The Long Belgian Legacy of Torture and Despair

The Worst of Colonialism Defined by the Belgian Congo

Michael Streich in 2011 

 

Belgium is a small country, derisively called one of the “chocolate producing” countries of Europe in the 21^st Century. In the 1890’s, however, the Belgian King Leopold II was master over an immense African private fief that he called the Congo Free State. But the Belgian Congo was anything but free; Leopold’s legacy of ruthless greed committed under the guise of benevolence resulted in the deaths of at least eight million indigenous people through slave labor. Upon his death in 1909, over sixteen million Africans were still enslaved. This was his legacy: a colony to continue enriching seven million Belgians.

 

How Leopold Exploited the Congo

 

Leopold’s secret monopoly in Africa focused first on ivory and in the later 1890’s rubber. It was the trade in rubber that made him a fortune well above his investments. It was also the pursuit of profits that resulted in growing slave labor that included frequent massacres of villagers and the mutilation of workers, including women and children. By the early 20^th Century, pictures of severed hands helped to tell the story of Leopold’s Congo Free State. By 1900, eleven millions pounds of rubber were being shipped from the Congo every year.

 

Leopold’s drive for African lands was many faceted. Psychohistorians may point to his upbringing and need for acceptance. Yet in the end, it was his voracious appetite for power and control beyond the confines of tiny Belgium. Professor David Landes writes that, “…colonies paid, whether by nourishing the growth of imperialist economies or by transferring wealth from poor to rich – empire as vampire.” The Congo Free State provided Leopold with unlimited funds.

 

The Role of State Functionaries in Africa

 

Belgian officials made up the bulk of the small white population in the colony. Administrators, military officers, merchants, and Catholic missionaries were often directly and indirectly party to the atrocities committed so that millions of francs flowed into Leopold’s coffers, dummy corporations secretly set up to deflect any criticism of the King-Sovereign. To the rest of the world, however, Leopold was a philanthropist, the don of charity whose only intentions were to eliminate the African “Arab” slave trade.

 

Leopold was one of the most cunning and duplicitous men of power when it came to imperialism and the exploitation of raw materials. Worse than the industrial robber barons, Leopold was also a first-rate “con” who used propaganda, preyed on the weaknesses of others with flattery and gifts, and used the power of the media to portray himself as a benevolent champion working for the betterment of African peoples.

 

Harvesting the Wealth of Central Africa

 

By 1900, the Congo was a source of raw materials needed to fuel the industrial conglomerates of Europe and America. This was the so-called “gospel of enterprise.” Copper, tin, gold, diamonds, and other minerals joined the rubber plantations in enriching the accounts of Belgium’s king. Much of the wealth came at a staggering humanitarian cost: the taking of hostages, floggings to the point of death, rape, and child labor. Only a few consular officials from foreign powers as well as American missionaries called for immediate and drastic reform.

 

Although the Congo became an official state colony upon the death of Leopold, much remained the same. Belgium never established a working local civil service or left an enduring infrastructure at the time independence was granted in 1960. After decades of misrule by J.D. Mobutu, the nation reverted to continual civil war. Today, slave labor continues to exist in the effort to harvest rare earth minerals, often referred to as “conflict” minerals. In early 2010, BBC reported that a special UN envoy, Margot Wallstrom, referred to the Democratic Republic of Congo as the “rape capital of the world.” (April 28, 2010)

 

Imperialism and Exploitation

 

Leopold was not alone in the ill-treatment of Africans. Adam Hochschild, in his book King Leopold’s Ghost, writes that, “What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa.” Historian Thomas Pakenham argues that the abuses “were not haphazard, but systemic.”

 

As with the Germans during the 1930’s and 1940’s, the first response to Belgian atrocities in the Congo was denial and disbelief. Belgians were far too civilized to perpetrate such acts of inhumanity. Yet what happened in much of central Africa under the brutal policies of Leopold II represented the first modern example of mass extermination. Like future exterminations, many eye witnesses were too afraid to speak up. Most came to accept the atrocities as the normal part of colonial rule.

 

Hochschild comments that, “In any system of terror, the functionaries must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation.” These were Rudyard Kipling’s “sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.” This was the ideology that allowed an American private fighting Filipinos to write his family that shooting people was like shooting rabbits back at home. The world, then as today, cared little for the most vulnerable members of humanity. That is always left to what Leopold II referred to as “do-gooders.”

 

Leopold was a life-long womanizer, with an incorrigible lust for young women. His final dalliance involved a sixteen-year old who produced two children before his death. Although history continues to treat Leopold with disdain, Belgium must share the responsibility. Belgium never paid reparations to the people of the Congo. Historian Eric Hobsbawm, who sees the scramble for the Congo as “primarily economic,” argues that, “The atrocities of Congo…so shocked the Age of Empire…just because [it] appeared as regression of civilized men into savagery.”

 

Sources:

 

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Mariner Books, 1999)

David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)

Thomas Packenham, The Scramble For Africa: The White Man’s Conquest

of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (Random House, 1991)

Copyright owned by Michael Streich;reprints require written permission