by Tim Jeal
Leopold became exasperated, and wrote testily to Strauch in October 1882: `The terms of the treaties Stanley has made with native chiefs do not satisfy me. There must at least be an added article to the effect that they delegate to us their sovereign rights over the territories ... the treaties must be as brief as possible, and in a couple of articles must grant us everything."' From this date onwards - without consulting Stanley - the king authorized eight, and then many more, of his subordinate officers to negotiate treaties claiming sovereignty and the right to a monopoly of trade for the AIC. Stanley was not a signatory to a single one of these treaties made in 11882 and 1188313 [see note for details]. From July 11883, Leopold employed the retired British general Sir Frederick Goldsmid to lead a team of treaty makers specifically to negotiate `confederacy' agreements. They would be answerable only to the king. In fact Leopold did not discuss his most important plans with Stanley, who many years later would write bitterly to Henry Sanford's widow: `I was too obscure a personage either for the General or the king to confide in me.114
As late as ii ii August 11883, in his fifth year on the Congo, Henry wrote to Leopold telling him that no Belgian officer or any one else was entitled to treat the Congolese `as though they were conquered subjects ... This is all wrong. They are not subjects - but it is we who are simply tenants.' Or, as Stanley insisted to Strauch a few days later: `These chiefs own and possess the soil."' Henry not only disapproved of treaties alienating land, but deplored those giving the AIC a monopoly of trade that excluded British and American traders.
Only two original treaties bearing Stanley's signature have survived - the rest appear to have been destroyed, either in the mid-1188os, or in the early years of the twentieth century when so many other early records were destroyed on Leopold's orders. The king did not want it ever to be known that Stanley's original treaties had claimed so little from the chiefs. Forgeries were then substituted by the king in order to prove to the international community that sovereignty had been acquired by his agents on the Congo from the very beginning and therefore gave him a right to have the AIC's territories recognized as a state. i6
So, what do the only two surviving original treaties bearing Stanley's signature prove? The first was supposedly signed by Henry at Vivi on 113 June 1188o. While sovereignty is not demanded, the treaty gave to the AIC a monopoly of trade in Vivi district. Since Stanley had made an earlier treaty with the Vivi chiefs on z8 September 11879 - which no longer exists, but is described fully in his diary and in let- ters,'7 and which did not contain a clause excluding foreign traders - this later treaty is puzzling," especially since, elsewhere, Henry argued in strong terms against all trade restrictions.'9 This June 1188o treaty is not mentioned in his diary, or in letters, so he may have concocted it later under pressure from Leopold. The only other original Stanley treaty that has survived was signed at Ntamo (on the Pool) on 311 December 118811 and is clearly genuine, being described by Stanley in a letter to Colonel Strauch dated 114 January. In the Ntamo treaty Stanley granted to himself, or to his representative, and not to the AIC or the Comite, the `privilege' of building upon a particular site, where his representatives would be allowed to live and trade with the chief and his people. There was no exclusion of traders of other nations, and sovereignty was not claimed.2O The second Vivi treaty apart, Stanley's other vanished treaties (as deduced from descriptions in his diaries and from summaries in letters to Colonel Strauch) did not include monopolistic clauses, or clauses involving a change of the ownership of the land.
Yet during 11884, at the very end of his time on the Congo, the bloody Arab-Swahili raids persuaded Henry that, unless the AIC had international authority as a sovereign state to deal with this threat by force of arms, the whole Congo basin would descend into anarchy. So at this eleventh hour, he changed his mind about sovereignty. Whether the Congolese understood the meaning of sovereignty or not, the king would need to claim it (or something like it) in order to argue in Europe that the AIC possessed authority over the country - the essential legal prerequisite for its recognition as a state." This reluctant change of heart does not mean that Stanley suddenly became cynical. He believed that Leopold, unlike the French, would keep the River Congo open for the trade of all nations. After all, the king would have to pledge himself to do so in international treaties in order to get the AIC recognized. Henry did not foresee that Leopold would one day break all his promises to the great powers of the world.
So on 23 April 11884, Stanley reported to the king that on his way downriver from the Pool he had `made treaties at Kimpoko' and that `Kimbangu, Mbama, and Mikumga have also accepted our flags and sovereignty'.22 So, having disapproved of claiming sovereignty up to now, what did Stanley mean precisely when saying that at Kimpoko the chiefs had `accepted our flags and sovereignty'? Two of these treaties mentioned to the king are among those quoted on pages 1195-7 and zo5 of Stanley's book The Congo and the Founding of its Free State, but in view of the falsification of other treaties by Leopold, these printed versions may well differ from their vanished originals.23 However, there does seem to be something significant about the only treaty printed in the book that was named by Stanley in his letter to the king of 23 April 118 84. This was signed by him at Pallaballa village near Vivi on 119 April 118 84. In the first clause - as it stands in the book - it is stated that at this place he was re-making a treaty that had first been made there by Lieutenant Lieven Van de Velde.
A transcription of Van de Velde's treaty has survived, and in it `the soil' of the relevant territory was ceded `in consideration of a present, once and for all': the `present' had included handkerchiefs, alcohol and items of clothing, such as `a coat of red cloth with gold facings'. In his re-made treaty, Stanley was at pains to nullify this earlier treaty of 7 January 1883.14 For Van de Velde, the phrase `Cession of Territory' had meant `the purchase of the soil', but Stanley amended this, stating that in his new treaty: `Cession of Territory does not mean the purchase of the soil, but the purchase of suzerainty by the Association.' So the all-important ownership of the land was returned by Stanley to the chiefs. Purchase of `suzerainty' is not the same as purchase of `sovereignty', and implies overlordship rather than the removal of all sovereign rights from the chief."
A typed copy of Stanley's Pallaballa treaty (though not the original) is preserved in the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs library. The most important clause gives to the AIA (rather than the AIC) `the right of governing, of arranging all matters affecting strangers of any colour or nationality'. Similarly, the chiefs `declare themselves as accepting the flag of the Association International Africaine as a sign to all men that the Association is their accepted suzerain, and that no other flag shall be hoisted within the limits of the district of Pallaballa'. In return for these concessions the chiefs were to be paid a monthly fee. These provisions were clearly intended to stop the French handing out tricolours (as they had done at Kinshasa), and to prevent them from trying to persuade chiefs to let them settle. Even if Stanley did sign an agreement containing these terms (and because there is no original document, it is uncertain that he did), he could not be accused of having usurped the chiefs' authority over their people in any general way.
Stanley noted in his diary, not long after his August meeting, that he had brought back with him to Belgium `about 400 treaties', showing that `we have a comparatively continuous territory from Vivi to Stanley Falls'." The context was once again his recent conversion to the view that Leopold was telling the truth when warning him that the French would close the Congo to world trade unless the AIC could produce at an International Conference treaties made with chiefs across a wide swathe of the country. One of Stanley's recent biogra pliers, John Bierman, has blamed him for having personally `duped' three hundred chiefs into signing away their land.27 In fact 320 of the rough total of 400 treaties had been with those chiefs who had signed the `new confederacy' treaty - supposedly uniting them under the AIC's flag for mutual defence against outsiders." These treaties were
almost all the result of the treaty-making of Sir Henry Goldsmid and his team.
Stanley did not mention in his book The Congo and the Founding of its Free State (CFFS) the fact that he had himself made very few treaties and that he had never alienated tribal land. He had been obliged by his original contract with Leopold to allow the king to prohibit publication, if he wished, and to make editorial changes to any book he might write about his work on the Congo. The king also had the right to approve the final text. The copy of the book's manuscript, which Leopold is known to have cut and altered, has disappeared and was probably destroyed by him.29
So why did Stanley allow his book to be heavily edited in a way that gave the impression that he had himself negotiated hundreds of confederacy and sovereignty treaties? He permitted it solely so that Leopold could sustain a legal case for gaining international recognition for the Congo as a state. Unaware of all the underlying facts, many historians - even well-known ones like Adam Hochschild - have accepted, mainly on the basis of CFFS, that Stanley took away the sovereignty and the ownership of the land of numerous chiefs for a few bales of cloth and some trinkets.3° The manuscript pages of CFFS, Volume II, pages 195-204 - in which the words of treaties that were allegedly negotiated by him are quoted - are not to be found in the only text of the book that exists in the author's hand, and so could have been added by Leopold. The manuscript has numerous gaps, additions in other hands, and pages of printed material inserted at various points.3i It is therefore a distressing irony that Stanley's reputation should have been so badly damaged by later generations' reliance upon such a singularly unreliable printed source.
Given the way in which Leopold would later milk the Congo and its people, some historians have assumed that men like Stanley, who had regular dealings with the king in the mid-r88os, must have known what was really in his mind. Yet even razor-sharp Harry Johnston had not been able to work out, on meeting Leopold, whether he was 'marvellously simple or marvellously deep'.32 The £6o,ooo a year that Leopold was by now spending in the Congo was a staggering sum; and since the king's returns from ivory sales had been paltry to date, Stanley was irritated on those rare occasions when journalists suggested that Leopold's philanthropy might be fraudulent.33 In February 1885, William Mackinnon, the shipping tycoon, wrote with absolute conviction of Leopold having undertaken `the noblest and most self-sacrificing scheme for Africa's development that has ever been attempted'.34 This was at a time when Mr Dunlop's invention of his inflatable rubber tyre still lay five years in the future, and the value of the Congo's wild rubber was very modest. Nevertheless, given the mutilations and misery to come, it is hard not to gasp at the scale of the king's hypocrisy when reading a fairly typical letter he sent to The Times in March 1883: `The International Congo Association as it does not seek to gain money, and does not beg for aid of any state, resembles in a measure, by its organization, the Society of the Red Cross; it has been formed ... with the noble aim of rendering lasting and disinterested services to the cause of progress.'35 But at that time, even William Bentley, the often sceptical Baptist missionary, could write ,that this Expedition [the AIC] has been the instrument in God's hand of opening up the country.'36
Stanley's respect for the Congolese people adds to the irony that he should still be thought of as their exploiter. This is how he described the ivory traders of Irebu, who lived in `the Venice of the Congo':
I was very soon impressed by their intelligent appearance ... They had an air of worldly knowledge and travel about them ... For these people were acquainted with many lands and tribes ... they knew all the profits and losses derived from barter; all the diplomatic arts ... They knew the varied lengths of the sina ('long' cloth), the number of matako (brass rods) they were worth, whether of savelist, florentine, unbleached domestic, twill, stripe, ticking, blue and white baft ... No wonder that all this mercantile knowledge had left its traces on their faces; indeed it is the same as in your own cities ... Know you not the lawyer, or the merchant, the banker, the artist or the poet ?37
Henry even paid tributes to the cannibal Soko tribe for `their remarkable skill in workmanship ... On a paddle blade may be seen an infinite number of carvings, lizards, crocodiles, canoes and buffalo ... Their spears are as sharp and bright as though they had just left a Sheffield shop ... Physically they are a splendid people.'3s He suggested that, `If Europeans will only ... study human nature in the vicinity [of Stanley Pool], they will go home thoughtful men, and may return again to this land to put to good use the wisdom they should have gained, and the kindly social relations created during their peaceful soj ourn.'39
The king's knowledge that Stanley would never be willing to implement exploitative or protectionist measures on the Congo gave him another reason - in addition to his infamous promise to the French government - not to allow him back to the Congo. Leopold owed everything to his `enterprising American' who had risked his life so often, yet the prospect of deceiving him for years to come did not worry the unscrupulous monarch. Henry remained trusting, and confident that within a year or so his patron would send him back to run the new colony as its Governor-General. If his private life had only been happier, he would have awaited the king's pleasure with equanimity.
TWENTY
A Pawn in Great Power Politics
On returning from Brussels and Paris at the beginning of September 11884, Stanley had many doubts about the future of the AIC. The 2-5 per cent mortality of the whites serving under him had been an alarming augury for future traders and colonial servants.' He also feared that his public estimate of the Congo's population at about forty million might be a substantial exaggeration (as indeed it was). And fewer Africans living along the river would mean less profit for European traders selling cloth and other goods to them. Then there was the problem of Leopold continuing to spend huge sums year after year and getting no return. How long could that go on? And what might happen if the king were suddenly to die? The Saturday Review's editor asked, very pertinently, what was going to finance the king's efforts when ivory was exhausted? Palm oil, ground nuts, ebony and gum copal were never going to make up for its loss. At this time there was no expectation that rubber might one day be more valuable than ivory.' Yet Stanley continued enthusing about the Congo's commercial prospects at large meetings in Manchester, Birmingham and other cities, and urging traders to go there in the footsteps of the hundred or so missionaries who had already done so.'
Of course, from a personal point of view, if the AIC failed to achieve recognition and fell into the hands of the Arabs or the French, five unimaginably hard years of his life would have been thrown away for nothing. Three years earlier, Stanley had written in his diary: `I am devoured with a desire to do something for Africa, and have found in King Leopold one who not only possesses the means but the will to assist.'4 Stanley's tragedy (though he did not yet know it) was that, after his unparalleled success as an explorer had made future African exploration anticlimactic, his subsequent efforts to improve the lot of Africans were already being subverted by a patron who was about to deceive the world as well as his most famous employee.
For the moment, Henry's negative feelings about Leopold were mainly connected with the unappreciative monarch's failure to consult him about the future of the AIC. After all, he was its architect. In late August 11884, Stanley was sent a renewal of his original contract, but his anxiety about being kept in the dark led him to postpone signing it.' A few weeks later, clandestine diplomatic exchanges were used to explain why the king could not yet allow publication of The Congo and the Founding of its Free State.' Stanley accepted the situation gracefully, though hurt to be told so little.
A few days before Leopold had made his secret agreement with France - again without telling Stanley, the king had engineered the immense triumph of American recognition of the AIC as a state. In November, Henry Sanford, the former American minister in Brussels and now Leopold's emissary extraordinary, had been received by President Arthur at the White House, where Sanf
ord handed over a letter in which Leopold made much of the supposed similarities between his projected `free state' and Liberia - founded sixty years earlier by American philanthropists as a home for freed slaves. Leopold also stressed the `fact' that Stanley was an American.7 Sanford had brought to America copies of various forged treaties, with sovereignty clauses inserted and all monopolistic ones removed. A convinced free trader himself, with plans to start an ivory company on the Congo, Sanford thought these altered treaties genuine.' Known as the `gastronomic diplomat', he had wined and dined numerous members of Congress and Cabinet members, and organized a lavish entertainment for the president at his orange plantation in Florida. His reward, and Leopold's, was that on zz April 1 1884 the Senate voted a resolution recommending that the flag of the association should be recognized as the `flag of a friendly government'.9
Recognition by the United States had brought Leopold's dream of his very own African state a lot closer. But to clinch it, the king had to ensure that a treaty Britain had signed with Portugal in February was never accepted internationally. France's ratification of the Makoko Treaty in November 1188z had persuaded Britain that the only way to deny France control of the Lower Congo was to hand that right to Portugal. But after discussions with Leopold, Bismarck rejected the Anglo-Portuguese treaty in June 1[ 884, effectively killing it. With Germany entering the race for African colonies, the Iron Chancellor had not wanted Britain, the principal power in Africa, to control the Congo through her puppet, Portugal. Nor did Bismarck want Leopold to be forced to hand the Congo to the French. So, the chancellor decided to support the AIC - just as Leopold had calculated he would. In Prince Bismarck's words, the Congo, as a state in Leopold's hands, would be `useful for diverting troublesome rivalries'."