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Charles Massard].
He was very cruel; he forced us to bring rubber. One day, I saw him with my own eyes kill a native named Bongiyangwa, solely because among the fifty baskets of rubber which had been brought, he found one not full enough. Malu Malu ordered the soldier Tshumpa to seize [Bongiyangwa] and tie him to a palm tree.
The effect on anyone who read these stories could be only that of overwhelming horror. However, no one read them.
The commission’s report was expressed in generalities.
Not until the 1980s were people at last permitted to read and copy them freely.
abroad. He bought Caroline a French château and often stayed there with her.
Cecil Rhodes,
“Don’t take away His Congo!”
But it would be more than three decades later before even the most ardently anticolonialist intellectuals, in Europe, Africa, or the Americas, said much like this again.
Times had changed after all...
Sheppard
William Morrison,
In the Kasai region, the normally unwarlike Kuba people had risen in revolt against the rubber terror, spurred on, as in similar doomed uprisings elsewhere in southern Africa,
by elders with a fetish said to change the white man’s bullets into water.
There are armed sentries of chartered trading
companies who force the men and women to spend most of their days and nights in the forests making rubber, and the price they receive is so meager that they cannot live upon it.
Sheppard
AMERICAN NEGRO HERO OF CONGO and FIRST TO INFORM WORLD
OF CONGO ...
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“Dr. Sheppard has not only stood before kings, but he has also stood against them. In pursuit of his mission of serving his race in its nat...
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dared to withstand all the power ...
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Roger Casement, had now taken some new turnings. When
“I realised that I was looking at this tragedy [in the Congo] with the eyes of another race of people once hunted themselves.”
He understood Casement’s frustrations, but was wise enough to know that some of them came from the man, not the job. “You are a difficult man to help,” he once wrote to Casement. “You are very proud, for which I admire you, in the first place. Also, forgive me for saying so, it is a little difficult sometimes to know exactly anything [that] could be done that would fall in with your exact wishes.”
Von Trotha’s
Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world also was largely ignoring America’s brutal counterguerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed some 20,000 rebels, and saw an estimated 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease.
Casement’s
Like almost all of his Congo reform movement friends,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle strongly disapproved of his action, but he contributed £700 toward Casement’s defense. He and many other famous writers signed petitions asking that Casement’s life be
spared. However, Joseph Conrad, Casement’s 1890 roommate from Matadi, refused to sign; he was as staunch a patriot of...
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Casement was an o...
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The authorities immediately made photographic copies of the entries about his homosexual experiences and showed them around widely:
Journalists were invited in for a look, and one set of copies went to Washington. The government wanted to discredit Casement and to discourage any more notables from speaking up for clemency. The diaries helped to seal his doom.
Morel formed the Union of Democratic Control, which quickly became the main voice of antiwar dissent in England.
Today we see so clearly that the more than 8.5 million dead and 21 million wounded of World War I were a needless, avoidable tragedy that we forget how few people had the courage to call it that at the time.
and find no clue that some twenty million Soviet citizens
had died in execution cellars, in manmade famines, and in the gulag.
Leopold and the Belgian colonial officials who followed him went to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence from the historical record.
“I will give them my Congo,” Leopold told Stinglhamber, “but they have no right to know what I did there.”
Colonel Maximilien Strauch, the king’s long-time consigliere on Congo matters, later said, “The voices which, in default of the destroyed archives, might speak in their stead have systematically been condemned to silence for considerations of a higher order.”
In their later quests for a higher order, Hitler and Stalin in some ways left a far larger paper trail behind them.
It is not a moment of erasure, but of turning things upside down, the strange reversal of the victimizer mentally converting himself to victim.
Sometimes, I think it is I who have suffered most.
Marchal
“There was a rule in the Foreign Ministry archives. They were not
permitted to show researchers material that was bad for the reputation of Belgium. But everything about this period was bad for the reputation of Belgium! So they showed nothing.”
He remained in the foreign service, returning to Africa as an ambassador and also working in several desk jobs in Brussels. He devoted all of his spare time to research and writing about Leopold’s Congo.
He found collections of private papers in Belgium that had been beyond reach of Leopold’s fire.
Although virtually ignored in Belgium, his books are the definitive scholarly study of the subject, a magisterial, scrupulously documented account unsurpassed in any language. It might never have been written had he not seen that Liberian newspaper article.
1960,
