King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

by Adam Hochschild

  Henry Morton Stanley at this time was in the midst of another expedition in Africa. He and his usual huge caravan of guards and porters had set off in 1874 from the east coast to the interior, heading for the biggest blank space on the map, the equatorial heart of the continent, where no European had yet been. On the way, he planned to map several of the great east African lakes and then push on to a large river, west of them, which might be the start of the Nile or the Congo. While he was still near the coast, messengers brought back Stanley's newspaper dispatches; then nothing more was heard from him.

  Livingstone, Stanley, and the other explorers, Leopold saw, had succeeded in stirring Europeans by their descriptions of the "Arab" slave-traders leading sad caravans of chained captives to Africa's east coast. As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1876, he began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers.

  He sent a trusted aide to Berlin to recruit German participants while he himself slipped across the English Channel to London, settling into a suite at Claridge's. By this time, he was far from being the awkward, naive youngster who had visited Queen Victoria on his honeymoon, more than twenty years earlier. As we watch him now moving about London, for the first time in his life he seems polished and cosmopolitan, at ease and quietly purposeful. He moves mainly in a world of men, but he remembers the names of their wives and children, and always asks about them warmly. His frustrations are concealed, his raw lust for colonies moderated by the knowledge that he must depend on subterfuge and flattery. He pays a visit to dear Cousin Victoria at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, dines twice with her son, the Prince of Wales, and visits eminent geographers and military men. Shrewdly, he also goes to lunch with Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, a well-known patron of missionaries. Most important, he meets the explorer Cameron, recently returned from crossing Africa, and grills him about his travels. To his delight, Leopold finds that the British have little interest in the great swath of territory Cameron has just explored. Most of it is believed to be the basin of the Congo River, although Cameron himself traveled far south of the river, and like everyone else in Europe still has no clear idea of its course. This is the land that now becomes the object of the king's desires.

  In September 1876, Leopold's Geographical Conference convened in Brussels. In the orders he gave to subordinates, no detail of protocol, however minute, escaped his attention: "The names must be spelled just as I have written them. G.C.B. means Grand Cross of Bath. F.R.G.S. means Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. K.C.B. means Knight Commander of the Bath.... These letters must be written after the names." He sent a Belgian ship across the Channel to Dover for the British guests, and had a special express train bring them the rest of the way. He issued orders that all those coming to the conference should be waved across the Belgian frontier without customs formalities. Representatives, who came from all the major European countries, were appropriately greeted by Leopold in English, French, or German.

  Among the thirteen Belgians and twenty-four foreign guests were famous explorers, like France's Marquis de Compiegne, who had gone up the Ogowe River in Gabon, and Germany's Gerhard Rohlfs, who had had himself circumcised so that he could pass for a Muslim while trekking to remote parts of the Sahara; geographers, like Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen, the president of the Berlin Geographical Society; humanitarians, like Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, president of Britain's Anti-Slavery Society, and Sir John Kennaway, president of the Church Missionary Society; business executives, like William Mackinnon of the British India Line; and military men, like Rear Admiral Sir Leopold Heath of England, who had headed the Royal Navy's Indian Ocean antislavery patrol, and Vice Admiral Baron de la Roncière-le-Noury, president of the Paris Geographical Society. Never in the nineteenth century had so many eminent Europeans in the field of exploration gathered in one spot, and the guests were delighted to become acquainted with one another in the luxurious surroundings of the Royal Palace. Almost the only notable European concerned with Africa who was not there was Stanley, whose work the conference acknowledged with a formal resolution. He was, everyone hoped, still alive somewhere in the middle of the continent. There had been no news of him for months.

  Leopold knew that even the wealthy and well-born would be delighted to live in a palace. The only complication was that the Royal Palace, in downtown Brussels, was really the king's office; the royal family's home was the suburban château of Laeken. And so the Royal Palace's staff quarters and offices were hastily converted to guest bedrooms. To make room for the visitors, some servants slept in linen closets, and desks, books, and filing cabinets were moved to the basement or the stables. On the opening day, dazzled conference participants filed up a new baroque grand staircase of white marble to be received by Leopold in a throne room illuminated by seven thousand candles. The king awarded the Cross of Leopold to everyone he had invited. "I have a suite of magnificent apartments to myself—all crimson damask and gold," Major General Sir Henry Rawlinson of the Royal Geographical Society wrote to his wife the first night. "Everything is red, even the Ink and the Ammunition [toilet paper]!"

  Leopold's welcoming speech was a masterpiece. It clothed the whole enterprise in noble rhetoric, staked out his own role in what was to come, and guaranteed his plans a stamp of approval by the group he was hosting.

  To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.... It seemed to me that Belgium, a centrally located and neutral country, would be a suitable place for such a meeting.... Need I say that in bringing you to Brussels I was guided by no egotism? No, gentlemen, Belgium may be a small country, but she is happy and satisfied with her fate; I have no other ambition than to serve her well.

  He ended by naming the specific tasks he hoped the conference would accomplish, among them deciding on the "location of routes to be successively opened into the interior, of hospitable, scientific, and pacification bases to be set up as a means of abolishing the slave trade, establishing peace among the chiefs, and procuring them just and impartial arbitration."

  Between sumptuous banquets, those attending the conference pulled out their maps and marked points in the blank space of central Africa for such "hospitable, scientific, and pacification bases." Each one, the high-minded guests decided, would be staffed by a half-dozen or so unarmed Europeans—scientists, linguists, and artisans who would teach practical skills to the natives. Every post would contain laboratories for studying local soil, weather, fauna, and flora, and would be well stocked with supplies for explorers: maps, trading goods, spare clothing, tools to repair scientific instruments, an infirmary with all the latest medicines.

  Chairing the conference—Leopold stayed modestly in the background—was the Russian geographer Pyotr Semenov. In honor of Semenov's daring exploration of the Tyan Shan Mountains of Central Asia, the tsar had granted him the right to add Tyan-Shansky to his name. Semenov, however, knew next to nothing about Africa—which suited Leopold perfectly. He was easily able to maneuver Semenov so that the chain of bases endorsed by the conference would stretch across the unclaimed territory of the Congo River basin that interested Leopold most. The British participants had wanted some of these posts nearer to British possessions.

  Before the guests dispersed to their respective countries, they voted to establish the International African Association. Leopold magnanimously volunteered space in Brussels for the organization's headquarters. There were to be national committees of the association set up in all the participating countries, as well as an international committee. Leopold was elected by acclamation as the international committee's first chairman. Se
lf-effacingly, he said that he would serve for one year only so that the chairmanship could rotate among people from different countries. He presented each guest with a gilt-framed portrait of himself in dress uniform, and the awed dignitaries and explorers headed home.

  The new body was welcomed throughout Europe. Prominent citizens, from the Rothschilds to Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, hastened to send contributions. The national committees, which sounded impressive, were to be headed by grand dukes, princes, and other royals, but most of them never got off the ground. The international committee did meet once in the following year, reelected Leopold as chairman, despite his earlier pledge not to serve again, and then evaporated.

  Nonetheless, Leopold had, foxlike, gone a step forward. He had learned from his many attempts to buy a colony that none was for sale; he would have to conquer it. Doing this openly, however, was certain to upset both the Belgian people and the major powers of Europe. If he was to seize anything in Africa, he could do so only if he convinced everyone that his interest was purely altruistic. In this aim, thanks to the International African Association, he succeeded brilliantly. Viscount de Lesseps, for one, declared Leopold's plans "the greatest humanitarian work of this time."

  If we take a step back and look at Leopold at this moment we can imagine him the political equivalent of an ambitious theatrical producer. He has organizational talent and the public's good will, as proven by his successful Geographical Conference. He has a special kind of capital: the great public relations power of the throne itself. He has a script: the dream of a colony that had been running through his head since he was a teenager. But he has as yet no stage, no cast. One day in September 1877, however, while the king-producer is planning his next move, a bulletin in the London Daily Telegraph from a small town on the west coast of Africa announces some remarkable news. It is just the opening Leopold has been waiting for. Stage and star have appeared, and the play can begin.

  3. THE MAGNIFICENT CAKE

  THE TOWN of Boma lay on the Congo River's north shore, about fifty miles in from the Atlantic Ocean. Besides its African inhabitants, sixteen whites lived there, most of them Portuguese—rough, hardbitten men used to wielding the whip and the gun—who ran a few small trading posts. Like Europeans for several centuries before them, these traders had never trekked inland through the forbidding jumble of rocks lining the great river on the tumultuous 220 miles of intermittent rapids that carried it down to sea level.

  On August 5, 1877, an hour after sunset, four bedraggled black men walked out of the bush at Boma. They had come from a village some two days' walk inland and were carrying a letter addressed "To any Gentleman who speaks English at Embomma."

  Dear Sir:

  I have arrived at this place from Zanzibar with 115 souls, men, women, and children. We are now in a state of imminent starvation ... but if your supplies arrive in time, I may be able to reach Embomma within four days ... better than all would [be] ten or fifteen man-loads of rice or grain.... The supplies must arrive within two days, or I may have a fearful time of it among the dying.... Yours sincerely, H.M. Stanley, Commanding Anglo-American Expedition for Exploration of Africa.

  At dawn the next day the traders sent Stanley porters carrying potatoes, fish, rice, and canned food. They realized instantly what the letter meant: Stanley had crossed the entire African continent, from east to west. But unlike Verney Lovett Cameron, the only European to do this before him, he had emerged at the Congo's mouth. He must therefore have followed the river itself, becoming the first white man to chart its course and to solve the mystery of where it came from.

  Resupplied just in time, Stanley and the haggard survivors of his expedition slowly walked the rest of the way to Boma. Since leaving Zanzibar, just off the east coast, they had covered a zigzag course of more than seven thousand miles and had been traveling for more than two and a half years.

  A Welshman masquerading as a native-born United States citizen, Stanley was both the Anglo and the American of his Anglo-American Expedition. The name, however, acknowledged that this trip, far more expensive and ambitious than his search for Livingstone, was financed both by James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald and Edward Levy-Lawson's London Daily Telegraph. Stanley's dispatches appeared in both papers, and he bestowed the names of their owners on his route across Africa: Mount Gordon-Bennett, the Gordon-Bennett River, the Levy Hills, Mount Lawson. He left his own name on Stanley Falls in the center of the continent and on a spot about a thousand miles downstream, at the head of the rapids, where the Congo River widened into a lake. He claimed that naming the latter was the idea of his second-in-command, Frank Pocock, who "cried out, 'Why ... this signal expanse we shall call Stanley Pool!'" Pocock was not able to confirm this; he drowned in the river soon after christening, or not christening, this portion of it.

  On the eve of his formidable trans-African journey, Stanley had once again fallen in love, this time with Alice Pike, a seventeen-year-old American heiress. Falling for a flighty teenager half his age just before leaving for three years was not the most likely path to wedded bliss, which may have been just what attracted Stanley, who remained fearful of women. He and Alice agreed to marry on his return, signed a marriage pact, and fixed the date of the wedding.

  It was after his new love that Stanley named the expedition's key means of transport. The Lady Alice was a forty-foot boat of Spanish cedar, divided into five sections. When the sections were fastened together, the boat could be rowed along African lakes and rivers; when they were separated and slung from poles, they could be carried overland by teams of porters for hundreds of miles.

  Stanley was always uncomfortable with anyone whose talents might outshine his own. From the twelve hundred men who applied to join the expedition, some of them highly experienced travelers, he chose three unsuitable companions: a pair of sailor-fishermen, the brothers Frank and Edward Pocock, and a young hotel clerk named Frederick Barker. Edward Pocock's main skill seems to have been playing the bugle. None of the three had had any experience exploring.

  When the four white men marched westward into the interior at the head of the Anglo-American Expedition, they led a group close to double the size of Stanley's expedition to find Livingstone—356 people all told. Forty-six were women and children, for some of the senior Africans had been granted the privilege of taking along their families. This miniature army carried more than sixteen thousand pounds of arms, equipment, and goods that could be traded for food along the way. On the march the column stretched for half a mile, a distance so long that halts had to be signaled by Edward Pocock's bugle.

  The bugle calls were appropriate; for Stanley, continual combat was always part of exploring. He never bothered to count the dead that the expedition left behind it, but the number must have been in the hundreds. Stanley's party carried the latest rifles and an elephant gun with exploding bullets; the unlucky people they fought had spears, bows and arrows, or, at best, ancient muskets bought from slave-traders. "We have attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score villages," he wrote in his journal. Most of the fighting took place on lakes and rivers, with the explorer and his men flying the British and American flags and firing from the Lady Alice and dugout canoes. The thin-skinned Stanley was remarkably frank about his tendency to take any show of hostility as a deadly insult. It is almost as if vengeance were the force driving him across the continent. As he piloted the Lady Alice toward a spot on Lake Tanganyika, for instance, "the beach was crowded with infuriates and mockers ... we perceived we were followed by several canoes in some of which we saw spears shaken at us ... I opened on them with the Winchester Repeating Rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking."

  In the early months of the journey, Stanley was able to describe such skirmishes in newspaper stories carried by messengers to Africa's east coast, where they were relayed to England by sea and telegraph. There, they stirred a storm of outrage from humanitarian groups like the Aborigi
nes Protection Society and the Anti-Slavery Society. Stanley "shoots negroes as if they were monkeys," commented the explorer and writer Richard Burton. The British foreign secretary, however, seemed far more upset that this brash writer for the popular press, who claimed to be an American, was flying the Union Jack. He sent Stanley a pompous message declaring that such display was not authorized.

  To the New York Herald's vehemently anti-British publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the controversy brought nothing but delight. He lashed out enthusiastically at Stanley's critics as "the howling dervishes of civilization ... safe in London ... the philanthropists...[whose] impractical view is that a leader ... should permit his men to be slaughtered by the natives and should be slaughtered himself and let discovery go to the dogs, but should never pull a trigger against this species of human vermin."

  Among the achievements of this first stage of his travels, Stanley claimed, was telling the Emperor of Uganda about the Ten Commandments and converting him to Christianity. However, a French officer who happened to be visiting Uganda at this time later said that Stanley convinced the emperor only by telling him that Christians had eleven commandments. The eleventh was: "Honor and respect kings, for they are the envoys of God."

  After months of carrying heavy loads, many of the expedition's porters mutinied, pilfered supplies, and fled. Again and again, Stanley dealt out swift punishment: "The murderer of Membé..." he wrote in his diary, "was sentenced to 200 lashes ... the two drunkards to 100 lashes each, and to be kept in chains for 6 months." Later, he wrote of his porters, "They are faithless, lying, thievish, indolent knaves, who only teach a man to despise himself for his folly in attempting a grand work with such miserable slaves."