The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Despite such measures, the Congo Free State continued to slide towards bankruptcy. Ivory was a dwindling source of income. Leopold’s luck was to be rescued by a single fortuitous factor – rubber.

  48

  THE RUBBER REGIME

  The rainforests of the Congo were rich in wild rubber. It came from vines that twined around trees, reaching the forest canopy a hundred feet or more above the ground. Until the 1890s, rubber sap had little value. But the invention of the pneumatic tyre, fitted first to bicycles and then to motor cars, and the increasing use of rubber for industrial products such as electrical wiring, hoses and tubing, led to soaring demand. Leopold seized upon this new source of wealth, devouring reports of commodity prices and rubber shipments. His objective was to make as much money as possible from wild rubber before new rubber plantations in Asia came into production, lowering the price. Harvesting wild rubber involved no cultivation or any expensive equipment. It required only labour.

  Company agents, backed up by the Force Publique, resorted to increasingly brutal methods to force African villagers to collect rubber sap and transport it in baskets to company outposts. Agents were paid on commission and given quotas to fulfil. They in turn imposed quotas on villagers. Women, children and elders were held hostage with official approval until the right quantity was delivered. Villagers who fell behind were flogged, imprisoned and even shot. Villagers who resisted were killed en masse, their villages burned down. To ensure that ammunition was not wasted, company militiamen and soldiers were instructed to cut off the right hand from a corpse so that officers could keep a check on them. The collection of severed hands became a regular part of the trade. But it was not only the dead who lost their hands – the living were similarly mutilated.

  The profits made from the rubber trade were enormous. In 1892, Leopold awarded a concession in the northern Free State to the Anglo-Belgian India-Rubber Company, otherwise known as Abir. Abir was given exclusive rights to exploit all forest products for a period of thirty years in an area that was four times the size of Belgium. In return, the Free State acquired a 50 per cent shareholding in the company. In 1895, the company produced 70 tons of rubber; in 1898, 410 tons; and in 1903, 951 tons. Villagers were paid trivial amounts in brass rods, salt, blankets and knives. The company’s margins were as high as 700 per cent a year.

  The overall increase in rubber production was impressive. In 1890, the Congo exported 100 tons of rubber; in 1901, 6,000 tons. Leopold used this great wealth to fund a grandiose programme of public works, building palaces, pavilions and parks in Belgium, enjoying his reputation as a ‘philanthropic’ monarch. He also acquired a huge personal portfolio of properties in Brussels and on the French Riviera.

  Few glimpses of how this wealth was generated reached the outside world. Missionaries working in the Free State provided one source of information, but their reports made little impact. In a letter to the London Times in November 1895, an American missionary, J. B. Murphy, described how the system worked:

  Each town in the district is forced to bring a certain quantity [of rubber] to the headquarters of the commissaire every Sunday. It is collected by force. The soldiers drive the people into the bush. If they will not go they are shot down, and their left hands cut off and taken as trophies to the commissaire. The soldiers do not care who they shoot down, and they more often shoot poor helpless women and harmless children. These hands, the hands of men, women and children, are placed in rows before the commissaire, who counts them to see that the soldiers have not wasted the cartridges. The commissaire is paid a commission of about 1d. [a penny] a pound upon all the rubber he gets. It is therefore to his interest to get as much as he can . . .

  Leopold pronounced himself to be shocked by such reports, but acknowledged that there might have been some excesses. ‘I will not allow myself to be splattered with blood or mud,’ he told a senior Free State official, ‘it is necessary that these villainies cease.’ He even appointed a six-man commission in 1896 to notify the authorities of any ‘acts of violence of which the natives may be victim’. But nothing was done to impede the rubber regime or check the abuses. It was far too profitable.

  The trading activities of Leopold’s Free State, however, began to intrigue an obscure shipping company official, Edmund Morel. Morel’s work for the Liverpool shipping line Elder Dempster brought him into frequent contact with Free State officials in Brussels and Antwerp. While studying trade statistics, Morel noted how ships bringing huge consignments of rubber from the Congo returned there loaded mainly with guns and ammunition; and he concluded that Leopold’s Free State was using a system of forced labour, akin to slavery, backed up by violence, to extract fortunes from Congo rubber. ‘These figures told their own story,’ he wrote later. ‘Forced labour of a terrible and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard-of profits . . . forced labour in which the Congo Government was the immediate beneficiary; forced labour directed by the closest associates of the King himself.’ He said he was left ‘giddy and appalled’ by the significance of his discovery. ‘It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman.’

  Morel resigned from Elder Dempster in 1901 and dedicated himself to exposing what he called the ‘Congo scandal’, tirelessly collecting evidence, delivering speeches and writing books, pamphlets and press articles. His campaign made little headway in Belgium, but in Britain he persuaded parliament to take an interest. The British government responded by instructing its consul in the Free State, Roger Casement, to investigate.

  A veteran of twenty years’ working in Africa, Casement had first travelled to the Congo in 1883 and had since undertaken several assignments there, before setting up the first British consulate in Boma in 1900. The report of his journey into the interior in 1903 dealt a fatal blow to Leopold’s assertions that the Congo Free State was a place of benign colonial rule.

  For more than three months, Casement travelled in a single-deck steam launch along the Congo River and its tributaries, stopping at outposts along the way to interview missionaries and villagers about conditions in Abir territory and Leopold’s own vast Domaine de la Couronne, amassing a wealth of detail about how the rubber regime worked on the ground. Witness after witness testified to the brutality of the system:

  From our country each village had to take 20 loads of rubber. These loads were big . . . We had to take these loads in 4 times a month . . . We got no pay. We got nothing . . . Our village got cloth and a little salt, but not the people who did the work . . . It used to take 10 days to get the 20 baskets of rubber – we were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved. Wild beasts – the leopards – killed some of us while we were working away in the forest and others got lost or died from exposure or starvation and we begged the white man to leave us alone, saying we could get no more rubber, but the white men and their soldiers said: Go. You are only beasts yourselves. You are only Nyama [meat]. We tried, always going further into the forest, and when we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes around their necks and bodies and taken away. The white men at the posts sometimes did not know of the bad things the soldiers did to us, but it was the white men who sent the soldiers to punish us for not bringing in enough rubber.

  Casement returned to the coast with tales of burned villages, severed hands, mass murder and refugee populations fleeing terror. What particularly struck him was the scale of depopulation. At Bolobo mission station, on the Congo River, he was told that a population once numbering 40,000 had been reduced to 1,000.

  Casement’s report was published in early 1904. Morel used it to further his campaign, producing a book entitled King Leopold’s Rule in Africa. The book was published in 1904 along with photographs of victims who had been mutilated. One showed a man named N
sala, a villager from Wala district, looking forlornly at a severed hand and foot. It was all that remained of his five-year-old daughter, who had been killed, then eaten, by Abir militiamen.

  As public furore mounted, Leopold sought to fend off criticism by appointing a commission of inquiry, fully expecting it to provide a ringing endorsement of his rule. But after an extensive tour of the Congo, the commission came to a verdict similar to that of Casement and Morel. A Punch cartoon in 1906 depicted Leopold as a serpent whose rubber coils were crushing the life out of the people of the Congo. Demands that Leopold hand over his private empire to the Belgian state gathered momentum.

  For several years more, Leopold tried to maintain his grip. ‘My rights over the Congo cannot be shared,’ he declared in 1906. Negotiations dragged on until 1908 when he finally agreed to give way in return for substantial sums of public money.

  By the end of his twenty-year reign as ‘King-Sovereign’, Leopold had become one of the richest men in Europe. But the Congo had lost several million people, possibly as many as ten million, half of the estimated population. In an essay on exploration, Joseph Conrad described the activities of Leopold’s Congo Free State as ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’.

  PART XIII

  49

  A TALE OF TWO TOWNS

  The gold rush to the Witwatersrand that began in 1886 brought hordes of white foreigners to Paul Kruger’s ramshackle Transvaal republic and transformed a barren stretch of highveld, 6,000 feet above sea level, into a landscape of mining headgear, battery stamps and ore dumps. Each day a stream of newcomers turned up from across southern Africa and beyond to try their luck, many coming from alluvial diggings in the eastern Transvaal, bringing with them their sluice boxes, pans, picks and shovels. But the gold reef that broke the surface of the Witwatersrand was different from all previous discoveries made in the Transvaal. The gold was contained in small veins in hard rock that dipped away at an angle, descending to unknown depths. The trace of gold was minute; it was difficult to mine; but outcrops were found over a vast area, running for some sixty miles from east to west. The Witwatersrand offered few pickings for small-time diggers but became instead the domain of a group of mining magnates and financiers known by the British press as the Randlords. At the forefront of this new bonanza was a powerful contingent from the diamond mines of Kimberley including Cecil Rhodes, Julius Wernher, Alfred Beit and Barney Barnato.

  From its origins as a tented diggers’ camp, Johannesburg grew into a frontier town of corrugated-iron buildings and boarding houses, brash and bustling, renowned for drunkenness, debauchery and gambling. The focus of attention in the early days rested on the stock exchange, a single-storey brick and iron building that attracted huge crowds at times of share excitement. By the end of 1887, sixty-eight gold-mining companies had been incorporated with a nominal capital of £3 million. In 1888, in an orgy of speculation, some 450 gold-mining companies were floated. More substantial buildings appeared. Johannesburg became, above all, a city of money. But its origins as a mining camp were never far away. The din of stamp batteries crushing gold ore persisted throughout the night and on windy days clouds of yellow dust from nearby ore dumps swirled through the streets.

  By 1896, after only a decade’s existence, Johannesburg’s population had reached 100,000. Wealthy whites congregated on the northern outskirts, over the crest of the ridge, living in luxury houses with views stretching away to the Magaliesberg hills, protected from the noise and dust of the mine workings by northerly winds which blew it all southwards. But most white miners and other employees lived in boarding houses in working-class districts close to the mines, frequenting the bars and brothels set up there. Two-thirds of the foreign white population – uitlanders, as the Transvaal’s Boers called them – consisted of single men. Black mineworkers were confined to compounds, as in Kimberley.

  During the first boom years of 1888 and 1889, scores of prostitutes arrived from the Cape Colony and Natal. More came when the rail link to the Cape was completed in 1892. With the opening of the railway from the port of Lourenço Marques on Delagoa Bay in 1894, there was an influx of prostitutes from Europe and New York City. A survey in 1895 counted ninety-seven brothels of various nationalities, including thirty-six French, twenty German and five Russian; the brothels in one part of Johannesburg were so numerous that it became known as ‘Frenchfontein’.

  A correspondent for the London Times, Flora Shaw, visiting Johannesburg in 1892, said she was repelled by its brash character. ‘It is hideous and detestable, luxury without order, sensual enjoyment without art, riches without refinement, display without dignity. Everything in fact which is most foreign to the principles alike of morality and taste by which decent life has been guided in every state of civilisation.’ The South African writer Olive Schreiner, who became a resident of Johannesburg, described it in 1898 as a ‘great, fiendish, hell of a city which for glitter and gold, and wickedness, carriages and palaces and brothels and gambling halls, beat creation’.

  Paul Kruger found it difficult to come to terms with this industrial monster in his backyard, only thirty miles from Pretoria, and the godless uitlander community that lived there; Duivelstad – Devil’s Town – he called it. Even on the occasion of his first visit to Johannesburg in 1887, there were signs of the friction that was eventually to prove fatal. He was given a cordial reception, but to his annoyance he was presented with a number of petitions listing grievances. The diggers asked for a daily postal service; they wanted their own town council, their own concession-licensing court, and a reduction of customs duties and mining dues. They pointed out that they had no representation in the Volksraad to make their case heard.

  Kruger’s encounters with the uitlander community became increasingly abrasive. Fearing that the sheer weight of their numbers would swamp the Boer population, he resisted demands to accord them political rights. Even at a local level, Johannesburg was not allowed its own municipality but was run by a sanitary board with limited powers. Despite the preponderance of English-speakers on the Witwatersrand, the only official language remained Dutch; the only medium of instruction allowed in state-supported schools was Dutch.

  In 1891, Kruger endeavoured to meet the uitlander demand for political representation by establishing a second volksraad for ‘new burghers’. Uitlanders were given the right to take up Transvaal citizenship after two years’ residence and to vote in elections for the second volksraad. The second volksraad, however, had limited functions; it was also subject to veto by the first volksraad where ‘old burghers’ remained in control. But Kruger’s two-tier system won him little support. Uitlanders were taxed but still left without adequate representation.

  While uitlander grievances mounted, the gold wealth they generated transformed the Transvaal’s prospects. In 1884, the government’s revenues amounted to £188,000. In 1886, the republic was close to bankruptcy, unable to raise a loan of £5,000. By 1895, government revenues had soared to £4.2 million. Pretoria grew from a somnolent rural village into a thriving town. Flush with new income, Kruger ordered the construction of an opulent new building for government offices and for parliament on Church Square; electric light and telephone systems were installed. He also awarded himself a huge increase in salary, raising it from £3,000 to £8,000 a year.

  Kruger’s temperament, however, made him ill-suited to handle the revolutionary changes sweeping across the Transvaal. In his sixties, he became increasingly dictatorial, resentful of opposition, prone to monumental rages and obstructive of new ideas, still believing himself to be divinely inspired. His speeches were more than ever like sermons, long, rambling and repetitive, with endless references to God and the Bible. Both his eyesight and his hearing were impaired by old age. In addition to uitlander grievances, he faced a chorus of complaints from a growing band of Boer critics disaffected by his old-fashioned style of leadership.

  Moreover, his administration was obsolete, tied to the ways
of a rural republic. No adequate financial controls were put in place. Kruger was accustomed to signing order-forms from the treasury without proper checks. No inspectorate was established until 1896. When a Volkraad committee investigated treasury disbursements in 1898, it discovered that in the previous sixteen years sums ‘advanced’ to officials without appropriate records being kept amounted to almost £2.4 million.

  There was also mounting criticism of Kruger’s concession policy and the corruption it spawned. Introduced in the 1880s as a way of promoting industrial development in a struggling rural state, it had become a central part of Kruger’s method of government. Kruger awarded monopoly concessions to favoured individuals and companies to establish not just factories but a whole range of public utilities: a state bank; water, gas and electricity supplies; municipal services in Pretoria, Johannesburg and other towns; tramways; road repairs; markets. The benefits, Kruger argued, included a substantial income for the state as well as the provision of local goods and services to the public. His critics pointed to the high prices that resulted from monopoly control and from the tariff barriers needed to protect monopolies. The most controversial concession concerned the supply of dynamite. Kruger’s deal to hand over a dynamite monopoly to a foreign consortium significantly raised the costs of the mining industry. His concession system, moreover, was used by many concession-hunters not to build factories or provide services but for speculative purposes; once in possession of a concession, they hoped to sell it for profit.

  With so many concessions available, the concession business was soon mired in corruption. So noticeable was the miasma of corruption in Pretoria that critics began to refer to the existence of a ‘third volksraad’ – the collection of businessmen, politicians and officials willing to trade favours for payment. The opposition newspaper, Land en Volk, frequently cited examples of bribery and corruption. Even the pro-government Pretoria Press admitted that there was ‘widespread corruption in the civil service’ and bemoaned the way in which senior officials cared more for their own enrichment than the interests of the state, while petty officials routinely expected bribes for small favours.