King Leopold's Ghost

by Adam Hochschild

  The king's negotiations with Bismarck reached a climax soon after Stanley returned to Europe in the summer of 1884. For five days the explorer was the guest of Leopold, now on holiday at Ostend's Royal Chalet, a sprawling seaside villa studded with turrets and towers. The king brought in a special cook to make Stanley a traditional English breakfast each morning, and the two men talked far into the night. Just as Stanley was about to leave came a message from Bismarck with questions about the boundaries of the new Congo state, so Stanley remained for a few hours to draw them in on a large map on the wall of the king's study. Bismarck let himself be convinced that it was better for the Congo to go to the king of weak little Belgium, and be open to German traders, than go to protection-minded France or Portugal or to powerful England. In return for guarantees of freedom of trade in the Congo (like everyone else, Bismarck did not know the full text of Leopold's treaties with the chiefs), he agreed to recognize the new state.

  ***

  In Europe, the thirst for African land had become nearly palpable. There were some conflicting claims to be resolved, and clearly some ground rules were needed for further division of the African cake. Bismarck offered to host a diplomatic conference in Berlin to discuss some of these issues. To Leopold, the conference was one more opportunity to tighten his grip on the Congo.

  On November 15, 1884, representatives of the powers of Europe assembled at a large, horseshoe-shaped table overlooking the garden of Bismarck's yellow-brick official residence on the Wilhelmstrasse. The ministers and plenipotentiaries in formal attire who took their seats beneath the room's vaulted ceiling and sparkling chandelier included counts, barons, colonels, and a vizier from the Ottoman Empire. Bismarck, wearing scarlet court dress, welcomed them in French, the diplomatic lingua franca, and seated before a large map of Africa, the delegates got to work.

  More than anyone, Stanley had ignited the great African land rush, but even he felt uneasy about the greed in the air. It reminded him, he said, of how "my black followers used to rush with gleaming knives for slaughtered game during our travels." The Berlin Conference was the ultimate expression of an age whose newfound enthusiasm for democracy had clear limits, and slaughtered game had no vote. Even John Stuart Mill, the great philosopher of human freedom, had written, in On Liberty, "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement." Not a single African was at the table in Berlin.

  With his embryonic state already recognized by the United States and Germany, and with his friendly right-of-first-refusal deal made with France, Leopold was in a strong position. His International Association of the Congo was not a government—in fact, conference delegates seemed confused as to just what it was—so it was not officially represented at Berlin. But Leopold had no problem staying abreast of what went on at the conference. To begin with, keeping a close ear to the ground in the German capital was his friend Bleichröder, who was host to the delegates at an elegant dinner. Further, the king had ties with no fewer than three of the national delegations.

  First, the Belgian representatives were his trusted underlings; one of them was appointed secretary of the meeting. Second, Leopold was unusually well informed about confidential matters in the British Foreign Office, because the foreign secretary's personal assistant owed a large sum of money to a businessman friend of the king's who had been one of his original co-investors in sending Stanley to the Congo. In addition, a legal adviser to the British delegation was Sir Travers Twiss, who had recently consulted for Leopold about his treaties with the Congo chiefs. Finally, who was appointed as one of two American delegates to the conference? None other than Henry Shelton Sanford, who sent Leopold informative dispatches almost daily. And who was "technical adviser" to the American delegation, even as he remained on Leopold's payroll? Henry Morton Stanley. Between sessions of the conference, Leopold sent Sanford to Paris and Stanley to London on diplomatic lobbying missions.

  Although his role at Berlin was mainly as a figurehead for Leopold's Congo ambitions, Stanley was lionized by everyone and had a splendid time. "This evening I had the honour of dining with Prince Bismarck and his family," he wrote in his journal. "The prince is a great man, a kind father, and excellently simple with his family.... The Prince asked many questions about Africa and proved to me that in a large way he understood the condition of that continent very well." Bismarck, acquiring the beginnings of a substantial African empire for Germany, was glad to have the famous explorer stimulate German interest in the continent. He arranged for Stanley a round of banquets and lectures in Cologne, Frankfurt, and Wiesbaden.

  In snowy Berlin, almost none of the conference participants except Stanley had seen more of Africa than the drawings of its scenery on the menus for Bismarck's banquets. So when anyone seemed unclear about why Leopold's claim was so grand, Stanley could speak with the authority of someone who had just spent five years in the Congo for the king. Early on, reported one diplomat, Stanley went to the big map of Africa "and immediately engrossed the interest of every delegate, by a vivid description of the features of the Congo basin; and finally of the [adjacent] country necessary to go with it under the same régime to secure the utmost freedom of communication."

  Telegrams zipped back and forth between Berlin and Brussels, where Leopold was following every move. Contrary to myth, the Berlin Conference did not partition Africa; the spoils were too large, and it would take many more treaties to divide them all. But by resolving some conflicting claims, the conference (and a separate pact the king negotiated with France) did help Leopold in one important way: the king, France, and Portugal each got land near the Congo River's mouth, but Leopold got what he most wanted, the seaport of Matadi on the lower stretch of the river and the land he needed to build a railway from there around the rapids to Stanley Pool.

  More important to Leopold was the web of bilateral agreements he made with other countries during and after the conference, recognizing his colony-in-the-making and marking out its boundaries. When talking to the British, for instance, he hinted that if he didn't get all the land he had in mind, he would leave Africa completely, which would mean, under his right-of-first-refusal deal, that he would sell the Congo to France. The bluff worked, and England gave in.

  Europeans were still used to thinking of Africa's wealth mainly in terms of its coastline, and there was remarkably little conflict over ceding to Leopold the vast spaces he wanted in the interior. A major reason he was able to get his hands on so much is that other countries thought that they were giving their approval to a sort of international colony—under the auspices of the King of the Belgians, to be sure, but open to traders from all of Europe. In addition to perfunctory nods in favor of freedom of navigation, arbitration of differences, Christian missionaries, and the like, the major agreement that came out of Berlin was that a huge swath of central Africa, including Leopold's territory in the Congo basin, would be a free-trade zone.

  The conference ended in February 1885, with signatures on an agreement and a final round of speechmaking. No one benefited more than the man who had not been there, King Leopold II. At the mention of his name during the signing ceremony, the audience rose and applauded. In his closing speech to the delegates, Chancellor Bismarck said, "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." Two months later, like a delayed exclamation mark at the from florida to berlin end of Bismarck's speech, a United States Navy vessel, the Lancaster, appeared at the mouth of the Congo River and fired a twenty-one-gun salute in honor of the blue flag with the gold star.

  ***

  Most Belgians had paid little attention to their king's flurry of African diplomacy, but once it was over they began to realize, with surprise, that his new colony was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. It was one thirteenth of the African continen
t, more than seventy-six times the size of Belgium itself.

  To make clear the distinction between his two roles, the King of the Belgians at first considered calling himself "Emperor of the Congo"; he also toyed with the idea of outfitting loyal chiefs with uniforms modeled on those of the famous red-clad Beefeaters at the Tower of London. Then he decided to be merely the Congo's "King-Sovereign." In later years, Leopold several times referred to himself—more accurately, for his main interest in the territory was in extracting every possible penny of wealth—as the Congo's "proprietor." His power as king-sovereign of the colony was shared in no way with the Belgian government, whose Cabinet ministers were as surprised as anyone when they opened their newspapers to find that the Congo had promulgated a new law or signed a new international treaty.

  Even though the entity officially recognized by the Berlin Conference and various governments had been the International African Association or the International Association of the Congo (or, in the case of the befuddled U.S. State Department, both), Leopold decided on yet another change of name. The pretense that there was a philanthropic "Association" involved in the Congo was allowed to evaporate. All that remained unchanged was the blue flag with the gold star. By royal decree, on May 29, 1885, the king named his new, privately controlled country the État Indépendant du Congo, the Congo Free State. Soon there was a national anthem, "Towards the Future." At last, at age fifty, Leopold had the colony he had long dreamed of.

  6. UNDER THE YACHT CLUB FLAG

  WHILE HIS POWER overseas was on the rise, at home Leopold's family life grew worse. He increasingly found refuge in the beds of various mistresses, one of whom Belgians promptly nicknamed "Queen of the Congo." In April 1885, only six weeks after his diplomatic triumph at Berlin, the king was named in a British courtroom as one of the clients of a high-class "disorderly house" prosecuted at the urging of the London Committee for the Suppression of the Continental Traffic in English Girls. Leopold had paid £800 a month, a former servant of the house testified, for a steady supply of young women, some of whom were ten to fifteen years old and guaranteed to be virgins. A Paris newspaper reported rumors that Leopold had secretly crossed to England in his yacht and paid a royal sum to the house's madam to be sure his name was not mentioned again. More likely, what made the case close with unusual speed was that the Prince of Wales was said to be another of the establishment's customers. The British home secretary sent a special observer to the court, apparently a veiled message to all concerned that the less said, the better. After pleading guilty, the madam of the house got off with a remarkably light fine.

  When she was seventeen, Leopold married off his eldest daughter, Louise, to a much older Austro-Hungarian prince. After citywide festivities, the couple's wedding night at Laeken was so traumatic that Louise fled into the château gardens in her nightgown and had to be retrieved by a servant and lectured on wifely duty by her mother. Some years later, she got caught up in a tangle of bad debts and an adulterous romance with a cavalry officer. After the officer fought a duel with her husband, Austrian authorities jailed him and gave Louise the choice of going back to her husband or entering an insane asylum. She chose the asylum, and Leopold refused to speak to her again. Afraid of further embarrassment, he urged that she be guarded more closely. At last the cavalry officer was released from jail and dramatically rescued Louise from custody, only to die not long afterward. For the rest of her unhappy life, Louise bought clothes in the same obsessional way in which her father tried to buy countries, a compulsion that ate up her share of the royal fortune and more. Her exasperated creditors finally managed to seize and auction off a portion of her wardrobe: sixty-eight veils, ninety hats, twenty-seven evening gowns, twenty-one silk or velvet cloaks, and fifty-eight umbrellas and parasols.

  Nor was Leopold a better father to his middle daughter, Stephanie. When she was only sixteen, he betrothed her to black-bearded Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria-Hungary so that she would one day become the empress. Leopold particularly envied the Hapsburgs because, unlike him, they were little encumbered by parliaments and constitutions. However, in what proved to be an omen of things to come, Rudolph, arriving in Brussels to meet Stephanie for the first time, brought his current mistress with him.

  The king's main relief from domestic misery was his new colony. The Congo, later recalled Louise, "was the one topic of conversation around me." And compared to his household, for Leopold things in the Congo ran more smoothly. Just as he had found the perfect political moment to acquire his new territory, so he found himself at the right technological moment to consolidate his grip on it. As he prepared to develop the enormous colony, he found a number of tools at his disposal that had not been available to empire builders of earlier times. The tools were crucial, for they would soon allow a few thousand white men working for the king to dominate some twenty million Africans.

  To begin with, there was weaponry. The primitive muzzle-loaders which were the best arms that most Congolese could obtain were little better than the muskets of George Washington's army. Starting in the late 1860s, however, Europeans could rely on breech-loading rifles, which had just shown their deadly power on the battlefields of the American Civil War. These shot much farther and more accurately, and, instead of needing loose gunpowder, which was useless in the rain, they used quick-loading waterproof brass cartridges.

  An even more decisive advance quickly followed: the repeating rifle, which could fire a dozen or more shots without being reloaded. Soon after came the machine gun. As the poet Hilaire Belloc wrote:

  Whatever happens, we have got

  The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

  Another tool that allowed Europeans to seize virtually all of tropical Africa in the two decades that followed the Berlin Conference was medical knowledge. Midcentury explorers had blamed malaria on everything from "marshy exhalations" to sleeping in the moonlight, but, whatever its cause, they learned that quinine was a useful defense. Around the turn of the century malaria and hematuria became better understood; researchers also mastered yellow fever and other diseases, and the awesomely high death rate for Europeans in the African tropics began to drop.

  Finally, because of the Congo's unusual geography, one tool was even more important to Leopold than to other imperialists, and we have already seen it in action: the steamboat. It was known to Congo Africans as "the house that walks on water," or, after its sound, as kutu-kutu. The steamboat was an instrument of colonization throughout the nineteenth century, serving everyone from the British on the Ganges in India to the Russians on the Ob and Irtysh in Siberia. Congo steamboats included both sidewheelers and sternwheelers; all had awnings against the tropical sun. Usually they were long and narrow, with the shallow draft needed to clear the innumerable sandbars on the main river and its tributaries. Sometimes wire netting hung from the awning to protect the captain and helmsman from arrows.

  By now, steam had also largely replaced sail on the high seas, making the long voyage from Europe down the coast of Africa far swifter and closer to a fixed schedule. These steamships carried the next wave of Leopold's agents to Africa. By the end of 1889, there were 430 whites working in the Congo: traders, soldiers, missionaries, and administrators of the king's embryonic state. Fewer than half of them were Belgians, for Leopold's homeland still showed little interest in its king's new possession. Significantly, almost all Leopold's agents in the Congo were officers on extended leave from the Belgian or other European armies.

  Staff in place and tools in hand, Leopold set out to build the infrastructure necessary to exploit his colony. A rudimentary Congo transportation system was the first item on his agenda; without it, the territory's riches, whatever they might turn out to be, could not be brought to the sea except on foot. In 1887, a party of surveyors began to chart the route for a railroad to skirt the notorious 220 miles of rapids. Mosquitoes, heat, fever, and the rocky landscape laced with deep ravines took a severe toll, and it was three years before workers could start laying trac
ks.

  As such work began getting under way, a Congo state bureaucracy grew in Belgium as well as in the colony itself. Henry Shelton Sanford tried to get himself a job as a top colonial executive in Brussels, writing hopefully to his wife, "There is just the sort of work I would like, with both reputation & money to gain & the satisfaction of doing good.... I think I will ... propose a plan of operations, and offer my services." His hopes were in vain, for Leopold knew that Sanford's ability to give sumptuous Washington dinner parties was not matched by talent as an administrator or by the ruthlessness the king would require. Instead, Leopold gave Sanford permission to gather ivory and other products in the Congo, and the promise of help (not followed through on, as it turned out) in the form of porters, buildings, and steamboat transportation. But the Sanford Exploring Expedition, as the venture was euphemistically called, soon went the way of Sanford's other businesses. As usual, he tried to manage everything from Belgium, where mounting debts forced him to sell off some of his art collection and move to a smaller château. Meanwhile, his man in charge in the Congo took to drink, while steamboat boilers rusted on the trailside.

  Leopold was a far better businessman than Sanford, but he too began to find himself under financial pressure. He had inherited a sizable fortune, yet by the late 1880s, explorers, steamboats, mercenaries, armaments, and other Congo expenses had burned up almost all of it. All these expenses, however, would continue—even increase—if he hoped to turn a profit in exploiting the territory. Where was the money to come from? Getting it from the Belgian government would be difficult, because a clause in the country's constitution had required parliamentary approval for Leopold to become monarch of another state. To obtain this approval, he had to promise that the Congo would never be a financial drain on Belgium. He had convinced skeptical legislators that he had sufficient funds to develop the territory, even though this was not true.