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“Exterminate all the brutes!”
“All the people of the villages run away to the forest when they hear the State officers are coming. To-night, in the midst of the rainy season, within a radius of 75 miles of Luebo, I am sure it would be a low estimate to say that 40,000 people, men, women, children, with the sick, are sleeping in the forests without shelter.”
Ewart S. Grogan
“Every village has been burnt to the ground, and as I fled from the country I saw skeletons, skeletons everywhere; and such postures—what tales of horror they told!”
fields. Harvests declined, and in the old A.B.I.R. region the period is remembered today as lonkali, the time of famine.
Smallpox
the Nazis and Soviets needed no poison gas or firing squads to finish off many of those who died in their camps.
An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold’s state, the population of the territory had “been reduced by half.”
between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was cut “by at least a half.”
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.
but this is of course an estimation!
“We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear,”
“So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert.”
Why, then, did the killings go on for so long?
In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed,...
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So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Arm...
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Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting.
Congo annals abound in cases like that of René de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late 1890s. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bas genoux, on your knees), because he always made people kneel before him.
Two Force Publique officers, Clément Brasseur and Léon Cerckel, once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a fire was lit beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.
I mean, if we can’t shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?”
Stanley was rumored to be unhappy with the chamber of horrors the Congo had become, but the few public statements he made were all in Leopold’s defense.
Casement’s
William Mountmorres,
The chicotte, he stressed, could be used only after a formal inquiry in which the accused had the right to call witnesses, and could be applied only to the buttocks.
Mary French Sheldon,
Everywhere she went, hostages were released so that she would see no one in custody.
Mrs. Sheldon fell in love with a steamboat captain and had a good time.
“I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than I have ever seen in the Congo,” she wrote in the Times in 1905.
The king did get some artful revenge on one opponent, the influential French journalist Pierre Mille, an ally of Morel’s who had fiercely and repeatedly attacked the king in print. One day a courtier brought word that Mille was quietly visiting Brussels with a woman not his wife. Leopold found out where they were staying and sent them an invitation to visit the great greenhouses at the château of Laeken. Mille and his lady friend accepted, and they appeared so delighted that Leopold thought he had won over a major critic. But soon after, Mille resumed his attacks. The king then asked the
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Within a year or two, new pro-Leopold books began coming off the presses.
The bureau focused much of its attention on Germany, now a major power in Africa.
“It is certainly not easy for a German to arrive at a clear opinion in questions where so many interests are at stake, notably those of the British rubber merchants.”
Although it is painted with too broad a brush and is far from Twain’s best work, King Leopold’s Soliloquy provoked the royal propaganda machine to rush out an anonymous forty-seven-page pamphlet, An Answer to Mark Twain.
futile.” Leopold also gave more than three thousand Congo artifacts to the American Museum of Natural History, knowing that J. P. Morgan was on its board.
“to act as if he were not in the State’s employ, but merely an impartial publicist.”
Colonel Henry I. Kowalsky
A bon vivant, raconteur, and big spender who ran up legendary hotel bills, the gregarious Kowalsky’s larger-than-life persona and courtroom skills won him a broad range of clients. Some were boxers and underworld figures; some were previously unknown relatives or common-law wives, whom he had a great knack for finding when there was a will that could be contested. Like many a colonel of his day, Kowalsky had never been in the army, although he let Europeans believe he had been.
William Howard Taft
When Kowalsky was on the other side of a bitter legal battle with the famous gunfighter Wyatt Earp, the short-fused Earp threatened to shoot Kowalsky on sight. The two men ran into each other in a San Francisco saloon. Earp forced Kowalsky into a back room, pulled out a revolver, and told the lawyer to get ready to meet his maker. Kowalsky’s jowly face dropped onto his chest and he dozed off. Earp stormed from the room, saying, “What can you do with a man who goes to sleep just when you’re going to kill him!”
Leopold in a silver frame, an album of photos of the Congo, and a memorandum asking him not to be deceived by jealous missionaries and Liverpool merchants.
KING LEOPOLD’S AMAZING ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE OUR CONGRESS EXPOSED. . . . FULL TEXT OF THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN KING LEOPOLD OF BELGIUM AND HIS PAID AGENTS IN WASHINGTON.
Although Kowalsky indignantly maintained that someone had robbed his office, he had, it appears, sold Hearst his complete Congo correspondence.
H...
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Kowalsky had used Leopold’s money to bribe Thomas G. Garrett, a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to help derail Congo protest resolutions.
The commission, however, was not as neutral as it appeared.
A parade of witnesses offered horrifying testimony. One of the most impressive was Chief Lontulu of Bolima, who had been flogged with the chicotte, held hostage, and sent to work in chains.
contents. But Leopold had one more trick up his sleeve, perhaps the most dazzling stroke of
showmanship in his long career.
With his modern sense of public relations, the king understood brilliantly that what matters, often, is less the substance of a political ...
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“complete and authentic résumé of the report.”
“Our arms were stretched over our heads. . . . Look at the scars all over my body. We were hanging in this way several days and nights. . . . All the time we had nothing to eat or drink, and sometimes it was raining and at other times the sun was out. . . . We cried and cried until no more tears would come—it was the pain of death itself. Whilst we hung there three
