Congo (17 page)

Mokolo, a married woman, testified:

My husband’s name was Wisu and every two weeks, along with Ebobondo and Ebote, he brought the rubber from our village to the trading post at Boyeka. We always supplied twenty baskets full, but then the whites began demanding twenty-five. Our people refused, and pointed out that our village was only a small one. But the next time they showed up with only twenty baskets, the white men became angry. One of them, Nkoi [the nickname used for Ablay], threw my husband to the ground and held onto his head. The other, Ekotolongo [the nickname of Félicien Molle], began beating him with
nkekeles
[canes], three of which even broke. Almost dead, Wisu was dragged by Ebobondo and Ebote to a dugout in which they traveled to Bokotola. But before they could go ashore there, he died. I saw Wisu’s body, and you can still see the traces of my tears.
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The Free State administration contained out-and-out racists and sadists. Torture, abuses of power, and massacres oc
curred. A person like René de Permentier, an officer in the Force Publique, reveled in completely pointless bloodbaths. He had the
brousse
(jungle brush) cleared around his house so that he could shoot at passers-by from his veranda. Domestic personnel who made a mistake were slaughtered without mercy. Executions were a daily occurrence.
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Léon Fiévez, a farmer’s son from Wallonia who became a district commissioner in Équateur, indulged in bloody punitive expeditions. After only four months in public service, he had murdered 572 people.
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During one of those expeditions, within a few days, he saw to the looting and torching of 162 villages, the destruction of the local fields, and the killing of 1,346 people. He was, however, also able to claim the greatest volume of incoming rubber in all the Free State.
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The lion’s share of those Belgians who arrived to try their luck in Congo came from small provincial towns and the lower middle class. Many of them had served in the army and looked forward to adventure, fame, and fortune. But once in Congo they often found themselves alone at remote trading posts in a killing climate. The heat and humidity were relentless, the attacks of fever frequent. No one knew yet that malaria was transferred by mosquitoes. A young man like that, in the flower of his youth, might awake at night for no good reason, soaked in sweat, delirious, shivering, thinking about all those other white people who had suffered and died. He heard a jungle full of strange noises, recalled snippets of a brusque conversation with a village chieftain earlier that day, and thought back on the skittish glances of the people charged with collecting rubber, on the sinister hissing of their incomprehensible language. In his feverish visions between sleep and wakefulness he saw gleaming eyes full of suspicion, broad, shiny backs covered in tattoos, and the budding breasts of a young native girl who had smiled at him.

George Grenfell, the British Baptist who had cared for Disasi Makulo, was a keen observer of all this. For a long time
he had been one of Leopold’s fervent supporters, he had even taken upon himself the task of chairing the king’s Commission for Native Welfare, in fact nothing but a paper attempt to spread oil on troubled waters. But Grenfeld’s disaffection grew rapidly: “In view of the number of solitary posts manned by unmarried white men, with only a handful of native soldiers amid semi-docile and often cruel and superstitious peoples, it should come as no surprise if more madness comes to light. But it is the system that is to be condemned, more than the poor individual who, overpowered by fever and fear, loses control over himself and indulges in forms of intimidation in order to maintain his authority.”
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The Free State’s administration prided itself on punctuality, state officials feigned a certain equanimity, the appearance of control was held high. But writhing beneath all this were feelings of fear, depression, melancholy, lethargy, despair, and total madness. People lost their heads.

The Free State condemned misconduct in word, but in deed it could not control its subordinates. There were almost no convictions. News of what was happening in Brussels reached Boma quicker than news from the rain forest. King Leopold too sounded dismayed when initial reports of atrocities began trickling in. He said: “The abuses must stop, or I shall withdraw from Congo. I will not let myself be sullied with blood or muck. This shameful behavior must stop.”
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That did not keep him, however, from reappointing infamous brutes like Fiévez, even though the king was well aware of the man’s shameful deeds. Neither he nor his advisers nor his top officials in Boma wished to admit that the atrocities were inherent to the system employed. And yet, with profit maximization as the alpha and omega of the entire enterprise, people at all levels of the administration were pressured to collect more taxes, bring in more rubber, tighten the thumbscrews even further. The Free State system was a pyramid with Leopold II at its pinnacle, and under him the governor general at Boma and the
various administrative levels, followed by the black soldiers of the Force Publique, and, at the very base, the native in his village. The physical violence may have been limited to the lowest rungs (on the part of rapacious soldiers and bugged-out officials in the interior, on the part of brutal sentries and completely deranged minds in the jungle), but the structural violence permeated all the way to the top, even unto the king’s palace at Laeken. The official rule may have been that a native was to work no more than forty hours a month for the state, but as rubber became scarcer the natives had to go farther and farther into the jungle to collect their quota. No time was left for other forms of work. People became the state’s bondsmen. Leopold II had, at least nominally, set out to eradicate Afro-Arabic slave trading, but had replaced it with an even more horrendous system. For while an owner took care of his slave (he had, after all, paid for him), Leopold’s rubber policies by definition had no regard for the individual. One would be hard-pressed to choose between contracting the bubonic plague or cholera, but from a distance it would seem that the life of a Congolese domestic slave in Saudi Arabia or India was to be preferred to that of a rubber harvester in Équateur.

The consequences were horrendous. The fields lay fallow. Agriculture dwindled to the raising of only the most basic staples. Native commerce came to a standstill. Crafts in the process of refinement for centuries, such as iron smithing or woodcarving, were lost. The native population became listless, enfeebled, and malnourished. And so extremely susceptible to illnesses. Around the turn of the century, sleeping sickness became rampant. This illness, carried by the tsetse fly, had been known in the region for a long time, but the death rate had never been so high. It assumed truly pandemic proportions. In 1904 George Grenfell wrote: “In many districts, the current death rate is nothing less than alarming. Along the thousand miles of river (two thousand miles of shoreline) between Léopoldville and Stanleyville, after having counted the houses and made a rough
estimate, I would strongly doubt whether if one hundred thousand souls still live in all of the town and villages along the way.”
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This, it should be remembered, was once the most populous stretch of the interior. In some villages, between 60 and 90 percent of population vanished. In 1891 Lukolela, one of the oldest trading posts along the banks of the Congo, had some six thousand inhabitants; by 1903 there were fewer than four hundred.
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It is impossible to say how many people died as a direct or indirect result of Leopold’s rubber policies. There are simply no reliable figures. What’s more, there was another reason for the depopulation; many people simply went away, away from the river, away from the banks. They went to live deep in the jungle or crossed the border to remain beyond reach of the state. They too became invisible. A rare eyewitness to that first historic stream of refugees was interviewed about this in 1903:

How long ago was it that you left your houses? Was it when the big problems began, the ones you told us about?

Three years ago. This is the fourth year after we fled and came to live in this region
.

How many days must one walk to reach your own country?

Six days of brisk walking. We ran away because we could no longer live with the things they did to us. Our village chieftains were hanged, we were murdered and starved. And we worked ourselves to death in order to find rubber.
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It would be absurd in this context to speak of an act of “genocide” or a “holocaust”; genocide implies the conscious, planned annihilation of a specific population, and that was never the intention here, or the result. And the term
Holocaust
is reserved for the persecution and annihilation of the Jews during World War II. But it was definitely a hecatomb, a slaughter on a staggering scale that was not intentional, but that could have
been recognized much earlier as the collateral damage of a perfidious, rapacious policy of exploitation, a living sacrifice on the altar of the pathological pursuit of profit. When sleeping sickness ravaged the population, Leopold II called in the assistance of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the most famous center for tropical medicine of its day. He would never have done that if his intention had been to commit genocide. But that does not mean that he immediately acknowledged his responsibility in the matter. That, in fact, was something he never did.

The bloodstained rubber policy, nicknamed “red rubber,” did not have the same impact everywhere. Équateur, Bandundu, and Kasai—the western part of the Congolese rain forest—were the hardest hit. That was where the exploitation was easiest to achieve, because of the big rivers. When I once asked old Nkasi, who came from Bas-Congo, about the days of the rubber quotas, he was unable to tell me anything. “That wasn’t where we were,” he said. “That was in the Mayombe.” He may very well have been right. The Mayombe was a stretch of equatorial forest north of Boma, close to the ocean and the Portuguese enclave of Cabinda. It was one of the few places in Bas-Congo where rubber was harvested. Nkasi knew about it only by word of mouth. “The Portuguese there cut off people’s hands,” he added, but he wasn’t completely sure about that. When I went on to ask whether he had witnessed the rapid spread of sleeping sickness, however, his nod was much more confident. “Yes, I saw that. Many young people died. A nasty disease.” He repeated that final sentence again in his simple French. “C’est mauvaise maladie” (It’s a bad disease).

F
ROM
1900
ON
increasingly clear indications began coming in concerning the atrocities in the Free State. They were not immediately given credence. Protestant missionaries expressed their abhorrence in no uncertain terms, but in Belgium it was felt that they were simply frustrated about the influx of Catholic mis
sionaries and the power they had lost. In Antwerp, Edward Morel, the employee of a British shipping company, began to realize that something was very wrong in Congo: he saw ships leave without cargo (except perhaps for guns and ammunition) and return full of rubber. That seemed more like plundering than bilateral trade, didn’t it? His objections, however, were dismissed lightly, as the typical moaning of those Liverpudlian traders who never stopped whinging about the decline of free trade. Did little Belgium really stand to learn anything from the British? That’s what they wanted to know. Weren’t those imperial browbeaters in fact the worst malefactors of all, now that they had made mincemeat out of the defenseless Boers down in South Africa? The Boer War, after all, had met with disapproval in Belgium as well.

The tenor of the discussion changed a bit, however, after Roger Casement, the British consul in Boma, wrote a thoughtful but damning report in 1904. Casement was a highly respected diplomat. This was no British dockworker, but an official envoy of Great Britain, a man of great moral authority and long acquainted with the Congolese interior. His objections could no longer be dismissed; they led to major protests in the British House of Commons. Authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain publicly voiced their disapproval. One year after the report appeared, King Leopold found himself compelled to send an international, independent investigative committee to Congo. Three magistrates, one Belgian, one Swiss, and an Italian, were allowed to travel around Congo for months and carry out interviews in his Free State. They would surely absolve him of all blame. But that is not how it went. The investigative committee went to work as a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission
avant la lettre
. They listened to hundreds of witnesses, compiled plaints, and wrote a down-to-earth report in which the Free State’s policies were quite accurately dissected. It was a dry but devastating text, stating that the “taking hostage and abduction of women, the
subjugation of chieftains to forced labor, the humiliations to which they are subjected, the
chicotte
used by harvest overseers, the violent actions on the part of blacks ostensibly occupied in ‘guarding’ the prisoners” were the rule rather than the exception.
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The Brussels lawyer and professor Félicien Cattier followed the reasoning through to its most extreme conclusion: “The clearest and most incontrovertible truth arising from this report is that the state of Congo is no colonized state, barely a state at all, but a financial enterprise . . . . The colony is not administered in the best interests of the natives, nor even in the economic interests of Belgium: to provide the sovereign with the greatest possible financial gain, that was the motivation.”
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