Attitudes towards empire are divided. Traditionally the Roman, Chinese and Ottoman empires have been seen as marking progress in human history. Modern colonial empires have also been seen in the same light, but at the same time they have been condemned so strongly as, in retrospect, to have been denied any moral legitimacy.
This ambivalent assessment was shared by Marx. He saw the British in India as agents of inhuman oppression, guided by sordid interests. Yet equally he believed that such empires were necessary stages in world history. Like the bourgeoisie in industrial Europe, the British were helping humanity to accomplish a destiny which could be accomplished only by the destruction of old types of despotism.
The history of colonial Congo fits this pattern perfectly: it is an extreme example of both colonial failure and colonial success. On the international scene, and in particular in the English-speaking world, the Congo has become a paradigm of all that is most horrific about colonialism, associated with a ‘heart of darkness’, a humanitarian tragedy, an empire of barbarity. But from another perspective, in its own day, it was seen as a harbinger of an awakening Africa that would be shaped by a black industrial class. This represented a promising alternative at a time when South Africa, with its policy of reserving to white labour all skilled positions, was regarded as the only effective model of industrialization in Africa.
These contrasting assessments are historical constructs. They tend to ignore the complex interplay between local factors and wider imperial constraints. A generation after the end of colonial rule, differences between particular colonial policies in the past lose their relevance, while similarities between local situations have become overwhelming, transcending former colonial boundaries.
Beyond the bipolar connection between mother country and colony, the issue of Africa’s future in the late 1880s also assumed an international dimension which tends to be forgotten or ignored. From the beginning, the Belgian Congo was the insecure member of an international community of empires in which Central Africa was widely regarded as a weak link. Much of Belgian policy was directed at staving off the designs of other imperial powers on the Belgian colony. Taking account of all these local and international factors is necessary to understand the history of the Belgian Congo in the imperial system.
This chapter will first focus on the ongoing incorporation of Central Africa into the international order as perceived by contemporaries. In the face of major crises developing in the Sudan and the Great Lakes region, what were the possible outcomes? King Leopold’s solution was only one of several that matured in this period.
It then follows the forceful pace of the Congo project and its derailment, first locally and then internationally. While not the first or the last human disaster in the history of the region, that of the Congo has acquired the status of an epitome of all that deserved to be condemned in imperialism.
Finally this chapter will explore the successive stages of the Belgian Congo project and how a new Congo exploded the old colonial order at a moment when it was reaching its economic climax.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans in Central Africa confronted decentralized societies that were militarily elusive – easy to penetrate but difficult to control. In the end, it was the non-egalitarian nature of the indigenous societies that provided the key to the rapid establishment of colonial empires across vast areas of land.
The challenge was not new. In central West Africa, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards, links had already been set up between the Atlantic trading stations on the coast and some of the societies that lived inland. A long-term trend had been the development of new sorts of population and commercial centres that were new to the history of the region: trading centres, markets and small cosmopolitan communities composed of runaway slaves and refugees.
From the 1860s onwards, the rapid increase in inland trade accelerated the penetration process, which now also encompassed Zanzibar and the east coast. The commercial ‘frontiers’ both east and west deepened and broadened the split between, on the one hand, village societies and the traditional centres and, on the other, the new social classes that had access to imported goods – especially textiles and arms. This social division, accompanied by the violence of armed gangs and militias, conducive to the emergence of powerful new leaders, was reflected locally by a situation that was virtually one of civil war between tribal factions and the new social classes that were underpinned by one of the two coastal cultures – Christian and Portuguese in the west, Muslim and Swahili in the east. Such peripheral conflicts preceded the great European and Zanzibari commercial advance from the Upper Nile to the Uele-Ubangi, and from the Upper Congo to the Zambezi. In the latter case, it was Livingstone’s final journeys that drew attention to the dramatic impact of Zanzibari traders and their local allies in the Tanganyika-Nyasa region. However, the Sudan was the focal point for a major crisis gathering momentum in the 1860s–80s in the wake of the gradual opening of the Upper Nile to commerce with the outside world. The decisive factor had been the attempts by Egypt to introduce a thin network of government stations in the Upper Nile basin, staffed by a cosmopolitan world of European and Turkish-Egyptian officers, commanding troops supplied by Egyptian and local levies. The aim was to impose some regulations on trade. By mid-century, under the influence of Austrian and Italian religious orders, missionary projects were also launched with the idea of reaching Central Africa through the southern Sudan, buttressing ‘Nuba’ populations against the encroachments of Islam. In its most sophisticated version, as conceived by Daniele Comboni, the Christian project aimed at converting ‘pagan’ Africans to Christianity through the agency of Africans themselves, backed by European material and spiritual support.1 In its first stage, this ambitious project was placed under the protection of the Habsburg dynasty, but in the 1880s Cardinal Lavigerie imposed his own ambitions as part of a more general French geopolitical programme for Central Africa. There was a militant message from this great strategist of a Catholic mission that resumed the war against slavery: he too spoke of a crusade, and for that purpose went to Brussels to utter his battle cry.2
The late nineteenth century in general was also an era of religious fervour. Some Protestants – in Britain and Sweden, for example – were talking of Christ’s Second Coming, for which the revivalist movements had the task of preparing people both in Europe and worldwide through their missions. Such messages found ready audiences in Africa.
In addition to these commercial and missionary designs there were other projects for incursions into the Sudan, but this time under Muslim auspices. A Muslim revivalist movement spread there in 1881, under the guidance of a Sufi prophet who proclaimed himself Mahdi (or Messiah) and set out to eradicate corruption and build a new world. This agenda was accompanied by prayers and invocations in mosques that spread from Sudan to Egypt and Turkey, and from Morocco to India.3 In the face of all the different geopolitical projects that entangled Central Africa in the web of European strategies, the Mahdist movement was the only one that responded with a universal vision of its own. Leopold II’s Congolese venture was one of many that would come into conflict with this formidable obstacle. Gordon, the officer in charge of the Egyptian garrison in Khartoum and a charismatic figure of the evangelical movement, had nearly accepted an offer from Leopold to join his service. But he was killed in 1885 and became an icon of Victorian imperialism. Later, the desire to revenge his death led to a major military expedition and ultimately to the incorporation of the Sudan in the British empire.
These episodes gave credence to a simplified view of the stakes in Africa as seen from a European perspective. From that standpoint, it looked at the time as if two ‘systems’ were simultaneously embroiled in a major conflict for the control of Africa: on the one hand, the survival and further extension of slaving economies, contradicting the universal vision of human rights which had developed in the abolitionist movement; on the other, the prospect of rational development induced by legitimate commerce and civilization. At stake, there was the ‘savage world’.
This reading of the situation led to a variety of opposing programmes for the takeover of Central Africa. Missionaries, among them some martyrs, side by side with crusaders and speculators, all consumed with ambition, had one aim in common – they wanted to remodel the world. They formed a new, all-conquering generation that trumpeted its arrival in Europe and Africa, determined to spread its different gospels, preaching in loud voices and sometimes abandoning the old rules of balanced diplomacy in favour of brute force. A whole gallery of portraits springs to mind: from Rhodes, ruthless financier and politician, to Stanley, constructing his image as an avenging angel, using steel and fire to crush the tribal nations that dared to stand in the way of the white man.4
As well as these ambitious designs by missionaries and traders, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims, other imperialists developed initiatives in Central Africa.
It is in this immensely complex context that an unlikely newcomer began launching projects of his own. The name of the Belgian king, Leopold II, appeared first in Africa-minded circles when in 1876 he convened a geography conference in Brussels, dedicated to promoting the advancement of science and the elimination of the slave trade. Behind these noble declarations which assured Leopold a well-disposed audience in enlightened Europe, there lurked a readiness to put his finger into any project, to explore any strategy and to associate with every visionary scheme, always keeping alive his fascination for the Nile Valley, which he regarded as the key site for the opening up of African resources.
It is troubling to observe in Leopold a mixture of pre-1789 ancien régime colonialism, intent on securing benefits for the mother country and its ruling dynasty, coupled with a pioneering view of globalization. Active in the era of Weltpolitik, Leopold had understood that, in the future, the major sources of profit would be found outside Europe. For this rapacious man, the Congo was never anything other than a stepping stone towards something else: towards the Nile; towards major investments in China; towards the organization of a sustained flow of profit destined to make Brussels a world centre. As a ruthless believer in his own material ambitions, Leopold was definitely closer to Rhodes than he was to Livingstone. However, the two great practitioners of collusion between business and politics differed fundamentally in their perspectives. Rhodes had a colonial vision for southern Africa which left an imprint, extending even to the design of his own grandly conceived grave.
Leopold’s legacy lasted longer economically than politically. His mobilization of the resources of state and capital in the service of a geopolitical dream survived only until the independence of the Congo in 1960. Yet his project eventually gave birth to a sense of Congolese identity.
It would, however, be a mistake to study Leopold’s successes and failures as solely engineered by a European Moloch projecting its net onto Africa. The preceding pages have suggested that the complex historical contexts of Africa imposed their own resilience as well as their own social dynamics on the great designs coming from the outside. It is interesting to note that throughout his interventions in Central Africa Leopold was associated with two lasting fault lines in modern African history. The Sudan crisis, with its religious and ethnic overtones, in which Belgium also intervened, came to a head in the 1880s and has been revived in our day. In contemporary Congo too, the crisis has been revived through diverse episodes, culminating in the present-day rule of armed militias organically linked to a corrupt state apparatus. In both cases, weak states are striving to keep huge composite territories as coherent ensembles.
Advancing under the banner of the International African Association which he had founded, Leopold II claimed initially that he was establishing a chain of trading stations lining the routes opened up in the east by Afro-Arab commerce in Zanzibar. But in 1877, while Belgian officers set up a post on the west bank of Lake Tanganyika, Stanley reached Boma, near the mouth of the Congo, at the end of an expedition that cost the lives of all his European companions and two-thirds of his African team. This crossing of the continent elicited one of those sudden changes of mind that were typical of Leopold: rather than opting for the penetration of Africa via an itinerary starting from the east, he now fixed his sights on the centre of Africa, starting from the west. The strategy was to be river- and not land-based. Before he could even return to England, Stanley was approached by emissaries from the king, and he quickly agreed to enter his service. Essentially financed by Leopold and several prominent bankers, Stanley’s mission was to build stations that would link up by means of treaties with independent chiefs and would combine them into a ‘negro confederation of free states’. This project was vaguely inspired by the precedent of African-American settlements in Liberia. It was hoped that it would serve as a partner in establishing an international company to finance the construction of a railway.
The international context led to this vision being abandoned. It was replaced by a string of bilateral agreements negotiated between Leopold and various powers, leading to the ‘International Association of the Congo’ – Leopold’s new cover – being invited to join the declaration known as the Act of Berlin which, in February 1885, concluded the conference summoned by Bismarck. This gave an international seal to Leopold as sovereign of ‘the state founded in Africa by the International Association’ with the reservation that there was no union between Belgium and the new state other than their sharing the same head of state. From now until 1908, the Congo – now called the Congo Free State – was thus not a colony in the same sense as applied to other European colonies.
The king’s venture had become a recognized feature of the international scene, but the price to be paid was a set of conditions imposed throughout the Congo basin: a liberal policy to end slavery, protection of the indigenous population and free access to the internal market.
In the long run, under Leopold’s rule, ruthless as it became, the state would bring huge profits to its sovereign. In the shorter term, however, the Berlin results were welcomed in Europe as a sign that Africa would be integrated into the developing world order. Even London, then the economic capital of the world, sent its lord mayor and his aldermen to ‘thank the founder of the state of Congo for the enlightened and philanthropic endeavours which he had made and which had ended in a triumph more splendid than the finest conquests obtained through the sword’.5
These were the days of triumph for the first colonial generation in the history of modern Congo. Seeing themselves as ‘Stanley’s men’,6 they were the first builders of public or missionary stations, the first surveyors, the first mechanics for a flotilla of small steamboats operating on the river system, the first military, the first European craftsmen. Theirs was a cosmopolitan world, both European and African. In addition to its Belgian agents, who became more and more numerous, the whole of Europe seemed to get involved: the Congo could not be navigated without Scandinavian pilots and engineers; there was no army without Belgian, Italian and Scandinavian units; there were no missions without Belgian, English, American and Swedish evangelists; there was no commerce without Dutch, French, Portuguese or Belgian traders. This cosmopolitanism also extended beyond Europe, for the king became obsessed with obtaining permits for recruitment – in East Africa from Zanzibar to Natal, in West Africa from Senegal to Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and even further afield, in Macao and Barbados.7
These men also represented the first colonial generation to engage with the African world in the interior of the Congo basin. There was a degree of exotic awe for the ‘savage world’, its industries such as the quality of metallurgical work in equatorial Congo, or its human qualities in the harsh context of the great forest. These sentiments were combined with the liberal conviction that this was a world which had to reform – and at the same time a rejection of it. There was the growing realization among reformers that it was a practical impossibility to separate the wheat from the chaff. The great Bobangi River commerce excited admiration but to prevent it from carrying slaves would doom it to extinction. The Yaka kingdom and the chain of Lunda principalities inspired respect but they too thrived on slave raids which were vital parts of their economy. To judge by the space that they occupied in the observations of this generation of Europeans, cannibals were an ever-present preoccupation and another incitation to reform. At the same time, they challenged the assumptions of Europeans surprised to find among them some of the ‘most enlightened and enterprising of the Congo communities’, as Herbert Ward wrote in his Five Years among the Congo Cannibals, published in 1890.
The notoriety still enjoyed by the Stanley generation may be attributed to the author of one of the great novellas of that period. In 1899, Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness, throwing a harsh light on an enterprise that claimed to be inspired by the Enlightenment whereas in fact it was motivated by sheer greed. ‘Enlightened’ civilization, it seemed, led to a nightmare of extermination. The victims were peoples whose origins could be traced back to prehistory and from whom there now emerged an unbearable cry of pain that was considered ‘savage’ but that was also profoundly human.
The evocative power of this account remains unabated, even though Conrad never knew the Congo of ‘red rubber’ and did not predict the course of its future history. Nor does his account contain even the smallest historical reflection on Africa’s pre-colonial past. On the contrary, he presents an image of primitive Africa, outside time. Heart of Darkness transforms the ‘Congolese question’ into a symbol of the deep uncertainty that overcame the colonial world in its first confrontations with Africa. The novella circulated in Europe during a period in which, in many ways, Westerners became increasingly confronted with the ‘primitive’ – the fin de siècle and Belle Époque were a time when ‘Fauve’ artists such as Matisse and Derain introduced African art into Western aesthetics. The masks and statuettes, often originating from Central Africa, accompanied the Congo’s entrance onto the world stage.
In fact, the tidy European fantasy, of ‘Arab slaving’ contrasting with liberal commerce and civilization, or of the ‘savages’ versus the ‘civilized’ world, could not account for a climate of confusion where realities were often blurred. Alliances with African powers were made and unmade in an international situation full of uncertainty. In 1892, the authorities of the Congo Free State brought together all the African allies of the coastal traders, and the decision was taken locally – not in Brussels – to engage in a military confrontation with the traders of Zanzibar and their allies.8 The successful outcome of this ‘Arab campaign’ in the eastern Congo earned the Free State the plaudits of the anti-slavery lobby, and helped to ensure the popularity of the king’s exploits in Belgium itself. The impact of the formal eradication of slavery was distorted by various forms of compulsory labour which succeeded slavery, but it should nevertheless not been dismissed out of hand as mere window-dressing. Indeed, the reconstruction of the Kasai region in the 1890s owed much to the influx of refugees from the ‘Arab zone’ who at first accepted a servile status among the local population but soon benefited from the anti-slavery legislation, reclaimed their liberty and set up emancipated and progressive communities.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, as seen from the outside the Congo was a hive of activity, demonstrating just what an industrial society could achieve in Africa. Progress and modernization were symbolized by the construction of a railway linking Matadi with Léopoldville, skirting the rapids of the river. Stanley had declared that when the railway reached Stanley Pool, the whole of Africa would stretch out ahead, and it would be from this moment on that it could be called civilized. Despite the difficulties caused by its ‘murderous’ location,9 the line was opened at great expense in 1898. The achievement was in fact considerable when set against the extremely slow progress of other rail construction sites in colonial Africa. The white world of the Congo evoked ‘the Africa of yesterday, primitive, barbarous and poor, bowing respectfully to the Africa of tomorrow’.10
Faith in the future imagined by the Westerners manifested itself through a flourishing scientific movement in which the various components of this developing colonial world all took part. In a number of spheres, black and white teams on the spot recorded observations about nature and human society that provided raw material for scientific analysis. It was in this environment, particularly around the religious missions, that the first generations of Congolese intellectuals – bona fide interpreters of their culture – identified the basic forms of social structures and belief systems that advanced Western ethnographic understanding of Africa.
In the meantime, however, there were increasing signs of policies being marred by excess. The beginnings can be traced back to the early 1890s, when massive quantities of ivory and subsequently of rubber provided the Free State with a growing source of wealth, allowing the king to expand his geopolitical vision of the Congo’s role in Central Africa.11 By the late 1890s, a worldwide speculation on the world rubber market provided windfall benefits, changing the outlook for an enterprise that had been on the brink of financial failure. The Congo, or rather the king and some cosmopolitan companies based in Antwerp, garnered huge profits through a system of enforced trading and taxation ruthlessly imposed on villages in the rubber-rich areas. Free of financial constraints, Leopold could then proceed with his vision of uniting the Congo as a political and economic whole, which would extend to a ‘natural frontier’ in the east, following the Great Lakes from Nyasa to Albert, and continuing northwards to the Nile basin. The development of two mining basins would consolidate the political economy of this unified country – Katanga in the south and, in the north, the Hofrat copper mines in Nahas, southwest of Darfur.
The Free State army, the ‘Force Publique’, now increasingly recruited from the indigenous peoples, became the region’s great war machine. It took part in the European campaigns against the Sudanese prophetic movement, but in 1898 it was a corps from the British imperial army, with troops provided by India and the Dominions, that inflicted a decisive, and bloody, defeat on the army of the khalifa, the Mahdi’s successor. Not long afterwards, both France and Leopold II were forced to reach a compromise with the British and relinquish their ambitious plans for the Nile. Nevertheless, the king continued to be fascinated by the Sudan. In 1908, once again he toyed with the idea of linking the Congo by way of the Nile to a future network of trans-Saharan railways. In the meantime, he had also turned his attention to the Chinese railways, in which he invested some of the capital that had come to him from the Congo.
By 1908, it was many years since the generation of ‘Stanley’s men’ had left, losing its illusions as the cost of rapid development was becoming more and more apparent. Among the first warnings of the Congo enterprise going awry were rumours surrounding heavy human losses incurred during the construction of the Matadi-Kinshasa rail line. Some wildly exaggerated figures circulated, and up to this day they form part of the Congo legend, encapsulated in the image of ‘one dead man per rail sleeper’.12 The human cost of rail construction in the area came to the fore once again in the 1920s when independent enquiries denounced the death rate on the construction site of the French Congo-Ocean line from Pointe-Noire to Brazzaville and the brutal recruitment of labour sent to the reconstruction site of the Matadi line on the Belgian side.
The great construction works, with their huge labour requirements, were limited in time. There were, however, recurring hardships linked to the communications infrastructure. In the early 1900s this appeared in a number of testimonies about the exploitation of the navigation system on the river and its affluents. Running steamer services required the construction of jetties, the establishment of woodcutters’ camps to fuel the engines, the establishment of trading stations, the provision of food supplies for passengers and crew, and the clearing of shrub under the wire line running along the river. The first systematic study of these impositions was due in 1903 to Roger Casement, recently appointed British consul in Boma. Casement had served under Stanley in the pioneering phase of the Congo enterprise and the country was not unknown to him. His assignment in Boma had primarily been to follow from a good vantage point the evolution of the conflicts that were pitting English commerce against concessionary societies in the French Congo. Acting beyond his formal instructions, he decided to set out on a mission to investigate rumours reaching the coast about developments in the Upper Congo.13
During a seven-week journey, Casement painstakingly observed and described a colonial hierarchy that worked as a system, with each level putting extreme pressure on the one below in order to evade its own responsibilities to fill quotas, or simply to extract surplus from the weaker. At the top, demarcated by a colour line, were European station chiefs or factory managers, followed by assistants of West African or Zanzibari origin, or more rarely Congolese recruits, left in charge of an outpost. These were supported in turn by local assistants, buttressed sometimes by armed militias recruited among local allies. Casement’s report denounced the arbitrary character of that organization which extracted labour and various other services from surrounding villages.
Casement praised the construction of the rail line and the impeccable naval yard in Kinshasa, which he contrasted with the miserable state of the local hospital. A typical man of his generation, he showed no awareness of the new, modern Congolese and cosmopolitan society that was developing along the communication lines. However, he showed himself at his most penetrating when going beyond the social cost of maintaining that infrastructure and addressing the economic requirements of navigation and rail companies which had to be supplied with cargo.
Collecting cargo on the river was another task entrusted to government bureaucrats. There again compulsion was generalized, leading to low prices and to the exploitation of African producers. Casement noted that a wage-earning labourer on a sternwheeler on the river made as much money in a few days as a local producer of copal (a coloured resin used in making varnishes and lacquers) earned in a year. Compounding the pressure on the victims of the system was the worldwide rush on rubber, feeding a speculative climate in all rubber-producing regions of the world.
Following the publication in England of Casement’s report, Leopold was driven to send an independent commission of enquiry. The Belgian report and above all the depositions of numerous actors and victims by and large vindicated the accusations brought by Casement. They confirmed extensive atrocities, perpetrated with a large degree of impunity due to the absence of an efficient court system. The importance of the depositions made by a large number of African witnesses should be stressed. All the enquiries of the time which documented the rubber system in the Free State as well as in French Congo relied of course on private conversations with Africans as well as Europeans. There were also African plaintiffs summoned at occasional court sessions held in the main European centres. In such cases, a panel of judges formally collected evidence from whole communities and these give us the record of African voices, reaching us unadulterated by European interpreters and announcing the emergence of a ‘native’ civil society.14
The question of mutilations aroused the strongest emotions. They were generally inflicted on dead bodies in the course of the relentless guerrilla wars carried on in the rubber zone, but there were also some cases of living victims who laid their testimonies before the commission. Up until this time, it had been held that the other ‘systems’ mentioned above, those of slave trading and those of the ‘savage world’, had been responsible for mutilations and indeed there is abundant evidence for such practice in the sources of the late nineteenth century, not to mention earlier periods.15 But it was a great shock to discover that the Congo regime had nurtured a system where different layers of brutality, European and African, had combined for the sake of profit.
Once again the question of hierarchy was the key. Crumbs of the profits of an exploitative system were distributed at a local level among African militias, purchasing or requisitioning wives as a form of accumulation. But, of course, incomparably larger profits were siphoned off to the European trading interests competing for the control of the expanding world rubber economy. The capitalist competition for control of raw material drew less attention than the accumulation of resources by the Fondation de la Couronne, a trust set up by King Leopold to fund various causes in Belgium. It was devised by Leopold to secure for himself and his descendants enough capital to sponsor urbanization works, scientific institutions and other activities in Belgium, beyond the reach of any political control. Concluding his observations on twenty-five years of Congo history, Herbert Ward, one of the few survivors of ‘Stanley’s men’ and a subtle specialist on the Congo, referring to the contrast between pre-colonial and colonial times, noted with melancholy that the Central African natives ‘never had a chance. First they persecuted one another, and then they were persecuted by others.’16
The denunciation of the Leopoldian regime inevitably took on political urgency in Belgium as it touched the constitutional foundation of the country. Two solidly documented indictments of the system were published in 1906. One emerged from the perspective of political economy; another came from a Christian reformist viewpoint informed by material from the Catholic missions that had previously kept silent about the labour atrocities.17 The two still rank as classic analyses of a developing colonial economy and they were instrumental in the political decision to annex the Congo to Belgium, to dismantle the Leopoldian monopolies and to submit the colony to parliamentary control. Despite stubborn rearguard opposition by the king, the Congo indeed became a Belgian colony on 15 November 1908. To the end Leopold had remained faithful to his archaic understanding of colonies as sources of profit for their mother countries. In his final message as sovereign of the Free State, he attributed the attacks against the Congo to jealousy. In his view, when the Congo was in the midst of financial difficulties, it did not come under attack. This only occurred when it became prosperous, ‘to the benefit of development in the world of Belgian commerce and industry’. His conclusion was that history would vindicate him.
The attacks mentioned by Leopold had indeed given a new twist to the history of the Free State. A campaign against colonial atrocities in the Congo had developed internationally. The first and better-known protest was organized in England but soon attracted mass support throughout the English-speaking world. Heir to the abolitionist tradition, it also pioneered modern mass-campaign techniques. The moving spirit behind it was E.D. Morel who for a few years had been keenly following developments in Africa. Acting as attorney for English trading firms, Morel had earlier become interested in the concessionary system in the French Congo. The controversy there was above all commercial and political in character but it carried humanitarian undertones as well. In its wake, the Leopoldian Congo campaign changed in scope as it placed the humanitarian element in the forefront. Despite the secular convictions of Morel, his campaign enlisted the support of the congregationalist missionary movement, which was actively engaged in the Free State of the Congo.18 Morel’s Congo Reform Association translated local history into a discourse that made sense on the international scene. It was destined to become a milestone in the history of the liberal reform movement in imperial Britain.19
Another campaign developed in parallel in France. It centred on the humanitarian disaster brought about by the enforced collection of rubber in the two Congos, particularly the French part. Its main agents, such as F. Challaye and P. Mille, made their indictments public in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, a collection of texts published in a militant spirit by Charles Péguy.20 The French denunciations were more characteristic of an intellectual campaign than the mass movement directed by Morel.
Both campaigns represented a further step in the emergence of a world civil society, a movement already initiated in reaction to the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Indies. The Congo reform campaign not only exposed extortions from indigenous people but also the fraud operated at their expense for the sake of dynastic grandeur in Europe. However, the simplification inherent in such a mass campaign carried a price, and aroused suspicions that the Congo was being made to serve as an expiatory victim for all the crimes of the period. Such good conscience was inherited from the abolitionist period and it helped the English-speaking world to control the official discourse on colonial ethics. Several direct witnesses of African conditions were aware of these ambiguities and, by the end of the war, Morel himself had broadened his denunciation of the Leopoldian Congo into a wider condemnation of European misdeeds in Africa, a recognition of which was a precondition for a new international order.21
The ghost of big-power agreements following the ‘scramble for Africa’ had haunted Belgian diplomats throughout the nineteenth century. It should thus come as no surprise that this fear acquired new urgency with the annexation of the Congo. The line was henceforth taken in Brussels that the Belgian Congo should become a ‘model colony’, offering no pretext for foreign criticism. As a corollary, a policy of denial was adopted towards the crimes of the past, a decision that ran counter to abundant evidence published in Belgium at the time. In the English-speaking world in the meantime, the Congo remained exotically associated with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the land of cannibals, of cut-off hands and of enigmatic Kurtzes, straddling the uncertain boundary between civilization and savagery.22
The Congo as a colony of Belgium (rather than as a colony of the Belgian king) was born in a context of uncertainty extending over the international status of the whole Central African region. In 1908 Britain refused to recognize the annexation by Belgium. In 1911 France traded territories in the French Congo for a settlement of the Moroccan question; it conceded to Germany strips of territory that joined the Cameroon to the Congo and Ubangi rivers. In 1913 Anglo-German negotiations laid the ground for the future partition of the Portuguese colony of Angola into British and German ‘spheres of influence’.
It was against this background that Belgian colonial policy concentrated on consolidating the economic and administrative occupation of the Congo. Economically, by the turn of the century Leopold had realized that the cosmopolitan trading interests that had put the Congo and Antwerp on the map of the world rubber economy could not be sustained, and the policies that he initiated formed the basis for the reorganization carried out by the Belgian government.
This was also true on the religious side where Leopold took steps to forge links with the Catholic Church, leading to an agreement between the Congolese Free State and the Vatican guaranteeing preferential treatment for Catholic missions. This helped to give the Congo a Belgian identity based on family, mass elementary schooling and a close-knit network of associations.
The economic record has multiple strands, many to be traced to the last years of Leopold’s rule. Production of gold had already begun in the northeast of the Congo, and it was clear that the country would soon be entering into an age of industrial mining. This led to an alliance between official colonial resources, major Belgian private businesses and international capitalism. A critical point was reached when control of the world’s rubber market became the object of an offensive by the great American companies. From the Free State, the Belgian Congo inherited a guaranteed stake in several huge enterprises whose concessions covered two-thirds of Congo territory. The same pattern was followed when diamond reserves were discovered in Kasai and the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga came into being, eventually becoming a giant of the copper industry. Another company that similarly benefited was the Huileries du Congo Belge, a subsidiary of Lever, dealing in palm oil and expected to provide some goodwill on the British side. The 1920s saw a flood of private and public investment, chiefly in mining and transport. In the long run, however, profits were unequally divided between shareholders and reinvestment in the Congo.
A further drawback of the system was the complete absence of local involvement in decision-making. Authority always flowed from above and exercised insufficient control on the ground. Today, one of the major ills of contemporary Africa can be traced to the general failure of colonial states to develop a solid bureaucratic tradition at the grassroots level.
Lack of control at the local level was less true with regard to the administration of justice, thanks to the presence of a larger than usual number of professional magistrates. However, education suffered from the same handicap. Whereas the English and French colonial systems had reached a point where an (admittedly tiny) fraction of students could go on to university level, the Belgian system put a premium on preparing the young for the labour market through basic literacy, some practical training and respect for the work ethic. Teachers’ pay was minimal, and education took up a mere 3 per cent of public expenditure. Up to the mid-1950s, higher education was available only in a few specialized centres, such as those preparing students as medical assistants, agricultural technicians, schoolteachers and local clergy.
A particular preoccupation of the colonial government in the interwar period was reversing the perceived trend towards depopulation. The reasons for the latter were the subject of wild speculation, ranging from epidemics to malnutrition and the harshness of labour recruitment dating back to the Leopoldian regime. Demographically, the fate of the Congo has unfortunately been in line with the massive losses inflicted on ‘tribal people’ worldwide. Ambitious measures were undertaken to remedy the situation. In 1930, Foréami (Fonds Reine Élisabeth d’Assistance Médicale aux Indigènes) was set up to offer preventative health care and, unusually for such initiatives – which were meant to be funded through local colonial budgets – it received financial support from the home country. Its scientific base was the Institut de Médecine Tropicale in Antwerp. The ultimate goal was no less than ‘health for all’ by the year 2000.
When Belgium was occupied by Germany during the war, Governor-General Pierre Ryckmans in Léopoldville was instrumental in keeping the Congo in the war on the Allied side and negotiating access to export markets and essential supplies from abroad. The Congo was able to maintain deliveries of uranium required by atomic research, manganese, tin and rubber.
Beyond the economic and social horizons, however, there were signs of a new world emerging. In 1945, with the defeat of Germany, Brussels hoped to continue its policy of economic growth directed from the centre. There was the feeling, locally, that the Congolese had suffered economic deprivation for the sake of a foreign war while capitalist enterprises hoarded the profits. There were isolated signs that the Atlantic Charter with its promise of emancipation had met with some echoes among an admittedly small minority of the African population.
In fact, while the end of the Second World War was bringing a new assessment of the whole concept of colonization, the situation of Africa remained problematic: in 1943, Sumner Welles, the American under-secretary of state, still believed that the Congo needed another hundred years before independence.23
It was in this context that the Belgian government launched post-war Congo on a programme of accelerated economic development based on the Western industrial model. At the same time, within the colony itself there were signs of a new, modern Congolese identity taking shape among a progressive rising class.
By 1949, an ambitious ten-year development plan was launched, but results were mixed.24 There is abundant statistical evidence that this was a period of material progress as all industrial and foreign trade indicators went upwards. A successful social programme was that of the Fonds du Bien-Être Indigène, financed by Brussels, which extended medical aid and the provision of drinking water to villages throughout the country. Yet the country still faced the unsolved challenge of a growing gap between capitalist sectors and the village economy. The difference in revenue between indigenous producers and wage-earners that had been exposed by Casement in 1903 remained unaltered fifty years later. This led to deep social discontent and was to prove a seriously destabilizing factor.
Some advances were mostly appreciated by the urban population. Such were progresses in the freedom of expression, as well as greater provisions for tertiary education in the colony – where no local college had previously prepared students for matriculation in the metropole – with the opening of a branch of the University of Louvain in 1954, and the establishment of a university in Elisabethville two years later. The church, too, seemed to provide greater avenues for Congolese participation with the ordination of the first ‘native’ bishop in 1956; by 1957, there were 298 Congolese priests in the colony.
The feeling was however widespread among the Congolese elite that they owed whatever timid steps towards liberalization to the new international climate rather than to Brussels’ own volition. And, indeed, the political horizon remained clogged in the absence of any significant Congolese representation in government. Talk of the Congo as destined to become ‘Belgium’s tenth province’ remained entirely limited to some white colonial circles.
The first signs of an impending change came from Belgium in the mid-1950s, when voices were heard in favour of a ‘thirty-year emancipation plan’, thus for the first time encouraging some to think in terms of an end to a colonial relationship. In the Congo itself, memoranda were drafted by local intellectuals, encouraged by the example of Ghana and by some openings to the wider world during the Brussels 1958 World Fair.25
As Congolese political parties began to emerge in the wake of the 1958 elections for local councils, confidence in the future of the Congo as a Belgian colony began to decline among European investors. From that time there were massive withdrawals of funds, and in the stock markets shares in colonial companies were heading downwards. However, the 1959 riots in Léopoldville came as a brutal awakening and led to an accelerated programme of constitutional reforms paving the way for independence. Much improvisation preceded the proclamation of Independence Day on 30 June 1960. A few days later, there was an uprising by the Force Publique. The European population began a dramatic exodus, and the country was plunged into the chaos of civil war. A new Congo had entered the world.