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

by Adam Hochschild

  After visits to England, France, and Germany, Shanu returned to the Congo and, in a remarkable move in this state set up by Europeans for their own benefit, became a successful businessman. In Boma, he opened a well-stocked store selling canned food and other supplies from Europe; in addition he operated a tailor's shop and laundry, and ran small lodging houses both in Boma and the railhead town of Matadi. He enjoyed photography, and had some of his pictures published in the Brussels magazine Le Congo Illustré. When he leased a house he owned to an early British vice consul, he made so great an impression that the man recommended Shanu to the Foreign Office as his replacement during a home leave. Shanu was also respected by his former employers. During a Force Publique mutiny at Boma in 1900, state officials gratefully accepted his help in preventing the rebellion from spreading to West Africans working in the town. He even offered to take up arms against the mutineers. "Monsieur Shanu, in these troubled moments, has given proof of his sincere loyalty to the State," wrote a high Congo official.

  Up to this point Shanu had thrown in his lot completely with the Congo's rulers. But something—we do not know what—caused a change of heart, and he moved into the camp of Leopold's enemies. For a black man living in the Congo capital, this was a dangerous step. One sign of his changed attitude came when he apparently supplied Roger Casement with information about the mistreatment of West African workers in the Congo. In turn, it appears that Casement told Shanu about the campaign Morel was mounting in Europe. While Casement was in the interior in 1903 making his investigation, Shanu sent a check to Morel, asking for copies of his writings. Delighted to have an African ally right in the enemy's capital, Morel immediately wrote back, sending Shanu a subscription to his newspaper, a book, and some pamphlets. "I do not know what your views on the Congo question are," he wrote, "but if they agree with mine, I shall be very glad if you can let me have information from time to time." Some weeks later Morel wrote again, suggesting that Shanu could avoid catching the eye of the Boma postal censor by addressing his mail to Morel's father-in-law in Devon. Before long Shanu found some useful information to send.

  After the protests against Leopold's rule began in Europe, the Congo state had periodically made a big show of prosecuting low-ranking white officials for atrocities against Africans. Occasionally the convicted men were sentenced to prison terms, although most were released after serving only a fraction of their time. But trials can be risky for repressive governments; they can put damaging material on the public record. Like other small-fry scapegoats in tyrannies the world over, the defendants accused of brutal massacres in the Congo usually said they were only following orders—and often could produce witnesses or documents to prove the claim. The state therefore took care to keep the transcripts of these trials secret, and for some years virtually nothing leaked out. Morel, knowing the evidence from these trials would be a source of ammunition for the Congo reform campaign, asked Shanu to find out what he could.

  One especially revealing case came to a climax in early 1904. The main defendant, a trigger-happy rubber-company agent named Charles Caudron, was accused of several crimes, including the murder of at least 122 Africans. In part, he was put on trial so that the state could claim it was upholding human rights, but the authorities had other motives as well. Caudron had offended the Force Publique commander in his area, who thought he was the one to run any military operations there. And he had spread his reign of terror so wildly that he had disrupted rubber production in a highly profitable district.

  The trial revealed much about government orders condoning the holding of hostages. Furthermore, the appeals court lowered Caudron's sentence because of "extenuating circumstances." Invoking the familiar lazy-native theme, the court referred to the "great difficulties under which [Caudron] found himself, accomplishing his mission in the midst of a population absolutely resistant to any idea of work, and which respects no other law than force, and knows no other means of persuasion than terror."

  Shanu got hold of some of the court documents and secretly sent them to Morel, who published them immediately, claiming that this was "the most damaging blow ever received by the Congo State." That was an overstatement, but the material was indeed damaging. And what was most embarrassing in it came from the mouths of Congo state officials themselves. It caught the eye of the British Foreign Office and was reprinted in an official report.

  Shanu's next contribution to the anti-Congo campaign, however, ended tragically. He acted as liaison between Morel and a Congo state official, the police chief of Boma, who claimed to have information to give or sell to the reformers. But the man turned treacherous; he attacked Morel in the Belgian press and exposed Shanu as Morel's accomplice. Morel, who considered Shanu a man "of unblemished reputation and of great courage," feared for Shanu's life and urged the British consul in Boma to do all he could to protect him. He sent offers of help to Shanu and anxiously asked for news. When it came, it was not good. Because Shanu was a British subject, the Congo authorities did not want to risk an international incident by arresting him. Instead, they harassed him unremittingly, even rescinding the medal he had been awarded for his work for the state. They then ordered all state employees not to patronize his businesses. That guaranteed that these would fail. In July 1905 Hezekiah Andrew Shanu committed suicide.

  ***

  At the turn of the century, the Élysée-Palace Hotel, near the Arc de Triomphe, was among the most elegant in Paris. One day a guest happened to notice a young woman, also staying at the hotel, whose name, like other details of her past, remains in question: it was Caroline, or perhaps Blanche, Delacroix, or perhaps Lacroix. Although still a teenager, Caroline was the mistress of Antoine-Emmanuel Durrieux, a former officer in the French Army. He attempted to support them both by betting on horse races. When his betting luck ran low, it appears, Durrieux also acted as Caroline's pimp. Their lodgings at the Elysee-Palace were a useful base for these operations, but they frequently left bills unpaid. An unexpected solution to these troubles appeared when a woman approached Caroline at the hotel and said, "Madame, I am sent to you by a gentleman who has noticed you. He is a very high personage but his exalted position obliges me to withhold his name."

  A meeting was arranged for the following day. According to Caroline's not entirely reliable memoirs, Durrieux, in a top hat and pearl-gray gloves, binoculars hanging around his neck, left for the racetrack unawares. (More likely, he was fully aware and had been paid off in advance.) Caroline went to a secluded room in a building on the nearby rue Lord Byron. The high personage arrived, accompanied by two aides, who took seats on either side of Caroline and began asking her questions. "It was not really a conversation; it was rather a series of trite questions asked in rotation first by one, then by the other.... These questions obliged me to turn my head first to the right, then to the left. I answered them without having to think, their only aim, as I learned later, being to show off my two profiles to the mute personage." After looking over his new prize, the high personage smiled behind his beard and pronounced himself pleased. He invited Caroline to travel to Austria with him, and the next day a large sum of money arrived, as well as some empty trunks for Caroline to fill with new dresses of her choice. Her admirer had found the way to her heart, for she liked nothing better in the world than to buy clothes. Caroline was sixteen; King Leopold II was sixty-five.

  Then, as now, nothing royal stayed secret long. Courtiers gossiped, servants whispered, and news of the scandalous romance soon filled the press of Europe. Leopold had long had a well-known taste for extremely young women, but losing his head completely over a sixteen-year-old call girl was a different matter entirely. His new mistress was young enough to be his granddaughter. Leopold's chaotic family life and sexual tastes are far more than incidental to the Congo story. Ironically, they probably lost him more popularity in Belgium* than any of the cruelties he perpetrated in Africa. This, in turn, meant that few of his people were willing to rally behind him when he became the target of
an international protest movement.

  The king's personal foibles also turned him into an irresistible target for a world press stirred up by Morel. The large beard, now turned white, made him a cartoonist's dream. His bulky, cloaked figure stalked through the pages of Europe's newspapers: his beard dripping blood, his hands clutching shrunken heads from the Congo, his eyes hungrily devouring the dancers of a corps de ballet. He sits down to dine on a severed African head garnished with bayonets. Tsar Nicholas II complains that his knout is ineffective, so his cousin Leopold, dressed in a tiger skin, recommends the chicotte. Leopold's rejected daughters sadly beg their father for Caroline's cast-off clothing. Leopold and the Sultan of Turkey share a good laugh and a bottle of wine while comparing the massacre of the Congolese to that of the Armenians.

  Several years into the king's liaison with his new love, his long-suffering wife, Marie-Henriette, lover of horses and music, died. From this point on, the king's infatuation with Caroline became flagrantly open. He installed her in a grand mansion, the Villa Vanderborght, across the way from the royal complex at Laeken, and built a pedestrian bridge over the street so that he could slip across at will for visits.

  He was wildly jealous of Caroline, apparently with reason; he once caught her in the Brussels villa with Durrieux, the former officer from whom he thought he had stolen her. Durrieux, whom Caroline tried to pass off as her brother, seems to have shown up on other occasions as well. One newspaper informed its readers that Caroline and Durrieux had secret electric bells installed in all her residences so that servants could warn them if Leopold was approaching.

  After she moved to Brussels, Caroline continued to make frequent trips to Paris to visit her dressmaker and her hatmaker. (During this period, she once bragged, she bought three million francs' worth of dresses at a single store, Callot's.) When she complained to the king that the evening express train back to Brussels departed too early and left her too little shopping time, Leopold, rather than risk her staying in Paris and out of his sight overnight, spoke to the head of the railway. From then on the train left an hour later.

  Caroline quickly learned to make use of Leopold's quirks, such as his hypochondria. "One day when I needed some free hours for myself I obtained them by sneezing. How many times have I kept intriguing women away from the sovereign simply by telling him that they had colds!"

  Leopold took Caroline with him everywhere. Ostensibly, she traveled incognito, but with an expanding retinue of servants this became difficult. Shocking everyone, she accompanied the king to London in 1901 for the funeral of his cousin Queen Victoria. The king did not entirely lose his interest in other young women—in Brussels, Paris, and elsewhere, he periodically sent his valet or another intermediary to look for candidates who met his detailed physical specifications—but Caroline was in a different category. The two of them seemed to trumpet, rather than disguise, their difference in age: she called him Très Vieux and he called her Très Belle. To the extent that someone like Leopold was capable of love, this teenage prostitute proved to be the love of his life.

  But it was not only Leopold's liaison with Caroline that lost him popularity with Belgians. It began to dawn on his people that their country was gaining little financial benefit from the Congo: the bulk of the profits were going straight into Caroline's dresses and villas and, on a far larger scale, into the king's construction projects. Since Leopold had little taste for good works, literature, or drama—and a well-known dislike for music—he spent his money mostly on building things, the bigger the better.

  For years the king had pled poverty, but as his triumphal arches, museums, and monuments sprouted around the country, he could keep up the pretense no longer. Belgians were even more upset when it became clear that their king was spending much of his newfound wealth abroad. He was soon one of the largest landowners on the French Riviera, where he built a dock for his fifteen-hundred-ton yacht, the Alberta, and had architects from Nice design and build a series of splendid villas. His property included most of the land at the end of the scenic fingertip of Cap Ferrat, then, as now, among the most expensive seaside real estate in the world.

  On his young mistress Leopold showered castles and mansions. When she became pregnant, he and the French government split the cost of building a new road near her villa at Cap Ferrat, in order to give her carriage a smoother ride. When her son was born, he was given the title of Duke of Tervuren, and she became the Baroness de Vaughan. The king took her around the Mediterranean on his yacht, but the Belgian public loathed her, and her carriage was once stoned in the streets of Brussels. In the minds of Europeans, the king's public and private lives by now were wholly entwined. When Caroline's second son was born, he had a deformed hand. A cartoon in Punch showed Leopold holding the newborn child, surrounded by Congolese corpses with their hands cut off. The caption read: VENGEANCE PROM ON HIGH.

  How did Leopold feel about being the target of such wrath? Clearly, it exasperated him; he once wrote to an aide, "I will not let myself be soiled with blood or mud." But the tone he sounded was always of annoyance or self-pity, never of shame or guilt. Once, when he saw a cartoon of himself in a German newspaper slicing off hands with his sword, he snorted, according to a military aide, and said, "Cut off hands—that's idiotic! I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not the hands. That's the one thing I need in the Congo!" Small wonder that when the king jokingly introduced Prime Minister Auguste Beernaert to a gathering as "the greatest cynic in the kingdom," Beernaert replied, deadpan, that he would not dare take precedence over His Majesty.

  15. A RECKONING

  AS E. D. MOREL, Roger Casement, and their allies caught Europe's attention with reports of the holocaust in central Africa, newspapers and magazines ran pictures of burned villages and mutilated bodies, and missionary witnesses spoke of the depopulation of entire districts. Looking at this written and photographic record today immediately raises a crucial question: what was the death toll in Leopold's Congo? This is a good moment to pause in our story to find an answer.

  The question is not simple. To begin with, history in this case cannot have distinct lines drawn around it as it can, say, when we ask how many Jews the Nazis put to death between 1933 and 1945. King Leopold II's personal État Indépendant du Congo officially existed for twenty-three years, beginning in 1885, but many Congolese were already dying unnatural deaths by the start of that period, and important elements of the king's system of exploitation endured for many years after its official end. The rubber boom, cause of the worst bloodletting in the Congo, began under Leopold's rule in the mid-1890s, but it continued several years after the end of his one-man regime.

  Furthermore, although the killing in the Congo was of genocidal proportions, it was not, strictly speaking, a genocide. The Congo state was not deliberately trying to eliminate one particular ethnic group from the face of the Earth. Instead, like the slave dealers who raided Africa for centuries before them, Leopold's men were looking for labor. If, in the course of their finding and using that labor, millions of people died, that to them was incidental. Few officials kept statistics about something they considered so negligible as African lives. And so estimating the number of casualties today requires considerable historical detective work.

  In population losses on this scale, the toll is usually a composite of figures from one or more of four closely connected sources: (1) murder; (2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; (3) disease; and (4) a plummeting birth rate. In the worst period in the Congo, the long rubber boom, it came in abundance from all four:

  1. Murder. Although outright murder was not the major cause of death in Leopold's Congo, it was most clearly documented. When a village or a district failed to supply its quota of rubber or fought back against the regime, Force Publique soldiers or rubber company "sentries" often killed everyone they could find. Those times when an eyewitness happened upon a pile of skeletons or severed hands, and a report survives, represent, of course, only a small proportion of the massacres carried ou
t, only a few sparks from a firestorm. But among those scattered sparks are some that burn distinctly:

  • In 1896, a German newspaper, the Kölnische Zeitung, published, on the authority of "a highly esteemed Belgian," news that 1308 severed hands had been turned over to the notorious District Commissioner Léon Fiévez in a single day. The newspaper twice repeated the story without being challenged by the Congo state. Several additional reports of that day's events, including some from both Protestant and Catholic missionaries, cited even higher totals for the number of hands. On a later occasion, Fiévez admitted that the practice of cutting hands off corpses existed; he denied only, with great vehemence, that he had ever ordered hands cut off living people.

  • In 1899, a state officer, Simon Roi, perhaps not realizing that one of the people he was chatting with was an American missionary, bragged about the killing squads under his command. The missionary, Ellsworth Faris, recorded the conversation in his diary: "Each time the corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given to him. He must bring back all not used; and for every one used he must bring back a right hand!...As to the extent to which this is carried on, [Roi] informed me that in six months they, the State, on the Momboyo River had used 6000 cartridges, which means that 6000 people are killed or mutilated. It means more than 6000, for the people have told me repeatedly that the soldiers kill children with the butt of their guns."