King Leopold's Ghost
Page 46
Almost every page of this book benefited immeasurably from intensive editorial consulting from Tom Engelhardt. Among American writers who care about their craft, Tom's name is a well-kept secret. There are few people alive for whom the act of critically reading, untangling and polishing a sentence, a paragraph, an entire book, is so much an act of the highest craftsmanship. If there were Oscars for editing, Tom would have won his long ago.
As a newcomer to this tragic patch of history, I was helped in my explorations by several people who know far more about it than I. Daniel Vangroenweghe read the manuscript and shared some documents with me. And I owe a special debt of gratitude to the two greatest scholars of this period, the anthropologist Jan Vansina and the historian Jules Marchal. Both generously responded to numerous calls and letters asking for information, and both read the manuscript with painstaking care, Marchal in two successive drafts, saving me from innumerable errors. They are not responsible for any mistakes that crept in by accident in my subsequent rewriting, or for the few points where my interpretation may differ from that of one or the other of them. I cannot thank them enough.
PHOTO CREDITS
Young Leopold: Corbis-Bettmann. Stanley: Royal Geographical Society. Sanford: Sanford Museum, City of Sanford. Telegram: Sanford Museum, City of Sanford. King Leopold: Corbis-Bettmann. Twa Mwe: Royal Geographical Society. Goodwill: Royal Geographical Society. Williams: Archive Photos. Ivory: Sanford Museum, City of Sanford. Conrad: New York Times Co./Archive Photos. Rom: Collection of the Musée Royal de l'Armée, Brussels. Rom with rifle: Les Vétérans Coloniaux 1876–1908: Revue Coloniale Illustrée. Van Kerckhoven: Collection of the Musée Royal de l'Armée, Brussels. Morel: Anti-Slavery International. Antwerp: Hulton-Getty. Casement: Archive Photos. Shanu: Au Congo: Comment les Noirs Travaillent by Charles Lemaire. Sheppard: Presbyterian Church (USA) Department of History, Montreat, N.C. Nsala: Anti-Slavery International. Severed hands: Anti-Slavery International. Two youths: Anti-Slavery International. Chicotte: Regions Beyond. Women Hostages: Regions Beyond. Baringa village: Regions Beyond. Baringa razed: Regions Beyond. Meeting poster: Regions Beyond. Leopold and skulls: Stock Montage, Inc. The Appeal: Regions Beyond. Expert Opinion: Stock Montage, Inc. Rubber coils: Stock Montage, Inc. Guilt of delay: Stock Montage, Inc.
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INDEX
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* Unfortunately for the apostles of European civilization, the first recorded crossing of central Africa, unacknowledged by Stanley and almost all the other white explorers, had been made half a century earlier by two mulatto slave traders, Pedro Baptista and Anastasio José. Theirs was also the first round trip.
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* Curiously, it was a Portuguese corruption of this word, Zaire, that Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko picked when he renamed his country in 1971.
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* The explorer never knew that, as she watched his fame grow, the new Mrs. Barney spent much of her life regretting that she had not become Mrs. Stanley. Long after his death, in a highly romanticized unpublished novel-memoir, she claimed credit for his great Congo journey: "She made it possible for him. Without her spirit animating him, he would never have accomplished it, not even had the desire to penetrate those abysmal darknesses again.... 'Lady Alice' had conquered Africa!"
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* Sanford, Florida, had a brief moment of notoriety three quarters of a century later, when its police chief, evoking an ordinance banning interracial sports on city property, ordered Jackie Robinson off the field in the middle of a spring-training exhibition game.
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* Even getting the elephants to land proved a near-disaster. The ship that brought them from India lowered them over the side in slings, but instead of swimming obediently to the beach, the elephants tried to climb back on board. When the ship's boats attempted to tow them toward shore, the elephants started to pull the boats out to sea.
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* Morgan gave this speech in support of a bill providing federal funds for the transportation costs of Southern blacks emigrating abroad. In response, an African-American convention in Chicago passed a resolution urging federal funds for the emigration of Southern whites, Senator Morgan in particular.
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* If the underlings' allegiance is unreliable, sometimes the conquerors take precautions. When eighteen mutinous black soldiers were executed in Boma in 1900, a photographer recorded the scene: the condemned rebels are tied to stakes and a firing squad of loyal black troops has just fired a salvo. But in case the loyalists waver, the entire white male population of Boma is standing in a long row at right angles to both groups, each sun-helmeted white man with a rifle at the ready.
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* Tippu Tip had supplied porters to Stanley, who had known enough not to ask too many questions about why they were sometimes in chains. On two of Stanley's expeditions, Tippu Tip and his entourage came along for part of the way. One reason the explorer's ill-fated Emin Pasha rescue operation drew such criticism in Europe was that at one point Stanley imperiously commandeered a missionary steamboat to transport his forces up the Congo River. The aghast men of God saw their boat carry off part of an expedition that included Tippu Tip and his thirty-five wives and concubines.
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* The biggest profiteer, King Leopold II, does not appear in Heart of Darkness, although he does in The Inheritors, the lesser novel that Conrad later co-authored with Ford Madox Ford. One of its central characters is the heavily bearded Duc de Mersch, who controls the Greenland Protectorate. The duc's Society for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions is dedicated to uplifting the benighted Eskimos by bringing them a railway, proper clothes, and other benefits of civilization. The duc has invested in an English newspaper in an attempt to buy favorable press coverage of his "philanthropic" activities. "We have," he says, "protected the natives, have kept their higher interests ever present in our minds." The Greenland of the novel is rich in oil and gold.
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* The noted anthropologist Jan Vansina has a different interpretation: Since the name Bope Mekabe is not in the Kuba royal genealogy, he suggests that the Kuba may have understood who Sheppard was, and were simply trying to flatter him into revealing the plans of other Europeans who wanted to enter the kingdom.
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* A high state official visiting the Congo River town of Upoto recorded in astonishment in his diary that a British missionary wanted him to issue "a decree making the natives wear clothes(!?)."
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* These were not the only indigenous people placed on exhibit at world's fairs and elsewhere around the turn of the century. Perhaps the most appalling case was that of Ota Benga, a Pygmy from the Congo, who was displayed in the monkey house of New York's Bronx Zoo in September 1906. An orangutan shared his space. Visitors ogled his teeth—filed, newspaper articles hinted, for devouring human flesh. To further this impression, zookeepers left a few bones scattered on the floor around him. A poem published in the New York Times declared that Ota Benga had been brought
From his native land of darkness,
To the country of the free,
In the ianterest of science
And of broad humanity
The promoter who staged this exhibit was a former Presbyterian missionary who abandoned his preaching for several business ventures. A delegation of black ministers finally rescued Ota Benga from the zoo. He remained in the United States and committed suicide ten years later.
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* The roster of those at lunch provides a picture of the current state of Leopold's family life. That the queen was there at all meant she was probably going to the opera or a concert that night in Brussels, for otherwise, exasperated with her husband's coldness and public
philandering, she no longer lived with him. Severely dressed in black and sometimes wearing a man's top hat, she spent most of her time at the elegant Belgian resort of Spa, nursing her sorrows in the company of an odd menagerie of animals that included several parrots and a llama.
Clementine, the youngest of the three daughters, was the only one with whom Leopold was now on speaking terms. Prince Victor Napoleon, the balding Bonaparte heir to the vanished French imperial throne, was her true love, but he did not pass muster with Leopold. For his African adventures the king needed the good will of France's republican government, which had deposed the Bonapartes. Leopold refused his consent to the marriage. The timid Clementine acquiesced, serving the king as palace hostess; she would marry Victor Napoleon only after her father's death.
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* Nor did they win him friends elsewhere: after he made a state visit to Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II's puritanical wife, Augusta, sent her personal chaplain to exorcise the palace rooms Leopold had been staying in.
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* Jacques later won glory in World War I, and today there is a statue of him in the main square of Diksmuide, Belgium.
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* It used, among other things, the lazy-native theme in justifying Leopold's methods: "To draw up a scheme by which the black race can be made to work without pressure or compulsion in some form or other is beyond the powers of human ingenuity."
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* "Probe novit summus Pontifex ea omnia, quae exagitata fuerunt contra Gubernium Status Congi Independentis seu Belgici, per aliquos missionarios protestantes anglicos...."
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* Here, for example, is Starr on the chicotte: "Many a time ... I have seen a man immediately after being flogged, laughing and playing with his companions as if naught had happened."
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* This was the case when this book was published in 1998. For changes since then, see pp. 312-313.
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* It ends:
Et quand ils rencontraient quelque Teuton frappé
Par une balle adroite, au bord d'un chemin proche,
Souvent ils découvraient, dans le creux de ses poches,
Avec des colliers d'or et des satins fripés,
Deux petits pieds d'enfant atrocement coupés.
And when they [Belgians] find some Hun struck down
By a well-aimed bullet, at a nearby roadside,
Often they find, in the folds of his pockets,
With gold rings and crumpled satin,
Two children's feet, cruelly cut off.
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