Hochschild adds his own telling comment: "Whether this inference is
right or wrong, the inhibitions that caused Stanley so much pain are a
reminder that the explorers and soldiers 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, labour and markets - are all valid, but
there was pyschological fuel as well."
Here Stanley had a common link with his ultimate employer, King
Leopold II. Hochschild tells how the "loveless marriage" of Leopold's
parents affected the young prince. "If Leopold wanted to see his father,
he had to apply for an audience". The cold atmosphere in which he grew
up haunted him in later life. He became an "ungainly, haughty young man
whom his first cousin Queen Elizabeth of England thought 'very odd' and
in the habit of 'saying disagreeable things to people'," says Hochschild.
Like his parents, Leopold and his wife, Marie-Henriette "loathed each
other at first sight, feelings that apparently never changed",
Hochschild continues. "Like many young couples of the day, the newlyweds
apparently found sex a frightening mystery." Queen Victoria became their
sex-educator. She and her husband, Prince Albert, gave Leopold and his
wife (visiting from Brussels) tips about how to consummate their
marriage. Several years later, when Marie-Henriette became pregnant,
Leopold wrote to Prince Albert thanking him for "the wise and practical
advice you gave me...[It] has now borne fruit."
When Leopold finally ascended the throne in 1865, his undying desire
was to own colonies. He tried everything under the sun to get a colony
to no avail, including offering to buy the Philippines from Spain,
buying lakes in the Nile and draining them out, or trying to lease
territory on the island of Formosa.
He despised Belgium's small size. "Small country, small people" was
how he described his little Belgium that had only become independent in
1830. The brutal expeditions of Stanley in Africa finally offered
Leopold the chance to land his prized jewel, Congo.
Stanley had made two "journalistic" trips to Africa, first in 1869 to
find David Livingstone. The second was in 1874 where, starting from
Zanzibar with 356 people (mostly Africans), he "attacked and destroyed
28 large towns and three or four score villages" (his own words) as he
plundered his way down to Boma and the mouth of the Congo River on the
Atlantic coast.
In 1879, Stanley was off again to Africa, this time under commission
from King Leopold to colonise Congo for him. Stanley used the gun, cheap
European goods and plain-faced deceit to win over 450 local chiefs and
their people and take over their land.
Stanley apparently remembered how the 22-sq-mile Manhattan Island in
New York Bay had been "bought" from the Native Americans by the Dutch
colonial officer, Peter Minuit, with trinkets valued at just $24.
If Minuit could do it in Manhattan, Stanley could do it, too, in the
Congo. Only that in his case, he just asked the Congolese chiefs to mark
Xs to legal documents written in a foreign language they had not seen
before. Stanley called them treaties, like this one signed on 1 April
1884 by the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela:
In return for "one piece of cloth per month to each of the
undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand, they promised to
freely of their own accord, for themselves and their heirs and
successors for ever...give up to the said Association [set up by
Leopold] the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all
their territories...and to assist by labour or otherwise, any works,
improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at
any time to be carried out in any part of these territories... All roads
and waterways running through this country, the right of collecting
tolls on the same, and all game, fishing, mining and forest rights, are
to be the absolute property of the said Association."
With treaties like this, Stanley set forth to colonise Congo for
Leopold. But the French would not let them have all the laugh. They sent
Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza on their own colonising mission. De
Brazza landed north of the Congo River, curved out an enclave for France
and had a town named after him (Brazzaville). The enclave eventually
became known as Congo Brazzaville, where the French too unleashed their
own brutality on the local people.
Meanwhile Stanley was doing a "good" job across the river for
Leopold, building a railway and a dirt road to skirt the 220-mile
descent of the river. This was to facilitate the shipping of Congo's
abundant ivory and other wealth to Belgium to enrich Leopold and his
petit pays. In 1884, Stanley finally left for home in England, his work
for Leopold done.
Leopold next sent in his hordes, including Leon Rom, to use absolute
terror to rule the land and ship out the wealth.
It was the brutality of Leopold's agents that would catch the eye of
the world and lead to his forced sale of Congo to the Belgian government
in 1908.
Ivory had been the initial prized Congo export for Leopold. Then
something happened by accident in far away Ireland that dramatically
changed the fate of Leopold, his Congo and its people. John Dunlop, an
Irish veterinary surgeon, was tinkering with his son's bicycle in
Belfast and accidentally discovered how to make an inflatable rubber
tire for the bike. He set up a tire company in 1890 named after himself,
Dunlop, and a new major industry was up and running. Rubber became the
new gold, and Leopold was soon laughing all the way to the bank.
The huge rainforest of Congo teemed with wild rubber, and Leopold
pressed his agents for more of it. This is when the genocide reached its
peak. Tapping wild rubber was a difficult affair, and Leopold's agents
had to use brutal force to get the people of Congo to go into the
forests and gather rubber for Leopold. Any Congolese man who resisted
the order, saw his wife kidnapped and put in chains to force him to go
and gather rubber. Or sometimes the wife was killed in revenge.
As more villages resisted the rubber order, Leopold's agents ordered
the Force Publique army to raid the rebellious villages and kill the
people. To make sure that the soldiers did not waste the bullets in
hunting animals, their officers demanded to see the amputated right hand
of every person they killed. As Hochschild puts it, "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 [of them]."
Fortunately for the people, Edmund Dene Morel, a clerk of a Liverpool
shipping line used by Leopold to ship out Congo's wealth, discovered on
his several journeys to the Belgian port of Antwerp in the 1890s that
while rubber and ivory were shipped from Congo to Antwerp, only guns and
soldiers were going from Antwerp to Congo. This marked the beginning of
his massive newspaper campaign to expose Leopold and his atrocities in
the Congo.
Morel's campaign in Europe and America finally forced Britain to ask
its consul in Congo, the Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement, to make an
investigative trip all over Congo and report. Casement's findings were
so damning that the Foreign Office in London was too embarrassed that it
could not publish the original.
Casement's description of "sliced hands and penises was far more
graphic and forceful than the British government had expected". When the
Foreign Office finally published a sanitised version of his report, an
angry Casement sent a stinking 18-page letter of protest to his
superiors in the Foreign Office, threatening to resign. He called his
superiors "a gang of stupidities" and "a wretched set of incompetent
noodles."
In the end, the Belgian government was forced to step in and buy
Congo from Leopold in 1908. Negotiations for the buy-out started in
1906. Leopold dragged his feet for two years, but finally, in March
1908, the deal was done.
"The Belgian government first of all agreed to assume [Congo's] 110
million francs worth of debt, much of them in the form of bond's Leopold
had freely dispensed over the years to [his] favourites", says
Hochschild. Nearly 32 million franc of the debt was owed to the Belgian
government itself through loans it had given years earlier to Leopold.
The government also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs towards
completing Leopold's then unfinished pet building projects. On top of
all this, Leopold got another 50 million francs (to be paid in
instalments) 'as a mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices made for
the Congo.'
"Those funds were not expected to come from the Belgian taxpayer.",
Hochschild writes. "They were to be extracted from the Congo itself."
He finishes his book on a very high note: Calling this bit The Great
Forgetting, Hochschild writes:
"From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left for Africa was
not democracy as it is practised today in countries like England, France
and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole
continent, perhaps no nation has had a harder time than the Congo in
emerging from the shadow of its past.
"When independence came, the country fared badly... Some Africans
were being trained for that distant day; but when pressure grew and
independence came in 1960, in the entire territory there were fewer than
30 African university graduates. There were no Congolese army officers,
engineers, agronomists or physicians. The colony's administration had
made few other steps toward a Congo run by its own people; of some 5,000
management-level positions in the civil service, only three were filled
by Africans."
Yet on the day of independence, King Baudouin, the then monarch of
Belgium, had the gall to tell the Congolese in his speech in Kinshasa:
"It is now up to you, gentlemen, to show that you are worthy of our
confidence".
No cheek could be bigger! And you could well imagine how mad the
Congolese nationalists like Patrice Lumumba were jumping.
Hochschild has written an excellent book. Africa owes him a huge debt
of gratitude. New African highly recommends the book for compulsory
reading in African schools and universities.
|