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Just as Europeans would be long obsessed with African cannibalism, so Africans imagined Europeans practicing the same thing.
But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for “discovering” some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.
He claimed that his doctors had prescribed long cruises in hot climates, and, escaping his miserable home life, he headed farther afield.
“Belgium doesn’t exploit the world,” he complained to one of his advisers. “It’s a taste we have got to make her learn.”
His death was inglorious but not inelegant: he shook hands with the members of the firing squad, handed them all gold pieces, pointed to his heart, and said, “Muchachos, aim well.”
These forest-dwellers were sometimes seminomads: if a group of Pygmies, for instance, killed an elephant, that site became a temporary settlement for a week or two of feasting, since it was easier to move a village than a dead elephant.
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.
“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.”
Just as terrorizing people is part of conquest, so is forcing someone else to administer the terror.*
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 different color—any which way. . . .
they said, “whether they cut off our heads or that of a chicken it is all the same to them. . . .”
There seems to be no record of Nzansu’s fate.
One officer noted the problem of files of conscripts crossing narrow log bridges over jungle streams: when “libérés [liberated men] chained by the neck cross a bridge, if one falls off, he pulls the whole file off and it disappears.”
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 happiness of receiving Holy Baptism; they are now little angels in Heaven who are praying for our great king.”
Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature, but its author, curiously, thought himself an ardent imperialist where Britain was concerned.
Phipps, a conceited man of limited intelligence, couldn’t believe “that Belgians, members of a cultivated people amongst whom I had lived, could, under even a tropical sky, have perpetrated acts of refined cruelty.”
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.
the Congo administration was “a bad and wicked system, inflicting terrible wrongs upon the native races.”
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.
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.”
An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a “hue and cry.” But we live in a world of corpses, and only about some of them is there a hue and cry.
