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Despite such prayers, back home the great king was having more domestic 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.
mAYERLIG
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.
For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power.
earned. “Vive le Congo, there is nothing like it!” one young officer wrote to his family in 1894,
Léon Rom,
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.
Almayer’s Folly.
Stanley’s painful inhibitions are a reminder that the adventurers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but restless, 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.
William Sheppard
To begin with, he wasn’t white.
John Tyler Morgan,
Reverend Samuel Lapsley,
Lake Sheppard.
Not surprisingly, the Kuba were happy with their existing way of life, and, despite their friendliness toward Sheppard, showed little interest in Christianity.
Some eight years after Sheppard’s historic visit, Leopold’s forces finally reached and looted the Kuba capital.
John Dunlop
Charles Goodyear
For Leopold, the rubber boom was a godsend.
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.
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.
In 1903, one particularly “productive” agent received a commission
eight times his annual salary.
By the turn of the century, the État Indépendant du Congo had become, far and away, the most profitable colony in Africa.
To gather wild rubber, people must disperse widely through the rain forest and often climb trees.
caoutchouc,
“the wood that...
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Wherever rubber vines grew, the population was tightly controlled.
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 station, telling me I could eat them, or kill them, or use them as slaves—as I liked.
The Kasai
Sheppard
who was sheppard? the reverend ?
“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.”
Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold’s rubber system.
For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded 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 standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. “Sometimes,” said one officer to a missionary, soldiers “shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man.” In some military units there was even a “keeper of the hands”; his job was the smoking.
lives. A Catholic priest who recorded oral histories half a century later quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of a particularly hated state official named Léon Fiévez, who terrorized a district along the river three hundred miles north of Stanley Pool:
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.
1894
Fiévez
“I made war against them. One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies at the station ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people . . . but that allowed five hundred others to live.”
When villagers, in a desperate attempt to meet the weight quota, turned in rubber mixed with dirt or pebbles to the agent Albéric Detiàge, he made them eat it.
In 1895, Leopold turned sixty,
to invest Congo state profits in a railway in China, eventually making big money on the deal.
Back in the Congo, the rubber boom gave added urgency to the territory’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.
It took three years to build just the first fourteen miles.
1898,
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.
Leopoldville quickly became the busiest river port in central Africa,
William Sheppard
missionary, E. V. Sjöblom,
