The Dream of the Celt: A Novel
Page 9
He spoke as if he had the fever and tremors of malaria.
“Fine, mon père,” Roger agreed. “But first sit down, let’s have coffee and something to eat.”
While they ate, Father Hutot explained to the consul that the Trappists at the mission in Coquilhatville had permission from the order to break the strict cloistered regime that rules elsewhere in order to give aid to the natives, “who need it so much in this land where Beelzebub seems to be winning the struggle with the Lord.”
Not only the monk’s voice trembled but also his eyes, his hands, his spirit. He blinked unceasingly, wore a coarse tunic that was stained and wet, and on his feet, covered with mud and scratches, were strapped sandals. Father Hutot had been in the Congo for some ten years. For the past eight he had traveled periodically to the villages in the region, climbed to the top of Bongandanga, and seen at close range a leopard that, instead of jumping him, moved off the path, waving its tail. He spoke indigenous languages and had gained the confidence of the natives, especially those from Walla, “those martyrs.”
They started out on a narrow trail between the branches of tall trees, intercepted from time to time by narrow streams. The song of invisible birds could be heard, and at times a flock of parrots flew screeching over their heads. Roger noticed that the monk walked through the jungle with assurance, not tripping, as if he had long experience of these treks through the undergrowth. Father Hutot explained to him what had happened in Walla. Since the village, already very reduced, could not deliver in full the last quota of food, rubber, and wood, or give over the number of laborers the authorities demanded, a detachment of thirty soldiers from the Force Publique, under the command of Lieutenant Tanville, came from the garrison at Coquilhatville. When they saw them approach, the entire village fled to the forest. But the interpreters followed and assured them they could return. Nothing would happen to them, Lieutenant Tanville wanted only to explain the new directives and negotiate with the village. The chief ordered them to return. As soon as they did, the soldiers fell on them. Men and women were tied to the trees and whipped. A pregnant woman who tried to move away to urinate was shot to death by a soldier, who believed she was fleeing. Another ten women were taken to the maison d’otages in Coquilhatville as hostages. Lieutenant Tanville gave Walla a week to fulfill its quota or those ten women would be shot and the village burned.
When Father Hutot arrived in Walla a few days later, he encountered a hideous sight. In order to fulfill the quotas they owed, the families in the village had sold their sons and daughters, and two of the men their wives, to traveling merchants who practiced the slave trade behind the backs of the authorities. The Trappist believed the children and women sold numbered at least eight, but perhaps there were more. The natives were terrified. They had gone to buy rubber and food to satisfy the debt but weren’t sure the money from the sale would be enough.
“Can you believe things like that happen in this world, Consul?”
“Yes, mon père. Now I believe everything evil and terrible that people tell me. If I’ve learned anything in the Congo it’s that there’s no bloodthirsty animal worse than the human being.”
I didn’t see anyone cry in Walla, Roger would think afterward. And he didn’t hear anyone complain. The village seemed inhabited by automatons, ghostly beings who walked back and forth among the thirty or so huts made of wooden sticks with conical roofs of palm leaves, disoriented, not knowing where to go, having forgotten who they were, where they were, as if a curse had fallen on the village, transforming its inhabitants into phantoms. But phantoms with backs and buttocks covered in fresh scars, some with traces of blood as if the wounds were still open.
With the help of Father Hutot, who spoke the tribe’s language fluently, Roger carried out his work. He questioned each and every one of the villagers, listening to them repeat what he had already heard and would often hear afterward. Here too, in Walla, he was surprised that none of those poor creatures complained about the main thing: With what right had the foreigners come to invade, exploit, and mistreat them? They took into consideration only the immediate problem: the quotas. They were excessive, there was no human force that could gather so much rubber, so much food, give up so many laborers. They didn’t even complain about the beatings and the hostages. They asked only that their quotas be lowered a little so they could fulfill them and in this way keep the authorities happy with the people of Walla.
Roger spent the night in the village. The following day, his notebooks filled with notes and testimonies, he said goodbye to Father Hutot. He had decided to change his planned trajectory. He returned to Lake Mantumba, boarded the Henry Reed, and headed for Coquilhatville. It was a large village, with irregular dirt streets, dwellings scattered among groves of palm trees, and small cultivated fields. As soon as he disembarked, he went to the garrison of the Force Publique, a vast space of rough buildings and a stockade of yellow slats.
Lieutenant Tanville had gone out on an assignment, but Roger was received by Captain Marcel Junieux, the head of the garrison and the man responsible for all the stations and posts of the Force Publique in the region. He was in his forties, tall, slim, muscular, his skin bronzed by the sun and his hair, already gray, cut close to the scalp. He had a little medal of the Virgin hanging around his neck and the tattoo of a small animal on his forearm. He led Roger to a crude office that had some banners and a photograph of Leopold II in parade uniform on the walls. He offered him a cup of coffee and had him sit at a small worktable covered with notebooks, regulations, maps, and pencils, on a very fragile chair that seemed about to collapse at each movement Roger made. The captain had spent his childhood in England, where his father had a business, and spoke good English. He was a career officer who had volunteered to come to the Congo five years earlier “to serve my country, Consul.” He said this with acid irony.
He was about to be promoted and return to the mother country. He listened to Roger without once interrupting him, very serious and, it seemed, deeply focused on what he was hearing. His grave, impenetrable expression did not alter at any detail. Roger was precise and meticulous. He made very clear what he had been told and what he had seen with his own eyes: the scarred backs and buttocks, the testimonies of those who had sold their children to fulfill the quotas they hadn’t been able to satisfy. He explained that His Majesty’s government would be informed of these horrors, but he also believed it was his duty, in the name of the government he represented, to lodge his protest against the Force Publique, which was responsible for abuses as outrageous as those committed in Walla. He was an eyewitness to the fact that the village had been turned into a small hell. When he finished speaking, Captain Junieux’s face did not change. He waited some time, in silence. Finally, moving his head slightly, he said quietly,
“As you no doubt know, Consul, we, I mean the Force Publique, do not issue the laws. We simply see that they are carried out.”
His gaze was clear and direct, with no trace of discomfort or irritation.
“I know the laws and regulations that govern the Congo Free State, Captain. Nothing in them authorizes you to mutilate the natives, to whip them until they bleed to death, to keep the women hostage so their husbands don’t run away, to extort the villages to the extreme that mothers have to sell their children to deliver the quotas of food and rubber you demand of them.”
“We?” Captain Junieux exaggerated his surprise. He shook his head and as he moved, the little tattooed animal moved. “We demand nothing of anyone. We receive orders and carry them out, that’s all. The Force Publique does not set the quotas, Mr. Casement. The political authorities and the directors of the concessionaire companies set them. We are the executors of a policy in which we have not intervened in the slightest. No one ever asked for our opinion. If they had, perhaps things would go better.”
He stopped speaking and seemed distracted for a moment. Through the large windows with metal screens, Roger saw a rectangular treeless clearing where a formation of Afri
can soldiers were marching, wearing drill trousers, theirs torsos and feet bare. They changed direction at the command of a sergeant major wearing boots, a uniform shirt, and a kepi.
“I’ll investigate. If Lieutenant Tanville has committed or facilitated extortion, he will be punished,” said the captain. “The soldiers, too, of course, if they were excessive in the use of the chicote. This is all I can promise you. The rest is beyond my authority; it is a legal question. Changing this system is not the task of the military but of judges and politicians. Of the Supreme Government. You know that too, I imagine.”
Suddenly a slight inflection of discouragement appeared in his voice.
“There’s nothing I’d like better than for the system to change. I’m disgusted too by what happens here. What we’re obliged to do offends my principles.” He touched the medal around his neck. “My faith. I’m a very Catholic man. Over there, in Europe, I always tried to act according to my beliefs. That isn’t possible here in the Congo, Consul. That’s the sad truth. That’s why I’m very happy to return to Belgium. I won’t set foot in Africa again, I assure you.”
Captain Junieux got up from his table and walked to one of the windows. Turning his back on the consul, he was silent for a long time, observing the recruits who never learned the rhythm of the march, who tripped, whose lines in their formation were crooked.
“If that’s the case, you could do something to put an end to these crimes,” Roger murmured. “This isn’t why we Europeans came to Africa.”
“Ah, isn’t it?” Captain Junieux turned to look at him and the consul saw that the officer had paled somewhat. “What have we come for, then? I know: to bring civilization, Christianity, and free commerce. Do you still believe that, Mr. Casement?”
“Not anymore,” Roger replied immediately. “Though I did believe it before. With all my heart. I believed it for many years, with all the ingenuousness of the idealistic boy I once was. That Europe came to Africa to save lives and souls, to civilize the savages. Now I know I was wrong.”
Captain Junieux’s expression changed, and it seemed to Roger that suddenly the officer’s face had traded the hieratic mask for a more human one that even looked at him with the pitying sympathy idiots deserve.
“I’m trying to redeem that sin of my youth, Captain. That’s why I’ve come to Coquilhatville. That’s why I’m documenting, as fully as I can, the abuses committed here in the name of so-called civilization.”
“I wish you success, Consul.” Captain Junieux mocked him with a smile. “But if you’ll allow me to speak frankly, I’m afraid you won’t have any. There’s no human power that can change this system. It’s too late for that.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to visit the jail and the maison d’otages where you have the women brought here from Walla,” said Roger, abruptly changing the topic.
“You can visit anything you like,” the officer agreed. “Make yourself at home. But permit me to remind you again of what I said. We aren’t the ones who invented the Congo Free State. We only make it function. We’re victims too.”
The jail was a hut of wood and brick, with no windows and a single entrance, guarded by two native soldiers with shotguns. There were a dozen half-naked men, some very old, lying on the ground. What he found most shocking wasn’t the abject or inexpressive faces of those silent skeletons whose eyes followed him back and forth as he walked around the hut, but the stench of urine and excrement.
“We’ve tried to teach them to take care of their business in those buckets.” He read the captain’s mind as he pointed at a receptacle. “But they’re not used to that. They prefer the ground. They don’t care about the stink. It’s their problem. Maybe they don’t smell it.”
The maison d’otages was smaller but the spectacle was more dramatic because it was so crowded Roger could barely circulate among those packed-together, half-naked bodies. The space was so tight that many women could not sit or lie down but had to remain standing.
“This is exceptional,” said Captain Junieux, gesturing. “There are never this many. Tonight, so they can sleep, we’ll move half of them to one of the soldiers’ barracks.”
Here, too, the stink of urine and excrement was compelling. Some women were very young, almost girls. They all had the same gaze—lost, somnambulistic, beyond life—which Roger would see in so many Congolese women during this journey. One of the hostages had a newborn in her arms, so still it seemed dead.
“What criterion do you follow for letting them go?” the consul asked.
“I don’t decide that, sir, a magistrate does. There are three in Coquilhatville. There is only one criterion: when the husbands turn in the quotas they’re supposed to, they can take their wives away.”
“And if they don’t?”
The captain shrugged.
“Some manage to escape,” he said, not looking at him and lowering his voice. “The soldiers take others and make them their wives. Those are the luckiest. Some go mad and kill themselves. Others die of sorrow, rage, and hunger. As you’ve seen, they have almost nothing to eat. That isn’t our fault either. I don’t receive enough supplies to feed the soldiers. Even less for the prisoners. Sometimes we take up small collections among the officers to improve the rations. That’s how things are. I’m the first to regret it isn’t different. If you succeed in improving this, the Force Publique will thank you.”
Roger went to visit the three Belgian magistrates in Coquilhatville, but only one received him. The other two invented pretexts for avoiding him. But Maître Duval, a plump, self-satisfied man in his fifties who, in spite of the tropical heat, wore a vest, false shirt cuffs, and a frock coat with a watch chain, led him to his stripped-down office and offered him a cup of tea. He listened politely, sweating profusely. He wiped his face from time to time with a handkerchief that was already wet. At times he made disapproving movements of his head and wore an afflicted expression because of what the consul was saying. When Roger finished, he asked him to detail everything in writing. In that way he would be able to file with the court of which he formed part a requisitory to open a formal investigation into these lamentable episodes. Though perhaps, Maître Duval rectified, with a reflective finger on his chin, it would be preferable if the consul would file that report with the Superior Court, established now in Leopoldville. Because it was a higher, more influential court, it could act more efficiently throughout the colony. Not only remedying this state of things, but at the same time indemnifying with economic compensation the families of the victims and the victims themselves. Roger told him he would. He said goodbye, convinced that Maître Duval would not lift a finger and neither would the Superior Court in Leopoldville. But even so, he would file the brief.
At dusk, when he was about to leave, a native came to tell him the monks at the Trappist mission wanted to see him. There he saw Father Hutot again. The monks—there were half a dozen—wanted to ask him to secretly carry away on his steamboat a handful of fugitives they had been hiding in the monastery for some days. They were all from the village of Bonginda, up the Congo River, where, on account of not fulfilling their quotas of rubber, the Force Publique had carried out a punishing action as severe as the one in Walla.
The Trappist mission in Coquilhatville was a large two-story house of clay, stones, and wood, which looked like a small fort from the outside. The windows were closed up. The abbot, Dom Jesualdo, of Portuguese origin, was very old, as were another two monks, emaciated and almost lost in their white tunics, with black scapulars and crude leather belts. Only the oldest were monks, the others were lay brothers. All of them, like Father Hutot, displayed the semiskeletal thinness that was like the emblem of the Trappists here. Inside, the building was bright, for only the chapel, the refectory, and the monks’ dormitory had roofs. There was a garden, an orchard, a yard with fowl, a cemetery, and a kitchen with a large stove.
“What crime have these people committed that you ask me to take them away in secret from the authorities?”
Roger agreed. Surely it was an act of mercy to give the help the Trappists had requested. But he hesitated. As a diplomat, secretly spiriting away fugitives from justice, even if persecuted for unjust reasons, was risky. It could compromise Great Britain and completely taint the informative mission he was carrying out for the Foreign Office.
“May I see and speak to them?”
Dom Jesualdo agreed. Father Hutot withdrew and returned with the group almost immediately. There were seven, all male, including three boys. They all had their left hands cut off or maimed by blows from a rifle butt, and traces of lashes from a chicote on their chests and backs. The head of the group was named Mansunda and wore a crest of feathers and necklaces of animal teeth; his face displayed old scars from the initiation rites of his tribe. Father Hutot acted as interpreter. Twice in a row the village of Bonginda had not fulfilled its deliveries of rubber—the trees in the area had run out of latex—to the emissaries of the Lulonga Company, the concessionary in the region. Then the African guards brought to the village by the Force Publique began to whip them and cut off hands and feet. There was an outburst of rage and the village rebelled and killed a guard while the others managed to run away. A few days later Bonginda was occupied by a column of the Force Publique that set fire to all the houses, killed a good number of the residents, men and women, burning some inside their huts and taking the rest to the jail in Coquilhatville and the maison d’otages. Chief Mansunda believed they were the only ones who had escaped, thanks to the Trappists. If the Force Publique captured them they would be victims of extreme punishment, like all the rest, because throughout the Congo rebellion by the natives was always punished by the extermination of the entire community.