King Leopold's Ghost

by Adam Hochschild

Leopold was a far better businessman than Sanford, but he too began to find himself under financial pressure.

The king described the need for fortified posts, roads, railways, and steamboats, all of which would support columns of troops pursuing the slavers.

only that the conference authorize him to levy import duties to finance the attack on slavery.

If Parliament gave him the loan he wanted, Leopold declared, he would leave the Congo to Belgium in his will.

Belgians, Sovereign of the État Indépendant du Congo, wishing to secure for Our beloved fatherland 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’État Indépendant du Congo.

“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.”

gush,”

“Do you consider worth nothing the glory of being a Pharaoh?”

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.

who is emin

By the time they finally reached Emin, Stanley and his surviving men were hungry and exhausted.

“a clean suit of snowy cotton drilling, well-ironed and of perfect fit,”

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.

And when the heat of Afric’s sun Grew quite too enervating, Some bloodshed with the Maxim gun Was most exhilarating!

Williams

Arthur

“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.”

that the king

“proved himself a good listener.”

baron Collis P. Huntington,

“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.”

Your Majesty’s Government gives £3 per head for able-bodied slaves for military service. . . . The labour force at the stations of your Majesty’s Government in the Upper River is composed of slaves of all ages and both sexes.”

Leopold’s Congo state, Williams wrote, was guilty of “crimes against humanity.”

The article quoted Stanley, who called the Open Letter “a deliberate attempt at blackmail.”

The Journal de Bruxelles asked, “First of all, who is Mr. Williams? This man is not a United States colonel.”

“the so-called ‘Colonel’,”

“an unbalanced...

Other Belgian newspapers, however, took Williams’s accusations seriously. “With commercial speculation dominant in the Congo, a personal, absolute and uncontrolled regime, whose chief autocrat has never set foot in the country he is governing, is fatally bound to produce the majority of grave deeds pointed out by the American traveler,” wrote the liberal La Réforme.

“His early death,” writes a modern diplomatic historian, S.J.S. Cookey, “. . . saved the Congo government from what might have been an embarrassingly formidable opponent.”

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 calumny.

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.

Unlike a venture capitalist in the marketplace, however, the king deployed troops and government officials as well as investment funds. He used them ruthlessly to shut out of the territory most businesses in which he did not have a piece of the action.

For Africans, transactions in money were not allowed. Money in free circulation might undermine what was essentially a command economy.

Even children were put to work: one observer noted seven- to nine-year-olds each carrying a load of twenty-two pounds.

“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.”

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 of burden with thin monkey legs, with drawn features, eyes fixed and round from preoccupation with keeping their balance and from the daze of exhaustion. 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, trotting with bent knees, belly forward, an arm raised to steady the 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 1891 by District Commissioner Paul Lemarinel for a forced march of more than six hundred miles to set up a new post, not one returned.

The station chief selects the victims. . . . Trembling, haggard, they lie face down on the ground . . . two of their companions, sometimes four, seize them by the feet and hands, and remove their cotton drawers. . . . Each time that the torturer lifts up the chicotte, 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.

officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps.

In fact, the most common way they were put to work was, like animals, as beasts of burden. 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.”

“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.”

purpose. It created a class of foremen from among the conquered, like the kapos in the Nazi concentration camps and the predurki, or trusties,

in the Soviet gulag. Just as terrorizing people is part of conquest, so is forcing someone else to administer the terror.*

this is also a great study on the horrors of oppression !

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 army of king Leopold in Congo: 19.000 soldiers

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 Publique’s military expeditions were officially called reconnaissances pacifiques.

men, in early 1897.