As reported by the UK Guardian,
"The hidden holocaust: Was Belgium's King Leopold II a mass murderer on
a par with Hitler or a greedy despot who turned a blind eye to a few
excesses? A new book has ignited a furious row in a country coming to
grips with its colonial legacy," Stephen Bates reports on 12 May 1999
-- As the sun sank slowly over Brussels, its fading rays glinted off
the glass domes and towers of the magnificent Victorian greenhouses in
the grounds of the royal palace at Laeken. Built to celebrate King
Leopold II's acquisition of the Congo a century ago, the greenhouses
stretch for more than half a mile and are among the most visible and
grandiose remaining symbols of a once enormous African empire, 60 times
the size of Belgium. The colony was the largest private estate ever
acquired by a single man - and one he never saw.
It is said that when he showed his nephew the greenhouses, the youth
gasped that they were like a little Versailles. 'Little?' snorted the
king.
Leopold always did think big. But the row over the king's notorious
stewardship of his African territories still has the ability to evoke
raw emotions in a country trying to come to terms with a brutal colonial
past.
The question is: was the spade-bearded old reprobate a mass-murderer,
the first genocidalist of modern times, responsible for the death of
more Africans than the Nazis killed Jews? Was his equatorial empire, the
setting for Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the terrible Kurtz with the
human heads dangling round his garden, the scene of a largely forgotten
holocaust? The old wounds have been re-opened by the publication of a
book called King Leopold's Ghost, by the American author Adam
Hochschild, which has brought howls of rage from Belgium's ageing
colonials and some professional historians even as it has climbed the
country's best-seller lists.
Alice Seeley Harris, Manacled
members of a chain gang at Bauliri. A common punishment for not paying
taxes, Congo Free State, c. 1904. Courtesy Anti-Slavery International /
Autograph ABP
The debate over Belgium's colonial legacy could not be more timely. In
the realm beyond the palace walls where Leopold's great grandson Albert
II is now king, the openly racist extreme rightwing Vlaams Blok, which
blames much of the country's ills on coloured immigrants from Africa, is
bidding to become one of the biggest parties in next month's elections.
And the planes which soar over the greenhouses as they depart Brussels
sometimes carry human cargo - black asylum seekers being unceremoniously
deported, occasionally naked and still bleeding, back to Africa. Last
September, the Belgian immigration service succeeded in suffocating one
of them, a Nigerian woman called Semira Adamu, 20, on board the plane
that was to take her home, by shoving her head under a pillow. The
police videoed themselves chatting and laughing while they pushed her
head down. It took them 20 minutes to kill her.
The history of Leopold's rule over the Congo has long been known. It was
first exposed by American and British writers and campaigners at the
turn of the century - publicity which eventually forced the king to hand
the country which had been his private fiefdom over to Belgium.
But Hochschild's book has hit a raw nerve for a new generation with its
vividly drawn picture of a voracious king anxious to maximise his
earnings from the proceeds of rubber and ivory.
It is clear that many of Leopold's officials in the depots up the Congo
river terrorised the local inhabitants, forcing them to work under the
threat of having their hands and feet - or those of their children - cut
off. Women were raped, men were executed and villages were burned in
pursuit of profit for the king.
But what has stuck in the gut of Belgian historians is Hochschild's
claim that 10 million people may have died in a forgotten holocaust. In
outrage, the now ageing Belgian officials who worked in the Congo in
later years have taken to the internet with a 10-page message claiming
that maybe only half a dozen people had their hands chopped off, and
that even that was done by native troops.
They argue that American and British writers have highlighted the Congo
to distract attention from the contemporary massacre of the North
American Indians and the Boer War.
Under the headline 'a scandalous book', members of the Royal Belgian
Union for Overseas Territories claim: 'There is nothing that could
compare with the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, or the deliberate
massacres of the Indian, Tasmanian and Aboriginal populations. A black
legend has been created by polemicists and British and American
journalists feeding off the imaginations of novelists and the re-writers
of history.' Professor Jean Stengers, a leading historian of the
period, says: 'Terrible things happened, but Hochschild is exaggerating.
It is absurd to say so many millions died. I don't attach so much
significance to his book. In two or three years' time, it will be
forgotten.' Leopold's British biographer, Barbara Emerson, agrees: 'I
think it is a very shoddy piece of work. Leopold did not start genocide.
He was greedy for money and chose not to interest himself when things
got out of control. Part of Belgian society is still very defensive.
People with Congo connections say we were not so awful as that, we
reformed the Congo and had a decent administration there.' Stengers
acknowledges that the population of the Congo shrank dramatically in the
30 years after Leopold took over, though exact figures are hard to
establish since no one knows how many inhabited the vast jungles in the
1880s.
It is true too that some of those reporting scandals had their own
knives to grind. Some were Protestant missionaries who were rivals to
Belgian Catholics in the region.
Yet Leopold certainly emerges as an unattractive figure, described as a
young man by his cousin Queen Victoria as an 'unfit, idle and
unpromising an heir apparent as ever was known' and by Disraeli as
having 'such a nose as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who has been
banned by a malignant fairy.' As king, he did not bother to deny charges
in a London court that he had sex with child prostitutes. When the
bishop of Ostend told him that people were saying he had a mistress, he
is reputed to have replied benignly: 'People tell me the same about you,
your Grace. But of course I choose not to believe them.' His wiliness
in convincing the world that he had only humanitarian motives in
annexing the Congo, in persuading the Belgian government essentially to
pay for his purchase and in buying up journalists, including the great
explorer Henry Morton Stanley, to promote his cause show both cunning
and skill.
Emerson claims Leopold was appalled to hear about the atrocities in his
domain, but dug his heels in when he was attacked in the foreign press.
He did indeed apparently write to his secretary of state: 'These horrors
must end or I will retire from the Congo. I will not be splattered with
blood and mud: it is essential that any abuses cease.' But the man who
(as Queen Victoria said) had the habit of saying 'disagreeable things to
people' was also reputed to have snorted: 'Cut off hands - that's
idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not hands. That's the one
thing I need in the Congo.' Although few now defend him, strange things
happen even today when the Congo record is challenged. Currently
circulating on the internet is an anguished claim by a student in
Brussels called Joseph Mbeka alleging he his thesis marked a failure
when he cited Hochschild's book: 'My director turned his back on me.'
Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who also published a
critical book about the period 15 years ago, says: 'Senior people tried
to get me sacked at the time. Questions were asked in parliament and my
work was subjected to an official inspection.' At a large chateau
outside Brussels in Tervuren is the Musee Royal de l'Afrique, which
Leopold was eventually shamed into setting up to prove his philanthropic
credentials. It contains the largest African ethnographic collection in
the world, rooms full of stuffed animals and artefacts including
shields, spears, deities, drums and masks, a 60ft-long war canoe, even
Stanley's leather suitcase.
There is one small watercolour of a native being flogged, but a visitor
would be hard-pressed to spot any other reference to the dark side of
Leopold's regime. Dust hangs over the place. A curator has said changes
are under consideration 'but absolutely not because of the recent
disreputable book by an American'.
The real legacy of Leopold and of the Belgians who ran the country until
they were bloodily booted out in 1960 has been the chaos in the region
ever since and a rapacity among rulers such as Mobutu Sese Seko which
outstripped even the king's. Leopold made £3m in 10 years between 1896
and 1906, Mobutu filched at least £3bn. When the Belgians left there
were only three Africans in managerial positions in the Congo's
administration and fewer than 30 graduates in the entire country.
Vangroenweghe says: 'Talk of whether Leopold killed 10 million people or
five million is beside the point, it was still too many.' I asked
Belgium's prime minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, about the Congo legacy this
week. 'The colonial past is completely past,' he said. 'There is really
no strong emotional link any more. It does not move the people. It's
part of the past. It's history.' (source: The UK Guardian)
Humanitarian disaster
Mutilation
Congolese children and wives whose fathers failed to meet rubber collection quotas were often punished by having their
hands cut off.
Nsala, of the district of Wala, looking at the severed hand and foot of
his five-year old daughter, Boali, who was killed and allegedly
cannibalized by the members of
Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (A.B.I.R.) militia. Source: E. D Morel, King Leopold's rule in Africa, between pages 144 and 145
Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death.
Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide a hand of their
victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was
believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from
Europe at considerable cost) for hunting.
[13]
As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in
chopped-off hands. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of
the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were
even small wars where villages attacked neighbouring villages to gather
hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill. A
Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state
official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river three hundred
miles north of
Stanley Pool:
All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator...From
all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He
wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to
bring them in baskets...A village which refused to provide rubber would
be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier
Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten
arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble
into the river...Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer
want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.[14]
One junior European officer described a raid to punish a village that
had protested. The European officer in command 'ordered us to cut off
the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades ... and to
hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross.'
[15]
After seeing a Congolese person killed for the first time, a Danish
missionary wrote: 'The soldier said "Don't take this to heart so much.
They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised
us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service."'
[16] In Forbath's words:
The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European
post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The
collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique
soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went
out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of
currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber
quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour
gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
In theory, each right hand proved a killing. In practice, soldiers
sometimes "cheated" by simply cutting off the hand and leaving the
victim to live or die. More than a few survivors later said that they
had lived through a massacre by acting dead, not moving even when their
hands were severed, and waiting till the soldiers left before seeking
help. In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by
bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread
mutilations and dismemberment.
Death toll
A reduction of the population of the Congo is noted by all who have
compared the country at the beginning of Leopold's control with the
beginning of Belgian state rule in 1908, but estimates of the deaths
toll vary considerably. Estimates of contemporary observers suggest that
the population decreased by half during this period and these are
supported by some modern scholars such as
Jan Vansina.
[17] Others dispute this. Scholars at the
Royal Museum for Central Africa argue that a decrease of 15% over the first forty years of colonial rule (up to the census of 1924).
[citation needed]
According to British diplomat
Roger Casement, this depopulation had four main causes: "indiscriminate war", starvation, reduction of births and diseases.
[18] Sleeping sickness
was also a major cause of fatality at the time. Opponents of Leopold's
rule stated, however, that the administration itself was to be
considered responsible for the spreading of the epidemic.
[19]
In the absence of a census providing even an initial idea of the size
of population of the region at the inception of the Congo Free State
(the first was taken in 1924),
[20] it is impossible to quantify population changes in the period. Despite this, Forbath claimed the loss was at least 5 million;
[21] Adam Hochschild, and
Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, 10 million;
[22][23]
However no verifiable records exist. Louis and Stengers state that
population figures at the start of Leopold's control are only "wild
guesses", while calling E.D. Morel's attempt and others at coming to a
figure for population losses as "but figments of the imagination".
[24] To put these population changes in context sourced references state that in 1900,
Africa as a whole had between 90 million
[25] and 133 million people.
[26]
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