in Europe, especially in England,
where the king was most worried about criticism. "It is wholly to King
Leopold s credit that he should have squarely faced the facts of the situ-
ation," said the Manchester Guardian.
Few people noticed that none of the commission members was based
in any of the prime rubber areas where the atrocity reports were coming
from; that the commissioners were scattered over more than a thousand
miles; that the king had provided no money for them to travel to meet-
ings; that one of the British members had previously advised his fellow
missionaries against publishing any atrocity stories; that another had sur-
veyed the Congo-Angola frontier for Leopold; and that the commission
had no power whatever except to "inform" the Congo state authorities
about abuses.
The commission met only twice, and each time, because of distance
and expense, only three of the six members managed to attend. But for
Leopold, the move was a public relations coup, and he cemented his
triumph with visits to England, Germany, and Sweden in the summer of
1897. For the next few years Britons were distracted by the Boer War, and
174
A SECRET SOCIETY OP MURDERERS
attacks on Leopold almost completely disappeared from the European press. The king's critics kept up sporadic fire, but no one seemed to heed them. They despaired ofattracting much attention again. Had there been approval ratings in Europe at the time, the closing
years of the century would have found Leopold at his peak offavor, both
abroad and at home. In Belgium, colonial chauvinism now began to bubble up in verse:
Sur les plages ou les entraine
La voix d yun sage Souverain,
Nos soldats vont Vdme sereine f
Affrontant un climat d'airain,
De VAjricain briser la chaine
En domptant VArabe inhumain
(On the beaches where a wise Sovereign's voice draws them,
Our soldiers, hearts serene, brave the brazen climate
To break the African's chain, and subdue the cruel Arab)
However, the sovereign's voice pushed rather than drew his soldiers to
the beachheads, for, although the Congo was the dominating passion of his life, Leopold never went there.
Why should he have done so? The Congo in Leopold's mind was not the one of starving porters, raped hostages, emaciated rubber slaves, and
severed hands. It was the empire of his dreams, with gigantic trees, exotic
animals, and inhabitants grateful for his wise rule. Instead of going there,
Leopold brought the Congo— that Congo, the theatrical production of his imagination— to himself. Red mahogany from it paneled the bed- room of his private railway car, animals from it appeared in Belgian zoos, and to the array ofhuge greenhouses at Laeken the king added a Congo Greenhouse (still full ofpalm trees today), topped with four glass cupolas
and an octagonal dome bearing the star emblem of his private state. From that serene, picturesque Congo stage setting of his fantasy,
Leopold brought to himself even its people. In 1897, when a world's fair took place in Brussels, the most talked-about exhibit was on the outskirts
of the city, at Tervuren. More than a million visitors came to see this celebration of the Congo. Items on display ranged from that great instru-
ment of civilization so praised by Stanley (who twice visited the fair), the Maxim gun, to a large set of linen tapestries portraying Barbarism and
175
WALKING INTO PIRB
Civilization, Fetishism and Christianity, Polygamy and Family Life, Slav-
ery and Freedom. The most extraordinary tableau, however, was a living
one: 267 black men, women, and children imported from the Congo.*
With great fanfare they were brought by train to Brussels's Gare du
Nord and then marched across the center of the city to take the tram for
Tervuren. There, in a park, they were installed in three specially con-
structed villages: a river village, a forest village, and a "civilized" village. A pair ofPygmies rounded out the show. The "uncivilized" Africans of the
first two villages used tools, drums, and cooking pots brought from home.
They danced and paddled their dugout canoes around a pond. During
the day they were on exhibit in "authentic" bamboo African huts with
overhanging thatched roofs. European men hoping to see the fabled bare
breasts of Africa went away disappointed, however, for the women were
made to wear cotton dressing gowns while at the fair. Clothing, a local
magazine observed, was, after all, "the first sign of civilization"
Leopold himselfcame to see the Congolese, his dream made flesh, and
was introduced to one of their chiefs. Told that some ofthe Africans were
suffering from indigestion because ofsnacks and candy given them by the
public, he ordered up the equivalent ofa don't-feed-the-animals sign. The
placard said: the blacks are fed by the organizing committee.
They were fed— and slept— in the royal stables. The local press titillated its readers by speculating about whether the
"uncivilized" Africans were dangerous. A reporter approached a circle of
* These were not the only indigenous people placed on exhibit at world's fairs and
elsewhere around the turn ofthe century. Perhaps the most appalling case was that ofOta
Benga, a Pygmy from the Congo, who was displayed in the monkey house ofNew York's
Bronx Zoo in September 1906. An orangutan shared his space. Visitors ogled his teeth —
filed, newspaper articles hinted, for devouring human flesh. To further this impression,
zookeepers left a few bones scattered on the floor around him. A poem published in the
NewYorkTimes declared that Ota Benga had been brought
From his native land ofdarkness,
To the country of thefree,
In the interest ofscience
And ofbroad humanity
The promoter who staged this exhibit was a former Presbyterian missionary who
abandoned his preaching for several business ventures. A delegation of black ministers
finally rescued Ota Benga from the zoo. He remained in the United States and committed
suicide ten years later.
176
A SfeftRHT SOCIETY OP MURDERERS
them. "At the center, sitting on a log, was the chief, motionless and sacrosanct. The voice of a singer was first heard alone; then a chorus picked up a refrain, accompanied by hand claps and the banging of sticks on metal objects, and by a swaying motion of these crouching bodies. And what were the soloist and chorus singing about? The magnificent deeds of [Force Publique Captain Hubert] Lothaire, the great warrior."
All was well.
The Africans ofthe "civilized" village included ninety Force Publique soldiers, some ofwhom made up a military band. The soldiers marched, the band played, and, near the end oftheir stay were guests at a banquet.A black sergeant rose and proposed a toast to King Leopold II. When the Africans sailed for home, a newspaper rhapsodized, "The soul ofBelgium follows them, and, like the shield ofJupiter, protects them. May we always thus show the world an example ofhumanity!"
The ship that took the Congolese back to their homeland probably returned to Belgium with a cargo of rubber, for the riches of the Congo were now flowing to Europe on a regular schedule. Every few weeks, a fine new steamer, equipped with electric lights and refrigerators, arrived at Antwerp filled with rubber, ivory, and other products. The vessels belonged to a subsidiary of Elder Dempster, a Liverpool-based shipping
line whose steamers had long plied the west coast ofAfrica. The firm had the contract for carrying all cargo to and from the Congo. For anybody curious about the Congo state, few jobs in Europe provided a better vantage point than a position with Elder Dempster. It was as if, in 1942 or
1943, somebody who began to wonder what was happening to the Jews had taken ajob inside the headquarters of the Nazi railway system.
Elder Dempster needed someone to go to Belgium frequendy to supervise the arrival and departure of ships on the Congo run. The company gave this task to a bright, hardworking young man on its staff, Edmund Dene Morel. Morel, then in his mid-twenties, was, conveniendy, bilingual. His mother was English; his father had been a low-ranking French civil servant who died young, leaving no pension for his widow and small son. After a childhood on the edge ofpoverty, both in England and France, Morel had left school at fifteen to work in Paris to support his ailing mother. A few years later, he took a position as a clerk in Liverpool for Elder Dempster.
177
wX1kin6 1WT6 MftB
Unable at first to adequately support his mother and himself on his
meager clerk's salary, the young Morel had also given French lessons for
two shillings and sixpence an hour. Then he found a more satisfying
sideline: writing free-lance articles on African trade issues for publications
like the Shipping Telegraph and the Liverpool Journal of Commerce. These
pieces reflected a businessman's view: they celebrated increases in cotton
production and shipping tonnage and seldom questioned the prevailing
dogmas of the day. Some praised Leopold's regime. "A great future is in
store for the Congo," Morel wrote in one, "and . . . those vast territories
secured to their country by the foresight ofKing Leopold II will one day
prove a magnificent field for [Belgian] enterprise."
It was with such enthusiasm that, in the late 1890s, Morel began
traveling back and forth across the English Channel as his company's
liaison with officials of the Congo state. Here is how he later described
the scene he saw once or twice a month:
The quay at Antwerp; a steamer moored alongside; the musical
chimes ringing from the old cathedral spire; the sound of the
Brabanconne— the Belgian national anthem. On the quay and on the steamer s decks, a jostling, modey crowd. Military uniforms,
the flutter of women's dresses. Ship's officers gliding to and fro.
The hatches battening down. Steam getting up. Surrounded by
groups of relatives or boon companions, passengers bound Con-
gowards. Men, of whose fitness for residing and governing in
tropical Africa even a novice would have doubts. Young mosdy,
and mostly of a poor type, undersized, pallid, wastrels. Some
shaken with sobs; others stumbling in semi-intoxication. Many
wearing broad tropical felts [hats] and with guns slung across
their shoulders, proud possessors for the first time in their lives of
either. Here and there an older bronzed individual— one who has obviously been through all this before. The faces of these,
distinctly not good to look upon; scarred with brutality, with
cruel and lustful eyes; faces from which one turns with an invol-
untary shudder of repulsion.
As Elder Dempster representative in Belgium, Morel dealt not just
with business at the wharf, but with Leopold's top Congo executives. He
later recalled how an episode in the office ofthe highest-ranking ofthem
awakened his suspicions:
178
A SECRET SOCIETY 6* MtRDBRBRS
A room whose windows look out upon the back of the Royal Palace at Brussels. A gloomy room, thick-carpeted, heavy cur- tained: a room of oppressive shadows. In its centre a man, seated
at a desk.A man thin to emaciation, with narrow, stooping shoul- ders; with receding forehead, high curved nose, large ears set
far back: lantern jawed, cold eyed. A face in repose passively in- human, bloodless, petrified, all sharp bones and gaunt cavities:
the face of the then "Secretary of State" for the Congo Free
State. . . . The physiognomy of the Secretary of State undergoes
a remarkable and disconcerting transformation. It becomes af-
fected by a sort of involuntary twitching. ... It is the face of
another man that looks at us. The mask ofan impeccable official- dom peels off like a powdered glove from the hand. He leans forward and in rapid staccato accents complains that confidential
information as to the last outward-bound steamer's cargo has
been divulged to the Press. . . . The paragraph is pointed out. It
looks innocent enough, being a list of the principal articles on
board. But that list contains an enumeration of the cases of ball
cartridges [rifle bullets], the cases of rifles and the boxes of per-
cussion-cap guns [military muskets]. . . . That is the fault. That is
the lapse from professional secrecy. As the enormity ofthe indis-
cretion is denounced, the speaker rises, the cadaverous cheeks
flush, the voice trembles ... the long bony hands saw the air. He will hear no excuses; allow no interruption. Again and again he
repeats the words secret prqfessionnel with passionate emphasis. His
gestures are violent. . . . The youngest individual present leaves
the room wondering why so large a quantity of material of war is required . . . why its export should be kept secret and why the Congo Government should be so greatly troubled at the
"indiscretion."
At the dockside at Antwerp, Morel saw what the Elder Dempster ships
were carrying. But he soon noticed that the records he carefully com- piled for his employer did not conform with the trade statistics that the
Etat Independant du Congo announced to the public. As he studied the discrepancies between the two sets of figures, he began to uncover an
elaborate skein offraud. Three discoveries shocked him:
The first was that the arms cargo sent to the Congo whose disclosure had so upset the secretary of state was not an exception; it was the rule:
179
WALKING INTO FIRE
"Elder Dempster steamers employed in the Congo trade had been regu-
larly shipping for the past few years prodigious quantities ofball cartridge
and thousands of rifles and cap-guns either consigned to the State itselfor
to sundry Belgian 'trading' Companies, ... To what usage was this arma-
ment put?"
Morel's second discovery was that somebody was skimming hand-
some profits off the top. To the tune of tens of millions of today's dollars,
"the amount of rubber and ivory brought home from the Congo in the
Elder Dempster ships ... greatiy exceeded the amounts indicated in the
Congo Government's returns. . . . Into whose pocket did the unavowed
surplus go?"
His final discovery lay starkly before him on the docks, as he watched
the ships being loaded and unloaded, and it was confirmed in Elder
Dempster s records. There he found the most ominous message of all: "Of
the imports going into the Congo something like 80% consisted of
articles which were remote from trade purposes. Yet, the Congo was
exporting increasing quantities ofrubber and ivory for which, on the face
of the import statistics, the natives were getting nothing or next to noth-
ing. How, then, was this rubber and ivory being acquired? Certainly not
by commercial dealing. Nothing was going in to pay for what was com-
ing out."
Morel was right.We now know that the value of the rubber, ivory, and other riches coming to Europe each year on the Elder Dempster ships
was roughly five times that of goods being shipped to the Congo that
were destined for Africans. In return for the rubber and ivory, Morel
knew, it was not possible that the Congo's Africans were being paid in
money— which he knew they were not allowed to use— or in goods that came from elsewhere, for Elder Dempster had the cargo monopoly.
Clearly, they were not being paid at all.
Later in life, E. D. Morel was to become good friends with Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. But the young Morel
made a deduction more far-reaching than anything accomplished by
Holmes. From what he saw at the wharf in Antwerp, and from studying
his company's records in Liverpool, he deduced the existence— on an- other continent, thousands of miles away— of slavery.
"These figures told their own story. . . . Forced labour of a terrible
and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard-of profits . . .
forced labour in which the Congo Government was the immediate
beneficiary; forced labour directed by the closest associates of the King
180
A SECftfef ibCIBTY OP MURDERERS
himself. ... I was giddy and appalled at the cumulative significance of
my discoveries. It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman."
With this brilliant flash of recognition by an obscure shipping-com- pany official, King Leopold II acquired his most formidable enemy.
181
II
A KING AT BAY
12
DAVID AND GOLIATH
AT the time E. D. Morel made his discoveries, most people in Europe and the United States knew surprisingly little about
Leopold's apparatus of exploitation. Few Europeans who came home from the Congo said much in public about the bloodshed they had participated in. Except for George Washington Williams, almost ten years
earlier, journalists who went to the Congo usually copied Stanley in celebrating the king's regime. (Twenty-six ofthem traveled there to mar-
vel over the opening of the railway in 1898, for instance.) The foreign
missionaries, who had seen so many atrocities, had little media savvy or political clout. Leopold's critics from British humanitarian societies were
easily dismissed by the public as relics ofpast batdes like Abolitionism and
as people who were always upset about something in some obscure corner of the world.
Morel would change all this. Until now, none of Leopold's oppo-
nents had had access to the facts and figures from the Congo administra-
tion in Europe that Morel had gleaned from his insider's position at Elder
Dempster. And until now none, except the prematurely dead Williams, had had another quality Morel would soon exhibit: a rare skill at publiciz-
ing his message.
Having made his dramatic discoveries, Morel refused to remain quiet.
First, he confronted his boss, Sir Alfred Jones, head ofthe Elder Dempster
line, president ofthe Liverpool Chamber ofCommerce— and honorary consul in Liverpool ofthe Congo state. "He was not the easiest ofmen to approach. He disliked having unpleasant facts brought to his notice. . . .
1S5
A KING AT BAY
The next day he left for Brussels. Upon his return he preserved silence, as far as I was concerned, and I noted a marked coldness in his manner. . . .
He told me he had seen the King and the King had promised him that reforms would be carried out, and that the Belgians were doing great
things and must have time to set their African house in order."
Morel's employers were at great risk. Ifhe made his information public
and angered Leopold, the company could lose the lucrative Congo ship-
ping contract. Now company officers did not know how to cope with this upstart junior functionary who was telling them that he had discov- ered something terrible about their best customer— and, worse, was demanding that they do something about it.
In Belgium, Morel found, abrupdy "the atmosphere changed and in a
hundred subde ways it was intimated to me that my presence was unwel- come." He was cold-shouldered at Elder Dempster headquarters in Liv- erpool; then the company tried to silence him. It offered him a higher
salary and a promotion to a post in some other country. When that didn't work, Jones offered him £200 a year to be an hour-a-day consultant, a
thinly veiled attempt to buy him off. Morel again refused. In 190 1, he quit
his job and took up his pen full-time, filled with "determination to do
my best to expose and destroy what I then knew to be a legalized infamy . . . accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for a vast
destruction ofhuman life."
Morel knew he had taken a momentous step. "I had launched the
boat" he wrote, "and there could be no turning back." He was twenty- eight years old.
From Morel's hand there now flowed a torrent of attacks on Leopold. At first he went to work for a British newspaper dealing with Africa, but
its editor limited what he could say about the Congo. So in 1903, with
funding from various sources, includingJohn Holt, a Liverpool business-
man known for his integrity who was something of a mentor to Morel, he started his own publication. The West African Mail, "An Illustrated
Weekly Journal Founded to Meet the Rapidly Growing Interest in West
& Central African Questions " would be a forum where no one could censor him.
Morel was all of a piece: his thick handlebar mustache and tall, barrel-
chested frame exuded forcefulness; his dark eyes blazed with indignation.
The millions ofwords that would flow from his pen over the remainder
186
DAVID AND GOXIATH
of his life came in a handwriting that raced across the page in bold,
forward-slanting lines, flattened by speed, as if they had no time to spare
in reaching their destination.
In certain ways Morel is harder to fathom than some of the other
figures of the Congo story. For example, it is easy to see how Stanley's painful poorhouse childhood may have fostered his cruel streak and the drive to place his mark on the world. The origin of the fiery passion for
justice that fueled Morel is less evident. He spent his youth in the business world, not in the socialist movement that inspired many turn-of-the-cen- tury crusaders. As a young man, he was not active in any political party or
social cause. Although he had some Quaker ancestors, he may have dis-
covered them only later in life, for there is no record of his receiving
Quaker teachings as a child. Formally, he was an unenthusiastic member of the Church of England, but at heart, like another great firebrand of
Quaker ancestry, Thomas Paine, he had little use for any form of organ-
ized religion. From his campaign against King Leopold, he had nothing
to gain, only a promising career at Elder Dempster to lose. He had a sick mother, a wife, and what would soon be a large family to support. In
every way, he seemed an unlikely person to become the leader of a great
moral crusade. His prodigious capacity for indignation seems to be some-
thing he was born with, as some people are born with great musical
talent. After learning what he had in Brussels and Antwerp, he writes, "to
have sat still . . . would have been temperamentally impossible."
It was this smoldering sense of outrage that led Morel to become, in
short order, the greatest British investigative journalist of his time. Once he determined to find out all he could about the workings ofthe Congo and to reveal it to the world, he produced a huge, albeit sometimes
repetitive, body of work on the subject: three full books and portions of
two others, hundreds of articles for almost all the major British newspa-
pers, plus many written in French for papers in France and Belgium,
hundreds of letters to the editor, and several dozen pamphlets (he turned
out six in one six-month stretch, one ofthem in French). He did all this while continuing to edit the West African Mail and to write much of it. Besides the articles under his byline, many columns by "Africanus" or "An Observer" seem the work of the editor himself. Before long, Morel was also editing a special monthly supplement to the newspaper, devoted
solely to exposing injustice in the Congo. And despite the pace of his work, he found time for a hobby, collecting different species ofmoths.
Morel's writing combined controlled fury with meticulous accuracy.
187
A KING AT BAY
Every detail in his books came from careful research, the evidence
amassed as painstakingly as in a lawyer's brief. Over the years both admir-
ers and enemies have searched his work for factual errors, with scant
success. Even today, in almost any account of the rubber system in
Leopold's Congo, if you trace statistics and quotations to their sources,
many ofthem prove to have been first printed by Morel.
Although his soon became the most energetic voice in England di-
rected against the Congo atrocities, it was not the only one. A few mem- bers of Parliament, especially Sir Charles Dilke, one of the most eloquent
proponents of human rights in his day, spoke out strongly. Then there were the humanitarian groups like the Anti-Slavery Society and the
Aborigines Protection Society; they preached a Christian humanitarian-
ism, which, though it sounds somewhat paternalistic to our ears today,
they applied to denouncing brutalities wherever they occurred, in Eng-
land's colonies or elsewhere. Morel differed from them not only in his
torrential energy but in his fervent belief that the Congo was a case apart, an entire state deliberately and systematically founded on slave labor. The
humanitarians, Morel wrote, emphasized "the atrocious nature of the
deeds committed, while my endeavor from the first was to show that given certain premises [Leopold's taking as his own the land and all its products] . . . those deeds must ofnecessity take place."
An important influence on Morel was the writer Mary Kingsley, who became a friend just before her death, in 1900. Kingsley's 1897 Travels in
West Africa is both a high-spirited classic of travel writing and one of the
first books by a European that treats Africans as human beings. She saw them not as "savages" in need of civilization, but as people living in
coherent societies that were being torn apart by colonialists and mission-
aries who had no appreciation ofAfrican life. Leopold s decree that "vacant" lands belonged to the state, as Morel
came to see it, completely destroyed the traditional systems ofcommunal
ownership of land and its products. He had learned from Kingsley that most land in Africa traditionally belonged in common to one village, clan, or tribe. If it was not being used for crops, it was a hunting ground
or a source of wood for building, iron for tools and weapons, or other materials.
Besides being theft, the seizure of the land left the Africans nothing to
trade with, which was especially upsetting to Morel, who had a passionate faith in free trade. Like Kingsley, he was convinced that only free trade
would humanely bring Africa into the modern age. In a way surprisingly
188
DAVID AND GOLIATH
conventional for such a firebrand, Morel assumed that what was good
for the merchants of Liverpool was good for Africa. His belief is under-
standable, because several of his Liverpool businessmen friends were
Quakers who took their business ethics seriously and who supported him unstintingly.
Morel now plunged ahead with books, speeches, articles, and pam-
phlets about the Congo. There was no question of his actually traveling
there, for Leopold routinely banned unfriendly journalists. But this did
not faze him. Once Morel had staked out his position as the best-in-
formed, most outspoken critic of the Congo state, insiders knew that he
was the man to come to ifthey had any revealing documents to leak. And
the rnore he published, the more they leaked. His knack for getting inside
information continually enraged Leopold and the men around him. As
the king's well-burnished version of the Congo was put on display in
world's fairs, greenhouses, and museums, a very different Congo began to
be seen in the pages of the West African Mail
When, for example, Leopold's spokesmen indignandy denied that
there was any kidnapping of women to force their husbands to gather rubber, Morel reproduced the printed form in French where each agent
of the A.B.I.R. concession company had to list "natives under bodily
detention during the month of , 1903." Across the page were col-
umns to be filled in for each hostage: "Name," "Village," "Reason for
arrest," "Starting date," "Ending date," "Observations." And there was no
doubt why people were being held "under bodily detention"; he also
printed an order from A.B.I.R. management instructing agents about the
"up-keep and feeding of hostages."
Dissident state or company employees in the Congo could not easily
write to Morel direcdy, for a cabinet noir} or censorship office, in Boma monitored their correspondence. But when these men came home, they
brought documents. For years, one of Morel's secret sources was Ray-
mond De Grez, a decorated Force Publique veteran, wounded in action
several times, who quiedy supplied Morel with a stream of inside infor-
mation from a post in Brussels. Someone in the Belgian head office of
a big Congo company— the one that had hired Joseph Conrad as a steamboat captain— apparendy passed on to Morel a collection ofletters from the company's agents in the Congo. And ifany disillusioned Congo
veteran came home and gave a newspaper interview, whether in Belgium
or Germany, Sweden or Italy, Morel s contacts would send him a clipping,
and he made sure that the critical information found its way into the
A KING AT BAY
British press. He even taunted the Congo administration once by print- ing, in the original French, a long itemized list of confidential memo- randa, letters, and other documents that someone had offered to sell him.
His campaign encouraged opposition to Leopold in Belgium, espe-
cially among the socialists in Parliament. And when damaging informa- tion surfaced in Belgian parliamentary debates, Morel quickly reprinted
it for the much larger audience in England. One revealing item he pub- lished, for example, was a secret order to Congo state officials in the field
about bonuses they would get for men conscripted into the Force Pub- lique: "90 francs for every healthy and vigorous man considered fit for military service, and whose stature exceeds 1 metre 55 centimetres; 65
francs for every youth whose stature is at least 1 metre 35 centimetres; 15
francs per male child. The male children must be at least 1 metre 20
centimetres in height, and must be sufficiendy strong to be able to sup-
port the fatigues of the road. . . . The bonus will only fall due when the men have been handed over to the headquarters of the various districts." The Congo's acting governor general added a warning to local officials
that this order "must under no pretext be removed from your archives.
You will convey to your subordinates such explanations as may be neces-
sary in connection with this circular, verbally." Morel gleefully included
that warning as well.
From other material cited in Belgian parliamentary debates, Morel
quoted a letter that a Force Publique officer, Lieutenant Edouard Tilkens,
had written to his commander: "I expect a general uprising. I think I
warned you of this, Major. . . . The motive is always the same. The natives are tired of . . . transport work, rubber collecting, furnishing livestock. . . .
For three months I have been fighting, with ten days' rest. ... I have 152
prisoners. For two years I have been making war in this country, always
accompanied by forty or fifty Albinis [soldiers armed with Albini breech-
loading rifles]. Yet I cannot say I have subjugated the people. . . . They
prefer to die. . . . What can I do?"
Other vital sources ofinformation were certain British, American, and
Swedish missionaries. The Congo state censors couldn't read their letters,
because they had their own steamboats and colleagues who could per- sonally carry mail back to Europe. For years the missionaries had been
helpless witnesses to chicotte whippings, Force Publique raids, burned
villages, and the other aspects of rubber slavery in action. Suddenly, here
was someone not only eager to publish their testimony, but to put it in
igo
DAVID AND GOLIATH
the hands ofthe British Parliament. Morel barraged the missionaries with
requests for more information. They gladly complied, and also began
sending what turned out to be powerful tools for Morel's campaign:
photographs— of devastated villages, severed hands, children with miss- ing hands and feet.
The missionaries provided some of the most horrifying accounts Mo- rel published. An American described seeing Congo state soldiers cut off someone's hand "while the poor heart beat strongly enough to shoot the
blood from the cut arteries at a distance of fully four feet." A British Baptist described a Congo state official punishing some men for stealing rubber: "For this he had them tied up right in the sun to stakes for a day
and a night. . . . They were naked and without food and water all day, and
so great was their agony that their tongues were hanging out."
Sometimes missionaries sent Morel the names of the dead, and these,
too, he published, like casualty lists in wartime. Nowhere else, of course,
did these names ever appear in print:
1. Bokangu .... Chief. . . Killed with blows with butt ofgun
2. Mangundwa ...".... . " " " " " " M
3. Ekunja " " M
" " " " "
21. Ekumba Man . . . Shot 22. Monjangu " "
23. Gili Woman.. "
24. Akaba Boy "
Morel also exposed the web of deceptions, large and small, continually
spun by Leopold and his allies. Little escaped him. For example, the king
went to great lengths to cultivate Sir Hugh Gilzean Reid, a prominent
British Baptist, newspaper owner, and former member of Parliament.
Leopold invited Gilzean Reid to the Royal Palace several times, gave him
the Order ofLeopold, and made him a Knight Commander ofthe Order
of the Crown. In return, Gilzean Reid led a delegation from the Baptist
Missionary Society to Brussels in 1903. There, at a luncheon with the
king and other prominent Belgians, the society presented a "memorial of
thanks" voicing the hope that "the peoples of the Congo may ever have
the advantage of just and upright rule" Morel swiftly pointed out in
print that when Gilzean Read passed the news on to the London Morning
191
A KING AT BAY
Post, he rewrote the Baptist message to express to the king the hope that
"the peoples of the Congo State may realise increasingly the advantages
of your enlightened rule"
Morel s attacks soon drew a response from the Royal Palace. One evening
in London, Sir Alfred Jones, Morel s former boss, invited Morel to a
dinner party. The two men's relations were, to say the least, strained, but at
the meal all was smiles, and, Morel writes, "the wines were choice and
copious." After dinner,Jones and the other guests retired, leaving Morel
alone with a visiting Antwerp shipping executive named Aerts, who made it clear that he was acting as Leopold's representative.
After one last attempt to convince Morel that the king meant well and
that reforms were in the offing, the visitor took, as Morel describes it, a
different tack (the ellipsis is in the original):
What were the Congo natives to me? Of what use this pursuit of an unrealisable ideal? I was a young man. I had a family— yes? I was running serious risks. And then, a delicately, very deli-
cately veiled suggestion that my permanent interests would be better served if. . . . "A bribe?" Oh! dear, no, nothing so vulgar,
so demeaning. But there were always means of arranging these
things. Everything could be arranged with honour to all sides. It
was a most entertaining interview, and lasted until a very late
hour. "So nothing will shake your determination?" "I fear not."
We parted with mutual smiles. But my companion, I thought, was a little ruffled. For my part I enjoyed myselfmost thoroughly.
One of the eyewitness attacks on Leopold's regime that Morel pub- lished consisted ofseveral articles by an American, whose testimony, given
at greater length in a 1903 book, was devastating [see pages 1 31-13 3 for
one instance already cited]. On his latest tour ofduty in the Congo, Edgar Canisius nominally had been a business agent of the Societe Anversoise
du Commerce au Congo, one of the big rubber concession companies,
but in effect he was a counterguerrilla commander. When the thirty- four-year-old Canisius arrived at his post near the northwestern border
of the Congo, at the start of 1900, the company had been harvesting
rubber for several years, and vines were getting scarce. The gatherers of
the Budja tribe, he writes, "became mere slaves to the company, for
192
DAVID AND GOLIATH
rubber-making occupied all their time, the victim having to search far
and wide for the giant vines from which the sap is extracted. They were
not even fed by their taskmasters, their only remuneration being mer-
chandise or mitakos [pieces of brass wire] in ridiculously small quanti-
ties. . . . The natives bitterly bemoaned the scarcity ofthe rubber-produc-
ing lianas, and piteously begged to be allowed to perform other service
than rubber-gathering."
Rebellious Budjas had killed thirty soldiers, and several punitive expe-
ditions were sent against them. Canisius and two other white officers led
one, accompanied by a force of fifty black troops and thirty porters. The
column marched into villages abandoned by the fleeing Budjas and left
scorched earth in its wake. "As our party moved through village after
village. ... A party ofmen had been detailed with torches to fire every hut. ... As we progressed, a line of smoke hung over the jungle for
many miles, announcing to the natives far and wide that civilization was
dawning."
Porters carried the soldiers' supplies. "We . . . marched . . . through
native clearings, where the trunks oflarge trees lay by hundreds across our
path. Over these we had to climb, the trail seeming to lead to the top of
every high ant-hill within range. The carriers had an especially hard time,
for many of them were chained together by the neck. . . . They carried
our boxes slung on poles, and when one fell he usually brought down all
his companions on the same chain. Many of the poor wretches became
so exhausted by this kind of marching that they could be urged forward
only by blows from the butt-ends of the rifles. Some had their shoulders
so chafed by the poles that they literally shrieked with pain."
From a military post far in the interior, Canisius's troops searched the
jungle for rebels, and when they captured them, worked them to death:
"All were compelled to carry heavy loads, each ofwhich had previously
required two men to transport . . . until they finally succumbed to starva-
tion and smallpox."
As the fighting grew worse, the troops took to killing their prisoners,
in one case thirty ofthem at a time. By the time the campaign was over,
"we had undergone six weeks of painful marching and had killed over
nine hundred natives, men, women, and children." The incentive, and the
cause of the deaths, was the potential of "adding fully twenty tons of
rubber to the monthly crop."
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A KING AT BAY
By 1903, after several years of hard work, Morel and his allies in Parlia- ment and the humanitarian societies had succeeded in putting the
"Congo Question" on the British public agenda more prominendy than
it had ever been. In May, following a major debate, the House of Com- mons unanimously passed a resolution urging that Congo "natives should be governed with humanity." The resolution also protested Leopold's failure to live up to his promises about free trade. Morel was
proving a shrewd lobbyist. Behind the scenes he fed information to the
speakers who supported the resolution; he would do so during many parliamentary debates on the Congo yet to come.
Leopold was alarmed. Britain was the superpower of the day and the
most prominent colonial power in Africa. If it turned the full force of its
influence against the Congo state, his profits would be at risk. Was a journalist like Morel capable of initiating this? Morel had been able to
launch a barrage of criticism in print and to inspire a parliamentary
resolution, but getting a reluctant British government to put pressure on
a friendly monarch was surely something else. Leopold and his entourage
were well aware of the difference: a Belgian newspaper editor had once
shrewdly remarked that Lord Salisbury, the long-time British prime min-
ister, "is not a man to care much about the fate of the blacks, any more than that of the Armenians or the Bulgarians
."
Leopold's rule had been thoroughly exposed for what it was, but it
remained in place. For the moment, he and Morel were at a stalemate.
Neither knew that it would soon be broken by a man who, the very day after the British parliamentary debate ended, had embarked on a steam-
boatjourney up the Congo River.
194
13
BREAKING INTO THE
THIEVES' KITCHEN
When Morel's allies in Parliament got the Congo protest reso- lution passed in May of 1903, the Foreign Office sent a telegram
to His Majesty's consul in the Congo, ordering him "to go to interior as
soon as possible, and to send reports soon."
The consul who received this telegram was an Irishman named Roger Casement, a veteran of twenty years in Africa. The first time we catch a
glimpse of him in connection with the Congo, in fact, is in a photo-
graph from some two decades earlier. It shows a group of four young
friends who went to work in the territory in the very early days ofKing Leopolds regime. They wear coats, ties, and high, starched collars. Three
have bluff, hearty British faces, faces from a thousand other posed group
photos of army cadets or rugby players. But the fourth man, with a
handsome black beard, black hair, and heavy brows, has a quizzical tilt of
the head and a pensive look that sets him apart from the other three.
"Figure and face," wrote the Irish writer Stephen Gwynn, who knew Casement only later, "he seemed to me one of the finest-looking crea- tures I had ever seen; and his countenance had charm and distinction and
a high chivalry. Knight errant he was."
It was back in 1883 that the nineteen-year-old Roger Casement first
made the long voyage out to the Congo, working, as it happened, as a
purser on an Elder Dempster ship. He returned the following year and remained in the territory through the rest ofthe 1880s. He ran the supply base for the ill-fated Sanford Exploring Expedition and worked for the
m
A KING AT BAY
surveyors charting the course for the railway around the rapids. He be- came, he claimed, the first white man who ever swam across the croco- dile-infested Inkisi River.When he served as the lay business manager ofa Baptist mission station, he drew some gende disapproval from his em-
ployer, who thought he didn't bargain hard enough at buying food. "He is very good to the natives, too good, too generous, too ready to give
away. He would never make money as a trader." When Stanley slogged through the Congo on his Emin Pasha Relief
Expedition, Casement accompanied him for a week. "A good specimen
of the capable Englishman," noted the explorer in his journal, not notic-
ing that Casement was Irish. Casement was a better judge of Stanley, for
although the explorer remained something of a hero to him, Casement
recognized Stanley's sadistic streak. After seeing that Stanley's dog lacked a
tail, he learned to his horror that Stanley had cut off the tail, cooked it,
and fed it to the dog to eat.
Casement saw much more brutality on the part of other white men in Africa! It is hard to tell whether there was a particular moral turning
point for him, as there would be for E. D. Morel when he made his
discoveries in Antwerp and Brussels. One such moment for Casement may have been in 1887, when he traveled up the Congo River on a
steamboat that also carried a Force Publique officer named Guillaume
Van Kerckhoven. Van Kerckhoven was a hot-headed, notoriously aggres-
sive commander with a rakish grin and waxed-tip mustache, one of
whose expeditions even the Congo's governor gjneral called "a hurri-
cane which passed through the countryside leaving nothing but devasta-
tion behind it" Casement listened, aghast, as Van Kerckhoven cheerfully
explained how he paid his black soldiers "5 brass rods (2V2 d.) per human head they brought him during the course of any military operations he
conducted. He said it was to stimulate their prowess in the face of the enemy."
In 1890, whenJoseph Conrad arrived at Matadi, he jotted in his diary:
"Made the acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement, which I should con-
sider as a great pleasure under any circumstances. . . . Thinks, speaks well,
most intelligent and very sympathetic" The rough-and-ready Matadi, a
hot, humid collection of corrugated sheet-iron buildings spread on a
hillside overlooking the Congo River, was filled with drunken sailors,
African prostitutes, and young European and American adventurers hop-
ing to get rich quickly off the ivory boom. Both Casement and Conrad
felt alienated from this gold rush atmosphere; they shared a room for
ig6
BREAKING INTO THE THIEVES KITCHEN
some ten days while Conrad waited to go inland, and together visited
nearby villages.
Everyone found Casement an impressive talker. "His greatest charm
was his voice, which was very musical," a colleague remembered. "Case-
ment doesn't talk to you," another person said. "He purrs at you." Talking
or purring, Casement had a fund of stories that seems to have darkened
Conrad's vision of colonialism in Africa. As he was leaving the Congo at
the end of his six months there, Conrad saw Casement once more. The
two men met again at a dinner in London, later in the decade, and
according to Conrad, "went away from there together to the Sports club
and talked there till 3 in the morning." The novelist wrote to a friend:
"He could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget, things I never did
know." One of those things— another possible source of Kurtz and his palisade of human skulls— may well have been the story about Van Kerckhoven, the collector ofAfrican heads.
In 1892, Roger Casement went to work for the British colonial ad-
ministration in what is today Nigeria. He was developing an eye for
injustice, however, even though he was employed by the leading colonial
power ofthe day. His first recorded public protest, in an outraged letter he
wrote in 1 894 to the Aborigines Protection Society, was against a hang-
ing. The twenty-seven victims were African conscript soldiers and their
wives in the German colony of the Cameroons; the men had mutinied
after the women were flogged. "I trust you may do something to raise a protesting voice in England," Casement wrote, "against the atrocious
conduct of the Germans. Altho' the men were their soldiers we all on
earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the
strong, and to protest against brutality in any shape or form "
Casement soon transferred to the British consular service; after serving
in several posts in southern Africa, in 1900 he was assigned to set up the
first British consulate in the Etat Independant du Congo.When he passed through Brussels on his way to taking up the new job, King Leopold,
with a keen eye for anyone in a position to help his cause, invited him to
lunch. The lowly consul found himselfeating at the Royal Palace with the
King, Queen Marie-Henriette, their daughter Princess Clementine, and
Prince Victor Napoleon ofFrance.*
* The roster of those at lunch provides a picture of the current state of Leopold's family
life. That the queen was there at all meant she was probably going to the opera or a
W
A KING AT BAY
Leopold invited Casement to come again the next day, and he did so, listening to the king ramble on for an hour and a halfabout the civilizing,
uplifting work he was doing in the Congo. Although Leopold granted
that some of his agents might be guilty of excesses, Casement reported,
the king also claimed that "it was impossible to have always the best men in Africa; and indeed the African climate seemed frequently to cause
deterioration in the character." As ever, the king tried to make sure that if
any damaging information turned up, he would be the first to hear. "His
Majesty, in bidding me farewell," Casement wrote, "asked me to write him privately at any time, and to write frankly, should there be anything
of interest I could, unofficially advise him of." Unlike most visitors,
Casement appears not to have been charmed by Leopold. He had already seen too much ofthe Congo.
At his post as consul, Casement remained fascinated by Africa, but it
was a resdess time in his life. He was approaching forty and seemed stuck in a backwaterjob that did not use his talents. The consular corps was the
poor stepchild of the British diplomatic service. Beyond that, being re-
sponsible for the Congo was a far cry from being British consul in Paris or Berlin, a post far more likely to go to someone from a well-connected
family in England than from a middle-class one in Ireland. Casement felt
he was always at the bottom of the list. His everyday life was one long
battle against leaky roofs, mosquitoes, dysentery, and the boredom of
inglorious work— "sometimes being even compelled to rise from bed when ill, to listen to a drunken sailor's complaint ."
Casement had other frustrations as well. His indignation at the wrongs
of colonial rule had no room for expression in his work as a consul. He had a vague interest in Irish history but could not pursue this in the
concert that night in Brussels, for otherwise, exasperated with her husband's coldness and
public philandering, she no longer lived with him. Severely dressed in black and some-
times wearing a man's top hat, she spent most ofher time at the elegant Belgian resort of
Spa, nursing her sorrows in the company of an odd menagerie of animals that included several parrots and a llama.
Clementine, the youngest of the three daughters, was the only one with whom Leopold was now on speaking terms. Prince Victor Napoleon, the balding Bonaparte heir to the vanished French imperial throne, was her true love, but he did not pass muster with
Leopold. For his African adventures the king needed the good will ofFrance s republican government, which had deposed the Bonapartes. Leopold refused his consent to the
marriage. The timid Clementine acquiesced, serving the king as palace hostess; she would marry Victor Napoleon only after her father's death.
BREAKING INTO THE THIEVES KITCHEN
tropics. He had ambitions as a writer but no outlets except long-winded
reports that left the Foreign Office staff in London amused; few other
consuls routinely sent twenty-page dispatches from West African ports.
He wrote large quantities of mediocre verse but managed to publish
almost none.
Other white men in the Congo considered the new British consul an
eccentric. When traveling for the first time as consul from Matadi to Leopoldville, for instance, Casement did not take the new railway; he
walked more than two hundred miles— in protest against high railway fares. On later trips he did use the railway, one baffled Congo state official reported back to Brussels, but "he always traveled second class. In all his
movements he is always accompanied by a big bulldog with large jaws"
At the back of his mind was something further, which Casement
could not share even with close friends or relatives, although several had
their suspicions. He was a homosexual. In a poem that could never be
published in his lifetime he wrote:
/ sought by love alone to go
Where God had writ an awful no
I only know I cannot die
And leave this love God made, not I.
Casement lived in a time when to be found out meant disgrace or
worse. It was in 1895 that Oscar Wilde, a fellow Irishman, was sentenced
to two years at hard labor for "committing acts of gross indecency with
other male persons." In the spring of 1903, as Casement was returning to
the Congo from home leave in Europe, another case captured the head-
lines, that of Major General Sir Hector Macdonald, among the most
decorated British soldiers of his time. Exposed as a homosexual and
scheduled for court-martial, he killed himselfin a Paris hotel room.
"News of Sir Hector Macdonald s suicide in Paris!" Casement wrote
in his diary on April 17, 1903. "The reasons given are pitiably sad. The
most distressing case this surely of its kind " Two days later, he added,
"Very sorry at Hector Macdonald's terrible end " Eleven days after that,
in the Congo port ofBanana, thoughts ofMacdonald pursued Casement
through a sleepless night: "A dreadful room at Hotel. Sandflies. Did not
close my eyes. Hector Macdonald's death very sad." Casement must have known that ifhe ever acquired powerful enemies,
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A KING AT BAY
he would be open to blackmail. Yet with a touch of unconscious self-de- structiveness, he kept a meticulous diary of his assignations, almost all of
which were paid for. On that same voyage from England to the Congo, he taunted fate by recording all his sexual encounters along the way. Madeira: "Agostinho kissed many times. 4 dollars." Las Palmas: "No offers." Shipboard: "Down and oh! oh! quick, about 18." Boma: "Tall, 'How much money?'" If the diary were discovered by someone who wished him ill, he would be destroyed. Until then, it was a time bomb, with a fuse ofunknown length.
In May 1903, the month following his diary entries about Macdonalds suicide, Casement found something to be happy about; moreover, it was something that promised a big advance in his career. For two years, he had been sending reports to the Foreign Office about the brutal condi- tions in Leopold's Congo. Now that the Congo protest resolution had been unanimously passed by the House of Commons, the British gov- ernment had to make a high-profile move in response.
The previous year, Casement had cabled London proposing that he make an investigative trip to the rubber-producing areas of the interior. He was given permission, but home leave in England and Ireland delayed the trip. The parliamentary debate immediately put it back on the agenda, and soon after returning to the Congo, Casement was under way He knew the journey would be arduous; writing to a friend later,
Casement quoted an African proverb: "A man doesn't go among thorns unless a snake's after him— or he's after a snake." He added, "I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it."
To carry out his investigation, Casement could have taken the new rail- way up to Stanley Pool and spent a few weeks touring areas within easy reach of the comfortable brick house where he stayed there. He didn't. Instead, he spent more than three and a half months in the interior. In order not to depend on the authorities for his transportation— a key hold they had over many visitors— he rented a narrow, iron, single- decker steamboat from some American missionaries and traveled far up the Congo River. He spent seventeen days at Lake Tumba, where the state ran its rubber slavery operations with no intermediaries; he visited con- cession-company territory; he directed his steamer up side rivers and walked when the rivers gave out; he counted the exact number ofpeople held hostage in a village that had not delivered its rubber quota; he
BREAKING INTO THB THIEVBS KITCHEN
canoed across a river and walked several miles through a flooded forest to
meet one victim and inspect his injuries in person.
Sometimes Casement stayed overnight at a mission station; sometimes
he camped in a riverside clearing or on an island. ("Hippo downstream.
Saw three pelicans feeding, close to us. Also saw a beautiful Egyptian
ibis, black body, white wings; a lovely fellow in full flight over us") He
was traveling, as always, with his beloved bulldog, John, and he brought
with him as cook and helper an otherwise unidentified man who ap-
pears in his diary only as Hairy Bill. "Poor old Hairy Bill. A queer life" Hairy Bill's repertoire as chef seems to have been limited to three dishes:
chicken, custard, and something known as boiled or stewed sugar.
"Chicken, chicken, custard, custard . . . every day. . . . Goddam," writes
Casement. Sometimes he turns sarcastic: "We had boiled sugar again for
change, also custard." Or: "Stewed sugar and custard again twice daily for
a month and beats me hollow." Casement sent a ceaseless flow of dispatches to the Foreign Office.
"They'll curse me at F.O." he noted with satisfaction. Surely others
cursed him too. He penned a torrent of letters to Congo state officials
condemning specific atrocities and, most undiplomatically, the entire way
the colony was run. "That system, Monsieur le Gouverneur-General, is
wrong— hopelessly and entirely wrong. . . . Instead of lifting up the native populations submitted to and suffering from it, it can, if persisted
in, lead only to their final extinction and the universal condemnation of
civilized mankind." Small wonder that word filtered back to a worried
Leopold that his regime would not be treated kindly in the British
consul's report. Similar rumors also reached E. D. Morel, who eagerly
waited for Casement's return. To the British foreign secretary, Casement
exulted, in a most unconsular manner, that he had "broken into the
thieves' kitchen."
He was a man possessed. His anger at what he saw had a dramatic
effect on many of the other Europeans he encountered; it was as if his
visible outrage gave them permission to act on stifled feelings of their
own. Two missionaries Casement visited were so inspired by his example
that they prompdy set off on their own investigative trips; one began
writing critical letters to the governor general. Casement, heading down-
river, met the steamer of the veteran British missionary George Grenfell
heading up, and the two men stopped and talked. After listening to
Casement, Grenfell prompdy resigned from Leopold's sham Commission
for the Protection of the Natives. (A fruidess gesture, incidentally: the
A KING AT BAY
king had let the commission's mandate expire a few months earlier, without informing any of its members.) The Italian consul in the Congo, disturbed by what Casement told him, abandoned plans for a European
holiday and made an investigative journey of his own that confirmed Casement's findings.
Casement's daily diary entries are far more moving to read than his carefully worded official report; his horror pulses through the cryptic pages.
June 5; The country a desert, no natives left.
July 23: 1 walked into villages and saw the nearest one— popula- tion dreadfully decreased— only 93 people left out ofmany hundreds.
July 26: Poor frail folk ...— dust to dust ashes to ashes— where then are the kindly heart, the pitiful thought— together van- ished.
August 6: Took copious notes from natives. . . . They are cruelly flogged for being late with their baskets [of rubber], . . . Very
tired.
August 13: A. came to say 5 people from Bikoro side with hands
cut offhad come as far as Myanga intending to show me. August 22: Bolongo quite dead. I remember it well in 1^87, Nov.,
fiill ofpeople then; now 14 adults all told. I should say people wretched, complained bitterly of rubber tax. t . .6:30 passed
deserted side ofBokuta. . . . Mouzede says the people were all taken away by force to Mampoko. Poor unhappy souls.
August 2Q: Bongandanga . . . saw rubber "Market," nothing but
guns— about 20 armed men. . . . The popln. 242 men with rubber all guarded like convicts. To call this "trade" is the
height oflying.
August 30: 16 men women and children tied up from a village Mboye close to the town. Infamous. The men were put in the prison, the children let go at my intervention. Infamous. Infa- mous, shameful system.
August 31 : In the evening a dance was organised in my honour; all the local chiefs and their wives, etc., came (at L.s orders) to
it. Poor souls. I was sorry for it, of all the forced enjoyment I
ever saw this took the cake.
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BREAKING INTO THE THIEVBS' KITCHEN
September 2: Saw 16 women seized by Peeters's sentries and taken
offto Prison.
September 9:11.10 passed Bolongo again. The poor people put off
in canoe to implore my help.
Living long after the movement against slavery and well before the ap-
pearance of organizations like Amnesty International, Casement in his
diary wrote in the tones of the Abolitionists: "Infamous. Infamous,
shameful system." But the official report he composed subsequendy is in
the language that Amnesty and similar groups would later make their
own: formal and sober, assessing the reliability of various witnesses, filled
with references to laws and statistics, and accompanied by appendices and
depositions.
In late 1903, Casement sailed back to Europe to prepare his report. He
spent some weeks in London dictating and correcting, and made his final
revisions on a train while returning from a visit to Joseph Conrad and his
family at their country house. The information in Casement's report was
largely familiar to people like E. D. Morel and his small group ofsupport-
ers, but for the first time it was to be laid out with the authority of His
Britannic Majesty's Consul. The report was all the more authoritative
because Casement was a veteran of Africa who made frequent compari-
sons between the Congo he had once known and the same territory
under the rubber terror.
Again and again Casement describes hands being cut off corpses.
Sometimes it wasn't the hands. His report quotes one witness:
"The white men told their soldiers: 'You kill only women; you cannot
kill men.' So then the soldiers when they killed us (here P.R who was
answering stopped and hesitated, and then pointing to the private parts of
my bulldog— it was lying asleep at my feet) then they cut off those things and took them to the white men, who said: 'It is true, you have
killed men.'"
Despite the restrained tone and careful documentation, the report's
accounts of sliced-off hands and penises was far more graphic and force-
ful than the British government had expected. The Foreign Office, al-
ready uneasy, began getting urgent requests to delay publication from Sir
Constantine Phipps, the fervendy pro-Leopold British minister to Brus-
sels. Phipps, a conceited man of limited intelligence, couldn't believe
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A KING AT BAY
"that Belgians, members of a cultivated people amongst whom I had lived, could, under even a tropical sky, have perpetrated acts of refined cruelty" The only reason the companies used "sentries," he explained to the foreign secretary, was to protect the rubber harvesters during their work. "Please manage to prevent issue of report by Casement until after ioth instant, date on which I must unavoidably encounter King of the Belgians "Phipps telegraphed. "The publication will inevitably put me in an awkward position at court."
More pressure came from another quarter. Urged on by an apprehen- sive Leopold, Sir AlfredJones ofthe Elder Dempster line twice visited the Foreign Office to try to soften the report, or to at least get an advance copy for the king.
Casement was so distressed by what he had seen in the Congo that the Foreign Office could not control him, and he gave several interviews to the London press. Their publication made it hard to censor or postpone his report, though Foreign Office officials did water it down by removing all names. When the report was finally published, in early 1904, readers found statements by witnesses that read: "I am N.N. These two beside me are O.O. and PR" Or: "The white man who said this was the chiefwhite man at F.F. ... His name was A. B " This lent the report a strangely disembodied tone, as if horrible things had been done but not to or by real people. It also made it impossible for Casement to defend himselfby reference to specific people and places when Leopold's staff issued a long reply. Belgian newspapers tied to Congo business interests joined in the attack; one, La Tribune Congolaise, said that the people Casement had seen with missing hands "were unfortunate individuals, suffering from cancer in the hands, whose hands thus had to be cut off as a simple surgical operation."
Casement was both angry and disappointed. Mercurial (he himselfhad at first wanted to protect his witnesses by omitting their names, then changed his mind) and easily offended, he sent offan eighteen-page letter of protest to the Foreign Office and threatened to resign. In his diary he wrote that his superiors were "a gang ofstupidities"; one in particular was "an abject piffler." In a letter, he called them a "wretched set ofincompe- tent noodles."
But then, at last, Casement found someone with whom he could share his feelings. He had avidly read Morel's writings while still in the Congo, and the men were eager to meet. "The man is honest as day," Casement wrote in his diary after the long-awaited meeting took place. "Dined at
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BREAKING INTO THB THIEVES* KITCHEN
Comedy [a restaurant] together late and then to chat till 2 a.m. M. sleeping in study." Casement was staying at a friend's house in Chester Square; Morel left after breakfast the next morning.
It is easy to imagine the two men talking that night: the tall, black- bearded Casement, simmering with fury at what he had seen; Morel, with his handlebar mustache, almost a decade younger, also big, but
stocky, filled with his own earnest anger at the evidence he had uncov- ered in Europe. In a sense, each had seen half ofwhat made up Leopold's "Free State." Together, they had as full a version of the story as was likely to be told. Morel remembered the meeting for the rest of his life:
I saw before me a man, my own height, very lithe and sinewy, chest thrown out, head held high— suggestive of one who had lived in the vast open spaces. Black hair and beard covering cheeks hollowed by the tropical sun. Strongly marked features.A dark blue penetrating eye sunken in the socket. A long, lean, swarthy Vandyck type of face, graven with power and withal of great gentieness. An extraordinarily handsome and arresting face. From the moment our hands gripped and our eyes met, mu- tual trust and confidence were bred and the feeling of isolation
slipped from me like a mantie. Here was a man, indeed. One who would convince those in high places ofthe foulness ofthe crime committed upon a helpless race. ... I often see him now in imagination as I saw him at that memorable interview, crouch- ing over the fire in the otherwise unlighted room . . . unfolding in a musical, soft, almost even voice, in language of peculiar
dignity and pathos, the story ofa vile conspiracy. ... At intervals
he would rise, and with swift silent steps, pace the room; then resume his crouching attitude by the fire, his splendid profile
thrown into bold reliefby the flames.
I was mosdy a silent listener, clutching hard upon the arms of my chair. As the monologue of horror proceeded ... I verily believe I saw those hunted women clutching their children and flying panic stricken to the bush: the blood flowing from those
quivering black bodies as the hippopotamus hide whip struck
and struck again; the savage soldiery rushing hither and thither
amid burning villages; the ghasdy tally ofsevered hands
Casement read me passages from his report, which he was then writing, whose purport was almost identical with oft-re-
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A KING AT BAY
peated sentences of my own. He told me that he had been
amazed to find that I, five thousand miles away, had come to
conclusions identical with his in every respect. ... An immense
weight passed from me.
It was long hours past midnight when we parted. The sheets of
his voluminous report lay scattered upon the table, chairs and
floor. And it was with the debris of that Report around me, that
Report which was ... to tear aside the veil from the most gigan-
tic fraud and wickedness which our generation has known, that I
slept in my clothes upon the sofa; while its author sought his
bedroom above.
A few weeks later, Casement visited Morel's home at Hawarden, a
small Welsh village near the border of England; he jotted in his diary,
'Talked all night nearly, wife a good woman." He was trying to persuade
Morel to found an organization devoted solely to campaigning forjustice
in the Congo, but Morel was at first reluctant. The Aborigines Protection
Society was wary at the prospect of a new group encroaching on its turf
and perhaps cutting into its fundraising. But Morel's wife, Mary, agreed
with Casement, and it may have been at her urging that Morel went to
Ireland to talk further with Casement. He wrote: "Casement's plan found
fervid support in my wife, and if I crossed the Irish Channel ... to meet
him ... it was very largely owing to [her] influence. ... It was ... on that
Irish soil . . . fertilised by so many human tears, that Casement and I
conspired further . . . [and] discussed ways and means and drew up a
rough plan of campaign"
The men talked over dinner at the Slieve Donard Hotel in Newcasde,
where Morel became convinced that "the Congo evil was a special and
extraordinary evil calling for special means of attack. . . . If the British
people could be really roused, the world might be roused Britain had
played that part before [in the campaign against slavery]. . . . Could we
raise a throbbing in that great heart of hers?"
Although he was between posts, Casement was still a member of the
consular service, so Morel would have to run the new organization. "But
how were the vulgar details to be overcome? I explained to Casement
that I had no money. . . . Neither had he Without a moment's hesita-
tion he wrote out a cheque for £100." For Casement this was more than
a month's income.
Shortly afterward, Casement wrote to Morel, "We shall grow in num-
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BREAKING INTO THE THIEVES' KITCHEN
bcrs day by day until there go up from the length and breadth ofEngland
one overwhelming Nay!"
A few weeks after their dinner in Ireland, Morel formed the Congo Reform Association. Using some of Casement's donation, he bought
the first supplies, including a typewriter. He rounded up the public en- dorsement of an impressive list of lords, earls, businessmen, churchmen,
members of Parliament, and, to evoke the heritage of the batde against
slavery, the great-grandson of the famous British Abolitionist William
Wilberforce. The C.R.A. attracted more than a thousand people to its first meeting, in Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall, on March 23, 1904.
Although Casement and Morel each had his prickly side, the friend-
ship between them was immediate and lasting, "I think Casement is
about as near to being a saint as a man can be " Morel wrote to a friend. Each now had the perfect ally. The relationship deepened over the years; in their many letters back and forth, Casement became "Dear Tiger" and Morel "Dear Bulldog." Leopold was "the King of Beasts."
Although he could be only a silent partner in the reform campaign,
Casement urged on Bulldog with enthusiastic advice about political
strategy, about whom to lobby, even about what clothes to wear. With- out the Foreign Office's knowledge, he helped to raise money for the campaign. Morel, for his part, encouraged Casement to return to the
Congo to conduct a further investigation. The consul replied that officials might "hang me as they did Stokes— and one couldn't do better than be hanged in order to end that den of devils." This is not
the last time that we will hear from Casement a hint of a desire for martyrdom.
That meeting between Bulldog and Tiger as they plotted their attack
on the King of Beasts would later be compared by their admirers with
the legendary conversation beneath a spreading tree between William
Wilberforce and William Pitt the Younger, more than a hundred years
earlier, which marked the beginning ofthe British antislavery movement.
But like the British Abolitionists, Morel and Casement were for the
moment safe in England; for all their good will, they were not themselves subject to the lash of the chicotte or the weight of shackles. They were
white men trying to stop other white men from brutalizing Africans. Most of the Africans who fought this batde in the Congo perished, their very names unrecorded. In a sense, we honor Morel and Casement in their stead.
The two men, however, were far more than armchair do-gooders.
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A KING AT BAY
They were people of conviction— and both ended up paying a high price. At the time they met and shared their passion about the Congo in
December 1903, Morel and Casement did not know that more than a
dozen years later they would have something else in common. Each
would be taken, in custody, through the gates of London's Pentonville
Prison. One would never emerge.
208
14
TO FLOOD HIS DEEDS WITH DAY
The crusade that E. D. Morel now orchestrated through the Congo Reform Association exerted a relentless, growing pressure on the
Belgian, British, and American governments. Almost never has one man,
possessed of no wealth, tide, or official post, caused so much trouble for
the governments of several major countries. Morel knew that officials
like Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey would act only "when kicked,
and if the process of kicking is stopped, he will do nothing.'* To this
kicking, Morel devoted more than a decade of his life.
In addition to running the Congo Reform Association, Morel contin-
ued to spend part of each workday, which sometimes stretched to six-
teen or eighteen hours, editing his West African Mail "People don't seem
altogether to realize that— apart from everything else— I turn out a weekly paper," he wrote to a fellow activist, "plus a monthly organ for
the C.R.A. whose size sometimes has been very great and would have
kept an ordinary individual pretty well busy all the month. It is only
because I am an exceptionally rapid worker that I have been able to do it afl."
Another reason Morel could do it all was that he had a devoted wife to
run his household. Indeed, he is one ofthe few people in this entire story
who was happily married. Mary Richardson Morel raised their five chil- dren and encouraged her husband's cause in every way. She took a par-
ticular liking to Casement, agreeing with him that her husband ought to
form an organization that focused exclusively on the Congo. As with so
many couples of their day, we do not know how many ofMorel's memo-
2og
A KING At *AY
rable achievements should also be credited to her. "I always think of her
as part ofyou "John Holt, his long-time staunch supporter and confidant,
wrote him, "the two constituting the Morel ofCongo reform."
Morel was not without flaws. He could be bullheaded; he rarely ad-
mitted any mistakes; and in his newspaper he ran an occasional picture of
himself, enthusiastic reviews of his books, resolutions thanking him for
his good work, interviews with himself reprinted from other papers, and
an editorial "wish[ing] Mr. Morel 'God-speed' on his journey" when
he went abroad to campaign for Congo reform. He sometimes clashed
with colleagues who were, he felt, getting too much of the limelight— although seldom with Casement, whom he venerated. Like many enor-
mously productive people, he had spells of depression and self-pity
"My home life is reduced to microscopic proportions. . . . Personally I
am at the end ofmy tether," he wrote in 1906 to Mark Twain, declaring
that he would go on with his Congo work nonetheless, because "those
wretched people out there have no-one but us after all. And they have the
right to live"
His politics also had limitations. Some of these he shared with most
other Europeans of his time, from his faith in the magic of free trade to
his beliefthat African men had a higher sexual drive than white men and
could pose a danger to white women. Other quirks were more rooted in
his single-minded passion for stopping the atrocities in King Leopold's
Congo. The picture Morel gives in his writings ofAfricans in the Congo
before whites arrived is that of Rousseau's idealized Noble Savage: in
describing traditional African societies he focuses on what was peaceful
and gentle and ignores any brutal aspects— which occasionally included, for example, long before the Force Publique made it the order of the day,
cutting off the hands of one's dead enemies.
More important, Morel was so enraged by Leopold's villainy that he
ignored his own country's use of forced labor— wide, though far less murderous— in its African colonies, particularly in the east and south. There was nothing inherently wrong with colonialism, he felt, if its
administration was fair and just. He believed this to be the case in the
British colonies in west Africa, where, to be sure, there was no rubber
terror and no massive seizure of all so-called vacant land. In the later
stages of his Congo campaign, he even found time to go to Nigeria and
write a generally approving book about British rule there.
But whatever his faults, when it came to campaigning against injustice
in the Congo, Morel had an unswerving, infectious sense of right and
wrong. A superb speaker, he regularly addressed crowds of several thou-
sand people with no notes. Between 1907 and 1909 alone, he spoke at
some fifty mass meetings throughout Great Britain. "Sometimes . . ."he
wrote, "I have had bursts of fury . . . when some story more abominable
than the rest moved me in a special way, and when I should have stopped
at very little ifany of Leopold's crew had been about. ... [I have experi-
enced] exhilaration when I had driven home some good thrust, or when
that something or other which it is difficult to name gripped me on the
platform and I felt I had a great audience in the hollow ofmy hand."
Morel considered his movement to be in the grand tradition of such
British humanitarian crusades as the righteous outrage provoked by the
Turkish massacres of Bulgarians in 1876 and of Armenians in the 1890s.
Above all, he saw himself as a moral heir to the antislavery movement. He
began his blistering Red Rubber: The Story ofthe Rubber Slave Trade Flourish-
ing on the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906 with an epigraph from the great
American Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison:
The standard ofemancipation is now unfurled ...
J will not equivocate,
I will not excuse,
I will not retreat a single inch:
And I will be heard,
Posterity will bear testimony that I was right.
The tradition of British radicalism from which Morel came was
rooted in the Nonconformist— that is, Protestant, but not Church of England— churches and in the Clapham Sect, the humanitarian evan- gelical group to which the antislavery leader William Wilberforce had
belonged. In the early nineteenth century these humanitarians had fo-
cused their zeal on improving the condition of all sorts of oppressed
groups: prisoners, factory workers, child laborers, the insane. Theirs,
however, was not the from-the-bottom-up politics later adopted by
Marxists and trade unionists; it was the top-down reformism of the
relatively well-born. They aimed at ending the death penalty, corporal
punishment, and cruelty to animals. When they turned their attention
overseas, it was to push for the abolition of the slave trade and to send
missionaries abroad to uplift the "natives" in the far reaches of the world.
(Indeed, it was the Nonconformist churches, especially the Baptists, that
sent the British missionaries to the Congo.)
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A KING AT BAY
Significantly, Morel's humanitarian political ancestors, unlike his so-
cialist contemporaries, had firmly believed that improving the lot of
downtrodden people everywhere was good for business. Better treatment
of colonial subjects would "promote the civil and commercial interests
of Great Britain. . . " declared a parliamentary select committee in the
1 830s. "Savages are dangerous neighbours and unprofitable customers,
and if they remain as degraded denizens of our colonies, they become a
burden upon the State."
Such humanitarians never saw themselves as being in conflict with the
imperial project— as long as it was British imperialism. "Morally eman- cipation put the British on a special plane. . . ." as James Morris sums it
up in his history of the British Empire. "If so much could be achieved by
agitation at home, what might not be done if the moral authority of
England were distributed across the earth— to tackle the evils of slav- ery, ignorance and paganism at source, to teach the simpler peoples the
benefits of Steam, Free Trade and Revealed Religion, and to establish not
a world empire in the bad Napoleonic sense, but a Moral Empire of
loftier intent? So was evolved the chemistry of evangelical imperialism."
This was the tradition in which Morel felt at home, and it was a
tradition that perfectly suited his organizational talent. Although without
old-school ties to them, he had the knack of making the wealthy, the
powerful, and the famous believe they did credit to themselves by sup-
porting his Congo crusade. Month after month, the front page of the
Congo Reform Association's periodical carried a full-page portrait photo
of a prominent supporter— a lord, an earl, a member of Parliament, a mustachioed retired colonial governor. After the association's founding in
Liverpool, Morel saw to it that the first meeting of the group's executive
committee was held in a room secured by a sympathetic M.P. at the
House of Commons. Almost every major C.R.A. public meeting after
that had at least one bishop on the platform. Having the apparent blessing
of both church and state, Morel found that few influential Britons could
resist his entreaties to lend their names to the cause ofCongo reform.
One of his political limitations was, in fact, a source of his immense
success as an organizer. If he had believed, as we might conclude today,
that Leopold's rape ofthe Congo was in part a logical consequence ofthe
very idea of colonialism, of the belief that there was nothing wrong with
a country being ruled other than by its own inhabitants, Morel would
have been written off as being on the fringe. No one in England would
have paid much attention to him. But he did not believe this; he believed
iu nuuu niu uuuuu wim «*••
with all his heart that Leopold's system of rule constituted a unique form
of evil. People in England's ruling circles, therefore, could support his
crusade without feeling their own interests threatened.
Yet despite some blind spots, Morel was at the far edge ofthe humani-
tarian tradition. His beliefs were implicidy more subversive than he al-
lowed himself to recognize. He saw brutality in the Congo not as a
specific imperfection to be wiped out in the way one could wipe out
child labor or capital punishment, by passing a law against it, but as part of
a complex, deeply embedded "System," as he called it— forced labor plus the massive European takeover ofAfrican land. This angle ofvision is
much closer to Marxism than to uplift-the-downtrodden humanitarian-
ism, although Morel probably never read a word of Marx in his life. He
never resolved the conflict between these two ways of seeing the world,
and much of the drama of his later life lay in the constant tension
between them.
"Morel has never had an equal as organizer and leader of a Dissenting
movement," writes the historian AJ.P. Taylor. "He knew exacdy where
to look for rich sympathizers; and he took money from them without
altering the democratic character of [his movement]. Millionaires and
factory workers alike accepted his leadership." Among the millionaires
were Quakers like the wealthy but plain-living chocolate manufacturer
William Cadbury Subsidies from these supporters kept the West African
Mail alive, and it was the newspaper, not the Congo Reform Associa-
tion, that paid Morel's salary. Paradoxically, Sir Alfred Jones of the Elder
Dempster line also invested a little money in the paper, doubdess hoping
to soften the attitude of his former employee. But his hopes were in vain;
Morel repeatedly attacked Jones without mercy, exposing his doings as
Leopold's major British ally.WhenJones saw he would have no influence,
he pulled his advertising from the paper.
Morel knew exacdy how to fit his message to his audience. He re-
minded British businessmen that Leopold s monopolistic system, copied
by France, had shut them out ofmuch Congo trade. To members of the
clergy he talked of Christian responsibility and quoted the grim reports
from the missionaries. And for all Britons, and their representatives in
Parliament, he evoked the widespread though unspoken belief that Eng-
land had a particular responsibility to make decency prevail in the uni-
verse.
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A KING AT BAY
One of the more surprising things about the Congo crusade was that,
except for forays to speak at meetings, Morel conducted it largely from
his study. During the first half of the Congo Reform Association's nine-
year lifetime, he didn't even live in London. Until December 1908, the
C.R.A.'s head office was in Liverpool; from there and from his home in
nearby Hawarden, Morel kept up a voluminous correspondence. In the
first six months of 1906, for instance, he wrote 3700 letters. More impor-
tant, his prodigious output of books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles
about the Congo inspired people to write to him. He carefully cross-
checked news items for accuracy, studied newspapers and documents
from Belgium, and corresponded with government officials, journalists,
and traders in Europe and Africa. By 1908, he estimated that he had
amassed about twenty thousand letters concerning the Congo. They
served as the basis for much of his published work.
Despite his disdain for organized religion, his tone was that of an
evangelical preacher. To him, Leopold and his supporters, such as "the
reptile Congophile Press ofBrussels and Antwerp," personified the Devil;
the Congo administration was "a bad and wicked system, inflicting terri-
ble wrongs upon the native races." Morel spoke effectively to the mood
of the day because he shared it: the optimism, the boundless confidence
of a society that had not yet seen or imagined the world wars, the belief
that humankind had the capacity to briskly eradicate all barriers that lay
in the path of progress. "Our forefathers smashed the over-sea slave-
trade" he declared in his book King Leopold's Rule in Africa, "and we shall
root out the modern inland slave-trade on the Congo."
He was eager to raise the Congo reform movement above partisan
politics and religious differences. On the speakers platform for his major
events were always M.Rs from the three major parties, clergy from both
the Church ofEngland and the Nonconformist churches, and an assort-
ment of right honourables,lord mayors, lord provosts, and other notables.
He had a superb sense of how to build up to an event: a large regional
Congo protest rally was often preceded by an afternoon meeting with
the local mayor and dignitaries at city hall. The mayor would then be on
stage that evening. Before the end of 1905, more than sixty mass meetings
had adopted a resolution condemning Leopold's rule as a revival of the
African slave trade and calling "upon His Majesty 's Government to con-
voke an assembly of the Christian Powers ... in order to devise and put
in force a scheme for the good government of the Congo territories" In
Liverpool, an audience overflowed an auditorium that seated nearly three
214
thousand and filled two adjoining halls. Cries of "Shame! Shame!" re-
sounded at similar mass meetings throughout England and Scotland.
A master of all the media of his day, Morel made particularly effective
use of photography. A central part of almost every Congo protest meet-
ing was a slide show, comprising some sixty vivid photos of life under
Leopold's rule; half a dozen of them showed mutilated Africans or their
cut-off hands. The pictures, ultimately seen in meetings and the press by
millions of people, provided evidence that no propaganda could refute.
Slides also showed charts and graphs estimating Leopold's Congo
profits; they even displayed poems, which made up in passion what they
lacked in art:
No zeal, no Faith, inspired this Leopold,
Nor any madness ofhalf-splendid birth.
Cool-eyed, he loosed the hounds that rend and slay,
Just that his coffers might be gorged with gold.
Embalm him, Time! Forget him not, O Earth, Trumpet his name, andflood his deeds with day.
To flood Leopold's deeds with day required that Morel mobilize his
fellow journalists. He knew the editors of most of the major British
magazines and newspapers, and wrote regularly for many of them, in-
cluding the most prestigious, the Times. When an editor needed to send a
reporter to Belgium or the Congo, Morel always had a candidate to
suggest. He engineered "the downfall," he happily claimed, of a Times
Brussels correspondent whom he thought too friendly to Leopold. He
fed information to sympathetic newspapers in Belgium, and through his
connections to the Press Association wire service was able to distribute
material worldwide. When the famous American correspondent Richard
Harding Davis was sent to Africa by Colliers magazine, he went supplied
with Morel's latest findings, and echoed them in what he wrote.
With a powerful boost from Casement's report, the international cam-
paign mounted by Morel reached newspapers all over the world. His
carefully kept files contain, for the ten years starting in 1902, 4194 clip-
pings relating to the drive for Congo reform. Nor did he focus on
newspapers alone: The author of a 1906 boy's adventure novel, Samba:
A Story of the Rubber Slaves of the Congo, thanks C.R.A. officials in his
preface "for their kindness in reading the manuscript and revising the
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A KING AT BAY
proofs of this book, and for many most helpful suggestions and criti-
cisms."
Morel described himself as "Congo possessed.'* A letter to his Quaker backer William Cadbury in 1906 shows how:
Book. Out this week . . . [this was Red Rubber]
Glasgow. Lord Provost has summoned a Town's meeting. Shall
probably have to go. Am arranging for formation of local CRA. . . . Any prominent Friends in Glasgow you could drop
a note to?
France. A French C.R.A. will be formed this month. ... Rising tide. Demands for literature literally coming in shoals
Twelve to 20 letters per day for literature, information, etc.
Like the Abolitionists before him, Morel understood that every na-
tional organization had to have local branches, so the C.R.A. had "aux-
iliaries" throughout England and Scodand. These groups organized their
members to send funds, to write to their representatives in Parliament,
and to produce an unending flow ofletters to local newspapers.A Ladies' Branch had two representatives on the C.R.A. Executive Committee.
Through such means, Morel applied steady pressure on the British gov-
ernment. He and his supporters never doubted that if only Britain were
to act, it could force Leopold to mend his ways or could wrest the Congo
entirely from his grasp.
The most effective spokespeople of all, Morel knew, were those with
firsthand knowledge. Starting in 1906, the returned Baptist missionaries
the Reverend John Harris and his wife, Alice Seeley Harris— she had taken almost all the photographs Morel used— began working full time for the association. The Harrises' zeal matched Morel's. In their first two
years with the C.R.A., one or both of them spoke in public on six
hundred occasions. A woman in a large audience in Wales was so moved that she handed Alice Harris her jewels to be sold for the benefit of the
movement. The Harrises displayed chicottes and shackles, and throughout
England they led church congregations in special hymns on "Congo
Sundays." To shocked audiences, they described personal experiences like
this one, which John Harris later put down on paper:
Lined up . . . are 40 emaciated sons of an African village, each
carrying his little basket of rubber. The toll of rubber is weighed
216
To FL66& HIS bfififtS WiTrt dAV
and accepted, but . . . four baskets are short of the demand. The
order is brutally short and sharp— Quickly the first defaulter is seized by four lusty "executioners," thrown on the bare ground,
pinioned hands and feet, whilst a fifth steps forward carrying a
long whip of twisted hippo hide. Swiftly and without cessation
the whip falls, and the sharp corrugated edges cut deep into the
flesh— on back, shoulders and buttocks blood spurts from a dozen places. In vain the victim twists in the grip of the execu-
tioners, and then the whip cuts other parts ofthe quivering body -— and in the case ofone ofthe four, upon the most sensitive part of the human frame. The "hundred lashes each" left four inert
bodies bloody and quivering on the shimmering sand of the
rubber collecting post.
Following hard upon this decisive incident was another.
Breakfast was just finished when an African father rushed up the
veranda steps of our mud house and laid upon the ground the hand and foot of his little daughter, whose age could not have
been more than 5 years.
As Morel s campaign surged forward in Europe, frantic messages flowed
from Brussels to the Congo capital ofBoma and from there to the most remote outposts. Near the British mission station where the Harrises had
been working, the state posted a deputy public prosecutor. The governor
general wrote to him:
The main reason for your being placed at Baringa is to keep the
government regularly informed of everything of interest in the
Baringa region concerning the missionaries' agitation. . . . [It]
will probably be necessary for you to have several blacks working
for you who could gather useful information in the villages of the region, especially when the missionaries go traveling.
I authorize you to hire five workers towards this end; I have
given instructions to the commissioner-general of the Equator
district to furnish you the necessary funds. You will use the funds
as seems best to you, whether in hiring black workers ... or in
giving presents to certain natives living in the villages who can keep you up to date. ...
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A KING AT BAY
It goes without saying that this must be done with the greatest
discretion.
In the following months, the public prosecutor at Boma wrote to his
deputy at Baringa asking him to find out what plans were to be hatched
at a forthcoming meeting of Protestant missionaries. Some weeks later,
this was followed by a collection of seven months' worth of Morel's West
African Mail and the news that further issues would be forwarded as soon
as they arrived at the capital:
I particularly draw your attention to the importance for the
Government in noting all the inaccuracies in the missionaries'
accusations, in order to show the bad faith that inspires their
attacks against the State. It is important that each of these issues
... be the object of your most careful examination, and of a
report that you send me ofinaccuracies. ...
As the attacks on Leopold mounted, the regime steadily increased its
scrutiny of Morel's allies in the Congo. None was at more risk than
Hezekiah Andrew Shanu.
Britain had established its colonies in Africa long before Leopold, and
in its early days the Congo state turned to these territories to recruit
experienced laborers, soldiers, and other personnel. Shanu was born and
educated in what is today Nigeria and became a schoolteacher. In 1884,
he began working for Leopold's regime; one task was to recruit soldiers
from his homeland for the Force Publique. When he became a clerk and French-English translator on the governor general's staff at Boma, he
brought his wife, brother-in-law, and other members of his family from
Lagos to live in the Congo. In 1893, he left state service to go into
business for himself. The following year he went to Belgium, where he
ordered himself a piano and a steam launch, and put his son in school. In
all countries with colonies there is a ready audience for grateful subjects,
and Shanu was received with much enthusiasm when he lectured on the
Congo and thanked the Belgians for their good works. One newspaper
noted approvingly that Shanu "expresses himself in French with the
greatest correctness;" another patronizingly remembered him as "a strik-
ing example of the perfectibility of the negro race." An august-looking
man, Shanu wore a starched white collar on public occasions, with the
ribbon of a Congo state medal on his jacket lapel.
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TO FLOOD HIS DEEDS WITH DAY
After visits to England, France, and Germany, Shanu returned to the
Congo and, in a remarkable move in this state set up by Europeans for
their own benefit, became a successful businessman. In Boma, he opened
a well-stocked store selling canned food and other supplies from Europe;
in addition he operated a tailor's shop and laundry, and ran small lodging
houses both in Boma and the railhead town of Matadi. He enjoyed
photography, and had some of his pictures published in the Brussels
magazine Le Congo Ulustri. When he leased a house he owned to an early British vice consul, he made so great an impression that the man recom-
mended Shanu to the Foreign Office as his replacement during a home
leave. Shanu was also respected by his former employers. During a Force
Publique mutiny at Boma in 1900, state officials gratefully accepted his
help in preventing the rebellion from spreading to West Africans working
in the town. He even offered to take up arms against the mutineers.
"Monsieur Shanu, in these troubled moments, has given proof of his
sincere loyalty to the State," wrote a high Congo official.
Up to this point Shanu had thrown in his lot completely with the Congo's rulers. But something— we do not know what— caused a change of heart, and.he moved into the camp ofLeopold's enemies. For a
black man living in the Congo capital, this was a dangerous step. One sign
of his changed attitude came when he apparently supplied Roger Case-
ment with information about the mistreatment ofWest African workers
in the Congo. In turn, it appears that Casement told Shanu about the
campaign Morel was mounting in Europe. While Casement was in the
interior in 1903 making his investigation, Shanu sent a check to Morel,
asking for copies ofhis writings. Delighted to have an African ally right in
the enemy's capital, Morel immediately wrote back, sending Shanu a
subscription to his newspaper, a book, and some pamphlets. "I do not
know what your views on the Congo question are," he wrote, "but if
they agree with mine, I shall be very glad ifyou can let me have informa-
tion from time to time." Some weeks later Morel wrote again, suggesting
that Shanu could avoid catching the eye of the Boma postal censor by
addressing his mail to Morel's father-in-law in Devon. Before long Shanu
found some useful information to send.
After the protests against Leopold's rule began in Europe, the Congo
state had periodically made a big show ofprosecuting low-ranking white
officials for atrocities against Africans. Occasionally the convicted men
were sentenced to prison terms, although most were released after serv-
ing only a fraction of their time. But trials can be risky for repressive
2ig
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governments; they can put damaging material on the public record. Like
other small-fry scapegoats in tyrannies the world over, the defendants
accused of brutal massacres in the Congo usually said they were only
following orders— and often could produce witnesses or documents to prove the claim. The state therefore took care to keep the transcripts of
these trials secret, and for some years virtually nothing leaked out. Morel,
knowing the evidence from these trials would be a source ofammunition
for the Congo reform campaign, asked Shanu to find out what he could.
One especially revealing case came to a climax in early 1904. The
main defendant, a trigger-happy rubber-company agent named Charles
Caudron, was accused of several crimes, including the murder of at least
122 Africans. In part, he was put on trial so that the state could claim it
was upholding human rights, but the authorities had other motives as
well. Caudron had offended the Force Publique commander in his area,
who thought he was the one to run any military operations there. And he
had spread his reign of terror so wildly that he had disrupted rubber
production in a highly profitable district.
The trial revealed much about government orders condoning the
holding of hostages. Furthermore, the appeals court lowered Caudron's
sentence because of "extenuating circumstances " Invoking the familiar
lazy-native theme, the court referred to the "great difficulties under
which [Caudron] found himself, accomplishing his mission in the midst
of a population absolutely resistant to any idea of work, and which
respects no other law than force, and knows no other means ofpersuasion
than terror."
Shanu got hold of some of the court documents and secretly sent
them to Morel, who published them immediately, claiming that this was
"the most damaging blow ever received by the Congo State." That was an
overstatement, but the material was indeed damaging. And what was
most embarrassing in it came from the mouths of Congo state officials
themselves. It caught the eye of the British Foreign Office and was
reprinted in an official report.
Shanu's next contribution to the anti-Congo campaign, however,
ended tragically. He acted as liaison between Morel and a Congo state official, the police chief of Boma, who claimed to have information to
give or sell to the reformers. But the man turned treacherous; he attacked
Morel in the Belgian press and exposed Shanu as Morel's accomplice.
Morel, who considered Shanu a man "of unblemished reputation and of great courage," feared for Shanu s life and urged the British consul in
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TO FLOOD HIS DBBDS WITH DAY
Boma to do all he could to protect him. He sent offers of help to Shanu
and anxiously asked for news. When it came, it was not good. Because
Shanu was a British subject, the Congo authorities did not want to risk
an international incident by arresting him. Instead, they harassed him
unremittingly, even rescinding the medal he had been awarded for his
work for the state. They then ordered all state employees not to patron-
ize his businesses. That guaranteed that these would fail. In July 1905
Hezekiah Andrew Shanu committed suicide.
At the turn of the century, the Elysee-Palace Hotel, near the Arc de
Triomphe, was among the most elegant in Paris. One day a guest hap-
pened to notice a young woman, also staying at the hotel, whose name,
like other details of her past, remains in question: it was Caroline, or
perhaps Blanche, Delacroix, or perhaps Lacroix. Although still a teen-
ager, Caroline was the mistress of Antoine-Emmanuel Durrieux, a for-
mer officer in the French Army. He attempted to support them both
by betting on horse races. When his betting luck ran low, it appears,
Durrieux also acted as Caroline s pimp. Their lodgings at the Elysee-
Palace were a useful base for these operations, but they frequently left
bills unpaid. An unexpected solution to these troubles appeared when a
woman approached Caroline at the hotel and said, "Madame, I am sent to
you by a gendeman who has noticed you. He is a very high personage
but his exalted position obliges me to withhold his name."
A meeting was arranged for the following day. According to Caroline's not entirely reliable memoirs, Durrieux, in a top hat and pearl-gray
gloves, binoculars hanging around his neck, left for the racetrack un-
awares. (More likely, he was fully aware and had been paid offin advance.)
Caroline went to a secluded room in a building on the nearby rue Lord
Byron. The high personage arrived, accompanied by two aides,who took
seats on either side of Caroline and began asking her questions. "It was
not really a conversation; it was rather a series of trite questions asked in
rotation first by one, then by the other These questions obliged me to
turn my head first to the right, then to the left. I answered them without
having to think, their only aim, as I learned later, being to show off my
two profiles to the mute personage." After looking over his new prize, the
high personage smiled behind his beard and pronounced himselfpleased.
He invited Caroline to travel to Austria with him, and the next day a
large sum ofmoney arrived, as well as some empty trunks for Caroline to
A KING AT BAY
fill with new dresses ofher choice. Her admirer had found the way to her
heart, for she liked nothing better in the world than to buy clothes.
Caroline was sixteen; King Leopold II was sixty-five.
Then, as now, nothing royal stayed secret long. Courtiers gossiped,
servants whispered, and news of the scandalous romance soon filled the
press of Europe. Leopold had long had a well-known taste for extremely
young Women, but losing his head completely over a sixteen-year-old call
girl was a different matter entirely. His new mistress was young enough to
be his granddaughter. Leopold's chaotic family life and sexual tastes are
far more than incidental to the Congo story. Ironically, they probably lost
him more popularity in Belgium* than any of the cruelties he perpe-
trated in Africa. This, in turn, meant that few ofhis people were willing to
rally behind him when he became the target of an international protest
movement.
The king's personal foibles also turned him into an irresistible target
for a world press stirred up by Morel. The large beard, now turned white,
made him a cartoonist's dream. His bulky, cloaked figure stalked through
the pages of Europe's newspapers: his beard dripping blood, his hands
clutching shrunken heads from the Congo, his eyes hungrily devouring
the dancers of a corps de ballet. He sits down to dine on a severed African head garnished with bayonets. Tsar Nicholas II complains that his
knout is ineffective, so his cousin Leopold, dressed in a tiger skin, recom-
mends the chicotte. Leopold's rejected daughters sadly beg their father for
Caroline's cast-off clothing. Leopold and the Sultan of Turkey share a
good laugh and a botde of wine while comparing the massacre of the
Congolese to that of the Armenians.
Several years into the king's liaison with his new love, his long-
suffering wife, Marie-Henriette, lover of horses and music, died. From
this point on, the king's infatuation with Caroline became flagrandy
open. He installed her in a grand mansion, the Villa Vanderborght, across the way from the royal complex at Laeken, and built a pedestrian bridge
over the street so that he could slip across at will for visits.
He was wildly jealous of Caroline, apparendy with reason; he once caught her in the Brussels villa with Durrieux, the former officer from
* Nor did they win him friends elsewhere: after he made a state visit to Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm IFs puritanical wife, Augusta, sent her personal chaplain to exorcise the palace
rooms Leopold had been staying in.
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TO FLOOD HIS DBBDS WITH DAY
whom he thought he had stolen her. Durrieux, whom Caroline tried to pass off as her brother, seems to have shown up on other occasions as well.
One newspaper informed its readers that Caroline and Durrieux had
secret electric bells installed in all her residences so that servants could
warn them ifLeopold was approaching.
After she moved to Brussels, Caroline continued to make frequent
trips to Paris to visit her dressmaker and her hatmaker. (During this
period, she once bragged, she bought three million francs' worth of
dresses at a single store, Callot's.) When she complained to the king that
the evening express train back to Brussels departed too early and left her
too litde shopping time, Leopold, rather than risk her staying in Paris and
out ofhis sight overnight, spoke to the head of the railway. From then on
the train left an hour later.
Caroline quickly learned to make use of Leopold's quirks, such as
his hypochondria. "One day when I needed some free hours for myself
I obtained them by sneezing. How many times have I kept intrigu- ing women away from the sovereign simply by telling him that they
had colds!"
Leopold took Caroline with him everywhere. Ostensibly, she traveled
incognito, but with an expanding retinue ofservants this became difficult.
Shocking everyone, she accompanied the king to London in 190 1 for the
funeral of his cousin Queen Victoria. The king did not entirely lose his
interest in other young women— in Brussels, Paris, and elsewhere, he periodically sent his valet or another intermediary to look for candidates
who met his detailed physical specifications— but Caroline was in a different category. The two of them seemed to trumpet, rather than
disguise, their difference in age: she called him Tres Vieux and he called
her Tres Belle. To the extent that someone like Leopold was capable of
love, this teenage prostitute proved to be the love ofhis life.
But it was not only Leopold's liaison with Caroline that lost him
popularity with Belgians. It began to dawn on his people that their
country was gaining litde financial benefit from the Congo: the bulk of
the profits were going straight into Caroline's dresses and villas and, on a
far larger scale, into the king's construction projects. Since Leopold had
litde taste for good works, literature, or drama— and a well-known dislike for music— he spent his money mostiy on building things, the bigger the better.
For years the king had pled poverty, but as his triumphal arches, muse-
ums, and monuments sprouted around the country, he could keep up the
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A KING AT BAY
pretense no longer. Belgians were even more upset when it became clear
that their king was spending much of his newfound wealth abroad- He was soon one of the largest landowners on the French Riviera, where he
built a dock for his fifteen-hundred-ton yacht, the Alberta, and had archi-
tects from Nice design and build a series of splendid villas. His property
included most ofthe land at the end ofthe scenic fingertip ofCap Ferrat,
then, as now, among the most expensive seaside real estate in the world.
On his young mistress Leopold showered casdes and mansions. When she became pregnant, he and the French government split the cost of
building a new road near her villa at Cap Ferrat, in order to give her
carriage a smoother ride. When her son was born, he was given the tide ofDuke ofTervuren, and she became the Baroness de Vaughan. The king
took her around the Mediterranean on his yacht, but the Belgian public
loathed her, and her carriage was once stoned in the streets ofBrussels. In
the minds of Europeans, the king's public and private lives by now were wholly entwined. When Caroline s second son was born, he had a de- formed hand. A cartoon in Punch showed Leopold holding the newborn child, surrounded by Congolese corpses with their hands cut off. The
caption read: vengeance from on high. How did Leopold feel about being the target ofsuch wrath? Clearly, it
exasperated him; he once wrote to an aide, "I will not let myselfbe soiled
with blood or mud." But the tone he sounded was always of annoyance
or self-pity, never of shame or guilt. Once, when he saw a cartoon of
himself in a German newspaper slicing off hands with his sword, he
snorted, according to a military aide, and said, "Cut off hands— that's idiotic! I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not the hands. That's the one
thing I need in the Congo!" Small wonder that when the king jokingly
introduced Prime Minister Auguste Beernaert to a gathering as "the
greatest cynic in the kingdom," Beernaert replied, deadpan, that he
would not dare take precedence over His Majesty.
224
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A RECKONING
As E. D. Morel, Roger Casement, and their allies caught Europe's attention with reports of the holocaust in central Africa, newspa-
pers and magazines ran pictures ofburned villages and mutilated bodies,
and missionary witnesses spoke of the depopulation of entire districts.
Looking at this written and photographic record today immediately
raises a crucial question: what was the death toll in Leopold's Congo?
This is a good moment to pause in our story to find an answer.
The question is not simple. To begin with, history in this case cannot
have distinct lines drawn around it as it can, say, when we ask how many
Jews the Nazis put to death between 1933 and 1945- King Leopold II's
personal Etat Independant du Congo officially existed for twenty-three
years, beginning in 1885, but many Congolese were already dying un-
natural deaths by the start of that period, and important elements of the
king's system of exploitation endured for many years after its official end.
The rubber boom, cause of the worst bloodletting in the Congo, began
under Leopolds rule in the mid- 1 890s, but it continued several years after
the end of his one-man regime.
Furthermore, although the killing in the Congo was of genocidal
proportions, it was not, stricdy speaking, a genocide. The Congo state was
not deliberately trying to eliminate one particular ethnic group from the
face of the Earth. Instead, like the slave dealers who raided Africa for
centuries before them, Leopold's men were looking for labor. If, in the
course of their finding and using that labor, rnillions of people died, that
22$
A KING AT BAY
to them was incidental. Few officials kept statistics about something they
considered so negligible as African lives. And so estimating the number of
casualties today requires considerable historical detective work.
In population losses on this scale, the toll is usually a composite of
figures from one or more of four closely connected sources: (i) murder;
(2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; (3) disease; and (4) a plummeting
birth rate. In the worst period in the Congo, the long rubber boom, it
came in abundance from all four:
1. Murder. Although outright murder was not the major cause of death
in Leopold's Congo, it was most clearly documented. When a village or a district failed to supply its quota of rubber or fought back against the
regime, Force Publique soldiers or rubber company "sentries" often
killed everyone they could find. Those times when an eyewitness hap-
pened upon a pile of skeletons or severed hands, and a report survives,
represent, of course, only a small proportion of the massacres carried out,
only a few sparks from a firestorm. But among those scattered sparks are
some that burn distinctiy:
• In 1896, a German newspaper, the Kolnische Zeitung, published, on the
authority of "a highly esteemed Belgian," news that 1308 severed
hands had been turned over to the notorious District Commissioner
Leon Fievez in a single day. The newspaper twice repeated the story
without being challenged by the Congo state. Several additional re-
ports of that day's events, including some from both Protestant and
Catholic missionaries, cited even higher totals for the number of
hands. On a later occasion, Fievez admitted that the practice ofcutting hands off corpses existed; he denied only, with great vehemence, that
he had ever ordered hands cut off living people.
• In 1899, a state officer, Simon Roi, perhaps not realizing that one of
the people he was chatting with was an American missionary, bragged
about the killing squads under his command. The missionary, Ells-
worth Faris, recorded the conversation in his diary: "Each time the
corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given to him. He
must bring back all not used; and for every one used he must bring
back a right hand! ... As to the extent to which this is carried on,
[Roi] informed me that in six months they, the State, on the Momboyo River had used 6000 cartridges, which means that 6000 people are
killed or mutilated. It means more than 6000, for the people have told
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A RECKONING
me repeatedly that the soldiers kill children with the butt of their guns."
• The punitive expeditions against the Budja rebels [see pages 192-193] altogether killed more than thirteen hundred Budjas. Reports of this appeared in various Belgian newspapers in 1900, one of which was
subsidized by the Congo state. Dozens of other rebellions against rubber-collecting broke out throughout the territory over the next
decade. Estimating the death toll caused by suppressing them all is impossible, but sometimes a stray statistic carries appalling implica-
tions, when we remember that soldiers were severely punished for "wasting" bullets on nonhuman targets. Among a raft of revealing documents from the A.B.I.R. concession company that Morel got hold of is a register showing that in the year 1903, a single one of the
thirty-five rubber-collecting posts in A.B.I.R. territory was sent a total
of 159 firearms and 40,355 rounds ofammunition.
The list of specific massacres on record goes on and on. The territory was awash in corpses, sometimes literally. Where a river flows into Lake Tumba, wrote the Swedish missionary E. V Sjoblom, "I saw . . . dead bodies floating on the lake with the right hand cut off, and the officer
told me when I came back why they had been killed. It was for the rubber. . . . When I crossed the stream I saw some dead bodies hanging down from the branches in the water. As I turned away my face at the horrible sight one of the native corporals who was following us down said, 'Oh, that is nothing, a few days ago I returned from a fight, and I
brought the white man 160 hands and they were thrown into the river.'" It was not only missionaries and visitors who recorded the mass mur-
ders. Many Force Publique officers kept astonishingly frank diaries about the death and destruction they left behind them.
• At the village ofBikoro on Lake Tumba, a Swedish officer ofthe Force
Publique, Lieutenant Knut Svensson, may have been the cause ofsome of the mangled bodies his countryman Sjoblom had seen. Svensson
noted in his diary a death toll of 527 people in four and a halfmonths'
time, upon the imposition of the rubber regime in 1 894-1 895. (Ac- cording to oral tradition in the area today, Svensson would assemble
the people ofa recalcitrant village, on the pretext ofsigning a treaty or
recruiting porters, and then simply open fire.)
• The diary of another officer, Charles Lemaire, is chilling in its casual-
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ness: "28 March 1891: . . . The village of Bokanga was burned. ... 4 April 1 891: A stop at Bolebo. . . . Since they wanted to meet us only with spears and guns, the village was burned. One native killed. ... 12 April 1 891: Attack on the Ikengo villages. . . . The big chief Ekele of
Etchimanjindou was killed and thrown in the water. . . . 14June 1891:
Expedition against the Loliva who refuse to come to the station. Dreadful weather; attack made in driving rain. The group of villages
was large; couldn't destroy them all. Around 15 blacks killed. . . .14
June 1 891: At 5 a.m. sent the Zanzibari Metchoudi with about 40 men
... to burn Nkole. . . . The operation was successful and everything
was burned. ... 4 September 1 891: At 4 a.m. preparations for attack-
ing Ipeko. . . . The whole village was burned and the banana trees cut
down. . . . 13 July 1892: The Bompopo villages were attacked 7 July by Lieutenant Sarrazijn; 20 natives killed; 13 women and children taken prisoner"
• From the diary ofLouis Leclercq, another Force Publique officer: "21
June 1895. . . . Arrived at Yambisi at 10:20 a.m. Village abandoned. . . .
We sent several groups of soldiers to scour the area; they came back several hours later with 1 1 heads and 9 prisoners. A canoe sent out hunting in the evening also brought back several heads. 22 June 1895:
They brought us three prisoners in the morning, three others towards
evening, and three heads.A man from Baumaneh running through the forest shouting for his lost wife and child came too close to our camp
and received a bullet from one of our sentries. They brought us his
head. Never have I seen such an expression of despair, of fear. . . . We burned the village"
The diaries of Lemaire and Leclercq— and others— go on in this vein for day after day, week after week.
Resistance of any kind, or even cutting corners, was fatal. E. D. Morel
reprinted a message that a district commissioner, Jules Jacques,* sent to
one of his underlings after finding that some villagers had severed vines,
killing them, to extract the rubber, instead of merely tapping the vines
as they were supposed to: "M. le Chef de Poste. Decidedly these people
of [Inongo] are a bad lot. They have just been and cut some rubber
* Jacques later won glory in World War I, and today there is a statue ofhim in the main square ofDiksmuide, Belgium.
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vines. . . . We must fight them until their absolute submission has been obtained, or their complete extermination. . . . Inform the natives that if
they cut another single vine, I will exterminate them to the last man "
Conrad was not making much up when he had Mr. Kurtz scrawl the
infamous line "Exterminate all the brutes!"
2. Starvation, exhaustion, and exposure. As news of the terror spread, hun-
dreds of thousands of people fled their villages. In retaliation, soldiers
often took their animals and burned their huts and crops, leaving them
no food. This pattern of action was established even before the rubber
boom, when Leopold's soldiers were looking primarily for ivory and for
porters and food for themselves. A Swedish lieutenant describes such a raid in 1885 in the lower Congo rapids district: "When we were ap-
proaching there was a terrible tumult in the village. The natives . . . were
completely taken with surprise. We could see them gather what they could of their belongings and escape into the deep thick woods. . . .
Before I left the place I had the village plundered of the large number of
goats, hens and ducks that were there. . . . Then we abandoned the village
and retired to a better place for our noon rest
"
As they fled these expeditions, villagers sometimes abandoned small
children for fear that their cries would give away their hiding places. As a
result, many children starved.A small proportion ofthe population, lucky enough to live near the Congo's borders, escaped from the country. Some
thirty thousand refugees, the French colonial governor estimated, had
crossed into French territory by 1900. Others fled to British territory,
although a number ofthem drowned in the Luapula River, which formed
part of the border with British-owned Northern Rhodesia. But for most
people there was nowhere to flee except deep into the rain forest or the
swamps, where there was no shelter and little food. The American soldier
of fortune Edgar Canisius saw refugees from his scorched-earth raids
"living like wild beasts in the forest, subsisting on roots, and ants and
other insects ." A fellow Presbyterian missionary of William Sheppard's wrote, in 1 899, "All the people of the villages run away to the forest
when they hear the State officers are coming. To-night, in the midst of
the rainy season, within a radius of 75 miles ofLuebo, I am sure it would
be a low estimate to say that 40,000 people, men, women, children, with
the sick, are sleeping in the forests without shelter."
Around the same time, a young English explorer named Ewart S.
Grogan walked the length of Africa and was shocked at what he saw in
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crossing a "depopulated and devastated" 3000-square-mile tract in the far
northeastern part of the Congo: "Every village has been burnt to the ground, and as I fled from the country I saw skeletons, skeletons every-
where; and such postures— what tales of horror they told!" Hunger also struck villagers who did not flee into the forest, because if
they were near a rubber post they had to give up much of their bananas, manioc, fish, and meat to feed the soldiers. The village ofBumba in the A.B.I.R. concession, for example, had only a hundred families, but it was
expected each month to deliver fifteen kilos ofyams or similar vegetables, in addition to five pigs or fifty chickens. Furthermore, villages like this
one usually had to come up with all the food while their able-bodied men were in the forest, desperately searching for rubber. Without the manpower to clear new garden plots, so essential in farming the fragile soil of the rain forest, the women often replanted worn-out fields. Har- vests declined, and in the old A.B.I.R. region the period is remembered today as lonkali, the time of famine.
Untold thousands of people, women, children, and the elderly, died as hostages. Soldiers kept them in dirt compounds, often in chains, feeding them little or nothing until the men of a village brought in the demanded amount of rubber— something that might take weeks. In one stockade in 1 899, prisoners were found to be dying at the rate ofthree to ten a day
3. Disease, As with the decimation of the American Indians, disease killed many more Congolese than did bullets. Europeans and the Afro- Arab slave-traders brought to the interior of the Congo many diseases previously not known there. The local people had no time to build up immunities— as they largely had to malaria, for instance. Both new illnesses and old ones spread rapidly, because huge numbers ofCongolese
were now forced to travel long distances: as men conscripted to be long-haul porters or to work as steamboat crews (a large boat required from twenty to sixty woodcutters) or as soldiers impressed into the Force
Publique. The most notorious killers were smallpox and sleeping sickness, although less dramatic lung and intestinal infections also took a high toll.
Smallpox had been endemic in parts of coastal Africa for centuries,
but the great population movements ofthe imperial age spread the illness throughout the interior, leaving village after village full of dead bodies.
A Kuba king— the successor to the one who had welcomed William Sheppard to the kingdom— died from the disease. Smallpox inspired a particular terror. The Africans called it "the sickness from above" or "the
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sickness of heaven," because the terrifying disease seemed to come from
no familiar source. One traveler to the Congo came on a deserted town where a fifteen-foot boa constrictor was dining on smallpox victims'
flesh, and on another where the vultures were so gorged that they were
too heavy to fly.
Sleeping sickness also spread lethally up the rivers. Half a million
Congolese were estimated to have died of it in 1901 alone. The disease is
caused by a parasite first spread by the bite of the pink-striped tsetse fly,
about the size of a horsefly, with a distinctive high-pitched buzz. Once
contracted by humans, sleeping sickness becomes highly contagious. It
can cause fever, swelling of the lymph glands, a strange craving for meat,
and a sensitivity to cold. At last comes the immense lethargy that gives the
illness its name.
Faced with undeniable evidence of massive population loss, Leopold's
apologists, then and now, blame sleeping sickness. And it is true that
sleeping sickness and the other diseases would doubdess have taken many
lives even if the Congo had come into the twentieth century under a
regime other than Leopold's. But the story is more complicated, for
disease rarely acts by itself alone. Epidemics almost always take a drasti-
cally higher and more rapid toll among the malnourished and the trau-
matized: the Nazis and Soviets needed no poison gas or firing squads to
finish offmany of those who died in their camps. Today, thanks in part to our century of famines and barbed wire, epidemiologists understand all
too well the exact mechanisms by which this happens. Even in the
Congo, one did not have to be a physician to see that those who were dying of disease were not dying of disease alone. Charles Greban de
Saint-Germain, a magistrate at Stanley Falls, wrote in 1905: "Disease
powerfully ravages an exhausted population, and it's to this cause, in my opinion, that we must attribute the unceasing growth ofsleeping sickness
in this region; along with porterage and the absence of food supplies, it
will quickly decimate this country. I've seen nowhere in the Congo as sad
a spectacle as that along the road from Kasongo to Kabambare. The
villages for the most part have few people in them; many huts are in ruins;
men, like women and children, are thin, weak, without life, very sick, stretched out inert, and above all there's no food."
4. Plummeting birth rate. Not surprisingly, when men were sent into the forest in search of rubber for weeks at a time, year after year, and women were held hostage and half-starved, fewer children were born.A Catholic
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A KING AT BAY
missionary who worked for many years in the Lake Mai Ndombe district, a major rubber area, noticed this pattern. When he arrived, in 19 10, he was surprised by the almost total absence of children between the ages of
seven and fourteen, although there were many of other ages. This pin- points the period from 1896 to 1903 — just when the rubber campaign was at its height in the district.A witness in a nearby area at that very time was Roger Casement, on his investigative trip. He estimated that the population had dropped by 60 percent and wrote that "the remnant of
the inhabitants are only now, in many cases, returning to their destroyed
or abandoned villages. ... A lower percentage of births lessenjs] the population. . . . Women refuse to bear children, and take means to save themselves from motherhood. They give as the reason that if 'war' should
come to a woman 'big with child' or with a baby to carry, 'she' cannot well run away and hide from the soldiers." Part of the population loss in
the Congo resulted, then, when families, terrorized and torn apart by the rubber campaign, simply stopped having children.
No territory-wide census was taken in the Congo until long after the rubber terror was over. But Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthro-
pologist who worked in a former rubber area in the 1970s, found persua- sive demographic evidence that large numbers ofmen had been worked to death as rubber slaves or killed in punitive raids— and he discovered the evidence in the regime's own statistics. No other explanation ac- counts for the curious pattern that threads through the village-by-village
headcounts taken in the colony long before the first territorial census.
These local headcounts consistently show far more women than men. At Inongo in 1907, for example, there were 309 children, 402 adult
women, but only 275 adult men. (This was the very town for which, some ten years earlier, the district commissioner had ordered "absolute
submission . . . or . . . complete extermination.") At nearby Iboko in
1908 there were 322 children, 543 adult women, but only 262 adult men.
Statistics from numerous other villages show the same pattern. Sifting
such figures today is like sifting the ruins of an Auschwitz crematorium.
They do not tell you precise death tolls, but they reek ofmass murder.
During Leopold's rule, by how much, from all four causes, did the Congo population shrink? Just as when historians chart population loss from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, they can be more
confident ofthe percentage than they are ofabsolute numbers. They have,
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after all, no census data. Interestingly, some estimates ofpopulation loss in
the Congo made by those who saw it firsthand agree with some of those made by more scientific methods today.
An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold's state, the
population ofthe territory had "been reduced by half." Major Charles C.
Liebrechts, a top executive of the Congo state administration for most of
its existence, arrived at the same estimate in 1920. The most authoritative
judgment today comes fromJan Vansina, professor emeritus ofhistory and
anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and perhaps the greatest
living ethnographer ofCongo basin peoples. He bases his calculations on "innumerable local sources from different areas: priests noticing their
flocks were shrinking, oral traditions, genealogies, and much more." His
estimate is the same: between 1880 and 1920, the population of the
Congo was cut "by at least a half."
Half of what? Only in the 1920s were the first attempts made at a
territory-wide census. In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten mil-
lion, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to
the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate after-
math the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten mil-
lion people.
Burned villages, starved hostages, terrified refugees dying in swamps,
orders for "extermination"— even in crass, purely monetary terms, aren't these inefficient means of doing business? Massacring huge num-
bers of people may frighten the survivors into gathering rubber, but
doesn't it destroy the labor force? Indeed it does. Belgian administrators
ordered the census taken in 1924 because they were deeply concerned
about a shortage ofavailable workers. "We run the risk ofsomeday seeing
our native population collapse and disappear," fretfully declared the per-
manent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium that
year. "So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert."
Why, then, did the killings go on for so long? The same irrationality
lies at the heart of many other mass murders. In the Soviet Union, for
example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Com- munist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there
were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed,
and many millions more died in the far-flung camps of the gulag. So
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many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway
men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals
were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 194 1.
In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to
take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it
becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo annals abound in cases like
that ofRene de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late
1890s. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bos genoux, on your
knees), because he always made people kneel before him. He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his
porch he could use passersby for target practice. If he found a leaf in a
courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he or-
dered a child killed in the nearest village.
Two Force Publique officers, Clement Brasseur and Leon Cerckel,
once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a fire was lit
beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads,
then set on fire. The list is much longer. Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter ofthe Vietnam War, captures
the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: "We'd rip
out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every
chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, ifwe can't shoot
these people,what the fuck are we doing here?"When another American, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to put the blood lust of that war on film,
where did he turn for the plot of his Apocalypse NouP. ToJoseph Conrad,
who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.
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"JOURNALISTS WONT GIVE YOU RECEIPTS"
As the congo reform crusade reached its height, the man in England whose name was most indelibly linked to the territory
passed from the scene. After having been elected to Parliament, Sir Henry
Morton Stanley found serving there a bore. The rousing adventure stories he liked to tell on the lecture circuit were no substitute for a polished
House of Commons debating style. Stanley lacked something else useful in Parliament: a sense ofhumor. He soon resigned. The years ofbattling malaria, dysentery, and other tropical diseases had
taken their toll. Only in his early sixties, this surprisingly small man with close-cropped white hair and mustache and a ruddy, weathered face
moved ever more slowly He avidly followed the news of the Boer War, fulminating against the rebels who dared to challenge British rule. Filled with self-pity and calling himself "a man who had given up his life for his country and for Africa " he worked fitfully on his autobiography. Al-
though he had been a fast, prolific writer all his life, he left this book
unfinished, perhaps fearful of being caught in the web of contradictory stories he had spun about his childhood and youth. He, his wife, Dorothy,
and an adopted son divided their time between a London home and an elegant mock-Tudor country mansion in Surrey. They named a pond, a stream, and a pine grove on their estate after the scenes of his fame:
Stanley Pool, the Congo River, and the Ituri forest.
Stanley was rumored to be unhappy with the chamber of horrors
the Congo had become, but the few public statements he made were all in Leopold's defense. His health grew worse, probably exacerbated by
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A KING AT BAY
the myriad of hovering doctors eager to give their famous patient all
the latest treatments: strychnine injections, ammonia, ether, and electric
pulses. On May 10, 1904, Stanley heard Big Ben strike in the night, and murmured, "How strange! So that is time! Strange!" Those were his last words.
Stanley was one of the most lionized Englishmen of his time, and
while he lived, his display of loyalty to Leopold was worth far more
than any publicity the king could have bought. But with Stanley gone,
Casement's report released, and Morel's attacks on the increase, Leopold
needed new defenses. Signs of these showed up in an unexpected place. Luxury train travel had reached a high point during the first decade of
the twentieth century. Cities across Europe were linked together by the
comfortable sleeping cars of the Compagnie Internationale de Wagons-
Lits. For the well-to-do, boarding an overnight express train meant clouds
of hissing steam on the platform, a porter carrying suitcases, and a sleep-
ing car attendant folding down the bed. By the middle of the decade, these elite travelers could count on a small addition to the ritual. On the table in the sleeping compartment would be found a monthly magazine,
with three parallel columns of type in English, French, and German,
called The Truth about the Congo. Its free distribution to this select captive
audience of wealthy Europeans was a publicist's dream. A major stock- holder of the Compagnie Internationale de Wagons-Lits was King
Leopold II. The king had begun his counteroffensive.
Stimulated by Morel, attacks on Leopold were now coming from all quarters. During the decade, branches or affiliates of the Congo Reform Association would spring up in Germany, France, Norway, Switzerland,
and other countries. Eight members of the Swedish Parliament signed
a statement supporting the C.R.A. Among his supporters Morel could count Prince Boris Czetwertynski, of a distinguished Polish noble family,
the famous novelist Anatole France, and the Nobel Prize-winning Nor-
wegian writer Bjornstjerne Bjornson. In Switzerland, wrote one witness,
men grew pale and tears collected in women's eyes when Alice Harris's pictures of maimed children were shown at a Congo protest meeting. A speaker attacked the Congo administration at a big public meeting in Australia; a series of talks was given in New Zealand. In Italy, one of Leopold's critics was so vociferous that the Congo state consul in Genoa, Giovanni Elia, challenged him to a duel. (Both men were lighdy wounded, the consul on the nose, his opponent on the arm.) Morel and
236
"journalists won't give you receipts"
his supporters seemed to the king an international conspiracy. So he fought back internationally.
Belgium's lack ofgreat-power status meant that Leopold was depend- ent on cunning, above all on his skill at manipulating the press. As he waged his countercampaign, the king showed himself to be as much a master of the mass media as his archenemy Morel. He dispatched an aide on a secret mission to British Africa to search out abuses to match those Casement had found in the Congo. He made sure there were frequent articles in The Truth about the Congo along the lines of "Opium in British India" and derogatory news items from all over the British Empire: flog- gings in South Africa, human sacrifices in Nigeria, abuses in Sierra Leone and Australia. Then, calling in his chits, Leopold threatened to take away his friend Sir AlfredJones's lucrative Congo shipping contract ifJones did not manage to dampen British criticism.
Jones promptly went to work. He paid £3000 for long trips to the Congo by two travelers. One was his friend Viscount William Mount- morres, a young man who indirectly owed Jones his job. Mountmorres obligingly published a favorable book about the Congo in 1906: "It is astounding to witness the whole-hearted zeal with which the officials devote themselves to their work." While Mountmorres acknowledged some excesses, he found most of the Congo "to be well and humanely- governed." Mountmorres s volume reminds one of Beatrice and Sidney Webb's famously cheerful account of their visit to the young Soviet Union. Like the Webbs, Mountmorres assumed that any laws and regula- tions on the books were carefully followed. The chicotte, he stressed, could be used only after a formal inquiry in which the accused had the right to call witnesses, and could be applied only to the buttocks. Also, "not more than twenty strokes may be inflicted in any case except for habit- ual thieving, when a maximum of fifty may be ordered, but in this case the punishment must be spread over a series of days, and not more than twenty strokes given on any one day" (In practice, this was fol- lowed about as rigorously as the early Soviet decree oudawing the death penalty.)
The other voyagerJones sponsored was Mary French Sheldon, a Lon- don publisher and travel writer. Once in the Congo, she depended for her travel on the steamboats of the state and its company allies (some- thing Casement had been careful not to do), and officials spared no effort in showing her the territory's delights. Everywhere she went, hostages
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A KING AT BAY
were released so that she would see no one in custody. According to one
missionary, at Bangala on the Congo River the state agent even "pulled down an old prison, and levelled the ground, and made it all nice, because she was coming." Things went seriously awry only once, when a local station chief got his instructions garbled. Confusing Mrs. Sheldon with
another VIP he had been told to prepare for, from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, he assembled for her inspection in a clearing the
most severely crippled people and the worst cases of disease he could
find. But no matter; Mrs. Sheldon fell in love with a steamboat captain
and had a good time. Leopold granted her an audience when she was on her way home, andJones helped place her enthusiastic articles in newspa-
pers. "I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than I have ever
seen in the Congo," she wrote in the Times in 1905. On her return, she gave a speech and slide show for five hundred people at London's Savoy
Hotel, for which Leopold paid the bill. The king then put her on his payroll at fifteen hundred francs a month (about $7500 today) to lobby members ofParliament.
While launching these counterattacks on his British critics in public,
Leopold simultaneously tried to co-opt them, always using go-betweens
to cover his tracks. A Paris attorney approached a board member of the Congo Reform Association: ifthe C.R.A. would draft a reform plan and a proposed budget for the Congo, he could guarantee, he said, that His
Majesty would read it with great interest. Morel rejected this as "extraor-
dinarily impudent." Leopold's British Baptist friend Sir Hugh Gilzean Reid made a similar overture to the Aborigines Protection Society; it too was rebuffed.
The king did get some artful revenge on one opponent, the influen- tial French journalist Pierre Mille, an ally of Morel's who had fiercely and repeatedly attacked the king in print. One day a courtier brought word that Mille was quiedy visiting Brussels with a woman not his wife. Leopold found out where they were staying and sent them an invitation
to visit the great greenhouses at the chateau ofLaeken. Mille and his lady
friend accepted, and they appeared so delighted that Leopold thought he
had won over a major critic. But soon after, Mille resumed his attacks. The king then asked the Belgian embassy in Paris to find Mille's home ad-
^
dress. To it he sent a huge bouquet of flowers, with a card bearing the
royal coat of arms and the message, "To Monsieur and Madame Pierre Mille, in memory of their visit to Laeken."
Leopold's public relations campaign was mounted by an elaborate staff.
23$
"journalists won't give you receipts"
In September 1904, he had called together a group of his top advisers and laid plans for a Press Bureau. It would be headquartered well away from public scrutiny behind several innocuous front organizations: the Ger- man-based Committee for the Protection of Interests in Africa, the Bu- reau of Comparative Legislation in Brussels, and the Federation for the Defense ofBelgian Interests Abroad, which operated in many coun- tries.
'
Within a year or two, new pro-Leopold boob began coming off the presses. The Press Bureau secretly subsidized several Belgian newspapers and a magazine, published in Edinburgh, called NewAfrica— The Truthon the Congo Free State. Taking a cue mom Morel, Leopold ordered up more than two dozen pamphlets. His British publicist, Demetrius C. Boulger (who was on a 1250-franc monthly retainer, plus bonuses), wrote one called, perhaps too defensively, The Congo State is not a Slave State* Another, ,4 Complete Congo Controversy, illustrating the. controversial methods ofMr. Morel, Hon. Sec. Congo Reform Association, appeared over the signa- ture of one Lieutenant Colonel James Harrison, billed as "a country gentleman of absolutely independent mind, a sportsman and a traveller and a familiar figure in London Social and Political Circles." Harrison'smam qualification as a Congo expert was his having made a big-game hunting expedition there, during which, he found, "the natives were cheerful and satisfied."
The main work of the Press Bureau, however, was done under cover Its agents surreptitiously passed cash to editors and reporters all over Europe; by 1907, the Brussels correspondents ofboth the Times ofLondon and Germany's Kblnische Zeitung were on the take. Two editors ofa major newspaper in Vienna received the equivalent of more than $70,000 in todays money. In Italy, Elia, the dueling consul, made payments to two newspapers, planted favorable articles elsewhere, arranged for people to write a pro-Leopold pamphlet and book, and paid offat least one legisla- tor. The newspaper Corriere della Sera refused a large bribe and launched an investigation instead.
The bureau focused much of its attention on Germany, now a major power in Africa. The country was a particular problem because Kaiser
dl unaTh * t ^^ ^fy"natiVe **"" ^J^fyiog Leopold's methods: "Todraw up a scheme by which the black race can be made to work without pressure orcompulsion in some form or other is beyond the powers ofhuman ingenuity^ 239
A KING AT BAY
Wilhelm II personally loathed Leopold; at one point he called him "Sa-
tan and Mammon in one person." The Press Bureau organized the usual
array of pro-Leopold lectures and pamphlets in German, but that was
only the beginning. Ludwig von Steub, a banker who served as honorary
Belgian consul in Munich, operated as a German bagman for Leopold. In
Berlin, the National-Zeitung was writing fiercely in 1903 of "the unscru-
pulous businessman who lives in the palace in Brussels," but von Steub,
knowing that the newspaper was in financial difficulties, acted accord-
ingly By 1905, the paper moved onto the fence: "It is certainly not easy
for a German to arrive at a clear opinion in questions where so many
interests are at stake, notably those of the British rubber merchants " Later
that year it devoted an entire page to a glowing portrait of a prosperous
Congo state, shamefully calumnized by a clique offoreign merchants and
missionaries who spread "old wives' tales" and "hateful peddlar's stories."
By 1906 it was publishing Leopold's decrees. In 1907 its editor was deco-
rated by the king.
Readers observed similar mysterious transformations in other Ger-
man newspapers. The Munchener Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, once
adamantly opposed to Leopold's rule, suddenly began publishing pro-
Leopold Congo news items from "a most reliable source" or "a Congo-
lese source" or "a well-informed source." The newspaper's Brussels cor-
respondent, not in on the take, sent home more critical reports, including
a long piece that apparendy got into the paper without first being read by
the editor in chief. In the very next issue, an editor's note began, "Con-
trary to the opinions we published in an earlier issue, another source, no
doubt better informed on the situation in the Congo, has sent us the
following commentary . . ."
Bribes are usually hard to trace, but we know something about
Leopold's in Germany because of an amusing chain of events. Exposes
damaged the Press Bureau's effectiveness, and in 1908 its German payoff
operations were ordered shut down. But poor von Steub in Munich
didn't understand the message or couldn't bring himself to stop doing
this interesting work. He kept on paying out his bribes— and then became upset when he wasn't reimbursed. He soon was bombarding
officials in Brussels with obsequious, complaining letters, which some-
how escaped destruction and were discovered in the archives more than
fifty years later. In them von Steub described his work in ever greater
detail, to ever higher officials. "According to the opinion of all the colo-
nial experts, the good will of the German government [toward the
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JOURNALISTS WONT GIVE YOU RECEIPTS"
Congo| is due mainly to my activity" he wrote to the Belgian foreign minister. "To abandon the flag at such an important moment and to leave (lie field free for the enemy seemed a crime to me. . . . OnJanuary 1 and April 1 I made all the usual payments, and I dare hope to at least have my expenses covered." Later, more desperate than ever, he describes his "pay-
ments to organs of the press" and explains why he isn't submitting paper- work to back up his claims: "In giving me my assignment, M. Liebrechts
I the Congo state's secretary general of the interior] told me, 'Journalists and writers won't give you receipts, so don't ask for any.'"
Despite the king's efforts to stem it, the outpouring of criticism spread
rapidly. As soon as the Congo Reform movement was well under way in England, E. D. Morel set his sights on the United States. That nation had,
Morel told every American who would listen, a special responsibility to bring Leopold's bloody rule to an end, because it was the first country to
have recognized the Congo.
In September 1904, at the invitation of a group of American Congo missionaries who were already denouncing the king's rule, Morel crossed the Atiantic. Shortly after he disembarked in New York, he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. He next spoke at a human rights conference in Boston and spurred his allies to found the American Congo Reform Association. Its first head was Dr. G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, remembered today mainly for later
inviting Sigmund Freud to the United States. The association s vice presi- dents soon included several churchmen, President David Starr Jordan of
Stanford University, Booker T. Washington, and Mark Twain. Washington took a delegation ofblack Baptists to the White House to urge President
Roosevelt to put pressure on Leopold, lobbied members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and, encouraged by Morel, joined Twain
in speaking about the Congo at public meetings in several cities. "Dr. Washington is no small enemy to overcome," one of Leopolds agents in the United States wrote the king. Leopold unsuccessfully tried to get
Washington off the case by offering him an all-expenses-paid trip to the Congo, and, when that didn't work, a trip to Belgium.
Deeply impressed after meeting Morel in New York, Twain three times went to the nation's capital to lobby. "I think I have never known him to be so stirred up on any one question as he was on that of the cruel
treatment of the natives in the Congo Free State. . . ."Washington wrote
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A KING AT BAY
ofTwain. "I saw him several times in connection with his efforts to bring
about reforms in the Congo Free State, and he never seemed to tire of
talking on the subject" Twain had lunch with Roosevelt— news Morel eagerly passed on to the British Foreign Office— met with the secretary of state, and wrote to Morel that the cause of Congo reform in the
United States was a "giant enterprise . . . [that] needs an organization like
US. Steel." In 1905 he wrote a pamphlet, King Leopold's Soliloquy, an
imaginary monologue by Leopold. It went through many printings and
garnered royalties that the author donated to the Congo Reform Associa-
tion. Much of the monologue is about Leopold s media campaign. "In
these twenty years I have spent millions to keep the Press of the two
hemispheres quiet, and still these leaks keep occurring," says Twain's
exasperated king, who rages against "the incorruptible kodak . . . The
only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn't
bribe." In Twain's pamphlet, Leopold attacks William Sheppard by name
and denounces the black man's "meddlesome missionary spying" Al-
though it is painted with too broad a brush and is far from Twain's best
work, King Leopold's Soliloquy provoked the royal propaganda machine
to rush out an anonymous forty-seven-page pamphlet,An Answer to Mark
Twain.
Just as he had done in England, Morel smoothly shaped his message for
different American constituencies. Most of his allies were progressive
intellectuals like Mark Twain, but he was willing to sup with the devil to
help his cause. He made shrewd use of Senator John Tyler Morgan, the
former Confederate general who had helped to engineer US. recogni-
tion of Leopold's Congo twenty years earlier. Morgan, still thundering
away about sending blacks back to Africa so as to make an all-white
South, wanted the abuses in the Congo cleaned up with no delay. Other-
wise, how could black Americans be persuaded to move there? He hoped
to see ten million ofthem "planted" in the Congo, he told Morel. With
prodding from Morel, Morgan kept the issue of Congo atrocities alive in
the Senate.
The veteran British Baptist missionaries John and Alice Harris, who
followed Morel to America, addressed more than two hundred public
meetings in forty-nine cities. At one meeting in Chicago an old woman
who had been born a slave tried to donate her life savings to the cause of
Congo reform; the reformers would accept only one dollar. Speaking
tours by other activists followed.John Harris enthusiastically reported to
Morel from Washington, "Telegrams, petitions, private letters are rolling
242
"JOUttfclALISTS WON'T GIVE YOU RECEIPTS*'
in here by the thousands The President . . . with a little more pressure will take some action ."
Secretary of State Elihu Root, who found himselfon the receiving end of all the pressure, recalled later in some exasperation, "The very people who are most ardent against entangling alliances insist most fanatically upon our doing one hundred things a year on humanitarian grounds The Protestant Church and many good women were wild to have us stop the atrocities in the Congo. . . . People kept piling down on the [State] Department demanding action." Petition-signers included the governor of Massachusetts and every member of the Commonwealth's senate, a group ofYale professors and officials, university presidents, divinity school deans, bishops, and newspaper editors. A Congo resolution was passed by the convention ofthe National Women's Christian Temperance Union.
Although Morel had vocal individual supporters throughout Europe, only in the United States did the cause of Congo reform become the full-scale crusade it was in England. Horrified to see the movement against him spreading to a new continent, Leopold leaped into action. When Morel spoke in Boston in 1904, no fewer than six of the king's spokesmen showed up to demand equal time.When the influential Sena- tor Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts arrived in Paris for a visit the following year, the king immediately sent an emissary to invite him to dinner in Brussels. "He named six different days, so there was no escape," Lodge wrote to President Roosevelt. Lodge was impressed by Leopold; he described him as "a shrewd, active able man of business— a cross between [railroad barons] Jim Hill & Harriman, between the great organ- izer & promoter & the speculator. He knows everybody & about every- body."
Using his knowledge "about everybody," Leopold targeted an even more powerful senator, Nelson W Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich, a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the fa- ther-in-law ofJohn D. Rockefeller, Jr., and chairman of the Senate Fi- nance Committee, was the ultimate Washington power broker. "I'mjust a president," Roosevelt once told the journalist Lincoln Steffens, "and he has seen lots of presidents."
Leopold courted Aldrich and other influential Americans by promis- ing them a share of the loot. He gave major Congo concession rights to Aldrich, the Guggenheim interests, Bernard Baruch,John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the financier Thomas Ryan, a close friend and former legal client of Secretary of State Root. A letter of advice to the king from one of his
H3
A KINU AT flAV
American agents made clear the strategy Leopold was following: "Open up a strip of territory clear across the Congo State from east to west for benefit ofAmerican capital. Take the present concessionaires by the throat
if necessary, and compel them to share their privileges with the Ameri-
cans. In this manner, you will create an American vested interest in the
Congo which will render the yelping of the English agitators and the Belgian Socialists futile." Leopold also gave more than three thousand
Congo artifacts to the American Museum of Natural History, knowing that J. P. Morgan was on its board.
With Senator Aldrich, Leopolds largesse worked. The State Depart- ment was under constant pressure from the reformers to appoint an
American consul general to the Congo who could follow up Roger Casement's investigation with one ofhis own. To get the reformers offhis
back, Secretary of State Root nominated the consul general they had
suggested, but when Aldrich let it be known he would block that choice in the Senate, Root withdrew the nomination.
His eye on key American ethnic voting blocs, Leopold also played the
role of the victimized Catholic. His representatives in Rome successfully convinced the Vatican that this Catholic king was being set upon by
unscrupulous Protestant missionaries. A stream of messages in Latin* flowed from the Holy See across the Adantic to the designated Catholic
point-man for Leopold in the United States,James Cardinal Gibbons of
Baltimore— who, as it happened, was another card-playing companion of Senator Aldrich. Cardinal Gibbons believed that the Congo reform crusade was the work of "only a handful of discontented men . . . de- pending largely upon the untrustworthy hearsay evidence of natives ." He spoke out loudly for Leopold, who awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown.
Leopold had a full squadron oflobbyists in the United States. Professor
Alfred Nerincx, of George Washington University, helped put out a new English-language magazine on the Congo, gave speeches, and saw to it
that favorable articles appeared in highbrow magazines. Frederick Starr,
an oddball University of Chicago anthropologist who was a big believer in the inferiority of "primitive"peoples, received one ofLeopolds innu-
merable medals and a full-year, all-expenses-paid tour of the Congo. In
* "Probe novit summits Pontifex ea omnia, quae exagitatajuerunt contra Gubemium Status Congi Independents seu Belgici, per aliquos missionarios protestantes anglicos. . . ."
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return he produced a series of fifteen enthusiastic articles in the Chicago
Daily Tribune under the heading "Truth about the Congo Free State," later reprinted as a book/ Henry Wellington Wack, an attorney for a
patent-medicine firm, published a thick book that soon appeared in
thousands of American libraries. Instructions from Brussels were that
Wack was "to act as if he were not in the State's employ, but merely an impartial publicist."
Another American agent, however, proved less reliable. In setting up
his US. lobbying effort, the king had made a rare and disastrous misstep.
For any well-heeled Californian who found himself on trial in 1904, a likely defense lawyer might have been Colonel Henry I. Kowalsky of San Francisco. Kowalsky was a classic American type: the flamboyant trial
lawyer who himself skirts the edge of the law and whose showman's dazzle attracts a roster offamous friends and acquaintances.A bon vivant, raconteur, and big spender who ran up legendary hotel bills, the gregari- ous Kowalsky s larger-than-life persona and courtroom skills won him a broad range of clients. Some were boxers and underworld figures; some were previously unknown relatives or common-law wives, whom he had a great knack for finding when there was a will that could be contested. Like many a colonel of his day, Kowalsky had never been in the army, although he let Europeans believe he had been.
It was not just Kowalsky s personality that was larger than life. A re- nowned amateur chef, he consumed a vast amount ofhis own and others' cooking. "Compared with him," a reporter later observed when the portly William Howard Taft was in the White House, "President Taft is a top worker in a team of acrobats." Kowalsky 's enormous neck cascaded
over his collar; his voice had a husky wheeze; and when a San Francisco newspaper asked local luminaries for their favorite recipes one Christmas,
Kowalsky slyly submitted one for roast jowls.
He also suffered from narcolepsy, the disease that causes uncontrollable short spells of sleep. "There is scarcely a man familiar with the life of San Francisco who has not seen Kowalsky fall asleep on the street, sitting in
* Here, for example, is Starr on the chicotte: "Many a time ... I have seen a man immedi- ately after being flogged, laughing and playing with his companions as if naught had
happened."
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the lobby of a hotel, trying a case in court or occupying a box at a theater" observed a reporter. He may, in fact, have had more control over this problem than he admitted; a journalist covering one trial noticed that
"he awakes just in time to interpose the most pertinent legal objections
to questions.
"And it is these sudden awakenings ," the story went on, "that have occasioned such havoc among the furniture ofJudge Graham's court. When a man of some 300 pounds— to put it conservatively— awakes with a start, it is apt to jar the strongest chair made. ... A few times more and there is an ominous creak, and then a crack and a smash. There goes another,' murmurs Bailiff McGenity as the colonel abandons his ruined chair and draws up a firm one" At the end of this particular trial, Kowal- sky grandly presented the court with a special chair he had ordered built — of solid oak, held together by iron bolts, its legs reinforced with iron bracing.
When Kowalsky was on the other side of a bitter legal battle with the famous gunfighter Wyatt Earp, the short-fused Earp threatened to shoot
Kowalsky on sight. The two men ran into each other in a San Francisco saloon. Earp forced Kowalsky into a back room, pulled out a revolver, and
told the lawyer to get ready to meet his maker. Kowalsky s jowly face dropped onto his chest and he dozed off. Earp stormed from the room,
saying, "What can you do with a man who goes to sleep just when you're going to kill him!"
Kowalsky had an unerring eye for the pathway to a lucrative client,
and he spotted one when Prince Albert, heir apparent to the Belgian throne, came to California. Albert was traveling incognito, but Kowalsky recognized and befriended him, and was rewarded in 1904 with an invita-
tion to Belgium. There, he was received on board the royal yacht at Ostend and introduced to Leopold.
Looking at Kowalsky, the king saw an American who was active in the Republican Party, then in power, and a man who portrayed himself as a lobbyist extraordinaire, able to thwart the troublesome do-gooders intent
on causing trouble for His Majesty. With Morel starting to stir up the American public, there seemed no time to waste. The king hired Kowal- sky, gave him detailed instructions, and provided enough money for a luxurious office on Wall Street. As Kowalsky prepared to move to New York, his friends in San Francisco—judges, businessmen, an admiral, and some rival lawyers who may have been happy to see him leave town — gave him a farewell banquet that doubdess added a few more pounds
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to his already awesome frame. "I shall not closely follow the text of the
toast which has been assigned me," said the mayor of San Francisco. "Like
our guest, it is too large a subject." Another speaker commented that it
was fortunate Leopold had not sent Kowalsky direcdy to the Congo,
where "the cannibals of Africa would have taken pleasure in so choice a
morsel."
Kowalsky replied to the toasts, "When I leave you, it is only because I
have heard the clarion call of duty in the interest of humanity and
civilization." The clarion call included an annual retainer of 100,000
francs, about $500,000 in today's money. In his new role, Kowalsky was
received by President Roosevelt, to whom he gave a photograph of Leopold in a silver frame, an album of photos of the Congo, and a
memorandum asking him not to be deceived by jealous missionaries and
Liverpool merchants.
Someone taken by surprise by all this was Baron Ludovic Moncheur,
the Belgian minister to the United States, who had just penned a raptur-
ous article, "Conditions in the Congo Free State," for the influential
North American Review and who thought he was leading Leopold's Ameri-
can propaganda effort. He was horrified by the sudden appearance of Kowalsky,who had the unmistakable look ofa shyster. On the very day of Kowalsky s farewell banquet in San Francisco, Moncheur learned with
dismay, the lawyer had had a fistfight in court with a creditor. Moncheur
and his aides sent off a frantic stream ofmessages to Brussels.
At the Royal Palace, no underling dared openly oppose a new favorite
of the king's, but Moncheur did at last receive a coded telegram from a
top executive for Congo affairs: "I have your information on Kowalsky.
Do you think the situation is such that we should cancel his mission?— which would be difficult for us, however. Wouldn't it be better to try to
give him another mission in Africa or China?"
"It would be worse than useless to send him to the Congo," one of
Moncheur s aides replied, "unless one could hope that he wouldn't come
back." Moncheur followed this up with a prescient warning about
Kowalsky: "If he took me to be the cause of his disgrace, he could make
scenes that would produce a scandal in the press."
Cautiously, Congo state officials asked Kowalsky to come to Brussels,
where they requested that he undertake an urgent mission to Nigeria.
Kowalsky was interested enough to buy himself a sun helmet and an
elephant gun, but he then turned down the assignment, probably having
guessed that he was being put out of circulation. Because he knew too
247
much, Leopold's worried Congo aides did not dare fire him, so they sent him back to the United States with more lobbying instructions, which barely disguised their mounting anxiety: "Colonel Kowalsky s mission is to enlighten senators and congressmen as to the justice of our cause, and to ward off the passing of unfavorable resolutions by them." However: "He wiU be careful not to call at the White House except in case of absolute necessity ... He will make no public speeches except after taking the Belgian Minister's advice."
Kowalsky was now out of the loop, and a year after Leopold had hired him, the king let his contract expire. In vain, the lawyer bombarded Leopold with letters (all beginning "My dear Majesty . . .") touting his work for the Congo cause, denouncing his rivals among Leopold s other American lobbyists (he called one "a characterless, unworthy, and unprincipled ingrate" with a "rascally hand"), and making extravagant claims for himself. "It was a mighty task, and I worked night and day. ... I have travelled thousands of miles in this cause" He tried to flatter the king into putting him back on the payroll: "I confess having conceived an affection for your Majesty such as I felt for my much beloved and lamented father." To Kowalsky's annual retainer, Leopold added a hefty 125,000 francs on condition that he leave quiedy all the while sooth- ing him with hints that at some future date the king might need his services again.
At last, however, the spurned Kowalsky did what Moncheur and his colleagues at the Belgian embassy had been dreading. On December 10, 1906, readers of William Randolph Hearst s New York American picked up their newspapers to find a front-page expose on the workings of the American Congo lobby, king Leopold's amazing attempt to INFLUENCE OUR CONGRESS EXPOSED. . . . FULL TEXT OF THE AGREE- MENT BETWEEN KING LEOPOLD OF BELGIUM AND HIS PAID AGENTS IN Washington. Although Kowalsky indignantiy maintained that someone had robbed his office, he had, it appears, sold Hearst his complete Congo correspondence.
Every day for a week, Hearst played the story for all it was worth, splashing tens of thousands of words and dozens of photographs across the pages of the American and the many other newspapers he owned. There could not have been a worse catastrophe for Leopold, for, in order to highlight its scoop, the American dramatized the king's villainy by reprinting Morel's severed-hands photos and trumpeting all the Congo
248
reformers' atrocity charges: infamous cruelties. . . . torture of
WOMEN AND CHILDREN. . . . U.S. AMAZED AT CRIMES OF CONGO. The documents revealed that, in addition to Kowalsky's salary and
keep-quiet payment, Leopold had promised Kowalsky an additional
100,000 francs in the king's Congo state bonds "ifthe American Govern-
ment does not make any declaration harmful to the Congo State, and if
Congress passes no unfavourable resolutions before the end of the next
session " A letter from Kowalsky to the king boasted of a $1000 bribe he had paid to an unnamed prominent journalist, who was, he claimed, "the
President's personal friend," from whose services "we got hundreds of
thousands in advertising our cause." Kowalsky also boasted that he had
quashed an expose in Munsey's Magazine by going to "the editor, my
personal friend, who destroyed the article and published one very com-
plimentary to Your Majesty's interest instead."
The most enticing revelation of all was that Kowalsky had used
Leopold's money to bribe Thomas G. Garrett, a staff member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to help derail Congo protest reso-
lutions. Garrett, Kowalsky extravagantiy told the king, had "stood at the
door of the committee room and held back the demanding, howling
missionaries, ministers, and religious cranks, as well as some agents of the
Liverpool outfit. All this time I was at my post, and only when Congress
closed did I breathe safely." On the American's front page appeared a photograph of a handwritten letter on U.S. Senate stationery from Gar-
rett to Kowalsky, asking for part of the promised payment.
Garrett was prompdy fired. Hours after the story broke, Senator Lodge
ofMassachusetts, where the American Congo Reform Association had its
headquarters, introduced a resolution calling for an international investi-
gation of the Congo scandal. Skillful lobbying by Moncheur and back-
room maneuvering by Senator Aldrich got the resolution watered down
before it was passed, but the entire episode dramatically changed the
climate in Washington. Secretary ofState Root reversed the government's
previous hands-off policy and decided to cooperate with the British
in putting pressure on Leopold to end his rule over the territory. The
Kowalsky revelations— swiftly and jubilantly reprinted by Morel, both in England and in a pamphlet in French for Belgium— created a major setback for Leopold. The tide was turning against the king.
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Around the time that he hired Kowalsky, Leopold had begun maneuvers
on a completely different front. Remembering how effectively his sham Commission for the Protection of the Natives had silenced his critics in
the 1890s, he decided it was time for another commission. This one
would go to the Congo, investigate the situation, and clear his name.
To his new Commission of Inquiry, he appointed three judges: one Belgian, one Swiss, and one Italian. The commission, however, was not as
neutral as it appeared. The Italian, Baron Giacomo Nisco, worked not in
Italy, but in the Congo state as chiefjudge. It was he, in fact, who in the notorious Caudron case [see page 220] had reduced the prisoner's sen-
tence on grounds that a certain amount of "force" and "terror" was
unavoidable. Furthermore, none of the three judges knew any African
language or even enough English to talk direcdy to the highly critical
British and American missionaries. The commission was told to hold
hearings, hear witnesses, and issue a report. On the long voyage to the Congo, the king surely hoped, the old Africa hand Baron Nisco would
enlighten his two fellow judges about the natives' need for firm disci-
pline.
The commission spent several months taking 370 depositions. It held
its sessions everywhere, from the verandas of rubber-collecting posts to
the deck of its steamboat, the Archiduchesse Stephanie, named after one of
the daughters Leopold was not speaking to. There was much ceremony:
scarlet judicial robes and black ones, interpreters, scribes, guards with
rifles and fixed bayonets. A parade of witnesses offered horrifying testi- mony. One of the most impressive was Chief Lontulu of Bolima, who had been flogged with the chicotte, held hostage, and sent to work in
chains. When his turn came to testify, Lontulu laid no twigs on the commission's table, each representing one ofhis people killed in the quest
for rubber. He divided the twigs into four piles: tribal nobles, men, women, children. Twig by twig, he named the dead.
Word about the testimony quickly got back to Brussels, but Leopold
did not realize what effect it was having on the commissioners. Then, in
March 1905, from the Congo's capital at Boma came a curious warning signal that all might not turn out well for the king. Paul Costermans, the
territory's acting governor general and, to the extent possible for a person
high up in such a system, a man of personal integrity, was briefed on the commission's findings. He then alarmed his aides by plunging into a deep depression. Some two weeks later, after writing a series of farewell letters,
he slit his throat with a razor.
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Another bad omen for Leopold was the news that one of the judges,
while listening to a succession of witnesses with atrocity stories, had
broken down and wept. It was now obvious to the king that the process
had backfired: to his horror what was intended to be a sham investigation
had slipped out of his control and become a real one. Although Morel
lacked the official verbatim transcripts, he quickly published as a pam-
phlet the information his missionary friends and their African parishion-
ers had given the commission, and he sent a copy to every member ofthe
Belgian Parliament.
On their return to Europe, the commissioners deliberated and pro- duced a 150-page report. Even though it was couched in bland and
bureaucratic language, Leopold saw that it repeated almost every major
criticism made by Casement and Morel. He was furious. By the fall of
1905, he could no longer delay publication of the report that all Europe
was waiting for. Politicians and journalists were already speculating about
its contents. But Leopold had one more trick up his sleeve, perhaps the
most dazzling stroke ofshowmanship in his long career.
With his modern sense of public relations, the king understood bril-
liantly that what matters, often, is less the substance of a political event
than how the public perceives it. If you control the perception, you
control the event. He also knew that journalists dread having to digest a
long official report when writing against a tight deadline— all the more so when the material is in a foreign language. On November 3, 1905, the day before the Commission of Inquiry report was scheduled for release,
every major paper in England received a document with a cover letter
explaining that it was a "complete and authentic resume of the report."
This timely and helpful summary came from the West African Missionary
Association, which surely sounded reliable. Missionaries, after all, had
been among the Congo state s most consistent critics. Most conveniendy
of all, the summary was in English.
Delighted, nearly all the British newspapers published the summary,
thinking they were getting a one-dayjump on the big news of the week.
The Associated Press transmitted the summary to the United States,
where it was also picked up by major newspapers. Only during the next
few days, as reporters and editors had time to read the full text of the
report in French, did they realize that the so-called summary had little to
do with the report. Again and again it took major points in the report and
"summarized" them beyond recognition. For example, where the report
said, "We have ourselves described the disastrous effects ofporterage, and
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shown that the excessive labor imposed on the natives in the neighbor-
hood of certain important posts had the effect of depopulating the coun-
try" the summary said. "In order to avoid the regrettable consequences of [porterage] while awaiting the building of the railways, the Commission
suggests that the waterways should be utilized."
And what, the journalists began to wonder, was the West African Missionary Association? They were able to trace it to the office of a London lawyer, but he refused to reveal the address of his client. A day or two later, relenting, he directed questioners to a one-room office across
the street, with a freshly painted sign on the door. It was occupied only by
a watchman. The lawyer then produced a list of the association s board members, but none of those whom reporters were able to reach had ever attended a meeting. Further investigation revealed that the "sum-
mary" had been brought to England by a Belgian priest to whose church
Leopold had recently made a large donation. The West African Mission- ary Association, never heard from before publishing its influential sum-
mary, would never be heard from again.
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NO MAN IS A STRANGER
IT is in the raw, unedited testimony given to the Commission of
Inquiry that King Leopold Us rule is at last caught naked. There could
be no excuse that this was information gathered by the kings enemies,
for the three commissioners had been sent by Leopold himself. There
could be no excuse that people were fabricating stories, for sometimes
many witnesses described the same atrocity. And there could be no ex- cuse that witnesses were lazy malcontents, for many risked their lives
by even speaking to the commissioners. When Raoul Van Calcken, an A.B.LR. official, found two Africans, Lilongo and Ifomi, traveling to meet
the commission, he ordered them seized. "He then told his sentries to tie
us to two trees with our backs against the trees and our feet off the
ground," Lilongo told a British missionary. "Our arms were stretched
over our heads. . . . Look at the scars all over my body. We were hanging in this way several days and nights. . . . All the time we had nothing to eat or drink, and sometimes it was raining and at other times the sun was
out. . . . We cried and cried until no more tears would come— it was the pain of death itself. Whilst we hung there three sentries and the white man beat us in the private parts, on the neck and other parts of the body with big hard sticks, till we fainted." Ifomi died, and Van Calcken ordered his body thrown in a river. Lilongo survived, testified before the commis-
sion, and was carried home by his younger brother.
The testimony given before the commission by Lilongo and other
witnesses appears on forms, each headed with the full title of the com-
mission ("The Commission of Inquiry instituted by the decree of the
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King-Sovereign dated July 23, 1904") and the names and tides of the
three commissioners, followed by blanks for the names of the secretary,
the witness, who swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and the interpreter. Then comes the story.
Witness Ilange Kunda of M'Bongo: "I knew Malu Malu [Quickly Quickly, the African name for Force Publique Lieutenant Charles Mas- sard]. He was very cruel; he forced us to bring rubber. One day, I saw him with my own eyes kill a native named Bongiyangwa, solely be- cause among the fifty baskets of rubber which had been brought, he found one not full enough. Malu Malu ordered the soldier Tshumpa to seize [Bongiyangwa] and tie him to a palm tree. There were three sets of bonds: one at knee height, a second at stomach height, and a third crush-
ing his arms. Malu Malu had his cartridge-pouch on his belt; he took his rifle, fired from a distance of about 20 meters, and with one bullet he
killed Bongiyangwa. ... I saw the wound. The unhappy man gave one cry and was dead."
Witness M'Putila ofBokote: "As you see, my right hand is cut off. . . . When I was very small, the soldiers came to make war in my village because of the rubber. ... As I was fleeing, a bullet grazed my neck and gave me the wound whose scars you can still see. I fell, and pretended to be dead. A soldier used a knife to cut offmy right hand and took it away. I saw that he was carrying other cut-off hands. . . . The same day, my father and mother were killed, and I know that they had their hands cut off."
Witness Ekuku, paramount chief of Boieka: "I knew Jungi well. He died about two months ago from the whipping he received. I saw him hit and I saw him die. It was about three or four meters from the white mans veranda, at the spot I showed you, between the two cactuses. They stretched him out on the ground. The white man Ekotolongo [Molle] held his head, while Nkoi [Ablay], standing at his feet, hit him with a cane. Three canes were broken during the execution. Finally Nkoi kicked
Jungi several times and told him to get up. When he didn't move, Ekate said to the white man, 'This man is dead. You've killed him. . . .' The white man replied, 'I don't give a damn. The judges are white men like me.' . . . Jungi was buried the next day. . . . Jungi was an old man but he had been healthy."
Witness Mingo ofMampoko: "While I was working at brick-making at Mampoko, twice the sentries Nkusu Lomboto and Itokwa, to punish me, pulled up my skirt and put clay in my vagina, which made me suffer
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NO MAN IS A STRANGER
gready. The white man Likwama [a company agent named Henri Spelier]
saw me with clay in my vagina. He said nothing more than, 'If you die working for me, they'll throw you in the river.'"
And so the statements continue, story after story, by the hundreds.
Here at last was something the rest of the world had seldom heard from
the Congo: the voices of the Congolese themselves. On few other occa- sions in the entire European Scramble for Africa did anyone gather such a
searing collection of firsthand African testimony. The effect on anyone
who read these stories could be only that ofoverwhelming horror.
However, no one read them.
Despite the report's critical conclusions, the statements by African
witnesses were never direcdy quoted. The commission's report was ex-
pressed in generalities. The stories were not published separately, nor was
anyone allowed to see them. They ended up in the closed section of a
state archive in Brussels. Not until the 1980s were people at last permitted
to read and copy them freely.
At the time he applied his artful spin control to the release of the Com- mission of Inquiry report, Leopold was seventy. As he grew older he
seemed always in motion. He avoided Brussels as much as he could, and even while there showed his distaste for things Belgian by having all the
meat for his table sent from Paris. He preferred to be abroad. He bought
Caroline a French chateau and often stayed there with her. He liked to
visit Paris, where he once took the entire French Cabinet out to dinner.
Each winter he traveled south to the Riviera in his private railway car, its
green leather chairs embossed with gold. While snowbound Belgians
fumed and couriers shuttled to and from Brussels, he lived and worked
for months on his yacht, the long, sleek Alberta, which could travel under
steam or sail.
During these Riviera winters, Leopold installed Caroline in a luxuri-
ous home on shore, the Villa des Cedres. "Every evening," she writes, "a
steam launch took the king ... to a pier leading to my villa through a subterranean passage. Speaking about this, I can't help remarking on the
extraordinary taste of the king for everything which . . . had a secret and
mysterious character. Anyone could sell him any house so long as it was
built on the side of an abandoned quarry or if it had secret staircases."
Even when he could bring himself to remain in his own frustratingly
small country, Leopold moved back and forth between the chateau at
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Laeken, the Chalet Royal on the beach at Ostend, and two other chateaux. Squadrons of craftsmen continually renovated these buildings,
adding new rooms, outbuildings, and facades. At Laeken workmen in- stalled an elevator done in Italian Renaissance style, and, open to the
public, a million-franc "Chinese pavilion" (equipped, strangely, with a
French restaurant). It was intended to be the first of a series of buildings
representing different regions of the world. Leopold s ceaseless architec-
tural fiddling extended to buildings he could see as well as those he lived
in. He wanted, for instance, "to adorn the heart of Ostend with attractive uniform facades." He offered a neighbor twenty-five thousand francs to put a facade on his house designed by Leopolds favorite architect, the
Frenchman Charles Girault. When the landowner declined, the house was expropriated.
The king often went to see Girault in Paris, seating himself at a table in the architect's studio and poring through stacks of blueprints. He liked visiting building sites. "Ask the Minister of Public Works to be at the Brussels Palace at 9 Wednesday," he instructed his private secretary one
day in 1908. "I want to go with him to St. Gilles Park and be there at 9:30. Then to the Cinquantenaire arch at 11. Then lunch at the Palace around 12:30, then go to Laeken at 2.A stop at the bridge over the canal opposite Green Avenue. At 3, Van Praet Avenue and the Japanese Tower. At 4 the
Meysse road and the Heysel road."When he ordered some building done in the neighborhood of the Royal Palace in Brussels, Leopold had a
special tower ofwooden scaffolding erected, from which he could watch the progress of the work.
With his visitors, the monarch was always subtly bargaining for ways to extend his power. Theophile Delcasse, the French foreign minister, ob-
served that Leopold's "only failing is that he cannot hide his intelligence:
one gets suspicious, and afraid of being led up the garden path " The South African diamond king Cecil Rhodes, the one other white man whose boundless reach in Africa matched Leopold's, once joked that he
had declined an invitation to a meal at the palace because "each dinner
accepted cost a province."
At Laeken, servants were used to seeing the king's large, bearded,
bald-headed figure with its severe brown eyes and big nose, dressed in a lieutenant general s uniform and walking for hours, leaning on his oak
cane, among the palm trees and other tropical plants in the greenhouses and on the paths of the chateau's large park. His eccentricities multiplied.
Sometimes he rode to rendezvous with Caroline on a large tricycle,
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NO MAN IS A STRANGER
which he referred to as "mon animal. " He still feared germs and became
convinced that it was good for his health to drink huge quantities of hot
water each day; servants kept a decanter always at the ready. Court proto-
col remained as formal as ever, the tone set by Leopold, who spoke slowly
and majestically; "as if" Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford wrote in
their thinly disguised portrait of him in their novel, The Inheritors, "he
were forever replying to toasts to his health." Leopold had also begun
speaking of himself in the third person. "Bring Him some hot water!" "Call Him his doctor!" "Give Him his cane!"
The command he really wanted to give was: "Don't take away His
Congo!" For thanks to Morel's campaign and his own Commission of
Inquiry report, from all sides pressure was mounting on him to divest
himself of the country he considered his private property. Only one
alternative to Leopold's control of the Congo was ever really considered:
its becoming a colony of Belgium. Even Morel, frustrated by the lack of
other politically viable choices, reluctantly advocated what was known as
"the Belgian solution." If such a move were accompanied by the proper
reforms— and Morel constandy insisted on these— he believed the rights of the Congolese might be better protected in a Belgian colony
open to scrutiny and under the rule of law than in a secretive royal
fief That few reformers considered anything but the "Belgian solution"
seems surprising to us today, but we forget that in the first decade of the
century, the idea of independence and self-government in Africa was
voiced by almost no one, except for a few beleaguered rebels deep in the
Congo rain forest. In 1890, George Washington Williams had called for
the Congo to be under rule that would be "local, not European; interna-
tional, not national" But it would be more than three decades later
before even the most ardendy anticolonialist intellectuals, in Europe,
Africa, or the Americas, said much like this again.
To Leopold, the international explosion of bad publicity triggered by
the Kowalsky disaster was a turning point: instead ofgrandly bequeathing
the Congo to Belgium at his death as he had planned, he understood that
he would have to make the change before then. With his extraordinary
knack for making the best ofan apparently difficult situation, he began to
maneuver. If these do-gooders were forcing him to give up his beloved
colony, he decided, he was not going to give it away. He would sell it.And
Belgium, the buyer, would have to pay dearly.
Oddly enough, Leopold had the Belgian government cornered. The
Congo reform movement had reached such a pitch of fervor that Bel-
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A KING AT BAY
gium's international reputation was at stake. And the British public's capacity for moral outrage had a power independent of government: at
about this time, for example, some British humanitarians were organizing
a boycott ofPortuguese products because ofPortugal's use offorced labor
in Africa. Furthermore, ifBelgium didn't take over the colony soon, some
powerful country might: France and Germany, long jealous of the king's
lucrative rubber profits, had their eye on pieces ofCongo territory. Presi- dent Roosevelt hinted that he was willing to join Britain in convening an
international conference to discuss the Congo's fate. Three times the
British and American ministers in Brussels went, together, to see the
Belgian minister of foreign affairs and press for Belgian annexation. But
sharply limited as Leopold's powers were in Belgium itself, the worried
Belgian government had no legal authority over him in his role as ruler of the Congo. In the end, the king held the key cards, and he knew it. How much, then, could he get the government to pay him for his
colony? Negotiations began at the end of 1906 but soon bogged down,
because the government could not get an accounting of the secretive
Congo state's finances. If you are buying a business enterprise, after all, you want to see the balance sheet. Leopold was wintering in the sun at
Cap Ferrat, and the government dispatched the secretary general of the
Foreign Ministry, Baron Leon van der Elst, to see him. The king received
the baron on his yacht, showered him with hospitality for several days, and showed him through the gardens of his expanding array ofproperties
on shore. But when the baron asked for financial data, Leopold replied that the Congo state "is not beholden to anyone except to its foun- der. . . . No one has the right to ask for its accounts." One reason for his obstinacy, it became clear when auditors finally got to see some numbers, was that the twenty-five million francs the Belgian government had
loaned him in 1890, plus nearly seven million more he had borrowed a few years later, were missing. An Antwerp newspaper suggested that the money had gone to Caroline. The king huffed and puffed and deflected further questioning.
Negotiations dragged on through 1907 and into early 1908. Leopold
grumped and raged at the officials who tried to talk with him. At one point he slammed the door in his secretary's face, accusing him of being
in league with the forces trying to take away his Congo. But like his
charm, the king's tantrums were calculated. With the time that they
bought him, he secretly did everything possible to hide his bewildering
web of Congo-related riches, all the while claiming that he had no such
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wealth at all: "I am the ruler of the Congo, but the prosperity of the
country no more affects me financially than the prosperity of America increases the means of President Roosevelt," he told an American corre-
spondent. "I have not one cent invested in Congo industries, and I have
not received any salary as Congo executive."
Finally the king hinted that he was ready to give in. He named his
price. He yielded a little, but not much, and in March 1908 the deal was done. In return for receiving the Congo, the Belgian government first of
all agreed to assume its no million francs' worth of debts, much ofthem in the form of bonds Leopold had freely dispensed over the years to
favorites like Caroline. Some of the debt the outmaneuvered Belgian
government assumed was in effect to itself— the nearly 32 million francs worth ofloans Leopold had never paid back.
As part of the deal, Belgium also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs
toward completing certain ofthe king's pet building projects. Fully a third
of the amount was targeted for the extensive renovations under way at
Laeken, already one of Europe's most luxurious royal homes, where, at
the height of reconstruction, 700 stone masons, 1 50 horses, and seven
steam cranes had been at work following a grand Leopoldian blueprint to
build a center for world conferences.
Finally, on top of all this, Leopold was to receive, in installments,
another fifty million francs "as a mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices
made for the Congo." Those funds were not expected to come from the
Belgian taxpayer. They were to be extracted from the Congo itself.
In November 1908, as solemn ceremonies at Boma marked the Congo's formal change of ownership, an unusual drama was unfolding far inland.
The mere fact that it had begun under Leopold's state and continued
uninterrupted in the new Belgian colony suggests that the difference
between the two regimes was not what the reformers had hoped for. At
center stage was the black American missionary William Sheppard.
Sheppard's article from a decade earlier, about his discovering eighty-
one severed hands being smoked over a fire, had been one of the most
widely quoted pieces of testimony about the Congo. "His eyewitness
account," writes one scholar, "was cited by almost every American re-
former, black or white." For some years now Sheppard had had a strong
ally in his boss, William Morrison, a white minister who had headed the
Southern Presbyterian Congo mission since 1897. Morrison was a fear-
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less opponent of the regime, a friend of Morel's, and a leader in inspiring
his fellow missionaries, American, British, and Scandinavian, to speak out.
He had bombarded officials in Boma with letters ofprotest, published an open letter to Leopold, and delivered an influential speech when passing through London. In the United States, he had led a group of Presbyteri-
ans to see President Theodore Roosevelt about the Congo. The regime, in turn, hated Morrison as much as it did Sheppard.
Sheppard and Morrison were the most outspoken of any of the
American Congo missionaries, wThose protests had long nettled Leopold. He had ordered missionary magazines searched for their hostile articles; some copies still survive, heavily marked in blue pencil by palace aides.
Leopold could not get at his real target, Morel, safe in England, but he had
tried persistently to intimidate Morels sources: in 1906 he had issued a
decree mandating a fine or a five-year jail term for any calumny against a
Congo state official.A British Baptist missionary who fed information to Morel was soon put on trial. He was convicted, fined a thousand francs plus court costs, and, less of a crusader than Sheppard or Morrison, he
left the country. The little band of American Presbyterians saw it was now riskier to speak out; the authorities were watching them closely, both in Africa and abroad. Unknown to them, Moncheur, the Belgian minister to Washington, had attended in Virginia one of the many head- line-making speeches denouncing Congo atrocities that was given by Sheppard, whose reputation for stirring oratory packed many a church or hall during his home leaves.
As the end of Leopold's rule approached, the Compagnie du Kasai, a
concession company of a new generation that was the de facto govern- ment of the area where the Presbyterians were working, was trying to extract all the rubber it could while the boom lasted. The Kasai River basin, where exploitation had begun a little later than elsewhere, had
become the Congo's most lucrative source of rubber. And who now suddenly reappears on the scene, visiting the area for some months as
inspector general of the Compagnie du Kasai, having risen in the world since we met him last? Leon Rom, the one-time collector of severed heads. His transformation into a Congo company official was a common one for retired Force Publique officers.
In the Kasai region, the normally unwarlike Kuba people had risen in revolt against the rubber terror, spurred on, as in similar doomed upris- ings elsewhere in southern Africa, by elders with a fetish said to change
the white man's bullets into water. The rebels burned trading posts and a
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mission station; when bullets did not turn to water, some 180 of them
were killed. Writing in the annual newsletter the American Presbyterians
published for their supporters back home, the Kassai Herald, William
Sheppard described the toll taken on the Kuba. Significandy, he first
celebrated the Kubas' history, writing in a way that no white missionary
would have done:
These great stalwart men and women, who have from time im-
memorial been free, cultivating large farms of Indian corn, peas,
tobacco, potatoes, trapping elephants for their ivory tusks and
leopards for their skins, who have always had their own king and
a government not to be despised, officers ofthe law established in
every town of the kingdom, these magnificent people, perhaps
about 400,000 in number, have entered a new chapter in the
history of their tribe. Only a few years ago, travelers through this
country found them living in large homes, having from one to
four rooms in each house, loving and living happily with their
wives and children, one ofthe most prosperous and intelligent of
all the African tribes. . . .
But within these last three years how changed they are! Their
farms are growing up in weeds and jungle, their king is practically
a slave, their houses now are mostly only half-built single rooms
and are much neglected. The streets of their towns are not clean
and well-swept as they once were. Even their children cry for
bread.
Why this change? You have it in a few words. There are armed
sentries of chartered trading companies who force the men and
women to spend most of their days and nights in the forests
making rubber, and the price they receive is so meager that they
cannot live upon it. In the majority of villages these people have
not time to listen to the Gospel story, or give an answer concern-
ing their soul's salvation.
Sheppard s story appeared in January 1908, the month Leon Rom
returned to Belgium from a six-month business trip to the Kasai. Soon
after, Rom's colleagues at the Compagnie du Kasai began to threaten,
bluster, and demand a retraction, which Morrison and Sheppard refused
to make. Morrison sent company officials forceful letters listing more
specific charges, which upset them still further. The two missionaries
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A KING AT BAY
were legally vulnerable, since technically they had published the article in the Congo itself. In England, Morel reprinted Sheppard's article, and also a photograph the missionaries had sent him, of forced laborers, tied to one another by ropes around their necks.
While the company was still complaining about the offending article, the British vice consul to the Congo, Wilfred Thesiger, paid a three- month visit to the Kasai basin to prepare a report on conditions there. Nervous officials monitored his travels, remembering all too well the international furor caused by Roger Casement's report four years earlier. To the authorities' dismay, Thesiger stayed with the American Presbyteri- ans at their mission and traveled on their steamboat, the Lapsley. As someone who understood the local languages and who knew the district well, Sheppard acted as guide to Thesiger, taking him to thirty-one Kuba villages. After they departed, a suspicious station chiefgrilled villagers the
two men had spoken to, and worriedly reported to his superiors that "Sheppard pointed to the Consul and said, 'You see this white man, when he returns to Europe he will tell the State officials whatever you tell him, because he is very powerful.' In the Bakuba villages [Thesiger] . . . asked any questions Sheppard suggested." Thesiger soon submitted an excoriat-
ing report on starvation and brutality in the Kasai to the British Parlia- ment. One passage, describing Kuba homes falling into ruin while people were put to work as rubber slaves, closely echoed Sheppard's article. The Compagnie du Kasai's stock price plummeted. Company and Congo state officials, furious, blamed Sheppard.
The company could not legally punish the Presbyterians for helping Thesiger, but it could do so for their publishing Sheppard's 1908 article. In February 1909 it filed suit for libel against Sheppard, as writer of the
article, and Morrison, as its publisher, demanding eighty thousand francs in damages. The two men, firm in their convictions, decided that if the judge ruled against them, they would, as Morrison wrote home, "prefer to go to prison rather than pay the fine." Abroad, their supporters rallied
to their defense. "Morrison in the dock," wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (ignoring the black defendant, Sheppard), "makes a finer Statue of Lib- erty than Bartholdi's in New York harbour." In Washington, the affair was discussed at a Cabinet meeting. The American legation in Brussels in- formed the Belgian government that the United States viewed the trial with "acute interest and no little concern," and suggested that U.S. recog- nition ofthe new Belgian claim to the Congo might hinge on the result.
The trial took place in Leopoldville, some six hundred miles down the
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NO MAN IS A STHANUBI
Kasai and Congo rivers from the Presbyterian mission. A photo shows
Morrison and Sheppard before the trial, standing under some palm trees
on each side of a dozen Kubas who were prepared to testify in their
defense. The Kubas are naked above the waist. Morrison, the white map,
looks resigned behind his heavy beard, as if preparing for one more ordeal
in a saintly life that will be rewarded in Heaven, but certainly not before
then. He wears a black hat, black suit, and scuffed shoes. Sheppard, the
black man, wears a white suit and white hat. His shoes gleam; his chest is
arched out; he stands a head taller than everyone else and seems to be
enjoying the moment immensely. There is something proud and inclusive
in his stance toward the Kubas, as if they are junior kinsmen.
The trial's opening date was set— deliberately, the missionaries thought— during the dry season on the Kasai River. After the steamboat carrying the two defendants and their Kuba witnesses
encountered low
water, the captain refused to go farther.A new date was fixed.
Morel telegraphed his friend and ally Emile Vandervelde, leader of the
Belgian socialists, asking him to recommend an "honest young Belgian
lawyer" for the two missionaries. Vandervelde, a leading figure in Euro-
pean democratic socialism, was also an attorney. To everyone's surprise, he
declared that he would take on the case himself, pro bono. The trial was
postponed yet again so that Vandervelde could travel out to the Congo. As
he was preparing to leave Belgium, someone criticized him for traveling
all the way to Africa to defend a couple of "strangers." Unspoken, per-
haps, was the fact that one of those strangers was black.
Vandervelde replied, "No man is a stranger in a court ofjustice."
Newly arrived in the Congo, the anticlerical Vandervelde, president of
the Second International and friend or acquaintance of all the great
left-wing figures of his day, found himself living in a mission station and
cruising Stanley Pool in the mission steamboat, which flew the American
flag. He watched with great amusement as missionaries carried out bap-
tisms by total immersion and prayed for a favorable verdict.
At last the trial began, in a Leopoldville courtroom ofwood and brick,
its windows open to the breeze. On a technicality, the court had dropped
the charge against Morrison, leaving Sheppard the only defendant. In this
frontier outpost, dotted with mango, palm, and baobab trees, and with its
forced labor gangs, military barracks, and a firing range where Europeans
practiced shooting on Sundays, the trial was definitely the biggest show
in town. Over thirty foreign Protestant missionaries packed the court-
room in a show ofsupport. They and other supporters ofSheppard sat on
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A KING AT BAY
one side of the courtroom; on the other side were Catholic missionaries,
Congo state officials, and other backers of the Compagnie du Kasai.
Onlookers who couldn't fit in the room watched through the open door and windows. The Compagnie du Kasai officials wore white suits and
white sun helmets; Sheppard looked natty in a dark coat with a handker-
chiefin his breast pocket.
After the judge rang a small bell to begin the proceedings and the
lawyer for the Compagnie du Kasai spoke, Vandervelde rose to make the
most of his unusual forum. Sheppard, he told the judge, was "no longer of
England or America, but of the Kasai. . . . His only motive in revealing
the condition of the natives amongst whom he lives is humanitarian." Vandervelde "made a magnificent defense" Morrison reported. "His
speech was a marvel of eloquence, invincible logic, burning sarcasm, and
pathetic appeal for justice to be done not only for us Missionaries but
especially for the native peoples. He held the audience in the Court- room spell-bound for over two hours." Sheppard, the accused, was also
moved. "The trial is the talk of the whole country," he wrote, and the
spectators "were so affected that their handkerchiefs were freely used."
According to Sheppard, even the Catholic priests— usually staunch al- lies of the state— were weeping, and one of them came up and con- gratulated Vandervelde after his speech. "It is said there has never been
such a speech as that made in Congo."
The trial won Sheppard some attention back home. Under the head- lines AMERICAN NEGRO HERO OF CONGO and FIRST TO INFORM WORLD of congo abuses, the Boston Herald wrote, "Dr. Sheppard has not only stood before kings, but he has also stood against them. In pursuit of his
mission of serving his race in its native land, this son of a slave . . . has
dared to withstand all the power of Leopold."
After the closing arguments, the judge announced that he would give
his decision in two weeks. In the end, it was politics, not Vandervelde's
eloquence or the missionaries' prayers, that dictated the results. The pres-
ence of the American consul general and vice consul in the courtroom
was a reminder of the problems Belgium might face if Sheppard were
found in the wrong. Similarly, the judge knew he would not have a promising career in the Congo if he found that Sheppard's accusations against the company were true. Steering a cautious middle course, he
made adroit use of the fact that (even though there were no other such
companies in the area) Sheppard's article had not specifically named the Compagnie du Kasai, but had only attacked "armed sentries of char-
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NO MAN IS A STRANGER
tered trading companies." Thus, the judge declared, most improbably,
"the defendant Sheppard did not intend to make an attack on the said
company. . . . The article did not and could not refer to the Compagnie
du Kasai." In effect, Sheppard was found innocent, without the Compag-
nie du Kasai s being found guilty. The company, however, had to pay
court costs.
Far up the Kasai River, the missionaries' wives knew that their hus-
bands had vowed to go to jail rather than pay the damages if the judg-
ment went against them. The sign that this had happened would be ifthe
men were not on board the Presbyterian steamboat when it returned
from Leopoldville. As people anxiously waited at the mission station,
there seems to have been a warmth and camaraderie among these black
and white Americans that would have been inconceivable back home.
"Mrs. Morrison and I waited almost breathlessly for the return of our
loved ones," wrote Lucy Gantt Sheppard. "As the Lapsley came steaming
in, hundreds of Christians began singing hymns and waving their hands
and shouting for joy. It was a glorious time— a time for thanksgiving"
Back in Europe, there was no thanksgiving for Leopold. In December
1909, less than two months after the Sheppard trial, the seventy-four-
year-old king fell gravely ill with an "intestinal blockage," possibly a
euphemism for cancer. Crowded out of the chateau of Laeken by his
endless renovations, surrounded as always by sheaves of architectural
drawings, the king was living in an outbuilding, the Palm Pavilion, amid
the great greenhouses. Caroline and their two sons rushed to Leopold's
side, and Leopold's private chaplain performed a hasty wedding. With
things now straightened out with the church, the king could receive last
rites. Nonetheless, Caroline, who stayed by his side, had to disappear from
sight every time a visitor arrived.
Leopolds rejected daughters, Louise and Stephanie, came to Brussels,
hoping for a reconciliation and for changes in their favor in the royal will.
Obstinate to the last, their father turned them away. The royal physician,
Dr. Jules Thiriar, who had also served as a dummy stockholder for the
king in several Congo corporations, ordered an operation, but it was
unsuccessful. Parliament had just passed a pet bill of Leopold's, instituting
compulsory military service.When he came out ofthe anesthetic after his
surgery, the king signed the bill with a trembling hand. The next day he
seemed to rally, demanding newspapers and giving orders to prepare for a
265
A KING AT BAY
departure for the Riviera. A few hours later he was dead. One of the myriad ofhovering officials led the weeping Caroline from his bedside.
If we are to believe Caroline's account, Leopold, just after the secret
wedding, had turned to Baron Auguste Goffinet, one of the plump,
bearded, slighdy cross-eyed twins who had been among his closest aides for more than thirty years, and declared, "I present you my widow. I place her under your protection during the few days she'll spend in Belgium
after my death." It is likely that the king did say something like this, for he knew that his three daughters and the Belgian public hated Caroline— and that they would do so all the more when they discovered that in his last days he had transferred to her a fortune in Congo securities, on top of
some six million francs he had already given her.
Princess Louise's lawyers came after the securities, so when Caroline went to her Brussels villa, she found it padlocked and guarded, the win-
dows boarded up. It was the same story at the French casde she had been
given by Leopold. But with the help ofthe kings loyalists,who were seen removing papers from his desk in his final hours, Caroline got herselfand
much ofher money away to Paris.
Less than a year later, she remarried— her husband none other than the former French officer, Durrieux, her original boyfriend and pimp. If
she shared some ofher fortune with him, his was surely one of the most
successful feats of pimpery of all time. Of Caroline and Leopold's two sons, one died a few years after his father. The other lived a long, quiet life
on the income from capital once wrested from the labor of Congo
rubber slaves; he died in 1984. Perhaps the most interesting of Leopold's
descendants was his granddaughter Elizabeth, the only child of Stephanie
and Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary. She married a socialist
politician and became known as the Red Archduchess.
At his death, Leopold was little mourned by his people. They much preferred his nephew and successor, Albert I, modest, likable, and— extremely rare for a European monarch— visibly in love with his wife. As for the world outside Belgium, thanks to Morel and his allies, it now thought ofLeopold not in terms ofthe monuments and buildings he was
so proud of, but of the severed hands. The American poet Vachel Lindsay
declaimed:
Listen to the yell ofLeopold's ghost
Burning in Hellfor his hand-maimed host.
266
NO MAN IS A STRANGBR
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, doom in Hell
But the battle over how Leopold and his works would be remembered
had only begun.
The life of a major figure in the early stages of that battle, Roger Case-
ment, had now taken some new turnings. When Casement's report was
published, he had been interviewed by newspapers, wined and dined by
the London literary world, awarded a medal by the British king, attacked
by the Belgian king, defended by Morel and the reform movement, and
then vindicated triumphandy by Leopold's own Commission of Inquiry.
But Casement had to earn a living. By 1906, he was once again serving
as British consul in a remote spot, this time Santos, Brazil, where the
consulate was an empty, whitewashed room in a coffee warehouse. He
wore a dress uniform for ceremonial occasions (white gloves, gold braid
on collar and cufis, a sword, and a hat with a cockade), but his daily work
was anything but glamorous. Exasperatedly summing up his entire consu-
lar career, Casement later wrote, "My predecessor in Santos had a wire
netting up to the ceiling to prevent . . . distressed British subjects throw-
ing things at him. ... At Delagoa Bay [in Mozambique] I could not
afford a secretary or clerk. I had to sit in my office for two years and open
the door to everyone who came in. I was bottle washer and everything
else. ... I have known ladies to come in and ask me for their cab fare. I
have been asked to pronounce a divorce and been upbraided for not
doing it. Once a woman came into my office in Delagoa Bay and fainted
on the sofa, and that woman remained in the house for a week."
When he was not bailing drunken sailors out of jail or performing
other consular duties, Casement was becoming ever more involved with
his native Ireland. On home leave he met members of the movement to
revive what he called the "lovely, glorious language" of Gaelic and, with
it, the roots ofIrish culture. He visited the movement's language school at
Cloghaneely, where he was photographed, arms crossed tighdy on his
stomach, as if holding in some anxiety, his tall frame seated awkwardly
amid solemn Gaelic League members in long Victorian cutaways and vests.
"In those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold," he wrote to a
friend, "I found also myself, the incorrigible Irishman." To another, he
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A KING AT BAY
said that "it was only because I was an Irishman that I could understand
fully, I think, the whole scheme of wrongdoing at work on the Congo."
He had come to feel that Ireland, like the Congo, was a colony, and that there, too, the core injustice was the way the colonial conquerors had
taken the land. "I realised that I was looking at this tragedy [in the
Congo] with the eyes of another race of people once hunted them-
selves"
True enough, but was the "race of people once hunted themselves"
only the Irish? Being a gay man in an unforgiving age, Casement surely felt hunted every day of his adult life. That was a cause too dangerous to
openly take on, but embracing Irish nationalism was possible, and Case-
ment did so with characteristic passion. Although he never fully mastered
the language, he sometimes used the Gaelic form of his name, Ruari
MacAsmund, and tried Gaelic in his letters. On his way to take up his post in Brazil, his baggage stuffed with books on Ireland, he wrote to a
friend, "Remember my address is Consulate of Great Britain and Ireland, Santos— not British Consulate!!" He had special stationery printed to emphasize this. From Brazil, he wrote home, "Send me news of Congo and Ireland— nothing else counts." On one trip home, his ship anchored at Rio de Janeiro. "Casement
came ashore and we talked for a time before going back to his liner for lunch " the British vice consul later recalled. "Half-way out to the
ship, the villainous Brazilian boatmen who were rowing us out suddenly rested on their oars and, as was often their wont, tried to hold us up for
more money than the price already agreed on. But by then Casement was launched on a tremendous monologue about Irish Home Rule and nothing could stem the flood. For a while the boatmen tried to shout
him down, but it was impossible. Finally they gave up in disgust and we continued on our way, with Casement still going strong on Ireland."
Generous as always (he helped support a ne'er-do-well brother for
some years) and frequendy in debt, Casement somehow managed to contribute more than £85 in "Payments to Irish Causes in 1907" out of his salary. More and more, he came to see the world in terms of coloniz- ers and colonized. His letters are filled with discomfort at working for the
biggest colonizer ofthem all, and he gently chided his friend E. D. Morel
for believing England to be morally superior to the other colonial pow- ers: "I have no use for your British government. . . . You are one of the
few, my dear Bulldog, who do not realise the national characteristics— and it is for that I love you. When I think what J.B. [John Bull] has done
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NO MAN IS A STRANGER
to Ireland I literally weep to think I must still serve— instead of fight I do not agree with you that England and America are the two great
humanitarian powers. . . . [They are] materialistic first and humanitarian
only a century after."
Morel advised Casement not to sacrifice his pension rights by prema-
turely leaving the consular service. He understood Casement's frustra- tions, but was wise enough to know that some of them came from the man, not the job. "You are a difficult man to help," he once wrote to Casement. "You are very proud, for which I admire you, in the first place.
Also, forgive me for saying so, it is a little difficult sometimes to know exactly anything [that] could be done that would fall in with your exact
wishes."
Casement worried about Morels welfare as much as Morel did about his. He knew that Morel, having poured all his energy into Congo reform, had not been able to put aside any money for his old age. In London on leave, Casement began collecting funds for this purpose,
contributing £50 himself. "My hope now" he wrote to William A. Cad- bury, the Quaker chocolate manufacturer, "is that we may raise from
£ 10,000 to £15,000 possibly & with this sum . . . invested for the wife and children the besetting fear and dread that weighs on his mind may be removed forever, & his whole personality released for greater good and more work for Africa, or elsewhere where such a fearless soul as his is needed." Casement followed this with a blizzard of letters and personal
visits to other Congo reform supporters. He fell short of his target, but he succeeded in gathering several thousand pounds. He, and Morel even
more so, were skilled at something essential to political crusades: fund-
raising.
Suddenly an opportunity arose for Casement to repeat his famous
Congo investigative journey, this time in another part of the world. Re- ports filtering back to England described atrocities committed against
Indians in the remote Putumayo region of the Amazon River basin by officials of the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company. British humanitari- ans, labor unions, and church groups were demanding action. The firm was incorporated in London, and some of the mistreated workers were
British subjects, contract laborers from Barbados. The Foreign Office sent Casement to investigate.
For Casement, the Putumayo was the Congo all over again, from the long, dreary journeys on crowded steamboats to the swarms of rain forest
mosquitoes to the shootings, shackles, beheadings, mutilations, and kid-
26g
A KING AT BAY
nappings of a slave-labor system driven by Europe's insatiable demand for
wild rubber. Casement weighed and tried to carry the Indians' rubber
loads. He measured the stocks into which people were locked to be
flogged with a tapir-hide whip, which resembled the chicotte.
In reporting to the Foreign Office, Casement knew everything had to
be precise and well documented. But his other writings from this time
show a romantic idealization of the oppressed. The Irish, he felt, were
"white Indians"; poverty-stricken Galway was the "Irish Putumayo." In a
magazine article, he argued that the Putumayo Indians were morally
superior to their white overlords; the Indian was "a Socialist by tempera-
ment, habit, and possibly, an age-long memory of Inca and pre-Inca
precept." (Some of the smaller peoples crushed by their armies might not
have seen the Incas so benignly)
Despite succumbing to his own version of the Noble Savage myth,
Casement got the job done. As with the Congo, he was not content just
to carry out his Foreign Office assignment; he wrote voluminous letters
to influential people, raised money, and fed pages of suggested questions
to sympathetic members of Parliament. In the middle of this work, he
received a startling piece of news: on recommendation of the foreign
secretary, he was to be knighted. He agonized for days over whether to
refuse the knighthood, feeling, as he explained to a friend, that "until
Ireland is safe and her outlook happy no Irishman has any right to be
accepting honours." Finally he said yes, but when it came to the day of
the actual ceremony— which would have required him to kneel before the British king— he pled ill.
While in the Putumayo, Casement's life had been all work, as in the
Congo, with scarcely a thought for anything else. But on the long voy-
ages to and from South America he filled his diary again with a record
of assignations. On shipboard: "Captain's steward, an Indian boy of 19, broad face." In Para, Brazil: "Shall I see Joao, dear old soul! I'll get up
early. ... To Cemetery and lo! Joao coming along, blushed to roots ofhair
with joy." He seemed to become more heedless in his meetings. Passing
through Para again: "Dinner at 8 p.m. and out to cemetery and met
Friend. . . . Police passing behind paling— but he laughed. . . . $10." Still undiscovered, the time bomb's fuse burned on.
One evening in 1910, a year after King Leopold died, London theatergo-
ers attending a new play, based on the Sherlock Holmes story The Speck-
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wu mnn iu 11 ihhui«ulh
led Band, noticed a trio of men in the audience: the famous journalist
E. D. Morel, with his trademark mustache; the black-bearded Sir Roger
Casement, deeply tanned from his time in the Putumayo; and the creator
ofSherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, host ofthe other two.
Conan Doyle was Morel's most important new recruit to the cause of
Congo reform. His help was eagerly welcomed by Morel, whose job had
been made more difficult by the Belgian takeover of the Congo and
Leopold s death the following year. Morel had suffered the worst setback
that can happen to a crusader: he had lost his villain. It is always tempting
to believe that a bad system is the fault ofone bad man. Morel never gave
in to that temptation, but he feared that his supporters would. For the
Congo reformers, being able to demonize Leopold had been a double-
edged sword. With the king now gone, the movement could easily falter,
so Conan Doyle's influential support had come at just the right time.
In 1909 the novelist had spoken side by side with Morel to huge
crowds: 2800 in Edinburgh, 3000 in Plymouth, 5000 in Liverpool. He
wrote an introduction to Morel's newest book and also published a book
ofhis own based on Morel's vast store of material, The Crime of the Congo,
which sold twenty-five thousand copies a week when it first appeared
and was immediately translated into several languages. With all the fervor
of a late convert, he was one of the few people in Europe whose denun-
ciations were even more impassioned than Morel's. He called the exploi-
tation of the Congo "the greatest crime which has ever been committed
in the history of the world."
Morel considered the Belgian takeover of the Congo only "a partial
victory." He knew that the system Leopold had set up would not be
quickly dismantled; it was too profitable. The same men who had been
district commissioners and station chiefs for Leopold would now simply
get their paychecks from a different source. The Force Publique didn't
even bother to change its name. The new Belgian minister of colonies
was a former official of a company that had used thousands of forced
laborers to build railways in the eastern Congo. The head of the Belgian
Senate committee that approved the new colonial budget— which in- creased "taxes in kind" on Africans, Morel pointed out— was a share- holder in the notorious rubber concession company, A.B.I.R. As long as
there was big money to be made from rubber, white men, with the help
of the gun and the chicotte, would force black men to gather it. Coached
by Morel, Conan Doyle wrote, in one of many letters to the editor he
sent to various British newspapers, "So long as in any report of Congo
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A KING AT BAY
reforms, such a sentence occurs as 'Adult natives will be compelled to
work,' there can be no true reform whatever."
Morel now concentrated on trying to make the Foreign Office de-
mand that the Belgian government eliminate the hated Leopoldian "Sys-
tem" of forced labor and confiscation of the products of the land. The
final picture in the Congo Reform Association slide show was ofa British
warship— which Morel urged be sent to Boma to block the Congo River. Earl Grey, the foreign secretary, refused, Hmiting his pressure on
Belgium to withholding British recognition of the Belgian Congo. Mo- rel threw himself into his organizing with more intensity than ever,
turning out another book and an undiminished stream of pamphlets,
articles, and issues of the Congo Reform Association's magazine. He
packed the Royal Albert Hall to the highest balconies with a huge Congo
protest meeting, endorsed by 20 bishops and 140 members ofParliament.
Change seemed to be on its way in the Congo. The new Belgian king,
Albert I, who had actually visited the territory just before taking the
throne and seen people without hands, let it be known that he thought
forced labor a scandal and lobbied for major reforms. (He would lose his
youthful idealism later in life, unfortunately.) Morel was delighted, but
such news made it hard to keep his followers fired up. By 1910, the
American Congo Reform Association had faded away. "Americans . . ."
Morel wrote to one of his hundreds of correspondents, "have not got
very much staying-power."
Morel tried valiandy to keep his followers focused on the issue ofland
ownership, so much more important but so much less dramatic than
Leopold's personal villainy had been. He had long believed that "the root of the evil [will remain] untouched ... till the native of the Congo
becomes once more owner of his land and of the produce which it
yields."
Although Morel never intended it to be, his vocal insistence on Afri-
can land rights was taken by many people, particularly in the Foreign
Office, as implicidy threatening notjust to Belgian but to British practice
in Africa. "The Native question is not so simple as he thinks," the foreign
secretary wrote to Lord Cromer, a Morel supporter. "We do not, in our
own Colonies, say that all the land and produce of the soil belongs to the
Natives." In believing that Congo land did belong to the Africans, Morel
was inherendy more radical than almost all of those he worked with.
Once again, Morel the crusader for justice was in unspoken tension with
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NU MAN IS A STHANUBH
Morel the British patriot, whose newest celebrity ally, Conan Doyle, had once been president of the Boys' Empire League. In Morels writing of
this period, we can begin to see signs of how his involvement with the Congo had changed and deepened him. In 1909, decades ahead of his time and in stark contrast to the self-congratulatory mood around him, he wrote a trenchant warning ofthe "far-reaching consequences over the
wider destiny, not only of South Africa, but of all Negro Africa" that would flow from the fact that Britain had set up the new, independent
Union ofSouth Africa with an all-white legislature.
All did not look bleak to Morel, however. In the fall of 1909, the
Belgian colonial minister announced major reforms, to be phased in
over three years. Morel strongly protested that the transition period was
too long. But over this time letters from his missionary correspondents
turned hopeful. Similarly encouraging news came from inspection tours by British consuls. Reports of atrocities against rubber workers slowed
to a trickle. In 1912, Alice and John Harris— now running the newly merged Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society— returned from a trip to the Congo and reported "immense improvement."
Morel was locked in a double race against time: against the inevitable
British recognition of the Congo as a Belgian colony, which finally came in 191 3, and against the waning fervor of his supporters. Even Casement
felt that "the break-up of the pirate's stronghold [was] nearly accom-
plished" and urged Morel to declare the campaign over. Despite some doubts voiced in his private correspondence, Morel decided to publicly
claim victory. "I do not wish to paint the present in roseate hues. The wounds of the Congo will take generations to heal. But ... the atrocities have disappeared. . . . The revenues are no longer supplied by forced or slave labour. The rubber tax has gone. The native is free to gather the produce of his soil. ... A responsible Government has replaced an irre- sponsible despotism." The one major goal not achieved, he acknow- ledged, was African ownership ofland.
On June 16, 19 13, the Congo Reform Association held its final meet- ing, at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London. Many of the principal British supporters of the cause were together for the last time:John and
Alice Harris, the Archbishop of Canterbury, explorers, missionaries, edi-
tors, M.P.s. Sir Roger Casement, William Cadbury, John Holt, Ernile
Vandervelde, Pierre Mille, and the writer John Galsworthy sent letters or
telegrams of support that were read aloud. As the organization he
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A KING AT BAY
founded, which had roiled the political waters of several countries for
nearly a decade, officially went out of business, E. D. Morel was only
thirty-nine years old.
A series of distinguished speakers praised him. Morel seldom liked sharing too much of the limelight, but when he replied on this occasion^
he gave the greatest credit to someone else: "While I was listening to all
that was being said, I had a vision. The vision ofa small steamer ploughing
its way up the Congo just ten years ago this month, and on its decks a
man that some ofyou know; a man of great heart . . . Roger Casement."
The meeting marked the end of the first major international human
rights movement of the twentieth century. "We have struck a blow for
human justice," Morel told the assembled dignitaries, "that cannot and
will not pass away." It would take another generation to judge whether
this was true.
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18
VICTORY?
Both in Africa and Europe, Leopold's death had promised to mark the end of an era. Many Belgians felt relieved; at last they would be
rid of the multiple embarrassments of his youthful mistress, his unseemly
quarrels with his daughters, and the sheer nakedness of his greed. But it
was soon clear that Leopold's ghost would not vanish so easily. The king
who had died while in possession of one ofEurope's largest fortunes had tried to take it with him. After a fashion, he had succeeded.
Not long before his death, it turned out, Leopold had surreptitiously
ordered the establishment of a foundation, based in Germany, to which
he transferred some twenty-five million francs' worth of paintings, silver-
ware, crystal, jewelry, furniture and the like, plus another twenty million
francs in securities. Some ofthe foundation s income was to be reinvested,
its charter said, and the remainder was to be spent— "according to the directions left by the Founder"— on the grand, showy projects he loved: palaces, monuments, and public buildings. He was afraid that future small- minded Belgian governments would not spend money in such ways, and
he was also trying, as always, to keep his wealth from going to Louise,
Stephanie, and Clementine. "The king has but two dreams," a former
Cabinet minister reportedly said during Leopold's last years; "to die a
billionaire, and to disinherit his daughters."
The German foundation was not the only place Leopold had tried to
hide his fortune. Fifty-eight pieces of real estate in Brussels, purchased for
the king by his faithful aide Baron Auguste Goffinet, turned out to
belong to another secret company.A third shadowy entity, the Residential
275
Jl 11111 If Jll Ufll
and Garden Real Estate Corporation of the Cote d'Azur, held possession of Leopold's panoply of Riviera properties. Some of these villas were earmarked as permanent vacation homes for future Belgian kings; others were to be part of a huge health resort, with parks, gardens, sports facili- ties, and cottages, providing free holidays for white officials returning
from their labors in the Congo. Furthermore, these several corporate hiding places held more than twenty-five million francs' worth of Leopold's Congo bonds.
The Belgian government s effort to clear up the dead king's financial morass dragged on for years. Since the entities involved had been vari- ously incorporated in Belgium, France, and Germany, the process of straightening everything out was wholly disrupted by World War I. The health resort was never built. The grand World School of Colonialism, which Leopold had enthusiastically planned, was left unfinished, its lavish foundations already laid outside Brussels. Somerset Maugham eventually bought one of the king s many Riviera villas. The grounds of another were turned into a zoo, known today for its troupe ofperforming chim- panzees.
Only in 1923, fourteen years after his death, was the last of Leopold's financial thicket untangled. Investigators trying to figure out his finances
discovered, among other things, that some of the riches he had disposed of had in fact belonged to his crazed sister Carlota, still very much alive. Leopold, her legal guardian, had helped himself to certain properties of hers that he wanted, illegally substituting for them some of his Congo state bonds.
The one-time Empress of Mexico long outlived her brother. When she received a visitor, it was in a room with twenty or more chairs lined up. Carlota would enter the room and solemnly greet an imaginary guest in each chair before talking with her caller. As the years passed, she spent endless hours changing her clothes and doing her hair. Then one day she reportedly caught sight of herself in a mirror, realized that she was no longer a youthful beauty, and ordered all the mirrors in her chateau
smashed. At a party forty-five years after her husbands execution, she exclaimed, puzzled, "And Maximilian isn't here!" She was probably one of the few people in Belgium who barely noticed the four-year German occupation during World War L She died in 1927, at the age of eighty- six, muttering madly about imaginary kingdoms and dynasties to the very end.
Even today, researchers are not completely sure which of Leopold's
276
VICTORY!
baubles were paid for out of which hidden pockets. Nor is it possible to
answer fully a larger question: how much profit altogether did the king
draw from the Congo in his lifetime? In answer to this question, the
Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, the leading historian of this period, makes
a "conservative" estimate, not including some smaller or hard-to-trace
sources of money, of 220 million francs of the time, or $1.1 billion in
today's dollars.
One of the lawsuits provoked by Leopold's financial tangles was filed
by Princesses Stephanie and Louise. They claimed that since the wealth in
the secret foundation and companies had been their father's, it was now in part theirs. The Belgian government, however, eventually got most of
the funds.
There was no lawyer to argue that the money should have been
returned to the Congolese.
The final meeting ofthe Congo Reform Association, in 19 13, marked the
end of the most important and sustained crusade of its sort between the
Abolitionism of the early and middle nineteenth century and the world-
wide boycott and embargo against apartheid-era South Africa in the
1970s and 1980s. But the Congo reform movement, heroic though it was,
leaves some troubling questions in its wake. The most important is, did it
do any lasting good?
For many years, the conventional answer was yes. The glare ofpublicity
surrounding the Casement and Commission of Inquiry investigations
had sparked a new outbreak of rebellions in some areas that caused
a noticeable, although temporary, reduction of rubber gathering. Later,
E. D. Morel and his allies could point to the marked drop-off in reports
of atrocities after the transfer to Belgium. Oblique testimony to the
importance of wresting the Congo away from Leopold came even from
Alexandre Delcommune, a long-time Congo businessman and adminis-
trator, a ruthless robber baron. (It was a steamboat from Delcommune's
company that Joseph Conrad was hired to command.) Delcommune
once wrote that if Leopold's rule had lasted another ten years, "one
would no longer have found a single rubber vine, or perhaps a single
native." Did the Congo reformers, then, save millions of lives?
It would be a fitting climax to our story if this were so, for a splendid
movement deserves splendid results. The organizing by E. D. Morel, the
acts of witness of George Washington Williams, William Sheppard, and
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A Mllli AI JSAI
Roger Casement, and the deaths of Andrew Shanu and of rebel leaders
like Nzansu, Mulume Niama, and Kandolo should not have been in vain.
But the truth is more somber.
Reports of abuses against gatherers of wild rubber in the Congo did
drop off markedly after the Belgian takeover of 1908. In the following
years there was far less news ofvillages burned or ofwomen and children held hostage. There was no more officially sanctioned severing of hands.
What lay behind the change, however, was not a kinder and gentler
regime brought about by the reformers, but several other developments.
One was the gradual shift from wild rubber to cultivated rubber. Another
was the introduction of a new method of forcing people to work that
drew much less protest from missionaries and humanitarians: taxes.
The Belgian administrators who took over from Leopold saw that
they needed plantations of cultivated rubber, because if all the rubber
harvested came from wild vines, Africans desperate to meet their quotas
would cut them all down; vines were already becoming scarce in parts of
the country. Look again at the statement from Alexandre Delcommune
on the previous page. He sounds just as concerned about the possible disappearance ofwild rubber as of Congolese.
The imposition of a heavy head tax forced people to go to work on
the plantations or in harvesting cotton, palm oil, and other products— and proved an effective means of continuing to collect some wild rubber
as well. Until the 1920s white traders bought wild rubber from villagers
pressed to pay their taxes.
The central part ofwhat Morel had called the "System," forced labor,
remained in place, applied to all kinds of work. Forced labor became
particularly brutal during the First World War. In 19 16, an expanded
Force Publique invaded German East Africa, today's Tanzania. Like the
other Allied powers, Belgium had its eye on getting part of Germany's
slice of the African cake in the postwar division of the spoils. Enormous
numbers of Congolese were conscripted as soldiers or porters. In 19 16,
by colonial officials' count, one area in the eastern Congo, with a popula-
tion of 83,518 adult men, supplied more than three million man-days of
porterage during the year; 1359 ofthese porters were worked to death or
died of disease. Famines raged. A Catholic missionary reported, "The father of the family is at the front, the mother is grinding flour for the
soldiers, and the children are carrying the foodstuffs!"
The years after the war saw the growth ofcopper, gold, and tin mining.
As always, the profits flowed out of the territory. It was legal for mine
278
management to use the chicotte, and at the gold mines of Moto, on the
upper Uele River, records show that 26,579 lashes were administered in
the first half of 1920 alone. This figure was equal to eight lashes per
full-time African worker. Techniques for gathering forced labor for the
mines were little different from those employed in Leopold's time. Ac-
cording to the historian David Northrup, "a recruiter from the mines
went around to each village chief accompanied by soldiers or the mines'
own policemen, presented him with presents, and assigned him a quota of
men (usually double the number needed, since half normally deserted as
soon as they could). The chiefthen rounded up those he liked the least or
feared or who were least able to resist and sent them to the administrative
post tied together by the neck. From there they were sent on to the
district headquarters in chains. . . . Chiefs were paid ten francs for each
recruit." If a worker fled, a member of his family could be imprisoned —
not so different from the old hostage system.
As elsewhere in Africa, safety conditions in the mines were abysmal: in
the copper mines and smelters of Katanga, five thousand workers died
between 191 1 and 1918. When the vaunted Matadi-Leopoldville railroad
was rebuilt with a wider gauge and pardy new route by forced labor
between 1921 and 193 1, more workmen on the project perished than had
died when the line was laid in the 1890s. To the Africans throughout the
Congo conscripted to work on these and other new enterprises, the
Great Depression, paradoxically, brought lifesaving relief.
With the start ofthe Second World War, the legal maximum for forced
labor in the Congo was increased to 120 days per man per year. More
than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs
came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. The Allies
also wanted ever more rubber for the tires of hundreds of thousands of
military trucks, Jeeps, and warplanes. Some of the rubber came from the
Congo's new plantations of cultivated rubber trees. But in the villages
Africans were forced to go into the rain forest, sometimes for weeks at a
time, to search for wild vines once again.
Although they failed to end forced labor, the Congo reformers for
roughly a decade were spectacularly successful in keeping the territory in
the spotlight. Seldom has so much outrage poured down for so long
upon such a distant target. This raises another major question about the
movement:Why the Congo?
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A &U*U Al UAI
An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or dis- cover a corpse and not raise a "hue and cry." But we live in a world of
corpses, and only about some ofthem is there a hue and cry. True, with a
population loss estimated at ten million people, what happened in the
Congo could reasonably be called the most murderous part of the Euro-
pean Scramble for Africa. But that is so only if you look at sub-Saharan
Africa as the arbitrary checkerboard formed by colonial boundaries. If
you draw boundaries differently— to surround, say, all African equatorial rain forest land rich in wild rubber— then what happened in the Congo is, unfortunately, no worse than what happened in neighboring colonies:
Leopold simply had far more of the rubber territory than anyone else.
Within a decade of his head start, similar forced labor systems for extract-
ing rubber were in place in the French territories west and north of the
Congo River, in Portuguese-ruled Angola, and in the nearby Cameroons
under the Germans. For the concession companies in the Cameroons,
"the 'model' from which they professed to derive their inspiration,"
writes one historian, "was . . . that of King Leopold II's ventures in the
Congo Free State, the dividends of which evoked admiration in stock-
broking circles."
In France's equatorial African territories, where the region's history is
best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than
what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all
exploitable land was divided among concession companies. Forced labor,
hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary com-
pany "sentries," and the chicotte were the order of the day Thousands of
refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold s regime eventually fled back to escape the French. The population loss in the
rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated,just as in
Leopold's Congo, at roughly 50 percent. And, as in Leopold s colony, both
the French territories and the German Cameroons were wracked by
long, fierce rebellions against the rubber regime. The French scholar
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch has published a chilling graph showing
how, at one French Congo post, Salanga, between 1904 and 1907, the
month-by-month rise and fall in rubber production correlated almost
exactly to the rise and fall in the number of bullets used up by company
"sentries" — nearly four hundred in a busy month. During this period a scandal erupted in France when two white men
were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set ofmurders in the French
Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in
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a black prisoner's rectum. Copying Leopold, the government tried to
calm things down in 1905 by sending to Africa a commission of inquiry.
To lead it, the famous explorer de Brazza was brought out of retirement.
It was hoped that he would not say anything embarrassing about the
territory he himself had won for France, whose capital city was named Brazzaville.
Plans, however, went awry Orders for cosmetic changes to be made
during de Brazza 's visit, such as unchaining the forced laborers, did not
reach all the way into the interior before de Brazza got there. Horrified
by what he saw, he began compiling a report that promised to be sear-
ingly critical, but, to the government's relief, he died on the way home.
He was given an impressive state funeral, and the minister of colonies
himself pronounced a flowery eulogy over his grave in Paris s Pere
Lachaise cemetery: "Brazza is not dead ... his passion lives. . . . He is the example . . . of the eternal traditions ofjustice and humanity which are
the glory of France." The eternal traditions ofjustice and humanity did
not allow for the release of de Brazza s draft report. It was promptly
suppressed by the same minister, with the endorsement of Parliament,
and was never published. The lucrative concession-company system con-
tinued, with few changes. In the 1920s, construction of a new railway
through French territory bypassing the big Congo River rapids cost the
lives of an estimated twenty thousand forced laborers, far more than had
died building, and later rebuilding, Leopold's railway nearby
(There is a curious footnote to the story of the French Congo. Who,
by way of strawmen and dummy corporations, was discovered to be a major shareholder in five of the concession companies there, and the
majority shareholder in three of these? King Leopold II. Belgian govern-
ment investigators discovered this in the course of trying to untangle
Leopold's finances after his death. Fearing that the French would be upset
to find their Congo partly owned by the king next door, they successfully
kept the news quiet for some years, and did not sell the shares until the
1920s. Leopold also held big blocks of shares in several concession com-
panies in Germany's Cameroons.)
The exclusive focus of the reform movement on Leopold's Congo
seems even more illogical ifyou reckon mass murder by the percentage of
the population killed. By these standards, the toll was even worse among
the Hereros in German South West Africa, today's Namibia. The killing
there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy It was
genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.
281
After losing much of their land to the Germans, the Hereros rebelled in 1904. In response, Germany sent in a heavily armed force under Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order
( Vernkhtungsbefehl)
:
"Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without catde, shall be shot. . . .
"Signed: The Great General ofthe Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha." In case everything was not clear, an addendum specified: "No male
prisoners will be taken."
Of an estimated eighty thousand Hereros who lived in the territory in 1 903, fewer than twenty thousand landless refugees remained in 1906. The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or— to economize on bullets— bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stocks.
Von Trotha's extermination order stirred some protests in Germany itself, but internationally it was greeted with silence, even though the
Congo reform campaign was then flying high. Morel and other Congo reformers paid so little attention that five years later John Holt, the
businessman who was one of Morels two main financial backers, could ask him, "Is it true that the Germans butchered the Hereros— men, women, and children? ... I have never heard of this before."
Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world also was largely ignoring America's brutal cpunterguerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed 20,000 rebels, and saw 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease. Britain came in for no international criticism for its killings of aborigines in Australia, in accordance with extermination or-
ders as ruthless as von Trotha's. And, of course, in neither Europe nor the United States was there major protest against the decimation of the
American Indians.
When these other mass murders went largely unnoticed except by their victims, why, in England and the United States, was there such a storm of righteous protest about the Congo? The politics of empathy are fickle. Certainly one reason Britons and Americans focused on the Congo was that it was a safe target. Outrage over the Congo did not involve British or American misdeeds, nor did it entail the diplomatic, trade, or military consequences oftaking on a major power like France or Germany. Morel had something of a blind spot about Germany, but, although he had his hands more than full with Leopold, to his great credit
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I
he repeatedly and forcefully attacked France for adopting the Leopoldian
system wholesale in its equatorial African colonies and reaping a lethal
rubber harvest second only to the kings. His words drew little response
among his fellow Britons,who saw World War I on the horizon and knew
that France would be their chief ally.
What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale,
but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no
more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere
in Africa. Conrad said it best: "All Europe contributed to the making of
Kurtz."
In the years following Leopold's death, the other actors in the Congo,
drama passed from the scene. In 1910, William Sheppard returned to the
United States for good. Just after being vindicated in the Compagnie du
Kasai libel trial, he was forced to resign his post as a missionary because he
had been caught having extramarital affairs with African women. He was
briefly placed on probation by the church and then allowed to resume
work as a minister in the United States, where word of the scandal was
never made public. His health was weakened after dozens of bouts of
fever during his twenty years in Africa, and he lived out most of his
remaining years as pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Louisville,
Kentucky, where his wife, Lucy, taught Sunday school and led the choir.
Sheppard continued to write and speak widely about Africa, even
though, in his Southern Presbyterian church, this meant having to talk
before segregated congregations. At different times, each of the two great
archrivals,Booker T.Washington and WE.B. Du Bois, invited Sheppard to
join him on the speaker's platform, and Sheppard obliged. But this man,
who was so honored in the black community, who had been the first
foreign visitor to meet the Kuba king, who had been received in the
White House, had returned to an American South where he was still a
second-class citizen. Years later, a white woman in Sheppard's home town
ofWaynesboro, Virginia, said ofhim: "He was such a good darkyWhen he
returned from Africa he remembered his place and always came to the
back door." When Sheppard died in Louisville at the age of sixty-two, in
1927, more than a thousand people came to his funeral.
On the other side of the country, the lawyer Henry Kowalsky's great
bulk hastened his end. He was found dead at the age of fifty-six, in 1914,
on the floor ofhis apartment in San Francisco's Palace Hotel. In Belgium,
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Leon Rom, his head-collecting days long past, collapsed in his office at
the Compagnie du Kasai in 1924. Joseph Conrad, who had so acutely captured the essence ofRom and of fortune-hunters like him in Heart of Darkness, died in England the same year. The only public figure from the
Congo controversy to survive into our time was the missionary, reformer,
and photographer Alice Harris, who died in 1970 at the age of one hundred.
Another major figure in the Congo story did not meet his end so
peacefully.
In 19 1 3, Sir Roger Casement retired from the British consular service
and was free at last to throw himself into the cause that now consumed
him: freedom for his homeland. Returning to Ireland, he helped to found
the Irish Volunteers, an armed militia, and traveled the country to speak at
mass meetings. A comrade left this description ofhim in Dublin in 191 4: "Looking outward before the window curtains, stood Roger Casement
. . . [with] the apparent dejection which he always wore so proudly, as
though he had assumed the sorrows of the world. His face was in profile
to me, his handsome head and noble outline cut out against the lattice-
work of the curtain and the grey sky. His height seemed more than
usually commanding, his black hair and beard longer than usual. His left
leg was thrown forward and the boot was torn in a great hole— for he gave his substance away always, and left himself thus in need."
"It is quite clear to every Irishman," Casement wrote, "that the only
rule John Bull respects is that of the rifle." He set off across the Atlantic to raise funds from Irish-Americans for buying black-market guns, but
shordy after he arrived in the United States, World War I began. Any talk
ofHome Rule for Ireland, the British said, would have to wait. Casement responded with an open letter declaring that the Irish people should
never "contribute their blood, their honour and their manhood in a war
that in no wise concerns them. . . . Ireland has no blood to give to any
land, to any cause but that of Ireland. . . . Let our graves be in that patriot
grass whence alone the corpse of Irish nationality can spring to life."
He shaved off his beard and, using a false passport, headed from New York to Germany. The militant Irish nationalists wanted the Germans to
declare that if they won the war, Ireland would receive independence. In return, they hoped to arm and train an Irish Brigade of freedom fighters
from among Irish prisoners ofwar now held in Germany. And if the Irish Brigade could not fight in Ireland itself, Casement thought, it would fight
beside the Egyptians, another colonial people yearning for freedom from
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V1L1URI r
Britain. His plan, he wrote in his diary, was to "link the green flag of
Ireland with the green flag of the Prophet & . . . drive the allies into
the sea.
Casement's dreams won little sympathy from the Irish prisoners of
war. They were professional soldiers, many with ancestors who had served
in the same British regiment. Ofsome 2200 Irish Catholic POW's, fewer
than sixty joined the Irish Brigade, where they were given German
uniforms with a harp and shamrock on the collar. Casement occasionally
marched with the brigade in training, but, scarcely larger than an Irish
platoon, it never went to war.
The Germans were highly uneasy with Casement's anticolonialism
and wanted to get this restless romantic off their hands; he was eager to
return to Ireland to join his comrades underground. On April 21, 1916,
off the west coast of Ireland, a German submarine captain released Case-
ment, two companions, and their supplies in a small boat. When he asked
Casement whether there was any more clothing he needed, Casement
replied, "Only my shroud."
In a way, Casement had been waiting for this moment of homecoming
and martyrdom all his life. "When I landed in Ireland that morning
(about 3 A.M.), swamped and swimming ashore on an unknown strand.
... I was for one brief spell happy and smiling once more ... and all
around were primroses and wild violets and the singing of the skylarks in
the air, and I was back in Ireland again."
He was captured a few hours later. His mind was filled with thoughts
ofprimroses and skylarks, but his pockets held a railway ticket stub for the
trip from Berlin to Wilhelmshaven, a German submarine port, and a
diary with the entry, supposedly in code, "April 12: left Wicklow in
Willie's yacht." Among the items police found buried on the beach
where he had landed were three Mauser pistols, ammunition, binoculars,
maps, and a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayydm.
Two days later, Casement was charged with high treason, the first
knight of the realm to be so accused in several hundred years. He was
held incommunicado in the Tower of London, and the British wasted
little time in putting him on trial. Guards led him to and mom court in
handcuffs. Like almost all of his Congo reform movement friends, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle strongly disapproved of his action, but he contrib-
uted X700 toward Casement's defense. He and many other famous writ-
ers signed petitions asking that Casement's life be spared. Howeverjoseph
Conrad, Casement's 1890 roommate from Matadi, refhsed to sign; he was
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A KING AT BAY
as staunch a patriot of his adopted country, England, as Casement was an opponent.
Money and messages of support arrived from around the world. From the United States, the Negro Fellowship League sent King George V an appeal for clemency: "We feel so deeply grateful to this man for the revelations he made while British Consul in Africa, touching the treat- ment ofthe natives ofthe Congo. But for him, the world might not know of the barbarous cruelties." George Bernard Shaw drafted a speech for Casement to give at his trial, but Casement rejected it and gave his own.
"Self-government is our right," he declared. "A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself— than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind. . . . Where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours . . . then surely it is braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel
. . . than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men." Like far too few
nationalists, Casement's passion for freedom applied to all peoples, not
just his own. For his time he was rare, perhaps unique, in proclaiming something in common between the struggle for freedom of Europeans like the Irish and of Africans like the Egyptians and the Congolese. His
speech quickly entered the annals of anticolonialism, where it made a deep impression on a young man who would later help lead his own country to independence,Jawaharlal Nehru. "It seemed to point out," he said, "exactly how a subject nation should feel."
Found guilty, Casement was moved to London s Pentonville Prison, a massive, forbidding structure built in 1842 to hold convicts in solitary
confinement under a strict rule of silence. At his former lodgings in London, Scotland Yard had already found some of his diaries. The authorities immediately made photographic copies of the entries about his homosexual experiences and showed them around widely: to the king, to influential citizens in their London clubs, to members of Parlia- ment.Journalists were invited in for a look, and one set of copies went to Washington. The government wanted to discredit Casement and to dis- courage any more notables from speaking up for clemency. The diaries helped to seal his doom.
An imprisoned pacifist caught a glimpse of Casement watching the sunset sky through his Pentonville cell window. He looked "wonderfully calm ... he seemed already to be living in another world; there was not a
286
VICTORY?
trace of anxiety or fear in his features" On the morning of August 3, 1916, guards tied his hands behind his back. "He marched to the scaf-
fold," said a priest who accompanied him, "with the dignity of a prince
and towered straight over all of us." The hangman called him "the bravest
man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute." In one of the last letters he
wrote from his cell, less than a week before he was hanged, Casement
looked back over his life: "I made awful mistakes, and did heaps of things
wrong andfailed at much— but ... the best thing was the Congo."
Like his friend Casement, E. D. Morel had also been transformed by the
long struggle over the Congo. In the final decade of his life he fought his
bravest, loneliest battle of all. And this time there were no lords and
bishops cheering him on.
In the closing years of the Congo reform movement, Morel saw how
much his cause was being hindered by the Entente Cordiale between
Paris and London, studded with secret clauses, in which the two coun-
tries subordinated everything to preparations for a coming European war.
At the beginning of August 1914, he was on a rare seaside vacation with
his daughter in Dieppe, France. Newly mobilized reservists filled the
streets as the two caught a packed boat across the Channel to England,
their holiday cut short by the looming conflict. In London, Morel and his
friend Charles Trevelyan, M.P., filled with foreboding, walked through an
empty House of Commons as crowds in the street outside roared their
support for war.
Morel was among the handful ofpeople on either side in Europe who
said openly that the war was madness. Through a series of treaties kept
secret from the public and Parliament, he argued, England had become
caught up in a needless cataclysm. He was not a pacifist; he said he would
fight ifEngland were attacked, but it had not been. He was asked to resign
his position as a Parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party. With a
small, beleaguered group oflike-minded men and women, Morel formed
the Union of Democratic Control, which quickly became the main
voice of antiwar dissent in England. UDC activists found that their mail was being opened by Scodand Yard and their telephone calls tapped.
Mobs broke up their meetings, tearing down banners, throwing stink
bombs, and beating up speakers and members of the audience. Before
long, no one in London would rent the UDC a meeting hall.On all sides, former admirers deserted Morel. When one old journalist friend, now in
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A KING AT BAY
uniform, deigned to greet him in the street, Morel was so moved that he
wept, saying, "I did not think anyone would speak to me now" In the UDC, as in the Congo reform movement, Morel became the
dominant figure. "I felt something volcanic in the man" wrote a col-
league. There were "fires smouldering always at his heart." As before,
his wife, Mary, supported him wholeheartedly, joining the organizations
council. He set up branches of the UDC all over England, edited the groups monthly newspaper, and wrote his usual stream of articles and
pamphlets, plus two books. But the work was far harder now, for England
was in the grip of war fever, the wartime censor banned some of his
writing, and his mailbox was filled with hate mail. Police raided both the
UDC office and the Morel family's home, where they took papers and correspondence from his study. Of one of the works Morel managed to get published while enduring all this, Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy, the
historian AJ.P. Taylor writes, "All the later studies of 'war-origins' stem
from [it] . . . the interwar historians were . . . cut from his cloak. . . .
Morel caused more than a change of method; he caused a change of
oudook."
Today we see so clearly that the 8.5 million dead and 21 million
wounded of World War I were a needless, avoidable tragedy that we
forget how few people had the courage to call it that at the time. As the
war went on, Morel came under heightened attack. A fierce blast against the British antiwar movement in the Daily Sketch noted, "If you meet
pacifists in debate and question their facts you always find yourself re-
ferred to one authority— Morel. ... To kill this conspiracy we must get hold of the arch-conspirator" His office was under constant police sur-
veillance, who is mr. e. d. morel? read a headline in the Daily Express, and who pays for his pro-german union? The Evening Standard called him "Germany's agent in this country."
It was while undergoing attacks like these that Morel got the news of
Casement s arrest. Morel's fellow UDC members warned him that they were in enough trouble as it was and urged him not to support his friend
who, unlike them, actually had been collaborating with the Germans. So
Morel, although he must have agonized about it, did not visit Casement
in prison during the few months he had left to live. Casement, generous-
spirited as ever, sent word that he fully understood. A friend who had seen him wrote to Morel: "He told me that he thought you were quite
right to have accepted the decision of your colleagues, that there was no
question about it."
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VICTORY?
Throughout the war, Morel stuck to his beliefs, as passionate and
unyielding now, when all were against him, as he had been in the days of
Congo reform, when much of the British establishment had been on his
side. He called for a negotiated peace and an end to secret treaties. And he
argued, with great prescience, against the harsh peace terms he was cer-
tain would be imposed on Germany.With tsarist Russia on the Allied side,
he wrote, it was ridiculous to claim that the war was one between de-
mocracy and autocracy He demanded disarmament, an agreement that
no land would be transferred without a plebiscite of its, inhabitants, and
an International Council of all nations.
"The War of 1914-1918 changed everything for me. . . "writes Ber-
trand Russell, another man who boldly challenged the chauvinist fever. "I
lost old friends and made new ones. I came to know some few people
whom I could deeply admire, first among whom I should place E. D.
Morel. . . . With untiring energy and immense ability in the face of all the
obstacles of propaganda and censorship, he did what he could to en-
lighten the British nation as to the true purposes for which the Govern-
ment was driving the young men to the shambles. More than any other
opponent of the War he was attacked by politicians and the press. ... In
spite of all this his courage never failed." Russell declared of Morel, "No
other man known to me has had the same heroic simplicity in pursuing
and proclaiming political truth."
British government records show that high officials in many depart-
ments long conferred about how best to get Morel "safely lodged in
gaol," as one man in the Foreign Office put it, without giving him the
public forum of a trial, at which he could deploy his persuasiveness as a
speaker and his awesome command of information. In 191 7, they found
an appropriate technicality, and arrested him for violating an obscure law
against sending antiwar literature to neutral countries. He was denied bail
and promptly sentenced to six months at hard labor.
Morel describes a curious event at his sentencing in 19 17: "A pictur-
esque feature in this otherwise squalid legal landscape was provided by an
individual crossing the body of the Court from somewhere behind me
while my counsel was pleading, and handing up a note to the prosecuting
counsel, who opened it, read it, and nodded, whereupon the individual
regained his seat, but not before I had recognised in him the same indi-
vidual who . . . acting as an accredited representative ofKing Leopold II,
had publicly opposed me in America in the course ofmy mission to the
United States." Leopold had died eight years earlier, and Morel's trip to
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A KING AT BAY
the United States had been five years before that. Some half-dozen of the
king's paid lobbyists had taken to the field against him then; he does not
tell us which ofthem made this mysterious appearance in the courtroom,
as ifLeopold were still sending orders from the grave.
Guards took Morel through the gates ofPentonville Prison a year after
Roger Casement had been executed there. The man in the cell on one
side of Morel had stolen three bottles of whiskey; on the other side was
someone who had raped a child. In one of the monthly letters, which
were all he was permitted to write to his wife, he referred to "this, the ist
time in the last twenty years we have not written to each other daily
when absent."
He spent his prison days in a dust-filled room sewing canvas mail-
bags and weaving rope into hammocks and mats for the navy, all in
silence: no conversation between prisoners was allowed at work. He
was locked in his cell each night from four p.m. until eight the next
morning. Supper, eaten alone in the cell, was "a piece of bread, half-a-
pint of coldish porridge at the bottom of a tin which earlier in the day
may have contained red-herrings and still bears traces of them, and a
pint of hot, greasy cocoa which one learns to regard as a veritable nec-
tar of the gods, especially in cold weather." Once or twice during the
night there would be clicking sounds as a warder opened the peephole
in each cell door to check on the prisoners. At night there was "the
cold of a cold cell— like nothing on earth. Nothing seems proof against it."
In the prison chapel prisoners sat, again in silence, watched by warders
on raised platforms while officials made announcements of battlefield
victories in the war Morel opposed. Sometimes at work he was made to
carry big slabs ofjute, whose weight he estimated at close to a hundred
pounds each, to the prison workshop. This made him think wryly of the
African porters who had carried his baggage through the Nigerian coun-
tryside half a dozen years before. "But memory remains, experience is a
great teacher, there is much to be learned here too, and, after all, one has
lived to play both parts." A man imprisoned for burglary, sensing that Morel was someone important, called him "sir."
Two months after his release, in early 191 8, Bertrand Russell, soon to
go to jail himself, wrote worriedly to Gilbert Murray: "I saw E. D. Morel
yesterday for the first time since he came out, & was impressed by the seriousness of a six months' sentence. His hair was completely white
(there was hardly a tinge of white before) — when he first came out, he
2go
VlLlUKir
collapsed completely, physically & mentally, largely as the result of in-
sufficient food."
Morel resumed his speaking and writing, but his once sturdy figure
was now painfully thin. Not long after his release, he had the first of
several heart attacks. But in the next few years he also had the satisfaction
ofbeing publicly vindicated. There were secret treaties among the Allied
powers, it turned out. And many of the Fourteen Points President Wood-
row Wilson proposed for the peace setdement sounded as if they had
been copied from one ofMorel's pamphlets. The UDC's wartime support
had come pardy from trade unionists and— to Morel's surprise, for this former shipping company official had never previously
thought himself a
socialist— he found himself treated as a hero by the Labour Party. In 1922, standing for a House of Commons seat on the
Labour ticket, he
had the great pleasure of defeating a former minister of the Cabinet that
had sent him to jail during the war— a member of Parliament named Winston Churchill.
Morel proved enormously popular with his constituents in Dundee,
Scotland. They reelected him in 1923 and again the following year, when
twenty thousand saw him off at the railway station as he left for London.
In Parliament, he rapidly became Labour's most prominent and respected
voice on foreign policy. When, in early 1924, the party leader Ramsay
MacDonald became Britain's first Labour prime minister, many expected
him to name Morel foreign secretary. But this was not to be. For the
leader of a shaky coalition government, Morel was too fiercely inde-
pendent a moralist and a crusader— and perhaps a potential rival for the leadership. MacDonald kept the foreign secretary's position
for himself.
As a consolation, he nominated Morel as Britain's candidate for the
Nobel Peace Prize.
Although Morel was only fifty-one years old, prison, wartime perse-
cution, his disappointment at not receiving a Cabinet post, and the gruel-
ing pace of his work over several decades all began to take their toll. He
had to He down periodically, stretched out on the terrace of the House of
Commons, and he and his wife often drove for rests to her family's home
in Devonshire. On November 12, 1924, out for a walk in the woods with
his sister-in-law, Morel said he felt tired, sat down, and leaned against a
tree to rest. He never got up.
. He was remembered at large memorial services in Dundee, in London,
and in New York. "Morel," said the French writer Romain Rolland, "will
tower above the age as the years pass."
291
19
THE GREAT FORGETTING
One of the more eerie experiences for a visitor to the old Soviet Union was strolling through the spacious galleries ofthe Museum
ofthe Revolution on Moscow's Gorky Street.You could look at hundreds
ofphotographs and paintings of fur-hatted revolutionaries behind snowy
barricades, innumerable rifles, machine guns, flags and banners, a large
collection of other relics and documents, and find no clue that some
twenty million Soviet citizens had died in execution cellars, in manmade
famines, and in the gulag.
Today that museum in Moscow has changed in ways its creators could
never have imagined. But on the other side ofEurope is one that has not
changed in the slightest. To see it, take the short walk from the European
Union headquarters complex in Brussels to the beginning of the Num- ber 44 tram line. The tram carries you through the shady, pleasant Foret
de Soignes on the outskirts of the city to the ancient ducal borough of
Tervuren. In the eighth century, Saint Hubert, the patron saint ofhunters,
lived here and pursued game in these woods. Today, grandly overlooking a
park, in an enormous Louis XV-^style palace built by King Leopold II, is
the Royal Museum ofCentral Africa. On a typical day it will be swarming with hundreds of visitors, from schoolchildren filling in blank spots in
workbooks to elderly tourists arriving in air-conditioned buses.
The museum houses one of the worlds largest collections ofAfricana.
It takes a full day to see all the exhibits, from Stanley's cap to Leopolds
cane, from slave manacles to a dugout canoe big enough for a hundred
men. One gallery full of weapons and uniforms celebrates the "antislav-
292
ery campaigns" of the 1890s - against the "Arab" slavers, of course. A
plaque lists the names of several dozen Force Publique officers who rest
in African earth." Other plaques in this "memorial hall" have the names
of hundreds more white pioneers who died in the Congo. Another
gallery holds stuffed wild animals: elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas.An old
black-and-white film plays continually on a TV monitor, showing Pende
masked dances, the Kuba king at court, Ntomba mneral rites- an Africa
composed entirely ofexotic costumes and pounding drums. Everywhere,
preserved in glass cases, are objects from the Congo's manifold cultures:
spears, arrows, pipes, masks, bowls, baskets, paddles, scepters, fish traps,
musical instruments.
One temporary exhibit shows a remarkable type of sculpture from the
lower part of the Congo River: three-foot-high wooden statues, the chest
and neck of each one studded with hundreds of nails, spikes, and tiny
razorlike blades. The statues look like brisding, tortured dwarfs. A sign
explains that each is an nkondi, a fetish to combat witches and other
evildoers. Every nail and blade stands for an oath or an appeal for retali-
ation against an injustice.But ofany larger injustice in the Congo there is
no sign whatever. For in none of the museum's twenty large exhibition
galleries is there the slightest hint that millions of Congolese met unnatu-
ral deaths. , _ There is no hint of these deaths anywhere
in Brussels. The rue
Brederode, where part ofthe Congo administration and the most mipor-
tant Congo companies once had headquarters, still runs past the back of
the Royal Palace. But today the spot where Joseph Conrad had his job
interview is occupied by a government tax-collection office. On another
side ofthe palace, a larger-than-life statue ofLeopold on horseback stares
metallically out at a freeway underpass. And yet the blood spilled in the
Congo, the stolen land, the severed hands, the shattered families and
orphaned children, underlie much that meets the eye. The ornate colum-
ned Royal Palace itself was renovated to its present splendor with Congo
profits, as was the more grandly situated, domed chateau of Laeken,
where the royal family lives, with its stunning array of greenhouses con-
taining more than six acres of glass. Each spring the greenhouses are
briefly opened to the public, and thousands of visitors walk past a bust of
Leopold, decorated with camelias and azaleas. At Laeken also stands the
five-story Japanese Tower, an architectural oddity that Leopold saw at a
Paris world's fair, took a fancy to, and bought with his Congo money
Dominating part of the city's skyline is the grandest Congo-financed
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A KING AT BAY
extravagance of all, the huge Cinquantenaire arch, studded with heroic statuary; it looks like a swollen combination of the Arc de Triomphe and the Brandenburg Gate, with curving wings added. The arch's massive stone and concrete bulk brings to mind Conrad's description of the unnamed European capital in Heart of Darkness as "the sepulchral city" But of the millions of Africans whose labors paid for all this and sent them to sepulchers ofunmarked earth, there is no sign.
Brussels is not unique. In Berlin, there are no museums or monu- ments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders ofthe rubber terror that slashed in halfthe populations ofparts
of French and Portuguese Africa. In the American South, there are hun- dreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in— its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of vio- lence— is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.
The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting. Leopold and the Belgian colonial officials who followed him went to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence
from the historical record. One day in August 1908, shordy before the colony was officially turned over to Belgium, the kings young military aide Gustave Stinglhamber walked from the Royal Palace to see a friend in the Congo state offices next door. The midsummer day seemed par- ticularly warm, and the two men went to an open window to talk. Stinglhamber sat down on a radiator, then jumped to his feet: it was burning hot.When the men summoned thejanitor for an explanation, he replied, "Sorry, but they're burning the State archives." The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most ofthe Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. "I will give them my Congo," Leopold told Stinglhamber, "but they have no right to know what I did there."
At the same time the furnaces roared in Brussels, orders went from the palace to the Congo commanding the destruction ofrecords there. Colo- nel Maximilien Strauch, the king s long-time consigliere on Congo mat- ters, later said, "The voices which, in default of the destroyed archives, might speak in their stead have systematically been condemned to silence for considerations of a higher order" Seldom has a totalitarian regime gone to such lengths to destroy so thoroughly the records of its work. In
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THE GREAT PORGETTING
their later quests for a higher order, Hider and Stalin in some ways left a
far larger paper trail behind them.
The same kind of deliberate forgetting took place in the minds of the
men who staffed the regime. Forgetting one's participation in mass mur-
der is not something passive; it is an active deed. In looking at the
memories recorded by the early white conquistadors in Africa, we can
sometimes catch the act offorgetting at the very moment it happens. It is
not a moment of erasure, but of turning things upside down, the strange
reversal of the victimizer mentally converting himself to victim. Take, for
example, a moment in the memoirs of Raoul de Premorel, who ran
rubber-collecting posts in the Kasai region of the Congo from 1896 to
190 1. Here is his description ofhow he dealt with the alleged ringleader
of a mutiny:
I had two sentries drag him to the front of the store, where his
wrists were tied together. Then standing him up against a post
with his arms raised high above his head they tied him securely
to a cross beam. I now had them raise him by tightening the rope
untiljust his toes touched the floor. ... So I left the poor wretch.
All night long he hung there, sometimes begging for mercy,
sometimes in a kind ofswoon. All night long his faithful wife did
what she could to alleviate his suffering. She brought him drink
and food, she rubbed his aching legs. ... At last when the morn-
ing came and my men cut him down, he dropped unconscious in
a heap on the ground. "Take him away," I ordered. . . . Whether
he lived or not, I do not know. . . . Now sometimes in my sleep I think I am the poor devil and half a hundred black fiends are
dancing . . . about me. I wake up with a great start and I find
myself covered with a cold sweat. Sometimes, I think it is I who
have suffered most in the years that have passed since that night.
Sometimes, I think it is I who have suffered most . . . Throughout history,
people with blood on their hands have used such rationalizations. But the
process of forgetting the killings of Leopold's Congo received an unex-
pected boost when Belgium itself was seen as victim instead of con-
queror. The world was shocked by Germany's unprovoked invasion of
neutral Belgium in August 1914, as well as by German killings of many
Belgian civilians in the opening weeks of the war.
During the next four years, first the British and then the American
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A KING AT BAY
governments used the sufferings of "brave little Belgium" to whip up war fever in countries that had not themselves been attacked. Newspaper stories, cartoons, posters, and patriotic speeches luridly denounced mass rapes of Belgian women by German soldiers. The Germans, it was said, crucified Belgian babies on the doors of houses. And, in a striking but unconscious echo of the imagery of the Congo reform movement, the press in the Allied countries reported that German soldiers were cutting off the hands and feet ofBelgian children. An exiled Belgian writer even wrote a poem on the subject/
These shocking reports of severed hands and feet were so widespread that a rich American tried to adopt maimed Belgian children; but, even with offers of a reward, none could be found. In the end, the mass rape, mutilation, and crucifixion charges also turned out to be false. During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And so the full history of Leopold's rule in the Congo and of the movement that opposed it dropped out of Europe s memory, perhaps even more swifdy and com- pletely than did the other mass killings that took place in the colonization ofAfrica.
In the quiet village of Hoepertingen, an hour east of Brussels by train, Jules Marchal and his wife live in a modest, rambling house with a small cherry orchard. Once a year they spend a few weeks on ladders, with baskets, harvesting cherries to sell through the local farmers* co-operative. Marchal was born here, and at seventy-three he fits the part of a town
r
It ends:
Et quand ils rencontraient quelque Teutonfrappe Par une balk adroite, au bord d'un chemin proche,
Souvent ib dkouvraient, dans le creux de sespoches,
Avec des colliers d'or et des satinsjripis,
Deux petits pieds d 'enfant atrocement coupe's.
And when they [Belgians] find some Hun struck down By a well-aimed bullet, at a nearby roadside, Often they find, in the folds of his pockets, With gold rings and crumpled satin, Two children's feet, cruelly cut off.
296
THE GREAT FORGETTING
elder: a gold tooth, suspenders, a ruddy, kindly face, white hair. His white
mustache gives him a slight resemblance to pictures of Stanley in the
explorer s last years. But there the similarity ends,
Marchal is a retired diplomat. In the early 1970s, he was Belgian
ambassador to a group of three countries in West Africa: Ghana, Liberia,
and Sierra Leone. One day he noticed a story in a Liberian newspaper
that referred, in passing, to ten million deaths in King Leopold's Congo.
"I was startled," says Marchal. "I wrote to the foreign minister in
Brussels. I said, 'I have to write a letter to the editor correcting this story,
this strange slander on our country. But I don't know the history of that
period. Could you please have someone send me some information?'
"I waited. But I never got an answer. And that's when my curiosity
began."
Marchal is a careful, methodical man, the sort of person who likes to
read a book in its original language, to trace a piece of information to its
source, to get his history not from someone else's summary, but from the
original documents. His interest ignited, he now read enough about early
Congo history to discover that finding official documents might not be
so easy, given Leopold's week-long bonfire. However, certain crucial pa-
pers had escaped the furnace in 1908, and among them were the tran-
scripts— never published— ofthe testimony given by African witnesses before the 1904-1905 Commission of Inquiry. Conveniently for him,
Marchal discovered, this important collection of records had eventually
ended up filed in the archives of the Belgian Foreign Ministry, his own
employer. He looked forward to examining them.
Marchal next served in another post in Africa, "but the Congo always
stayed in my head. There was an air ofsomething rotten about it. I learned
that there had been this huge campaign, in the international press, from
1900 to 1910; millions of people had died, but we Belgians knew abso-
lutely nothing about it. And so when I arrived in 1975 for a post at the
Foreign Ministry in Brussels, the first thing I did was to go to the
ministry archives and ask to see the Commission of Inquiry testimony."
Impossible, he was told. The testimony papers were stamped Ne pas a
communiquer aux chercheurs— no access for researchers. Marchal protested that it was seventy years after the commission had delivered its report, and
that he was of ambassadorial rank. It made no difference. He was not
allowed to see the files.
"There was a rule in the Foreign Ministry archives. They were not
permitted to show researchers material that was bad for the reputation of
297
A KING AT BAY
Belgium. But everything about this period was bad for the reputation of
Belgium! So they showed nothing" Marchal, now obsessed with the
subject, had another decade and a half to serve before retirement. He remained in the foreign service, returning to Africa as an ambassador and
also working in several desk jobs in Brussels. He devoted all of his spare time to research and writing about Leopold's Congo. After he retired, in
1989, he worked at his project full time. Four decades as a civil servant
had given him unusual skill in locating revealing information in govern-
ment records, and he traveled to every archive in Europe and the United
States that had material about this period. He found collections ofprivate papers in Belgium that had been beyond reach of Leopold's fire. He found that often the most revealing material lay in the letters and reports
of low-ranking, idealistic young colonial officers, newly arrived in the
Congo and shocked that African realities did not match the noble rheto-
ric they had heard in Europe. He studied the files of missionary societies and of companies that had done business in Africa. He went to Ireland to look at Casement's papers and to visit the beach where Casement had
landed on his last, fatal mission.
While Marchal was still a Belgian diplomat, he wrote under a pseudo-
nym— Delathuy, the maiden name of his great-grandmother. "A re- markable woman. But she had been written out of the family history
because she had had a child out of wedlock. Her name was never men-
tioned. It was taboo. Like the history of the millions killed." Marchal
wrote his history of Leopold's Congo in his native Dutch, then revised
and translated it for a four-volume edition in French. Although virtually
ignored in Belgium, his books are the definitive scholarly study of the
subject, a magisterial, scrupulously documented account unsurpassed in
any language. It might never have been written had he not seen that
Liberian newspaper article.
As Marchal describes his work, he seems a man possessed. His voice
rises, he gesticulates. He pulls books and papers off his shelves and bur- rows into drawers to find photographs. The photos are of every house in
England where E. D. Morel lived. "Morel has been treated in Belgium as
a traitor and a bad man. I want to put him in his rightful place."
It upset Marchal that he had been representing his country for many
years while knowing nothing of this piece of its past, and it rankled him
even more to be denied access to the archives of his own ministry. At one point, a senior official told him, "You can see the files, but only if you
promise not to write anything based on them." Marchal refused the
2g8
THB GREAT PORGBTTING
bargain. Only after badgering ministry officials for eight years was he
allowed to look at the Commission of Inquiry testimony. He has publish-
ed an annotated collection of it as a book.
There was a further reason that Marchal was distressed by what he
learned. Before joining the Belgian diplomatic service when he was in
his early forties, he had worked in the Congo for nearly twenty years, in
its last years as a Belgian colony and its first as an independent country,
starting as a young assistant district administrator for the colonial regime.
Years later, on first learning about the turn-of-the-century history, Mar-
chal and his wife, Paula, carefully sifted their memories to see whether
there were any clues, anything people had said, that could be understood
in a new light. He remembered one such episode:
"When I arrived in the Congo in 1948, my very first job was to go
around and distribute medals to the village chiefs who had gathered
rubber for the government during the Second World War.You know they
made everyone go back into the forest then, and tap wild rubber. I had to
give decorations to about a hundred chiefs. I had a corporal and six or
seven soldiers who went to all the villages with me. The corporal, he
said to me, 'The rubber this time, that was nothing. But the first time,
that was terrible.' Only thirty years later did I understand what he was
talking about."
In all of Africa, the colonizers wrote the school textbooks; together with
widespread book-banning and press censorship, this accomplished the act
of forgetting for the written record. In the Congo, throughout the half-
century of Belgian rule that followed Leopold's death, textbooks for
Africans praised Leopold and his works as lavishly as Soviet schoolbooks
praised Lenin. For example, a 1959 text for young Congolese soldiers
studying to become NCOs in the Force Publique explained that history "reveals how the Belgians, by acts of heroism, managed to create this
immense territory" Fighting the "Arab" slavers, "in three years of sac-
rifice, perseverance and steadfast endurance, they brilUandy completed
the most humanitarian campaign ofthe century, liberating the decimated
and exploited peoples of this part of Africa." As for critics, who go
unnamed: "The criticisms emitted in the course of defamatory cam-
paigns undertaken by jealous foreigners . . . were shown to amount to
nothing."
This officially decreed forgetting could not, of course, reach all the
299
A KING AT BAY
way to the villages, where there remains some lore about the rubber
terror. But even that collective memory today is more scanty than one
would expect. A handful of dedicated anthropologists have helped find and preserve these memories— often a fragmentary local legend about an extraordinarily cruel person from the period remembered as la guerre
du Blanc [the white man's war], or, in the Mongo language, lokeli, "the overwhelming." Sometimes, in conjunction with information gathered
by witnesses like Casement or the missionaries, the villain of legend can
be identified as a district commissioner or rubber-company agent or a
chief who collaborated with the conquerors. Sometimes the period of terror is stamped into the language itself. In the Mongo tongue, "to send someone to harvest rubber" is an idiom meaning "to tyrannize
"
Relatively little collective memory of the rubber era has survived in
rural Africa, because oral tradition is usually a matter of remembering
kings, dynasties, victories in battle. And those dynasties which have sur-
vived almost always did so by collaborating with the colonial rulers. As
Jan Vansina observes in his history of the Kuba people: "No account of
those events [the Leopold-era rubber slavery] appeared in the dynastic
traditions. The rulers who had benefited from the system were not about to commit this to official memory." In the cities, where many Congolese
now live, the process of rapid urbanization itself has brought drastic
upheaval. For example, what was,just over a hundred years ago, the small
village of Kinshasa is today a sprawling, chaotic metropolis of some five
million people, many of them recently arrived from rural areas in a
desperate search for work. Such changes have strained and loosened the
connecting links by which lore is passed from one generation to another.
Traditional cultures have been much weakened, and disappearing with
them is the very memory of the forces that first shattered them.
Decades after Leopold's death a curious legend developed in the Congo.
The king, it was believed, had not died at all but had come to live in his
former colony. He had been transformed into a Catholic bishop, Jean- Felix de Hemptinne, an autocratic nobleman who long weilded great political influence in the Congo. (The legend was clearly sparked by de
Hemptinne s large white beard and figure, which were of Leopoldian
dimensions.) De Hemptinne was Leopold reincarnated, it was said, or maybe he was the king's illegitimate son, and in this role he was a
shadowy figure behind the scenes at pivotal moments, ordering the po-
300
TUB GREAT FORGETTING
lice to fire on striking mineworkers in one notorious episode, ordering a
judge to be tough on an accused prisoner in another.
It needed no reincarnation, however, for Leopold to leave his mark.
History lies heavy on Africa: the long decades of colonialism, several
hundred years of the Atlantic and Arab world slave trade, and— all too often ignored— countless centuries of indigenous slavery before that. From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and
Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole continent, perhaps no nation has had a harder time than the Congo in emerging from the shadow of its past.
When independence finally came to the Congo, the country fared badly. Like most other colonial powers in Africa, Belgium was taken by
surprise by the demand for self-rule that swept across the continent in
the 1950s, igniting mass demonstrations in Leopoldville in 1959 that were
bloodily suppressed by the Force Publique. Until then, Leopold's heirs
had thought independence might come, but decades hence. Some Afri- cans were being trained for that distant day; but when pressure grew and independence came in i960, in the entire territory there were fewer
than thirty African university graduates. There were no Congolese army
officers, engineers, agronomists, or physicians. The colony's administra- tion had made few other steps toward a Congo run by its own people: of some five thousand management-level positions in the civil service, only
three were filled by Africans.
King Baudouin ofBelgium arrived in Leopoldville to grant, officially
and patronizingly, the Congo its freedom. He said, "It is now up to you, gentlemen, to show .that you are worthy of our confidence " An angry, impromptu speech in reply by Patrice Lumumba caught the worlds attention. Barely a month earlier, an election had made Lumumba a coalition-government prime minister. It was the first democratic national
election the territory had ever had. In substance if not form, it would be,
for more than thirty-five years, the last. Lumumba believed that political independence was not enough to free Africa from its colonial past; the
continent must also cease to be an economic colony of Europe. His
speeches set off immediate alarm signals in Western capitals. Belgian,
British, and American corporations by now had vast investments in the Congo, which was rich in copper, cobalt, diamonds, gold, tin, manganese,
and zinc. An inspired orator whose voice was rapidly carrying beyond his country's borders, Lumumba was a mercurial and charismatic figure.
301
A KING AT BAY
His message, Western governments feared, was contagious. Moreover, he
could not be bought. Finding no sympathy in the West, he asked for help
from the Soviet Union. Anathema to American and European capital,
he became a leader whose days were numbered. Less than two months
after being named the Congo's first democratically chosen prime minis-
ter, a U.S. National Security Council subcommittee on covert operations,
which included CIA chief Allen Dulles, authorized his assassination. Richard Bissell, CIA operations chief at the time, later said, "The Presi-
dent [Dwight D. Eisenhower] would have vastly preferred to have him
taken care of some way other than by assassination, but he regarded
Lumumba as I did and a lot of other people did: as a mad dog . . . and he wanted the problem dealt with."
Alternatives for dealing with "the problem" were considered, among
them poison (a supply of which was sent to the CIA station chief in Leopoldville), a high-powered rifle, and free-lance hit men. But it proved
hard to get close enough to Lumumba to use these, so, instead, the CIA supported anti-Lumumba elements within the factionalized Congo gov-
ernment, confident that before long they would do the job. They did.
After being arrested and suffering a series of beatings, the prime minister
was secretly shot in Elizabethville inJanuary 1961.A CIA agent ended up driving around the city with Lumumba s body in his car's trunk, trying to find a place to dispose of it. We cannot know whether, had he survived, Lumumba would have stayed true to his rhetoric and to the hopes he embodied for so many people in Africa and elsewhere. But the United
States saw to it that he never had a chance. Like millions of Congolese
before him, he ended up dumped in an unmarked grave.
The key figure in the Congolese forces that arranged Lumumba's
murder was a young man named Joseph Desire Mobutu, then chief of staff of the army and a former NCO in the old colonial Force Publique. Early on, the Western powers had spotted Mobutu as someone who would look out for their interests. He had received cash payments from the local CIA man and Western military attaches while Lumumba's mur- der was being planned. Wearing dark glasses and his general's uniform
with gold braid and a sword, he later met President Kennedy at the White
House in 1963. Kennedy gave him an airplane for his personal use— and a U.S. Air Force crew to fly it for him. With United States encourage-
ment, Mobutu staged a coup in 1965 that made him the country's dicta-
tor. And in that position he remained for more than thirty years. Further U.S. military aid helped Mobutu repel several attempts to
302
THE CHEAT FORGBTTWfi
overthrow him. Some of his political enemies he ordered tortured and killed; some he co-opted into his ruling circles; others he forced into exile. The United States gave him well over a billion dollars in civilian and military aid during the three decades ofhis rule; European powers— especially France— contributed more. For its heavy investment, the United States and its allies got a regime that was reliably anti-Communist and a secure staging area for CIA and French military operations, but Mobutu brought his country little except a change of name, in 1971, to Zaire.
Government-owned media began referring to Mobutu variously as the Guide, the Father of the Nation, the Helmsman, and the Messiah. With American and European approval, the country's wealth flowed mainly into the pockets of the Messiah and foreign mining companies. Mobutu's loyalty to his Western backers made him a popular visitor to Washington, where he shrewdly abandoned his military uniform for civilian dress, a carved ebony cane, and a trademark African-looking leopard-skin hat that had actually been made by an elegant Paris milliner. Ronald Reagan received him at the White House several times, praising him as "a voice ofgood sense and good will " George Bush greeted him as "one of our most valued friends." He added, "I was honored to invite President Mobutu to be the first African head of state to come to the United States for an official visit during my presidency." Mobutu and his entourage helped themselves to state revenue so freely
that the Congolese government ceased to function. When he ran out of money to pay the army and other state workers in 1993, he printed up a new kind of currency Because shopkeepers would not accept it, soldiers rioted, looting shops, government buildings, and private homes. Hun- dreds of people were killed. For years, garbage piled up in heaps, uncol- lected. A few foreign airlines continued to stop in the country, but they avoided leaving their planes overnight; insurance would not cover it. Government support of schools and hospitals dwindled to almost noth- ing. The U.S. embassy advised its staff in the capital not to unlock car doors or roll down windows when stopped by police at roadblocks: they should show their papers through the window only, lest their wallets be taken.
Before Mobutu was overthrown, in 1997, his thirty-two years in power had made him one of the worlds richest men; his personal wealth at its peak was estimated at $4 billion. He spent much ofhis time on his yacht, on the river at Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville. One of the big lakes he
303
A K1NU AT BAY
renamed Lake Mobutu Sese Seko. He acquired palatial homes in France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and elsewhere. He made no dis- tinction between state assets and his own; in a single year, he dispatched a
state-owned jet airliner thirty-two times to Venezuela to ferry five thou-
sand long-haired sheep to his ranch at Gbadolite; while his yacht was
being renovated in 1987, he simply took over the most comfortable ofthe
few remaining passenger boats still operating on the river system. And he demanded, and got, a piece of the action in almost every major corpora-
tion operating in the country.
It is an oversimplification to blame Africa's troubles today entirely on
European imperialism; history is far more complicated. And yet, consider Mobutu again. Aside from the color of his skin, there were few ways in
which he did not resemble the monarch who governed the same terri- tory a hundred years earlier. His one-man rule. His great wealth taken
from the land. His naming a lake after himself. His yacht. His appropria-
tion of state possessions as his own. His huge shareholdings in private
corporations doing business in his territory Just as Leopold, using his
privately controlled state, shared most of his rubber profits with no one,
so Mobutu acquired his personal group of gold mines— and a rubber plantation. Mobutu's habit of printing more money when he needed it resembled nothing so much as Leopold's printing ofCongo bonds.
"Those who are conquered," wrote the philosopher Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century, "always want to imitate the conqueror in his
main characteristics— in his clothing, his crafts, and in all his distinctive traits and customs ." Mobutu's luxurious Villa del Mare, a pink-and-white
marble colonnaded chateau at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French
Riviera, complete with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, gold-fitted
bathrooms, and heliport, lay a mere dozen miles down the coast from the estates Leopold once owned at Cap Ferrat. From one cape you can see the other.
What epitaph can we write for the movement that worked so hard for justice in the Congo a hundred years ago?
The Congo reform movement had two achievements that lasted far beyond its own time. First, through the efforts of E. D. Morel, Roger Casement, and equally brave but lesser-known figures like George Wash-
ington Williams, William Sheppard, and Hezekiah Andrew Shanu,it put a remarkable amount of information on the historical record. And there it
304
THH UHBAT FORGETTING
remains, despite the strenuous efforts of Leopold and his admirers, then and now, to burn it, to ignore it, to distort it with mythologizing. That record of truth matters, especially for a continent whose history is other- wise so filled with silences.
The movements other great achievement is this.Among its supporters, it kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth.
When the Congo reformers spoke at hundreds of mass meetings throughout Britain and the United States, they showed slides: photo- graphs of adults and children with their hands cut off, forced laborers at work as porters, a devastated village, lantern lecture on the congo atrocities, read an advertisement. "60 excellent Photographic Lantern
Slides from Photographs taken by Mrs. Harris, late of Baringa, Congo Free State. Descriptive lecture, revised by the Rev.J. H. Harris & Mr. E. D. Morel." These slides were black and white, approximately three inches square, made for "magic lantern" projectors. Someone who goes in search ofthose slides today can find them. They rest in two dusty wooden boxes on a storage shelfon the ground floor of a small, low-rent building in south London. The building is the office ofAnti-Slavery International, formerly the Anti-Slavery Society, formerly the Anti-Slavery and Abo- rigines Protection Society, formerly the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. John and Alice Harris ran the society for many years after their work with Morel. In continuous existence since 1839, it is the oldest human rights organization on earth. Today, in that room with the boxes of slides, men and women in their twenties briskly come and go, carrying posters, video cassettes, and bundles ofpamphlets— about child labor in Bangladesh and Nepal and Malaysia, women in household slavery in the Middle East, debt bondage in Brazil, child prostitution in Thailand, geni- tal mutilation ofwomen in Africa, the exploitation ofimmigrant domes- tic servants in England.
The tradition that is alive in that London office has grown and broad- ened in the last two hundred years. Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternaUstic generosity, and more likely to speak ofhuman rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but, as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entided from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International,
3<>5
A KING AT BAY
with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opin-
ions is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina, and
Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to
medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx.
The Congo reform movement at its best not only helped to shape and
strengthen this set of beliefs; it went beyond them. Human rights groups
today usually deal with results— a man in jail, a woman in servitude, a child without medicine. E. D. Morel talked, as well, about causes: above
all, the theft ofAfrican land and labor that made possible Leopold's whole
system of exploitation. It was this radicalism, in the best and deepest sense
of the word, that underlay the passion of the leading Congo reformers
and that led Morel and Casement, after their battle for justice in the
Congo, to Pentonville Prison.
The larger tradition ofwhich they are a part goes back to the French
Revolution and beyond; it draws on the example of men and women
who fought against enormous odds for their freedom, from the slave
revolts of the Americas to the half-century of resistance that brought
Nelson Mandela to power in South Africa. During its decade on the
world stage, the Congo reform movement was a vital link in that chain,
and there is no tradition more honorable. At the time of the Congo
controversy a hundred years ago, the idea of full human rights, political,
social, and economic, was a profound threat to the established order of
most countries on earth. It still is today.
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
306
NOTES
Sources are given for direct quotations, which are identified by their closing words,
for most numbers and statistics, and for many other points ofinformation. I have not
identified sources when the facts involved are not in dispute and can easily be found
in one— or usually several— of the key books acknowledged at the beginning of the Bibliography.
Some works cited only once or twice are referred to in the source notes but are
not listed in the Bibliography.
For abbreviated references to one of several books by the same author— as in Morel 5, Stengers 2, Marchal 3 — consult the Bibliography.
INTRODUCTION
page
1 Morel in Antwerp: Morel 5 , chapters 4 and 5
.
2 nearly three hundred a year: in 1907, for example. Official Organ . . . April 1908,
p. 24.
2 letter ofprotest to the Times : 23 Dec. 1 908 , Morel 5 , p. 208
.
2 "so strongly and so vehemently": Morel 5, p. xiv.
4 "history of human conscience": "Geography and Some Explorers," Last Essays, ed.
Richard Curie (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926), p. 17, excerpted in Conrad,
p. 187.
prologue: "the traders are kidnapping our people"
6 early European maps and images ofAfrica: See Klemp.
7 "edge of the world": Forbath, p. 41
.
8 "without resistance" : Forbath, p. 73.
8 "in his household": Forbath, p. 73.
8 Mhanza Kongo: Balandier, p. 30 ff.
8 ManiKongo: Vansinai,pp. 41-45
*
309
NOTES
9 sophisticated and well-developed state: see Balandier; Cuvelier; Hilton, chapters 1-3 ; and
Vansina 1, chapter 2.
io "of theirfaith": Relations sur le Congo du pbte Laurent de Lucques (1700-1717), ed.Jean
Cuvelier (Brussels: Institut Royal Colonial Beige, 1953), p. 338, quoted in Balan-
dier, p. 81.
1 1 fifteen thousand slaves a year: Vansina 1 ,p. 149.
1 1 "she is dying": Miller, p. xiii. This list ofslaves is from 1 73 6.
11 Atlantic slave trade and the Kongo kingdom: Miller is the best source, although he
concentrates on a later period.
1
2
"that ofAffonso ": quoted in Davidson 1 , p. 138.
12 "speaking of our Savior": Rui de Aguiar to King Manuel I, 25 May 1516, quoted in
Affonso, p. 117.
12 selective modemizer: Vansina i,pp. 45-58.
12 first known documents: Albert S. Gerard, African Language Literature: An Introduction to
the Literary History ofSub-Saharan Africa (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981), p. 287.
1
3
"transport ofslaves ": Affonso to Joao III, 6 July 1 526, Affonso, p. 156.
1 3 "red-hot iron ": Affonso I toJoao III, 1 8 Oct. 1 5 26, Affonso, p. 1 67.
1
3
"selling them as captives " : Affonso I toJoao III, 2 5 Aug. 1 5 26, Affonso, p. 1 59
.
14 "obedient to us and content": Affonso I to Joao III, 6 July 1526, Affonso, pp. 155-156.
14 "no slave has ever left": Joao III to Affonso, 1 529 (n. d.) , Affonso, p. 175.
1
4
"He is again crucified": Affonso to Manuel 1,31 May 1 5 1 5 , Affonso, p. 103.
14 "theirfathers and mothers": Affonso I to Joao III, 25 Mar. 1539, Affonso, p. 210.
1
5
ancestral ghosts: see, for instance, Harms 2, p. 2 10.
16 "wars and miseries": Haveaux, p. 47.
16 deadly transformations began: Miller, pp. 4—5.
16 "sold them to the white men": Weeks,pp. 294-295.
17 "of this animal": Instructions to Mr. Tudor, 7 Feb. 1 816, quoted in Anstey 1 , p. 5.
1
8
"masses ofquartz " : Forbath, p. 177
.
18 "ofthe Thames": Narrative of the Expedition to explore the River Zaire, usually called the
Congo . . . (London: i8i8),p. 342, quoted in Anstey i,p. 9.
I. "l SHALL NOT GIVE UP THE CHASE"
21 John Rowlands/Henry Morton Stanley: The best sources on Stanleys life are the careful,
thorough biographies, Bierman and McLynn 1 and 2. Hall was a pioneer bio-
graphical debunker but does not give specific sources. Stanley 5, Stanley's own
autobiography, the only source for much of his youth, omits and embellishes a
great deal, often revealingly so.
2
1
"sound whipping" : Stanley 5 , p. 8
.
22 "utter desolateness "
; Stanley 5 , p. 1o
.
22 "things they should not": Bierman, p. 8.
22 "as with a snap": Stanley 5, p. 29.
23 "to sail in this ship?": Stanley 5, p. 67.
23 "want a boy, sir?": Stanley 5, p. 87.
23 "big talk and telling stories": New Orleans Daily States, 16 Apr. 1891, quoted in Bierman, p. 29.
24 "almost broke my spine": Stanley 5, p. 33.
310
NOTES
24 "God bless you!": Stanley 5, p. 1 1 3
.
24 "you are to bear my name": Stanley 5, p. 121
.
24 "esteemed him as he deserved?": Draft for Stanley's unfinished autobiography, quoted
in McLynn 1 , pp. 3 7-3 8
.
25 "through excess ofsentiment, intofolly": Stanley 5, pp. 107-1 1 1
.
26 "debauchery . . . whirlpool ofsin": Bierman, p. 48.
26 "on the warpath": Newspaper dispatch of25 May 1867, quoted in Bierman, p. 47.
27 "we were here all the time": reportedly said by Dr. Hastings Banda of Malawi, quoted
in McLynn 3, p. ix.
27 too vile to be spoken of: West, pp. 22-23 •
28 "in the emancipation ofslaves": Honour, p. 264.
29 "but find Livingstone!": Stanley i,pp. xvi-xvii.
29 "all the subsequent professional travel writers": George MartelH, Leopold to Lumumba:A History ofthe Belgian Congo 1877-1960 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1962), p. 10.
30 "bring his bones to you": Stanley's Despatches to the New York Herald 1871-72, 1874-77, ed. Norman R. Bennett (Boston: Boston University Press, 1970), p- 23, quoted in
Bierman, p. 10 1.
30 "the Arab . . .the Banyan . . ,the half-castes": Stanley i,p. 6.
31 "too ungrateful to suit myfancy": Slade 2, p. 23.
3
1
"sometimes to an extravagant— activity": Bierman, p. 97, 3
1
"wellflogged and chained" : Stanley 1 , p. 3 1 8
.
3
1
"thorn clumps andgum trees!": Stanley's Despatches to the New York Herald, p. 76, quoted
in Bierman, p. 109.
3
1
"their next resting place?": Stanley 1 , pp. 11 2-1 1 3
.
3
1
march to the sea: McLynn 1 , p. 204.
32 "fellow Missourian": Hall, p. 99.
2. THE FOX CROSSES THE STREAM
33 Leopold II: Emerson is the standard scholarly biography of Leopold. Ascherson does
a better job ofcapturing the spirit ofthe man but is scantily footnoted.
34 "by this last report": Queen Marie-Louise to Leopold, 28 June 1849, reprinted in
Freddy, p. 27.
34 "That is Leopold's way!": Emerson, p. 23.
3 5 "saying disagreeable things to people": Aronson, p. 3 5
.
35 "by nun I mean the Duke ofBrabant": Madame de Metternich, quoted in Ascherson,
P-34-
3 5 "I shall not go on living much longer": Joanna Richardson, My Dearest Uncle. Leopold I
of the Belgians (London: Jonathan Cape, 1961), p. 188, quoted in Ascherson,
p. 36.
36 "has now bornefruit": Leopold to Albert, 19 Nov. 1857, quoted in Emerson, p. 56.
36 "richest countries in the world": Emerson, p. 19.
37 "makes now out ofher colonies": Leopold to Brialmont, quoted in Ascherson, p. 46.
37 "corrupt peoples of the Far East": L. Le Febve de Vivy, Documents d'histoire prkoloniale
beige (Brussels: Academie Royale des Sciences Coloniales, 1955), p. 20, quoted
in Stengers 7, p. 19. On Money, also see Money, Stengers 1, p. 145 m., and Marchal 1 , pp. 40-4 1
.
311
NOTES
38 "times as big as Belgium": Leopold to Lambermont, 11 June 1861, quoted in
Roeykens, pp. 413-414 fii.
38 "let such afine prey escape": Leopold to Brialmont, 16 May 1861, quoted in Stengers
7>P- 21.
38 "got to make her leant": L. le Febve de Vivy, Documents d'histoire prkoloniale beige
(Brussels: Academie Royale des Sciences Coloniales, 195 5), p. 23, quoted in Asch-
erson,p. 58.
39 "
<a Zreai veterinarian'?": Daye, pp. 43 8-439.
39 "without knowing how to wear it": Marshal Canrobert, quoted in Daye, p. 92.
39 "banned by a malignantfairy": Aronson, pp. 34-3 5
.
39 "his admirable tW/e": Louise, p. 34.
39 "to me or my sisters": Louise, p. 29.
40 Laeken and its greenhouses: Goedleven, pp. 60-75.
40 "Little? ": Stinglhamber and Dresse, p. 2 56
.
41 "Muchachos, aim well": Hyde, p. 29 1
.
41 "I am starving, literally starving!": Hyde, p. 226. See also O'Connor, pp. 271-273
.
42 "anything to be done in Africa": Leopold to Lambermont, 22 Aug. 1875, quoted in
Roeykens, pp. 95-96,
42 100,000 francs: Roeykens, p. 73.
43 "letters must be written after the names": Vandewoude,p. 434.
44 "even the Ink and the Ammunition": Rawlinson to Lady Rawlinson, 11 Sept. 1876,
quoted in Pakenham, p. 2 1
.
44 Leopolds speech to the Geographical Conference: reprinted in P. A. Roeykens, Uopold II et
la Conference geographique de Bruxelles (1876) (Brussels: Academie Royale des Sci-
ences Coloniales, 1956), pp. 197-199. See Bederman for a short treatment ofthe
conference.
46 "greatest humanitarian work of this time": Pakenham, p. 22.
3. THE MAGNIFICENT CAKE
47 wielding the whip and the gun: And much worse; see Marchal 1 , pp. 28-32.
47 "Exploration ofAfrica "
: Stanley 2, vol. 2, pp. 346-3 47.
48 " 'we shall call Stanley Pool!'": Stanley 5 , p. 3 29.
49 "three orfour score villages": Stanley 7, p. 199.
49 "quiet the mocking": Stanley 7, p. 125.
50 "as ifthey were monkeys": Bierman, p. 182.
50 "safe in London ": McLynn 2, p. 11.
50 "species ofhuman vermin": New York Herald, 17 Sept. 1 877, quoted in McLynn, vol. 2,
p. 11.
50 "for they are the envoys of God": McLynn 1, p. 257.
50 "in chainsfor 6 months": Stanley 7, p. 87,
50 "such miserable slaves": Stanley 7, p. 195.
50 "until death relieves them": Stanley to Alice Pike, 25 Dec. 1874, quoted in Bierman,
p. 163.
5
1
"angry with Central Africa ": Alice Pike to Stanley, 1 3 Oct. 1 874, quoted in McLynn 1
,
p. 248.
52 "attend you in your sleep!": Stanley 2, vol. 2, pp. 148-1 52.
312
NUTHS
53 "the poor young man was dead": Stanley 2, vol. 1, p. 190.
5 3 "take his last gasp ": Stanley 2, vol. 1 , p. 9 1
.
53 "and not disturb him": Stanley 7, p. 130.
54 "the strong Basoko with jeers "
: Ward, p. 1 1 o.
54 part ofwhite anatomy: Hulstaert, p. 52.
55 "commerce to West Central Africa" : Daily Telegraph, 12 Nov. 1877, quoted in Stanley 3,
vol. 1 , p. vi.
55 "through a rock tunnel": Stanley 2, vol. 2, p. 261-262.
56 "until I meet you": Stanley to Alice Pike, 14 Aug. 1876, quoted in Bierman, p. 189.
57 footnote: quoted in Bierman, p. 214.
57 "indecency of their nakedness": Stanley 2, vol. 2, p. 59.
57 "western halfof the Dark Continent": Stanley 2, vol. 2, p. 99-
57 "commerce with Central Africa": Stanley 7, p. 40.
57 "reached the Lualaba": Leopold to Greindl, 30 May 1 877, quoted in Roeykens, p. 23 5
.
58 "this magnificent African cake": Leopold to Solvyns, 17 Nov. 1877, quoted in part in
Pakenham, p. 3 8, and in part in Ascherson, p. 104.
59 Sanford's business troubles: Fry 1, esp.pp. 78-89.
59 "loves and appreciates you": Greindl to Sanford, 28 Nov. 1 877, quoted in Fry 1 , p. 1 3 3 -
60 "called a pirate": Hall, p. 245
.
4. 'the treaties must grant us everything"
6
1
time spent in Africa : Marchal 1 , p. 49
.
64 "has been a nose-bleed? " : Stanley 5 , p. 3 5 1
.
6 5 the real purpose of their work: Marchal 1 , p. 49
.
65 "explorations are intended": "The Whitehall Review and the King ofthe Belgians," in
The Whitehall Review, 2 Aug. 1879, p. 269. Quoted in Stengers 3, p. 122.
65 "doesn't grasp that": Leopold to Strauch, 8 Jan. 1884, quoted in Stanley 6, pp. 20-21.
66 the elephants: Anstey 1 , p. 75
.
66 "traffic in slaves ": speech of 6 Mar. 1 879, reprinted in Bontinck, p. 74-
66 "to the cause ofprogress": Stengers 3, p. 144.
67 "believe in Kings forever": William T. Hornaday, Free Rum on the Congo (Chicago:
Women's Temperance Publication Association, 1887), pp. 44~45> quoted in
Stengers 4, p. 260.
67 "free negro republics ": Col. Maximilien Strauch, quoted in Bierman, p. 225
.
67 "Some in the Congo?": Eugene Beyens to Leon Lambert, 3 Nov. 1882, quoted in
Stengers 3, p. 142.
67 "retain all the powers": Strauch to Stanley, undated, Stanley 6, pp. 22-23
.
67 "shame and discomfort": Stanley to Strauch, 12 June 1881, Stanley 6, p. 49-
68 "able to use it as before": Stanley 6, p. 44.
68 "the ranks ofsoldier-laborers": Stanley 3 , vol. 2, pp. 93~94-
68 "Breaker ofRocks": Stanley 3, vol. i,pp. I47-H8,p. 237.See also Marchal i,p. s^fcr
a corrective.
68 "weak-minded . . .so many idle hands": Stanley 3, vol. 2, pp. 376-377-
68 "clothesless . . . unabashed nudity": Stanley 3, vol. 2, p. 100.
69 "chieftainship to wear them": Stanley 3 , vol. 1 , pp. 1 30-1 3 1 •
69 "entrusted to me": Pakenham, p. 150.
313
NOTES
69 "underbred . . . white children": Stanley 3, vol. i,p. 459.
70 "when I most need you?": Frank Hird, H. M, Stanley: The Authorized life (London:
S. Paul & Co., 193 5) , p. 1 86, quoted in Bierman, p. 23 5
.
70 "perhaps Chinese coolies": Leopold to Stanley, 31 Dec. 1881, quoted in Emerson,
p. 96.
70 "carry on trade": FO 84/1802, 15 Nov. 1882, quoted in Stengers 3, p. 133. 70 "custom ofevery country": Leopold to Stanley 3 1 Dec. 1 8 8 1 , quoted in Emerson, p. 96.
71 "claim to manhood": Stanley 3, vol. 1, p. 466.
71 "must grant us everything": Leopold to Strauch, 16 Oct. 1882, reprinted in Stanley 6,
p. 161.
7
1
"bottles, ofgin ": Stanley 3 , vol. 1 , p. 185.
72 "property ofthe said Association ": Stanley 3 , vol. 2, pp. 1 96-1 97.
72 as diverse as the land: There is a vast anthropological literature on the Congo basin.
See especially Vansina 1 and 3, and, for a highly readable treatment of the Pyg-
mies,Turnbull.
73 harsh as warfare elsewhere: Vellut, p. 70 1 ; Vansina 2 , p. 144, p. 3 43
.
74 spot in the rainforest: Vansina i,p. 100.
74 "take in a herring": Stanley to Sanford, 4 Mar. 1885, reprinted in Bontinck, p. 300.
5. FROM FLORIDA TO BERLIN
75 "a gentleman . . . evidently a goodfeeder": NewYorkTimes, 6 Apr. 1883, 13 Apr. 1883.
75 President Arthurs trip to Florida: New York Times, 5-1 5 Apr. 1883. On Arthur generally see Reeves.
76 Sanfords Florida business troubles: Fry i.pp. 100-106.
77 a special code: Bontinck, pp. 1 39-1 40.
77 "population of several millions": Leopold to Arthur, 3(?) Nov. 1883, quoted in Bon-
tinck, pp. 135^136.
78 The copy, however, had been altered: Stengers 3, p. 128 fh. and p. 130 m.
78 "discovered by an American": Sanford to FreHnghuysen, 30 Dec. 1882, quoted in
Carroll, p. 115.
78 "the neutrality of the valley": President Arthur's message to Congress, 4 Dec. 1883,
quoted in Bontinck, p. 144.
79 "enchanted with emile": Strauch to Sanford, 6 Dec. 1883, quoted in Bontinck,
p. 146.
79 "gastronomic campaign": Anonymous letter-writer in the Times of Philadelphia, 31
Jan. 1885, quoted in Bontinck, p. 160.
79 "queenly presence too": Latrobe to Sanford, 18 Mar. 1 884, quoted in Bontinck, p. 1 89.
79 "enforced negro rule . . . innocent woman": Fry 2, pp. 56-57.
79 "general exodus": Fry 2, p. 56.
79 "home ofthe negro ": Fry 2, p. 185.
80 "fieldfor his efforts": Congressional Record, 7 Jan. 1 890, quoted in Carroll, pp. 3 32-3 3 3
.
80 footnote: Carroll, p. 337.
80 "more congenial fields than politics": Sanford to Evarts, 21 Jan. 1878, quoted in Bon-
tinck, p. 29.
80 "modern Israelites": "American Interests in Africa," The Forum 9 (1890), p. 428,
quoted in Roark 1, p. 169.
80 "over the Southern states": ibid., p. 428, quoted in Meyer, p. 28 fh.
3H
NOTES
80 "adjacent rivers ": Bontinck, p. 171.
80 "secure their welfare": US. Senate, Occupation of Congo in Africa, S. Rept. 393, 48th
Congress, 1st sess., 1 884, p. 9, quoted in Normandy, p. 171
.
81 "both the King and Queen": Gertrude Sanford to Henry Sanford, April 1884, quoted
in Fry i,p. 148.
8 1 "flag of afriendly Government
"
: Bontinck, p. 20 1
.
8
1
statement was reprinted: Stanley 3 , vol. 2, p. 420.
82 "new life ofthe Association ": Stanley 3 , vol. 2,^383.
82 large monthly stipend: of 1000 francs. Stengers 7, p. 48.
82 "be established in the Congo ": Leopold to Strauch, 26 Sept. 1883, quoted in Pakenham,
p. 245.
82 "its work was completed": Emerson, p. 108.
8 3 "and eradicate it ": Emerson, p. 108.
83 "get away with anything": Emerson, p. 109.
83 the role ofBleichroder: Stern, p. 403-409.
84 "slaughteredgame during our travels": Hall, p. 265
.
84 "end be their improvement": J. S. Mill, "On Liberty" In Focus, eds.John Gray and G.W Smith (London: Roudedge, I99i),p. 31.
85 owed a large sum ofmoney: Anstey 1 , p. 68; Pakenham, p. 247.
85 "of that continent very well": Stanley's journal, 24 Nov. 1884, quoted in McLynn 2,
pp. 86-87.
86 "the utmostfreedom ofcommunication" : John A. Kasson, an American delegate, in U.S.
Senate, Report ofthe Secretary ofState Relative to Affairs ofthe Independent State of the
Congo, p. 42., quoted in Clarence Clendenen, Robert Collins, and Peter Duig-
nan, Americans in Africa 1865-1goo (Stanford: The Hoover Institution on War,
Revolution, and Peace, 1966), p. 57.
86 "its illustrious creator": H. L. Wesseling, Divide and Rule: The Partition ofAfrica, 1880-
1914 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996).
87 "as the Congo's 'proprietor'": Stengers 2, p. 262. See also Jean Stengers in La Nouvette
C/wIX(i95o),p. 515.
6. UNDER THE YACHT CLUB FLAG
88 the king was named: Pall Mall Gazette, 10 Apr. 1 8 8 5 , p. 9; and 1 1 Apr. 1 88 5, p. 3
.
89 umbrellas and parasols: NewYorkTimes, 5 June 19 1 7 and 1 5 June 1 9 1 7.
89 "topic ofconversation around me": Louise, p. 32.
90 "and they have not": Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller (1 898).
90 430 whites working in the Congo: census taken 3 1 Dec. 1889, reported in he Mouvement
Gkographique, 23 Mar. 1 890.
91 "offer my services": Henry Sanford to Gertrude Sanford, 30 Aug. 1884, quoted in Fry
1, p. 150.
9 1 the Sanford Exploring Expedition: Fry, pp. 1 57-163 ; White.
91 this was not true: Van der Smissen, vol. 1 , p. 127.
92 "with your Congo!": Stinglhamber and Dresse, p. 142.
92 honorary president: Lzgergren, p. 198 m.
93 "receptions and balls": Kirk to Wylde, 24 Apr. 1 890, quoted in Miers, p. 102.
93 "a new pretty woman": Liebrechts, pp. 29-30.
93 the king had betrayed him: Meyer, p. 37; Fry 1, p. 168.
315
NOTES
94 "greatest sovereign is your own": Emerson, p. 149.
95 "over Vktat Indkpendant du Congo": Mutamba-Makombo, p. 32.
95 "throws away the peel": August Beernaert inJean Stengers, Belgique et Congo:Uelabora- tion de la charte coloniale (Brussels: La Renaissance du Livre, 1963), p. 98, quoted in
Emerson, p. 64.
95 "in ample time to prepare": Stanley to Mackinnon, 23 Sept. 1886, quoted in Bierman,
P* 256.
95 "I can't talk to women": Hall, p. 274.
96 "her sweet scented notes": Stanley to Mackinnon, 23 Sept. 1886, quoted in Bierman,
p. 256.
96 "I will nevergive it up!": Stengers 2, p. 287.
96 "resources ofcivilisation": the Times, 14 Jan. 1887, quoted in Emerson, p. 157.
97 "to overcome barbarism": Globe, 19 Jan. 1887, quoted in McLynn 2, p. 146.
98 "frenzy ofrage": The Diary ofA.J. MounteneyJephson, ed. Dorothy Middleton (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 228 (26 Feb. 1888), quoted in
Bierman, p. 289.
99 "catch some more of their women ".-James S.Jameson, The Story of the Rear Column of
the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, ed. Mrs. J. A.Jameson (London: R. H. Porter,
1890), p. 92 (21 July 1887), quoted in Bierman, p. 297.
99 "burn all the villages round": The Diary ofA. J. MounteneyJephson, ed. Dorothy Mid-
dleton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 203 (10 Dec. 1887),
quoted in Bierman, p. 286.
99 "poured into the village": Stairs's journal, 28 Sept. 1887, quoted in Bierman, p. 281.
99 by his Piccadilly taxidermist: Bierman, p. 298.
99 "peace ofmind": Stanley 4, vol. 1 , p. 396.
100 "leave without me!": Die Tagebiichen von DrEmin Pascha, ed. Franz Stuhlmann (Ham-
burg: G. Westerman, 1916-1927)^01. 4, p. 202, 14Jan. 1889, quoted in McLynn 2, pp. 262-263
1 00 "well-selected and iced " : Stanley 4 , vol . 2 , p. 45 8
.
100 "was most exhilarating!": Funny Folks, quoted in Bierman, p. 340.
7. THE FIRST HERETIC
102 several different lives: unless otherwise noted, biographical facts about Williams are
taken from Franklin.
103 he had never earned: Marchal i,p. 176.
1 03 "That day will come!": Franklin, pp. 10-1 1
.
1 04 "so much native ability " : New York Times, 22 Jan. 1883, quoted in Franklin, p. 116.
104 "greatest historian of the race": WE.B. Du Bois, "The Negro in Literature and Art," Annals ofthe American Academy ofPolitical and Social Science 49 (Sept. 1913), p. 235,
quoted in Franklin, p. 1 3 3
.
1 05 Williams, Arthur, and Sanford: Bontinck, pp. 22 1 , 442.
105 when he visited London: Marchal 1, p. 178.
106 "with complete success": LTndependance Beige, 1 Nov. 1889, quoted in Marchal 1,
p. 180.
106 "a pleasant and entertaining . . . mercy, and justice . . .good listener": Boston Herald, 17
Nov. 1889, quoted in Franklin, pp. 1 81-182.
107 "within afew days": Williams 3, p. 265.
316
NOTES
108 "loaded on to the steamer":). Rose Troup, With Stanley's Rear Column (London: Chap-
man & Hall, 1890), p. 124, quoted in Sherry, p. 59- See De Premorel pp. 42-44
for another description ofsteamer travel.
108 "Siberia of the African Continent": Williams to Huntington, 14 Apr. 1890, quoted in
Franklin, p. 191.
108 Open Letter quotations: Williams 1, pp. 243-254.
1 1
1
"introduced this . . fust, not cruel": Williams 3 , PP- 277-279.
H2 "crimes against humanity": Williams to Blaine, 15 Sept. 1890, quoted in Bontinck,
P 449- 112 "attempt at blackmail": New York Herald, 14 Apr. 1 891.
112 "natives of that country": Huntington to Mackinnon, 20 Sept. 1890, quoted in Frank-
lin, p. 208.
112 "truth in his pamphlets" : Vivian to Salisbury, 4 Apr. 1891, quoted in Franklin, p. 210.
112 "un vrai scandale": Emile Banning, Memoires politiques et diplomatiques: comment Jut
fondS le Congo beige (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1927), P 295, quoted in
Bontinck, p. 448.
112 "First of all . . . not a colonel" : Journal de Bruxelles 12, 13, 14 June 1891, quoted in
Franklin, pp. 211-212.
113 "the American traveler": La Reforme, isjune 1891, quoted in Marchal i,p 195.
1 1 3 "in its own defense ": Franklin, p. 2 1 3
.
1 1 3 "Colonel Williams and others": Gosselin to Salisbury, 19 July 1 891 , quoted in Franklin,
p. 215.
113 "an embarrassinglyformidable opponent": Cookey, p. 36.
114 "action of the State":Gren£e\[ to Bzynes, 23 ]une 1890; quoted in Franklin, p. 194.
8. WHERE THERE AREN'T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS
115 Boma in the 1890s: see numerous articles in La Belgique Coloniale, esp. 18 Dec. 1897,
p. 607, and 28 Aug. 1898, p. 411.
1 1
6
"learn to stoop ": Aronson pp: 141-1 42.
1 16 Fischers of Strasbourg: Gann and Duignan 2, p. 106.
1 16 bridesfrom Europe: Leclercq, pp. 284-285.
1 1 8 "ivory had disappeared": Obdeijn, p. 202.
118 "lessen its deficit": Leopold to Beernaert, 19 June 1891, reprinted in Van der Smissen,
vol. 2, p. 212.
118 "the sanctity of work": Interview by Publishers' Press, in the New York American, 11
Dec. 1906.
118 fourfrancs per kilo: Marchal 1 , p. 212.
119 twenty-two pounds: Constant De Deken, Deux Ans au Congo (Antwerp: Clement
Thibaut, 1902), p. 72 rh., cited in Samarin, p. 118.
119 "A file ofpoor devils , . .up to thejob": Courouble, pp. 77, 83
.
119 three thousand porter loads: Samarin, p. 120.
120 "overwork in their villages " : Picard, pp. 96-97-
120 not one returned: Marchal i,p. 202.
120 "each of the children": Marchal 4, p. 3 * 7-
121 "give the military salute": Marchal 4, pp. 325-326. Lefranc's account, which he wrote
for the Belgian newspaper L'Express de Liege on 1 June 1908, was also reprinted as
a pamphlet by the Congo Reform Association.
317
NOTES
121 "A mediocre agent": Marchal 4, p. 318.
121 "without asking questions": quoted as epigraph in Katz.
122 "become used to it": Sereny p. 200.
122 "never made any lethal injections ": KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS: Hoess, Broad, Kremer, ed. Jadwiga Bezwinska and Danuta Czech (Oswiecimiu, Poland: Panstwowe Mu- seum, 1978), quoted in Katz, pp. 54-55.
122 "punishmentfor his own gang": De Premorel, p. 6s . 123 footnote: Jules Marchal unearthed this remarkable photo, which was first used by
Morel before he became editor of the West African Mail. Marchal 2, p, 116; Marchal 3, p. 39.
123 "walk intofire as if to a wedding": Bricusse, p. 85.
123 more than nineteen thousand officers and men: Gann and Duignan 2, p. 79. 123 more than halfthe states budget: Marchal i,p. 354.
124 different ethnic groups staged major rebellions: Isaacman and Vansina is the best short
summary.
124 Mulume Mama: Marchal 4, pp. 27-28; Flamant, pp. 182-1 83
.
125 fifty thousand men a year by the mid-i 890s: Marchal 1 , p. 3 23
.
125 "cannotfeel surprised": Karl Teodor Andersson, 28 Dec. 1893, Missionsforbundet 1894,
p. 83.
125 "the rebels have not fled . . . leaders in those times": C. N. Borrisson, 2 Feb. 1894, Missionsforbundet 1 894, pp. 1 3 2—1 3 4.
126 Rommel and Nzansu: Axelson, pp. 259-260; Marchal 1 , pp. 320-3 2 1
,
127 "rather than with the hunted": Casement 3, p. 166.
127 ordered her killed: Marchal 1 , p. 3 73
.
127 Kandolo: One thing that can mislead the unwary researcher is that three different men named Kandolo figure in Congo history of this period, one ofwhom was a leader ofanother mutiny, that of 1897 in the northeast.
1 27 snatched the whip out ofhis hands: Van Zandijcke, p. 1 82.
128 thirteen years after the uprising began: De Boeck, pp. 104, 125. See the other extensive treatments of the uprising in Flament and Van Zandijcke, and a summary in Marchal i,pp. 372-376.
128 "worthy of a better cause": Flament, p. 417. The best treatment of this uprising is in De Boeck.
128 quotations from Father Achte: De Boeck, pp. 224-228. De Boeck has rescued this valuable piece of testimony, earlier accessible only in truncated versions.
129 starting in the 1060s: De Boeck's entire book is premised on this point. 130 Bongata in 1 892 : Vangroenweghe, p. 43
.
130 instead ofpaying chiefsfor them : Marchal 1 , p. 2 1 6.
130 "drowned trying to escape": Marchal 1 , p. 224.
130 instead ofheavy iron ones: Marchal 1, p. 227.
1 3o "pulls the wholefile offand it disappears " : Marchal 1 , p. 23 1
.
131 the campaign against the "Arabs": See Marchal 1, chapter 14.
133 "to the white men s town at Nyangwe ": Canisius , pp. 250-2 56
.
133 the rigors ofLeopolds regime: see Marchal 2, part V for the best treatment ofthe role of Catholic missionaries.
134 "1500 children and administrative personnel": Leopold to Van Eecvelde, 27 Apr. 1890, quoted in Marchal 2, p. 209.
318
NOTES
1 34 "the most male children possible": Governor general's circular, 4 June 1890, quoted in
Marchal 2, p. 177.
134 "was sounded by bugles": Het H. Misoffer. Tijdschrift van de Norbertijner Missien 1899,
p. 226, quoted in Marchal 2, p. 298.
135 often over 50 percent: Marchal 2, pp. 1 8 1-1 82.
135 within thefollowingfew weeks: Marchal 2, p. 179.
1 3 5 "prayingfor our great king": Marchal 2, p. 22 1
.
135 "Once more, I thank you": Bauer, p. 216.
1 3 5 "that shepherd": Daye, p. 399 •
136 "That isforbidden!": O'Connor, p. 346.
1 36 "in theface ofthe enemy": Gann and Duignan 2, pp. 62-63 -
137 onlyfinedfive hundredfrancs: Lagergren, p. 195
.
137 "trader!! H% mrt/": Slade 2,p. 116. 137 Hon Rom's career: The principal sources (all more or less hagiographic) are Biographie
coloniale beige, vol. 2, cols. 822-826;Janssens and Cateaux,vol. i,pp. 125-132 and
vol. 2, pp. 197-200; Lejeune-Choquet, pp. 1 14-126; Bulletin de VAssociation des
VZte'rans coloniaux, June 1946, pp. 3-5; Sidney Langford Hinde, The Fall of the
Congo Arabs (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969; reprint of 1 897 edition),
pp. 232, 235, 244-245; and Rom's own unpublished Notes. Mes Services au Congo
de 1886 a 1908. The first three, as well as Arnold, are useful guides for career details,
sanitized, ofmany other Congo state European personnel of this time.
137 "as proofofsurrender": Janssens and Cateaux, vol. 2, pp. 199-200.
138 "Master, they're going to kill you!": Lejeune-Choquet, pp. 123-124.
138 many butterfly specimens: Albert Chapaux, Le Congo (Brussels: Charles Rozez, 1894),
p. 470.
138 "can raise a thirst": from "Mandalay" in Barrack Room Ballads (London: Methuen,
1892).
138 a third ofwhite Congo state agents died there: Marchal 1, p, 210, See Gann and Duignan
2, p. 68, for a similar figure, almost as high, for military men only, prior to 1906.
139 "plein de tristesse/Pour le Congo": Picard, pp. 145-146.
139 "the river will kill the white man": L. Dieu, Dans la brousse congolaise (Liege: Marechal,
1946), pp. 50-60, quoted in Slade 2, p. 72.
9. MEETING MR. KURTZ
140 "I shall go there": Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (London: J. M. Dent & Sons,
1912), p. 13, excerpted in Conrad, p. 148.
141 Conrad in the Congo: Unless otherwise noted, biographical facts about Conrad in the
Congo are taken from Nadjer, the most careful biographer when it comes to this
period ofthe novelist's life.
141 "realities ofa boy's daydreams!": Joseph Conrad, "Geography and Some Explorers," in
Last Essays, ed. Richard Curie (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926), p. 17* ex-
cerpted in Conrad, pp. 186-187.
142 missionary doctor: Lapsley, p. 83 . Conrad's various biographers have not noticed this.
142 "not a thought in his head": Edward Garnett's introduction to Letters from Con-
rad 1895-1924, p. xii. (London: Nonesuch Press, 1928), excerpted in Conrad,
p- 195.
319
NOTES
142 "Soundings in fathoms: 2,2,2,1,1,2, 2, 2, 2": Joseph Conrad, Congo Diary and Other
Uncollected Pieces, ed. Zdzislaw Najder (New York: Doubleday, 1978), reprinted in Conrad, p. 182.
142 "everything you had known " : Conrad, p. 3 5
.
142 "lost in the depths of the land": Conrad, p. 12.
143 "narrow white line of the teeth": Conrad, p. 57.
143 "beyond the actual facts of the case": Joseph Conrad, "Authors Note" to Youth: A • Narrative; and Two Other Stories (London: William Heinemann, 1 921), reprinted in Conrad, p. 4.
143 "bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking": Conrad, p. 19.
144 "now and then . . . bullet-hole in theforehead": Conrad, p. 23.
144 "met an off[ic]er . . . Saw another dead body . . . tied up to a post": Joseph Conrad, Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces, ed. Zdzislaw Najder (New York: Doubleday, 1978), reprinted in Conrad, pp. 160, 161, 165.
144 "several abandoned villages": Conrad, p. 23.
144 "precious trickle of ivory": Conrad, p. 21.
144 "The word 'ivory''. . . could earn percentages" : Conrad, pp. 26-27.
145 famedfor his harem: Marchal i,p. 284.
145 captured and beheaded him: Times ofLondon, 8 Dec. 1892, quoted in Sherry, pp. 1 10-
iii.
145 Rom: see biographical references in preceding chapter.
145 "a flower-bed in front of his house!": E. J. Glave in The Century Magazine, Sept. 1897,
p. 706.
145 Rom: see biographical references on p. 3 19. 146 a young officer he had met: Any meeting between Conrad and Rom would have taken
place at the beginning of August, when Conrad passed through Leopoldville, or in the next day or two, before his boat left neighboring Kinshasa. Conrad was again at Leopoldville/Kinshasa from late September to late October and would have had ample opportunity to hear stories of Rom then. Rom himself had already left for his next post on September 2, 1890, while Conrad was upriver. I am indebted to Jules Marchal for finding this date in the state personnel archives. The Biographie Coloniale beige wrongly implies a later depar- ture date. For other white collectors of Congolese heads whose boasts may also have helped inspire Conrad's creation of Mr. Kurtz, see pp. 99, 166, and
196-197.
146 "The horror! The horror!"': Conrad, p. 68.
146 "when you look into it too much": Conrad, p. 10.
146 "real work is done in there": Conrad, p. 13.
146 "sparkfrom the sacredfire": Conrad, p. 8.
146 "under the Englishflag all over the world": Frances B. Singh, "The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness," in Conradiana 10 (1978), reprinted in Conrad, p. 278.
146 "less savage than the other savages": Mark Twain, More Tramps Abroad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1897) pp. 137-138, quoted in C. P. Sarvan, "Racism and the Heart of Darkness," International Fiction Review 7 (1980), reprinted in Conrad,
p. 284.
146 "weird incantations" : Conrad, p. 65
.
146 "passionate uproar": Conrad, p. 38.
320
NOTES
146 "some satanic litany": Conrad, p. 66.
147 "lot the darkness found him out": Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in
Conrad's Heart ofDarkness," reprinted in Conrad, p. 261.
147 "the Company was runfor profit": Conrad, p. 16.
147 footnote: Conrad and Hueffer,p. 165.
147 "the noble cause": Conrad, p. 12.
1 147 "science and progress ": Conrad, p. 28
.
147 "sketch in oils": Conrad, p. 27.
147 "vibrating with eloquence . . . Exterminate all the brutes!": Conrad, pp. 50-5 1-
148 in a Belgian museum: the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale at Tervuren.
148 "he generally responds with something stupid": Rom, Le Negre du Congo, pp. $-6.
148 "they will have at the next stop": Rom, Le Ntgre du Congo, p. 84.
149 "getting himselfadored" : Conrad, p. 56.
149 "He makes his agents . . .the role ofa second Rom": Leclercq, p. 264.
149 "in front of the station!": Wahis to Van Eetvelde, 2 Nov. 1896, quoted in Marchal 1,
p. 298.
10. THE WOOD THAT WEEPS
1 50 "bums like the altarflame": Tennant to Stanley, 6 May 1 890 and 9 May 1 890, quoted in
McLynn 2, pp. 328-329.
1 5
1
"like a monkey in a cage": Stanley's journal, 9 Sept. 1 890, quoted in McLynn 2, p. 3 34-
1 5
1
"he considered sexfor the beasts ": McLynn 2, p. 3 3 4.
1 52 "general mediocrity": McLynn 2, p. 3 7<5-
152 "untrained, undisciplined, loutish and ill-bred": Stanley to Mackinnon, 25 Dec. 1890,
quoted in McLynn 2, p. 3 37.
152 William Sheppard: The most thorough study of Sheppard is Phipps. See also Schall,
Shaloff, Roth, Walter Williams, Sheppard, and numerous articles by and about
Sheppard in the Southern Workman.
152 "to the homes of their ancestors": Shaloff, p. 1 5
153 in the process : The Missionary, vol. xxvi, no. 6, pp. 2 19-220.
153 as much as he did other visitors: Lapsley, p. 44-
154 "famishes a handle I hope to use on him": Lapsley to his "Aunt Elsie," in Lapsley, p. 83.
A misprint in Lapsley erroneously dates this letter 1891.
1 54 "black white man, as they call Sheppard h
: Lapsley to "Aunt Elsie," Lapsley, p. 83
.
1 54 "thankful to Godfor Sheppard": Lapsley to his mother, 22 Dec. 1 890, Lapsley, p. 94-
154 "I let him do most of the buying "
: Lapsley, p. 108
.
1 54 "the dense darkness . . .filled with superstition and sin": William Sheppard in the South-
ernWorkman 44 (i9i5),PP 166, 169, quoted in Schall, pp. 114-115.
154 "I would be happy, and so I am": Sheppard to Dr. S. H. Henkel, 5 Jan. 1892, quoted in
Shaloff, p. 29.
154 "the names they gave us": Sheppard, "Yesterday, To-day and To-morrow in Africa," in
Southern Workman, Aug. i9io,p. 445.
155 "my people": Walter Williams, p. 138.
155 "the country of my forefathers": letter from Sheppard to The Missionary, Sept. 1890,
quoted in Walter Williams, p. 1 3 8
.
155 "and on the 26th ofMarch died": S. C. Gordon to Sheppard, quoted in Shaloff, p. 30.
321
NOTES
155 "he alone speaks ofall the Europeans ": Ernest Stache to the Board ofWorld Missions of
the Presbyterian Church, 7 Aug. 1892, quoted in Shaloff, p. 32.
155 strayedfrom his marriage: Phipps, p. 118; Benedetto, pp. 3 o, 423-42 5 •
156 "got theirsfrom the Bdkuba!": Sheppard in the Southern Workman, Dec. 1893, pp. 184-
187, quoted in Walter Williams, p. 143.
156 "came from a far-away land": Sheppard, "African Handicrafts and Superstitions,"
Southern Workman, Sept. 1921, pp. 403-404.
1 56 thefirstforeigner: Vansina 2, p. 3
.
1 57 aformer king: This is the way Sheppard usually told the story, as, for example, when he
spoke at Hampton on 14 Nov. 1893 (reprinted in the Southern Workman, April
1895, "Into the Heart of Africa" p. 65): "You are Bo-pe Mekabe, who reigned
before my father and who died." Although on several occasions (Southern Work- man, April 1905, p. 218, and Sept. 1921, p. 403), he said he was taken for a dead
son ofthe present king.
157 footnote: Shaloff, p. 45.
1 57 informationfor later scholars: Vansina 2 is the definitive scholarly treatment ofthe Kuba.
To avoid contusion, however, in quotations from Sheppard and elsewhere, I have
generally used Sheppard s spelling ofAfrican names.
157 "the highest in equatorial Africa ": Sheppard, p. 137.
1 57 Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo:A later edition is called Pioneers in Congo. 1 57 "and the rope was drawn up": Sheppard, p. 119.
159 to aidesfor action: Liebrechts, pp. 3 7-3 8
.
160 eight times his annual salary: Harms 3, p. 132.
160 nearly thirty times what it had been six years earlier: Harms 3 , pp. 1 30-131
.
160 increased ninety-six times over: Nelson, p. 82.
161 "tapping some vines": Official Organ, Sept. 1907, p. 10.
161 "must be compelled to do it": Louis Chaltin,journal, 1 6 July 1 892, quoted in Northrup,
p. 5i.
161 "the requisite amount of rubber had been collected": Pulteney to FO, 15 Sept. 1899, FO 10/73 1, no. 5, quoted in Cookeypp. 50-51 fh.
1 62 "unchain the prettiest ones and rape them": Bricusse, p. 8 1
.
162 "will usually decide to send representatives": Donny, vol. i, pp. 139-140.
163 three tofour kilos ofdried rubberper adult male perfortnight: Harms 3, p. 132.
163 against leopards: Daniel Vangroenweghe u Le Red Rubber de TAnversoise, 1 899-1 900,
Documents inedits" in Annales Aequatoria 6 (1985), p. 57.
163 and squeeze the rubber out: Harms 1, p. 81.
163 forty-seven thousand rubbergatherers: Harms i,p. 79.
163 four hundred men with baskets: Harms 3, p. 134.
164 "use them as slaves— as I liked": Canisius, p. 267. 164 some of the strongest resistance to Leopolds rule: Marchal 4, pp. 106-107.
164 "I counted them, 81 in all": Sheppard diary, 14 Sept. 1899, Sheppard Papers.
164 "to show the State how many we have killed": Sheppard in The Missionary, Feb. 1900,
p. 61.
165 "cut off hands, noses and ears": Charles Lemaire, Belgique et Congo (Gand: A. Van-
deweghe, 1908), p. 64, quoted in Vangroenweghe, p. 46.
165 "cut offa handfrom a living man": Ellsworth E. Farisjournal, 23 Aug. 1899, quoted in
Morel 5, p. 248.
322
NOTES
165 "keeper of the hands ": Vangroenweghe, p. 234.
165 "Arches of the Severed Hands": Parliamentary debate of 28 Feb. 1905, quoted in
Vangroenweghe, p. 288.
1 66 "rape their own mothers and sisters": Boelaert, pp. 5 8-59.
166 "allowedfive hundred others to live": Bricusse, p. 56. (1.1 June 1 894).
166 shoot holes in Africans' ear lobes: Guy Burrows, The Curse of Central Africa (London:
R. A.Everett & Co., 1903), pp. xviii-xix. 166 large doses ofcastor oil: de Premorel, p. 64.
166 he made them eat it: Marchal 4, p. 85.
166 rubbed with excrement: Marchal 1, p. 391.
166 contained chopped-up hands: Bremen i,pp. 1 19-120.
II. A SECRET SOCIETY OF MURDERERS
167 "except money!" Bauer, p. 169.
167 "one day or another come on to the market": conversation of 30 Aug. 1892 in
Auguste Roeykens, Le baron Leon de Bithune au service de Leopold II (Brussels:
Academie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer, 1964), p- 5<5, quoted in Stengers 2,
p. 286.
168 "moving Europe so deeply": Emerson, pp. 193-194.
168 understated the state's real profits: Marchal i,p. 353.
168 more than a hundred millionfrancs: Vangroenweghe, p. 87.
169 Leopolds daily routine: For eyewitness accounts, see Stinglhamber and Dresse, espe-
cially pp. 38-50, and Carton de Wiart, especially pp. 44 and 123-130.
169 "I'll also take some cutlets": Stinglhamber and Dresse, p. 88.
170 "thinking that Africans are black? ": Emerson, p. 22 1
.
170 "by the hands of giants": C. Vauthier, "Le chemin de fer du Congo de Matadi
a Leopoldville. Les environs de Matadi et le massif de Palabala," in Bulletin
de la Societe Giographique d'Anvers 13 [1887?], pp. 377-378, quoted in Kivilu,
P- 324.
170 twelve miles in length: Cornet, p. 376.
170 "what would it cost?": Leopold to Thys, 3 1 May 1 888, quoted in Cornet, p. 236.
170 east coast and then home: Cornet, p. 236.
171 each telegraph pole one European life: Axelson,p. 204.
171 close to 1800 a year: Marchal 3, p. 143, p. 153.
171 forced them back: Cornet, p. 209.
172 eleven million pounds: Gann and Duignan 2, p. 123
.
172 footnote: Emile Wangermee,journal, 3 1 Jan. 1 899, quoted in Lagergren, p. 294 fh.
172 "to save us from the rubber trouble?": Regions Beyond, April 1897, quoted in Slade 1,
p. 251.
173 "We want to die": Axelson,pp. 259-260.
173 " (toujours desagreable) " :
J. De Witte, MonseigneurAugouard (Paris: Emile-Paul Freres,
1924), p. 71, quoted in Slade i,p. 255.
173 "time ofservice will soon befinished": Morel 3, pp. 43 - 44-
173 reportedly paid a visit: Fox Bourne to Morel, 21 Nov. 1903, quoted in Louis 1 , p. 99 fh.
174 "dared to kill an Englishman": Lionel Decle in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1 1 June 1896,
quoted in Louis 3 , p. 575.
323
NOTBS
174 "faced thefacts ofthe situation": 21 Sept. 1896, quoted in Lagergren, p. 197 fii.
175 "En domptant l'Arabe inhumain": Louis Graide, "Les Beiges au Congo," in F.
Alexis-M. Soldats et Missionnaires au Congo de iSgi a 1894 (Lille: Desclee, de
Brouwer & Cie., 1896). 175 the Congolese at Tervuren: See Marchal 2, pp. 78-80, Gerard, p. 181, Debrunner,
pp. 340-342, Le Mouvement Giographique, 27 June 1897 and 18 July 1897, and La
Belgique Coloniale, 4 July 1897 and 5 Sept. 1897.
176 footnote: The poem by M.E. Buhler appeared in the NewYorkTimes ofSept. 19, 1906.
This and other press clippings are reprinted in Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo,
by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1992).
176 "first sign ofcivilization": La Belgique Coloniale, 4 July 1897, p. 314.
177 "the great warrior": La Belgique Coloniale, 4 July 1897.
177 "an example ofhumanity!": Bruxelles-Exposition, n.d., quoted in La Belgique Coloniale,
5 Sept. 1 897, p. 423.
178 "a magnificent field for [Belgian] enterprise": "The Belgians in Africa," 22 Feb. 1894.
(Name ofperiodical is missing in the Morel Papers microfilm.)
178 "involuntary shudder ofrepulsion": Morel 5, p. 27.
179 "greatly troubled at the indiscretion*": Morel 5, pp. 28-29.
180 "to what usage was this armament put?": Morel 5, p. 36.
180 "into whose pocket did the unavowed surplus go?" Morel 5, pp. 39—40.
1 80 "to payfor what was coming out. " Morel 5, p. 36.
180 were destinedfor Africans: Gann and Duignan, p. 149.
181 "with a Kingfor a croniman " : Morel 5 , pp. 4 1-42
.
12. DAVID AND GOLIATH
186 "set their African house in order": Morel 5, pp. 47-48.
186 "presence was unwelcome": Morel 5, p. 48,
186 "a vast destruction ofhuman life": Morel 5, p. 5.
186 "no turning back": Morel 5, p. 49.
187 "temperamentally impossible": Morel 5, p. 30.
188 "these deeds must ofnecessity take place": Morel 3, p. 8 m.
189 " (Ending date . . . Observations'": West African Mail, 13 Jan. 1905, p. 996.
1 89 "feeding ofhostages ": Special Congo Supplement to the West African Mail, Jan. 1905
.
189 from a post in Brussels: A. and J. Stengers, "Rapport sur une mission dans les archives
anglaises" in Bulletin de la Commission Royale d'Histoire, vol. CXXIV (1959), pp. ciii—civ.
189 the company's agents in the Congo: Morel 1, p. 3 1.
190 in the original French: Official Organ, Sept.-Nov. 1908.
190 "of the various districts": Morel 3, p. 24.
190 "in connection with this circular, verbally": Morel 3, p. 25.
190 "What can I do?": Morel 3 , p. 56.
191 "at a distance offullyfourfeet": Morel 3, p. 47.
191 "tongues were hanging out": Morel 3, p. 57.
191 list ofthe dead: Official Organ, Jan. 1906, p. 1 5.
192 "the peoples ofthe Congo may ever have . . .the advantages ofyour enlightened rule": Morel
$,P- "5-
3H
NOTBS
192 "choice and copious": Morel 5, p. 128.
192 "I enjoyed myselfmost thoroughly": Morel 5, p. 129.
193 "other service than rubber-gathering": Canisius, pp. 75-80.
193 "that civilization was dawning": Canisius, p. 99.
193 "literally shrieked with pain ": Canisius, pp. 92-93
.
193 "to starvation and smallpox": Canisius, p. 113.
193 "men, women and children": Canisius, p. 142.
193 "to the monthly crop": Ibid.
194 "governed with humanity": Resolution of 20 May 1903, quoted in Cline, p. 37. 194 "the Armenians or the Bulgarians": Georges Lorand, in La Riforme, 14 Sept. 1896,
quoted in Lagergren, p. 199 fh.
13. BREAKING INTO THE THIEVES* KITCHEN
195 "to send reports soon": PRO HO 161, quoted in Reid, p. 42. See also PRO FO 629/10,11,12.
195 Roger Casement: Reid and Inglis are the best of the many biographers of Case-
ment. Inglis gives much more space to his African experiences, but lacks source
notes.
195 "Knight errant he was": Stephen Gwynn, Experiences of a Literary Man (London:
T. Butterworth, 1926), p. 258, quoted in Reid, p. 63.
196 "would never make money":W Holman Bendey, quoted in Vangroenweghe,p. 276. 196 "specimen of the capable Englishman": Stanley's journal, 15 Apr. 1887, quoted in
McLynn2,p. 171.
196 to the dog to eat: McLynn 2, pp. 174-175.
196 "nothing but devastation behind it": Camille Janssen, in Bulletin de la Sociiti Beige
d'&udes Coloniales ( 19 1 2) , p. 7 1 7
.
196 "stimulate their prowess in theface of the enemy": Casement to Foreign Office, 14 Jan.
1904, PRO FO 10/807, quoted in Casement 5, p. i. 196 "most intelligent and very sympathetic": Joseph Conrad, Congo Diary and Other Uncol-
lected Pieces, ed. Zdzislaw Najder (New York: Doubleday, 1978), reprinted in
Conrad, p. 159.
197 "His greatest charm . . . He purrs at you": Ernest Hambloch, British Consul: Memories of Thirty Years' Service in Europe and Brazil (London: G. G. Harrap, 1938), p. 71,
quoted in Reid, p. 5 fii.
197 saw Casement once more: the clear implication of Conrad's letter to Cunninghame
Graham of 26 Dec. 1903 ("I have seen him start off into an unspeakable wilder-
ness ... A few months afterwards it so happened that I saw him come out again"), quoted in Reid, p. 14.
197 "talked there till 3 in the morning": Conrad to John Quinn, 24 May 1916, quoted
in Frederick Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three lives (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), p. 286. Sometimes foggy about dates, Conrad, echoed by one
or two of his more careless biographers, placed this meeting in 1896. But
that could not have been; Casement was in Africa that year. Jane Ford (in
"An African Encounter, A British Traitor and Heart of Darkness" Conradi- ana, vol. 27, no. 2, 1995, p. 125) believes the encounter probably occurred in
1898— which would have made it just before Conrad started writing Heart of Darkness.
325
NOTBS
197 "things I never did know": Conrad to Cunninghame Graham, 26 Dec. 1903 , quoted in Reid, p. 14.
197 "in any shape or form": Casement to Fox-Bourne, 2 July 1894, quoted in Reid,
p. 20.
198 u in the character": Singleton-Gates, p. 91
.
198 "advise him of": Louis 1, p. 103
.
198 "listen to a drunken sailors complaint": Inglis, p. 41
.
199 "big bulldog with largejaws": Marchal 3, p. 187.
1 99 "And leave this love God made, not I": Inglis, pp. 3 82-383
.
199 diary entries on Macdonald: Casement 2, pp. 121, 123, 125 (17,19 and 30 Apr. 1903). 200 "Agostinho . . . How much money?": Casement 2, pp. 1 1 1, 1 1 5, 1 19, 129 (13 , 20 Mar.; 6
Apr.; 12 May 1903). 200 brutal conditions in Leopolds Congo: Marchal 3, pp. 189-190.
200 Casement was under way: Marchal 3 , p. 192; Inglis, p. 69.
200 "please God I'll scotch it": Casement to Poultney Bigelow, 13 Dec. 1903, quoted in Reid, p. 53.
201 "infullflight over us": Casement 2,p, 145 (2 July 1903).
201 "poor old Hairy Bill. . . . beats me hollow": Casement 2, pp. 147, 149 (8, 9, 10, 13 July
1903).
201 "curse me at BO. ": Casement 2, p. 1 37 (1 1 June 1903). 201 "condemnation of civilized mankind": Casement to Fuchs, 15 Sept. 1903, quoted in
Casement 5, p. v.
201 "into the thieves' kitchen": Casement to Lansdowne, no. 34 Africa, 15-16 Sept. 1903, FO 10/805, quoted in Louis i,p. 107.
20
1
letters to the governorgenera I : Lagergren, pp. 323-329.
202 diary entries, 5fune-9 Sept.: Casement 2, pp. 135, 153, 155, 157, 159, 163, 165.
203 " 'you have killed men ' ": Casement 3 , p. 114.
204 "acts of refined cruelty": Phipps to Lansdowne, 27 Feb. 1904, quoted in Louis 1,
pp. 112-113.
204 "awkward position at court": Phipps to Barrington, 5 Feb. 1904, quoted in Louis 1,
p. 1 1 1 fh.
204 "I am N.N. . . . his name was A.B. ": Casement 3, p. 112.
204 "as a simple surgical operation": Special Congo Supplement to the West African Mail, June
1904.
204 "gang ofstupidities": Casement 2, p. 183 (1 Dec. 1903).
204 "an abject piffler" : Casement 2, p. 185 (16 Dec. 1903).
204 "incompetent noodles": Casement to Nightingale, 8 Sept. 1904, quoted in Reid, p. 65.
205 "M. sleeping in study": Casement 2, p. 183 (10 Dec. 1903). 206 "sought his bedroom above": Morel 5, pp. 160-162.
206 "wife a good woman": Casement 2, p. 189 (5 Jan. 1904).
206 "drew up a rough plan ofcampaign": Morel 5, pp. 163-164.
206 "in that great heart of hers?": Morel 5, pp. 164-165.
206 "he wrote out a chequefor £1 00 ": Morel 5 , p. 165.
207 "one overwhelming Nay!": Inglis, p. 92.
207 "as near to being a saint as a man can be": Morel to Holt, 12July 1910, quoted in Porter,
p. 267.
207 "to end that den ofdevils": Casement to Morel, 4 July 1906, quoted in Louis 1, p. 1 19.
326
NOTBi
14. TO FLOOD HIS DEEDS WITH DAY
209 "he will do nothing": Morel to Guthrie, 25 Feb. 1910, quoted in Morel 5, p. 195 fix.
209 "that I have been able to do it all": Morel to Brabner, 14 Sept. 1908, quoted in Morel 5,
p. 211.
210 "the Morel ofCongo reform": Holt to Morel, quoted in Adams, p. 179.
210 " 'God-speed' on hisjourney": West African Mail, 23 Sept. 1 904, p. 601
.
210 "And they have the right to live": Morel to Mark Twain, quoted in Hawkins i,p. 167.
210 the hands of one's dead enemies: Vansina 2, pp. 144, 343; Vellut,p. 701.
211 "in the hollow ofmy hand": Morel to Holt, 1910, quoted in Morel 5, p. 217.
212 "a burden upon the State": Furleypp. 1 41-142.
212 "chemistry of evangelical imperialism": James Morris, Heaven's Command: An Imperial
Progress (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 39.
213 "accepted his leadership ".Taylor, p. 1 3 3
.
214 "the reptile Congophile Press ofBrussels and Antwerp": Morel 1, p. 261
.
214 "terrible wrongs upon the native races": Morel 1, p. x.
214 "inland slave-trade on the Congo " : Morel 1 , p. xvii.
214 "good government ofthe Congo territories": Cookey,p. 149.
215 "and flood his deeds with day": William Watson, "Leopold of Belgium" in the
Congo Reform Association's slide show. The poem also appeared in the West
African Mail, 21 Sept. 1906, p. 608, and, in a slightly different version iden-
tified as being from Watson's New Poems (Lane), in the African Mail, 26 Nov. 1909,
p. 80.
215 "the downfall": note to himself, 14 June 1907, quoted by Cline, p. 58.
215 4,194 clippings: The sum of various subtotals given in Inventaire des microfilms des
Papiers Morel, series A, B, E, F, G, H, I, se rapportant a Vhistoire du Congo et consents a
la British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School ofEconomics (Brus-
sels: Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1961),
215 Samba:A Story of the Rubber Slaves ofthe Congo, by Herbert Strang (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906), p. vi.
216 "literature, information, etc": Morel to Cadbury, Oct. 1906, quoted in CHne, p. 54 r
216 for the benefit of the movement: West African Mail, 24 Aug. 1906, p. 520.
217 "more than 5 years": John Harris, unpublished autobiographical ms., quoted in Louis
6,p. 833-
218 "with the greatest discretion": Wahis to Charles Smets, 26 Jan. 1906, De Ryck Collec-
tion.
218 "send me of inaccuracies ": Weber to Naur, 1 6 Aug. 1 906,De Ryck Collection.
218 Hezekiah Andrew Shanu: Unless otherwise noted, all information on Shanu
comes from Marchal 3, pp. 142, 167-168, 191, 231, 296-302, 330~332»plus a few
details from Lemaire 1 , pp. 42-44, and Biographie Coloniale Beige, vol. 4, cols.
838-839.
218 "with the greatest correctness": Le Mouvement Giographique, 30 Sept. 1894, p. 85.
218 "of the negro race": La Chronique Coloniale et Financihe, 1 1 Dec. 1904, p. 1.
219 "loyalty to the State": Memorandum by Albrecht Gohr, director ofjustice, 27 July
1900, quoted in Marchal 3, p. 297.
219 "from time to time": Morel to Shanu, 4 Sept. 1903, quoted in Morel 5, p. 157-
220 "means ofpersuasion than terror": Marchal 3, p. 231.
327
NOTES
220 "ever received by the Congo State"; Morel 1 , p. 135.
220 the Caudron case: Morel 1 , pp. 135-153.
220 "unblemished reputation and ofgreat courage": Morel 5, p. 1 56.
221 "to withhold his name": De Vaughan, p. 48. 221 "to the mute personage": De Vaughan, p. 5 1
.
222 footnote: Stinglhamber and Dresse, p. 306.
223 left an hour later: De Vaughan, p. 123
.
223 "telling him that they had colds!": De Vaughan, p. 67. 224 "be soiled with blood or mud"; Leopold to Liebrechts, 3 1 Jan. 1 899, quoted in Marchal
2, p. 96.
224 "the one thing I need in the Congo!": Stinglhamber and Dresse, p. 136.
224 not dare take precedence over His Majesty: Ascherson, p. 142.
15. A RECKONING
226 without being challenged by the Congo state: Marchal 1, p. 339.
226 even higher totalsfor the number ofhands: Marchal 1, p. 339. f
226 hands cut off living people: LsigeTgren, p. 297.
227 "with the butt of their guns": this statement was quoted in Casement's report,
repeated by Morel, and is quoted in Lagergren, p. 288, and Marchal 3, pp. 197-
198.
227 40,35$ rounds ofammunition: West African Mail, 17 Feb. 1905, p. 111.
227 "'they were thrown into the river'": Speech by Sjoblom in London, 12 May 1897, quoted in Morel 3, p. 43.
227 rubber regime in 1894—1895: Lagergren, p. 121.
227 simply openfire: Vangroenweghe, p. 59
.
228 "13 women and children taken prisoner": Lemaire 2, pp. 18, 20, 23 , 30, 36, 48.
228 "We burned the village": Leclercq, pp. 244-445.
228 footnote: Marchal i,p. 362.
229 "exterminate them to the last man": West African Mail, 16 Mar, 1906, p. 1219.
229 "Exterminate all the brutes!": Conrad, p. 51.
229 "better place for our noon rest": P. Moller, Tre Ar i Kongo (Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt,
1 887) , pp. 234-23 5 , quoted in Kivilu, p. 3 3 8
.
229 French territory by 1900: Morel 3, p. 63.
229 "roots, and ants and other insects": Canisius, p. 170.
229 "sleeping in theforests without shelter": William Morrison, letter from Luebo, 15 Oct.
1 899, in The Missionary, Feb. 1900, p. 67.
230 "depopulated and devastated. , . . what tales ofhorror they told!": From Cape to Cairo: the
First Traverse of Africa from South to North (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1900),
quoted in Morel 3, p. 58.
230 five pigs orfifty chickens; Nelson, p. 100.
230 three to ten a day: Harms 3, p. 134.
23
1
too heavy tofly: McLynn 3, p. 245. 23 1 in 1901 alone: McLynn 3 , p. 23 8
.
23 1 blame sleeping sickness: For a modern example of this, see Jean Stengers in Morel 5, p. 255.
23 1 "above all there's nofood": Marchal 4, p. 49.
23 2 noticed this pattern: Vangroenweghe, p. 23 3
.
328
NOTES
232 "hidefrom the soldiers " : Casement 3 , p. 1 40.
232 show the same pattern: Vangroenweghe, pp. 233,237.
233 "been reduced by half": L. Guebels, Relation complete des travaux de la Commission
Permanente pour la Protection des Indigenes (Elisabethville: I954),PP- I9^~i97-
23 3 "and much more": interview, Sept. 1995
.
233 "by at leas t a half" :Jan Vansina, introduction to Vangroenweghe, p. 1o
.
23 3 reckoned at ten million: La Question sociale au Congo: Rapport au comiti du congrh colonial
national (Brussels: Goemaere, 1 924) , p. 7.
233 "confronted with a kind of desert": La Question sociale au Congo: Rapport au comitS du
congrh colonial national (Brussels: Goemaere, 1924), p. 10 1.
234 killed in the nearest village: Vangroenweghe, p. 60.
234 cooked to <fort/i:Marchal4,p. 26.
234 then set onfire: Vangroenweghe, p. 115.
234 "are we doing here?": Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977),
p. 29.
16. "journalists won't give you receipts"
235 "for his country andfor Africa ": McLynn 2, p. 405
.
23
6
"So that is time! Strange! ": Stanley 5 , p. 5 1 5
.
236 wrote one witness: Daniel Bersot in the foreword to Sous la Chicotte (Geneva: A.Jullien,
1909).
236 on the arm: Liane Ranieri, Les Relations entre V&tat Independant du Congo et Vltdie
(Brussels: Academie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer, 1959), p. 195.
237 those Casement hadfound in the Congo: Marchal 4, p. 12.
237 "Opium in British India": in La Veritk sur le Congo, Jan. 1905, P- 8 -
237 "It is astounding . . . humanely-governed": Mountmorres, pp. 99-100, 159.
237 "on any one day": Mountmorres, pp. 105-106.
23 8 "because she was coming": John Weeks to Morel, 7 Nov. 1904, in the West African Mail,
10 Mar. 1905, p. 1 1 86.
238 worst cases ofdisease he couldfind: Marchal 3 , p. 304.
238 "than I have ever seen in the Congo": Times, 3 Feb. 1905, quoted in Bontinck, p. 456.
238 for which Leopold paid the bill: Marchal 3, p. 316.
23 8 "extraordinarily impudent": Morel to Fox, 1 8 Oct. 1 905 , quoted in Cookey, p. 143
.
23 8 "in memory of their visit to Laeken": Stinglhamber and Dresse, pp. 334—3 3 5 •
239 operated in many countries: Willequet, pp. 109-1 1 3
.
239 footnote: Demetrius C. Boulger, The Congo State is not a Slave State:A Reply to Mr. E. D. Morel's Pamphlet Entitled "The Congo Slave State" (London: Sampson Low,
Marston, 1903), p. 3.
239 "cheerful and satisfied": interview with Harrison in the Journal of Commerce, 23 June
1904.
239 at least one legislator: Marchal 4, pp. 12-21.
239 launched an investigation instead: Official Organ, #1, 1909, p. 64.
240 "Satan and Mammon in one person ": Willequet, letter reproduced following p. 36
.
240 "the unscrupulous businessman who lives in the palace in Brussels": National-Zeitung, 22
May 1903 , quoted in Wllequet, p. 1 50.
240 "the British rubber merchants": National-Zeitung, 4 Mar. 1905, quoted in Willequet,
pp. 1 50-151.
329
NOTBS
240 "old wives' tales . . . hateful peddlar's stories": National-Zeitung, 30 May 1905, quoted in
Willequet,p. 152.
240 "the following commentary": Munchener Altgemeine Zeitung, 1 Mar. 1906, quoted in
Willequet, pp. 159 160.
241 "due mainly to my activity": Von Steub to Davignon, 21 May 1909, quoted in
Willequet, p. 11461.
241 "have my expenses covered": Von Steub to Davignon, 21 May 1909, quoted in
Willequet, p. 128.
241 "to organs of the press": Von Steub to Davignon, 14 Sept. 1909, quoted in WiHequet,
p. 130.
241 " 'don't askfor any'": Von Steub to Denyn, 8 Oct. 1909, quoted in Willequet, p. 130.
241 Mark Twain and Congo reform: see Hawkins 1.
24 1 "no small enemy to overcome ": Kowalsky to Leopold, undated, in New YorkAmerican, 1
1
Dec. 1906.
241 Booker T Washington and Congo reform : Harlan 1 , pp. 270-27 1 ; Harlan 2 , pp. 75~77- 242 "talking on the subject": Booker X Washington in "Tributes to Mark Twain," North
American Review 191, no. 655 (June 1910), p. 829, quoted in Shelley Fisher
Fishkin, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 106.
242 "needs an organization like U.S. Steel": Twain to Morel, c. 12 Jan. 1906, reprinted in
Wuliger, p. 236.
242 royalties that the author donated: Maxwell Geismar, Mark Twain: An American Prophet
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 222.
242 "these leaks keep occurring": Twain, p. 1.
242 "that I couldn 't bribe ": Twain, p. 66
.
242 "meddlesome missionary spying": Twain, p, 36.
242 he told Morel: Morgan to Morel, 6 Oct. 1904, quoted in Baylen, p. 129.
242 inforty-nine cities: Congo News Letter, April 1906 and April 1907.
242 would accept only one dollar: Official Organ, April 1906, p. 10.
243 "will take some action": Harris to Morel, 14 Feb. 1906, quoted in Cookey, p. 174.
243 "demanding action": Philip C. Jessup, Blihu Root, 1905-1937, vol 2 (New YorkrDodd,
Mead, 1938), pp. 61-62, quoted in Shaloff,p. 90.
243 "everybody & about everybody ": Lodge to Roosevelt, 6 July 1 905 , quoted in Sternstein, p. 192.
243 "seen lots of presidents": The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich) , 1 93 1 , p. 506, quoted in Sternstein, p. 193
.
244 "the English agitators and the Belgian Socialistsfutile": Wack to Leopold, n.d,, quoted in
the NewYorkAmerican, 13 Dec. 1906.
244 footnote: Cardinal Gotti to Gibbons, 24 Nov. 1904, quoted in Slade 1, p. 3 ion.
244 "hearsay evidence of natives": Gibbons to Morel, 21 Oct. 1904, quoted in Morel 5,
p. 183.
245 footnote: Starr, p. 91.
245 "an impartial publicist" : NewYorkAmerican, 12 Dec. 1906.
245 "in a team ofacrobats": San Francisco Call, 15 Jan. 191 1.
246 "a box at a theater": San Francisco Examiner, 29 Nov. 1914.
246 "draws up afirm one ": San Francisco Call, 1 5 Jan. 1 9 1 1
.
246 "just when you're going to kill him!": San Francisco Bulletin, 1 8 Nov. 1914.
247 "too large a subject": Mayor E. E. Schmits, Speeches Made, p. 10.
330
NOTBS
247 "so choice a morsel": A. Reuf, Speeches Made, p. 26.
247 "humanity and civilization": Speeches Made, p. 40.
247 "mission in Africa or China?": de Cuvelier to Moncheur, 4 Feb. 1905, quoted in
Marchal 4, p. 270.
247 "wouldn't come back": Nerincx to de Cuvelier, 11 Feb. 1905, quoted in Marchal 4,
p. 270.
247 "a scandal in the press": Moncheur to de Cuvelier, 19 Feb. 1905, quoted in Marchal 4, p. 271.
248 "taking the Belgian Minister's advice": New York American, 10 Dec. 1906. 248 "a characterless . . . lamentedfather": Kowalsky to Leopold, n.d., reprinted in NewYork
American, 11 Dec. 1906.
248 a hefty 125,000francs: Marchal 4, p. 272.
249 infamous cruelties . . . women and children: New York American, 10 Dec. 1906.
249 "crimes of Congo": New York American, 11 Dec. 1906. 249 "the end ofthe next session": New York American, 10 Dec. 1906. 249 "the President's personalfriend . . . Your Majesty's interest instead": Kowalsky to Leopold,
n.d.,in New York American, 11 Dec. 1906. 249 "did I breathe safely": Kowalsky to Leopold, n.d., in New YorkAmerican, 1 1 Dec. 1906. 250 Commission of Inquiry: see Congo Reform Association; Vangroenweghe; Marchal 4,
pp. in-i22;Cookey,pp. 132-15 1.
25
1
broken down and wept: Conan Doyle, p. 75; Morel in Penny Pictorial, Oct. 1907, article
4 in series.
251 "complete and authentic resume" of the report": Daily Chronicle, 7 Nov. 1905.
252 "We have ourselves . . . should be utilized": Daily Chronicle, 7 Nov. 1905.
252 West African Missionary Association: Daily Chronicle, 7, 1 1, 14, and 15 Nov. 1905; Daily
News, 15 Nov. 1905.
17. NO MAN IS A STRANGER
253 "till wefainted": Regions Beyond, Jan.-Feb. 1906, p. 46; also Official Organ, Jan. 1906,
P-5-
254 "gave one cry and was dead": Proch- Verbaux, 2 Nov. 1904.
254 "had their hands cut off": Prods- Verbaux, 21 Nov. 1904.
254 "but he had been healthy": Prods- Verbaux, 5 Jan. 1905.
255 "throw you in the river": Prods- Verbaux, 2 Jan. 1905.
255 "ifit had secret staircases": De Vaughan, pp. 99-100. 256 "with attractive uniform facades": Leopold to Goffinet, 23 Jan. 1906, quoted in Ra-
nieri, p. 247.
256 "and the Heysel road": Carton de Wiart, p. 1 77.
256 "led up the garden path": Ascherson, p. 219.
256 "cost a province ": Stiriglhamber and Dresse, p. 59
.
257 "toasts to his health": Conrad and Hueffer,p. 120.
257 "Give Him his cane!": Bauer, p. 163 , de Lichtervelde, p. 323
.
257 "international, not national": Williams 3 , p. 279.
257 said much like this again: Even as late as 19 19, when the Second Pan-African Congress ofblack American, Caribbean, and African leaders met in Paris under the leader-
ship ofWE.B. Du Bois, it did not advocate full independence for African colo-
331
NOTES
nies. Pan-Africanism, eds. Robert Chrisman and Nathan Hare (New York: Bobbs- Merrill, 1974), p. 302.
257 turning point: Stengers 7, p. 176.
258 pressfor Belgian annexation: Cookeyp. 210.
258 "to askfor its accounts ": Baron Leon Van der Elst, "Souvenirs sur Leopold II," in Revue
Generate, 1923, quoted in Emerson, p. 259.
258 to take away his Congo: Carton de Wiart,p. 188.
259 "any salary as Congo executive": interview with Publishers* Press, in the New York American, 1 1 Dec. 1906.
259 "madefor the Congo": Marchal 4, p. 349.
259 "almost every American reformer, black or white": Normandy, p. 300.
259 William Morrison: see Marchal 3, pp. 75-91; Shaloff, pp. 84-94; and Vinson. Dozens
ofMorrison's letters are reprinted in Benedetto.
260 left the country: Slade 1, p. 3 17.
260 home leaves: Phipps, pp. 95-96.
261 some 180 of them were killed: Marchal 4, p. 225.
261 "concerning their soul's salvation": from "From the Bakuba Country," by W. H. Shep-
pard, The Kassai Herald, 1 Jan. 1908, pp. 12-13. Sheppard Papers.
262 "asked any questions Sheppard suggested": Kocher to the State Prosecutor, 3 1 July 1 908,
quoted in Martens, p. 398.
262 eighty thousandfrancs in damages: American Consul General Handley to the Assistant
Secretary of State, 21 Sept. 1909. Sheppard Papers.
262 "pay thefine": Morrison to Chester, 9 Aug. 1909, reprinted in Benedetto, p. 383.
262 "in New York harbour": Conan Doyle, p. iv. 262 "no little concern ": State Dept. to H. L. Wilson, 2 July 1909, quoted in Shaloff, p. 119.
263 "young Belgian lawyer": Morel to Vanderveldejuly 1909, quoted in Slade 1, p. 371 m.
263 "in a court ofjustice ": Vinson, p. 99.
263 prayedfor afavorable verdict: Vandervelde, pp. 90—9 1
.
264 "amongst whom he lives is humanitarian": Official Organ, No. 5Jan. 19 10, p. 465.
264 "for over two hours": Morrison to Conan Doyle, n.d., reprinted in Official Organ,
no. 5,Jan. 19 10.
264 "were so affected . . . made in Congo": William Sheppard, "The Days Preceding the
Trial," in the Christian Observer, 10 Nov. 1909.
264 "all the power ofLeopold": Phipps, p. 106.
265 "could not refer to the Compagnie du Kasai": Shaloff, p. 125
.
265 "a timefor thanksgiving": Phipps, p. 106.
266 "in Belgium after my death ": De Vaughan, p. 20 1
.
267 "Cutting his hands off, down in Hell": Vachel Lindsay, "The Congo," in The Congo and
Other Poems (New York:MacmiUan, 1916). 267 "remained in the house for a week": Casement in 191 3 [?], Singleton-Gates and Gi-
rodias,p. 317.
267 "lovely, glorious language": Casement to Gertrude Bannister, March 1904, quoted in
Inglis,p. 113.
267 "the incorrigible Irishman": Casement to Alice Green, Spring 1907, quoted in Inglis,
p. 152.
268 "wrongdoing at work on the Congo": Casement to Cadbury, 7 July 1905, quoted in
Porter, p. 267.
332
NOTES
268 "people once hunted themselves*': Casement to Alice Green, quoted in Inglis, p. 125.
268 "not British Consulate!!": Casement to Alice Green, 21 Sept. 1906, quoted in Reid,
p. 78.
268 "nothing else counts": Casement to Parry, 9 Oct. 1906, quoted in Reid, pp. 80-81
.
268 "still going strong on Ireland": interview with Sir Gerald Campbell in MacColl,
p. 73 m.
269 "humanitarian only a century after": quoted in Adams, p. 203
.
269 "with your exact wishes": Morel to Casement, 12 June 1913, quoted in Reid, p. 173.
269 "a fearless soul as his is needed": Casement to Cadbury, 4 July 1910, quoted in Reid,
p. 97.
270 "white Indians . . . Irish Putumayo": from a comment by Casement written on a letter
from Charles Roberts, 6 June 191 3, quoted in Reid, p. 172.
270 "pre-Inca precept": Casement, "The Putumayo Indians" in the Contemporary Review,
September 191 2, quoted in Inglis, p. 206.
270 "any right to be accepting honours": Casement to Alice Green, 21 June 191 1 , quoted in
Reid, p. 137.
270 "boy of 19, broadface": Casement 4, p. 289 (20 Nov. 1910).
270 "blushed to roots ofhair withjoy": Casement 4, p. 221 (9 Aug. 19 10).
270 "laughed . . . $10. ": Casement's diary for 16 Aug. 191 1 , quoted in Inglis, p. 194.
271 "in the history of the world": Conan Doyle to the Times, 18 Aug. 1909, reprinted in
Conan Doyle 2, p. 138.
271 "partial victory": Morel to Weeks, 9 Nov. 1908, quoted in Cline, p. 64.
272 "no true reform whatever": Conan Doyle to the Daily Express, 13 Apr. 19 10, re-
printed in Conan Doyle 2, p. 152.
272 "not got very much staying-power": Morel to Claparede, 23 Mar. 1910, quoted in Morel
5, p. 202.
272 "the produce which it yields": Morel in the Morning Post, 4June 1907, quoted in Louis
4, p. 280.
272 "produce of the soil belongs to the Natives": Grey to Cromer, 13 Mar. 1908, quoted in
Morel 5, p. 199 m.
273 "but ofall Negro Africa": African Mail, 27 Aug. 1909, p. 463
.
273 "immense improvement": Official Organ, no. 10, August 19 12, p. 799.
273 "nearly accomplished": Casement to Morel, 13 June 191 2, quoted in Louis 1 , p. 119.
273 "replaced an irresponsible despotism": Morel's speech to the executive committee ofthe
C.R. A., 25 Apr. I9i3,in Official Organ, July I9i3,pp. 986-987.
274 "A man ofgreat heart . . . Roger Casement": Supplement to the African Mail, 27 June
I9i3,p. 12.
274 "will not pass away": Supplement to the African Mail, 27 June 191 3, p. 6.
18. VICTORY?
275 "to disinherit his daughters": Robert E. Park, "A King in Business: Leopold II of
Belgium, Autocrat of the Congo and International Broker " reprinted in Stan-
ford M. Lyman, Militarism, Imperialism, and Racial Accomodation: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Early Writings of Robert E. Park (Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 1992), p. 214.
276 huge health resort: Stinglhamber and Dresse, p. 1 3 1
.
333
NOTES
276 twenty-Jive millionfrancs' worth ofLeopold's Congo bonds: Marchal 4, p. 432,
276 some ofhis Congo state bonds: Stengers i, pp. 172, 275.
276 to the very end: Hyde, pp. 321-324; Ridley, p. 290; Gene Smith, p. 290; Foussemagne,
p. 378. However, most reports of the last six decades of Carlota's life are second
or third hand, because the Belgian royal family kept her secluded from public
view.
277 out of which hidden pockets: Stengers 1 is the most exhaustive study of Leopold's
finances, but even it finds some questions unanswerable.
277 $1.1 billion in today's dollars: A condensed version of MarchaTs calculations (in a letter to the author, answering a question on this point, 30 July 1997) are as
follows:
• Loans to the Congo state not invested in the Congo but spent by Leopold in
Europe: 1 10 million francs (Jean Stengers "La dette publique de l'Etat Indepen-
dant du Congo (1 879-1 908)," in La dette publique aux XVIIIe et XIXe sikles:son
dSveloppement sur le plan local, regional et national (Brussels: Credit Communal de
Belgique, 1980), p. 309).
• Estimated off-the-books rubber profits for the peak boom years, 1 898-1908,
mainly from rubber gathered on state land, and also including profits from
the state's share of the major concession companies (A.B.I.R., the Compagnie
du Kasai, and the Societe Anversoise du Commerce au Congo): no million francs.
Not included in the calculations are profits from earlier rubber harvests or from
the state share in more than half a dozen smaller companies.
277 "or perhaps a single native": Alexandre Delcommune, L'Avenir du Congo Beige Menace
(1919), quoted in Michel Massoz, Le Congo de Leopold II (1878-1908), (Liege:
Soledi, 1989), p. 576.
278 died of disease: Northrup,p. 109.
278 "carrying thefoodstuffs!": quoted in Northrup,p. 107.
279 in thefirst halfofig20 alone: Northrup,p. 161.
279 "paid tenfrancsfor each recruit": Northrup, p. 99.
279 Katanga mines, Matadi-Leopoldville railroad: Jules Marchal, work in progress.
279 80 percent of the uranium: Cornevin 2, pp. 286-288.
279 searchfor wild vines once again: Anstey 2, pp. 144—1 52.
280 "admiration in stockbroking circles " : Suret-Canale, p. 2 1
.
280 just as brutal: Suret-Canale, pp. 20-28; West, pp. 165-181; Coquery-Vidrovitch 1,
pp. 171-197.
280 at roughly 50 percent: Vansina 3 , p. 2 39
.
280 fierce rebellions against the rubber regime: Vansina 3, p. 242.
280 nearlyfour hundred in a busy month: Coquery-Vidrovitch 1 , p. 1 8 1
.
28
1
"which are the glory ofFrance": Etienne Clementel, quoted in Pakenham, p. 639.
281 the lives ofan estimated twenty thousandforced laborers: Coquery-Vidrovitch 1, p. 195.
28
1
discovered to be a major shareholder: Stengers 1 , pp. 278-279, Marchal 3 , p. 45
.
282 extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl): Swan, p. 5 1 ; Pakenham, p. 61 1
.
282 "never heard of this before": Holt to Morel, 5 Oct. 1909, quoted in Louis 5, p. 34.
283 "contributed to the making ofKurtz": Conrad, p. 50.
283 never made public: Benedetto, pp. 30, 423-425
.
283 and Sheppard obliged: Roth, p. 28 3
.
334
NOTfiS
283 "and always came to the back door": Phipps, preface.
284 "and left himself thus in need": Darrell Figgis, Recollections of the Irish War(New York:
Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1927) p. 1 1, quoted in Reid,p- 190. 284 "is that ofthe rifle": Casement to Morten, 1 May 1914, quoted in Sawyer, p. 1 14. 284 "Irish nationality can spring to life": Roger Casement in the Irish Independent, 5 Oct.
1914, quoted in Singleton-Gates and Girodias, pp. 357~~35 8 -
285 "drive the allies into the sea": Casement on 28 Sept. 191 5, quoted in Reid, p. 309.
285 "Only my shroud": Basil Thompson [Casement's Scodand Yard interrogator], Queer
People (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), p. 87. 285 "J was back in Ireland again": Casement to his sister Nina, 15 July 1916, quoted in
Reid, p. 351.
285 "left Wicklow in Willie's yacht": Inghs, p. 3 1 3
.
286 "know of the barbarous cruelties": Ingjis,p. 364.
286 "the natural lot ofmen": reprinted in Singleton-Gates^and Girodias, p. 498.
286 "how a subject nation shouldfeel": Inglis, p. 346.
287 "not a trace of anxiety orfear in his features" : A. Fenner Brockway, quoted in Inghs,
p. 368.
287 "towered straight over all ofus": Father Thomas Carey, writing on 5 Aug. 1916, quoted
in Reid, p. 448.
287 "lot to execute": EUis [the executioner] in The Catholic Bulletin, Aug. 1928, quoted in
Reid, p. 448.
287 "the best thing was the Congo": Casement to Morten, 28 July 19x6, quoted in Reid,
pp. 436.
288 "anyone would speak to me now": Adams, p. 212.
288 "athisheart":Svnnwick t p.i8j.
288 and the Morelfamily's home: Swartz, p. 105; Swanwick p. 98.
288 "a change ofoutlook" : Taylor, p. 120.
288 "get hold of the arch-conspirator": Daily Sketch, 1 Dec. 191 5, quoted in Cline, p. 103,
and Swartz, p. in.
288 his pro-german union?: Daily Express, 4 Apr. 191 5, quoted in Cline, p. 1 10.
288 "Germany's agent in this country": Evening Standard, 7 July 1917, quoted in Adams,
p. 210.
288 "there was no question about it": Alice Green to Morel, quoted in McColl, pp. 273-
274.
289 "his courage neverfailed": The Autobiography ofBertrand Russell, vol. 2 (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1968), pp. 36-37.
289 "proclaiming political truth": Bertrand Russell, Freedom versus Organization, 1814-1914
(New York, 1962), p. 402, quoted in Swartz, p. 50. 289
i{
safely lodged in gaol": Minute by M. N. Kearney, 10 Oct. 1916, FO 371/2828/ 202398, PRO, quoted by Cline, p. 1 1 1
.
289 "my mission to the United States": The Persecution ofE. D. Morel: The Story of his Trial
and Imprisonment. With an introduction by Sir D. M. Stevenson and a prefatory
note by Thomas Johnston (Glasgow: Reformers' Bookstall, 1 9 1 8), p. 1 1
.
290 "to each other daily when absent": Adams, p. 1 80.
290 "especially in cold weather": Morel 4, p. 60.
290 "proofagainst it": Morel 4, p. 62.
290 "lived to play both parts": Morel 4, p. 66.
335
NOTES
291 "the result of insufficientfood": Russell to Murray, 27 Mar. I9i8,in The Autobiography of
Bertrand Russell, vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. 108.
291 as he leftfor London: "E. D. Morel" by F. Seymour Cocks,in Foreign Affairs:AJournal of International Understanding, vol. VI no. 6, Dec. 1924, p. 118.
291 "as the years pass": Morel Papers F 1 , 7, quoted in Marchal 3 , p. 10.
19. THE GREAT FORGETTING
294 "the sepulchral city": Conrad, p. 27.
294 "no right to know what I did there ": Stinglhamber and Dresse, pp. 52-53*
294 "for considerations of a higher order": Strauch to Wauters, 1911, quoted in Stanley 6,
p. xi.
295 "in the years that have passed since that night": De Premorel, p. 97-
296 footnote: Emile Verhaeren. "La Belgique sanglante" quoted in Read, p. 35.
296 to hefalse: Read, pp. 78-96.
296 Jules Marchal: interviewed September 1995.
298 idealistic young colonial officers: such as Lefranc (pp. 1 20-1 21) or Greban de Saint-Ger-
main (p. 231).
299 "exploited peoples of this part ofAfrica": Etat Major de la Force Publique, VAfrique et le
Congojusqu'a la creation de VEtat Indipendant du Congo (Leopoldville: 1 June 1959)
,
pp. 10-1 1, quoted in Stengers 5, p. 165.
299 "to amount to nothing": Etat Major de la Force Publique, VEtat Independant du Congo
(1885-1908) (Leopoldville: 1 Oct. 1959), P- H5, quoted in Stengers 5, p. 165.
300 dedicated anthropologists: The pioneering work of two Belgian priests, Fathers Ed-
mond Boelaert and Gustave Hulstaert, deserves special mention. See also Van-
groenweghe and Anstey 3
.
300 "the overwhelming": Nelson, p. 104.
300 an idiom meaning "to tyrannize": Vangroenweghe,p. 234.
300 "to commit this to official memory": Vansina 2, p. 230.
300 a curious legend: Fabian, pp. 27-28 , 5 5 , 60, 26 1
.
301 only three werefilled by Africans: Stengers 7, p. 27 1
.
301 "worthy ofour confidence": Bremen 2, p. 145
.
302 authorized his assassination: Kelly, pp. 57-60. Kelly's careful account is based on
both interviews and documents, particularly the landmark report of Novem-
ber 20, 1975, from the US, Senate investigation headed by Senator Frank
Church: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report of
the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence
Activities.
302 "the problem dealt with": John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 342, quoted in Kelly, p. 59. 302 find a place to dispose of it: John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (New York:WW
Norton, 1978), p. 105, cited by Kelly, p. 71
.
302 was being planned: Young, p. 3 25 ; Kelly, pp. 52, 1 70.
303 several attempts to overthrow him: Kelly, p. 178.
303 "voice ofgood sense andgood will": Winternitz, p. 270.
303 "during my presidency": George Bush, on 29 June 1 989, quoted in Kelly, p. 1
.
336
NOTES
303 estimated at $4 billion: The Guardian, 13 May 1997. 304 sheep to his ranch at Gbadolite: Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent (New York:
Norton, 1990), by Blaine Harden, p. 38.
304 "his distinctive traits and customs ": Pascal Bruckner, The Tears ofthe White Man: Compas-
sion as Contempt (New York: The Free Press, 1986), p. 84.
337
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The researcher who wants the most comprehensive bibliography ofmodern scholar-
ship on the colonial Congo should turn to Bibliographic historique du Zaire a Vepoque
coloniale (1880-1960): travaux publiis en 1960-1996 (Louvain, Belgium: Enquetes et
Documents d'Histoire Africaine, 1996), edited by Jean-Luc Vellut. What follows is a
list of the works I used.
The tyranny ofalphabetical order cannot do justice to the help that other people's
books gave me in writing this one. So let me first make a particularly low bow to
those volumes on which I drew the most.
Primary sources penned by some ofthe central characters in this story include the
works listed here by King Affonso I, Roger Casement, Joseph Conrad, William
Sheppard, Henry Morton Stanley, George Washington Williams, and E. D. Morel.
There is no comprehensive edition of King Leopold IFs voluminous, revealing
output of letters and memoranda, but hundreds of them do appear in Edouard Van
der Smissen's Uopold II et Beemaert: d'apres leur correspondance inedite de 1884 a 1894.
Some are also reprinted in Francois Bontinck's Aux Origines de Y&tai Indkpendant du
Congo, an important collection of letters and documents on the early days. Robert
Benedetto's new anthology has made a large collection of source material on the
Presbyterian missionaries' work for human rights easily available for the first time.
Most of the major European and American figures— but none of the African ones— have had biographies written of them. I have drawn particularly on those of Stanley by John Bierman and Frank McLynn, of Casement by Brian Inglis and B. L.
Reid, and of the studies (although none ofthem is the full-scale biography the man
deserves) of E. D. Morel by Catherine Cline, A.J.R Taylor, E Seymour Cocks, and
W S. Adams. John Hope Franklins biography of George Washington Williams res- cued Williams from obscurity and provided most ofmy source material for Chapter
8. Of the various biographies of Leopold, those by Barbara Emerson and Neal
Ascherson were essential; most of the material about life in the king's household
comes from the memoirs of his aides, Gustave Stinglhamber and Baron Carton de
Wiart.
Thomas Pakenham's The Scramblefor Africa is a comprehensive diplomatic over-
33*
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view of that period whose novelist's-eye array of detail I have gratefully stolen from.
In the Prologue, I was also inspired by The River Congo by Peter Forbath, one of the
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of sugar-coated Congo history that has usually been their country's norm. Du Sang sur les Lianes, by Daniel Vangroenweghe, is passionate and highly useful. Guy De Boeck's study ofthe Force Publique mutinies points out how these are the precursors of anticolonial guerrilla wars ofmore than half a century later. And the French-lan- guage edition ofJules Marchal's four-volume history of the Congo, from 1876 to
19 10, is, for this crucial period, the best scholarly overview by far, encyclopedic in
scope. In coundess places in this volume, I am in his debt, as will be anyone who writes about this era for years to come.
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350
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go to staff members at the Royal Geographical Society in London, Anti-Slavery International in London, the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in
Tervuren, Belgium, the Musee Royal de l'Armee et d'Histoire Militaire in Brussels,
Svenska Missionsforbundet in Stockholm, the American Baptist Historical Society in
Rochester, New York, the Sanford Museum in Sanford, Florida, and the Department of History of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Montreat, North Carolina, all of
whom kindly responded to my requests for information, photographs, or other materials. Thanks also to Enid Schildkrout at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, to the archivists at Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia, who allowed me to look at William Sheppard's papers, to Ebba Segerberg for transla- tions from the Swedish, and to David Raymond and Fritz Stern for some good
bibliographic suggestions.
Writing this book helped me understand the essential role of libraries in preserv-
ing the records of history that powerful interests want forgotten or that people have
chosen to ignore. I felt grateful to be able to borrow a book, even though— as I found in one case— I was the first person who had checked it out since 1937. Or— and this happened to me twice— to check out a library book from decades ago and find the pages still uncut.My thanks to the many helpful staffmembers at the various places I did research: the libraries at Northwestern University, Yale University, and
Bates College; the New York Public Library; the library ofUnion Theological Semi- nary in New York; the Hoover and Green libraries at Stanford University, and, above all, the Doe, Moffitt, and Bancroft libraries ofthe University ofCalifornia at Berkeley,
where I did most ofmy work. Berkeley's rich range ofmaterials from a century ago is
eloquent testimony to what existed before small-minded politicians and tax-cutting
fanatics began slashing the budgets ofAmerican public and state university libraries.
Although she was in the midst of finishing a remarkable book of her own, my
wife, Arlie, talked, lived, and breathed this project with me every step of the way. By
the time the manuscript was ready for her insightful reading, she knew the characters
in the Congo story almost as if they were close friends of ours. I was lucky to have
351
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
many real-life friends who also read the manuscript and gave me helpful comments, often drawing on their experience as writers, journalists, or historians: Ayi Kwei Armah, Harriet Barlow, Mary Felstiner, Laurie Flynn, David Hochschild, Patricia Labalme, Paul Solman, Allen Wheelis, Francis Wilson, and Blaikie, Monty, and Robert
F. Worth. For critical readings and other support, I am also grateful to my agents, Denise Shannon and Georges Borchardt, and to my former editor at Houghton Mifflin, Dawn Seferian.
Almost every page of this book benefited immeasurably from intensive editorial consulting from Tom Engelhardt. Among American writers who care about their craft, Tom's name is a well-kept secret. There are few people alive forwhom the act of critically reading, untangling and polishing a sentence, a paragraph, an entire book, is
so much an act of the highest craftsmanship. If there were Oscars for editing, Tom would have won his long ago.
As a newcomer to this tragic patch of history, I was helped in my explorations by several people who know far more about it than I. Daniel Vangroenweghe read the manuscript and shared some documents with me. And I owe a special debt of gratitude to the two greatest scholars of this period, the anthropologist Jan Vansina and the historian Jules Marchal. Both generously responded to numerous calls and letters asking for information, and both read the manuscript with painstaking care,
Marchal in two successive drafts, saving me from innumerable errors. They are not responsible for any mistakes that crept in by accident in my subsequent rewriting, or for the few points where my interpretation may differ from that of one or the other ofthem. I cannot thank them enough.
PHOTO CREDITS
Young Leopold: Corbis-Bettmann. Stanley: Royal Geographical Society. Sanford: San-
ford Museum, City of Sanford. Telegram: Sanford Museum, City of Sanford. King Leopold: Corbis-Bettmann. Twa Mwe: Royal Geographical Society. Goodwill: Royal Geographical Society. Williams: Archive Photos. Ivory: Sanford Museum, City of Sanford. Conrad: New York Times Co./Archive Photos. Rom: Collection of the Musee Royal de FArmee, Brussels. Rom with rifle: Les Vktkrans Coloniaux 1876-1908: Revue Coloniale Ulustrie. Van Kerckhoven: Collection of the Musee Royal de FArmee, Brussels. Morel: Anti-Slavery International. Antwerp: Hulton-Getty. Casement: Ar-
chive Photos. Shanu: Au Congo: Comment les Noirs Travaillent by Charles Lemaire. Sheppard: Presbyterian Church (USA) Department ofHistory, Montreat, N.C. Nsala: Anti-Slavery International. Severed hands: Anti-Slavery International. Two youths:
Anti-Slavery International. Chicotte: Regions Beyond. Women Hostages: Regions Beyond. Baringa village: Regions Beyond. Baringa razed: Regions Beyond. Meeting poster: Regions
Beyond. Leopold and skulls: Stock Montage, Inc. The Appeal: Regions Beyond. Expert
Opinion: Stock Montage, Inc. Rubber coils: Stock Montage, Inc. Guilt of delay: Stock
Montage, Inc.
352
INDEX
A.B.I.R. See Anglo-Belgian India Rubber
and Exploration Company
Abolitionists, 104, 203, 207, 21 1, 277; Morel
and, 211, 216
Aborigines Protection Society, 50, 92, 173,
188, 197,206,238
Abyssinia, Emperor of, 26
Achebe, Chinua, 146-47
Achte, Father Auguste, 128-29
Admirable Crichton, The (Barrie), 154
Aerts, shipping executive, 192
Affonso I, king ofthe Kongo, 1 1-15
Africa: travel writers in, 4-5, 29, 147-48,
185, 236, 237-38; early European explora-
tion ofsub-Saharan, 6-8; European
scramble for, 26-27, 74, 255; 19th-century
explorers of, 27; first European crossings
of central, 28, 28n, 42; Stanley describes as
unpeopled, 3 1; Stanley crosses central, 47—
5 1 ; abuses by other colonial powers in,
280-83
African Americans: possible relocation to Af-
rica, 78, 79-80, 105, 1 52-53, 242; Williams's
history of, 104; missionaries to the Congo,
152-55, 158, 173, 259-65- See also
Douglass,Du Bois, Franklin, Sheppard, Washington.Williams
African chieftains: and rebellions against
Congo rulers, 125-26, 128; selling men in
the Congo, 129-30, 164
African enforcers: ofEuropean brutality in
the Congo, 122-23 (see ^o Force Pub- lique)
African land: Leopold's appropriation of,
117, 187-88; Morel's campaign against
confiscation of, 272-73
African records:by AfTonso I ofthe Kongo,
13; lack of written, 15; oral, 15-16; Ilanga's
tale of slave raid, 131-33
Africans: sexual stereotypes of, 210
African slavery, 9-1 1, 1 19, 301
African trade, 13—15
Afro-Arab slave trade: European crusade
against, 27-28, 30, 38, 42, 57, 78, 92, 130, 299
Albert I, king ofthe Belgians: as heir to
throne, 40, 1 16, 246; succeeds Leopold,
266; opposes forced labor in the Congo,
272
Albert, prince consort to Victoria, 3 5
Alberta (yacht), 255
Albert Memorial, London, 27-28
Aldrich, Nelson W, 243-44, 249 Almayer's Folly (Conrad), 141
American Congo Reform Association, 241,
249, 272
American cotton trade: Africa and, 79
American Indians, 78, 103, 113, 282
American missionaries to the Congo, 152-
55,158, 173, 259-65; on trial for exposing
abuses, 262-65
American Museum ofNatural History,
244
353
INDEX
American South: slave trade to, 1 1; white am-
bitions to relocate freed blacks to Africa,
78, 79-80, 105, 152-53, 242
Amnesty International, 305-6
Andersson,Karl Teodor, 125
Anglo-American Expedition: Stanley's, 47-
49
Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and Explora-
tion Company (A.B.I.R.), 160, 162-63,
189,227,230,253,271
Angola, 8,280
animism, 74
Answer to Mark Twain, An, 242
Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection So-
ciety, 273, 305
Anti-Slavery Conference, 1889,92-95, 105
Anti-Slavery International, 305-6
Anti-Slavery Society, 50, 188, 305
antiwar movement,WWI, 287-91 apartheid system, 277
Apocalypse Now (film), 143, 234 "Arab" slave trade: European crusade against,
27-28, 30, 38, 42, 57, 78, 92, 130, 299
Archiduchesse Stephanie (steamboat), 250
Armenia, 168, 21 1, 222
Arthur, Chester A., 75-77, 78, 79, 80, 105
artwork: ofCongo peoples, 73-74; ofthe Kuba, 156-57
Associated Press, 251
Augusta, consort ofWilhelm II, 222n
Australian aborigines, 282
Bahr-el-Ghazal copper mines, 167
Baka Baka station, 125
Baptista, Pedro, 28n
Baptist missionaries: to the Congo, 21 1, 216,
260
Baptist Missionary Society, 191
Baring, Sir Evelyn, 113
Baringa post, 217-18
Barker, Frederick, 49, 52
Barrie,James, 1 54
Barttelot, Edmund, 98, 145 Baruch, Bernard, 243
Basoko people, 54
Baudouin, king of the Belgians, 302
Beernaert, Auguste, 224
beheadings in the Congo, 145, 196, 197, 234 Belgian Congo: transfer ofLeopold's prop-
erty to, 257-59, 272, 276; Morel continues
crusade on abuses in, 271-72; decline in re-
ports of abuses in, 277-79; taxation in, 278;
mining in, 278-79. See also Congo Free State
Belgian press: attacks Williams, 1 12-1 3 ; cele-
brates Leopolds railway, 185; counters
Casement's brutality reports, 204
Belgian royal family, 3 3 , 40, 266
Belgian colonial textbooks, 299—300
Belgium: creation ofkingdom of, 33; disin-
terest in colonialism, 37—38, 90; parliamen-
tary government of, 39, 94; approves loan
to Leopold for Congo enterprise, 94-95, 168; response to Williams's charges on the
Congo, 1 12-13; colonial chauvinism in,
1 3 6-3 7, 175; socialist opposition to
Leopold in, 190; Leopold's sale of colony
to state, 257-59; loan to Leopold missing,
258-59, 275-76; colonial administration of
the Congo, 271-72; heritage ofLeopolds
Congo exploitation in, 292-93; royal ar- chives destroyed, 294; as victim in WWI, 295-96
Belloc, Hilaire, 90
Bennettjames Gordonjr., 26,48, 50, 60, 98;
and search for Livingstone, 29; African
landmarks named for, 48 Berlin Africa Society, 83
Berlin Conference, 1885, 84-87,95
Bikoro village killings, 227
birth control: among Congo peoples, 73 birth rate: decline of, in Congo Free State,
231-32
Bismarck, Otto von, 74, 83; negotiations
with Leopold, 83-84; colonial ambitions
of, 84-85
Bissell, Richard, 302
Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, 2^6
Black Death, 232
Bleichroder, Gerson, 83, 85
Boa people, 124
Boer War, 174-75,235
Bokanga village: destruction of, 228
Bolia people, 74
Boma (town), 47-48, 56, 115, 134; as capital of the Congo, 115; missionaries at, 1 5 5; censorship office in, 189-90; attempt to
control missionaires from, 217—18; transfer
ofCongo ownership at, 259 Borrisson, C. N., 125—26
354
INDEX
Boston Herald, 264
Boulger, Demetrius C.,239
Brasseur, Clement, 234
Brazil: slave trade to, 10, 1 1 , 14; Casement as
consul in, 267-70
Brazzaville, 281
Bricusse, Georges, 123, 161-62
Britain: and Leopold's imperial ambitions,
82; furor over killing ofBritish citizen in
the Congo, 174; "Congo Question" raised
in, 194, 195; recognition ofBelgian Congo,
272,273
British consular service, 198
British Empire: industrialism in, 27; slavery
abolished in, 27; campaign against slave
trade, 27-28; extent of, 37, 61; in Africa, 42,
74, 86; Conrad's support for, 146; Morel's
support for, 210; Leopold exposes abuses
in, 237; Morel exposes abuses in Africa,
272-73
British explorers: in Africa, 27; hostility to
Stanley, 3 1-32; and Congo death toll, 229-
30
British Foreign Office, 2, 50, 85; Casements
reports to, 198, 201, 203-5, 269-70
British humanitarianism: and Leopold, 173-
74, 185, 194; Morel in the tradition of, 211-
1 3 ; boycott Portuguese, 258; contemporary,
305-7
British radicalism, 211
Brussels Geographical Conference, 1 876, 43-
46
Brussels Royal Museum ofCentral Africa,
292-93
Budja people, 124, 192-93, 227; death toll
among, 227
Bumba village, 230 Burdett-Courts, Baroness Angela, 43 , 66
Bureau ofComparative Legislation, Brussels,
239
Burke, Lindsay, 128
burning of villages, 227-28, 229-30
Burton, Richard, 27, 50
Bush, George, 303
Buxton, Sir Thomas Fowell, 44
Cadbury, William A., 213, 216, 269, 273
Cameron,Verney Lovett, 42, 48
Cameroons, the, 280, 281-82
Canary Islands, 168
Canisius, Edgar, 131,1 92-93 » 229
cannibalism: African, 16; Africans imagine
European, 16; ofCongo peoples, 73; hand
severing and, 166
Canterbury, archbishop of, 2, 273
Cao,Diogo, 7-8, 15,16
Caribbean slave trade, 10
Carlos III, king of Spain, 36-37
Carlota, empress ofMexico, 40-41 , 61; mad-
ness of, 41 , 1 36; last years and death of,
276
Caroline, Baroness de Vaughan, mistress of
Leopold II, 221-24, 255. 256-57; marries
king, 265; inheritance of, 266
Casement, Roger, 192, 195-208,219,232,
244,251,277, 304, 305, 306; appearance of,
195; appointed consul to the Congo, 195,
197-99; early career of, 195-96; friendship
with Conrad, 196-97. 203, 274; as witness
to white men's brutality in Africa, 196-97;
joins consular service, 197; talking skills of,
197; meets Leopold, 197-98; as writer, 199;
homosexuality of, 199-200, 286; travels up
the Congo River, 200-203; diary of, 202-3,
204; reports on rubber terror, 203-4;
friendship with Morel, 204—7, 269, 27 1
,
274; and Irish nationalist movement, 267-
68, 284-87; as consul in Brazil, 267-70; and
Putumayo Indian cause, 269-70; knighted,
270; retirement from consular service, 284;
tried and executed for treason, 285-87,
288,290
castration of corpses, 203
Catholic Church: missionaries of, 8—9, 12,
14, 17, 1 3 3-3 5; Leopold employs support
of, 244
Caudron, Charles, 220, 250
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 302,
303
Century Magazine, 145
Cerckel, Leon, 234
chains: used on laborers, 1 19, 130, 279; used
on children, 135
Chaltin, Louis, 161-62
Chicago Daily Tribune, 245
chicotte beatings, 119, 120-23, 163, 190,216,
237,250,280
child labor: in the Congo, 1 19; contempo-
rary, 305
child prostitution: contemporary, 305
355
INDEX
children ofthe Congolaboring, 1 19; beaten,
120; as conscripts for Force Publique, 190;
starvation of, 229
children's colonies: in the Congo, 133-35
China: Leopold's colonial ambitions in, 169-
70
Chinese laborers: in the Congo, 170-71
Chokwe people, 124 1
Churchill,Winston, 291
ClaphamSect,2ii
Clementine, Princess, daughter ofLeopold
11,39,197,198^275
Cleveland, Grover, 105, 157
cUtoridectomies, 73, 305
cloth trade, 13, 16,79
Collier's, 215
colonialism: Scramble for Africa and, 26-27,
74, 82-84, 212-13, 255, 272-73 (see also in-
dividual African oj/omes); industrialism and,
27; Leopold's envy of other European, 37—
38; Europeanjustifications for, 38-39;
Leopold proposes pacification bases, 45.
See also, specific colonies
Columbus, Christopher, 158
Commission for the Protection of the Na-
tives, 174-75, 201-2, 250
Commission ofInquiry, 250-52, 253, 267,
277, 297—98; endorses Morel's and Case-
ment's charges, 25 1 ; reports oftorture to,
253—55; secreting of records of, 297-98
Committee for the Protection of Interests in
Africa, 240
Committee for the Studies ofthe Upper
Congo, 64—65
Commoner (black newspaper), 104
Compagnie du Kasai, 260-65 ,283
Compagnie Internationale de Wagons-Lit,
236
Compiegne, Marquis de, 43
Complete Congo Controversy (Boulger),239
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 180, 262, 271, 285;
support for Congo reform, 271-72, 273 concentration camps: Nazi and Soviet, 121,
122, 162-63, 233-34, 292, 295
Congo, the: name associated with territory,
66-67; independence of, 301 ; history of
modern, 301-4. See also Belgian Congo;
Congo Free State
Congo and the Founding of Its Free State (Stan-
ley), 81
Congo basin, 17; economic potential of, 61-
62; inhabitants of, 62, 72-75; Stanley ob-
tains trading treaties with chieftains of, 71-
72, 74; kingdoms of, 72-73 (see also Kongo);
traditions ofpeoples of, 73; art ofpeoples
of, 73-74, 293
Congo Free State: Morel's crusade on abuses
in, 1-2, 4, 209-24, 260 (see also Morel);
slave labor in, 1—2, 119-20 (see also forced
labor in the Congo); Mark Twain on, 3, 241-42; travel writers in, 4-5; founding of,
81—82, 87; whites working in, 89; techno-
logical needs to colonize, 89-91; transpor-
tation in, 90-91 (see also railroads);
Leopold's funding for exploitation of, 91-
92; network ofriver stations in, 101—2, 1 16;
Williams's charges on brutality in, 108-11,
1 12- 1 3 (see also Williams) ; administered
from Brussels, 1 15-16; life of functionaries
in, 1 16-17; Leopold appropriates all "va-
cant" land in, 117, 188-89; shareholding in,
117; venture capital in, 1 17; command
economy in, 1 1 8; floggings in, 120-23 > l63,
1 90-91 , 2 1 6, 237, 250; African enforcers in,
1 22-23; military rme hi, 123-29, 163, 179-
80 (see also Force Publique); pacification
wars in, 124-29; children's colonies in, 133-
3 5 ; appeal of career in, for young Belgians,
136-39; depicted in Heart ofDarkness, 142-
49; rubber wealth exploited in, 160-66;
hand severing in, 164-66, 172, 173, 191,
203 , 226-27, 254, 259^ 260, 266-67, 272,
296, 305; Leopold issues bonds on, 168; fu-
ror over killing ofBritish citizen in, 174;
exhibits in Brussels from, 175—76; Elder
Dempster shipping contract for, ^Jour- nalists banned from, 189; censorship in,
189-90; duration of, 225; death toll in, 225-
34; murder toll in, 226-29; deaths from star-
vation, exhaustion, and exposure in, 229-
30; disease-related deaths in, 230-3 1 ; birth
rate decline in, 23 1-32; population cut in
halfunder Leopold's rule, 233; "Belgian so-
lution" to, 257-58, 271; Leopold sells to
state, 258; Leopold's absconding ofprofits
from, 258-59, 275-76; intimidation and
trial ofmissionaries in, 260-65; under Bel-
gian state administration, 271-72;
Leopold's total ofprofits from, 277; destruc-
tion of royal archives on, 294; rationaliza-
356
INDEX
tion over atrocities in, 29j-96;Jules Mar-
chal uncovers crimes in, 296-99
Congo Greenhouse, Laeken, 175
Congolese people: Pende, i5;Basoko, 54;
Pygmies, 72-73 , 1 76; Bolia, 74; Budja, 1 24,
227; Chokwe, 124; Boa, 124; Sanga, 124;
Yaka, 124; rebellions of, 124-29, 260-65,
295; Kuba, 1 56-57; exhibited in Belgium,
176-77
"Congo Question": raised in Britain, 194,
195
Congo Reform Association (C.R.A.),2i3,
242, 272; Morel forms, 207-8; periodical
of, 212; Liverpool headquarters of, 214; lo-
cal branches of, 216; international affiliates
of, 236; American branch of, 241 , 249, 272;
final meeting of, 273^74, 277
Congo River: European discovery of, 7-8;
characteristics of, 16-17, 53, 61-62; British
exploration of, 17-18; search for source of,
42; Stanley charts course of, 47-48, 52-56;
names for, 54—55; tributaries of, 54~55; rap-
ids of, 55-56; casualties of Stanley's explora-
tion of, 56; economic potential of, 61-62
Congo State . . . (Boulger),239
Conrad,Joseph, 3, 140-49, 153-54, 189,229,
234, 257, 277, 283, 284, 285, 293, 294; depic-
tion of the Congo, 3, 142-49, 229, 284, 294
(see also Heart ofDarkness); early life of,
140-41; visits the Congo, 141-46; friend-
ship with Casement, 196-97,203
Cookey,S.J.S.,ii3
copper mining, 278, 279
Coppola, Francis Ford, 143, 234
Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, 280
Corriere della Sera, 239
Costermans, Paul, 250
Courier de Bmxelles, 113
Crime of the Congo (Conan Doyle), 271
"crimes against humanity": Leopold accused
of, 112
Cross ofLeopold, 44
Crystal Mountains, 18, 56, 63, 68
cubism, 73
Czetwertynski, Price Boris, 236
d'Aarche, Count, 151
Daily Express, 288
Daily Sketch, 288
Daily Telegraph (London), 46, 48, 57
Davis, Richard Harding, 215
death toll in the Congo, 225-34, 293
de Brazza, Count Pierre Savorgnan, 70-71,
74,95,28i
debt bondage: contemporary, 305
De Grez, Raymond, 189 Delcasse, Theophile, 256
Delcommune, Alexandre, 277, 278
De Le Court, Charles, 136 Detiege,Alberic, 166
Devos, Commandant, 134
Dhanis, Baron Francis, 129
Dickens, Charles, 24-25
Dilke, Sir Charles, 188
Disraeli, Benjamin, 39
Douglass, Frederick, 104
DuBois,WE.B.,i04,283
Du Chaillu, Paul Belloni, 27 Dulles, Allen, 302
Dunlop,John,i58
Dunlop Company, 158
Durrieux,Antoine-Emmanuel, 22 1 ,222-23
,
266
Dutch East Indies, 37, 6
1
Earp,Wyatt,246
Edison,Thomas, 151
Egypt: Khedive of, 36; Leopold's colonial am-
bitions in, 83. See also Nile
Ekuku, chiefofBoieka: witness to torture,
253
Elder Dempster shipping firm, 177-80, 185-
86, 187, 195; attempts to undermine Case-
ment, 204
elephant ivory trade, 63-64, 70, 101-2, 118,
137
Elia, Giovanni, 236
Elizabeth, Archduchess, grandchild of
Leopold II, 266
Elst, Baron Leon van der, 258
Emin Pasha, 96-98, 99-100, 150
Emin Pasha ReliefExpedition, 97-100, 141,
152,196
English law: and humanitarian principles,
280
Etat Independent du Congo. See Congo
Free State
European slave traders, 10-11, 17, 27
Evening Standard, 288
exhaustion: deaths from, 229-30
357
INUEX
explorers: earliest European in sub-Saharan
Africa, 6-8; African myths on, 15-16; Brit-
ish and French in Africa, 27-28; Leopold
hosts conference of, 43-46. See also de
Brazza, Stanley
exposure: deaths from, 229-30
Faris, Ellsworth, 226
Federation for the Defense ofBelgian Inter-
est Abroad, 240
female household slavery: contemporary, 305 Ferry,Jules, 82
Fievez, Leon, 166, 226
floggings in the Congo, 120-23, 163, 190, 216, 237, 250; and rubber harvesting labor,
163,190-91
forced labor in the Congo, 1-2, 1 19-20, 125, 129-3 5; for ivory trade, 1 19-20, 130-3
1
(see also ivory trade); floggings and, 120-23,
163, 190-91, 237, 250; rebellions against,
124-29; for harvesting ofrubber, 161-62,
1 90-91; Morel uncovers unpaid, 180-81;
death toll from, 225-26; Morel continues
campaign against, 272; continues under
Belgian administration, 278; for mining,
279
Force Publique, 124, 127-29, 13 1, 177, 196,
271 , 293 ; African soldiers in, 127, 129; con-
scription into, 127, 129, 190, 278; desertion
and mutinies in, 127, 190; white officers of,
127; eyewitness report of slave raid by, 131-
33; handling oforphans, 134; appeal of ca-
reer in, for Europeans, 137-39; and rubber-
harvesting labor, 163-64, 166, 173; and
hand-severing policy, 164-66, 172, 173,
226-27; and beheadings, 196, 197, 234; toll
from murders by, 226-29; diaries kept by,
227-28; sadism of, 234; testimony to Com- mission ofInquiry on torture by, 253-55; in WWI, 278; in final days ofBelgian Congo, 301
Ford, Ford Madox, I47n, 257 Fox Bourne, H. R., 173 France, Anatole, 2, 236
France: and Leopolds imperial ambitions,
82,95, 167; involvement in the modern Congo, 303. See also French Empire
Franklin,John Hope, 1 14 Frelinghuysen, Frederick, 78, 79, 8
1
French Congo: abuses in, 280-81
French Empire, 42, 61 ; in Africa, 70-7 1 , 74, 86, 95, 280-81; abuses in, 280-81
French Foreign Legion, 138-39
Gaelic League, 267
Galsworthyjohn, 273
Gantt, Lucy, 158, 265
Garfield,James A. , 76
Garnett, Edward, 142
Garrett, Thomas G., 249 Garrison, William Lloyd, 104, 21
1
Geniral Sanford (steamboat), 93
genital mutilation, 273; contemporary, 305 genocide: in German West Africa, 282. See
also murders
Geographical Conference, Brussels, 1876,43-
46
German African colonies, 83-84, 128, 280-
82,294
German Cameroons, 280, 28 1-82 German concentration camps, 121, 122,225, 295
German East Africa, 174, 278 German South West Africa: abuses in, 28 1-82 Germany, 36; Berlin Conference (1885), 83-
87; and Emin Pasha, 100; Nazi concentra- tion camps of, 121, 122, 225, 295; Leopolds
press campaign in, 239-41; Casement and, in WWI,284-85,288;in WWI,Morel and, 288-89; and atrocities against Belgians in
WWI, 295-96 Gibbonsjames Cardinal, 244 Girault, Charles, 256
Gladstone, William, 149, 167
Goffinet, Baron Auguste, 266, 275 gold mining, 278-79
Goodyear, Charles, 1 59
Gough-Roberts, Katie, 29, 32
Grant,UlyssesS.,58
Greindl, Baron Jules, 59 Grenfell, George, 1 14, 201
Grey, Sir Edward, 2, 209, 272
Grogan,Ewart S., 229-30
Guggenheim corporation, 243 Gullah language, 1
1
GustafWasa.king ofSweden, 126
Gwynn, Stephen, 195
Hall, Dr. G.Stanley, 241
hand severing in the Congo, 164-66, 172,
35$
INDEX
1 73 , 226-27, *54, 259. *6o, 266-67, 272,
296, 305; missionary reports on, 191; Case-
ment reports on, 203
hangings in the Congo, 123, 149
Harris, Alice Seeley, 216, 236, 242, 273, 284,
305
Harris, Rev.John, 216, 242, 273, 305
Harrison, Benjamin, 107, 153
Harrison,James, 239
Hayes, Rutherford B., 105
head severings in the Congo, 145, 196, 197, 234
Hearst,William Randolph, 248
Heart ofDarkness (Conrad), 3, 142-49, 229,
284, 294; models for Kurtz, 144-46, I47~
49, 197, 229; racism in, 146-47; indicting
imperialism, 146-49
Heath, Sir Leopold, 44
Heaton, Dick, 25
Hemptinnejean de, Archbishop ofEliza-
bethville, 301-2
Hereros: genocide of, 28 1-82, 294
Herr, Michael, 234
Higden, Ranulf, 6
History of the Negro Race in America . . . (Wil-
liams), 104
Hider, Adolf, 295
Holland: empire of, 37; traders object to
Leopold's monopoly in the Congo, 1 12
Holt,John, 186,210,273,282
homosexuality:Victorian opprobrium of,
199-200,286
hostage-taking: during rubber harvesting,
161-62, 189,230,231-32,236-37,250
House ofCommons, London: resolution on
the Congo, 194, 195, 200; Stanley serves in,
235; Leopold lobbies, 23 8 ; Morel serves in,
291
How I Found Livingstone (Stanley), 29 humanitarian critics, 188; of Stanley, 50; of
Leopold, 173-74, 185, 194; Morel obtains
support of, 185, 194, 195,211-12,213;
Morel in the tradition ofBritish, 21 1-1 3;
boycott Portugal, 258; English law and,
280; contemporary, 305-6
human rights movement: contemporary,
305-6
Huntington, Collis P., 107, 1 12, 1 1
3
Ibn Khaldiin, 304
Iboko: death toll in, 232
Ifomi: victim of torture, 253
Ifuca, capital of the Kuba, 156, 158
Ilanga: tells of slave raid, 131-33
Ilange Kunda ofM'Bongo: witness to tor-
ture, 253
imperialism: indicted in Heart ofDarkness,
146-49. See also colonialism
In Darkest Africa (Stanley), 5
1
Indies, General Archive of the, 37
industrialism: and colonialism, 27
infections, 90; deaths associated with, 230-3
1
Inheritors,The (Conrad & Ford), 14711, 257 Inongo: death toll in, 228, 232
International African Association,Brussels,
5 8 , 59, 64, 87; creation of, 45
International Association ofthe Congo, 65,
66-67, 78, 81, 84-85, 87, 105
Irish nationalist movement, 267-68, 284-85
Irish Volunteers,284
Italian consul to the Congo: confirms Case-
ment's reports, 202
Ituri rain forest: Stanley explores, 97~99
ivory trade, 63-64, 70, 101-2, 118, 137; por-
ters for, 1 19-20, 130-3 1 ; described by Con-
rad, H3-45
Jacquesjules, 228-29
Java; or How to Manage a Colony (Money), 37 Joao II, king ofPortugal, 8
Joao III, king of Portugal, 13, 14
Jones, Sir Alfred, 185, 192, 204, 213,237;
mounts defense ofLeopold, 237
Jordan, David Starr, 241
Jose, Anastasio, 28n
Journal de Bruxelles, 1 12
journalist(s): Stanley as, 26, 51-52 (see also
Stanley); Williams as, 105-6 (see alsoWil-
liams); Morel as, 186-88 (see also Morel);
banned from Congo Free State, r89; take
up Morel's crusade, 215; Leopold employs
in his defense, 237-41. See also travel writ-
ers and specijk newspapers
Kandolo, rebel leader, 127-128, 278
Kasai, Compagnie du, 260-65, 283
Kasai region: rebellions in, 127, 260-65, 295;
* missionaries in, 153-58; hand-severing pol-
icy in, 164-65, 260; rubber trade in, 164-65
Kassai Herald, 261
Kennaway, Sir John, 44
359
INDEX iNbfiX
Kennedy,John F., 302
Kenya, 28
Kevenhuller, Count von, 93 KiKongo language, 1
1
Kimpuki, rebel leader, 128
King Leopold's Rule in Africa (Morel), 214
King Leopold's Soliloquy (Twain), 242
Kingsley, Mary, 188
Kinshasa, 140, 145-46, 300, 303
Kioko, Mukunzo, 15-16
Klein, Georges Antoine, 144
Kolnische Zeitung, 226, 239
Kongo, Kingdom of the, 8-1 1, 42; govern-
ment of, 8-9; economy of, 9; slavery in, 9-
1 1 ; under Affonso 1, 1 1-16
Kot aMbweeky II, king of the Kuba, 1 56-57 Kowalsky, Henri I., 245-49, 250, 257, 283-84
Kremer, Dr.Johann Paul, 122
Kuba people, 156-57; artwork of the, 156-
57; Sheppard studies, 1 56-57; political sys-
tem of the, 157; Leopold's forces engulf,
158; rebellion of, 260-65, 295
"Kurtz, Mr." (character), 142-46, 147-49,
197, 229, 283; models for, 144-46, 147-49,
197
Labour Party, 291
LadyAlice (boat), 48-49, 54, 55
Laeken, chateau at, 40, 168-69, 255-56, 259,
293 ; Leopold's life at, 169, 256-57; Congo Greenhouse at, 175
Lake Mai Ndombe district, 23 1-32 Lake Sheppard, 157
Lake Tanganyika, 27, 30, 5
1
Lake Tumba, 200
Lancaster (ship), 87
Lapsley, Rev. Samuel: missionary work to the
Congo, 153-55
Lapsley (steamboat), 262, 265
Leclerq, Louis, 228
Lefranc, Stanislas, 120-21
Lemaire, Charles, 165, 227-28; diary of, 227-
28
Lemarinel, Paul, 120-21
Leopold I, king of the Belgians, 33, 34; rela-
tions with son, 34
Leopold II, king of the Belgians, 1 , 2, 4, 33;
characterized as foxlike, 34; relations with
father, 34; marriage of, 3 5-36; imperial am-
bitions of, 36, 37-38,41-42, 46,61, 167-68;
" visits Spain, 36-37; ascends to throne, 39;
daughters of, 39; monument projects of,
40, 168-69, 223-24, 256, 293-94; relations
with sister Carlota, 41; hosts conference of
explorers and geographers, 43-46; confer-
ence welcoming speech of, 44—45; chairs
International African Association,45-46;
reputation as humanitarian, 46, 92-93, 167—
68; hopes for colony from Stanley's explo-
ration, 57—60, 61; meets with Stanley, 61,
62-63; covets ivory from the Congo, 63-
64, 70, 1 18; camouflages his ambitions in
the Congo, 64-66; funds Stanleys expedi-
tion, 64—72; obtains trading monopolies
and land in Congo basin, 71-72, 74, 78; seeks American recognition for Congo col-
ony, 77-82; exploits Anglo-French rivalry
in Africa, 82-83; negotiates with Bismarck,
83-84; and Berlin Conference, 84-87; cre-
ates proprietary Congo Free State, 87; early mistresses of, 88; relations with
daughters, 88-89, 135, 275-76; obtains
weaponry to rule colony, 89-90; and Anti-
Slavery Conference, 92-95; agrees to be-
queath the Congo to Belgium, 94-95; se- cures loan for Congo development, 94-95, 168; retains Stanley as consultant, 95; and
Emin Pasha ReliefExpedition, 97-98; Wil-
liams's Open Letter to, 102, 108-1 1, 1 12,
114, 140; meets with Williams, 106; mounts
counterattack on Williams, 1 1 2-1 3 ; absolut-
ist rule in the Congo, 1 16, 136; medals
awarded to Congo functionaries, 116; ap-
propriates all "vacant" land in the Congo,
1 17, 187-88; and mercenaries for the
Congo, 123—24; and slave trade in the
Congo, 1 29-31; and Catholic missionaries,
134; fictionalized by Conrad & Ford, I47n, 257; and American missionaries, 153; ex-
ploits rubber wealth of the Congo, 159,
162, 167; and hostage-taking policy, 162,
1 89; issues bonds, 168; understates profits
of his colony, 168; hypochondria of, 169,
257; lifestyle of, 169; Chinese moneymak-
ing schemes of, 169-70; and foreign critics
of rubber terror, 172—74; and Commission
for the Protection ofthe Natives, 174-75,
201—2; creates Congolese theatricals for
Belgians, 175-77; bans journalists from the
Congo, 189; alarm over British critics, 194;
meets Casement, 197-98; concern over
Casement's report, 201 ; counters Case-
ment's brutality reports, 204; Morel's de-
monic personification of, 210, 214; liaison
with Caroline as mistress, 221-24, 255, 256-
57; cartoons of, 222; children by mistress,
224, 265, 266; mounting international criti-
cism of, 236-37; uses press and travel writ-
ers in counterattack, 237-39; attempts to
mount defense in the United States, 243-
49; creates Commission ofInquiry, 250-52;
final years ofrule of, 255-59; sale of col-
ony to state, 257-59; expenditures on
Caroline, 2 58-5 9; marries Caroline, 265;
death of, 265-66, 270, 275; secredy trans-
ferred fortune to foundation, 275-76; total
profit from Congo colony for, 277; or-
dered archives on the Congo destroyed,
294; reputation of, in Belgian colonial text-
books, 299; legend ofreincarnation of,
300-301; Mobutu as successor to, 304
Leopold River, 67
Leopoldville: as independent Congo capital,
3; Stanley in, 67, 69; founding of, 67; chil-
dren's colony in, i33~34; Conrad in, 145-
46, 148—49, 153—54; American mission at,
153; as port, 172; Casement in, 199; trial of
missionaries in, 262-65; as Belgian Congo
capital, 301
Lesseps,Viscount Ferdinand de, 46
Levi, Primo, 121
Levy-Lawson, Edward, 48
Liberia, 77
Liebrechts, Charles C, 233, 241
Ligongo: witness to torture, 253
Li Huang-Chang, 170
Lincoln,Abraham, 5 8
Lindsay,Vachel,266-67
Livingstone, David, 28-29, 51-52; Stanley's
search for, 29-30, 48, 5 1; death of, 30
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 243, 249
London Committee for the Suppression of
the Continental Traffic in English Girls, 88
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 105
Lontulu, chief ofBolima, 250
Lothaire, Hubert, 177
Louise, Princess, daughter ofLeopold II, 39,
88-89, 135, 265, 266, 275, 277
Lualaba River, 52-53. 57, 129
Luapula River: drownings in, 229
Luluabourg military base, 127
Lumumba, Patrice, 3, 301-2; assassination of,
301
MacDonald, Ramsay, 291
Macdonald, Sir Hector, 199-200
Macintosh, Charles, 158
Mackinnon,William, 44
Madhist rebellion, 96-98
Mafela, 72
malaria, 90, 230
Manchester Guardian, 174
Mandela, Nelson, 306
ManiKongo (Kongo monarch), 8-10
Manuel du Voyageur et du Rhident au Congo,
162
Marchal,Jules, 277, 296-99
Marchal, Paula, 299
Mare Tenebroso, 6-7
Marie-Henriette, queen ofthe Belgians, 39,
92, 197, 222; marriage to Leopold, 35-36
Marxism, 213
Massard, Charles, 253
Matadi (port), 86, 1 19, 125, 137, 141, 153,
170-71, 196, 199, 219, 279, 285
Mauro, Fra, 6
Maxim, Hiram, 97
Maximilian, emperor ofMexico, 40, 61,
103
Mbanza Kongo, 8-9
McLynn, Frank, 1 5
1
Medecins Sans Frontieres, 306
medical technology, 90
mercenaries: in the Congo, 123-29, 136-39.
See also Force Publique
Michaux, Oscar, 132
Milljohn Stuart, 84
Mille, Pierre, 23 8, 273
Mingo ofMampoko: witness to torture, 253
mining industry in the Congo, 278-79
missionaries, Christian, 1; Portuguese, 8-9,
12, 14, 17; and colonialism, 27, 38, 86; and
Muslim slave trade, 92; and children's colo-
nies, 133-35; Catholic versus Protestant,
134; ofSouthern Presbyterian Church,
152-55, 158, 173, 259-65;William Shep-
pard, 152-58 (see also Sheppard); among
the Kuba, 1 56-58; Protestants reporting on
conditions in the Congo, 172-73, 185, 190-
91 , 217-18; avoiding censorship, 190;
360 361
U
INDBX
missionaries (cont.)
Congo officials attempt to suppress reports of, 217-21; trial of, 262-6$
MobutuJoseph Desire, 54n, 302-4; exploita- tion ofthe Congo, 303-4
Moncheur, Baron Ludovic, 247, 248, 260
MoneyJ.WB.,37
Mongo language, 300 monopolies, trading, 37; Leopold obtains in
Congo basin, 71-72; Leopold exploits in Congo Free State, 112
Moors, 6
Morel,Edmund Dene, 177-81, 277, 298, 304, 306; first notes discrepancies in Congo trade, 1-2, 178-8 1 ; crusades against
Leopold's abuses, 2, 4, 209-24, 257; back-
ground of, 177-^78;joins Elder Dempster
firm, 177-78; exposes fraud in Congo trade, 179-80, 185-86; obtains support in
Britain, 185, 194, 195; efforts to silence,
1 86, 1 87; takes up as investigativejournalist,
186-88; character of, 187-88, 196,210;
mounts attack on rubber terror, 188-96,
209-24; obtains information from mission-
aries, 190-91; expectations from Case-
ment's investigations, 201 , 203; friendship
with Casement, 204—7, 268—69, 271; forms
Congo Reform Society, 207-8, 209; mari- tal partnership with Mary, 209-10; politics
of, 210, 21 1-1 3; supports British imperial-
ism, 210; and Red Rubber , . . , 21 1,216; as
speaker, 211; in the tradition ofBritish hu-
manitarianism, 2 1 1—1 3 ; organizational
skills of, 212-13, 214-15; amasses evidence
on abuses in the Congo, 214; and King
Leopold's Rule in Africa, 214; collects photo-
graphic records, 21 5, 216-17; obtains sup-
port offellow journalists, 215; receives
reports from Shanu, 218-21; mounting
international support of, 236-37; sends re-
port to Belgian Parliament, 251; advocates
"Belgian solution" to the Congo, 257, 271;
continues Congo crusade after Leopold's death, 271-73 ; campaigns for African land
rights, 272-73 ; winds down campaign over Congo, 273-74; attitude toward other colo-
nial power abuses, 282-83; in antiwar
movement, 287-91 ; later career of, 287-91
;
and Ten Years ofSecret Diplomacy, 288; tried
and imprisoned for antiwar activities,
289-90; serves in Parliament, 291 ; death of,
291
Morel, Mary Richardson, 206, 209, 288
MorganJ.P.,244
Morgan,John Tyler, 79-80, 152,242
Morning Post (London), 191-92
Morris,James, 212
Morrison, William, 259-60; and trial for ex-
posure ofKasai abuses, 262-63
Moto gold mine, 279 Mountmorres,Viscount William,237
Mozambique, 42
M'Putila ofBokote: witness to torture, 253
Mukimbungu mission, 125 Mulamba, rebel chief, 129
Munchener Allgemeine Zeitung, 240
murders: extent of, in the Congo Free State, 226—29, 253, 283. See also genocide
Murray, Gilbert, 290
Museum ofthe Revolution (Moscow), 292
Muslim fundamentalists: in the Sudan, 96-98
Muslim slave trade: European crusade
against, 27-28, 30, 42, 57, 78, 92, 130
mutinies: by soldiers, 127-29; by children, 135 My Dark Companions and Their Strange Stories
(Stanley), 51
Namibia, 281-82
Napoleon III, emperor ofFrance, 36, 40
National Geographic, 147-48
NationalWomen's Christian Temperance
Union, 243
National-Zeitung, 240
Nazi concentration camps, 121, 122, 225, 295 Nkgre du Congo, 148
Negro Fellowship League, 286
Nehru,Jawaharlal, 286
Nerincx, Alfred, 244
Neve, Paul, 68
NewAfrica, 239 NewYorkAmerican, 248,249
New York Chamber ofCommerce, 80 New York Herald, 26, 29, 48, 50, 98, 112; Stan- ley begins working for, 26
Ngombi, 72
Niama, Mulume, 124, 278 Nicholas II, tsar of Russia, 222
Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handels Vennootschap,
362
INDEX
Nile: search for source of, 7, a**. 3°. 4^;
Leopold's ambitions in valley of, 96; plans
for railroad connecting the Congo and, 167
Nisco, Baron Giacomo, 250
Noble Savage myth, 210, 270
Nonconfbrmism, 211
North American Review, 24.7
Nzansu, chief of Kasi, 125, 126, 144, 278
On Liberty (Mill), 84 Open Letter to . . . Leopold //(Williams), 102,
108-11,112,114,140
oral history in Africa, 1 5, 300
Order ofthe African Star, 1 16
Ostend, 168
Ota Benga, I76n
pacification bases: Leopold proposes, 45
Paine,Thomas,i87
Parliament, British: resolution on the Congo,
194, 195, 200; Stanley serves in, 23 5;
Leopold lobbies, 23 8; Morel serves in, 291
Parry, Betsy, 21-22
Pelzer, Mathieu, 127
Pende people, 15
Permentier, Rene de, 234
Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, 267
Philippines, the, 41 , 282
Phipps, Sir Constantine: British minister to
Brussels, 203—4
photographic records: ofCongo abuses, 21 5,
216-17,236,242,305
Picard, Edmond, 1 19-20
Pike, Alice, 48, 50-51, 56-57,96
Pitt,William, the Younger, 207
Pocock, Edward, 49, 53
Pocock, Frank, 48, 49, 52
Pond,James B., 104-5
porters, 1 19-20, 129-30, I44;in WWI,278
Portugal: and slave trade, 10-1 1, 14-15; rela-
tions with Afibnso I of the Kongo, 12-15;
empire of, 42, 86, 280; humanitarians boy-
cott, 258
Portuguese explorers, 7-9; and the Congo
River, 17
Premorel,Raoul de, 122, 166, 295
Presbyterian Pioneers in the Congo (Sheppard),
157
press: takes up Morel's crusade, 215; Leopold
employs in his defense, 237-41
Press Association, 2 1
5
Press Bureau, 239-40; bribes by, 240
PresterJohn,7, 10
Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 42
Protestant Nonconformism, 21
1
Putumayo Indians, 267
Pygmies, 72-73; on exhibit in Belgium, 176,
i76n
Quakers, 187, 189,213
quinine, 90
racism: of Stanley, 68-69; ofEuropeans in
the Congo, 121; ofBelgians, 136; displayed
in Heart ofDarkness, 146-47 1 148; and ex-
hibit ofCongolese in Belgium, 176^77;
Pygmy exhibited in U.S., i76n; sexual
stereotypes and, 210
railroads, 27; building ofCongo, 82, 91 , 92,
119, 143-44, 167, 170-72, 271; Leopold in-
vests in Chinese, 169; casualties ofbuilding
Congolese, 171 , 279; luxury travel by, 236;
in French Congo, 281
Rawlinson, Sir Henry, 44
Reagan, Ronald, 303
reconnaissances pacifiques, 124
Red Rubber. . . (Morel), 21 1,216
Reforme, 113
reformist movements: British, 211
Reid, Sir Hugh Gilzean, 191, 238 Report upon the Congo-State . . , (Williams),
in Residential and Garden Real Estate Corpora-
tion of the Cote d'Azur,276
Rhodes, Cecil, 41, 256
Richthofen, Baron Ferdinand von, 44
rifles: technological advances, 80-90; in trade
with Congo, 179-80
Rockefeller,John D. , Jr. , 243
Rohlfs, Gerhard, 43
Roi, Simon, 226
Roi de Beiges (steamboat), 140, 141-42, 145
Rolland, Romain, 291
Rom, Leon, 137-38, 162, 260, 261, 284; as
model for Kurtz in Heart ofDarkness, 145-
49; racism of, 148
Rommel, Eugene, 125
Ronciere-le-Noury, Baron de la, 44
Roosevelt, Theodore, 2, 241, 242, 243 , 247,
258,259,260
363
INDBX
Root, Elihu, 243, 249
Rothschild family, 46, 91
Rousseau,J. J., 210
Royal Geographical Society, London, 31, 157
Royal Museum ofCentral Africa, Tervuren, 292-93
Royal Order ofthe Lion, 116
rubber terror, 158-66; origins of, 158; prod-
ucts from, 1 5 8-59; hostages taken during
harvesting, 161-62, 189, 230, 231-32; Shep-
pard uncovers horrors of, 164-65; hand
severings and, 164-66, 172, 173 (see also
hand severing in the Congo); sadism in,
166; railroad building for, 170-72 (see also
railroads); missionaries report on horrors
of, 172-73, 190-91; Leopold tries to
counter critics of, 173—75; Morel mounts
attack on, 188-94, 200-24; Casement inves-
tigates, 200-203; Casement reports on, 203—
5; death toll from, 225-34; decline in re-
ports ofabuses in, 278; in WWII, 279, 299; suppression ofhistory ofterror 0^294-300
rubber trees, cultivated, 1 59-60; increase in,
278
rubber vine, wild, 159-60, 278; labor for har-
vesting of, 160-6
1
Rudolph, crown prince ofAustria-Hun-
gary, 89, 135,266
Rufvji River, 29
Russell, Bertrand, 289, 290
Russian Empire, 61 , 90
Ryan, Thomas, 243
Saint-Germain, Charles Greban de, 23
1
Salisbury, Lord, 167, 194
Samba, 215
Sanford, Gertrude, 58,81
Sanford, Henry Shelton, 1 12; background of,
58-59; minister to Belgium, 58-60; and
Leopold's colonial ambitions, 66, 76—82, 85,
105; business venture in Florida, 76-77;
lobbies for Leopold in America, 77-82;
seeks venture in the Congo, 91, 93, 98;
death of, 93
Sanford Exploring Expedition, 91, 195-96
Sanga people, 124
Saturday Review, 145
Scheut fathers, 134
Schnitzer, Eduard (Emin Pasha), 96-98, 99-
100
schooling in the Congo, 134-35
Scramble for Africa, 26—27, 74, 82—84, 25 5; in
Heart ofDarkness, 147
sculpture, 73-74; ofthe Kuba, 156
Semenov, Pyotr, 45
Seville, 36—37; Spanish archives in, 37
sexual stereotypes ofAfricans, 210
Shanu, Hezekiah Andrew, 2 1 8-2 1 , 278
,
304
Shaw, George Bernard, 286
Sheldon, Mary French, 237-38
Sheppard, Lucy Gantt, 158,265
Sheppard, William, 230, 277, 304; missionary
travels in the Congo, 152, 153-58; early life
of, 153; record ofwork in the Congo, 154-
56; studies the Kuba, 1 56-57; honored for
work, 157—5 8; marriage of, 158; uncovers
horrors ofrubber terror in the Congo,
164-65, 172, 173, 259; on exposure of vil-
lagers, 229; reports on Kuba rebellion, 260-
65; on trial for reportage, 262-65; later ca-
reer of, 283
Sherman,William Tecumseh, 3 1 , 104
Shinkolobwe mine, 279
Sj6blom,E.V, 173,227
slave labor in the Congo: chieftains selling
men, 129-30, 164; Morel uncovers, 180. See
also forced labor in the Congo
slavery: in Kingdom ofthe Kongo, 9-10;
practiced among Africans, 9-1 1 , 1 19, 301
;
abolished in British Empire, 27-28; Anti-
Slavery Conference (1889), 92-93; in Tur-
key, 93
slaves, freed: American ambitions to colonize
Africa with, 78, 79-80, 105, 152-53, 242
slave trade, 10-11, 16-17; Affonso 1 ofKongo
opposes, 13-14; depopulating the Kongo,
1 4;European crusade against Afro-Arab,
27-28, 30, 42, 57, 78, 92, 130, 289; Leopold
proposes pacification bases to abolish, 45
sleeping sickness, 230, 23
1
smallpox, 230
Societe Anversoise du Commerce au Congo,
163, 192
South Africa, 42, 277; Union of, 273; boycott
of, 277; Mandela and, 306
Southern Presbyterian Church: General As-
sembly of, 1 52—53; missions in the Congo,
153—55, 158, 173, 259-65; missionaries on
trial, 262-65
364
INDBX
Soviet concentration camps, 121, 162-63,
233-34,292,295
Spanish-American War, 168
Spanish Empire, 36-37, 42
Speckled Band, The (play), 270-71
Speke,John, 27
Spelier, Henri, 255
Stalin,Josef, 233, 295
Stangl, Franz, 122
Stanley, Dorothy Tennant, 96, 1 50, 23 5 ; mar-
riage to Stanley, 150-51
Stanley, Henry Morton: background and
youth of, 21-23 ,31-32; renames himself,
23; autobiography of, 23-25; fictionalizes
his life, 23-25 , 3 1-3 2; fear ofwomen, 25,
48, 95;journals of, 25, 53-54; in the Civil
War, 25-26, 103 ; begins journalist career,
26; and How I Found Livingstone, 29; search for Livingstone, 29-30, 51; brutal as explo-
ration leader, 3 1 , 49, 55, 67-68, 196; crosses
Africa east to west along the Congo, 42,
47~56; skirmishes during explorations, 49-
50; and Congo exhibition, 175; criticized by humanitarian groups, 50; and In Darkest
Africa, 5 1 ; and My Dark Companions and Their Strange Stories, 5 1 ; as reporter of his
explorations, 51-52; casualties ofCongo River expedition, 56; Leopold courts, 57,
60, 61, 62-63; hailed for Congo explora- tion, 57-60; Leopold funds expedition by,
63-65 , 67—72; harshness as colonizer, 67—
69, 71; racism of, 68-69; illnesses of, 69-70;
competition with rivals, 70-71; book on
founding ofCongo Free State, 81; at Ber- lin Conference, 85-86; and Anti-Slavery
Conference, 93~94; as consultant to
Leopold, 95; and Emin Pasha ReliefExpe- dition, 97-100, 141, 150, 196; Williams's
charges against Congo abuses by, 100-1 1; marriage of, 1 50-5 1 ; career as lecturer,
1 5 1-52; defends Leopold, 23 5; knighted
and elected to Parliament, 23 5 ; death of,
235-36
Stanley Cap, 62
Stanley Club, Paris, 63
Stanley Falls, 48, 54; station at, 102; Williams
visits, 108-9; Conrad at, 141, 143-44; Rom at, 145, 149
Stanley Pool, 119
Starr, Frederick, 244
starvation in the Congo: deaths from, 229-30
stations in Congo Free State, 101—2; life in, 116-17
steamboats: invention of, 27; and travel on
the Congo, 55,63, 108; and colonization of
the Congo, 90; and slave labor in the
Congo, 119
Stephanie, Princess, daughter ofLeopold II,
39,89,135,265,275,277
Steub, Ludwig von, 240
Stevens, Arthur, 82
Stinglhamber, Gustave, 294
Stokes, Charles, 174
Strauch, Maximilien, 64—65, 79, 82, 294
sub-Saharan Africa: early European explora-
tion of, 6-8; slavery in, 9-1
1
Sudan: colonial rule in, 96-98
Suez Canal Company, 3 8
Svensson, Knut, 227
Swedish missionaries: 125-26, 172—73, 227
Taft, William Howard, 245
Tanzania, 28, 278
Taylor,A.J.R,2i3,288
telegraph, 27
Temps, Le, 82
Tennant, Dorothy. See Stanley, Dorothy Ten-
nant
Ten Years ofSecret Diplomacy (Morel), 288
Tervuren, Duke of, 224 Thesiger,Wilfred, 262
Thiriar, Dr.Jules, 39, 265
Through the Dark Continent (Stanley), 5 1, 63 Tilkens, Edouard, 190
Times (London), 2, 57, 96, 169,215,238,239
tin mining, 278
Tippu Tip, 130-3 1,154
Travels in WestAfrica (Kingsley), 188
travel writers in Africa, 4-5, 29, 147-48, 185,
236; Leopold seeks favorable reports on
the Congo from, 237—38 Trevelyan, Charles, 287
Tribune Congolaise, 204
Trotha, Lothar von, 282
Truth about the Congo, 236, 237
Tshamakele cave killings, 124
Tswambe: eyewitness report on rubber trade
horrors, 166
Tuckey,James K, 17-18, 21 Turkey, 93
365
INDBX
TWain, Mark: on slave labor in the Congo, 3
;
and Stanley, 32; Morel and, 210, 241-42;
and King Leopold's Soliloquy, 242
TWiss, Sir Travers, 71,85
Uganda, 167; emperor of, 50
Union ofDemocratic Control, 287-88, 291
United States: and Leopold's ambitions in Af-
rica, 75-82, 241 ; expansionist wars of, 168,
282; Morel takes Congo campaign to, 241-
43; Congo controversy in, 241-49; involve-
ment in the modern Congo, 301—3
Van Calcken, Raoul, 253
Vandervelde, Emile, 165, 263-64, 273
Vangroenweghe, Daniel, 232
Van Kerckhoven, Guillaume, 196, 197 Vansina,Jan, 1 5 7n, 23 3 , 300
Vatican, 244
Verdussenjean, 166
Victoria, queen ofGreat Britain, 3 5 , 43 , 1 5 1
,
168,223
Victor Napoleon, Prince, 197, i98n
• vumbi, 15
Wack, Henry Wellington, 245
Wales, Prince of, 43, 59, 88
Washington, Booker X, 2, 241, 283
Webb, Beatrice, 23 7
Webb, Sidney, 237
West African Mail, 1 86, 1 87, 1 89, 209, 213,218
West African Missionary Association, 25 1-52
Wilberforce, William, 207, 2 1
1
Wilde, Oscar, 199
Wilhelm II, kaiser ofGermany, 166, 222n;
dislike for Leopold, 240
Williams, George Washington, 4, 102, 129,
140, 152-53, 185,277,304; Open Letter to
Leopold, 102, 108-11, 112, 114, 140; in
Civil War, 102-3; background °f> 102-6;
education of, 103; career of, 103-6; black
histories written by 104, 105; and History of
the Negro Race in America . . . , 104; seeks
journalist career, 105-6; origins ofinterest
in the Congo, 105-7; interviews Leopold,
106; visits the Congo, 107—9; and Report
upon the Congo-State . . . , in; death of,
113; advocates local rule of the Congo, 257
Williams, Roger, 78
Wilson,Woodrow, 291
woodcarving, 73-74
World School of Colonialism, 276
World War 1, 276, 278, 284; Casement's pro-
Irish activities in, 284—85, 288; Morel and
antiwar movement, 287-91; peace terms
of, 291; Belgium as victim in, 295-96
World War II, 279
Yaka people, 124
Yamba-Yamba, rebel leader, 128
yellow fever, 90
Zanzibar, 28
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: A South AfricanJourney and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember
Stalin. Hochschild *s work has won prizes from the Overseas Press
Club of America, the World Affairs Council, and the Society
of American Travel Writers. His most recent book, Finding the
Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-
Diamonstein Award for the Art ofthe Essay. His books have been
translated into five languages.
Besides his books, Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review ofBooks, The New York Times Magazine, MotherJones, The Nation, and many other
newspapers and magazines. He is a former commentator on Na- tional Public Radio's All Things Considered.
Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School ofJour-
nalism at the University of California at Berkeley and has been a
guest teacher at other campuses in the United States and abroad.
In 1997-98 he spent five months as a Fulbright Lecturer in India.
He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Arlie, the sociologist and author. They have two sons.
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