King Leopolds Ghost:
A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1998)
Edmund Dene Morel
Brought face to face with evil, Morel does not turn away. Instead, what he sees determines the course of his life and the course of an extraordinary movement, the first great international human rights movement of the twentieth century. Seldom has one human being—impassioned eloquent, blessed with brilliant organizing skills and nearly superhuman energy—managed almost single handedly to put one subject on the worlds front pages for more than a decade.
2
This is a story of that movement, of the savage crime that was itstarget, of the long period of exploration and conquest that preceded it and the way the world has forgotten one of the great mass killings of recent history.
2-3
AHs book began from his having read a footnote in a book about Mark Twain, said that Clemmons had been part of a decade long struggle to end the slave trade in the Congo which had taken from 7 to 10 million lives.
3
In 1960s the US CIA had covertly pulled off the murder of Patrice Lamumba the first elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo apparently the spilling of Congolese blood then was merely the more recent in a long series of imperial intrigues that had cost the Congo dearly in lives, treasures, and self-respect. [Commentary]
3
Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, had been written about the Congo
3
The Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.
4
Actors in the drama:
George Washington Williams, black American veteran, journalist, historian and evangelist
Joseph Conrad, author
William Sheppard, journalist on site
King Leopold II of Belgium
Stanley, Henry Morgan (John Rowlands)
General Henry Shelton Sanford (Sanford Fl. is his named for him)
Roger
Casement, Irish Republican & inspector in the British Foreign Office, Boma
Congo
Reform Association (created by Morel, his wife and Roger Casement)
King Leopolds Ghost: Statements
notes
pages
The worst of the bloodshed in the Congo took place between 1890 and 1910, but its origins lie much earlier, when Europeans and Africans first encountered each other there.
5
Mare Tenebroso the Sea of Darkness lay all south of the Canaries a region of uttermost dread.
6
In the 1440s, Lisbons shipbuilders developed the Caravel, a compact vessel particularly good at sailing into the wind. Although rarely more than a hundred feet long, this sturdy ship carried explorers far down the west coast of Africa, where no one knew what gold, spice, and precious stones might lie.
7
Diego Co –in 1482– discovered the estuary of the Congo River, the largest all-tropical river in Africa
The impression its vastness made on him and his men.
7
For the space of 20 leagues [the river] preserves its fresh water unbroken by the briny billows which encompass it on every side; as if this noble river had determined to try its strength in pitched battle with the ocean itself, and alone deny it the tribute which all other rivers in the world pay without resistance.
8
The Kingdom of the Kongo was roughly three-hundred miles square, comprising territory that today lies in several countries.
8
In 1491,an expedition of awed Portuguese priests and emissaries.marked the first sustained encounter between Europeans and a black African nation.
8
The Kingdom of the Kongo had been place for at least a hundred years before the Portuguese arrived. Its monarch, the ManiKongo, was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders.
8
As in much of Africa, the kingdom (of the Kongo) had slavery. The nature of African slavery varied from one area to another and changed over time, but most slaves were people captured in warfare. Others had been criminals.
9
When the Atlantic slave trade began decimating the Kongo, that nation was under the reign of a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba Alfonso, who had gained thethrone in 1506 and ruledfor nearly forty years.
11
pivotal time in Kongolese history as slave fever begun by the Portuguese who having arrived in 1491, by 1500 were buying slaves from Kongolese chiefs to supply the needs of Brazils, plantations and mines. Despite appeals to Portugal and the Pope to end slavery Alfonsos sons were taken away to school in Licnon and sold instead as slaves in Brazil.
10-15
The jig is up: how the world discovered Leopolds operations as a fraud
George Washington Williams (Afro-American Lawyer, reporter, entrepreneur) in 1890-1891 is the first person to report of the tragedy of slavery, mutilation and devastation of the Congo by Europes purported civilizing agents working for Leopold of Belgium.
An Open Letter published in Europe probably by the Dutch and widely circulated accused the Congo State of crimes against humanity by detailing abuses, wanton killing, enslavement, destruction of villages, and the bad reputation of Henry M. Stanley among the indigenous Congolese.
300 African (Congolese) porters on a forced march all died.
Hauled Ivory, decimating Elephant populations and later rubber to Boma and disassembled machine parts from Boma ( Euro-port of entry) up river on to the plateau.
Hochschild Quotes Primo Levy to the effect that:
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous arethe functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
121
It is the functionaries who carry out their instructions who may be worse than monsters.
Four factors that make terror possible & functionaries more dangerous than monsters:
Race
To Europeans, Africans were inferior beings: lazy, uncivilized, little better than animals.
Authority
Sanction by the state, monarchy and the church
Distance – distancing
oneself
In such a regime, one thing that often helps functionaries become used to it is a slight, symbolic distance –irrelevant to the victim – between and official in charge and the physical act of terror itself.
122
Efficiency
Finally, when terror is the unquestioned order of the day, wielding it efficiently is regarded as a manly virtue, the way soldiers value calmness in battle.
Hence the tolerance for terror exceeds the threshold of human decency by an interaction of factors:
1.
Race dehumanizing those you are set against
2.
Authority people smarter, better and more powerful
than me say it is so
3.
Distance having others do the terrorizing,
murders, or beatings
4. Efficiency getting used to horror by routine steps to improve performance
121-123
But brave De Le Court sprang into
the breach.
He immobilized the black demons. Sinister black heads seemed to emerge from every corner, grinding their white teeth.He fellthe supreme moment of death had come.Smiling disdainful, sublimehe looked for the last time upon the screaming horde of black demons.
Thus Charles De Le Court died in the fullness of youth in the faces of the enemy. (1897 mutiny in the Congo as told to young Belgian boys)
136
What mattered was keeping the ivory flowing back to Belgium.
137
the Congo offered a chance for a great rise in status.
137
risky
before 1895 fully one third of white Congo state agents died there.
138
Leopold had a monopoly on trade into and from the Congo, maintained an Army to suppress rebellions and insubordination called Public Force whose patrol units (seven year enlistments) were referred to as reconnaissances pacifiques and he claimed all unoccupied land in addition to the crops of occupied lands to feed the Army.
From (1893) 180 to 345 military bases in 1908.
By 1896, visitors, missionaries, and functionaries are beginning to report to the world about the abuses of Europeans in the Congo.
August 1890, Joseph Conrad, went upstream on the Congo as a pilot on a riverboat and his experiences end up in The Heart of Darkness.
140-141
He fell ill, spent six months in the Congo and returned to Europe
141
An empty stream a great silence, and impenetrable forest. The air was warm,
thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.You
lost your way on that rivertill you thought yourself bewitched and cut off
forever from everything you had known.
Heart of Darkness
142
What is notable is how precise and detailed a description it [H of D] is of the actual facts of the case; King Leopolds Congo in 1890, just as the exploitation of the territory was getting under way in earnest.
143
railway workers described as starving
143-44
the mysterious body of a middle-aged Negro, with a bullet hole in his forehead.
This is simply the record of what Conrad saw on his walk around the rapids to Stanley Pool.
p.144.
Conrad began writing about his earlier experiences in the end of 1898-1899 after a mutiny at the Stanley falls outpost (1895) and after a publishing of an account of skulls decorating Lon Roms garden (Rom had once been station chief at Kinshasa on Aug. 2, 1890 when Conrad accompanied an ivory fetching expedition!)
145
Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature, but its author curiously, thought himself an ardent imperialist where England was concerned.
146
The horror! The horror! (Kurtz dying phrase)
Mark Twain said
the white mans notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
146.
However laden with Victorian racism [my aside: and English nationalism], Heart of Darkness remains the greatest portrait in fiction of Europeans in the scramble for Africa.
147.
Kurtz an emissary of scienceand progress.
Exterminate all the brutes!
147.
Lon Rom, in 1899 wrote Le Ngre du Congo, The Negroes of the Congo of Africans he said they are:
The product of a mindless state, its feelings are coarse, its passions rough, its instincts brutish.
148
The black man has no idea of time, and questioned on that subject,he generally responds with something stupid.
148
There are several other tantalizing parallels between Lon Rom and Mr. Kurtz. (both painters, head collectors, would-be scientists, and writers). Kurtz succeeds in getting himself adored by the Africans of the Inner Station.
149
From an 1895 diary of a Force Publique lieutenant there is a description of his fellow officer:
He makes his agents starve while he gives lots of food to the black women of his harem.Theis man wants to play the role of a second Rom.
149
Whatever the case, the moral landscape of Heart of Darkness and the shadowy figure at its center are the creations not just of a novelist but an open-eye observer who caught the spirit of a time and a place with piercing accuracy.
149.
Henry M Stanley was married in Westminster Abbey, to painter Dorothy Tennant,12 July 1890, with a case of gastritis bad enough to lay on a couch in a darkened room during the weddings reception.
151
William Sheppard Presbyterian minister (Afro American) from Virginia spent a decade in the Kuba region of the Congo up the Kasai River noting the customs and artistic productions of the peoples before and after the rubber exploitation of the region that led to systematized mutilation, death and slaughter of nearly three to five million inhabitants of the entire Congo.
152-164.
Rubber extraction and the native resistance to Belgian demands led to a gruesome discovery – the smoking for curing of 81 in all right hands!
In 1899 a reluctant Sheppard was ordered by his superiors to travel into the bushto investigate the source of the fighting.
164.
Sheppard was not the first foreign witness to see severed hands in the Congo, nor would he be the last. But the articles he wrote for missionary magazines about his grisly find were reprinted and quoted widely, both in Europe and the United States, and it is partly due to him that people overseas began to associate the Congo with severed hands.
165.
Edmund Morel, a shipping clerk in Antwerp discovers:
- A huge discrepancy in what is said and what is shipped as far as arms to the Congo
- Unaccounted for amounts of ivory and rubber far in excess of what the lading charges and invoices claim to be when compared to what sits on the docks (Someone is skimming off the top!)
- a nearly five to one (5:1) ratio with respect to the wealth that is exported from the Congo as opposed to the value of the imports of goods going to the Congo that could clearly not account for how the labor was being remunerated in the Colony. It must be forced labor – institutionalized slavery!
167-181
At the time E. D. Morel made his discoveries, most people in Europe and the US knew surprisingly little about Leopolds apparatus of exploitation. Few Europeans came home from the Congo
185.
26 journalists covered the opening of the railway in 1898 first hand and none mentioned any of the troubles.
Morel was an official for Elder Dempster, (a Liverpool based) the corporate trade monopoly, of the dependency.
185
Having confronted his boss and the president of the steamship line, EDM was relegated to being ignored, then offered raises, and eventually bribed to say nothing.
In 1901 he quit his job and took up his pen full-time, filled with determination to do my best to expose and destroy what I knew to be legalized infamyunimaginable barbaritiesresponsible for a vast destruction of human life.
186
He was twenty-eight years old.
186
John Holt, a Liverpool businessman was his patron and mentor or sorts
186
The origin of the fiery passion for justice that fueled Morel is less apparent.
187
His prodigious capacity for indignation seems to be something he was born with, as some people are born with great musical talent.
187
the greatest British investigative journalist of his time.
His hobby was collecting species of moths
Morels writing combined controlled fury with meticulous accuracy.
187
The missionaries provided some of the most horrifying accounts Morel published.
Torture, starvation and hands being severed
191
Morel also exposed the web of deceptions, large and small continually spun by Leopold and his allies.
191
the Budja tribe, he writes, became mere slavbes to the company, for rubber making occupied all their time, the victim having to search far and wide for the giant vines from which the sap is extracted.
Edgar Canisius, American trader, 34 years old, 1900
192-93
A party of men had been detailed with torches to fire every hut [in rebellious villages].As we progressed, a line of smoke hung over the jungle for many miles, announcing to the natives far and wide that civilization was dawning.
193
we had undergone six weeks of painful marching and had killed over nine hundred natives, men, women and children.
193
all for 20 tons of rubber (Ibid.)
by 1903 Parliament began to take up the Congo question Morel lobbied, Leopold was reviled in Parliament for reneging on promises, especially on ffree trade
194
Leopolds rule had been thoroughly exposed for what it was, but it remained in place.
May 1903, Parliament passed the Congo Resolution. HM Consul Roger Casement was ordered in the Congo to go upriver
195
Figure and facehe seemed to me one of the finest looking creatures I had ever seen; and his countenance had charm and distinction and a high chivalry. Knight errant he was.
Stephen Gwynn wrote of the Irishman, Sir Roger Casement, ships purser turned British Counsel in the Congo 1883-1903.
195
Roger Casement worked for Sanford, surveyor for the railway, accompanied Stanleys second expedition.
196
Casement saw much more brutality on the part of other white men in Africa.
Conrad noted meeting Casement in 1890, when they shared a room for some ten days
197
Casement never shared was a homosexual. In a poem that could never be published he wrote:
I sought by love alone to go
Where God had writ an awful no
.
I only know I cannot die
And love this love God made,
not I.
199
General Sir Hector MacDonald, decorated British serviceman, accused of homosexuality, facing court martial committed suicide in his Paris hotel room.
[sentenced for sedition (Irish Repub.), sent to Pentonville Prison and executed in 1916,
Casement kept diary of all his male encounters!
200
like his friend Casement, E.D. Morel had also been transformed by the long struggle over the Congo. In the final decade of his life he fought his bravest, loneliest battle of all.
XV A Reckoning
As E.D. Morel, Roger Casement, and their allies caught Europes attention with reports of the holocaust in central Africa, newspapers and magazines ran pictures of burned villages and mutilated bodies, and missionary witnesses spoke of the depopulation of entire districts.
The rubber boom, cause of the worst bloodletting in the Congo, began under Leopolds rule in the mid-1890s, but it continued several years after the end of his one-man regime. (1906?)
225
In the closing years of the Congo reform movement, Morel saw how much his cause was being hindered by the Entente Cordiale between Paris and London, studded with secret clauses, in which the two countries subordinated everything to preparations for a coming European war.
287
Morel was among the handful of people on either side in Europe who said openly that the war was madness. (he was sent to Pentonville Prison in 1917 for pacifism, p.282-5.)
287
although the killing in the Congo was of genocidal proportions, it was not strictly speaking.Leopolds men were looking for labor.
millions of people died.
225
In population losses on this scale, the toll is usually a composite of figures from one or more closely connected sources:
(1) murder;
(2) starvation;
(3) disease; and
(4) a plummeting birth rate.
Covered in details between
pp. 226-232
Part of the population loss in the Congo resulted, then, when families, terrorized and torn apart by the rubber companies, simply stopped having children.
232
Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who worked in a former rubber area in the 1970s, found persuasive evidence that large numbers of men had been worked to death as rubber slaves or killed in punitive raids – and he discovered the evidence in the regimes own statistics.
232
Interestingly, some estimates of population loss in the Congo made by those who saw it firsthand agreed with some of those made by more scientific methods today.
233
An official Belgian government Commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopolds state, the population of the territory had been reduced by half.
233
1920 census first ever conducted in the region.
In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts.
that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.
233
Burned villages, starved hostages, terrified refugees dying in swamps, orders for extermination – even in crass, purely monetary terms, arent these inefficient means of doing business?
but doesnt it destroy the labor force? Indeed it does.
233
in the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own.
234.
Stanley lacked something else useful in Parliament: a sense of humor. He soon resigned.
235
IT IS IN THE RAW, unedited testimony given to the Commission of Inquiry that King Leopold IIs rule is at last caught naked. There could be no excuse.
253
1913 was the final meeting of the Congo Reform Association
p. 277.
It is estimated Leopold made $1.2
Billion from his looting of the Congo.
Story-line: justice deferred
The qualities of
the books tale:
Real actions told around
heros & villains; a focal event
building to a climax of events {Parliament}
- leading to a resolution [investigations] & dnouement [transfer to Belgium].
Heros & Villians with Impact on the familiar
Joseph
Conrads
Heart of Darkness
Mark Twain
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Lord Salisbury
William Wilberforces Grandson
Baptist & Presbyterian Missionaries
Two African-American writers
Cadbury (candy) Co. (Quakers)
William Randolph Hearst
Contest between selfless good (moral outrage) &
self-serving greed that led to abuse.
Heros
Tragic Williams
Sheppard
Casement
Morel
Kawolsky (American Lawyer hired by Leopold who turned sides!)
Villians
King Leopold II of Belgium (earned $1.1 billion in todays terms) tragic family
His sister married Maximillian of Austria and went mad after 1863.
Eldest daughter married Crown Prince Rudolf (Mayerling fame).
Henry Morton Stanley, (AKA
John Rowlands), the Anglo-American chameleon
General Henry
Shelton Sanford
Congo Conquest & Controversy
1880-1913
Focal event: Parliamentary legislation, 1903, Foreign office report, Belgian Commission
A tragedy of holocaust proportions with 10 million black people dead from 1880-1914.
Thiis was the first international human rights campaign of the 20th century.
Largest civil rights movement between Abolition Movement & Suffrage, or Apartheid.
The debacle and loss of human life in the Belgian Congo was largely eclipsed by carnage & horror of WWI and thereafter forgotten.
A story of imperialism, personal ambition, fear, conquest, immorality and brutalizing forces that collided in the African tropics where cultures clashed in a search to amass personal fortunes from natives to extract equatorial sources of ivory and then rubber.
African wealth was stolen by ambitious and allegedly superior, civilized Europeans.
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