Belgium's colonial past and the violence of Leopoldian rule
Belgium was an unlikely candidate to participate in the nineteenth-century race for empire. It had no history of overseas expansion to speak of and no colonies. The country’s only experience with empire-building was as a victim of it at the hands of Spanish, Austrian, French and Dutch rulers in Europe.
Although an industrial and financial powerhouse by the mid-1800s, Belgium profited from intra-European trade and its capitalists seemed uninterested in colonies. Among the most densely populated countries in the world, Belgium provided a source of little emigration. Small, neutral and young (independent only in 1830), Belgium remained devoid of great power pretensions, preoccupied with the rise of socialism, engaged in a debate over the future of secular and religious education and divided between Flemings in the Dutch-speaking north and Walloons in the French-speaking south.Because Flemings and Walloons lacked a desire for empire, the Congo colony emerged from the efforts of Leopold II, an ambitious man and Belgium’s king from 1865 to 1909. In recent decades historians have emphasised how large, impersonal forces shape history, sometimes at the expense of considering traditional historical actors, especially so-called dead white males. Numerous large-scale, anonymous developments did indeed drive European overseas expansion, including industrialism, nationalism, technological change and strategic considerations. Although some of these factored into Belgian imperialism, Leopold II’s role in creating a colony in the Congo was outsized and represents a clear instance of an individual fundamentally affecting history’s course.
Leopold II’s ambitions and actions resulted in an anomaly among Western colonies. Before ascending the throne, Leopold had long dreamt of obtaining an overseas colony from which to profit. After several failed attempts, he turned his attention to central Africa.
By financing voyages of exploration and deviously posing as a disinterested neutral party, by 1885 he persuaded the United States and the European powers to recognise him as sovereign over a massive swathe of central Africa, roughly analogous to the Congo River basin. Baptised the Congo Free State, this new colony was ‘free’ only in the sense that no state ruled it—rather, an individual did. When Belgium’s parliament recognised Leopold as roi-souverain of the CFS, it insisted there was no connection between the colony and Belgium:According to the Belgian Prime Minister, Belgium had nothing to do with the Congo State—they were two separate and independent countries, associated only by the accident that King Leopold happened to be King of the Belgians as well as Sovereign of the Congo State.6
European suzerainty overseas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries included protectorates such as Britain’s Federated Malay States, condominiums like Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, overseas provinces like Portuguese Angola and French Algeria, concessions such as Tsingtao (to Germany) in China and colonies. Leopold’s Congo was distinct in that power was wielded there not by a state but by a person.
Despite U.S. and European acknowledgment of Leopold’s authority, the Belgian king did not actually rule the Congo in 1885, and in fact only several dozen whites lived there. This meant Leopold had to create his own colonial state apparatus and explore, occupy and administer a massive territory, which eventually attained a size equivalent to the whole of the United States east of the Mississippi. Although he was one of the richest men in Europe, the effort exhausted his fortune, leading him to implement a system that maximised the extraction of natural resources at minimal cost. This engendered widespread, atrocious violence against his African subjects. The main resources the CFS exploited were rubber and ivory, but it is important not to forget that humans bore the brunt of Leopoldian colonialism because of the labour they were forced to provide.
Leopold Il’s African rule resulted in too many outrages to enumerate them all here, but describing a few indicates their severity. Take CFS state agent Charles Massard, a Belgian whom Africans called Malu-Malu or ‘quick-quick’. Massard became known for the terror he sowed collecting rubber from 1898 to 1900 while stationed in Mbelo, west of Lake Leopold (today Lac Mai-Ndombe). One slightly ungainly account reported that Massard
would stand at the door of the store and receive the rubber from the poor trembling wretches who after in some cases weeks of privation in the forests had ventured in with what they had been able to collect. A man bringing rather under the proper amount the whiteman flies into a rage and seizing a rifle from one of the guards shoots him dead on the spot.7
Another witness described how Massard ‘would put some of us in lines, one behind the other, and would shoot through all our bodies’.8 Massard’s successor at the station, Belgian Auguste Dooms, ‘almost fainted on attempting to enter the station prison in which were numbers of poor wretches so reduced by starvation and the awful stench from weeks of accumulations of filth that they were not able to stand’.9 Another Belgian CFS agent, Rene de Permentier—stationed in Equateur province from 1894 to 1901—had all the trees and bushes around his residence cut down so that he could shoot at passersby from his veranda, for target practice. When de Permentier found a leaf on an area recently swept by female prisoners, he ordered his soldiers to take twelve of them out of prison and decapitate them. If while travelling de Permentier stumbled while walking along a trail, he blamed it on poor trail maintenance and had a child in the next village killed.10
Killing became commonplace in many regions of Leopold’s colony. CFS officer Konstant Halling, a Norwegian, reported having killed 245 Congolese, and he reproached fellow officers like Dooms for not killing more.11 Belgian Leon Fievez, a commissaire de district, recorded a number of ‘necessary operations’ that took place in November 1894 to reinforce the state’s authority.
During one they killed 959 people and took 200 prisoners, half of those captured aged 4—10 years old. Fievez’s forces suffered three dead and ten wounded. A few days later his men killed another 145 Congolese, followed by another attack in which they killed 59. Fievez recorded, ‘We ravaged 162 villages, burned their houses and cut down their plantations to suppress the populations with hunger.’12 Fievez was not leading troops into battle against a foreign foe or insurgents. These were routine operations he saw as part of his responsibilities as a territorial administrator.Since history teaches us that people are capable of performing unspeakable acts against other people, what is most disturbing about practices in the CFS is not that individuals committed atrocities but that they amounted to a system. Leopold and his collaborators created, implemented, sustained and refined a scheme that extracted raw materials at the lowest cost and that required violence to operate. Not able to actually administer the whole Congo, Leopold leased out massive tracts to private concessionary companies, such as the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR), which gained a huge concession in north-central Congo, in and around the Maringa and Lopori Rivers. The CFS maintained a significant financial stake in ABIR just as it did in many other colonial enterprises. Leopold reserved for himself an immense territory known as the Domaine de la Couronne, where his agents ran their own extractive operations. He backed up the authority of the CFS by establishing the Force Publique, a combined police and military force staffed by white soldiers from countries like Belgium, Sweden and Italy commanding black soldiers from West Africa and parts of the Congo.
CFS and concessionary company agents’ success was measured in the weight of rubber and ivory procured, and they were not merely given free rein to develop tactics to extract as much as possible: they were rewarded for doing so.
Europeans imposed rubber collection quotas on villages, and agents and Force Publique officers and their African soldiers kidnapped people—oftentimes women, children or chiefs—to hold for ransom until quotas were met. Because many fled or could not meet quotas, innumerable people died of exposure or starvation while being held hostage, sometimes in crudely fashioned cages. Many Europeans and their African soldiers whipped people to force them to harvest more rubber, most infamously with the chicotte, a hippopotamus hide whip that inflicted severe damage because of the corkscrew shape of its hardened tip. Some agents imposed gruesome, oftentimes arbitrary penalties for non-compliance or failure to meet quotas: fastening people to trees, posts or platforms to expose them to the elements without food or drink; burning people with gum copal; torching homes, fields, even entire villages. Officers and soldiers of the Force Publique did not defend the CFS against foreign threats; instead they enforced the colonial state’s and concessionary companies’ authority by punishing non-compliant Africans and crushing rebellions. There was in essence no rule of law in the CFS. The growth in colonial exports suggests the sheer scale of the violence. From 1888 to 1900, ivory exports increased from 5,824 to 330,491 kilograms, and rubber climbed from 74,294 to 5,316,534 kilograms.13 Figures on arms are also revealing. As one scholar put it, ‘A single post in 1903 imported 17,600 Albini cartridges [and] 33 Albini rifles.’14 By 1903 dozens of such posts were scattered across Leopold’s colony. Africans and Europeans who perpetrated colonial violence were not inherently more evil than anyone else, but they did form part of a vicious system.Thankfully, a number of people called attention to the violence of Leopold’s rule and helped bring it to an end. One key actor was Englishman E.D. Morel. Working in the Belgian port of Antwerp, Morel first suspected and then confirmed large-scale abuses going on in the Congo, after which he worked tirelessly to drive a humanitarian movement to bring international condemnation down on Leopold.
Reports from Irishman Roger Casement, Americans William Henry Sheppard and George Washington Williams, and other missionaries substantiated Morel’s claims. After Leopold’s own commission of enquiry corroborated Roger Casement’s damning 1904 report detailing atrocities in the Congo, the international debate intensified and spread, eventually spurring indignation in Belgium as well. Several options were mooted, including partitioning the Congo among the European powers, but ultimately Leopold agreed to turn his colony over to his other kingdom, Belgium. Belgium was a neutral country and by 1908, the year of the cession, a certain pro-colonial sentiment had developed in favour of a takeover: the CFS became the Belgian Congo.The turnover transformed Belgium into a colonial power. In theory the monarchy retained significant powers while the kingdom’s representative government held charge. In practice, the colonial administration, missionaries and private capital called the shots. The debate over Leopoldian rule led to a much greater awareness of colonial issues, and Belgian pluck and suffering during the First World War contributed to a post-war surge of nationalism that included a slow but growing attachment to empire and a marked effort to rehabilitate Leopold II.15 Many scholars downplay the influence the colony had on Belgian society and politics and deny that any ‘colonial culture’ developed among Walloons and Flemings. Nonetheless, more recent work suggests that the Congo subtly but profoundly influenced Belgian culture, for example in the way that the Art Nouveau movement incorporated Congolese materials and motifs.16
In the colony itself violence continued, albeit it abated. There was continued wielding of the chicotte, for example.17 Colonial firms used forced labour in the growing mining sector: ‘In the 1910s, it was not uncommon to send the recruits to the mines of Katanga in columns with ropes tied around their necks.’18 Belgians denigrated African culture, created a colour bar, implemented compulsory crop schemes and imposed European norms and the French language. The decline of natural rubber, Belgian reforms and a transition away from lawless concessionary regimes lessened physical violence against the African population. All the same, forced labour grew during times of real or potential crisis, such as when the colonial administration raised labour service to 120 days during the Second World War. African labour remained paramount since the Congo never became a settler colony: at the height of European settlement, on the eve of Congo’s independence in 1960, only 112,000 whites lived there, among them 89,000 Belgians.