by Philipp Blom
Lined up ... are 40 emaciated sons of an African village, each carrying his little basket of rubber. The toll of rubber is weighed and accepted, but ... four baskets are short of the demand. The order is brutally short and sharp - Quickly the first defaulter is seized by four lusty ‘executioners,’ thrown on the bare ground, pinioned hands and feet, whilst a fifth steps forward carrying a long whip of twisted hippo hide. Swiftly and without cessation the whip falls, and the sharp corrugated edges cut deep into the flesh - on back, shoulders and buttocks blood spurts from a dozen places. In vain the victim twists in the grip of the executioners, and then the whip cuts other parts of the quivering body - and in the case of one of the four, upon the most sensitive part of the human frame. The ‘hundred lashes each’ left four inert bodies bloody and quivering on the shimmering sand of the rubber collecting post.
Following hard upon this decisive incident was another. Breakfast was just finished when an African father rushed up the veranda steps of our mud house and laid upon the ground the hand and foot of his little daughter, whose age could not have been more than 5 years.
The Harrises showed shocked audiences the photo to prove this very episode.
The horror: a father stares at the hands of his five-year-old daughter,
severed as a punishment for having harvested too
little caoutchouc.
This truly was the Heart of Darkness evoked in the 1899 novel by a Polish-British sailor and adventurer whom Roger Casement had befriended in the Congo: Joseph Conrad. It was the cancer eating away at Europe’s claim to moral leadership and missionary zeal to colonize the world. King Leopold himself - dull, business-minded and possessed by epic greed - had cited humanitarian motives for appropriating the Congo, which, he had pledged, would be thoroughly studied and Christianized. He had even founded a scientific organization to carry out the research, and one of his many huge building projects in and around Brussels was a monumental museum devoted to the cultures of central Africa. Behind this philanthropic façade, the Colony was robbed not only of raw materials, but also of lives. Some ten million Congolese natives perished under Leopold’s rule, murdered, maimed, or left to starve. It was the largest genocide the world had seen. The proceeds of his murderous business practices also financed endless enlargements and renovations at the royal castle in Laaken, an extensive park with architectural follies, a promenade in the seaside town of Ostend, a gallery for his favourite racetrack, a golf course and his pet project, a monumental triumphal arch commemorating his achievements. He also bought palatial properties in other countries, notably in southern France, where he liked to spend weeks with his mistress, whom he had discovered as a teenage Parisian prostitute and whom he would eventually marry shortly before his death.
The Shame of Empires
It was not difficult to hate and despise Leopold, but a vein of violent oppression ran beneath all colonial projects. However, despite the (often quite sincere) rhetoric of Christian missions and the ‘white man’s burden’, and partly thanks to Morel’s ceaseless and highly effective activism, the international press was increasingly aware of aspects of colonial policy that were absent from official documents, school lessons, and the memoirs of distinguished administrators. No event did more to sway public opinion away from an uncritical endorsement of imperial adventures than the Boer War (1899-1902), which was a constant presence in European and American newspapers.
The European press was extremely critical of Britain’s cynical attempt to secure South Africa’s most lucrative gold fields for the Crown, if necessary by exterminating the local colonizers of Dutch descent, the Boers. Early defeats of the British forces were cheered like great patriotic victories from St Petersburg to Paris. Always good for a foreign-policy scandal, the German Kaiser had caused a major diplomatic incident by sending President Kruger a telegram congratulating him for beating off the first British incursion, the Jameson Raid of December 1895. When the imperial forces were strengthened and went onto the counter-offensive, European papers followed the fate of individual Boer units and their commanders with daily front-page dispatches from the front, as if the fighting were occurring in the streets of Frankfurt or Lyon.
This international public outrage at the British attempt to subdue the plucky Dutch colonists and their legitimate interests was to some degree political, of course, especially in Germany, which had a strategic interest in South Africa. Much of the revulsion abroad, however, was quite sincere, and the critical voices grew into a storm of protest when the British commander Lord Kitchener adopted a policy of scorched earth, systematically destroying Boer farms and herding women and children into internment facilities dubbed ‘concentration camps’ - the first occurrence of this term. Twenty-eight thousand civilians, a quarter of all prisoners, died of starvation, exposure and of epidemics soon raging in the hastily improvised camps. Of these victims, 22,000 were under sixteen years of age. The satirical Austro-Hungarian magazine Der Floh captured the mood of many Europeans about the final peace agreement in 1902 in doggerel: ‘Old England, cheers! No longer war / And now we can go to it. / We lug home all that Transvaal ore / We’ll live like kings, champagne galore / And shear the Boers to do it.’
Opposition to the Boer War often came from the left. The socialist Vienna paper Arbeiterzeitung echoed the feelings of many on the left when it wrote about Britain’s ‘bloody struggle against a people of heroes’. In Britain, the thrust of the argument against big capital and its involvement in the British-owned gold-mining firms in the Transvaal often developed antisemitic overtones, as in the writings of the liberal writer J. A. Hobson, who held in a popular book that the gold business was ‘almost entirely in ... [the Jews’] hands’ and that ‘Jewhannesburg’ was not worth the blood of Christian soldiers. Just as Captain Dreyfus was the perfect embodiment of French anxieties, the image of the straight-living Christian Boers being crushed under the boot of a superior power with undeniable economic motives made them an ideal symbol of a common anxiety, a rallying point for admirers of very different backgrounds.
It was relatively easy for European observers to show solidarity with the Boers; they were, after all, Europeans themselves, and dared to defy the colossus of the British empire. This was not quite a colonial war: rather, it seemed to be a war of liberation, much like the struggles for Polish independence during the early nineteenth century, a vision which accorded perfectly with the Boers’ perception of themselves and their struggle. Despite their modern Mauser rifles (feared by their attackers), the staunch men with their huge beards who proudly posed for press photographs published around the world seemed like a nation of prophets defending their promised land: a pious white society which they would defend to the last drop of their blood. They fought hard for a society in which Apartheid was effectively already implemented, not for anything even vaguely resembling a society with civil liberties for blacks. When Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, later to become the founder of the Boy Scouts, armed black men for the defence of British-held Mafeking which was being besieged by the Boers, the commander of the attacking forces, General Pieter Arnoldus Cronje, was so disgusted by this act of racial treason that he sent Baden-Powell a message across the lines: ‘I would ask you to pause and ... even if it cost you the loss of Mafeking, to disarm your blacks and ... act the part of the white man in a white man’s war.’ Baden-Powell refused to play the part and held the town, partly due to his disgraceful ruse.
For Britain itself, the Boer War was a disaster, even if her troops eventually overwhelmed the exhausted settler forces in June 1902. Victory had been won at an appalling human cost, and none but the blindest imperialist could think of it as an evenly matched and honourable conflict. The glorious British forces had been humiliated by a ragtag band of settlers who at the beginning of the conflict could rely on little else but their courage and stubborn determination (later on, material support and even volunteers arrived from France and Germany). When they had eventually forced the decision in their favour, they had done so
at the price of tens of thousands of innocent civilian lives, and with very questionable motivation. The lofty principles with which the colonizers justified their empires no longer looked so pure. What had been a victory in military terms was still seen as a moral defeat of devastating proportions. ‘The horrible consciousness that we have, at best, shown ourselves to be unscrupulous in methods, vulgar in manners and inefficient to the last degree, is an unpleasant background to all one’s personal life…The Boers are, man for man, our superiors in dignity, devotion and capacity - yes, in capacity,’ noted the Fabian activist Beatrice Webb in her diary in disgust in 1900, before the concentration camps and the scorched earth.
In view of this recent history, the British government’s response to the Casement Report two years later was predictably muted. Moral outrage at the brutal exploitation of an African territory would not have looked very credible. The colonial experience became none of the colonial masters, in fact. In the case of Germany, one of the most vociferous supporters of the Boers, the cancer of violence erupted that very year, when a group of tribes in German South West Africa rebelled against Wilhelm II’s forces. Armed Herero warriors laid siege to the township of Okahandja, and attacked farms and police stations in the area, with the loss of some 140 German lives.
With only a small troop contingent in place, the governor of the colony turned to Berlin for reinforcements and got more than he bargained for. On the direct order of the Kaiser and against the advice of most senior officers of the general staff, Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha was dispatched into the area. Trotha had years of experience in the colonial service, as well as a reputation for exceptional harshness. When he found that he could not beat the rebels in open battle and instead saw himself faced with an infuriatingly effective guerrilla campaign, he turned to more comprehensive tactics and issued the following decree to the Herero:
I, the great general of the German soldiers, am sending this letter to the Herero people. The Herero no longer are German subjects. They have murdered and stolen, have cut off ears, noses and other body parts of wounded soldiers and now they are too cowardly to fight ... The Herero people has to leave this land. If they do not go, the Groot Roor [artillery] will force them to go. Within German borders, every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot and I no longer shelter women and children, I will drive them back to their people or have them shot at. These are my words for the Herero people. The great general of the mighty German Kaiser.
Trotha’s forces, most of whom were worn out from the campaign in the unfamiliar heat and weakened or disabled by tropical diseases, were in no state to execute this brutal order. However, faced with other punitive measures such as blocked water holes, a column of some 30,000 Herero had taken flight into the arid hinterland, beyond the reach of the German forces. Their way led them into the waterless Sandfeld desert, where most cattle and some 12 to 14,000 men, women and children died of thirst. Scouts later found water holes several metres deep and surrounded by skeletons, but without water. When the order from Berlin came (accompanied by an outcry in the media) to countermand the declaration, cease hostilities and give humanitarian aid to the survivors, roughly a third of the Herero people had died, either in battle or in the Sandfeld.
Driven into the desert: surviving members of the Herero tribe.
If Trotha’s barbaric intent and the terrible death toll among the Herero people were an isolated occurrence in Germany’s short colonial history, murderous violence was frequent and systematic in the Ottoman Empire, where between 1894 and 1915 millions of Armenians perished at the hands of the army and its often Kurdish henchmen, and, to a lesser extent, in some of the Dutch colonies, notably in Java and Sumatra. Also in 1904, the Dutch Lieutenant-Colonel van Daalen mounted a penal expedition against an insurrection in the Aceh region (troubled by civil war already then), during which his soldiers burned several villages and killed 2,900 natives, 1,150 of them women. A photographer brought along to document the expedition photographed officers proudly standing over the slain bodies of villagers, one foot planted on the corpses’ heads. Ten years earlier, a young lieutenant had taken part in another punitive raid. In letters to his wife he recounted the experience: ‘I had to drive together nine women and three children who were begging for mercy and deliver them to death. It was unpleasant work, but there was nothing else I could have done. The soldiers killed them with bayonets.’ He accepted the ‘terrible duty of the colonial soldier’, he wrote. The lieutenant, Hendrikus Colijn, would later become prime minister of the Netherlands. Some 2,000 natives were shot or hacked to death in the expedition in which he dutifully took part.
Media Wars
It was due to men such as Morel and Casement that atrocities like these became more difficult to hide and public pressure for change increased around the world. Morel’s effectiveness was largely due to his immense skill in exploiting the unprecedented reach and hunger of the mass newspapers. More people than ever could read and afford newspapers, which had become the dominant source of information and entertainment. Only a decade before, cheaper and faster typesetting, photographic reproduction and printing technologies had revolutionized the industry and a good story always sold, especially if it involved atrocities committed by a foreign power. Morel fed the papers and fanned the flames of public outrage with an effective publicity campaign which even involved a trip to the United States in September 1904, on which he visited President Roosevelt in Washington and won the support of Mark Twain; in Europe he had already secured the support of the French writer Anatole France and the Nobel Prize-winner Björnstjerne Björnson from Norway. Congo committees and societies sprang up all over the world, ranging from regular rallies in Zurich to a series of talks given in New Zealand. Almost single-handedly, Edward Morel had made the Congo an issue that would not go away.
Newspapers had taken a new place in the public consciousness. Leopold quickly understood that the only way to counteract Morel’s influence was by going to the media himself. He instituted a toothless commission of missionaries carefully selected for eminence, working in a region without significant rubber exploitation, and with inaccessible mission stations. In a systematic international campaign, he paid lobbyists to influence politicians and bribed newspaper editors to change their tack. His German agent pulled off the remarkable feat of having the Berlin National-Zeitung, which had previously attacked Leopold as ‘the unscrupulous businessman who lives in the palace in Brussels’, switch within two years to belittling reports about atrocities as ‘old wives’ tales’. In Britain, Leopold’s agent (working on a handsome retainer) went further and sent two presentable specimens of English society on a fact-finding mission preceded by a degree of cosmetic enhancement wherever the travellers went. Both came back with glowing tales about their experiences. One of them, Viscount William Montmorres, published a gushing book about hard-working officials and cheerful natives. The other traveller, the publisher Mary French Sheldon, was shown around by officials of the concessionary rubber companies, fell in love with the captain of her steamboat and later wrote in The Times. ‘I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than I have ever seen in the Congo.’ Leopold made sure that this message got to the right people, paying out of his own pocket for a lecture by Sheldon followed by a dinner for five hundred invited guests at the Savoy.
All this to no avail. The war about the Congo was a media war and, despite his best efforts, the Belgian King was losing. This may have been due to his strategy of targeting people he deemed important with grand free dinners or brochures entitled The Truth about the Congo put into the first-class compartments of luxury trains, while Morel made sure to speak to a more general public. But it may have also been simply because Leopold defended the indefensible, up to the point of disseminating stories about atrocities committed by other colonial regimes and dismissing the amputated hands of his unfortunate Congo subjects as isolated cases of malicious cancers selflessly treated by Belgian doctors. The case agains
t him was simply overwhelming, and Belgium carried too little political weight to be shielded by other great powers for strategic reasons.
One of the lobbyists recruited by the King of the Belgians to turn around public opinion was Colonel Henry I. Kowalsky, a flamboyantly brash and fast-living San Francisco lawyer whose legendary girth once caused the mayor of San Francisco at a dinner given in Kowalsky’s honour to remark: ‘I shall not closely follow the text of the toast which has been assigned to me. Like our guest, it is too large a subject.’ On an annual salary of 100,000 francs (the equivalent of £300,000), the novice public relations manager travelled to visit his new boss in Brussels and then moved to New York, where he installed himself in sumptuous offices on Wall Street. The ‘colonel’, whose rank was as spurious as his other qualifications, proved a disastrous choice. The Belgian colonial office soon attempted to marginalize the embarrassing American who was famous for his loud clothes and addressed Leopold in his voluminous correspondence as ‘My dear Majesty’. When the money from Brussels dried up, Kowalsky indignantly changed sides and sold his bulky and detailed correspondence with Leopold to the newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst.
The effect of publishing the evidence of the Belgian King’s manipulation of the press and of Washington politicians was catastrophic. Once more, Leopold sought to head off the worst by instituting a commission of inquiry. This time, however, naive missionaries would not do, and despite their being carefully chosen for their views, the commission of three European judges that travelled to the Free State actually took their work seriously, proceeding to hear hundreds of witnesses. During the deposition of statements one of the judges broke down and wept. One witness, a chief who had himself been flogged and held hostage, laid 110 twigs on the commission table - one for each member of his tribe murdered in the pursuit of rubber. On hearing the first findings from the commission in March 1905, the Congo governor-general, Paul Costerman, slit his throat with a razor. Time was running out for the Congo Free State.