From 1885 to 1906 the blue flag with a solitary star, representing what was euphemistically and cruelly called the Congo Free State, fluttered over a good part of Central Africa. In reality, what such sinister flag stood for was an immense concentration camp –or something most similar to one, founded by Leopold II, King of the Belgians, whose greed, slyness and lack of scruples was astonishing and only comparable to other big tyrants like Hitler, Kim Il Sung or Stalin. How could he, the monarch of a small and peaceful European kingdom, obtain a territory of 2.5 million km2 –almost half of Europe- and run it with an iron fist, as if it were his personal property, without anybody stopping him? What’s more, how could he do it without even setting a foot on that territory? It is hard to understand, as it is always the case when the world finds out about a social nightmare of colossal proportions. Nevertheless, in order to try to find an answer to what happened in Leopold’s Congo it is necessary to understand its context. It was mid-19th century, not only an era in dire need of heroes, but also convoluted times, hardened and worn out by the sudden changes that the industrial revolution brought about. It was indeed a world whose geographical limits seemed completely explored, in a historic moment in which the Western man was proud to be able to see the reflection of his own proud creation.
The atrocities committed during those terrible barbaric years in the Congo were described by Joseph Conrad in the magnificent and harrowing novel that is Heart of Darkness. Even if many posterior readings have insisted on the mostly allegoric character of the book, immersing yourself in the Congo of that time makes you realize that Conrad did little more than transcribe his tireless trip across the African hell and the absolute evil of such men who made possible this story of never-ending violations.
During more than 20 years, and ever since Leopold II put into place the ambitious plan of achieving the world’s recognition of the African territory to be his, both good old Europe and the USA kept on looking the other way, oscillating between the indifference they felt for whatever activity the Belgian King was undertaking in such a remote region of Equatorial Africa and the sudden economic interests arising from the news reaching them; news that spoke about eventual riches from which both continents could obtain a juicy participation. They also had the benefit of a perfect alibi: as the King of the Belgians himself had insisted over and over again, it was a case of humanitarian and religious work. Leopold had been wise enough to insist on the cruelty of Muslim slavery, an activity that any well-meaning European community looked upon with a scandalised horror –a community that forgot about the years when it was precisely Europeans the ones to fill harbours with the spilled blood and terror of hundreds of thousands of African slaves.
The world was, therefore, a territory economically and culturally ready for something of such magnitude to take place. But in order for such a savage machinery to be put in motion, in such a cruel and in such a large scale, both a diabolically inspired orchestration and apt henchmen were required, as is common in circumstances like these. To Leopold’s harmful talent was added the greed and cruelty of two characters as important in this story –at least at the beginning: the explorer Henry Morton Stanley and Henry Shelton Sanford, a rich aristocrat from Connecticut who put all his trickery to the Belgian monarch’s service in order to get the US and President Chester Arthur’s Government to accept Leopold’s pretensions over the Congo. It was the last roll of the dice for the Congo.
Leopold II of Belgium had, even since before inheriting the throne of his small kingdom, one and only ambition, which made him live almost giving his back to his country, his family and anything that went on in his immediate surroundings: becoming the lord and master of a colony. Apparently, it was not a question of it being the excessive ambition of a head of state nor a delusion of grandeur belonging to a turn-of-the-century megalomaniac monarch either. It was, more than anything, a question of voracious greed, of a man wanting to become somebody powerful and rich enough to have an influence in the concert of nations on a personal level. “Petit pays, petit gens” ['Small country, small people'], he used to say when referring to Belgium, scorning his kingdom’s smallness, sandwiched between the energic German Empire and Napoleon III’s buoyant France. Much before ascending the throne, the King of the Belgians had glimpsed the possibility of getting a hold of a colony anywhere in the world. Before turning 20 he had already visited Constantinople, Egypt, the Balkans… He was obsessed with buying a territory with the excuse of catapulting Belgium to the club of the most powerful nations, taking control and owning the exploitation rights of a space which turned him in a fabulously rich and powerful monarch. First he expressed an interest on Abyssinia, then for the Dutch East Indies, and even on the Argentinian province of Entre Ríos and the Martín García Island, near the mouth of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers. Feverishly pensive, confined inside of the Laeken Palace, the young heir to the Belgian throne spent his time consumed by his colonialist obsessions without any short-term prospect. Nevertheless, that situation was about to change. Patient, stubborn and acting on a limitless ambition, the future King of the Belgians would soon find the opportunity he had been looking for years.
Such opportunity arrived in 1872 when the news that the explorer Henry M. Stanley had found Livingstone hit the world. The young monarch Leopold II, who had already been on the throne for seven years, saw the heavens open up before him: that was the providential opportunity he had been waiting for. Nevertheless, he did not rush. He was probably one of the persons to follow most attentively the adventurer’s chronicles, the same way he had followed –and had sometimes financed- Verney Lovett Cameron’s expeditions, who almost became the first European to cross Africa from East to West, noticing that the English paid little attention for such an immense territory, which nobody had cartographed accurately. Leopold took good stock of both Stanley and Livingstone’s stories about the ‘Arab slavery cruelty’ and how they alarmed the community of Western nations, understanding that his colonising pretensions had to acquire a humanitarian gloss: eradication of the commerce with slaves, the progress of science and a deep moral reform on those primitive societies. He concocted an intelligent plan in 1876 to convince and get together a group of geographer, explorers, humanitarian activists, military men and businessmen in a Geographic Conference in Brussels. There Leopold went to great lengths to talk about the ‘solely humanitarian’ interest he felt for the Congo and the need to bring civilisation where it still had not reached. Leopold dazzled his guests with his elegance and bonhomie, together with the luxurious greeting he gave them all and the extent of his altruistic concerns. Naturally, he was elected President of the newly created International African Association, with in time would become the Congo International Association –the similarity of names not being coincidence, and would finally change to the Free State of the Congo, an extremely vast agricultural, wood and mining exploitation in which almost 5 million people lost their lives.
When Henry M. Stanley gave signs of life in 1877 –after embarking in another expedition through Africa, the Belgian monarch made the right moves to contact him and make the next step. It was barely a year after the Geographical Conference in which his image of humanitarian king, concerned about the well-being of the poorest communities, captivated an important group of men.
Making use of an astonishing shrewdness, Leopold of Belgium managed to convince Stanley, already extremely famous and rich, to explore the territory he had crossed from coast to coast on an arduous and epic journey, bringing unbelievable stories of people and, moreover, of never-ending riches –both on his behalf and with his economic back up.
As Adam Hochschild tells in his wonderful book King Leopold’s Ghost, it even took Stanley –a fierce, cruel and ambitious man himself, some time before realizing that he had been trapped in the refined and educated monarch’s colonialist plans. He had been mesmerised by the deference and royal distinctions which fulfilled the explorer’s desire of recognition –as Leopold was quick to notice, resentful as he was by the lack of interest the British showed him towards the Congo, and especially towards his exploit of rescuing Livingstone.
Leopold was not in a hurry, though. He had only one worry: neither the French nor English could not find out about the immense cake that was at stake. That was the main reason for his concern over the sovereign nations of Europe to formally recognize the African Association of the Congo. For that purpose alone he could count on the priceless help of the man who had been the US Ambassador in Belgium, Henry Sheton Sanford, an American millionaire and aristocrat who was enthralled by European royalty and desperately sought a place in the small but opulent court Leopold presided over. Once the latter realized Sanford’s weaknesses, he managed to have him at his service without a moment of hesitation. Sanford centered his fight for the recognition of the African protectorate in two extremely attractive aspects for the US: the fight against Arab-led slavery in the region and the creation of something similar to the US in Africa. He managed to count on with the unexpected help of the Alabama Senator John Morgan, who saw in the great civilising work of the monarch a similar model –albeit more ambitious, to the one Americans themselves had made with the creation of Liberia, where a large colony of freed black people was sent in order for them to be able to found their nation in their own land.
What took place during the course of the following years has a perfect place in the blackest pages of contemporary history: the wheels of such savage mechanism set in motion years earlier by Leopold II finally started to reap benefits, and so that king without scruples, sly and ambitious became the lord and master of immensely vast and rich lands. He administered them making use of the brutality and cruel behaviour of civil servants, explorers and adventurers of all kinds who saw those Africans as people who were barely above animals.
From 1885 to 1906 there was never anything remotely close to commerce in the Congo, apart from the cheap necklaces and cotton T-shirts that Leopold’s civil servants used to exchange for fertile lands or years of work. That was in the best of cases, for most of the time there was only looting, exploitation, raping, burnt towns, brutal blackmailing and terrible punishments for those who would not cope with the terrifying working day that the monarch’s insatiable ambition demanded. Without a shadow of a doubt, states Hochschild in his book, Leopold II of Belgium was perfectly aware of what was going on in his private finca. Moreover, worried about the fact that his working squads were being decimated by the sheer physical effort, he even went as far as suggesting the implementation of teams of children in order to help with the work load. And how did they get such young labour? They simply took them away from their families, sending them to a definite death by making them carry loads of over ten kilos during working days that even the strongest men found exhausting. There was no way of opposing the power and brutality of the whites, who were better armed than the African natives, now turned into exhausted skeletons.
When the first news of what was really going on in the Congo started to reach Europe through missionaries and travellers horrified by what they saw, Leopold had already managed to establish an image of altruist and disinterested nature. He simply denied the reports and just explained, for instance, that the ivory commerce was used to alleviate the deficit incurred by his investments on those uncivilised aboriginals. Nevertheless, and partly due to the courage and stubbornness of some individuals, like the British vice-consul in the Congo Roger Casement, and Edmund Dene Morel, an employee of a naval company in Liverpool, the world started to find out little by little about the horrors Leopold had brought upon, from the peace and quiet of his palace in Brussels, that African land –which was for many hardly an immense spot in that continent’s map. Both flooded half of Europe’s governmental offices with letters, complaints and articles. They finally created the Association for the Reform of the Congo. Morel himself visited the North-American president Theodore Roosevelt in order to demand that his Government take action, he managed to persuade personalities like Anatole France or Canterbury’s Archbishop to demonstrate against those horrors, and in short managed to wake up the sleepy consciousness of the society of the time and make it confront the evil which for so long turned the Congo into a hell, shattering its future.
Perhaps the worst thing in this story is the impunity which time has given to it dissolving it in our memory in less than a century. Nowadays almost nobody remembers even hearing about the savage display of the levels greed can reach when combined with impunity. The equestrian statue of King Leopold II still rides on in the Laeken palace without anybody paying any particular attention to it, and without the five million corpses caused by that nightmarish moment in time being able to alter its safe hiding place in history.
Translated from “Amo y señor del Congo”, by Jorge Eduardo Benavides in El País Semanal, published on the 29th January 2006 (available in http://www.elpais.com/solotexto/articulo.html?xref=20060129elpepspor_2&type=Tes&k=Amo/senor/Congo,
by JORGE EDUARDO BENAVIDES
EL PAIS SEMANAL – 29-01-2006
