Leopold's Holocaust

We’ve all heard about the six million Jews. Fewer are aware of the genocide in Armenia, at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. But what about the ten million indigenous people of the Congo Free State, later known as the Belgian Congo, later Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo? That’s the rough guess of the fruits of King Leopold of Belgium’s stewardship of his African possession, as told by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold’s Ghost.

I like Hochschild’s point that the mythologizing around Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, inspired by his trip to the Congo, as well as further treatment in the movie Apocalypse Now (one of my all-time favorites, that I have seen numerous times), is beside a critical point about the source material: it is factually true. This tragedy really happened. It’s not symbolic of something else. Don’t give me some artsy-fartsy explication de texte.

I say Leopold’s stewardship since he assiduously appropriated the huge profits from his Congo possession for his personal estate, facilitated by his exploitation — virtual embezzlement — of the resources of the Belgian state. The lucrative trade was initially in ivory, later joined by rubber.

It doesn’t seem quite fair to call the Congo part of a “Belgian Empire,” although the country, which did enjoy a degree of democracy, indulged their monarch’s practices over an extended period of time. Protest from liberal and left opposition seemed on a par with today’s Democrats’ lame bleating about SCOTUS. There is also the fact that the state thereafter suppressed information about Leopold’s doings, virtually to the present day.

In a nutshell, the Congo Free State was founded on land effectively stolen by Leopold’s agents, assigned to shell companies under his personal control, and delivered massive profits based on reliance on brutal slave labor and mass murder (terrorism compelling the labor) in a period (1890-1920, roughly) when slavery was supposed to have been abolished. Leopold initially was sly enough to paint his project in humanitarian, philanthropic colors, with continual reference to an imaginary war with an “Arab slave trade.” Arabs did engage in a slave trade in East Africa, while Europe and the U.S. administered internal slavery in their possessions.

As Moses Finley says, there have been diverse forms of “labor for others” under conditions of compulsion. Wage labor is merely benign in relative terms. Chattel slavery is its polar opposite, but there are many intermediate points.

A leading critic of Leopold was one Edmund Morel, a British shipping agent for the line that had the franchise to move people and goods back and forth between Belgium and the Congo. Morel noticed that all the incoming cargo was valuable ivory and rubber, while outgoing was mostly soldiers and armaments. There was no sign of anything that could be used to pay for the labor employed at the other end. Slavery was the inescapable implication. The conscience-stricken Morel eventually turned whistle-blower and full-time international anti-Congo-slavery crusader.

The status of the territory changed when, after Leopold’s death, and thanks to the hue and cry raised by Morel and others, it was transferred to the Belgian state proper. There is some indication of improved conditions afterwards. The fact remained, however, that as long as rubber and ivory extraction were profitable, superior military force would compel Africans to work for a pittance while their masters grew rich.

The most interesting part of the book is the David/Goliath asymmetrical power relationship between Leopold’s regime and Morel. Leopold himself was evidently highly intelligent and crafty in the practices of diplomacy, public relations, and graft, and he had a lot of money to spread around Europe and the U.S., but his adversaries made up for their dearth of financial resources with energy and passion.

The upshot is that for those in despair over the difficulty of speaking truth to power, the Congo saga is an inspiring demonstration of how a handful of private, not especially high-ranking citizens bereft of resources can leverage popular politics to make life difficult for the reigning monarch of a European nation. The criticism was fueled by voluminous evidentiary sources and not confined to simple moral appeals, the latter a common resort of the politically inept further left.

Another interesting angle is that the critics avidly leveraged their criticism with logically contradictory support for British imperialism. The latter was a charnel house in its own right, including in Africa. (In this vein I again recommend the Caroline Elkins book I wrote about.)

By Hochschild, the benevolence of British colonialism was something the latter-day abolitionists evidently believed, rather than being a cynical ploy. They were loyal English subjects. I don’t necessarily recommend moral inconsistency, but at any rate, it helped them raise a huge ruckus in Britain and probably greased the wheels in other European nations, since it avoided offending Belgium’s neighboring governments. Under pressure of the first world war, that national loyalty weakened. Morel himself became a critic of Britain’s participation in the war, for which he did a turn in prison that ruined his health. He died at the age of 51.

The forced labor regimes in neighboring countries, under the auspices of Great Britain, France, and Germany were no less brutal than the Congolese system. A difference was that in Africa, there wasn’t as much rubber to extract. Extraction of other resources came later. European empires, long after the formal abolition of slavery, prospered thanks to forced labor regimes. The U.S. pillage of the Philippines unfolded with its own atrocities.

In a similar, relentlessly pragmatic vein, in a trip to the U.S., Morel met the arch-racist and segregationist Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan, a former Confederate general, who was moved to support Morel’s protest on the grounds that Morgan’s hopes for sending U.S. blacks back to Africa would be precluded by Leopold’s ruination of the Congo. Leopold’s lobbyists in the U.S. had been instrumental in coaxing the Congress to become the first nation to formally recognize the legitimacy of the “Congo Free State.”

At the other extreme of humanity, Morel activated Mark Twain, one of the nation’s foremost, early anti-imperialists, who wrote King Leopold’s Soliloquy, which became internationally famous and the sales proceeds of which Twain donated to the cause. (Twain was not particularly wealthy and was always on the hunt for money-making schemes.) Another celebrity ally was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In one respect, the apogee of Leopold’s exploitation came full circle, in the person of independent Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu looted the country no less than Leopold for thirty years. Leopold’s ghost indeed. Mobutu owed his ascendancy to U.S. government complicity in the assassination of the most popular leader in the nation, Patrice Lumumba. This was with the approval of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

As I’ve said before, among those with political power in the U.S., there are no good guys.

Hochschild argues that the lasting achievement of the anti-slavery activists was the invention of human rights, both as ideology and as organizational method. It seems inadequate these days, but there isn’t much else to hang onto.

I would suggest a renewed attention to imperialism, both its history and prospects, and behind that of course is Capitalism.