Review of 'King Leopold's Ghost' by Adam Hochschild

(2006 [1998], London: Pan Macmillan)

There are a lot of really interesting things about King Leopold's Ghost (no, really, there are. Go read it now and you'll see. I don't mind; I'll wait here until you're done). But I think that maybe the message which I'm getting most strongly from the story is that human outrage is a really surprisingly unpredictable and inconstant thing. I don't know if that's the message which Hochschild intended people to take away from the book, but I think it's one worth discussing here.

Here's a quick summary of the history that unfolds in the book. The people who live in the area around the Congo river mouth were first encountered by Europeans in the 15th century. The Portuguese introduced them to Christianity, at the same time that they started taking huge numbers of them captive so that they could be sold into slavery in the Americas (I may go back to this in another post, because it's an interesting story). However, it was not until the 19th century that Europeans started seriously exploring inland. By engaging in a series of impressively complex political machinations, King Leopold II of Belgium was able to secure control of a very large stretch of land around the Congo river. Leopold gained a reputation for being a humanitarian who was sinking huge amounts of his own personal wealth into 'civilising' the Congo and ensuring that its native inhabitants were protected from the predations of Arab slave traders.

Flash forward to roughly 1897. A man named Edmund Dene Morel is working for a Liverpool shipping company named Elder Dempster. By the standards of Victorian society, Morel isn't particularly educated or well-off, but he's fluently bilingual (his father was French). His job therefore involves helping to supervise the Belgian end of Elder Dempster's operations. This territory is quite important to Elder Dempster, since they've managed to get ahold of a lucrative monopoly on cargo between Belgium and the Congo. Morel makes regular trips to Antwerp and Brussels to keep an eye on things.

Morel starts to notice something weird. Firstly, Elder Dempster's statistics on all the cargo carried between Belgium and the Congo do not match the trade statistics made public by the 'Congo Free State'.

Secondly, the Secretary of State for the Congo seems to get extremely twitchy when someone offhandedly mentions to the Press that cargo going to the Congo includes guns and ammunition.

Thirdly, when you look at the cargo manifests, the Congo Free State is not just receiving occasional shipments of arms- it's receiving virtually nothing else. And in return, it's getting back shipments of rubber and ivory, in amounts worth far more than the profits officially declared by the Congo Free State. But this doesn't make sense- if Belgium was trading with the Congo Free State, then surely they'd have to ship out goods to trade with? Unless the Congo Free State doesn't pay its labourers anything... at which point, the regular shipments of arms start looking a lot more ominous.

So Morel investigated further, and it turned out that King Leopold had a lot more control over the 'Free State' than he was admitting (he was also making a lot more profit from it than he cared to admit to his creditors or the Belgian government). Large numbers of Congolese people were effectively getting worked to death. You could call it a type of slavery, except that in my mental image of 'slavery' the slaves generally at least get fed by the slavemasters*. This stands in contrast to the system of rubber extraction in the Belgian Congo, whereby villages were given quotas of rubber they had to supply before a certain date. To ensure that the quotas were fulfilled, the European officials often took the local women hostage (holding them captive in stockades where food was scarce and the women were frequently raped). Since the rubber quotas were set high enough to require the male population to work more or less constantly, this left hardly anyone free to gather food to sustain the village (especially since the Europeans were frequently also looting all the domestic animals as soon as they arrived). If people tried to resist, they could be beaten with a chicotte (a whip made from hippo hide), or shot en masse until local people got the message. Large numbers of people were also mutilated, especially by having their hands cut off. (p.161-5).

Hochschild notes that it's very difficult to estimate the precise number of deaths resulting from this. But the sources he quotes seem pretty confident that the population of the Congo dropped by about 50% between 1880 and 1920. If the 1924 census is accurate, this would indicate a death toll of approximately ten million people (p.253).

Morel blew the whistle to Elder Dempster, but the company proved unsurprisingly reluctant to publicise the fact that their valuable and respected client was committing mass murder. Morel received offers from various people hoping to pay him to keep his mouth shut. Despite the fact that he had a family to support and could really have used the money, Morel refused the bribes, quit his job and dedicated his life to campaigning on behalf of the Congolese. Morel was not the first or the only person to conclude that something very, very wrong was going on in the Congo (various people, most of them missionaries, had raised questions already), but he was an extremely skilled campaigner who was able to get the issue placed on the public agenda in a way which forced formerly-apathetic politicians to make a decision about whether they wanted to officially endorse Leopold's behaviour or not. The result was a movement that Hochschild calls "the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera" (p.4).

Morel was successful in networking with many people who seemed to have turned up in the Congo and decided quite quickly that the Belgian policies were immoral (even though they were surrounded by people who treated the slavery and death as a matter of course). He was also successful in reaching members of the public who were initially apathetic, and then persuading them to develop a sense of moral outrage over the whole thing. Morel therefore comes across as one of the few historical figures who I'm inclined to admire both in terms of his political ability and in terms of how much we have in common morally-speaking.

Morel ultimately succeeded in turning the Western world against Leopold and his policies. Hochschild could easily have gone off and written the book as a story of the triumph how the Western public's innate sense of injustice triumphed over Leopold's tyrannical greed. But as Hochschild shows, the story's actually a bit more complicated than that. As I say, Morel and many of the other people in the protest movement seem to have concluded fairly quickly that Leopold's policies were unjust and needed to be opposed. This initially seems like a fairly straightforward process, but the picture gets a bit more complicated when we pan out to consider the geopolitical context.

As Hochschild notes, Leopold's policies were by no means unique. Very similar policies were adopted by the colonial rulers of other African countries in areas where the ecosystem was suitable for rubber production. Parts of the French Congo, the German Cameroons and Portuguese Angola all used forced labour for rubber production (in the case of the French Congo, which is best document, there seems to have been a 50% death toll in rubber-producing areas, just as with the Belgian Congo). The major difference seems to have been less that Leopold was unusually tyrannical and more than he controlled more of the rubber territory than anyone else did (p.280).

I don't really want to get into the debate over the definition of 'genocide', but some people would argue that what Leopold did wasn't 'genocide' because it wasn't specifically aimed at wiping out any Congolese ethnic groups (Leopold was pushing to extract the maximum amount of rubber possible from Congolese rubber vines in the window before rubber tree plantations owned by other nations matured and so reduced his market share- so it was in his interests to push for a massively high rate of rubber production in the short tem, even if that meant enormous death tolls. But he wasn't actively aiming to wipe out the Congolese- after all, he needed them as an ongoing source of labour). The outcome was that Leopold wiped out 'only' 50% of Congolese people in rubber-growing areas.

By contrast, when the Herero people of Germany's South West Africa (now Namibia) rebelled against the colonial government in 1904, Germany ordered that "within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot [...] No male prisoners will be taken." This meant that the Herero population within German territory dropped from 80,000 in 1903 to less than 20,000 in 1906. The others had been shot, bayoneted or beaten to death with rifle stocks (to save on bullets), or driven out into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes) (p.282).

There were some protests in Germany, but the international community was silent. This is interesting, given that at this point the anti-Leopold Congo campaign was in full swing. Hoschschild notes: "Morel and other Congo reformers paid so little attention that five years later John Holt, the businessman who was one of Morel's two main financial backers, could ask him, "is it true that the Germans butchered the Hereros- men, women and children? ...I have never heard of this before." Similarly, there was no mass movement to protest American action against Filipinos and Native Americans, or British massacres of Australian Aborigines (p.282).

Morel did attempt to campaign against forced labour in the French Congo, but met with little success. Hochschild argues that this was because Belgium was a minor player in European politics, and so was a safe target- by contrast, Britons were reluctant to criticise France because they could see they would be valuable ally in the shifting conflict of allegiances that would eventually result in WW1 (p.283).

Also, after Leopold II's death, control over the Congo passed to the Belgian government. Reports of specific atrocity incidents (maimings, mass deaths, etc) became much less frequent, but the new taxation system meant that the amount of forced labour being imposed on the Congolese effectively increased, which led to mass famines during WW1 (p.278).

I should clarify that I don't mean this as a personal criticism of Morel- he dedicated decades to the anti-Leopold campaign, and it sounds like during that time he had very little time for anything else (see p.214-6). Also, his public reputation was seriously damaged after he became part of the anti-WW1 movement (although he was not strictly speaking a pacifist: he argued that he would fight if Britain were directly attacked, but could not endorse the conflict in Europe). In 1917 he was arrested and sent to jail for six months, on the basis that he'd violated an obscure law that banned sending antiwar literature to neutral countries. This sentence seems to have pretty much broken his health (p.289-90). Meanwhile, Roger Casement (one of his key allies in the Congo protest movement) became a passionate proponent of Irish republicanism. He went to Germany, attempted to secure German support for an Irish militia, and then was arrested shortly after returning to Ireland via German submarine. He was sent to Pentonville prison and then executed (p.284-7).

So the message here seems to be that mass moral outrage isn't something that 'just happens' in response to an incident- without at least one charismatic and politically-savvy person networking to drum up support for protests, there doesn't seem to be much public reaction. Put like that, it sounds kind of trite and like something which should have been obvious previously, but I don't think I'd ever really considered the issue in exactly this way before.

*To be fair, the stereotypical "chain them up and force them to labour for you directly" type of slavery was also extensively practiced by Europeans in the Congo, e.g. as a source of porters (p.119)