Congo Free State

The Congo Free State was a private kingdom owned by Leopold II of Belgium between about 1877 and 1908 that included the entire area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The kingdom was the scene of exploitation, greed, and mass killings and maimings. The atrocities where carried with the aim of create an atmosphere of terror, to prevent congolese people to oppose Leopold's rule or don't work hard enough as forced laborers in rubber plantations or other profit-making ventures. In 1908, after Leopold's activities had finally been exposed in the Western press, it became, at least in theory, an orthodox colony of Belgium, and known as the Belgian Congo.

European exploration

See Colonisation of the Congo

The genesis of the Congo Free State

In Europe, years of intrigues to gain hold of Congo by King Leopold's began to bear fruit. Whereas he had gained ownership of the Congo largely through the lack of interest of the major powers, now he would confirm and strengthen it because of their interest. In the few years since the establishment of the Congo venture, the mood in Europe had shifted decisively, and the struggle for Africa was about to begin in earnest. Leopold's activities in the Congo had already pushed the French into claiming an area on the north shore (the modern Republic of the Congo on the northern shore of Stanley Pool). While no-one (bar Leopold) particularly wanted such economically unpromising colonies, the other European powers were not prepared to stand idly by and see land snapped up by rivals.

In an astonishingly devious succession of negotiations, Leopold, in his capacity as chairman of the purely humanitarian and disinterested Association Internationale Africaine, played one off against the other.

Britain was uneasy at French expansion and had a technical claim on the Congo via Lt. Cameron's 1873 expedition from Zanzibar to bring home Livingstone's body, but was reluctant to take on yet another expensive, unproductive colony. Portugal had a much older claim, dating back to Diego Cão's discovery of the mouth of the river in 1482 and, having ignored it for centuries, were stimulated into remembering it. Portugal flirted with the French at first, but the British offered to support Portugal's claim to the entire Congo in return for a free trade agreement. For the English, the free trade was a minor issue: the real benefit was frustration of the French. Next Bismarck entered the fray on behalf of Germany: with vast new holdings in South-West Africa already, he had no desire for the Congo, but every intention of seeing that it did not go to either Britain or France.

At this point Leopold acted. He began a publicity campaign in England, harping on Portugal's dreadful slavery record, and quietly let English merchant houses know that he would, if given formal control of the Congo, give them the same "most favoured nation" status that Portugal offered. At the same time, Leopold promised Bismarck that he would not give any one nation special status, and that German traders would be as welcome as any other. Then Leopold offered France the support of the Association for French ownership of the entire northern bank, and sweetened the deal by proposing that, if his personal wealth proved insufficient to hold the entire Congo (as seemed utterly inevitable), that it should revert to France. Finally, he enlisted the aid of the United States, sending President Arthur carefully edited copies of the cloth-and-trinket treaties Stanley had extracted from various local chiefs, and proposing that, as an entirely disinterested humanitarian body, the Association would administer the Congo for the good of all, handing over power to the locals as soon as they were ready for the grave responsibility. This was the master stroke.

In November 1884 Bismarck convened a 14-nation conference to find a peaceful resolution to the Congo crisis, and after three months of negotiation, Leopold emerged triumphant. France was given 257,000 square miles (666,000 km²) on the north bank (modern Congo-Brazzaville and the Central African Republic), Portugal 351,000 square miles (909,000 km²) to the south (modern Angola), and Leopold's wholly-owned, single-shareholder "philanthropic"organisation received the balance: 905,000 square miles (2,344,000 km²), to be constituted as the Congo Free State.

In a dazzling display of diplomatic virtuosity, Leopold had the conference agree not to a transfer of the Congo to one of his many philanthropic shell organisations, nor even to his care in his capacity as King of the Belgians, but simply to himself. He became sole ruler of 30 million people, without constitution, without international supervision, without ever having been to the Congo, and without more than a tiny handful of his subjects having heard of him.

Leopold's conquest

File:CecilRhodes.jpeg

In one of three problems for Leopold, Cecil Rhodes attempted to expand English territory northward into the Congo basin.

Leopold no longer needed the façade of the Association, and replaced it with an appointed cabinet of Belgians who would do his bidding. To the temporary new capital of Boma, he sent a Governor-General and a chief of police. The vast Congo basin was split up into 14 administrative districts, each district into zones, each zone into sectors, and each sector into posts. From the District Commissioners down to post level, every appointed head was European: mercenaries and adventurers of every kind.

Three main problems presented themselves over the next few years. First, beyond Stanley's eight trading stations, the Free State was unmapped jungle, and offered no commercial return. Second, Cecil Rhodes, then Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony (part of modern South Africa) was expanding from the south and threatening to occupy the southern Congo area in defiance of the Berlin Treaty and with the tacit connivance of London. Third, Tippu Tip's slaving gangs had established a strong presence in the north and east of the country and the area to the east of it (modern Uganda), and had effectively established an independent state.

Leopold was one of the richest men in Europe, but not even he could afford to keep the expense. He needed to extract riches from the Congo, not expend them. In flagrant violation of his mandate, he set out to do just that, and set in train the most brutal colonial regime in modern history.

The first change was the introduction of terres vacantes — "vacant" land, which was anything that no-one was actually living on. This was deemed to belong to the state, and servants of the state (i.e., any white men in Leopold's employ) were encouraged to exploit it.

Next, the Free State was divided into two economic zones: the Free Trade Zone was open to entrepreneurs of any nation, who were allowed to buy 10 and 15-year monopoly leases on anything of value: ivory from a particular district, or the rubber concession, for example. The other zone - almost two-thirds of the Congo - became the Domaine Privé: the exclusive private property of the State, which was in turn the exclusive private property of King Leopold.

On this basis, the Congo became financially self-sufficient. It was not sufficient for Leopold's boundless greed, however. In 1893 he excised the most readily accessible 100,000 square mile (259,000 km²) portion of the Free Trade Zone and declared it to be the Domaine de la Couronne: here the same rules applied as in the Domaine Privé, except that all revenue went directly to Leopold in person. No-one knows how much Leopold made from the Congo Free State, but it was certainly many tens of millions (and this in a time when even one million was a massive fortune), and vastly more than even Leopold could spend.

Early in his rule, the second problem — British expansionism into the southern part of the Congo Basin — was addressed. The vulnerable and distant district of Katanga on the upper Congo was occupied by a powerful chief named Msiri who had already rejected overtures from Rhodes. Leopold did not trouble to negotiate: he sent well-armed military expeditions to occupy the capital. Msiri retreated into the forest, was captured, and still refused to give up his sovereignty. On Leopold's orders, a Free State officer assassinated Msiri, and the replacement chief proved to be more amenable.

In the short term, the third problem, that of the Arab slavers, was simply solved: Leopold negotiated an alliance, and later appointed Tippu Tip as governor of the Stanley Falls district. In the longer term, this was unsatisfactory. At home, Leopold found it embarrassing to be allied with the last slaver in the world of any consequence and, worse, Tippu Tip and Leopold were direct commercial rivals: every slave that Tippu Tip extracted from his realm, every pound of ivory, was a loss to Leopold. War was inevitable.

Both sides fought by proxy, arming and leading the cannibal tribes of the upper Congo forests in a conflict of unparalleled ferocity. They believed that suffering tenderised the meat, and prisoners were prepared for the pot still living; nor was it just the native tribesman who indulged: European officers too ate human flesh. Tippu Tip's muskets were no match for Leopold's artillery and machine guns, however, and by early 1894 the war was over.

Leopold's rule

Meanwhile, the quest for income was unrelenting. District officials' salaries were reduced to a bare minimum, and made up with a commission payment based on the profit that their area returned to Leopold. Native communities in the Domaine Privé were not merely forbidden by law to sell items to anyone but the State: they were required to provide State officials with set quotas of rubber and ivory at a fixed, government-mandated price, to provide food to the local post, and to provide 10% of their number as full-time forced labourers — slaves in all but name — and another 25% part-time.

To enforce the rubber quotas, the Force Publique (FP) was called in. The FP was an army, but its aim was not to defend the country, but to terrorize the local population. The officiers were white agents of the State. Of the black soldiers, many were cannibals from the most fierce tribes from upper Congo while others have been kidnapped during the raids in villages in their childhood and brought to Catholic missions, when they received a military training in a condition of substantial slavery. Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte — a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide — the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages (mostly women), flogged, raped, burned recalcitrant villages, and above all, took human hands as trophies on the order of white officiers to show that bullets haven't been wasted.

One junior white officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The white officer in command: "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross." After seeing a native killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote: "The soldier said 'Don't take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service.'" In Forbath's words again:

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

In theory, each right hand proved a judicial murder. In practice, soldiers sometimes "cheated" by simply cutting off the hand and leaving the victim to live or die. More than a few survivors later said that they had lived through a massacre by acting dead, not moving even when their hand was severed, and waiting till the soldiers left before seeking help.

Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. British diplomat Roger Casement's famous 1904 report set it at 3 million for just twelve of the twenty years Leopold's regime lasted; Forbath, at least 5 million; Adam Hochschild, 10 million; the Encyclopædia Britannica gives a total population decline from 20 or 30 million to 8 million.

The end of the Congo Free State

Leopold ran up high debts with his Congo investments before salvation came with the beginning of the worldwide rubber boom in the 1890s. Prices went up at a fevered pitch throughout the decade as industries discovered new uses for rubber in tires, hoses, tubing, insulation for telegraph and telephone cables and wiring, and so on. By the late 1890s wild rubber had far surpassed ivory as the main source of revenue from the Congo Free State. The peak year was 1903, with rubber fetching the highest price and concessionary companies raking in the highest profits.

However, the boom sparked efforts to find lower-cost producers. Congolese concessionary companies started facing competition from rubber cultivation in South-east Asia and Latin America. As plantations were begun in other tropical areas-- mostly under the ownership of the rival British firms-- world rubber prices started to dip. Competition heightened the drive to exploit forced labor in the Congo in order to lower production costs. Meanwhile, the cost of enforcement was eating away at profit margins, along with the toll taken by the increasingly unsustainable harvesting methods. As competition from other areas of rubber cultivation mounted, Leopold's private rule was left increasingly vulnerable to international scrutiny, especially from Britain.

To visit the country was difficult. Missionaries were allowed only on sufferance, and mostly only if they were Belgian Catholics that Leopold could keep quiet. White employees were forbidden to leave the country. Nevertheless, rumours circulated and Leopold ran an enormous publicity campaign to discredit them, even creating a bogus Commission for the Protection of the Natives to root out the "few isolated instances" of abuse. Publishers were bribed, critics accused of running secret campaigns to further other nations' colonial ambitions, eyewitness reports from missionaries dismissed as attempts by Protestants to smear honest Catholic priests. And for a decade or more, Leopold was successful. The secret was out, but few believed it.

Eventually, the most telling blows came from a most unexpected source. Edmund Dene Morel, a clerks in a major Liverpool shipping office and a part-time journalist began to wonder why the ships that brought vast loads of rubber from the Congo returned full of guns and ammunition for the Force Publique. He left his job and became a full-time investigative journalist, and then (aided by merchants who wanted to break into Leopold's monopoly or, as chocolate millionaire William Cadbury that joined his campaign later, used their money to support humanitarian causes), a publisher. In 1902 Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness was released: based on his brief experience as a steamer captain on the Congo ten years before, it encapsulated the public's growing fears. In 1903 Morel and its allies in the House of Common succed in passing a resolution who asked British government to inquiry on the alleged violations of Berlin Agreement. In 1904, Sir Roger Casement, then the British Consul, delivered a long, detailed eyewitness report which was made public. The British Congo Reform Association, founded by Morel with Casement's support, demanded action. Other European nations followed suit, as did the United States, and the British Parliament demanded a meeting of the 14 signatory powers to review the 1885 Berlin Agreement. The Belgian Parliament, pushed by socialist leader Emile Vandervelde and other opponents of the King, forced Leopold to set up an independent commission of enquiry, and despite the King's desperate efforts, in 1905 it confirmed Casement's report in every damning detail.

Leopold offered to reform his regime, but few took him seriously. All nations were now agreed that the King's rule must be ended as soon as possible, but no nation was willing to take on the responsibility, and never once was it suggested that that the land might be given back to the native population. Belgium was the obvious European candidate to run the Congo, but the Belgians were still unwilling. For two years Belgium debated the question and held fresh elections on the issue; meanwhile Leopold made the most of his last opportunity and-- incredibly-- enlarged the Domaine de la Couronne so as to milk the last possible ounce of personal profit while he could.

Finally, on November 15, 1908, four years after the Casement Report and six years after Heart of Darkness was first printed, the Parliament of Belgium annexed the Congo Free State and took over its administration. However, the international scrutiny was no major loss to Leopold or the concessionary companies in the Belgian Congo. By then, Southeast Asia and Latin America had become lower-cost producers of rubber. Along with the effects of resource depletion in the Congo, international commodity prices had fallen to a level that rendered Congolese extraction unprofitable. The state took over Leopold's private dominion and bailed out the company, but the rubber boom was already over.

References

Peter Forbath: The River Congo, Harper & Row, 1977. ISBN 0-06-122490-1.
Adam Hochschild: King Leopold's Ghost, Pan, 2002. ISBN 0-330-402333-0.
Walter Rodney: How Europe underdeveloped Africa, Howard University Press, 1974. ISBN 0-88258-013-2.
Thomas Pakenham: The scramble for Africa, Abacus, 1991. ISBN 0-349-10449-2.
Richard Hall: Stanley: an adventurer explored, Purnell, 1974.

External links