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

by Adam Hochschild

  When these other mass murders went largely unnoticed except by their victims, why, in England and the United States, was there such a storm of righteous protest about the Congo? The politics of empathy are fickle. Certainly one reason Britons and Americans focused on the Congo was that it was a safe target. Outrage over the Congo did not involve British or American misdeeds, nor did it entail the diplomatic, trade, or military consequences of taking on a major power like France or Germany. Morel had something of a blind spot about Germany, but, although he had his hands more than full with Leopold, to his great credit he repeatedly and forcefully attacked France for adopting the Leopoldian system wholesale in its equatorial African colonies and reaping a lethal rubber harvest second only to the king's. His words drew little response among his fellow Britons, who saw World War I on the horizon and knew that France would be their chief ally.

  What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best: "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz."

  ***

  In the years following Leopold's death, the other actors in the Congo drama passed from the scene. In 1910, William Sheppard returned to the United States for good. Just after being vindicated in the Compagnie du Kasai libel trial, he was forced to resign his post as a missionary because he had been caught having extramarital affairs with African women. He was briefly placed on probation by the church and then allowed to resume work as a minister in the United States, where word of the scandal was never made public. His health was weakened after dozens of bouts of fever during his twenty years in Africa, and he lived out most of his remaining years as pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where his wife, Lucy, taught Sunday school and led the choir.

  Sheppard continued to write and speak widely about Africa, even though, in his Southern Presbyterian church, this meant having to talk before segregated congregations. At different times, each of the two great archrivals, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, invited Sheppard to join him on the speaker's platform, and Sheppard obliged. But this man, who was so honored in the black community, who had been the first foreign visitor to meet the Kuba king, who had been received in the White House, had returned to an American South where he was still a second-class citizen. Years later, a white woman in Sheppard's home town of Waynesboro, Virginia, said of him: "He was such a good darky. When he returned from Africa he remembered his place and always came to the back door." When Sheppard died in Louisville at the age of sixty-two, in 1927, more than a thousand people came to his funeral.

  On the other side of the country, the lawyer Henry Kowalsky's great bulk hastened his end. He was found dead at the age of fifty-six, in 1914, on the floor of his apartment in San Francisco's Palace Hotel. In Belgium, Léon Rom, his head-collecting days long past, collapsed in his office at the Compagnie du Kasai in 1924. Joseph Conrad, who had so acutely captured the essence of Rom and of fortune-hunters like him in Heart of Darkness, died in England the same year. The only public figure from the Congo controversy to survive into our time was the missionary, reformer, and photographer Alice Harris, who died in 1970 at the age of one hundred.

  Another major figure in the Congo story did not meet his end so peacefully.

  In 1913, Sir Roger Casement retired from the British consular service and was free at last to throw himself into the cause that now consumed him: freedom for his homeland. Returning to Ireland, he helped to found the Irish Volunteers, an armed militia, and traveled the country to speak at mass meetings. A comrade left this description of him in Dublin in 1914: "Looking outward before the window curtains, stood Roger Casement...[with] the apparent dejection which he always wore so proudly, as though he had assumed the sorrows of the world. His face was in profile to me, his handsome head and noble outline cut out against the latticework of the curtain and the grey sky. His height seemed more than usually commanding, his black hair and beard longer than usual. His left leg was thrown forward and the boot was torn in a great hole—for he gave his substance away always, and left himself thus in need."

  "It is quite clear to every Irishman," Casement wrote, "that the only rule John Bull respects is that of the rifle." He set off across the Atlantic to raise funds from Irish-Americans for buying black-market guns, but shortly after he arrived in the United States, World War I began. Any talk of Home Rule for Ireland, the British said, would have to wait. Casement responded with an open letter declaring that the Irish people should never "contribute their blood, their honour and their manhood in a war that in no wise concerns them.... Ireland has no blood to give to any land, to any cause but that of Ireland.... Let our graves be in that patriot grass whence alone the corpse of Irish nationality can spring to life."

  He shaved off his beard and, using a false passport, headed from New York to Germany. The militant Irish nationalists wanted the Germans to declare that if they won the war, Ireland would receive independence. In return, they hoped to arm and train an Irish Brigade of freedom fighters from among Irish prisoners of war now held in Germany. And if the Irish Brigade could not fight in Ireland itself, Casement thought, it would fight beside the Egyptians, another colonial people yearning for freedom from Britain. His plan, he wrote in his diary, was to "link the green flag of Ireland with the green flag of the Prophet &...drive the allies into the sea."

  Casement's dreams won little sympathy from the Irish prisoners of war. They were professional soldiers, many with ancestors who had served in the same British regiment. Of some 2200 Irish Catholic POW's, fewer than sixty joined the Irish Brigade, where they were given German uniforms with a harp and shamrock on the collar. Casement occasionally marched with the brigade in training, but, scarcely larger than an Irish platoon, it never went to war.

  The Germans were highly uneasy with Casement's anticolonialism and wanted to get this restless romantic off their hands; he was eager to return to Ireland to join his comrades underground. On April 21, 1916, off the west coast of Ireland, a German submarine captain released Casement, two companions, and their supplies in a small boat. When he asked Casement whether there was any more clothing he needed, Casement replied, "Only my shroud."

  In a way, Casement had been waiting for this moment of homecoming and martyrdom all his life. "When I landed in Ireland that morning (about 3 A.M.), swamped and swimming ashore on an unknown strand.... I was for one brief spell happy and smiling once more ... and all around were primroses and wild violets and the singing of the skylarks in the air, and I was back in Ireland again."

  He was captured a few hours later. His mind was filled with thoughts of primroses and skylarks, but his pockets held a railway ticket stub for the trip from Berlin to Wilhelmshaven, a German submarine port, and a diary with the entry, supposedly in code, "April 12: left Wicklow in Willie's yacht." Among the items police found buried on the beach where he had landed were three Mauser pistols, ammunition, binoculars, maps, and a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

  Two days later, Casement was charged with high treason, the first knight of the realm to be so accused in several hundred years. He was held incommunicado in the Tower of London, and the British wasted little time in putting him on trial. Guards led him to and from court in handcuffs. Like almost all of his Congo reform movement friends, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle strongly disapproved of his action, but he contributed £700 toward Casement's defense. He and many other famous writers signed petitions asking that Casement's life be spared. However, Joseph Conrad, Casement's 1890 roommate from Matadi, refused to sign; he was as staunch a patriot of his adopted country, England, as Casement was an opponent.

  Money and messages of support arrived from around the world. From the United States, the Negro Fellowship League sent King George V an appeal for clemency: "We feel so deeply grateful to this man for the revelations he made while British Consul in Africa, touching the treatment of the n
atives of the Congo. But for him, the world might not know of the barbarous cruelties." George Bernard Shaw drafted a speech for Casement to give at his trial, but Casement rejected it and gave his own.

  "Self-government is our right," he declared. "A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself—than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind.... Where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours ... then surely it is braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel ... than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men." Like far too few nationalists, Casement's passion for freedom applied to all peoples, not just his own. For his time he was rare, perhaps unique, in proclaiming something in common between the struggle for freedom of Europeans like the Irish and of Africans like the Egyptians and the Congolese. His speech quickly entered the annals of anticolonialism, where it made a deep impression on a young man who would later help lead his own country to independence, Jawaharlal Nehru. "It seemed to point out," he said, "exactly how a subject nation should feel."

  Found guilty, Casement was moved to London's Pentonville Prison, a massive, forbidding structure built in 1842 to hold convicts in solitary confinement under a strict rule of silence. At his former lodgings in London, Scotland Yard had already found some of his diaries. The authorities immediately made photographic copies of the entries about his homosexual experiences and showed them around widely: to the king, to influential citizens in their London clubs, to members of Parliament. Journalists were invited in for a look, and one set of copies went to Washington. The government wanted to discredit Casement and to discourage any more notables from speaking up for clemency. The diaries helped to seal his doom.

  An imprisoned pacifist caught a glimpse of Casement watching the sunset sky through his Pentonville cell window. He looked "wonderfully calm ... he seemed already to be living in another world; there was not a trace of anxiety or fear in his features." On the morning of August 3, 1916, guards tied his hands behind his back. "He marched to the scaffold," said a priest who accompanied him, "with the dignity of a prince and towered straight over all of us." The hangman called him "the bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute." In one of the last letters he wrote from his cell, less than a week before he was hanged, Casement looked back over his life: "I made awful mistakes, and did heaps of things wrong and failed at much—but ... the best thing was the Congo."

  ***

  Like his friend Casement, E. D. Morel had also been transformed by the long struggle over the Congo. In the final decade of his life he fought his bravest, loneliest battle of all. And this time there were no lords and bishops cheering him on.

  In the closing years of the Congo reform movement, Morel saw how much his cause was being hindered by the Entente Cordiale between Paris and London, studded with secret clauses, in which the two countries subordinated everything to preparations for a coming European war. At the beginning of August 1914, he was on a rare seaside vacation with his daughter in Dieppe, France. Newly mobilized reservists filled the streets as the two caught a packed boat across the Channel to England, their holiday cut short by the looming conflict. In London, Morel and his friend Charles Trevelyan, M.P., filled with foreboding, walked through an empty House of Commons as crowds in the street outside roared their support for war.

  Morel was among the handful of people on either side in Europe who said openly that the war was madness. Through a series of treaties kept secret from the public and Parliament, he argued, England had become caught up in a needless cataclysm. He was not a pacifist; he said he would fight if England were attacked, but it had not been. He was asked to resign his position as a Parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party. With a small, beleaguered group of like-minded men and women, Morel formed the Union of Democratic Control, which quickly became the main voice of antiwar dissent in England. UDC activists found that their mail was being opened by Scotland Yard and their telephone calls tapped. Mobs broke up their meetings, tearing down banners, throwing stink bombs, and beating up speakers and members of the audience. Before long, no one in London would rent the UDC a meeting hall. On all sides, former admirers deserted Morel. When one old journalist friend, now in uniform, deigned to greet him in the street, Morel was so moved that he wept, saying, "I did not think anyone would speak to me now."

  In the UDC, as in the Congo reform movement, Morel became the dominant figure. "I felt something volcanic in the man," wrote a colleague. There were "fires smouldering always at his heart." As before, his wife, Mary, supported him wholeheartedly, joining the organization's council. He set up branches of the UDC all over England, edited the group's monthly newspaper, and wrote his usual stream of articles and pamphlets, plus two books. But the work was far harder now, for England was in the grip of war fever, the wartime censor banned some of his writing, and his mailbox was filled with hate mail. Police raided both the UDC office and the Morel family's home, where they took papers and correspondence from his study. Of one of the works Morel managed to get published while enduring all this, Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy, the historian A.J.P. Taylor writes, "All the later studies of 'war-origins' stem from [it]...the interwar historians were ... cut from his cloak.... Morel caused more than a change of method; he caused a change of outlook."

  Today we see so clearly that the 8.5 million dead and 21 million wounded of World War I were a needless, avoidable tragedy that we forget how few people had the courage to call it that at the time. As the war went on, Morel came under heightened attack. A fierce blast against the British antiwar movement in the Daily Sketch noted, "If you meet pacifists in debate and question their facts you always find yourself referred to one authority—Morel.... To kill this conspiracy we must get hold of the arch-conspirator." His office was under constant police surveillance. WHO IS MR. E. D. MOREL? read a headline in the Daily Express, AND WHO PAYS FOR HIS PRO-GERMAN UNION? The Evening Standard called him "Germany's agent in this country."

  It was while undergoing attacks like these that Morel got the news of Casement's arrest. Morel's fellow UDC members warned him that they were in enough trouble as it was and urged him not to support his friend who, unlike them, actually had been collaborating with the Germans. So Morel, although he must have agonized about it, did not visit Casement in prison during the few months he had left to live. Casement, generousspirited as ever, sent word that he fully understood. A friend who had seen him wrote to Morel: "He told me that he thought you were quite right to have accepted the decision of your colleagues, that there was no question about it."

  Throughout the war, Morel stuck to his beliefs, as passionate and unyielding now, when all were against him, as he had been in the days of Congo reform, when much of the British establishment had been on his side. He called for a negotiated peace and an end to secret treaties. And he argued, with great prescience, against the harsh peace terms he was certain would be imposed on Germany. With tsarist Russia on the Allied side, he wrote, it was ridiculous to claim that the war was one between democracy and autocracy. He demanded disarmament, an agreement that no land would be transferred without a plebiscite of its inhabitants, and an International Council of all nations.

  "The War of 1914–1918 changed everything for me...." writes Bertrand Russell, another man who boldly challenged the chauvinist fever. "I lost old friends and made new ones. I came to know some few people whom I could deeply admire, first among whom I should place E. D. Morel.... With untiring energy and immense ability in the face of all the obstacles of propaganda and censorship, he did what he could to enlighten the British nation as to the true purposes for which the Government was driving the young men to the shambles. More than any other opponent of the War he was attacked by politicians and the press.... In spite of all this his courage never failed." Russell declared of Morel, "No other man known to me has had the same heroi
c simplicity in pursuing and proclaiming political truth."

  British government records show that high officials in many departments long conferred about how best to get Morel "safely lodged in gaol," as one man in the Foreign Office put it, without giving him the public forum of a trial, at which he could deploy his persuasiveness as a speaker and his awesome command of information. In 1917, they found an appropriate technicality, and arrested him for violating an obscure law against sending antiwar literature to neutral countries. He was denied bail and promptly sentenced to six months at hard labor.

  Morel describes a curious event at his sentencing in 1917: "A picturesque feature in this otherwise squalid legal landscape was provided by an individual crossing the body of the Court from somewhere behind me while my counsel was pleading, and handing up a note to the prosecuting counsel, who opened it, read it, and nodded, whereupon the individual regained his seat, but not before I had recognised in him the same individual who ... acting as an accredited representative of King Leopold II, had publicly opposed me in America in the course of my mission to the United States." Leopold had died eight years earlier, and Morel's trip to the United States had been five years before that. Some half-dozen of the king's paid lobbyists had taken to the field against him then; he does not tell us which of them made this mysterious appearance in the courtroom, as if Leopold were still sending orders from the grave.

  Guards took Morel through the gates of Pentonville Prison a year after Roger Casement had been executed there. The man in the cell on one side of Morel had stolen three bottles of whiskey; on the other side was someone who had raped a child. In one of the monthly letters, which were all he was permitted to write to his wife, he referred to "this, the 1st time in the last twenty years we have not written to each other daily when absent."

  He spent his prison days in a dust-filled room sewing canvas mailbags and weaving rope into hammocks and mats for the navy, all in silence: no conversation between prisoners was allowed at work. He was locked in his cell each night from four P.M. until eight the next morning. Supper, eaten alone in the cell, was "a piece of bread, half-a-pint of coldish porridge at the bottom of a tin which earlier in the day may have contained red-herrings and still bears traces of them, and a pint of hot, greasy cocoa which one learns to regard as a veritable nectar of the gods, especially in cold weather." Once or twice during the night there would be clicking sounds as a warder opened the peephole in each cell door to check on the prisoners. At night there was "the cold of a cold cell—like nothing on earth. Nothing seems proof against it."