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In other ways, African slavery was more flexible and benign than the system Europeans would soon establish in the New World. Over a generation 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 catastrophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready to buy endless shiploads of slaves, they found African chiefs willing to sell.
By the end of the 1500s, other European countries had joined in the slave trade; British, French, and Dutch vessels roamed the African coast, looking for human cargo.
The chiefs and wise men said that these vumbi were the former possessors of the land. . . . From that time to our days now, the whites have brought us nothing but wars and miseries.
The man whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the records of the conquistadors.
“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.”
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.”
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.
Just as terrorizing people is part of conquest, so is forcing someone else to administer the terror.
In the end, though, their superior firepower guaranteed victory—and a history written by the victors.
Conrad was a man of his time and place in other ways as well. He was partly 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.”
The true message of the book, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has argued, is: “Keep 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.”
Casement was a better judge of Stanley, for although the explorer remained something of a hero to him, Casement recognized Stanley’s sadistic streak. A dog-lover himself, Casement later learned, to his horror, that Stanley had cut off his own dog’s tail, cooked it, and fed it to the dog to eat.
Casement quoted an African proverb: “A man doesn’t go among thorns unless a snake’s after him—or he’s after a snake.”
Furthermore, although the killing in the Congo was of genocidal proportions, it was not, strictly 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, millions of people died, that to them was incidental. Few officials kept statistics about something they considered so negligible as African lives. And so estimating the number of casualties
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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!”
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 million, a figure confirmed by later counts. 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.
Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the 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, if we 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 Now? To Joseph Conrad, who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.
‘Journalists and writers won’t give you receipts, so don’t ask for any.’”
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.”
Brussels is not unique. In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa.
And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—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.
“I will give them my Congo,” Leopold told Stinglhamber, “but they have no right to know what I did there.”
“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.”
And to speak, as Leopold’s officials did, of forced laborers as libérés, or “liberated men,” was to use language as perverted as that above the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei.
In addition to those that I cited, I could have mentioned many more. Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, a Congolese scholar whose Histoire générale du Congo was published the same year as King Leopold’s Ghost, put the death toll at roughly thirteen million, a higher figure than I’ve suggested. Defensive Belgians sometimes point out that there were catastrophic death rates in other colonies in central Africa, and an even larger toll among American Indians. Both points are true. But this does not negate or excuse the enormous human loss in Leopold’s Congo.
The reasons most of Africa has not done so go far beyond the colonial heritage. One factor is the abysmal position of women and all of the violence, repression, and prejudices that go with that. Another is the deep-seated cultural tolerance and even hero-worship of strongmen like Mobutu, for whom politics is largely a matter of enriching themselves and their extended clan or ethnic group. Finally, perhaps above all, is the way the long history of indigenous slavery is still deeply and disastrously woven into the African social fabric.
