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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
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 £5 that they could hit the native with their rifles. Three shots were fired and the native fell dead, pierced through the head.”
“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
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.
Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold’s rubber system. Like the hostage-taking, the severing of hands was deliberate policy, as even high officials would later admit. “During my time in the Congo I was the first commissioner of the Equator district,” recalled Charles Lemaire after his retirement. “As soon as it was a question of rubber, I wrote to the government, ‘To gather rubber in the district . . . one must cut off hands, noses and ears.’”
They were white men trying to stop other white men from brutalizing Africans. Most of the Africans who fought this battle in the Congo perished, their very names unrecorded. In a sense, we honor Morel and Casement in their stead.
This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.
Vandervelde replied, “No man is a stranger in a court of justice.”
Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.
