Congo Free State

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Congo Free State was privately owned by one man who never once set foot in it. King Leopold II of Belgium ran the territory from Brussels, from 1885 to 1908, as an absolute monarch over a country that was not part of Belgium at all. In legal terms, the two were joined only in a personal union. He had convinced the other European powers, gathered at the Berlin Conference, that he was a philanthropist who would tax no trade and bring civilization to Central Africa. Behind that promise stood a different reality. How does a single king persuade rival nations to hand him most of the Congo Basin? How does a humanitarian guise become one of the greatest international scandals of the early 20th century? And how do baskets of severed human hands end up as the symbol of a regime? The answers run through ivory traders, a Welsh-American explorer, a part-time journalist, and a death toll still argued over more than a century later.

• 2. The Philanthropic Guise

  ›

  In 1876, Leopold II hosted the Brussels Geographic Conference, gathering explorers, philanthropists, and members of geographic societies. He spoke of improving and civilizing the lives of Indigenous peoples in central Africa. At that conference he organized the International African Association and was elected its chairman. The body was presented as a multi-national, scientific, and humanitarian assembly. It even invited Gustave Moynier, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, to its 1877 gathering. The International Law Institute supported the project, believing it aimed to abolish the Congo Basin slave trade.

  Leopold patronized leading explorers, and the most useful of them was Henry Morton Stanley, famous for making contact with the missionary David Livingstone in 1871. Stanley had failed to interest Britain in the Congo, so he took service with Leopold. From August 1879 to June 1884 he worked in the Congo Basin, building a road from the lower Congo up to Stanley Pool and launching steamers on the upper river. Along the way he set treaties with local chiefs that signed over the rights to their land.

  Christian de Bonchamps, a French explorer who served Leopold in Katanga, described what those treaties meant to the men who signed them. They were, he said, four long pages the African leaders did not understand a word of, marked with a cross in exchange for peace and gifts. "They do not concern the black sovereign who signs them for a moment," he wrote. The real audience was the European powers, who would treat the papers as serious only in the event of territorial disputes.

  The association did not stay what it claimed to be. After 1879 Leopold's work shifted to the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo, supposedly an international group but in fact businessmen holding Congo shares, with Leopold owning a large block by proxy. That committee disintegrated too, yet he kept invoking the defunct organization as a smokescreen. Between 1879 and 1882 he created the International Association of the Congo to fold the small acquired territories into one sovereign claim and to ask the European powers for recognition.

• 3. Winning The Powers

  ›

  On the 23rd of April 1884, France formally recognized the International Association's claim on the southern Congo Basin. The condition was telling. France got the first option to buy the territory if the Association ever decided to sell. Leopold had sweetened the deal by proposing that, if his personal wealth proved insufficient, the Congo should revert to France. The arrangement gave other major powers a reason to want him to succeed, rather than see the territory pass to a rival.

  Leopold played each nation against the others with a different promise. In Britain he ran a publicity campaign attacking Portugal's record of slavery and offered to drive slave traders from the Congo Basin. He secretly told British merchant houses they would get most favoured nation status. At the same time he promised Bismarck that no single nation would get special status and that German traders would be as welcome as any other.

  The United States recognized Leopold's claim first, on the 22nd of April 1884, thanks to the lobbying of businessman Henry Shelton Sanford. Sanford had recruited Stanley and now worked the American side. On the 29th of November 1883 he convinced President Chester A. Arthur that Leopold's agenda resembled the United States' involvement in Liberia. That framing satisfied Southern politicians, especially Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan, who saw the Congo as a place to send freedmen to build a cotton market. Leopold sent President Arthur carefully edited copies of the cloth-and-trinket treaties. In 1884 the US Secretary of State announced American sympathy with the humane and benevolent purposes of the International Association of the Congo.

  In November 1884, Otto von Bismarck convened a 14-nation conference to submit the Congo question to international control. Austria-Hungary, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States attended. The Berlin Conference recognized the International Congo Association, ruled it should have no connection with Belgium beyond a personal union, and placed it under Leopold's personal control. It drew boundaries, demanded that all nations could trade with no tariffs, and called for the slave trade to be suppressed.

  In 1885 the partition was settled. France received 666,000 square kilometres on the north bank, the modern Congo-Brazzaville and Central African Republic. Portugal took 909,000 square kilometres to the south, modern Angola. Leopold's personal organization received the balance, 2,344,000 square kilometres holding about 30 million people. On the 29th of May 1885, after the conference closed, the king announced he would name his possession the Congo Free State. The name officially replaced International Association of the Congo on the 1st of August 1885.

• 4. A State Run From Brussels

  ›

  Leopold held the title Sovereign of the Congo Free State and governed it as the Domaine Privé, his personal property. By a resolution of the Belgian Parliament he became roi souverain, sovereign king, with nearly absolute control over a country of more than two million square kilometres. He appointed the heads of three departments of state, interior, foreign affairs, and finances, all headquartered in Brussels. Each was led by an official obligated to enact the sovereign's policies or resign.

  The interior department carried the weight of the system. It handled defence, police, public health, and public works, and it oversaw the exploitation of the Congo's natural resources and plantations. In 1904 its secretary-general set up a propaganda office, the Bureau central de la presse, in Frankfurt. The state also kept an independent judiciary headed by a minister of justice at Boma, with a supreme court of three judges and a high court of one. Justice, however, was slow and ill-suited to a frontier society.

  Leopold's grip rested on remarkably few people. In 1900 there were just 3,000 Europeans in the Congo, only half of them Belgian. Officials numbered between 700 and 1,500 across the whole period. Free State presence was patchy, its agents concentrated in small and widely dispersed stations that controlled little of the surrounding land. To rule the vast interior he relied on African chiefs, who implemented government orders within their communities and taxed their own subjects.

  The land itself was claimed by decree. Beginning in the mid-1880s Leopold asserted state proprietorship over all vacant lands, making nearly all of the territory terres domaniales. Four problems pressed on him. He had run up huge debts to finance the colony. Much of the territory was unmapped jungle offering little return. Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, threatened to occupy Katanga in the south. And the interior was ruled by Zanzibari slavers and warlords such as Tippu Tip, who would have to be coerced or defeated.

• 5. Katanga And The Slavers

  ›

  Msiri, the powerful mwami of the Yeke Kingdom in Katanga on the upper Lualaba River, had signed no treaties and had already rejected one brought on behalf of Cecil Rhodes. His land was known to be rich in copper and thought to hold much gold. In 1891 a Free State expedition extracted a letter from Msiri agreeing to let agents come to Katanga. Later that year Leopold sent the well-armed Stairs Expedition, led by the Canadian mercenary William Grant Stairs, to take possession one way or another. Msiri tried to play the Free State against Rhodes, and when talks broke down Stairs flew the Free State flag anyway and issued an ultimatum. Msiri decamped to another stockade. Stairs sent a force to capture him, Captain Omer Bodson shot Msiri dead and was fatally wounded in the fight, and the expedition cut off Msiri's head and put it on a pole. A successor chief recognized by Stairs then signed the treaty.

  Tippu Tip, the Zanzibari and Swahili strongman of the eastern Congo, was handled differently at first. In early 1887 Henry Morton Stanley proposed making him governor, or wali, of the Stanley Falls District. Leopold II and Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar both agreed, and on the 24th of February 1887 Tippu Tip accepted. The alliance was indefensible at home. In Belgium the Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1888 by Catholic intellectuals led by Count Hippolyte d'Ursel. Tippu Tip and Leopold were also commercial rivals, since every pound of ivory sent to Zanzibar was a loss to the king.

  Open warfare broke out in late November 1892. Both sides fought by proxy, arming and leading the peoples of the upper Congo forests. By early 1894 the Zanzibari and Swahili slavers were defeated and the Congo Arab war ended. The Belgians freed thousands of enslaved men, women, and children between 1886 and 1892, enlisting some in the militia Force Publique and turning others over to allied local chiefs. Chattel slavery was legally abolished only in 1910, after the Belgian Congo was established, yet prisoners were still conscripted as forced labourers.

  The state pushed north as well. In 1894 Leopold signed a treaty with the United Kingdom that granted him the Lado Enclave, giving access to the navigable Nile and extending his sphere into Sudan. In December 1896 two columns set out against Mahdist rebels there. The larger, around three thousand men under Baron Dhanis, mutinied in February 1897, costing Dhanis his entire force and several Belgian officers their lives. The smaller column of eight hundred under Louis-Napoleon Chaltin pressed on and defeated the rebels at the Battle of Rejaf on the 17th of February 1897.

• 6. The Rubber Monopoly

  ›

  The terres vacantes was the lever that turned the Congo into a money machine. Any land without a dwelling or cultivated garden plot, which meant most of the country, was deemed to belong to the state. After the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference of 1889 to 1890, Leopold decreed that Africans across a large part of the Free State could sell their harvested ivory and rubber only to the state. Since the resources came from state-owned land, the state owned them too, and it set the prices. For local elites the system offered opportunity, as the state and concession companies paid them with guns to tax their subjects in kind.

  A decree in 1892 split the terres vacantes into a domainal system that privatized rubber extraction. In October 1892 Leopold granted concessions to a number of companies, each given a large area to collect rubber and ivory for sale in Europe. They could detain Africans who did not work hard enough, police their territories as they saw fit, and take all the products of the forest. In return they paid an annual dividend to the Free State. From 1901 to 1906, at the height of the rubber boom, those dividends filled the royal coffers. In 1893 Leopold carved out the most accessible 259,000 square kilometres and declared it the Domaine de la Couronne, its rubber revenue flowing directly to him.

  Demand drove the whole apparatus. John Boyd Dunlop's 1887 invention of inflatable rubber bicycle tubes and the rise of the automobile sent global demand soaring, and in 1896 it surged again. Congolese rubber did not come from tapped trees like the Brazilian Hevea brasiliensis. It came from wild vines, which workers slashed and then lathered over their bodies. When the latex hardened it was scraped off the skin along with the worker's hair, a painful process.

  Three decrees in 1891 and 1892 reduced the Indigenous population to serfs, forcing them to deliver all ivory and rubber to state officers. Communities in the Domaine Privé could sell to no one but the state, had to meet set quotas at a fixed government price, and had to feed the local post. District officials' salaries were cut and replaced with commissions based on the profit their area returned. The system also funded infrastructure. The railway from the coast to Leopoldville, now the Matadi-Kinshasa Railway, was completed in 1898.

• 7. The Severed Hands

  ›

  The chicotte, a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide, was the everyday instrument of Leopold's private army, the Force Publique. Its officer corps was entirely white, Belgian regulars and foreign mercenaries, commanding men drawn from Zanzibar, West Africa, and eventually the Congo itself. Some soldiers had been kidnapped as children in village raids and trained at missions in conditions close to slavery. The army took hostages, burned villages, and flogged and raped. One refugee described being driven into the forest to find rubber vines, starving as the women could no longer tend the fields, and watching soldiers come to kill those who fell short. Many were shot, he said, some had their ears cut off, others were roped by the neck and taken away.

  Failure to meet a rubber quota was punishable by death. Soldiers were required to produce a human hand as proof for every bullet fired, on the reasoning that they would otherwise waste costly ammunition hunting. Quotas began to be paid off in chopped-off hands. Villages attacked neighbouring villages to gather them when their own quotas were impossible. A Catholic priest recorded the words of a man named Tswambe about the official Leon Fievez, who ran a district 300 miles north of Stanley Pool. "All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator," he said, describing soldiers ordered to bring in baskets of hands and a village swept clean for refusing rubber.

  In theory each right hand proved a killing. In practice soldiers sometimes cut off a hand and left the victim alive, and some survivors lived through massacres by playing dead even as their hands were severed. A Danish missionary recorded a soldier's defence after a first killing. "They kill us if we don't bring the rubber," the soldier said. The historian Forbath wrote that the baskets of severed hands set at the feet of European post commanders became the symbol of the Congo Free State, a kind of currency used to make up shortfalls in rubber quotas.

  The horror extended to cannibalism the administration did little to suppress, and sometimes tolerated among its auxiliaries. During the Congo-Arab war the Batetela allies of the Belgian commander Francis Dhanis reportedly feasted on defeated combatants. His medical officer, Captain Sidney Langford Hinde, described days of cannibal feasting after the conquest of Nyangwe. Groups of Songye fighters known as Zappo Zaps, named for the sound of their rifles, were employed to enforce tax policy, attacking villages that fell short and cutting off hands to prove their success.

• 8. Exposure And End

  ›

  Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899 as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine, drew on his service as a steamer captain on the Congo twelve years earlier and helped spark organized opposition. In 1900 E. D. Morel, a part-time journalist running Congo trade for the Liverpool shipping firm Elder Dempster, noticed that ships brought vast loads of rubber from the Congo and returned carrying only guns and ammunition for the Force Publique. In 1902 he left his job to campaign full time, founded his own magazine The West African Mail, and toured Britain speaking.

  Roger Casement, the British Consul at Boma, was sent to investigate after a 1903 resolution in the House of Commons. He had already written to the Foreign Office that the root of the evil lay in the Congo government being above all a commercial trust, with everything else oriented toward commercial gain. His detailed eyewitness account, the Casement Report, appeared in 1904. He and Morel, introduced by their mutual friend Herbert Ward, founded the Congo Reform Association to end Leopold's control. Its members included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose book The Crime of the Congo was widely read, along with Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Booker T. Washington, and Bertrand Russell. Earlier, on the 18th of July 1890, George Washington Williams had sent an open letter to Leopold detailing the crimes committed against the Congo's residents.

  Missionaries pressed the case in court. In January 1908 William Henry Sheppard published a report on abuses in a Presbyterian mission newsletter, and he and William Morrison were sued for libel by the Kasai Rubber Company. When the case reached court in September 1909 the missionaries had the backing of the Congo Reform Association and the lawyer Emile Vandervelde, and Sheppard was acquitted. Vandervelde and other critics in the Belgian Parliament forced Leopold to set up an independent commission of inquiry, which in 1905 confirmed Casement's report.

  The boom that built the system was already turning against it. The peak year was 1903, after which plantations in Southeast Asia and Latin America undercut Congolese rubber and falling prices made extraction unprofitable. Yielding to international pressure, the Belgian Parliament annexed the Congo Free State on the 15th of November 1908, governing it thereafter as the Belgian Congo under the 1908 Colonial Charter. Just before releasing sovereignty, Leopold had all evidence of his activities destroyed, including the archives of the departments of finance and the interior. He died in Brussels on the 17th of December 1909.

  The death toll remains contested. Contemporaries such as Morel counted 20 million souls in the territory, and Mark Twain spoke of ten million deaths. A 1919 Belgian government commission and later independent studies cited by Adam Hochschild concluded that roughly half the population perished, while the first census in 1924 put the population at about 10 million. Jan Vansina later criticized extrapolating the rubber provinces' 50 percent loss to the whole country, and recent demographic research estimates the 1885 population at most likely 11.5 million, a decline of around 1.2 to 1.5 million. Hochschild wrote that the killing was of genocidal proportions but "not strictly speaking a genocide," and in 2006 an early day motion signed by 48 members of the British Parliament called Leopold's regime a genocide and asked Belgium for an apology.