A History of the World (72 page)

Burton, Speke and Livingstone would have been aghast at the consequences of their heroic and lonely voyages. They might have thought it unlikely this land would soon be taken over by Europeans. Malaria, yellow fever, thick forests, wild beasts, hostile natives and ferocious heat had so far kept most outsiders at bay. This was the interior of what was called, without any European self-consciousness, the ‘Dark Continent’. But Stanley, who was in Africa when the Brussels conference was held, was a very different cast of man. He was ambitious for worldly success and, spurned by the British, was easily wooed by Leopold II. Within five years of the conference Stanley and his Belgian team had carved a river through the rock and jungle to reach the huge and navigable waterway of the Upper Congo. Soon riverboats would be using it to trade, to create small settlements and to reach one-sided, bogus ‘treaties’ with local chieftains.

Even in the 1880s, the legality of simply taking a vast slice of Africa for one’s personal empire (the parliament of Belgium had made it clear it had no wish to be involved) was controversial. But Leopold’s serpentine diplomacy won him the support of the US President. France and Portugal, who both had interests in the area, were furious, but Leopold played off the European powers against each other. It helped that nobody felt threatened by Belgium. So Leopold won the backing of Bismarck’s Germany and then of the British. The ‘International Association of the Congo’, flying an old Congo king’s flag, became in effect a shell company for Leopold’s new empire. In 1885 the Belgian parliament backed his scheme and he began to call himself ‘King-Sovereign of the Congo Free State’. Shares were sold and funds raised, though Leopold retained personal control. Soon, at terrible human cost, a railway was being blasted from the coast to the safe waters beyond the huge rapids and falls that divided the mighty Congo River from the sea.

Armed traders poured into the belly of Africa, first buying up all the ivory they could find. Chiefs were fooled into signing over their lands. Villagers were cajoled, bullied and threatened so they would hand over their supplies of food and ivory. Elephants were hunted to near-extinction in all the areas the whites could reach. The rule of the rope and the whip reached deep into the Congo; the supposed humanitarian crusade had become a new form of slavery.

Ivory was hugely valuable because it was used for everything from
false teeth to piano keys, but once the pneumatic bicycle tyre had been invented, rubber – which grew wild, the sap of creepers, across the Congo – was even more so. Native Africans were forced to deliver ever greater amounts of the sticky, unpleasant gum. If they seemed reluctant, their wives and children would be held as hostages. Those who protested – and there were rebellions – were mowed down with the new fast-action rifles and machine-guns, or strung from trees, or whipped to death. A brutal native army, officered by Belgians, cut the hands off those it had killed so as to claim a financial bounty. Often, to make up the numbers or out of pure sadism, hands and ears were cut off the living.

Away from their families, their priests and their neighbours, out of reach of newspaper reporters, ordinary Belgian men turned into the perpetrators of massacres. It was a story not so different from the transformation of quiet Lutheran shopkeepers and Swabian farm-hands into SS killers in Nazi extermination camps. Congolese were like Jews, not quite human. Society’s restraints had been stripped away. ‘Nobody’ was watching. From Antwerp off went adventurers, guns and ammunition, along with shackles and manacles, to the Congo. What came back were cargoes of ivory and rubber, and huge profits, including for Leopold, who began splurge-spending, not just on mistresses and luxuries but on expanding his royal palace and on new buildings to impress his Belgian subjects.

The apparent success of Leopold’s audacious gamble caused worry and jealousy elsewhere in Europe, and the ‘scramble for Africa’ began. The British had been mainly settled in the far south of the continent, a much easier climatic and geographical area for Europeans, living uneasily alongside Dutch Boers and native people. In the far north, the French had begun to seize Algeria in 1830, and the Suez Canal was being built with French and British money during 1859–69.

But it was Leopold’s rubber bonanza, and the discovery of diamonds around the Orange River in South Africa, followed in the 1880s by a gold rush, that turned expansion into a frenzy. The French pushed into West Africa, into countries such as Chad, Senegal and Mali that had been at the core of earlier African civilizations, as they tried to link the river basin of the Niger with their North African possessions across the Sahara. The British proceeded north from South Africa, through today’s Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Malawi, trying to link the
Cape with Egypt in a huge north–south stripe of control. Germany, late into the game, seized chunks of the remaining carcass – Tanganyika, Togoland, Namibia. From the 1890s until 1914, the frenzy caused snarling and squabbling between the European powers. Germany’s unsatisfied hunger was one of the causes of the First World War.

From the ravaged rainforests of the Congo Basin, stripped of rubber and elephants, then depopulated by the Belgian slaughter, to the brutal regimes that emerged from the humiliation of conquest and exploitation, the ‘scramble for Africa’ was late imperialism with almost no redeeming aspects. Some of the worst behaviour seen in modern Africa, from the use of child soldiers (a Belgian idea) to the amputation of rebels’ arms, feet or hands, originated at this time. The lines on the map drawn back home in Europe, dividing tribes and language groups, are at least partly responsible for the sequence of failed states, unable to command loyalty, that litter contemporary Africa. True, European doctors brought drugs and medicines that began to turn the tables on ancient African diseases; but these same drugs allowed Europeans to enter parts of the continent, and exploit them, for the first time. Africa was less populous, and as soon as medically protected and industrially armed people arrived, almost completely helpless. To give him a kind of cold credit, Leopold realized this early and instinctively.

His Congolese empire was so barbaric that word got out, and European protests grew. The story of the writers and campaigners who publicized the horrors of the Belgian Congo is an impressive one. A former shipping clerk called Edmund Morel, who had spotted the disparity between the cargoes leaving and arriving in Antwerp – only guns and ammunition going out, lucrative ivory and rubber coming back – was a key leader in the agitation, setting up the Congo Reform Association. Morel was a ‘good European’ pendant to hang against Leopold. Other famous men, including the British–Polish novelist Joseph Conrad and the later Irish nationalist Roger Casement, were also influential, though the Christian nonconformist tradition was more important than any one individual. This became the first humanitarian campaign of the modern age, an Edwardian equivalent of Live Aid or Amnesty International.

The steady rain of horror stories in European and American newspapers infuriated Leopold. He reacted by bullying, bribing and hiring
his own propagandists, but none of it worked. When a commission of inquiry he set up himself failed to whitewash the story, he eventually gave up and sold his private empire to the Belgian state, after which reforms began. Adam Hochschild, the American writer who has written a careful modern history of Leopold’s empire, quotes calculations suggesting that between 1880 and 1920 murder, starvation, disease and a falling birthrate cut the human population of the Congo by about half: ‘That would mean . . . that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.’
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Stuffed animals, uniforms, chains and native loot are on show at one of Leopold’s tasteless, rather grotesque buildings on the outskirts of Brussels. The people of Belgium, quite understandably, have done their level best to forget this clever and remarkably unpleasant monarch. But the most dramatic act of imperial chaos was performed not by a latecomer, but by the originator of modern imperialism.

Opium, War and Tragedy

The story started, however, with a Chinese victory over the British, masterminded by one of the most intriguing and tragic figures of the nineteenth century, Lin Zexu, or ‘Commissioner Lin’, as he is mostly remembered. The scene was a small village downriver from the great city of Canton, a world of water, grey-green, hot, misty, vibrating with mosquitoes, smelling of mud. Lin, a large man with a loud laugh and a substantial moustache, was overseeing the destruction of a huge drugs haul. On the orders of the Chinese emperor, he was meticulously disposing of twenty thousand chests of opium, worth many fortunes.

Getting rid of so much of the sticky, strong-smelling dark drug was very difficult. Lin had a team of five hundred digging huge pits, lined with stones and timber. The wooden chests were upended. The balls of opium, bound in poppy leaves, were then crushed underfoot and thrown into the pits, where they were dissolved in water with salt and lime, stirred into a foul-smelling porridge, before being allowed to trickle into a stream, then into the sea. There was so much opium that the job took three weeks to complete. Lin, who was an amateur poet
as well as a popular and successful government official, had already composed a prayer to the sea, apologizing for the pollution and advising fishes and other sea creatures to go and hide somewhere safe until the opium was dissolved.
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This was the finale of Commissioner Lin’s dogged campaign against foreign merchants in Canton, mainly but not entirely British, as he tried to bring an end to the opium trade. The Chinese were not the first users of opium, or even early adopters. The bitter, gritty powder that comes from white poppy seeds had been used in classical times and around the Arab world. It had been grown in India under the Mughals and shipped across Asia by Indian and Dutch merchants. Even as Lin’s men were emptying their wooden chests into the Pearl River, it was being used in Britain too. Writers such as Thomas de Quincey and poets such as Coleridge and Crabbe were addicts. The British conqueror of India, Robert Clive, died of an overdose. Opium had been prescribed as laudanum, a liquid ‘medicine’ that was also very popular among working-class men and women struggling to adapt to the industrial revolution. It was even being given to babies to stop them crying. But only the Chinese had moved in large numbers to a new way of taking the drug – smoking it, mixed with tobacco. This produced a stronger, more addictive and therefore much more dangerous high – the difference has been compared to snorting cocaine and smoking ‘crack’.

No one knows for sure how many Chinese men (for it was mostly a male preoccupation) had become addicted by the 1830s. Estimates at the time varied between four and twelve million. Whatever the true figure, everyone thought the rate of addiction was growing fast, despite a ferocious edict against the trade issued by the emperor in 1799. As a boy, Lin had seen the effects of the drug in his home province of Fujian, where it turned hardworking men into dazed zombies. He became a passionate anti-drugs campaigner. He was also a rising star of Chinese bureaucracy who had put down a peasant revolt by persuasion, and was known as ‘Blue Sky’ because of his reputation as a rare uncorrupted official. Appointed to confront the problem in Canton by the emperor, Lin had arrived with a sophisticated mix of carrots and sticks. The carrots included an eighteen-month amnesty for drug addicts and a refuge for smokers trying to kick the habit. The sticks included the death penalty for pushers – slow strangulation for
Chinese, decapitation for foreigners.

But the most important sticks were for beating foreign traders with. For opium was pouring in from British India, where the new colonial power had taken over the Mughal poppy fields. To start with, it was an unofficial and surreptitious trade, which the officially sanctioned British East India Company deplored. There was a modest amount of smuggling, mostly through the one gateway for foreign merchants into imperial China, the so-called factories, a small quarter of trading sheds, houses and courtyards, just outside Canton. But then global economics kicked in.

The biggest British addiction was not opium but tea, which was then grown only in China. This benign national obsession, which continues to this day and had played such a strange role in the loss of the American colonies, was both expensive and very lucrative for the British government. During the early nineteenth century it taxed tea at 100 per cent of its value, at times bringing in enough to cover half the cost of its global war machine, the Royal Navy. The Chinese, however, had long refused to buy manufactured British goods to balance the value of the imported tea, so a huge and potentially ruinous outpouring of British silver and gold was happening instead. That was what really worried London. To begin with, compared with tea and silver, opium was a sideshow.

Then those laudanum-addicted factory workers became part of the story. The British cotton mills, producing cheap clothing, had a ready market in India. If Indian opium brought silver back from China, then India could buy cotton – and other goods – from Britain, and Britain could pay for her tea. It was the kind of multiple trade suddenly opened up by industrialism. Silver for tea – bad for the British – became a four-way minuet of tea, opium, cotton and silver – which was very good for the British. The British East India Company sold opium in India to ‘country merchants’, independent traders whose ships then took it to feed the growing Chinese market. When the Company’s monopoly was finally abolished, this still surreptitious drug trade became a flood.

This was what had caused the crisis that brought Lin to Canton in the first place. The poor Commissioner thought he was merely stamping out an evil addiction. In fact, he was about to set two empires at war.

The Opium Wars are remembered as the worst the British Empire engaged in, a ruthless attack on the territory, morality and sovereignty of a dozing, decaying and incompetent China. In China to this day, the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, which ended the first Opium War, humiliated the emperor and kicked open the ocean-front doors of his empire to British trade, is remembered as a national humiliation. The Communist rulers from 1949 onwards used the one-sided treaty as a prime example of how the country’s final Qing dynasty had failed the Chinese people. In the West, including Britain, the evil of the trade in opium, cynically peddled alongside missionary tracts, is regarded as one of the imperial exploits for which there can be no excuse.