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Leopold’s most forceful critic
‘The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service. I have brought in plenty of hands already, and I expect my time of service will soon be finished.’”
But in 1895 he faced his first real trouble in Europe when a particularly brutal Congo state officer, as one shocked British journalist put it, “dared to kill an Englishman.”
In 1896 he appointed the Commission for the Protection of the Natives: six prominent Congo missionaries, three of them Belgian Catholics, three foreign Protestants.
When the king was told that some of the Africans were suffering indigestion because of candy given them by the public, he ordered up the equivalent of a zoo’s don’t-feed-the-animals sign. The placard said: THE BLACKS ARE FED BY THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE.
Edmund Dene Morel.
After a childhood on the edge of poverty, both in England and France, Morel had left school at fifteen to work in Paris to support his ailing mother.
forced labour directed by the closest associates of the King himself. . . .
I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman.” With this brilliant flash of recognition by an obscure shipping-company official, King Leopold II acquired his most formidable enemy.
Morel differed from them not only in his torrential energy but in his fervent belief that the Congo was a case apart, an entire state deliberately and systematically founded on slave labor.
For years the missionaries had been helpless witnesses to chicotte whippings, Force Publique raids, burned villages, and the other aspects of rubber slavery in action.
“became mere slaves to the company, for rubber-making occupied all their time, the victim having to search far and wide for the giant vines from which the sap is extracted. They were not even fed by their taskmasters, their only remuneration being merchandise or mitakos [pieces of brass wire] in ridiculously small quantities. . . . The natives bitterly bemoaned the scarcity of the rubber-producing lianas, and piteously begged to be allowed to perform other service than rubber-gathering.”
gathering.”
“is not a man to care much about the fate of the blacks, any more than that of the Armenians or the Bulgarians.”
the nineteen-year-old Roger Casement
Casement
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 saw much more brutality on the part of other white men in Africa.
Casement listened, aghast, as Van Kerckhoven cheerfully explained how he paid his black soldiers “5 brass rods (2½ d.) per human head they brought him during the course of any military operations he conducted. He said it was to stimulate their prowess in the face of the enemy.”
In 1890, when Joseph Conrad arrived at Matadi, he jotted in his diary: “Made the acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement, which I should consider as a great pleasure under any circumstances. . . . Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic.”
Everyone found Casement an impressive talker.
“His greatest charm was his voice, which was very musical,”
“A man doesn’t go among thorns unless a snake’s after him—or he’s after a snake.”
“I’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.”
secretary, Casement exulted, in a most unconsular manner, that he had
“broken into the thieves’ kitchen.”
International, Casement in his diary wrote in the tones of the Abolitionists: “Infamous. Infamous, shameful system.” But the official report he composed subsequently is in the language that Amnesty and similar groups would later make their own: formal and sober, assessing the reliability of various witnesses, filled with references to laws and statistics, and accompanied by appendices and depositions.
Casement was so distressed by what he had seen in the Congo that the Foreign Office could not control him, and he gave several interviews to the London press. Their publication made it hard to censor or postpone his report, though Foreign Office officials did water it down by removing all names. When the report was finally published, in early 1904, readers found statements by witnesses that read: “I am N.N. These two beside me are O.O. and P.P.” Or: “The white man who said this was the chief white man at F.F. . . . His name was A. B.” This lent the report a strangely disembodied tone, as if
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been done but not to or by real people.
The men talked over dinner at the Slieve Donard Hotel in Newcastle, where Morel became convinced that “the Congo evil was a special and extraordinary evil calling for special means of attack. . . .
The two men, however, were far more than armchair do-gooders. They were people of conviction—and both ended up paying a high price. At the time they met and shared their passion about the Congo in December 1903, Morel and Casement did not know that more than a dozen years later they would have something else in common. Each would be taken, in custody, through the gates of London’s Pentonville Prison. One would never emerge.
Morel was not without flaws. He could be bullheaded; he rarely admitted any mistakes; and in his newspaper he ran an occasional picture of himself, enthusiastic reviews of his books, resolutions thanking him for his good work, interviews with himself reprinted from other papers, and an editorial “wish[ing] Mr. Morel ‘God-speed’ on his journey” when he went abroad to campaign for Congo reform.
in describing traditional African societies he focuses on what was peaceful and gentle and ignores any brutal aspects—which occasionally included, for example, long before the Force Publique made it the order of the day, cutting off the hands of one’s dead enemies.
A superb speaker, he regularly addressed crowds of several thousand people with no notes.
Above all, he saw himself as a moral heir to the antislavery movement.
Better treatment of colonial subjects would “promote the civil and commercial interests of Great Britain. . . .”
But he did not believe this; he believed with all his heart that Leopold’s system of rule constituted a unique form of evil.
“He knew exactly where to look for rich sympathizers; and he took money from them without altering the democratic character of [his movement].
A master of all the media of his day, Morel made particularly effective use of photography. A
The order is brutally short and sharp—Quickly the first defaulter is seized by four lusty “executioners,” thrown on the bare ground, pinioned hands and feet, whilst a fifth steps forward carrying a long whip of twisted hippo hide.
Following hard upon this decisive incident was another. Breakfast was just finished when an African father rushed up the veranda steps
of our mud house and laid upon the ground the hand and foot of his little daughter, whose age could not have been more than 5 years.
Hezekiah Andrew Shanu.
After visits to England, France, and Germany, Shanu returned to the Congo and, in a remarkable move in this state set up by Europeans for their own benefit, became a successful businessman.
He even offered to take up arms against the mutineers. “Monsieur Shanu, in these troubled moments, has given proof of his sincere loyalty to the State,” wrote a high Congo official.
The king took her around the Mediterranean on his yacht, but the Belgian public loathed her, and her carriage was once stoned in the streets of Brussels.
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.
The diary of another officer, Charles Lemaire, is chilling in its
casualness: “28 March 1891: . . . The village of Bokanga was burned. . . . 4 April 1891: A stop at Bolébo. . . . Since they wanted to meet us only with spears and guns, the village was burned. One native killed. . . . 12 April 1891: Attack on the Ikengo villages. . . . The big chief Ekélé of Etchimanjindou was killed and thrown in the water. . . . 14 June 1891: Expedition against the Loliva who refuse to come to the station. Dreadful weather; attack made in driving rain. The group of villages was large; couldn’t destroy them all. Around 15 blacks killed. . . . 14 June 1891: At 5 A.M. sent the
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we must fight them until their absolute submission has been obtained, or their complete extermination. . . . Inform the natives that if they cut another single vine, I will exterminate them to the last man.”
