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

by Adam Hochschild

  18. VICTORY?

  BOTH IN Africa and Europe, Leopold's death had promised to mark the end of an era. Many Belgians felt relieved; at last they would be rid of the multiple embarrassments of his youthful mistress, his unseemly quarrels with his daughters, and the sheer nakedness of his greed. But it was soon clear that Leopold's ghost would not vanish so easily. The king who had died while in possession of one of Europe's largest fortunes had tried to take it with him. After a fashion, he had succeeded.

  Not long before his death, it turned out, Leopold had surreptitiously ordered the establishment of a foundation, based in Germany, to which he transferred some twenty-five million francs' worth of paintings, silverware, crystal, jewelry, furniture and the like, plus another twenty million francs in securities. Some of the foundation's income was to be reinvested, its charter said, and the remainder was to be spent—"according to the directions left by the Founder"—on the grand, showy projects he loved: palaces, monuments, and public buildings. He was afraid that future small-minded Belgian governments would not spend money in such ways, and he was also trying, as always, to keep his wealth from going to Louise, Stephanie, and Clementine. "The king has but two dreams," a former Cabinet minister reportedly said during Leopold's last years; "to die a billionaire, and to disinherit his daughters."

  The German foundation was not the only place Leopold had tried to hide his fortune. Fifty-eight pieces of real estate in Brussels, purchased for the king by his faithful aide Baron Auguste Goffinet, turned out to belong to another secret company. A third shadowy entity, the Residential and Garden Real Estate Corporation of the Côte d'Azur, held possession of Leopold's panoply of Riviera properties. Some of these villas were earmarked as permanent vacation homes for future Belgian kings; others were to be part of a huge health resort, with parks, gardens, sports facilities, and cottages, providing free holidays for white officials returning from their labors in the Congo. Furthermore, these several corporate hiding places held more than twenty-five million francs' worth of Leopold's Congo bonds.

  The Belgian government's effort to clear up the dead king's financial morass dragged on for years. Since the entities involved had been variously incorporated in Belgium, France, and Germany, the process of straightening everything out was wholly disrupted by World War I. The health resort was never built. The grand World School of Colonialism, which Leopold had enthusiastically planned, was left unfinished, its lavish foundations already laid outside Brussels. Somerset Maugham eventually bought one of the king's many Riviera villas. The grounds of another were turned into a zoo, known today for its troupe of performing chimpanzees.

  Only in 1923, fourteen years after his death, was the last of Leopold's financial thicket untangled. Investigators trying to figure out his finances discovered, among other things, that some of the riches he had disposed of had in fact belonged to his crazed sister Carlota, still very much alive. Leopold, her legal guardian, had helped himself to certain properties of hers that he wanted, illegally substituting for them some of his Congo state bonds.

  The one-time Empress of Mexico long outlived her brother. When she received a visitor, it was in a room with twenty or more chairs lined up. Carlota would enter the room and solemnly greet an imaginary guest in each chair before talking with her caller. As the years passed, she spent endless hours changing her clothes and doing her hair. Then one day she reportedly caught sight of herself in a mirror, realized that she was no longer a youthful beauty, and ordered all the mirrors in her château smashed. At a party forty-five years after her husband's execution, she exclaimed, puzzled, "And Maximilian isn't here!" She was probably one of the few people in Belgium who barely noticed the four-year German occupation during World War I. She died in 1927, at the age of eighty-six, muttering madly about imaginary kingdoms and dynasties to the very end.

  Even today, researchers are not completely sure which of Leopold's baubles were paid for out of which hidden pockets. Nor is it possible to answer fully a larger question: how much profit altogether did the king draw from the Congo in his lifetime? In answer to this question, the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, the leading historian of this period, makes a "conservative" estimate, not including some smaller or hard-to-trace sources of money, of 220 million francs of the time, or $1.1 billion in today's dollars.

  One of the lawsuits provoked by Leopold's financial tangles was filed by Princesses Stephanie and Louise. They claimed that since the wealth in the secret foundation and companies had been their father's, it was now in part theirs. The Belgian government, however, eventually got most of the funds.

  There was no lawyer to argue that the money should have been returned to the Congolese.

  ***

  The final meeting of the Congo Reform Association, in 1913, marked the end of the most important and sustained crusade of its sort between the Abolitionism of the early and middle nineteenth century and the worldwide boycott and embargo against apartheid-era South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. But the Congo reform movement, heroic though it was, leaves some troubling questions in its wake. The most important is, did it do any lasting good?

  For many years, the conventional answer was yes. The glare of publicity surrounding the Casement and Commission of Inquiry investigations had sparked a new outbreak of rebellions in some areas that caused a noticeable, although temporary, reduction of rubber gathering. Later, E. D. Morel and his allies could point to the marked drop-off in reports of atrocities after the transfer to Belgium. Oblique testimony to the importance of wresting the Congo away from Leopold came even from Alexandre Delcommune, a long-time Congo businessman and administrator, a ruthless robber baron. (It was a steamboat from Delcommune's company that Joseph Conrad was hired to command.) Delcommune once wrote that if Leopold's rule had lasted another ten years, "one would no longer have found a single rubber vine, or perhaps a single native." Did the Congo reformers, then, save millions of lives?

  It would be a fitting climax to our story if this were so, for a splendid movement deserves splendid results. The organizing by E. D. Morel, the acts of witness of George Washington Williams, William Sheppard, and Roger Casement, and the deaths of Andrew Shanu and of rebel leaders like Nzansu, Mulume Niama, and Kandolo should not have been in vain. But the truth is more somber.

  Reports of abuses against gatherers of wild rubber in the Congo did drop off markedly after the Belgian takeover of 1908. In the following years there was far less news of villages burned or of women and children held hostage. There was no more officially sanctioned severing of hands. What lay behind the change, however, was not a kinder and gentler regime brought about by the reformers, but several other developments. One was the gradual shift from wild rubber to cultivated rubber. Another was the introduction of a new method of forcing people to work that drew much less protest from missionaries and humanitarians: taxes.

  The Belgian administrators who took over from Leopold saw that they needed plantations of cultivated rubber, because if all the rubber harvested came from wild vines, Africans desperate to meet their quotas would cut them all down; vines were already becoming scarce in parts of the country. Look again at the statement from Alexandre Delcommune on the previous page. He sounds just as concerned about the possible disappearance of wild rubber as of Congolese.

  The imposition of a heavy head tax forced people to go to work on the plantations or in harvesting cotton, palm oil, and other products—and proved an effective means of continuing to collect some wild rubber as well. Until the 1920s white traders bought wild rubber from villagers pressed to pay their taxes.

  The central part of what Morel had called the "System," forced labor, remained in place, applied to all kinds of work. Forced labor became particularly brutal during the First World War. In 1916, an expanded Force Publique invaded German East Africa, today's Tanzania. Like the other Allied powers, Belgium had its eye on getting part of Germany's slice of the African cake in the postwar division of the spoils. Enormous numbers of Congolese were conscripted as s
oldiers or porters. In 1916, by colonial officials' count, one area in the eastern Congo, with a population of 83,518 adult men, supplied more than three million man-days of porterage during the year; 1359 of these porters were worked to death or died of disease. Famines raged. A Catholic missionary reported, "The father of the family is at the front, the mother is grinding flour for the soldiers, and the children are carrying the foodstuffs!"

  The years after the war saw the growth of copper, gold, and tin mining. As always, the profits flowed out of the territory. It was legal for mine management to use the chicotte, and at the gold mines of Moto, on the upper Uele River, records show that 26,579 lashes were administered in the first half of 1920 alone. This figure was equal to eight lashes per full-time African worker. Techniques for gathering forced labor for the mines were little different from those employed in Leopold's time. According to the historian David Northrup, "a recruiter from the mines went around to each village chief accompanied by soldiers or the mines' own policemen, presented him with presents, and assigned him a quota of men (usually double the number needed, since half normally deserted as soon as they could). The chief then rounded up those he liked the least or feared or who were least able to resist and sent them to the administrative post tied together by the neck. From there they were sent on to the district headquarters in chains.... Chiefs were paid ten francs for each recruit." If a worker fled, a member of his family could be imprisoned—not so different from the old hostage system.

  As elsewhere in Africa, safety conditions in the mines were abysmal: in the copper mines and smelters of Katanga, five thousand workers died between 1911 and 1918. When the vaunted Matadi-Leopoldville railroad was rebuilt with a wider gauge and partly new route by forced labor between 1921 and 1931, more workmen on the project perished than had died when the line was laid in the 1890s. To the Africans throughout the Congo conscripted to work on these and other new enterprises, the Great Depression, paradoxically, brought lifesaving relief.

  With the start of the Second World War, the legal maximum for forced labor in the Congo was increased to 120 days per man per year. More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. The Allies also wanted ever more rubber for the tires of hundreds of thousands of military trucks, Jeeps, and warplanes. Some of the rubber came from the Congo's new plantations of cultivated rubber trees. But in the villages Africans were forced to go into the rain forest, sometimes for weeks at a time, to search for wild vines once again.

  ***

  Although they failed to end forced labor, the Congo reformers for roughly a decade were spectacularly successful in keeping the territory in the spotlight. Seldom has so much outrage poured down for so long upon such a distant target. This raises another major question about the movement: Why the Congo?

  An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a "hue and cry." But we live in a world of corpses, and only about some of them is there a hue and cry. True, with a population loss estimated at ten million people, what happened in the Congo could reasonably be called the most murderous part of the European Scramble for Africa. But that is so only if you look at sub-Saharan Africa as the arbitrary checkerboard formed by colonial boundaries. If you draw boundaries differently—to surround, say, all African equatorial rain forest land rich in wild rubber—then what happened in the Congo is, unfortunately, no worse than what happened in neighboring colonies: Leopold simply had far more of the rubber territory than anyone else. Within a decade of his head start, similar forced labor systems for extracting rubber were in place in the French territories west and north of the Congo River, in Portuguese-ruled Angola, and in the nearby Cameroons under the Germans. For the concession companies in the Cameroons, "the 'model' from which they professed to derive their inspiration," writes one historian, "was ... that of King Leopold II's ventures in the Congo Free State, the dividends of which evoked admiration in stockbroking circles."

  In France's equatorial African territories, where the region's history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies. Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company "sentries," and the chicotte were the order of the day. Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold's regime eventually fled back to escape the French. The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, at roughly 50 percent. And, as in Leopold's colony, both the French territories and the German Cameroons were wracked by long, fierce rebellions against the rubber regime. The French scholar Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch has published a chilling graph showing how, at one French Congo post, Salanga, between 1904 and 1907, the month-by-month rise and fall in rubber production correlated almost exactly to the rise and fall in the number of bullets used up by company "sentries"—nearly four hundred in a busy month.

  During this period a scandal erupted in France when two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner's rectum. Copying Leopold, the government tried to calm things down in 1905 by sending to Africa a commission of inquiry. To lead it, the famous explorer de Brazza was brought out of retirement. It was hoped that he would not say anything embarrassing about the territory he himself had won for France, whose capital city was named Brazzaville.

  Plans, however, went awry. Orders for cosmetic changes to be made during de Brazza's visit, such as unchaining the forced laborers, did not reach all the way into the interior before de Brazza got there. Horrified by what he saw, he began compiling a report that promised to be searingly critical, but, to the government's relief, he died on the way home. He was given an impressive state funeral, and the minister of colonies himself pronounced a flowery eulogy over his grave in Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery: "Brazza is not dead ... his passion lives.... He is the example ... of the eternal traditions of justice and humanity which are the glory of France." The eternal traditions of justice and humanity did not allow for the release of de Brazza's draft report. It was promptly suppressed by the same minister, with the endorsement of Parliament, and was never published. The lucrative concession-company system continued, with few changes. In the 1920s, construction of a new railway through French territory bypassing the big Congo River rapids cost the lives of an estimated twenty thousand forced laborers, far more than had died building, and later rebuilding, Leopold's railway nearby.

  (There is a curious footnote to the story of the French Congo. Who, by way of strawmen and dummy corporations, was discovered to be a major shareholder in five of the concession companies there, and the majority shareholder in three of these? King Leopold II. Belgian government investigators discovered this in the course of trying to untangle Leopold's finances after his death. Fearing that the French would be upset to find their Congo partly owned by the king next door, they successfully kept the news quiet for some years, and did not sell the shares until the 1920s. Leopold also held big blocks of shares in several concession companies in Germany's Cameroons.)

  The exclusive focus of the reform movement on Leopold's Congo seems even more illogical if you reckon mass murder by the percentage of the population killed. By these standards, the toll was even worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today's Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.

  After losing much of their land to the Germans, the Hereros rebelled in 1904. In response, Germany sent in a heavily armed force under Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl):

  "Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or wit
hout cattle, shall be shot....

  "Signed: The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha."

  In case everything was not clear, an addendum specified: "No male prisoners will be taken."

  Of an estimated eighty thousand Hereros who lived in the territory in 1903, fewer than twenty thousand landless refugees remained in 1906. The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or—to economize on bullets—bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stocks.

  Von Trotha's extermination order stirred some protests in Germany itself, but internationally it was greeted with silence, even though the Congo reform campaign was then flying high. Morel and other Congo reformers paid so little attention that five years later John Holt, the businessman who was one of Morel's two main financial backers, could ask him, "Is it true that the Germans butchered the Hereros—men, women, and children?...I have never heard of this before."

  Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world also was largely ignoring America's brutal counterguerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed some 20,000 rebels, and saw an estimated 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease. Britain came in for no international criticism for its killings of aborigines in Australia, in accordance with extermination orders as ruthless as von Trotha's. And, of course, in neither Europe nor the United States was there major protest against the decimation of the American Indians.