When Henry Stanley arrived back in London in January 1878 after his epic journey down the Congo River, he was greeted with much admiration but found little interest in his plans to use the river as a ‘great highway of commerce’ into the interior. Neither ministers nor missionaries nor business houses took up his suggestions. In Brussels, however, Stanley’s exploits had been watched closely by King Leopold II of Belgium.
An ambitious, greedy and devious monarch, Leopold had long dreamed of establishing colonies abroad and enriching himself on the proceeds. His attention to central Africa had first been drawn by remarks made by a British naval officer, Lieutenant Verney Cameron, after completing a three-year journey across the belly of Africa from the east coast to the west coast in 1875. As reported in The Times, a newspaper that Leopold read avidly, Cameron’s view was that central Africa was a ‘country of unspeakable riches’ with an abundance of gold, copper, silver and coal, just waiting for an ‘enterprising capitalist’ to ‘take the matter in hand’.
Leopold began his quest for an African empire by inviting a collection of European explorers and geographers, including Cameron, to a conference at his palace in Brussels in September 1876. In welcoming his guests, he spoke of the need for an international crusade to open up central Africa ‘to civilisation’ and extinguish the slave trade. He stressed he was ‘in no way motivated by selfish designs’, but merely wanted to advance the cause of science and philanthropy by establishing bases there. With the approval of delegates, he set up a new international body, the Association Internationale Africaine (AIA), with himself as president, to lead the crusade. But his real purpose, as he made clear in a letter written a few months later to Baron Solvyns, the Belgian ambassador in London, was to gain personal control of African territory and to use it for commercial gain: ‘I do not want to miss the opportunity of obtaining a share of this magnificent African cake.’
Stanley figured prominently in Leopold’s grand scheme, but the king was wary of disclosing his true purpose. He confided to Solvyns in November 1877:
I believe that if I commission Stanley to take possession in my name of any given place in Africa, the English would stop me . . . I am therefore thinking in terms of entrusting Stanley with a purely exploratory mission which will offend no one and will provide us with some posts down in that region, staffed and equipped, and with a high command for them which we can develop when Europe and Africa have got used to our ‘pretensions’ on the Congo.
Failing to find any British interest in the Congo region, Stanley accepted an invitation to meet Leopold in Brussels in June 1878. Leopold, it seemed, was the only person willing to sponsor his return there. In November, Stanley signed a five-year contract with the king. His remit was to set up posts along the Congo River, build roads and pave the way for commercial development.
In August 1879, Stanley’s flotilla of boats reached the mouth of the Congo and sailed upriver towards the Yellala Falls, the first of the chain of cataracts, 110 miles inland. He purchased from local chiefs a lease on land on a rocky plateau at Vivi and began building a station there. Stanley himself joined in the work of road-building, breaking up rocks with a sledge-hammer. Watching Stanley toil away, a local Bakongo chief called him Bula Matari, a breaker of rocks, a name that spread far and wide through the Congo Basin and would eventually acquire sinister connotations.
From Vivi, Stanley intended to build a wagon-road bypassing the cataracts and crossing over the Crystal Mountains, giving him a route to Malebo Pool, a name that Stanley changed to Stanley Pool, 230 miles away. Malebo Pool was key to the whole enterprise: it was the gateway to the Congo Basin, giving access to a web of interconnecting rivers navigable for 4,000 miles of the interior. Stanley estimated that it would take two years of hard labour and heavy hauling before the road reached Malebo Pool.
On 7 November 1880, with about fifty miles of the road complete. Stanley was resting in his tent near Isangila Falls, reading a book, when a white stranger in a tattered naval uniform arrived at his camp. It was one of the early encounters in what became known as the Scramble for Africa.
Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was an Italian-born French ensign carrying out a mission to explore the upper reaches of the Congo River on behalf of the Société Géographique de Paris. The son of an Italian aristocrat, born in 1852, he had enlisted as a cadet at the French naval school at Brest, hoping for an adventurous career. He had caught his first sight of central Africa in 1872 while serving on an anti-slavery patrol on the coast of present-day Gabon, where the French had established several trading posts. Keen to explore inland, he made two trips at his own expense up the Gabon and Ogowé rivers and then persuaded the French government in 1875 to provide funds for an expedition to discover the source of the Ogowé. During three years of exploration, Brazza traced the Ogowé to a watershed within 150 miles of Malebo Pool. Returning to Paris in December 1878, he learned that Leopold had commissioned Stanley’s venture to the Congo and urged French officials to authorise another expedition to ‘plant the French flag’ at Malebo Pool before the Belgians claimed it. Brazza was given funds but no official mandate.
Accompanied by an armed escort of twenty-four Senegalese and Gabonese sailors, Brazza made his way up the Ogowé once more, crossed overland to the Lefini River, and reached the Congo, opposite the mouth of the Kwa Kasai, upriver from Malebo Pool, in August 1880. He was accorded a warm welcome from the Bateke king, Makoko, who hoped to profit from trade links to the coast. On 10 September, Makoko put his mark to a treaty placing his kingdom under French ‘protection’. He also arranged for Brazza to be given the site for a station at Mfwa, on the northern shore of Malebo Pool. On 3 October, Brazza raised the French flag at Mfwa, a place that later became known as Brazzaville. And on 18 October, instead of returning via the Ogowé, he headed down the Congo, leaving behind a Senegalese sergeant, Malamine, in charge of the Mfwa station.
On meeting Stanley three weeks later, Brazza made no mention of the Makoko treaty, only that he had set up a small guard post at Malebo Pool. Two days later, he was on his way to the coast with the treaty in his pocket. But to his dismay, he found French officials in Paris reluctant to engage in empire-building in central Africa at that time; they had priorities elsewhere in Africa, in north Africa and on the west coast. Sergeant Malamine was recalled to the Gabon coast. It was only after a lengthy campaign fought by Brazza in Paris that in November 1882 the French parliament agreed to ratify the Makoko treaty.
Stanley, meanwhile, persevered with his own bit of empire-building. By December 1881, he had completed the construction of 200 miles of roadway from Vivi to Malebo Pool, signed treaties with local chiefs along the way and secured a site on the southern shore of Malebo Pool, near a village called Kinshasa, for a trading station named Leopoldville. From Leopoldville, Stanley launched a fleet of steamboats which ventured further upriver, establishing new stations ever deeper into the interior. The furthest outpost was at Wagenia Falls, 1,000 miles upriver from Malebo Pool, which marked the upper limit of navigation on the main stretch of the Congo River and which became known as Stanley Falls. By 1882, Stanley’s staff included forty-three Europeans – clerks, agents, storekeepers and engineers. To help finance the whole enterprise, Leopold instructed Stanley to collect ‘all the ivory which is to be found in the Congo’.
The treaties that Stanley obtained on behalf of Leopold’s AIA were initially focused on gaining trade monopolies. But the possibility of French intervention in the Congo region prompted Leopold to press for treaties that conceded wider powers. As a result of Brazza’s endeavours, the public mood in France had swung decisively in favour of colonial expansion in central Africa, leading the French parliament to vote for funds for a major expedition there. In April 1883, Brazza returned to the coast of Gabon with the remit to extend French sovereignty far and wide across the Congo Basin. His priority was to establish French authority on the coast of Luango, an area north of the Congo estuary ruled by descendants of the Bakongo kings that would give the French direct access and a short route from the sea to Malebo Pool.
Determined to ward off the French, Leopold established a new front organisation, the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC), and ordered agents in the field to obtain new treaties assigning it sovereignty. ‘The treaties must be as brief as possible,’ Leopold demanded, ‘and in a couple of articles must grant us everything.’ To back up the Association’s presence on the ground, he also began to set up a private army, sending Stanley a thousand rifles, a dozen Krupp field guns and four machine guns.
Returning to Europe in June 1884 at the end of his five-year contract, Stanley took with him as many as 400 treaties. ‘We have a comparatively continuous territory from Vivi to Stanley Falls,’ he wrote in his diary. Stanley himself had obtained only a few treaties. The rest had been obtained by agents.
The text of the treaties and the payments made for them varied. At Isangila, Stanley recorded that he had been able to purchase land by providing local chiefs with ‘an ample supply of fine clothes, flunkey coats, and tinsel-braided uniforms, with a rich assortment of marketable wares . . . not omitting a couple of bottles of gin’. A treaty drawn up for the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela in April 1884 stated that in return for ‘one piece of cloth per month’ for each of the chiefs, they promised:
freely of their own accord, for themselves and their heirs and successors for ever . . . [to] give up to the said Association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories . . . and to assist by labour or otherwise, any works, improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories . . . All roads and waterways running through the country, the right of collecting tolls on the same and all game, fishing, mining and forest rights, are to be the absolute property of the said Association.
In August 1884, Stanley was called to Leopold’s seaside summer residence at Ostend for a series of meetings. Presented with a map of Africa and a red pencil, he was asked to draw an outline of the territory now said to belong to the AIC. As the king watched, Stanley obligingly drew an outline that extended far to the north and south of the equator and stretched from the Atlantic coast to Lake Tanganyika. In the centre lay the frail thread of the Congo stations, seventeen in all. They were no more than pinpoints in the forest, a few buildings with thatched roofs and shady verandas, sheltered by palm trees, with the AIC flag – a blue standard with a single gold star – flying from a pole. Around them lay a million square miles of unexplored African territory. This was the land that Leopold was determined to turn into his personal empire.
The claims made in Belgium and France to rights over a vast swathe of the Congo Basin prompted a chain reaction in other European states. France’s ratification of the Makoko Treaty in November 1882 persuaded Britain to support Portugal’s claims to both banks of the Lower Congo as far north as Cabinda. Portugal’s claims were based largely on the exploits of its explorers in the fifteenth century, notably its dealings with the old kingdom of Kongo, and its possession of trading posts on both sides of the Congo estuary. But Portugal was too weak a state to make much of an argument on its own and turned to Britain for support. By backing Portugal’s claims, Britain hoped to deny the French control of the Lower Congo and keep the river open for free navigation. But Britain’s support for Portugal’s claims was in turn opposed by Leopold and by Germany’s chancellor, Bismarck. Leopold saw Britain’s negotiations with Portugal as a conspiracy to keep powers other than Britain and Portugal away from the Congo. Bismarck viewed Anglo-Portuguese negotiations as an attempt by Britain to use Portugal as a puppet to further its own interests. Bismarck was also averse to the idea of giving protectionist France control of the Congo region; he therefore supported Leopold’s claims: little Belgium and its king’s private venture presented no threat to German interests. France, meanwhile, was opposed to any British intervention.
But the burgeoning row over the Congo set off by Leopold’s quest for ‘a slice of this magnifique gâteau africain’ was but one aspect of a growing European clamour for African territory.