A History of The Democratic Republic of The Congo

The Magnificent African Cake

“Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost

Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.

Hear how the demons chuckle and yell

Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.”

For over twenty years, that area of land now known as The Democratic Republic of the Congo was administered as a personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium. From 1885 to 1908, Leopold and fellow investors in the colony extracted massive amounts of wealth from the Congo, and in doing so, created a regime that relied on massive human rights violations, murder, torture, rape and outright theft to achieve its ends. Arguably, the plight of the Congo Free State was one of the first truly international humanitarian crises, and serves as a prime example of European paternalistic colonialism and Social Darwinism at work.

Ultimately, international outcry forced Leopold to give up his private colony and turn it over to Belgium. However, the damage was done. The native population had been savagely depopulated, natural resources plundered, and a harsh colonial administration mainly interested in profit left in place. It took decades to undo the worst of the harm, and even to this day, the Congo is not fully recovered from all the harm caused by the colonial days. Joseph Conrad recorded a reasonably accurate account of oppression and evil in the Congo in his well known book Heart of Darkness, while other activists were tackling the problem of the Congo head on.

Museums are often a repository of the past, a place where long dead cultures can live again, and where artifacts and records can tell the many diverse and intertwined stories that make up history. One should expect a museum to be a useful source of information on the past and to tell a well rounded story. One might expect Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa to be a showcase of the history of Belgian involvement in the Congo, and in light of modern sensibilities to reflect the reality of Belgium's roll in The Congo Free State. However, there is no such luck there, as the best one might find is this little brief that tells a history so sanitized as to be worthy of Stalin.

One might argue this is typical of the legacy of Western colonialism in Africa and other parts of the world. A industrialized state shows up, forces their way into control of a weaker state populated by non Europeans and exploits it for all its worth, and eventually leaves either through localized force of arms or more rarely international pressure. What is left behind is often a failed state that has boundaries of convenience, which in turn encourage additional internal strife as traditional tribal and cultural boundaries are erased. In the end, the colonizing state will carefully try to forget the evils it perpetuated, and continue ignoring the terrible legacy of its actions, and continue to sanitize the story at home, rather than come face to face with the past and its modern consequences.

The story of The Congo Free State and its attendant horrors can serve well to represent the evils of Western Colonialism as a whole. It contains all the classic elements, ranging from forced or deceptive treaties with tribal leaders to control land and create treaties, oppressive colonial rule, operation of the colony for the primary purpose of maximizing profits, widespread slaughter of natives either due to their rebellion or as other punitive actions, paternalistic views towards the native population, and a desire to impose Christianity on the indigenous tribes.

In 1885, the explorations of the famed Morton Stanley (Doctor Livingston, I presume?) on behalf of Leopold II of Belgium, secured the Congo as a private colony. Stanley rather infamously convinced native chiefs who had little or no idea of what they were signing to cede their rights to Leopold, and through much trickery gained the sort of documents that modern European states considered legal, and more primitive tribes were utterly clueless about. As Leopold’s envoy, Stanley traveled the Congo meeting tribal chiefs and eventually returned to Belgium with the most outrageous sorts of treaties that gave Leopold the pretense he needed to claim the Congo.

Once he had control of the Congo, Leopold settled in to create the nightmare world that Joseph Conrad would eventually visit and memorialize in his famous book Heart of Darkness. Picture if you will, a lush part of Africa, largely unspoiled by European intervention, and watered by the mighty Congo river. Certainly, it was no utopia, but the inhabitants were by and large happy, well fed and generally comfortable. After all, their ancestors had lived there for thousands upon thousands of years, and created a stable and functioning culture that made use of the land and its resources to suit their own needs.

But that land had things the European industrial machine needed, first ivory, then rubber, and always in quantities that seemed impossible to procure. “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”

The European ivory trade was a particularly unique form of colonial exploitation, in that it required the slaughter of abundant wildlife, which of course would eventually lead to a collapse of the population of the very animal providing the valuable resource. In Europe, ivory was used for such mundane things as billiard balls, and piano keys, and finer quality things such as knife handles, pistol grips, buttons, jewelry and in artistic inlays. The demand for ivory was such, that the Congo was dotted with “trading stations” which all had a quota to fill. Here then, was the first sign of barbarism from the supposedly enlightened and Christian Europeans, as they used pressure to force native chiefs to supply every growing supplies of ivory. According to Hoschild, natives were prohibited to trade with any but Leopold’s authorized agents, who, if they didn't steal the ivory outright from villages, would pay a bare pittance in the form of cloth or measured brass rods, which served as currency. Added to the existing system of forced or nearly forced labor for porters and railway workers, and the framework of future exploitation was built.

It was the initial brutality of the ivory trade, and the harsh methods used to coerce natives to provide labor and ivory that gave rise to Conrad's infamous character Kurtz. Hochschild has theorized that the sophisticated, educated, violent and utterly mad Kurtz was a pastiche of several real people Conrad met while in the Congo, including a station manager who did in fact maintain a fence topped with the severed heads of natives who had raised his ire.

While in Europe, Leopold had proclaimed his humanitarian goals, and convinced the Western world that his aim in the Congo was strictly for the betterment of humanity, blood soaked ivory flowed into his hands, and from there, all throughout Europe, leaving countless unknowing people enjoying the fruits of lethal forced labor, all in the name of piano keys and false teeth. But while ivory jump started the horrors of Leopold's Congo, something much more important and useful was just around the corner.

It is a given that a colonial state exists not to enrich itself, but rather to serve as a constant source of raw materials and a captive market for the mother country, so when the rubber boom happened, The Congo Free State suddenly became a major source of a product that would in no way benefit itself, or provide the industry rubber was fueling.

It is difficult to think of it now, in a world with all manner of synthetic plastics and artificial rubber, but there was a time when industry and transportation depended on a rather sticky plant sap, which when treated with a bit of heat and sulfur became a valuable waterproofing agent, electrical insulator and vehicle tire. Rubber was the source of top quality rain gear, tires for the recently fashionable bicycle and in a few short years that new fangled automobile thing. But it also coated untold millions of mile of telegraph, telephone and electrical wires snaking their way around the globe like some sort of 19th Century Medusa. Without those wires, the burgeoning industrial state would come to a grinding halt as messages slowed to a crawl, and giant electric motors that drove factories where once steam engines had belched their smoke grew silent. All this and more required vast quantities of rubber, and Leopold wanted to provide as much of it as his natives could be forced to extract.

The rubber boom was a peculiar beast. Rubber can be extracted from a particular vine, or from a type of tree. In each case, being plants, such things can be grown in nice controlled plantations, instead of relying on random harvest from wild jungles. However, it takes time to grow the plants to maturity, so Leopold was racing against the development of other commercial plantations to get his product to market.

LANDOLPHIA Klainei Pierre is a vine like rubber plant , which due to its presence in the Congo would lead to untold human pain and misery. Growing randomly in the jungles of the Congo region, the rubber vine gave off a reddish sap, which would be gathered, roughly processed and eventually make its way to the hungry markets of Europe. Its reddish color may be fitting, as it represents the blood of the millions of innocent Congolese who suffered due to its demand.

Leopold's agents imposed rubber quotas in their districts, and forced tribal chiefs to secure them by any means necessary. Eventually this system of forced labor and virtual slavery proved to be so contentious that the colonial administrators would resort to the most brutish, barbaric savagery imaginable to ensure that the valuable rubber would continue to flow.

Most infamously was the severing of hands of those who failed to meet production quotas, in addition hostages in the form of wives and children would be held to ensure that the men forced into labor would return with their established quota. Heart wrenching images of these hostages and persons mutilated as punishment fill a section of Hoschild's book, and are as gruesome as one might imagine. One such image features two naked women chained together as they are taken into custody as a surety against the return of their husbands, and another of a father staring forlornly at the severed and and foot of his five year old daughter. These images and more poured out of the Congo, taken by concerned missionaries or travelers who were seeking to bring proof of the evils of the Congo to the same world that had recently heralded Leopold as a selfless humanitarian.

An unattributed article in the November 24, 1909 New York Times briefly tells of the travels of one Reverend Doctor William Leslie who had been missionaries in the Congo for a number of years. Doctor Leslie testified to the horrors of the Belgian colonial regime, attesting to the severing of hands as punishment, even that of children. By the time the article was published, the plight of the Belgian Congo had become a humanitarian crisis of international proportions.

It is interesting to note that in a world that considered non Europeans to be inferior persons, in some cases barely more than animals, that the Congo could in fact raise an international outcry. This is testimony to the sheer brutality of Leopold's rule, and of the extraordinary methods he employed. But it is also a testimony to the sheer will of a dedicated group of persons who worked relentlessly to expose the truth of the Congo.

Men such as Doctor Leslie were joined by other missionaries, social activists, and concerned persons in pounding the warning drums of the horrors of colonial rule in the Congo, and even inspired Mark Twain to direct his sharp edged pen against Leopold. In King Leopold's Soliloquy, Twain writes a satirical narrative as if from the voice of Leopold, which opens with “If I had them by the throat! [Hastily kisses the crucifix, and mumbles] In these twenty years I have spent millions to keep the press of the two hemispheres quiet, and still these leaks keep on occurring. I have spent other millions on religion and art, and what do I get for it? Nothing. Not a compliment. These generosities are studiedly ignored, in print. In print I get nothing but slanders -- and slanders again -- and still slanders, and slanders on top of slanders! Grant them true, what of it? They are slanders all the same when uttered against a king.”

The rest of the Soliloquy is filled with “Leopold's” rantings, and each is cited to a journal article, pamphlet or other direct source, which damns Leopold with each additional source. In Twain's typical fashion, he held the truth aloft like some sort of still beating heart of an Aztec sacrifice and showed it to the world. Leopold had spent decades trying to convince the world of the nobility of his Congo rule. He purported to have fought the slave trade (truthfully, he did drive out Arabic slave traders, but only for the purpose of cementing his own control over the labor of the area), to have brought Christianity to a dark corner of the continent (a typical colonialist ambition, and in this case, the missionaries themselves helped condemn Leopold's actions.), and that his sole aim in governing the Congo was to bring civilization to a primitive area. Despite the best efforts of Leopold's vast propaganda machine, even the king himself was “slandered”. It could be that Leopold even believed the vast lies he had spread around the globe, or at least the principal of them. He certainly wanted to have a colony, and to bring his little European nation to the same table as the great powers, each holding overseas possessions, but like a petulant child finally given a puppy to make him be quiet, Leopold prove incapable of taking care of what was his, and instead caused it great torment and suffering.

Eventually, pubic outcry and internal pressure forced Leopold to cede (or rather, to sell) the Congo to Belgium to operate as a real colony, instead of a privately owned fiefdom. In doing so, Leopold first destroyed all records of his administration there, refused to give accounting of the income of the area, and engaged in much financial chicanery with the Belgian government. In the end, he was paid a absurd sum of money to surrender control, said sum coming both from the Belgian treasury, and to be extracted from the Congo itself. While the ruler had changed, the nightmare wasn't fully over.

While Belgium took control over the Congo in 1908, it took another 52 years for the colony to gain its independence. A gradual reform process took place, so that as the old regime was purged, and a new one took its place life improved for the Congolese people. However, Belgium still had a rather absurdly paternalistic view of its colony, as seen in in the infamous children's book Tintin In the Congo. This absurd bit of work, which the author later regretted writing is a cliched work showing an enlightened white man traveling among the primitive blacks of the Congo and demonstrating the superiority of his way of life and mocking the primitive tribal existence of the natives.

After WWII, when colonial states the world over started agitating for independence, one might have expected Belgium to start considering how to rid itself of its overseas possessions, but despite growing demands for independence, they drug their feet, until 1960, when a nationalist movement voted to claim independence. However, the newly minted nation was not ready to take over its own affairs, and soon plunged into civil war and violence, which the region is still trying to work through.

This then is the legacy of Leopold and of Western Imperialism. Massive parts of the world are still left unstable and reeling from violence and civil unrest. From the 19th Century until WWII, the nations of Europe, and to a lesser extent, the United States plundered the non white world. Africa was carved up like a Christmas turkey, China was destabilized and stripped of sovereignty, nations were overthrown in the name of fruit growers and profit, the Philippines were civilized with the Krag, and millions of native persons died of direct murder, starvation, privation and torture, all in the name of feeding raw materials to the western industrial machine.

One might argue that industrialization and capitalism drove this Imperialism, but it goes much deeper than a search for a profit, and a perversion of Locke's ideas on capitalism. While Africa laid bare the “Heart of Darkness” within the Western world, it was also the victim of a perverse pairing of social Darwinism and Christianity. Social Darwinism insisted that various “races” of people were various stages of evolution, with white Europeans being the most advanced form, and the blacks of Africa being the least evolved form of humanity. It then fell to the white man to take up his “burden” and to enlighten the poor pitiful savage of Africa. It also permitted them to exploit these “less evolved” peoples as little more than animals, for the common view held them as little more than savage brutes. Additionally, Christianity has always depended on active missionary work to perpetuate and propagate its dogma and methodology. When faced with a continent full of unsaved savage primitives, then again, the white man must take up his burden and bring the Word of God to these poor savages, and so save his soul, which is an important step forward on the social evolutionary tree.

In the end, this white man's burden of bringing civilization and soul saving salvation to the less advanced (and non Christian) corners of Europe managed to upend the way of life of a good part of the world, and continues to be a constant source of problems in the 21st Century. Until the Western world truly steps up and takes responsibility for its past evils, the problems of political instability, war, and terrorism that plague Africa and the Mid East will continue. Our chickens have come home to roost, and the descendants of those people who stepped out of Africa, stopped in the Middle East and then kept going, and who then viciously turned on their forgotten ancestral homelands in the name of profit and God will suffer the consequences of ill considered colonial actions until things are put right.

African imperialism is the story of the entire Western world writ large, and is the apex of several thousands of years of Western civilization. Our mighty industrialized states turned on the weaker nations of the Global South, despoiled them, left them unstable when it became too inconvenient to hold them any longer and are now standing around trying to address the resulting problems, without actually admitting to what caused them. Until such time, the world will continue to suffer due to our ancestor's greed. The modern world is built on the backs of long dead people, victims and heroes, martyrs and villains, liberated people and the oppressed. The latter half of the 20th Century and into the 21st has been one where “Freedom” and “Democracy” are the two constant buzzwords. Those parts of the world that gave all and gained nothing deserve a chance to have their place in the sun as well. Perhaps the 21st Century will lead to repairing of the crimes of the 19th.