King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild When Henry Morton Stanley--more or less as a stunt to sell newspapers--went looking for David Livingstone in central Africa, he got a taste for the adventure of the explorer’s march in the tropics. He returned to hike across equatorial Africa from 1874-1877, and came back with information on interior economies and river systems. The King of Belgium, Leopold II, saw his reports as an opportunity to profit, and financed a third African mission for Stanley, where the explorer obtained treaties from many African leaders that purported to transfer their property to Leopold. As long as European merchants were ostensibly free to come and go from this territory, these agreements were regarded as legitimate by other European powers, and by 1885 Leopold claimed sovereignty over a vast landscape in the middle of the continent. The colony, called the Congo, became King Leopold’s personal property (while ironically his power as King at home was being reduced). Also formally proclaimed in 1885, was a law that all “vacant land” there was the King’s. (Land determined as empty by European observers did not actually mean it was not being used by some Congolese.) The goal of the colony was to harvest wealth as quickly as possible. Initially this mainly meant obtaining the ivory from elephant tusks, but this also included looting food from Congolese peasants to feed the colonial state’s soldiers. District officers--white, nearly always single (most of whom took Africans as concubines)--became the men in charge in many parts of the territory. They received a bottle of red wine per diem as well as various prestigious canned foods, and each had several African house-servants. In exchange, they were expected to keep wealth flowing from their district to Belgium. Because the King did not have enough people to exploit all the territory claimed, he offered up concessions to outside buyers. This meant a company would buy up rights to land exploitation, and then have access to about half of the profits of a particular good (such as ivory or copper) that they were able to extract in that zone. The remaining profits went into the Free State’s--and Leopold’s--treasuries. The Free State government also made it illegal for Africans to use money; they had to exchange goods via bartering. Sometimes African goods were confiscated. Others were purchased for low prices at gunpoint. To collect most of the resources, however, Africans were forced to labor in the Congo for European masters. This practice was justified by claiming that Africans would otherwise be lazy; Europeans argued that hard work was good for the Congolese as a people. Most Africans initially worked as porters, people who carried goods long distances, prior to the building (by African labor) of rails and importation of inland steamboats, and in any places where steam-powered-vehicles could not reach. Other Congolese worked for the state as rail-builders, dockworkers, soldiers, collectors, and farmers. A Belgian described the porters he saw in 1896:

[The PDF that follows scanned poorly: in a few places letters are rendered as weird symbols, like ~ for the “m” in more.]

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load, the other leaning on a long walking-stick, dusty and sweaty,insects spreading out across the mountains and valleys their manyflies and their task of Sisyphus, dying along the road or, thejourney over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages.

The death toll was particularly high among porters forced to carryloads long distances. Of the. three hundred porters conscripted in 1891 byDistrict Commissioner Paul Lemarinel for a forced march of more thansix hundred miles to set up a new post, not one returned.

Stanislas Lefranc, a devout Catholic and monarchist, was a Belgian prose-cutor who had come to the Congo to work as a magistrate. Early oneSunday morning in Leopoldville, he heard the sound of many childrenscreaming desperately.

On tracing the howls to their source, Lefranc found "some thirtyurchins, of whom several were seven or eight years old, lined up andwaiting their turn, watching, terrified, their companions being flogged.Most of the urchins, in a paroxysm of grief ... kicked so frightfully thatthe soldiers ordered to hold them by the hands and feet had to lift themoff the ground .... 25 times the whip slashed down on each of thechildren." The evening before, Lefranc learned, several children hadlaughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all theservant boys in town be given fifty lashes. The second installment oftwenty-five lashes was due at six o'clock the next morning. Lefrancmanaged to get these stopped, but was told not to make any more proteststhat interfered with discipline.

Lefranc was seeing in use a central tool of Leopold's Congo, which inthe minds of the territory's people, soon became as closely identified withwhite rule as the steamboat or the rifle. It was the chicotte - a whip ofraw; sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged cork-screw strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim's bare buttocks.Its blows would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokescould mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more - not an uncom-mon punishment - were often fatal.

Lefranc was to see many more chicotte beatings, although his descrip-tions of them, in pamphlets and newspaper articles he published in Bel-gium, provoked little reaction.

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Leopold as a young man.

Henry Morton Stanley,in the "Stanley Cap" hedesigned for exploringin the tropics.

EXPERT OPINION.1AxJ1'OIJ)."SILLY FUSS 'l'HE:Y'RE MAKING AT30UT THESE SO-CALLED ATROCITIES IN MY CO~GO PItOI'ERTY."A:8ocL"ONLY T"1LK, MY DEAR BOY. THEY WON'T DO AN~ING. THEY NEVER TOUCHED MK!"'

Punch, 1905: One of a number of cartoons where Leopold compares noteswith the sultan of Turkey, alsocondemned for his massacres(of Armenians).

The open horror Lefranc expressed succeeded only in earning him areputation as an oddball or troublemaker. He "shows an astonishingignorance of things which he ought to know because of his work. Amediocre agent," the acting governor general wrote in a personnel evalu-ation. In an attempt to quiet his complaints, Lefranc wrote, officials or-dered that executions at his post be carried out in a new location insteadof next to his house.

Except for Lefranc, few Europeans working for the regime left recordsof their shock at the sight of officially sanctioned terror. The white menwho passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains,or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of thechicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniformwould accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi andSoviet concentration camps. "Monsters exist," wrote Primo Levi of hisexperience at Auschwitz. "But they are too few in number to be trulydangerous. More dangerous are ... the functionaries ready to believe andto act without asking questions."

What made it possible for the functionaries in the Congo to soblithely watch the chicotte in action and, as we shall see, to deal out painand death in other ways as well? To begin with, of course, was race. ToEuropeans, Africans were inferior beings: lazy, uncivilized, little betterthan animals. In fact, the most common way they were put to work was,like animals, as beasts of burden. In any system of terror, the functionariesmust first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideasabout race provided such a foundation.

Then, of course, the terror in the Congo was sanctioned by theauthorities. For a white man to rebel meant challenging the system that

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The station chief selects the victims .... Trembling, haggard, theylie face down on the ground ... two of their companions, some-times four, seize them by the feet and hands, and remove theircotton drawers .... Each time that the torturer lifts up the (hi-cotte, a reddish stripe appears on the skin of the pitiful victims,who, however firmly held, gasp in frightful contortions. . . . Atthe first blow-s the unhappy victims let out horrible cries whichsoon become faint groans. . . . In a refinement of evil, someofficers, and I've witnessed this, demand that when the sufferergets up, panting, he must graciously give the military salute.

Pun(h, 1909.

Co~oo S1..<\'~-D~I\'J<lI."I'M ALL IUOHT. TH!."Y'RE srnr, TALKmG:'

Pun(h, 1906.

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provided your livelihood. Everyone around you was participating. Bygoing along with the system,you were paid, promoted, awarded medals.So men who would have been appalled to see someone using a chicotteon the streets of Brussels or Paris or Stockholm accepted the act, in thisdifferent setting, as normal. We can hear the echo of this thinking, inanother context, half a century later: "To tell the truth," said FranzStangl of the mass killings that took place when he was commandantof the Nazi death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, "one did becomeused to it."

In such a regime, one thing that often helps functionaries "becomeused to it" is a slight, symbolic distance - irrelevant to the victim-between an official in charge and the physical act of terror itself. Thatsymbolic distance was frequently cited in self-defense by Nazis put ontrial after World War II. Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, for example, an SSphysician who liked to do his pathology research on human tissue thatwas still fresh,explained:

The patient was put on the dissecting table while he was stillalive.I then approachedthe table and put severalquestions to theman as to such details which pertained to my researches. . . .When I had collected my information the orderly approachedthe patient and killedhim with an injection in the vicinity of theheart.... I myselfnever made any lethal injections.

I myself never made any lethal injections. Although some whites in theCongo enjoyed wielding the chicotte, most put a similar symbolic distancebetween themselves and the dreaded instrument. "At first I ... tookupon myself the responsibility of meting out punishment to those whoseconduct during the previous day seemed to warrant such treatment;'recalled Raoul de Premorel, who worked for a company operating in theKasaiRiver basin. "Soon ... 1found it desirable to assignthe execution ofsentences to others under my direction. The best plan seemed to be tohave each capita [African foreman] administer the punishment for hisown gang."

And so the bulk of chicotte blows were inflicted by Africans on thebodies of other Africans. This, for the conquerors, served a further pur-pose. It created a class of foremen from among the conquered, like thekapos in the Nazi concentration camps and the predurki, or trusties, in the

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Soviet gulag.Just as terrorizing people is part of conquest, so is forcingsomeone else to administer the terror. *

Finally,when terror is the unquestioned order of the day,wielding itefficiently is regarded asa manly virtue, the way soldiers value calmness inbattle. This is the ultimate in "becoming used to it." Here, for instance, astation chief named Georges Bricusse describes in his diary a hanging heordered in 1895 of a man who had stolen a rifle:

The gallowsis set up.The rope is attached,too high.They lift upthe nigger and put the noose around him. The rope twists for afew moments, then crack, the man iswriggling on the ground. Ashot in the back of the neck and the game is up. It didn't makethe least impressionon me this time!!And to think that the firsttime I sawthe chicotte administered,I waspale with fright.Africahas some use after all. I could now walk into fire as if to awedding.

The framework of control that Leopold extended across his enormousrealm was military.After all,without armed force, you cannot make menleave their homes and families and carry sixty-five-pound loads for weeksor months. The king was particularly happy to run his own army inAfrica, since in Belgium he was forever at loggerheads with legislatorswho did not share his passion for building great forts, spending moremoney on the army,and instituting the draft.

Leopold had made use of African mercenaries ever since sendingStanley to stake out his claim from 1879 to 1884. In 1888 he formallyorganized them into the Force Publique, an army for his new state. Overthe next dozen years, it grew to ~ore than nineteen thousand officersand men, the most powerful army in central Africa. By the late I890s,itconsumed more than half the state's budget. At once counterguerrillatroops, an army of occupation, and a corporate labor police force, it was

* If the underlings' allegiance is unreliable, sometimes the conquerors take precautions.When eighteen mutinous black soldiers were executed in Boma in 1900, a photographerrecorded the scene: the condemned rebels are tied to stakes and a firing squad of loyalblack troops has just fired a salvo.But in case the loyalists waver, the entire white malepopulation of Borna is standing in a long row at right angles to both groups, eachsun-helmeted white rnan with a rifle at the ready. .

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divided mainly into small garrisons - typically, several dozen black sol-diers under one or two white officers, on a riverbank. The initial handfulof military posts quickly grew to 183 by 1900, and to 313 by 1908.

The Force Publique had its hands full. Many of the king's new subjectsbelonged to warrior peoples who fought back. More than a dozen differ-ent ethnic groups staged major rebellions against Leopold's rule. The Yakapeople fought the whites for more than ten years before they weresubdued, in 1906. The Chokwe fought for twenty years, inflicting heavycasualties on Leopold's soldiers. The Boa and the Budja mobilized morethan five thousand men to fight a guerrilla war from deep within the rainforest. Just as Americans used the word pacification in Vietnam seventyyears later, so the Force Publique's military expeditions were officiallycalled reconnaissances pacifiques.

The history of central Africa before the European arrival was as filledwith wars and conquests as Europe's own, and even during Leopold's rulenot all the Congo's violence was between colonizer and colonized. Be-cause so many Congo peoples had earlier fought among themselves, theForce Publique was often able to ally itself with one ethnic group todefeat another. But sooner or later the first group found itself subdued aswell. With their forces stretched thin over a huge territory, Leopold'scommanders made clever use of this shifting pattern of alliances. In theend, though, their superior firepower guaranteed victory - and a historywritten by the victors.

Yet sometimes, even through those records, we can glimpse the deter-mination of those who resisted the king. In Katanga in the far south,warriors from the Sanga people were led by a chief named MulumeNiama. Though the state troops were armed with artillery, his forces putup a stiff fight, killing one officer and wounding three soldiers. They thentook refuge in a large chalk cave called Tshamakele. The Force Publiquecommander ordered his men to light fires at the three entrances to thecave to smoke the rebels out, and after a week he sent an emissary tonegotiate Mulume Niamas surrender. The chief and his men refused.Soldiers lit the fires again and blocked the cave for three months. Whenthe troops finally entered it, they found 178 bodies. Fearful ofleaving anysign of a martyrs' grave, the Force Publique soldiers triggered landslides toobliterate all traces of the existence of the Tshamakele cave and of thebodies of Mulume Niama and his men.

Another rebellion took place along the caravan route around thelower Congo rapids. A notorious state agent, a Belgian named Eugene

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Rommel, built a station there to procure porters for the three-week trekfrom Matadi to Stanley Pool, a job for which the state needed fiftythousand men a year by the mid-r 890s. Unlike the Protestant missionar-ies and some private traders, who hired the porters they used on thisroute and negotiated wages with them, the Congo state - at Leopold'sspecific order - used forced labor. Rommel named his station BakaBaka, which means "capture, capture."

A local chief named Nzansu led an uprising, ambushing and killingRommel on December 5, 1893, and burning his station to the ground.The rebels also burned and pillaged two other nearby state .posts,wherethey killed two white officials and wounded several more. However,Nzansu spared Mukimbungu, a Swedish mission on the caravan route. Heeven gave the missionaries some supplies he had found abandoned on thetrail and returned some goods his men had taken from the missionstation. One of the missionaries, Karl Teodor Andersson, wrote to hischurch members back in Sweden:

If our friends of the Mission at home are worried for our safetyhere as a result ofletters and newspaper reports about the unrestin these parts, I wish to reassure them. . . . The leader of therebels, Chief Nzansu of Kasi, has let us know that he does notwish harm to anyone of us as we have alwaysshown that we arefriends of the black people. But to the men of the State he hassworn death. And anyone who knows of the conditions out herecannot feel surprised.

This rebellion particularly alarmed the state because it completelystopped traffic on the crucial caravan route to Stanley Pool. To crush therebels, the authorities sent out a force of fifteen white officers and twohundred black soldiers. Another Swedish missionary, C. N. Borrisson,wrote home a few weeks later, "The rebels have not fled . . . but haveassembled in the leader's village, which they are defending unto deathalthough their other villages have been burned."

Borrisson goes on to speak powerfully for the rebels whose ownvoices we cannot hear:

A man sowswhat he reaps.In reality,the state is the true source ofthese uprisings. It is strange that people who claim to be civilizedthink they can treat their fellow man - even though he is of a

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different color - any which way. . . . Without a doubt one ofthe most disreputable [of the officials] is the late Mr. Rommel.One should not speak. ill of the dead but I must simply men-tion some smaller matters to prove that the unrest has beenjustified .... He imprisoned women when the people refusedto transport [supplies] and to sell him goods below marketprices. . . . He was not ashamed to come by our station andabduct our school girls . . . and treat them in despicable ways.One Sunday morning brother Andersson and I went to a neigh-boring village and helped release three poor women whom hissoldiers had imprisoned because one of them had asked for thereturn of a stone jug which had been taken from her. ...

But what happens to all of the women who are taken pris-oner? Some are set free . . . when their husbands have done allthey can to regain the one who is dearest to them. Others areforced to work in the fields and also to work as prostitutes. . . .Our most respected men here . . . have told us with tears in theireyes and much vexation in their hearts that they had recentlyseen a group of seven hundred women chained together andtransported [to the coast on steamboats]. "And;' they said,"whether they cut off our heads or that of a chicken it is all thesame to them ... :'

So can anyone feel truly surprised that the discontent hasfinally come to the surface? Nzansu, the leader of the uprising,and [Rommel's] assassin, only wanted to become the Engelbrektof the Congo and the GustafWasa of his people. His followers areas loyal to him as Swedes were to their leaders in those times.

The missionary's comparison was to two Swedish patriots of the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries, noblemen who led rebellions of Swedish peas-ants against harsh foreign kings. Wasa was successful and was himselfelected King of Sweden. Nzansu was less fortunate. He and his warriorsfought on against Leopold's Force Publique for eight months, and, despiteseveral scorched-earth expeditions sent against them, continued to fightsporadically for five more years. There seems to be no record ofNzansu s fate.

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All the commissioned officers and some sergeants of the Force Publiquewere white, mostly Belgian, but from other countries as well. Their ownarmies were usually happy to give them leave to gain a few years' combatexperience. All the ordinary soldiers were black. Mercenaries fromZanzibar and the British West African colonies in the army's first fewyears were soon outnumbered by soldiers from the Congo itself, most ofwhom were conscripts. Even those who volunteered often did so be-cause, as one soldier explained to a European visitor, he preferred "to bewith the hunters rather than with the hunted:' III paid, ill fed, and floggedwith the chicotte for the slightest offense, many tried to desert, and in theearly days officers had to spend much of their time capturing them. Then,to guard against desertions, the state began sending new conscripts farfrom their home districts. As a soldier finishing your seven-year term, youmight then face a journey of several hundred to a thousand miles to gethome. Sometimes even then you would not be allowed to go.

The soldiers' frustrations frequently boiled over into mutinies, largeand small. The first big one erupted at the military base at Luluabourgin the south-central savanna country in 1895. The base commander,Mathieu Pelzer, was a notorious bully who used his fists on those underhim and routinely ordered soldiers given 125 lashes with the chicotte.When his African concubine slept with another man, he ordered herkilled. At one point Pelzer ordered a soldier punished, but before the manwielding the chicotte could begin, a sergeant named Kandolo went up tohim and snatched the whip out of his hands. When rebellion againstPelzer broke out shortly afterward, it was led by angry black noncommis-sioned officers with Kandoio at their head.

Soldiers attacked and wounded Pelzer, who fled into the bush and hid.But the rebels tracked him down and killed him. Under Kandolo, dressedin white and riding on a bull, they set off for other Force Publique posts,gathering supporters among the black soldiers and killing several Euro-pean officers. For more than half a year, the rebels controlled most of theKasai region. In the bush, they split into small groups, spreading out overa broad area and successfully evading or fighting off a long series ofheavily armed expeditions sent against them. A year later, worried ForcePublique officers estimated that there were still four hundred to fivehundred rebels at large, recruiting new members and allying themselveswith local chiefs against the state. Altogether, suppressing the revolt costthe Force Publique the lives of several hundred black soldiers and porters

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and fifteen white officers or NCOs. One was an American, LieutenantLindsay Burke, a twenty-six-year-old native of New Orleans, who hadbeen in Africa less than a year. He marched into an ambush and died,along with twenty-seven of his men, in early 1897. The rebel leaderKandolo was fatally wounded in battle, but two corporals who played amajor-role in the revolt, Yamba-Yamba and Kimpuki, fought on as guer-rilla leaders;they were killed, still fighting, in 1908,thirteen years after theuprising began.

At the other end of the country, in the far northeast, a great mutinybroke out in 1897among three thousand soldiers and an equal number ofporters and auxiliaries. The men, who had been forced to march formonths through forests and swamps in a renewed reach by Leopoldtoward the headwaters of the Nile, finally had enough. The fighting wenton for three years, as column after column of loyalist Force Publiquetroops fought the rebels over some six hundred miles of forest and sa-vanna along the chain oflakes on the Congo's eastern border. Beneaththeir own red-and-white flag,rebels from different ethnic groups foughttogether, maintained military discipline,and staged ambushes to replenishtheir supplies of weapons and ammunition. Sympathetic chiefs gave themsupport, including warnings by talking drum of approaching troops.Eventhe Force Publique's official history acknowledges that in battle "therebels displayeda courage worthy of a better cause."

More than two years after the revolt began, the rebels were able tomuster twenty-five hundred soldiers to attack a heavily fortified position.One contingent of loyalist Force Publique mercenaries was reduced fromthree hundred men to three during the campaign. The rebels were stillfighting in 1900,when two thousand of them finallywithdrew acrossthefrontier into German territory, today's Rwanda and Burundi, where theygave up their arms in return for the right to settle.

This prolonged mutiny is the sole case in the history of Leopold'sCongo where we have an eyewitness account of what it was like behindrebel lines. In April 1897,these insurgents captured a French priest, FatherAuguste Achte, who unintentionally walked into their hands, assumingthat the "immense camp" he had come upon must be that of a ForcePublique expedition. Finding himself instead among some two thousandrebels, whose leaders were wearing captured gold-braided officers' uni-forms and pistols,Achte was terrified, certain that he was going to die.Some of the mutineers did rough him up and tell him they had sworn tokill all white people. But the leaders of the group argued them down,

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making a distinction between those whites who worked for the hatedCongo state and those who did not. Mulamba, the chief of this group ofrebels, reported Achte, told the priest that they were sparing his lifebecause "I had no rifle, I taught God's word, I took care of sick natives,and (the decisive argument) I had never hit a black." The rebels hadreached this conclusion after interrogating a dozen young Africans towhom the priest was giving religious instruction.

To Father Achte's surprise, the rebels eventually slaughtered a goat, fedhim, brewed him a cup of coffee, and presented him with a gift of ivoryto compensate for those of his goods they had confiscated, "so you won'twrite in Europe that we stole from you:' After several days, he wasreleased. The rebels told him they had killed their Belgian officers be-cause the officers treated them like animals, they hadn't been paid formonths, and soldiers and chiefs alike were flogged or hung for the slight-est offense.They spoke of one white officer who shot sixty soldiers in asingle day because they refused to work on a Sunday,and of another who"with his own hands poured salt and pepper on the bloody wounds madeby the chicotte and ordered the sick from his post thrown alive into theLualaba River:'

"For three years I built up a hatred against the Belgians in my heart,and choked it back;' Mulamba said to Achte. "When I saw Dhanis[Baron Francis Dhanis, the Force Publique commander in the area] faceto face with my rebelling countrymen, I trembled with happiness: it wasthe moment of deliverance and vengeance." Other rebels told Achte thatthey had chosen Mulamba as their king and two others as his deputies,and that they wanted to set up an independent state free of white rule.This uprising and the other Force Publique rebellions were more thanmutinies of disgruntled soldiers; they were precursors of the anticolonialguerrilla wars that shook central and southern Africa starting in the1960s.

While Leopold grandly issued edicts banning the slavetrade, virtually novisitors except George Washington Williams stated the obvious: not onlythe porters but even the soldiers of the Force Publique were, in effect,slaves.Moreover, under a system personally approved by the king, whitestate agents were paid a bonus according to the number of men theyturned over to the Force Publique. Sometimes agents bought men fromcollaborating chiefs,who delivered their human goods in chains. (In one

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transaction, recorded in a district commissioner's notes, twenty-five francsper person was the price received for a half-dozen teenagers delivered bytwo chiefs from Bongata in r892.) Congo state officials were paid anextra bonus for "reduction in recruiting expenses" - a thinly veiledinvitation to save the state money by kidnapping these men directlyinstead of paying chiefs for them.

Always, however, the slave system was bedecked with euphemisms,used even by officers in the field. "Two boats . . . just arrived withSergeant Lens and 25 volunteers from Engwettra in chains; two mendrowned trying to escape;' wrote one officer, Louis Rousseau, in hismonthly report for October r892. Indeed, some three quarters of such"volunteers" died before they could even be delivered to Force Publiqueposts, a worried senior official wrote the same year. Among the solutionsto the problem of this "wastage" he recommended were faster transportand lightweight steel chains instead of heavy iron ones. Documents fromthis time repeatedly show Congo state officials ordering additional sup-plies of chain. One officer noted the problem of files of conscripts cross-ing narrow log bridges over jungle streams: when "liberes [liberated men]chained by the neck cross a bridge, if one falls off, he pulls the whole fileoff and it disappears."

White officers who bargained with village chiefs to acquire "volun-teer" soldiers and porters were sometimes dealing with the same sourcesthat had supplied the east coast Afro-Arab slave-traders. The most power-ful of these. Zanzibar-based slavers was the handsome, bearded, stronglybuilt Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi, popularly known as Tippu Tip.His nickname was said to have come from the sound of the slave-traders'principal instrument, the musket.

Tippu Tip was a shrewd, resourceful man who made a fortune in ivoryas well as slaves, businesses he was able to expand dramatically, thanks toStanley's discovery of the route of the upper Congo River.* Leopoldknew that Tippu Tip's power and administrative acumen had made him

* Tippu Tip had supplied porters to Stanley, who had known enough not to ask too manyquestions about why they were sometimes in chains. On two of Stanley's expeditions,Tippu Tip and his entourage came along for part of the way. One reason the explorer'sill-fated Emin Pasha rescue operation drew such criticism in Europe was that at one pointStanley imperiously commandeered a missionary steamboat to transport his forces up theCongo River. The aghast men of God saw their boat carry off part of an expedition thatincluded Tippu Tip and his thirty-five wives and concubines.

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almost the de facto ruler of the eastern Congo. In 1887, the king askedhim to serve as governor of the colony's eastern province, with its capitalat Stanley Falls, and Tippu Tip accepted; several relatives occupied postsunder him. At this early stage, with Leopold's military forces spread thin,the bargain offered something to both men. (The king also contracted tobuy the freedom of several thousand ofTippu Tip's slaves,but one condi-tion of their freedom, these "liberated" slaves and many others quicklydiscovered, was a seven-year enlistment term in the Force Publique.)Although Leopold managed for most of his life to be all things to allpeople, the spectacle of this antislavery crusader doing so much businesswith Africa's most prominent slave-dealer helped spur the first murmur-ings against the king in Europe.

Eventually the two men parted ways. Ambitious white state officials inthe eastern Congo, without the approval of their superiors in Brussels,then fought several victorious battles against some of the Afro-Arab war-lords in the region, fighting that after the fact was converted into a noblecampaign against the dastardly "Arab" slave-dealers. Colonial-heroic lit-erature elevated it to a central place in the period's official mythology,echoes of which can be heard in Belgium to this day. However, over theyears Congo military forces spilled far more blood in fighting innumer-able uprisings by Africans, including the rebels from their own ranks.Furthermore, as soon as the rogue campaign against the slavers was over,Leopold put many of them back in place as state officials.

What was it like to be captured and enslaved by the Congo's whiteconquerors? In one rare instance we can hear an African voice describethe experience. It was recorded by an American Swahili-speaking stateagent, Edgar Canisius, who found himself unexpectedly moved by thestory told to him by "a woman of great intelligence, named nanga:' Later,when he met the officer and soldiers who had captured her, he con-cluded that she had indeed spoken the truth. The events she describestook place in the eastern part of the territory, near Nyangwe, the townwhere Stanley had first seen the giant river that turned out to be theCongo. Here, as recorded by Canisius, is nanga's story:

Our village is called Waniendo, after our chiefNiendo .... It is alarge village near a small stream, and surrounded by large fields ofmohago (cassava) and muhindu (maize) and other foods, for we all

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worked hard at our plantations, and always had plenty to eat ....We never had war in our country; and the men had not manyarms except knives. . . .

We were all busy in the fields hoeing our plantations, for itwas the rainy season, and the weeds sprang quickly up, when arunner came to the village saying that a large band of men wascoming, that they all wore red caps and blue cloth, and carriedguns and long knives, and that many white men were with them,the chief of whom was Kibalanga [the African name for a ForcePublique officer named Oscar Michaux, who once received aSword of Honor from Leopold's own hands]. Niendo at oncecalled all the chief men to his house, while the drums werebeaten to summon the people to the village. A long consultationwas held, and finally we were all told to go quietly to the fieldsand bring in ground-nuts, plantains, and cassava for the warriorswho were coming, and goats and fowls for the white men. Thewomen all went with baskets and filled them, and then put themin the road .... Niendo thought that, by giving presents of muchfood, he would induce the strangers to pass on without harmingus. And so it proved ....

When the white men and their warriors had gone, we wentagain to our work, and were hoping that they would not return;but this they did in a very short time. As before, we brought ingreat heaps of food; but this time Kibalanga did not move awaydirectly, but camped near our village, and his soldiers came andstole all our fowls and goats and tore up our cassava; but we didnot mind that as long as they did not harm us. The next morning... soon after the sun rose over the hill, a large band of soldierscame into the village, and we all went into the houses and satdown. We were not long seated when the soldiers came rushingin shouting, and threatening Niendo with their guns. Theyrushed into the houses and dragged the people out. Three or fourcame to our house and caught hold of me, also my husbandOleka and my sister Katinga. We were dragged into the road, andwere tied together with cords about our necks, so that we couldnot escape. We were all crying, for now we knew that we were tobe taken away to be slaves. The soldiers beat us with the ironsticks from their guns, and compelled us to march to the camp ofKibalanga, who ordered the women to be tied up separately, ten

1]2

WHERE THERE AREN"T NO TEN CUMM1\NUiVlr::" 1 J

to each cord, and the men in the same way. When we were allcollected - and there were many from other villages whom wenow saw, and many from Waniendo - the soldiers brought bas-kets of food for us to carry; in some of which was smoked humanflesh ....

We then set off marching very quickly. My sister Katinga hadher baby in her arms, and was not compelled to carry a basket;but my husband Oleka was made to carry a goat. We marcheduntil the afternoon, when we camped near a stream, where we .were glad to drink, for we were much athirst. We had nothing toeat, for the soldiers would give us nothing .... The next day wecontinued the march, and when we camped at noon were givensome maize and plantains, which were gathered near a villagefrom which the people had run away. So it continued each dayuntil the fifth day, when the soldiers took my sister's baby andthrew it in the grass, leaving it to die, and made her carry somecooking pots which they found in the deserted village. On thesixth day we became very weak from lack of food and fromconstant marching and sleeping in the damp grass, and my hus-band, who marched behind us with the goat, could not stand uplonger, and so he sat down beside the path and refused to walkmore. The soldiers beat him, but still he refused to move. Thenone of them struck him on the head with the end of his gun, andhe fell upon the ground. One of the soldiers caught the goat,while two or three others stuck the long knives they put on theends of their guns into my husband. I saw the blood spurt out,and then saw him no more, for we passed over the brow of a hilland he was out of sight. Many of the young men were killed thesame way, and many babies thrown into the grass to die .... Aftermarching ten days we came to the great water ... and were takenin canoes across to the white men's town at Nyangwe.

Even children were not spared the rigors of Leopold's regime. "I believewe must set up three children's colonies;' the king wrote on April 27,1890. "One in the Upper Congo near the equator, specifically military,with clergy for religious instruction and for vocational education. Oneat Leopoldville under clergy with a soldier for military training. One at

133

[Hochschild explains further the role of

missionaries in the more-or-less kidnapping of

Congolesechildrentoraisethemassoldiersfor the Force Publique'")

HethendiscussesWilliamsheppard'ablackAmerican missionary, who arrived in the

Congo in 1890. ShePPard became an

evangelical explorer and ended up being the

firstnon.AfricantoenterthecourtoftheKubaKingdom.

Next comes the story of LeoPold's new

commoditY.Not surprisinglU the Kubl .r,ere h;tpPv s'ittr their existing \\'av oilifb,

:rpd, <Icspite rheir iriendliness to\\'ard Sheppard, shorvecl little interest in

christianiq,. The rnission srurion Sheppard rell alllong thenr trlade G$'

couverts. tsut ShepprlJ had becotrle so rvcll known back honre fbr his

cliscoveries that thc l)resbvteriatls \\rcrc atraid of an adverse public reac-

rion if thev closccl his nussion to the Kuba and strtionecl hinr elselvhcre .

Thc entire Kasai regiotr, like the rest clf rhe Congo. in tittrc sttc-

cun:bed to fht' tightening grip of the Congo statc. Sonre eight years aiter

Sheppard's historic visit. Leopold'.s forces trnallv reached and looted thc

Kuba capital.

ffiffi

The raid on the capital. iike trr,inv t>rher events in the Congo. u'as trigl*

gcred by a ciiscgven tar as';rr'. Ortc dlv a feu' r'ears betbre Willianr Shcp-

parct tirst erlbarkecJ for Afncl,l vc'lerittarv surqeotr rvith a ntajestic rvhite

bcar6 rvas tinkering u'ith his son'.s rricvcle at his lionre irr Beltast.lreland'

Joirr: r)rrnlop *'ts rrf ing ro solvc a problenr th;rt had bedeviled bicvclists

t'or nulr' rL.ars: |o1' clo yoll get I gentlt ride n'ithotrt sprines? l)trnlop

tlnallv deYrsecl r1 p::actical $,;]v oi making a long-sousht sollrtioll. an

inflatable rr-rtrber tire. Irr tligo the Dunlop Companv began nrakirlg tires

- setting off :r bic;-cle craze and snrring a ne\\' industn' just in ttnle. lt

rurned otrt. tbr the cot:ring <lf thc" .iutonlobilc'

Europrgnn5 had knorvn about rubber er-er sincc Christopher Colutrl-

bus noriccil ir irr the V/esr Indies. Irr rhe l;ltc I-oos.:i British scietrtist qavc

rhe substltlce tts Enghsir llalllc rvhctr he troticcd ir could rub out pencil

nurks. Th.. Scot Ch;rrles Macintosh concributed his rtanre to the language

r -i.t li9

TFtI] WI(}C)I)'I'HA'I' WT.IPS

ip r fi:.3 *'hcn he fiqured ollt ;r nrass-procluction nrerhoci for doing sonlc-

thing long pracriced bv tire hlclilrts of thc Atttcricrs: appiving rubber to

clorh rc1 rnake it rvntcrpr<>o{-, Sixteel'} \'e:Irt hter. the Arnerican in|entor

(.h;rrles Goodvear ac-ciclcnrailv spilleci sultirr ittco sottre hot rubber on his

sro\"c. Hc rliscor,cred th:ir thc rcsulrurg lrrlxture did ltot ttlrn rdtt $-hcn

coltl or snrelh, ancl ggoel g'hen hot - lllalor pro[lerrrs tor rhose fn'ing

ro nrake rubber boots or r:titrco.rts betbre thr:n. Ijitr it q'.rs nor untrl rhc

errJr. r tigos. half I t]eclcle after I)uniop fitted the ptteurtLrtic rire onto his

solls rrrcyclc g'hccl. rhlt tl:c n'orl,,|vi.1e rr,rbber boottt Lrcgan' The irrdus-

tri.tl 1'orld rrrpiclh' <lcvelopcd *n .rppctitc Itot jusr tor rttlrbcr tires. but tor

hores, tubinq. gaske*. arrti tlrc likc. and ttrr rutrbcr insulation for thc

relegraprh, celephone. arrd clccrric.il u'irinq ttt>u' rapidlv ctlcotrlpassinq thc

g1lbe. SurJcJenlv iactorics cor"rld not gct enortglt oithe ntaqical cottrntocl-

in; lnti irs price rose rhrclurrirout the r S9os. Nou'hcrc dicl the troonl h;rve

:l piore r-lrastic iurpact on peoplc'.s lives thatt in the equatorial rain forest,

l,hcre r,l,ilcl rubber vines snakecl high into thc trecs. thlt covercd rlcarll'

lralf oiKinu LeoPoldls Congo.

For Leopold, thc rubber boottr w:'ls 1l godsend. Hc hlcl gonc clen{er-

qtrslv irrto clebt l'ith his Congo irlvestr:tenrs. hut hc noru slu' that the

retllrn rvotrlcl be tnorc Ittcrltive thltrt hc hacl ever inragincd' The r't'orld

cli{ 19t lose its clesirc fbr iygrl', but by tftc latc t figos .,r'ild rublrer had tlrsurpasse d it as thc rnain source oi rdvrnlrc. frtlnt thc (longo. His ibrturtc

assttrecl' the king cag;erlv grilled iunctiotrirrics rctrtrttittq frottr the Clortgo

about ruLrtrer h:rrrrests; hc clevourecl :r constanf streilnt <li tclcgrlttrts lttrci

rcports frorri the territorr. rnarking thettt urp irt the ntargirts attd pitssilru

thc.rp op to aides tbr acri()n. His letters trortr this period lrc tlllcd u'irlr

nlnrbers: cortrmclclirr,' pricc's ti'ont n'orlci tttarkets. ititerest riltcs ol) loltts,

qrruntities r>f rtfler to [rr' shipped tt> the Cortqo. t6trs t>f rublrer tg bc

s6ippccl ro Europe, lntl thc cxal(:t dimensions t>i rhc triunrphal arclr irt

Brussels ht g,:rs plannine to buiki rvith his treu.toritrd profits.l{clding the

kilq\ corresponclettce is iike reading the lettt'rs oithe CEO oia corpor:t-

riol tfilt h:rs jrrst clevelopccl a profit.rlrle r]c$'proLlttdt.ul,.l is racing to tlkE

atlr,ant,rge of it betorc conrperitors c;ut set thetr assertrblv lincs goin*.

The conrpedrion Leopol,,l norricd ebout rvls ti'ont cultir-atc'd rubbcr.

g.hich colles rx)t frot'6 a vtne but ii tree. Il,ubtrc'r trcL's. ho$'c'r'er. rcqtllrt-

nruch clrc alci soprc velrs before thev grou' large ettor.rgi: ro Lre t.rpped.

The kirrg \'orit('iouslv denr;in.leci er',.'r qrciltL'r qtt.trtririts ot rvikl rulrber

t'logr thc (lo1g6, trecausc hc kncx' tirrt thc pricc u-otrltl drop- ottcc

nlirrrtations of rubber rr"ees in Lrrrin Anrerica :rnd Asia reachcd tttaturiili