Colonial Legacy in the Congo

Our story begins, as these stories often do, with a young and shrewd man of eighteen years. Awkward in his physical appearance and the product of an extraordinary cold relationship with his father, our lanky and “haughty young man” proved to have an eye for matters not quite befitting his status as the crown prince of Belgium, a newly minted constitutional monarchy only recently free from Dutch rule. Called “subtle and sly”, Leopold's qualities would serve him well to become the absolute ruler of a vast African empire that dwarfed what he viewed as his weak inheritance. Always thinking abroad, Leopold visited around Europe and the Middle East, continuing to strive to improve Belgium's position in international trade and commerce. By the age of twenty, he had already attempted to acquire land in Egypt, then a largely independent state that owed nominal suzerainty to the Ottoman Sultan. Obsessed utterly with colonies, he searched far and wide for a suitable region to which he could lay claim, going so far as to investigate possible territorial acquisitions in South America and the East Indies.

Ascending to the throne in 1865, Leopold embarked on a series of construction projects in Belgium, constructing monuments and palaces, most notably the “little Versailles” at Laeken. Not content with domestic matters, Leopold continually sought out potential colonies, attempting to purchase the Philippines from Spain in 1875 and finally set his eyes on the only remaining land left for an aspiring colonial power. Africa would prove to be the land upon which Leopold would carve out his personal empire.

Leopold had changed greatly since his ascension to the throne. Now a suave, calculating master statesman, his “polished and cosmopolitan” mannerisms served him well in 1876, when he convened a geographic conference of famous explorers and officials from across Europe. Lodging the guests at his own private palace, Leopold has little trouble subverting the conference to his own gains. Indeed, Leopold's purpose in convening this conference was to “open to civilization the only part of the globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples […] Belgium may be a small country, but she is happy and satisfied with her fate; I have no other ambition than to serve her well.” Central to this “opening” of Africa was, of course, the establishment of so-called “hospitable, scientific, and pacification bases” worked by Europeans to study the areas in question, primarily the region around the Congo River basin, which at this point was unclaimed by European powers.

Generously offering to house this new international organization in his capital, Leopold had effectively secured himself as the head of this new “altruistic” International African Association. Always a master statesmen, Leopold only reluctantly accepts the chairmanship for a single year, informing the Association that he will step down the next year. Of course, he is unanimously reelected the following year and donations begin flowing in to fund the establishment of these small outposts.

At this point, I believe a direct quote serves best. “He [Leopold] has organizational talent and the public's good will, as proven by his successful Geographical Conference. He has a special kind of capital: the great public relations powers of the throne itself. He has a script: the dream of a colony that has been running through his head since he was a teenager […] but a bulletin in the London Daily Telegraph from a small town on the west coast of Africa announces some remarkable news. It is just the opening Leopold has been waiting for. Stage and star have appeared, and the play can begin”.

At this point, Africa is unexplored. Europeans have coastal colonies and outposts to be sure, but the interior of the continent was a mystery to the West. Henry Morgan Stanley, a famous explorer with a background that I will avoid for the purpose of length, successfully navigated the Congo River. Successful in that he survived, that is. Disease, starvation, drowning, and exhaustion claimed most of the men he brought along on his journey along the Congo River. But Stanley made it and Leopold, interested as he was in Africa, sent for Stanley to meet him in Belgium. The details of Stanley's “exploration” of the Congo River is where the brutality so characteristic of colonial rule can find its origins; floating down the river, Stanley and his men used their breech-loading rifles to kill hundreds of natives for sport. Having established that there were no significant military threats in the forms of powerful indigenous kingdoms as found in West Africa, Leopold realized he had found his colony. Contracting Stanley for five years, Leopold sent the explorer to the western mouth of the Congo River to begin construction on a road and rail network that would circumnavigate the formidable rapids that prevented movement past the mouth of the river.

However, public opinion certainly wouldn't support a conquest of the region. Instead, Leopold, formed a new cover organization called the International Association of the Congo. This organization, using the same flag and nearly same name as the International African Association, was meant to deliberately confuse the public. In effect, the philanthropic and humanitarian mission of the International African Association would be extended to the Association of the Congo, a term which now gave vague geographical boundaries to what would become the Congo state. Embarking on a diplomatic offensive, Leopold and his agents won support for the “humanitarian” mission of claiming the Congo in the name of the King from the United States, Britain, France, and Germany under the guise of a federation of “free African states”, a complete myth fostered by Leopold in order to gain international support. At long last, in November of 1884, the Berlin Conference took place.

The Berlin Conference did not partition Africa. Indeed, that would take many years and extraordinary efforts on the behalf of foreign offices throughout Europe to do that. But what it did do was lay the groundwork for how African territory could be claimed, and is significant for our story in how it helped King Leopold.

Although the treaty itself and the build up to it is rather fascinating, I will omit it for the sake of expediency. Suffice it to say that Leopold's deception of the entire European community was nearly total and enormously successful. Among the clauses of the treaty, a vast swath of Africa was deemed to be a free trade zone. Cleverly manipulating the other diplomats, Leopold in effect persuaded the other powers that they were agreeing to an international colony under the control of the Belgian King, where in reality Leopold had already signed treaties with local African leaders for direct annexation to his personal rule. Nearly a decade of diplomatic maneuvering, deception, and manipulation finally paid off when, in February of 1885, Bismarck stated that “the new Congo state is destined to be one of the most important executors of the work we intend to do, and I express my best wishes for its speedy development, and for the realization of the noble aspirations of its illustrious creator”. Thus, the Congo Free State was born.

Leopold now owned one thirteenth of Africa, a region seventy-six times the size of Belgium, as his own personal fiefdom and held absolute control over it. Completely independent of the Belgian government, Leopold had his own empire and would proceed to extract an incalculable amount of wealth from it in the following years.

What better way to lift barbarians and cannibals out of depravity and into civilization than good, honest work? And so we begin with the series of events and desires that led, ultimately, to the death of half of the Congolese population and the mutilation of hundreds of thousands.

Ivory, an incredibly valuable trade resource, provided most of the initial revenue of the Congo Free State. However, ivory is heavy and, since pack animals cannot survive in the climate of the Congo, human labor was conscripted to provide porting services. These porters were nominally paid in trinkets, usually in just the food required to keep them alive.

“Black, miserable, with only a horrible filthy loin-cloth for clothing […] most of them sickly, dropping under a burden increased by tiredness and insufficient food; pitiful walking caryatids, beasts of burden with thin monkey legs […] requisitioned by the State armed with its powerful militia, dying along the road or, the journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages”.

In 1891, not a single porter of three hundred returned from a march of six hundred miles.

“The evening before, Lefranc [Catholic magistrate] learned, several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all the servant boys in the town be given fifty lashes.” The whip used, called the chicotte, is a piece of “raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged cork-screw strip. Usually applied to the victim's bare buttocks, it would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred more – not an uncommon punishment – were often fatal.”

Remember that to Europeans, Africans were subhuman at best. “Lazy, uncivilized, little better than animals.” Indeed, “Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation”. And for a white man to protest...well, that meant a rejection of your entire livelihood. Everyone “around you was participating; you were paid, promoted, awarded medals. So men who would have been appalled to see someone using chicotte on the streets of Brussels or Paris accepted the act, in this difference setting, as normal”. Moreover, European overlords found it useful to have native Africans perform the beatings. Creating “foremen”, the Europeans created a system similar to the Nazi kapos and the Soviet predurki to serve their interests.

With a mercenary army numbering nineteen thousand, mostly native African soldiers and white officers, Leopold had the most powerful army in Central Africa. This “Force Publique” was used to pacify the never-ending native resistance of local tribes as well as mutinies of the native troops. Back home in Europe, young men viewed service in the Congo as a “place to get rich and to wield power”. Young men, far from home and with incredible power at their fingertips, died in droves to tropical diseases, with the death rate of Europeans in the Congo numbering a third of all who went there). Sexual relations with the natives were taken to be a matter of course.

Rubber is where the Congo gets really exciting. In the early 1890s, rubber was discovered to be useful for factories and industrial enterprises throughout Europe. The rubber boom transformed the Congo in Africa's single most profitable colony; rubber trees covered half of the Congo's forests and the large native population made it perfect for harvesting. Concessions to companies in return for half of their profits made the Congo experience a surge of revenue almost unheard of in terms of economic productivity. Harvested by draining vines, rubber is incredibly simple to extract.

The wonderful thing about rubber is that its simple.

It takes no fertilizer. No cultivation. No harvesting machinery, no wells, no factories, nothing.

To harvest rubber, all you need are people.

To compel natives to harvest the rubber, a common tactic was to land at a village, attack the natives to the point of being able to secure women and children as hostages, and then force the men to gather however much rubber the officer required. Hostage-taking proved to be one of the most effective forms of persuasion, as “every state or company post in the rubber areas had a stockade for hostages. Resisting the order to gather rubber could mean death for your wife. She might die anyway, for in the stockades the food was scarce and conditions were harsh. All along the rivers, columns of exhausted men, carrying baskets of lumpy gray matter on their heads, walked twenty miles or more to assemble near the houses of European agents, who sat on their verandas and weighed the loads of rubber.”

“For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone […] the standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse; sometimes they cut off a hand from a living man.”

“'See! Here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the State how many we have killed.' The smoking preserved the hands in the hot, moist climate, for it might be days or weeks before the chief could display them to the proper official and receive credit for the kills.”

“All the blacks saw this man [violent Belgian official] as the Devil […] from all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets […] a village that refused to supply rubber would be wiped completely clean […] rubber caused these torments”.

The Congo of Leopold was a brutal militarized state that had an effective bureaucratic approach towards the large-scale exploration of native labor. In a world that had long since frowned on slavery, Leopold's Congo proved to be a stark exception to this. All in all, half of the Congolese population died from Belgian rule.

The Congo Reform Movement is a topic that is directly related to the Congo, but suffice it to say that characters such as Roger Casement and Edmund Dene Morel are legends in their own right and well worth looking at in greater detail. While the movement against the brutal treatment of the Congo took off in the early 1890s and has a host of amazing characters with their own stories, Leopold and the Congo finally parted ways in December of 1909 when the old King finally died. Thanks to the efforts of the first international human rights movement, which I unfortunately will not discuss here, the legacy of Leopold was one of severed hands and death. The Belgian government took over the administration of the Congo, yet sadly the brutalization never really changed. 26,579 lashes were administered for the first half of the 1920s alone, equal to eight lashes per worker, a ratio similar to that used by Leopold. Forced labor remained legally acceptable; indeed, at the start of World War II, “the legal maximum for forced labor in the Congo was increased to 120 days per man per year.”

Ironically, the Great Depression of the 1930s brought relief to many Congolese. The collapse of the international economy dried up the desire for such immense amounts of rubber and thus the Depression brought relief for many.

The administration had changed, but the reality was that Europe needed rubber, and this was especially important during World War II with the need of the Allies for evermore rubber. And, like always, forced labor provided the most effective means of this.

The invasion of Belgium during WWI helped immensely in the “great forgetting” of Belgium's crimes in the Congo and after the war it was anti-German propaganda that received virtually all the attention of the world. Not until the 1970s did historians begin to revive the atrocities committed by the Leopold and his Belgians for the sake of profit.

“Leopold and the Belgian colonial officials who followed him went to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence from the historical record. The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. 'I will give them my Congo,' Leopold said, 'but they have no right to know what I did there'”.

However, it is important to note that Belgium did not act alone. The French and Portuguese used nearly identical methods, though their net profit was considerably less than the extremely lucrative Congo.

But the story of the Congo and Belgium doesn't end here. In 1961, after independence, King Baudouin of Belgium granted the Congo independence. In his speech, Baudouin spoke of how Belgium had brought the Congo into the realm of civilized nations and other colonial-orientated ideological statements. Newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo reacted angrily and gave a speech that condemned what their colonial overlords had done. Lumumba, an advocate of the idea that the Congo must be free of foreign political and, equally as important, economic colonialism, instantly became an enemy of American corporations and the Belgian government, both of which had immense investments in the metal-rich areas of the Congo. Turning to the Soviet Union for support, Lumumba was the target of an assassination by the American CIA, although this failed.

Instead, the Belgians and Americans orchestrated a withdrawal of all Belgian military officers from the Congo (which meant that the Congolese Army was decapitated). At the same time, they encouraged rebellion in the resource-rich area of the Congo called Katanga. Lastly, they encouraged a coup led by Mobuto Sese Seko in which Lumumba was arrested and flown to Katanga by a Belgian pilot. There, he was arrested by the rebels and murdered.

A theme in American foreign policy, the deposition of democratically elected politicians because he has sympathies towards the left, is certainly a recurring one. Geopolitical interests trumping human rights and democracy is an unfortunate legacy of the Cold War.

Supported by the Americans, Mobuto became the dictator of the renamed Zaire. Overthrown in 1997, he had extorted nearly $4 billion from the country in methods copied from Leopold, namely the direct control of state resources, personal building projects, and private shareholdings in corporations extracting resources from his state. Along with Idi Amin and Gaddafi, Mobuto is one the great stereotypical African dictators. Empowered by a foreign-supported military coup and equipped with foreign weapons, he maintained strict control over Zaire for decades.

It's simple to point the finger of Africa's woes at their European colonizers and say, "Hah! Europeans fucked everything up, let's blame them!".


It is true that most of the greatest systematic wrongs in human history have occurred at the hands of Westerners, often under the guise of "civilizing" and other nonsense.

Yet other countries, such as Ireland and South Korea, were also brutally colonized and turned out to be prosperous, advanced states. A lot of what is wrong with Africa today is a mixture of extreme political corruption, foreign extraction of resources that doesn't benefit the people in general (Nigerian oil as an example of this), and, of course, HIV/AIDS, which is something far beyond the scope of this already far too long post.

I don't know what the real legacy of Belgian rule in the Congo is. A lot of dead people? Yes, definitely. But that really isn't anything new, even if the Congo was perhaps disproportionally injured by colonial rule.

No, instead I think the most important legacy of the Leopold and his Congo is the fact that people so quickly forgot. People largely forgot what happened in the Congo until only relatively recently, and the Congo experience is not a factor in the common education in Western countries today. It is this forgetting, and the forgetting of the crimes of the French, Portuguese, and other colonial powers that is the significant legacy of what happened there.

"There aren't any monuments in Berlin to the slaughtered Hereros."