Congo (11 page)

To start with, its head of state lived more than six thousand kilometers (about 3,700 miles) to the north, a four-week journey by ship from his empire—a journey that he himself, by the way, never undertook. From his investiture in 1885 to his death in 1909, Leopold II never set foot in his Congo. In view of the inherent risks to personal health engendered by such a journey at the time, that is hardly surprising. The heads of state of other European powers did not travel to their recently acquired holdings in Central Africa either. The more curious fact is that the Belgian king, unlike his colleagues, was the complete and absolute ruler over his overseas territory. Kaiser William I, Queen Victoria, and Jules Grévy, president of France’s Third Republic, also ruled over vast stretches of Africa in 1885, but none of
them owned those areas personally. Their colonial policies were not a private matter but a government affair, watched over by parliament (chamber of deputies) and cabinet. But the Belgian king ruled over the new state in a personal capacity.

Officially, the Kingdom of Belgium at that point still had nothing to do with Congo; it only happened to share a head of state with that remote tropical backwater. In Belgium, Leopold was a constitutional monarch with limited powers; in Congo he was an absolute ruler. This extremely personalized regime made him more closely resemble a fifteenth-century king of the Kongo Empire than a modern European monarch. And he acted as though he truly did
own
this empire of his.

Leopold’s acquisition of so much power, incidentally, took place almost by sleight of hand. The European superpowers had not recognized him, but his Association Internationale du Congo, as sovereign administrator over the Congo basin. Yet when he abandoned that paper tiger for what it was after the Berlin Conference and began behaving ostentatiously as ruler of the Congo Free State, no one seemed to protest. People saw him as a great philanthropist with a great many ideals and even more means at his disposal.

On the ground, however, things went quite differently. His ideals turned out to be rather pecuniary, his means often extremely shaky. At first, the Congo Free State existed only on paper. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, Leopold had no more than fifty stations, each of which ruled—in theory, at least—over a territory the size of the Netherlands. In actual practice, large parts of the territory eluded his effective occupation. Katanga was still largely in the hands of Msiri, Tippo Tip was still lord and master to the east, and various native leaders refused to bow to his authority. Until the very end of the Free State itself, the number of representatives of his government remained limited. By 1906 there were only fifteen hundred European state officials among a total of three thousand whites
(the rest were missionaries and traders) in the country.
¹

Indicative of the sketchy state of affairs was that no one knew exactly where the borders of Leopold’s empire lay. Least of all Leopold himself. When it came to those borders, he had a tendency to change his mind. Before the Berlin Conference that, of course, was understandable: nothing had as yet been fixed. On August 7, 1884, he, along with Stanley, had drawn up a preliminary sketch of the future territory at the royal villa in Oostende. Stanley unfolded the very tenuous map he had made after his African crossing, a large blank roll showing only the Congo River and its hundreds of shoreline villages. It was to this sheet of paper that the king and Stanley added a few hastily penciled lines. It could almost not have been more arbitrary. There was no natural entity, no historical inevitability, no metaphysical fate that predestined the inhabitants of this area to become compatriots. There were only two white men, one with a mustache, the other with a beard, meeting on a summer afternoon somewhere along the North Sea coast to connect in red pencil a few lines on a big piece of paper. Nevertheless, it was that map that Bismarck would approve is a few weeks later and that would set in motion the process of international recognition.

On December 24, 1884, the king pulled out his pencil once again. He was on the verge of losing to the French the area to the north of the Congo’s mouth, a region for which he had entertained great hopes and that he would surrender only with pain in his heart. As compensation, on that dark day before Christmas, he set about annexing another area: Katanga. Quite literally, annexation in this case meant poring over a map and thinking, like that mythical first landowner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s: “Ceci est à moi” (This belongs to me). Not a single soldier was involved. It was a game of Risk, not of Blitz. So Katanga it was, Katanga it would have to be. Leopold was not particularly delighted. Katanga consisted of savanna, with less ivo
ry to be found than in the rain forest. Only decades later would it become clear that the earth there abounded in ores and minerals. But Leopold simply doodled it into the picture.

In 1885 France and England approved the new borders. Which is not at all to say, however, that they would be incontestable from then on. During the twenty years that followed, a great many territorial disputes would arise: with France about Ubangi, with England about Katanga, and with Portugal about Luanda, the area that bordered on Angola. And as though that were not enough, during the first years of the Free State, Leopold tried to press on to the headwaters of the Zambezi River, to Lake Malawi, Lake Victoria, and the headwaters of the Nile, in fact to the whole area to the east of his holdings. His lust for land was insatiable. Why all the hurry? His African state was still extremely shaky. Wouldn’t it have been better for him to clean up his own internal backyard before thinking about moving on to something else? After all, his means were considerable but they were not inexhaustible, were they? All true enough, but Leopold realized that soon there would no more opportunities for new acquisitions in Central Africa. An understandable concern. As easily as he had swept together hundreds of thousands of square kilometers before 1885, as ploddingly did that go afterward. Until 1900 he kept alive the hope of further expansion, but none of his plans succeeded. He had his sights set on the Nile in particular, and even made a grab for the Sudan, where he apparently hoped to become a new-fangled pharaoh. But Uganda and Eritrea attracted him as well. And meanwhile, outside of Africa, he also lay in wait to appropriate the Philippines or parts of China . . . .

Congo’s definitive borders would be established only in 1910. But then what is definitive? In 1918 the map was altered anew when Belgium received Rwanda and Burundi (formerly part of German East Africa) as mandated territories. During World War I, the eastern border had already been tampered
with. A piece of Katanga was added in 1927. And even as late as 2007, discussions were still going on concerning the exact border between Congo and Angola.

T
ODAY, THE
C
ONGO
F
REE
S
TATE
is notorious not so much for its vague borders as for its crushing regime. And rightly so. Along with the turbulent years before and after 1960, the year of independence, and the decade between 1996 and 2006, that period is seen as the bloodiest in the nation’s history. But during the first few years, there was none of that. From 1885 to 1890 history ran its course in relative calm. Europeans were still engaged primarily in trading in ivory, and made use of the stations established by Stanley beginning in 1879. The governing of the state itself remained a rather minimalist affair.

Yet things were not all sweetness and light. Some areas were marked by outspoken native resistance to the new authorities, but that resistance did not essentially differ from what had been seen in the past. Expeditions were attacked, local chieftains refused to fly the newcomers’ flag, and they besieged government stations. It was hardly coincidental that these acts of resistance took place largely in areas on the periphery, such as Kwango in the southwestern Congo, parts of Katanga in the south, and Uélé to the northeast. There the traditional power structures had been less eroded by the turbulent events along the river, there one still had relatively robust empires. Which were, as that is called, then forcefully “pacified.”
²

Leopold II invested a great deal of his own money in expanding his state, particularly in the new outposts, which helped to extend his grasp on the territory. It constituted, however, an extremely light form of governance. He set up no bureaucratic state apparatus, but only created the minimum conditions needed to allow free trade to flourish. Costs were to be kept as low and profits as high as possible. His imperialism was based on decidedly economic motives. The revenues for which he hoped were not meant to develop the Free State, but to be
funneled off to Brussels. Later that was often seen as avarice, and not entirely without good reason. Yet it is only part of the story. Leopold used one of his states, Congo, to provide the other, Belgium, with new élan. He dreamed of economic prosperity, social stability, political grandeur, and national pride. In Belgium, that is—near was his shirt, but nearer yet his skin. To reduce one’s view of his enterprise to a case of unbridled self-enrichment would be to do injustice to the national and social motives for his imperialism. Belgium was still young and unstable; it had lost huge sections of its territory in Dutch-Limburg and Luxembourg, the Catholics and liberals of his day fought each other tooth and nail, and the proletariat was beginning to stir: altogether, this formed an explosive cocktail. The country was like a “boiler without a safety valve,” Leopold thought.
³
Congo was to become that safety valve.

The place in Congo where the new state was most highly visible was, without a doubt, the town of Boma. In 1886 it became the country’s first real capital. Today, time there seems to have stood still. There are few places in Africa where nineteenth-century colonialism has remained so visible. In 1926 it surrendered its status as capital to Léopoldville, and as port of call it was eventually outclassed by Matadi. To walk through Boma today is to wander through time. At the waterfront is an enormous baobab that has been poking its gnarly limbs at the sky for centuries. A little farther along one finds the old post office, dating from 1887. Like almost all buildings from that day it stands on cast-iron pilings, to prevent rotting and to ward off insects. Atop a little hill nearby is “the cathedral,” a pompous name for an extremely modest chapel built entirely of iron. The walls, doors, and windows consist of prefabricated plates that were sent from Belgium in 1889 and assembled on the spot, as a sort of IKEA furnishing
avant la lettre
. But most impressive of all is the governor general’s residence from 1908. That too was built on iron pilings and constructed of prefab metal plates; around them, however, was built a beautiful wooden façade
featuring a spacious verandah, high-beamed rooms, plaster ceilings, and windows of skillfully cut glass. It was from here that the Free State was run: the governor general’s instructions were given to his provincial governors, who passed them in turn to their district commissioners in the interior, and from there they went to the
chef de secteur
and, further down, to the
chef de poste
. At Boma, letters were postmarked, statistics compiled, and soldiers trained. Cases were judged and a regime was founded. It served, in truth, as the hinge between Congo and the outside world. And it was here, a few decades later, that the inhabitants, who had already grown accustomed to steamboats, printing presses, and marching bands, saw the strangest thing that had ever been seen: an automobile. A British industrialist had shipped in an eight-cylinder Mercedes with spoked wheels, followed a few years later by a LaSalle from the United States. “For his wife,” the people of Boma will tell you today; the wrecks of those old-timers, the first two cars in Congo, still stand rusting beneath a lean-to just outside of town.

But it was not just the inhabitants of Boma who came in contact with the European way of life. Here and there around the country young Congolese were entering service as “boys.” In that way they literally made their way into the white man’s home, kitchen and bedroom. They saw that he did not sleep on a mat, but a mattress. They collected his sheets and his dirty laundry. They scrubbed sweat stains out of shirts and urine stains out of underpants. Hanging on the walls they saw photographs, of which they later told their friends: “When I was in the white man’s house I saw people hanging straight up on the wall, but they couldn’t speak, they remained silent. In fact, those were the dead. The white man had taken them prisoner.”
⁴
It was an awkward acquaintanceship. Boys wondered why their boss swallowed pills every day and did not eat with his hands, why he became so angry about a spot on his glass, and why he always left the fish’s head on his plate. (Wasn’t that the tastiest
part, after all? How wonderful to feel the little bones crack between your teeth and hear the eyes pop in your mouth.) In the evening they saw him writing beside a lamp, smoking a pipe or putting on a pair of spectacles. How peculiar, how peculiar it all was. The boy learned to cook in the Western fashion, he set the table, washed the dishes, and made the beds. He made sure that while doing the ironing—another bizarre habit!—no holes were burned in the linen. When the boss went on a journey he was often allowed to go along, and so found himself in places he would never have known otherwise. A good boy often received kudos, sometimes a beating, but rarely autonomy. Leopold had sworn to put an end to the Swahilo-Arab slave trade, but in essence there was no difference between the life of a Central African domestic slave on the Arab peninsula and a boy in the household of a European official in Congo.

And this was the life Disasi Makulo had led since Stanley entrusted him to Anthony Swinburne. He could have done worse, for Swinburne was patient and amiable and the station at Kinshasa comfortable and lively. Neither boy nor boss, however, however, could have guessed that their lives were about to be brutally upturned. But Leopold II had decided to do just that.