King Leopold's Ghost

Link to Wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold's_Ghost

                                              BELGIAN HISTORY REVISITED

                                          KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST

                                                                                    Adam  Hochschild

                        Our Book Club met in February, with the husbands,( as we are used to doing twice a year) to discuss the book that, when published in 1999  changed the approach to our former colony : the Congo.

             We, as Belgian schoolchildren, learned that King Léopold II ( 1835-1909), was “ The Builder King” . He embellished Brussels  . Among other things, he laid out the long and beautiful Avenue de Tervuren, to reach the Museum of Central Africa, inspired by the Petit Palais in Paris. He also commissioned the elegant greenhouses of Laeken …… but, most importantly, he gave a colony to his small kingdom : the Congo.

But nobody spoke about what happened behind the scenes !

                First, a short historical reminder of the facts at that time.

               What, in the first place, prompted THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA in the 2d half of the 19^th century?

Europe confidently entered the industrial age, brimming with a sense of power given it by railroads and  steamships plying the oceans. For Europeans, Africa was the supplier of valuable raw materials to feed the industrial revolution.

Furthermore, Léopold II, king of “ a country too small to hold him”, was family related to the British royal family at the head of a vast empire. He didn’t want to be left behind and he too wanted  his fair share of “ the African cake”.

                 The circumstances were ripe for his seizure of the Congo. This vast territory in the middle of Africa was miraculously still unclaimed by any European power.

                 Colonization  also coincided with the Victorian era and its ideas about race. “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad is laden by Victorian racism.

                  Although Léopold II wanted to establish his image as a philanthropist and humanitarian ( curbing the East-West slave trade), his drive for a colony was shaped only by a desire for money and power. He was a cunning man and the whole world was fooled by his tactics

                   Léopold II commissioned H. M. Stanley ( 1841-1904), British explorer and journalist, to lead  an expedition in search of Livingstone whom he found in 1871. Stanley became” the King’s man” and was instrumental in securing the King’s authority over the Congo, officially acknowledged  at the Berlin Conference in 1885.

The Congo was the King’s personal possession , exploited  for his own personal profit.

Ivory was the colony’s most prized commodity. Then, rubber was discovered.

                   Stanley’s painful poorhouse childhood may have fostered his cruel streak. He who became one of the most lionized Englishmen of his time was a tyrant, using forced labour, leaving behind a trail of  destruction , cruelty and death.

The building of the railway in the Crystal Mountains was a major human disaster.

                    But, several HEROES dared to voice heir outrage at the mass murder taking place in the Congo.

G. W. WILLIAMS, black American. He wrote a document that was a milestone in the literature of human rights and investigative journalism and a systematic indictment of Léopold II’s colonial regime.  He was the first to coin the phrase : “ Crime against Humanity”

W. SHEPPARD, first  black missionary in the Congo. He stumbled on one of the most grizly aspects of Léopold’s rubber system: for those refusing to submit to the system, the severing of hands was deliberate policy.

MOREL, became the greatest investigative journalist of his time. From  what he saw at the wharfs in Antwerp, he deduced that the existence of slavery and forced labour could alone explain such unheard of profits.

Also,R. CASEMENT, John and Alice HARRIS

                           Why did the killing go on for so long ?

                           

                            The system itself was to be blamed ( ordering, executing)

.Hochschild said: “ Everyone was participating, going along with the system. So, men who would have been appalled to see someone using the chicotte on the streets of Brussels or Paris accepted the act in this different setting as normal.

Just as terrorizing people is part of the conquest, so is forcing someone else to administer the sanction”.

Primo Levi wrote of his experience at Auschwitz, “ Monsters exist . But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…. the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

                             Hochschild concluded : “ What happened in the Congo was indeed massmurder on a vast scale but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Léopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa.

                              J. Conrad said it best :” All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz ( one character in Heart of Darness)

 Léopold II also used the profits reaped from his colony to build a number of palaces or luxurious villas to accommodate his mistress ;

                              

                               In 1908, the Congo was officially transferred to Belgium. But, this is another story

                                                                                          Anne Van Calster

                                                                                           February . 2012