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

by Adam Hochschild

  He was a man possessed. His anger at what he saw had a dramatic effect on many of the other Europeans he encountered; it was as if his visible outrage gave them permission to act on stifled feelings of their own. Two missionaries Casement visited were so inspired by his example that they promptly set off on their own investigative trips; one began writing critical letters to the governor general. Casement, heading downriver, met the steamer of the veteran British missionary George Grenfell heading up, and the two men stopped and talked. After listening to Casement, Grenfell promptly resigned from Leopold's sham Commission for the Protection of the Natives. (A fruitless gesture, incidentally: the king had let the commission's mandate expire a few months earlier, without informing any of its members.) The Italian consul in the Congo, disturbed by what Casement told him, abandoned plans for a European holiday and made an investigative journey of his own that confirmed Casement's findings.

  Casement's daily diary entries are far more moving to read than his carefully worded official report; his horror pulses through the cryptic pages.

  June 5: The country a desert, no natives left.

  July 25: I walked into villages and saw the nearest one—population dreadfully decreased—only 93 people left out of many hundreds.

  July 26: Poor frail folk...—dust to dust ashes to ashes—where then are the kindly heart, the pitiful thought—together vanished.

  August 6: Took copious notes from natives.... They are cruelly flogged for being late with their baskets [of rubber].... Very tired.

  August 13: A. came to say 5 people from Bikoro side with hands cut off had come as far as Myanga intending to show me.

  August 22: Bolongo quite dead. I remember it well in 1887, Nov., full of people then; now 14 adults all told. I should say people wretched, complained bitterly of rubber tax.... 6:30 passed deserted side of Bokuta.... Mouzede says the people were all taken away by force to Mampoko. Poor unhappy souls.

  August 29: Bongandanga ... saw rubber "Market," nothing but guns—about 20 armed men.... The popln. 242 men with rubber all guarded like convicts. To call this "trade" is the height of lying.

  August 30: 16 men women and children tied up from a village Mboye close to the town. Infamous. The men were put in the prison, the children let go at my intervention. Infamous. Infamous, shameful system.

  August 31: In the evening a dance was organised in my honour; all the local chiefs and their wives, etc., came (at L.'s orders) to it. Poor souls. I was sorry for it, of all the forced enjoyment I ever saw this took the cake.

  September 2: Saw 16 women seized by Peeters's sentries and taken off to Prison.

  September 9: 11.10 passed Bolongo again. The poor people put off in canoe to implore my help.

  ***

  Living long after the movement against slavery and well before the appearance of organizations like Amnesty International, Casement in his diary wrote in the tones of the Abolitionists: "Infamous. Infamous, shameful system." But the official report he composed subsequently is in the language that Amnesty and similar groups would later make their own: formal and sober, assessing the reliability of various witnesses, filled with references to laws and statistics, and accompanied by appendices and depositions.

  In late 1903, Casement sailed back to Europe to prepare his report. He spent some weeks in London dictating and correcting, and made his final revisions on a train while returning from a visit to Joseph Conrad and his family at their country house. The information in Casement's report was largely familiar to people like E. D. Morel and his small group of supporters, but for the first time it was to be laid out with the authority of His Britannic Majesty's Consul. The report was all the more authoritative because Casement was a veteran of Africa who made frequent comparisons between the Congo he had once known and the same territory under the rubber terror.

  Again and again Casement describes hands being cut off corpses. Sometimes it wasn't the hands. His report quotes one witness:

  "The white men told their soldiers: 'You kill only women; you cannot kill men.' So then the soldiers when they killed us (here PP. who was answering stopped and hesitated, and then pointing to the private parts of my bulldog—it was lying asleep at my feet) then they cut off those things and took them to the white men, who said: 'It is true, you have killed men.'"

  Despite the restrained tone and careful documentation, the report's accounts of sliced-off hands and penises was far more graphic and forceful than the British government had expected. The Foreign Office, already uneasy, began getting urgent requests to delay publication from Sir Constantine Phipps, the fervently pro-Leopold British minister to Brussels. Phipps, a conceited man of limited intelligence, couldn't believe "that Belgians, members of a cultivated people amongst whom I had lived, could, under even a tropical sky, have perpetrated acts of refined cruelty." The only reason the companies used "sentries," he explained to the foreign secretary, was to protect the rubber harvesters during their work. "Please manage to prevent issue of report by Casement until after 10th instant, date on which I must unavoidably encounter King of the Belgians," Phipps telegraphed. "The publication will inevitably put me in an awkward position at court."

  More pressure came from another quarter. Urged on by an apprehensive Leopold, Sir Alfred Jones of the Elder Dempster line twice visited the Foreign Office to try to soften the report, or to at least get an advance copy for the king.

  Casement was so distressed by what he had seen in the Congo that the Foreign Office could not control him, and he gave several interviews to the London press. Their publication made it hard to censor or postpone his report, though Foreign Office officials did water it down by removing all names. When the report was finally published, in early 1904, readers found statements by witnesses that read: "I am N.N. These two beside me are O.O. and PP." Or: "The white man who said this was the chief white man at EE ... His name was A. B." This lent the report a strangely disembodied tone, as if horrible things had been done but not to or by real people. It also made it impossible for Casement to defend himself by reference to specific people and places when Leopold's staff issued a long reply. Belgian newspapers tied to Congo business interests joined in the attack; one, La Tribune Congolaise, said that the people Casement had seen with missing hands "were unfortunate individuals, suffering from cancer in the hands, whose hands thus had to be cut off as a simple surgical operation."

  Casement was both angry and disappointed. Mercurial (he himself had at first wanted to protect his witnesses by omitting their names, then changed his mind) and easily offended, he sent off an eighteen-page letter of protest to the Foreign Office and threatened to resign. In his diary he wrote that his superiors were "a gang of stupidities"; one in particular was "an abject piffler." In a letter, he called them a "wretched set of incompetent noodles."

  But then, at last, Casement found someone with whom he could share his feelings. He had avidly read Morel's writings while still in the Congo, and the men were eager to meet. "The man is honest as day," Casement wrote in his diary after the long-awaited meeting took place. "Dined at Comedy [a restaurant] together late and then to chat till 2 A.M. M. sleeping in study." Casement was staying at a friend's house in Chester Square; Morel left after breakfast the next morning.

  It is easy to imagine the two men talking that night: the tall, black-bearded Casement, simmering with fury at what he had seen; Morel, with his handlebar mustache, almost a decade younger, also big, but stocky, filled with his own earnest anger at the evidence he had uncovered in Europe. In a sense, each had seen half of what made up Leopold's "Free State." Together, they had as full a version of the story as was likely to be told. Morel remembered the meeting for the rest of his life:

  I saw before me a man, my own height, very lithe and sinewy, chest thrown out, head held high—suggestive of one who had lived in the vast open spaces. Black hair and beard covering cheeks hollowed by the tropical sun. Strongly marked features. A dark blue penetrating eye sunken in the socket. A long, lean, swarthy Vandyck typ
e of face, graven with power and withal of great gentleness. An extraordinarily handsome and arresting face. From the moment our hands gripped and our eyes met, mutual trust and confidence were bred and the feeling of isolation slipped from me like a mantle. Here was a man, indeed. One who would convince those in high places of the foulness of the crime committed upon a helpless race.... I often see him now in imagination as I saw him at that memorable interview, crouching over the fire in the otherwise unlighted room ... unfolding in a musical, soft, almost even voice, in language of peculiar dignity and pathos, the story of a vile conspiracy.... At intervals he would rise, and with swift silent steps, pace the room; then resume his crouching attitude by the fire, his splendid profile thrown into bold relief by the flames.

  I was mostly a silent listener, clutching hard upon the arms of my chair. As the monologue of horror proceeded ... I verily believe I saw those hunted women clutching their children and flying panic stricken to the bush: the blood flowing from those quivering black bodies as the hippopotamus hide whip struck and struck again; the savage soldiery rushing hither and thither amid burning villages; the ghastly tally of severed hands....

  Casement read me passages from his report, which he was then writing, whose purport was almost identical with oft-repeated sentences of my own. He told me that he had been amazed to find that I, five thousand miles away, had come to conclusions identical with his in every respect.... An immense weight passed from me.

  It was long hours past midnight when we parted. The sheets of his voluminous report lay scattered upon the table, chairs and floor. And it was with the debris of that Report around me, that Report which was ... to tear aside the veil from the most gigantic fraud and wickedness which our generation has known, that I slept in my clothes upon the sofa; while its author sought his bedroom above.

  A few weeks later, Casement visited Morel's home at Hawarden, a small Welsh village near the border of England; he jotted in his diary, "Talked all night nearly, wife a good woman." He was trying to persuade Morel to found an organization devoted solely to campaigning for justice in the Congo, but Morel was at first reluctant. The Aborigines Protection Society was wary at the prospect of a new group encroaching on its turf and perhaps cutting into its fundraising. But Morel's wife, Mary, agreed with Casement, and it may have been at her urging that Morel went to Ireland to talk further with Casement. He wrote: "Casement's plan found fervid support in my wife, and if I crossed the Irish Channel ... to meet him ... it was very largely owing to [her] influence.... It was ... on that Irish soil ... fertilised by so many human tears, that Casement and I conspired further...[and] discussed ways and means and drew up a rough plan of campaign."

  The men talked over dinner at the Slieve Donard Hotel in Newcastle, where Morel became convinced that "the Congo evil was a special and extraordinary evil calling for special means of attack.... If the British people could be really roused, the world might be roused.... Britain had played that part before [in the campaign against slavery].... Could we raise a throbbing in that great heart of hers?"

  Although he was between posts, Casement was still a member of the consular service, so Morel would have to run the new organization. "But how were the vulgar details to be overcome? I explained to Casement that I had no money.... Neither had he.... Without a moment's hesitation he wrote out a cheque for £100." For Casement this was more than a month's income.

  Shortly afterward, Casement wrote to Morel, "We shall grow in numbers day by day until there go up from the length and breadth of England one overwhelming Nay!"

  A few weeks after their dinner in Ireland, Morel formed the Congo Reform Association. Using some of Casement's donation, he bought the first supplies, including a typewriter. He rounded up the public endorsement of an impressive list of earls, viscounts, businessmen, churchmen, members of Parliament, and, to evoke the heritage of the battle against slavery, the great-grandson of the famous British Abolitionist William Wilberforce. The C.R.A. attracted more than a thousand people to its first meeting, in Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall, on March 23, 1904.

  Although Casement and Morel each had his prickly side, the friendship between them was immediate and lasting. "I think Casement is about as near to being a saint as a man can be," Morel wrote to a friend. Each now had the perfect ally. The relationship deepened over the years; in their many letters back and forth, Casement became "Dear Tiger" and Morel "Dear Bulldog." Leopold was "the King of Beasts."

  Although he could be only a silent partner in the reform campaign, Casement urged on Bulldog with enthusiastic advice about political strategy, about whom to lobby, even about what clothes to wear. Without the Foreign Office's knowledge, he helped to raise money for the campaign. Morel, for his part, encouraged Casement to return to the Congo to conduct a further investigation. The consul replied that officials might "hang me as they did Stokes—and one couldn't do better than be hanged in order to end that den of devils." This is not the last time that we will hear from Casement a hint of a desire for martyrdom.

  That meeting between Bulldog and Tiger as they plotted their attack on the King of Beasts would later be compared by their admirers with the legendary conversation beneath a spreading tree between William Wilberforce and William Pitt the Younger, more than a hundred years earlier, one step toward the beginning of the British antislavery movement. But like the British Abolitionists, Morel and Casement were for the moment safe in England; for all their good will, they were not themselves subject to the lash of the chicotte or the weight of shackles. They were white men trying to stop other white men from brutalizing Africans. Most of the Africans who fought this battle in the Congo perished, their very names unrecorded. In a sense, we honor Morel and Casement in their stead.

  The two men, however, were far more than armchair do-gooders. They were people of conviction—and both ended up paying a high price. At the time they met and shared their passion about the Congo in December 1903, Morel and Casement did not know that more than a dozen years later they would have something else in common. Each would be taken, in custody, through the gates of London's Pentonville Prison. One would never emerge.

  14. TO FLOOD HIS DEEDS WITH DAY

  THE CRUSADE that E. D. Morel now orchestrated through the Congo Reform Association exerted a relentless, growing pressure on the Belgian, British, and American governments. Almost never has one man, possessed of no wealth, title, or official post, caused so much trouble for the governments of several major countries. Morel knew that officials like Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey would act only "when kicked, and if the process of kicking is stopped, he will do nothing." To this kicking, Morel devoted more than a decade of his life.

  In addition to running the Congo Reform Association, Morel continued to spend part of each workday, which sometimes stretched to sixteen or eighteen hours, editing his West African Mail. "People don't seem altogether to realize that—apart from everything else—I turn out a weekly paper," he wrote to a fellow activist, "plus a monthly organ for the C.R.A. whose size sometimes has been very great and would have kept an ordinary individual pretty well busy all the month. It is only because I am an exceptionally rapid worker that I have been able to do it all."

  Another reason Morel could do it all was that he had a devoted wife to run his household. Indeed, he is one of the few people in this entire story who was happily married. Mary Richardson Morel raised their five children and encouraged her husband's cause in every way. She took a particular liking to Casement, agreeing with him that her husband ought to form an organization that focused exclusively on the Congo. As with so many couples of their day, we do not know how many of Morel's memorable achievements should also be credited to her. "I always think of her as part of you," John Holt, his long-time staunch supporter and confidant, wrote him, "the two constituting the Morel of Congo reform."

  Morel was not without flaws. He could be bullheaded; he rarely admitted any mistakes; and in his newspaper he ran an occasional picture of himself, enthusiastic reviews of
his books, resolutions thanking him for his good work, interviews with himself reprinted from other papers, and an editorial "wish[ing] Mr. Morel 'God-speed' on his journey" when he went abroad to campaign for Congo reform. He sometimes clashed with colleagues who were, he felt, getting too much of the limelight—although seldom with Casement, whom he venerated. Like many enormously productive people, he had spells of depression and self-pity. "My home life is reduced to microscopic proportions.... Personally I am at the end of my tether," he wrote in 1906 to Mark Twain, declaring that he would go on with his Congo work nonetheless, because "those wretched people out there have no-one but us after all. And they have the right to live."

  His politics also had limitations. Some of these he shared with most other Europeans of his time, from his faith in the magic of free trade to his belief that African men had a higher sexual drive than white men and could pose a danger to white women. Other quirks were more rooted in his single-minded passion for stopping the atrocities in King Leopold's Congo. The picture Morel gives in his writings of Africans in the Congo before whites arrived is that of Rousseau's idealized Noble Savage: in describing traditional African societies he focuses on what was peaceful and gentle and ignores any brutal aspects—which occasionally included, for example, long before the Force Publique made it the order of the day, cutting off the hands of one's dead enemies.