Western colonial violence and the historiography of Belgian imperialism

Egregious violence was part and parcel of European and U.S. overseas imperialism. Many colonising projects, particularly settler societies, dismissed the labour potential of indigenous peoples in favour of dispossessing them of their land.

The consequences could be massive loss of life or population displacement. At the moment when Morel and Casement were calling attention to abuses in Leopold’s colony, a German punitive war to suppress an uprising in German south-western Africa from 1904 to 1907 killed some 75—80 per cent of the Herero and nearly 50 per cent of the Nama people.¹⁹ Wars of ‘pacification’ killed hundreds of thousands, including the reimposition of Spanish and French rule in Morocco and Italian rule in Libya after the First World War, campaigns during which Europeans used poison gas. By 1931 Libya’s population had dropped from 250,000 to 142,000.20 Missionaries divided communities by introducing Christianity, and Europeans denigrated African and Asian cultures and imposed their own norms. There also was violence from omission, such as the lack of Bengal famine relief in 1943 and India’s botched partition in 1947, which together killed millions.

Notwithstanding the litany of Western violence across the globe, many today view the Belgian case as the worst. This despite the fact that other colonial states not only engaged in their own stunning displays of outright aggression, but that they were both more premeditated and apparent at the time they occurred. For Italy’s 1935—1936 attack on Ethiopia,

the full force of a relatively modern industrial society was brought to bear on a still semi-feudal and agricultural one. Half a million Italian men made the trip to the Horn of Africa and vast quantities of up-to-date ordinance, including mustard gas bombs... were shipped through the Suez canal... The Italian military were effectively granted a blank cheque.²¹

The war killed hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians, and Italian colonial rule that followed included massacres.²² France’s suppression of a 1947—1948 nationalist revolt in Madagascar killed as many as 40,000 people, and its attempt to hang onto Algeria from 1954 to 1962 at one point saw half a million French soldiers stationed across the Mediterranean.

French forces killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians, tortured untold numbers and displaced millions.²³

All the same, the history of Belgian colonial rule is today viewed as uniquely awful, although that history was not always seen as such. Turn-of-the-century reports by Sheppard, Williams, Casement and Morel did publicise Leopold II’s abusive regime, even if many Belgians dismissed such accounts as basely motivated. But then the First World War recast Belgium as a victim of German aggression and an upholder of civilisation. Simultaneously Belgium’s ‘new’ colonial administration (much of it inherited from the CFS) began to implement reforms, leading to some positive developments. What is more, up to 1960 the history of Belgian colonialism, largely crafted by Belgian scholars, was, unsurprisingly, rather positive. After the Congo’s abrupt independence in 1960, study of and writing about the Congo declined precipitously in Belgium, and the post-independence enthusiasm that contributed to the establishment of so many African history programmes in the United States and elsewhere found no echo in Belgium. Africa’s past remained outside the mainstream of Belgian academia, and scholars at work in the field, such as Jean-Luc Vellut and the late Jean Stengers, were few. Since the first university was not founded in the Congo until the 1950s, few Congolese made major contributions to the historiography. Thus it fell to people outside Belgium and the Congo to write the most significant histories of Belgian colonialism.

The result was a dual understanding of Belgium’s colonial past. The history was known because of the original reports on atrocities by Morel, Casement and others, but many of those interested in this history, such as former colonials, downplayed criticisms of Leopold and the CFS as overblown or negatively motivated and focussed instead on Belgian accomplishments after 1908. Thus the odd paradox in 1985—1986 when Belgian anthropologist Daniel Vangroenweghe published a thorough recounting of the brutality of the CFS in Red Rubber: Leopold II and His Congo.²⁴ Scholars commended the book but said it was anything but revelatory.

In Belgium it sparked no public discussion since Belgians interested in that chapter of their past focussed on the positive aspects of Belgian colonialism that had, after all, lasted much longer than the era of Leopold’s personal rule.²⁵

The lack of public debate came to an end with the 1998 publication of Adam Hochs- child’s King Leopold's Ghost, a riveting popular history of Leopold’s African rule and the humanitarian movement that hastened its end. Hochschild claimed ten million people had died in the colony in a crime of genocidal dimensions.²⁶ His book quickly appeared in translation and sparked an outpouring of journalistic assessments of and academic research into imperialism in central Africa. Commentators condemned Belgium, its colonial past and the country’s inability to face up to it. Journalist Michela Wrong wrote that ‘no colonial master has more to apologise for, or has proved more reluctant to acknowledge and accept its guilt, than Belgium’.²⁷ Academics have not been immune to such hyperbole. Despite advances in the Congo after 1908, reinvestment of funds raised in the Congo in infrastructure and no perpetual hunger, UCLA anthropologist Robert Edgerton wrote that ‘Once European powers took possession of the Congo, its people were almost perennially hungry, and its mineral wealth enriched only politicians and foreign corporations.’²⁸ Critics remained unimpressed by a special 2005 exhibition on central Africa’s history at Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa. Although the exhibition was overseen by Jean-Luc Vellut, among the world’s most accomplished Africanists, its treatment of the colonial era was derided, with some insinuating that Vellut was an apologist for empire.²⁹ Hochschild declared the display unsatisfactory because it downplayed the atrocities and killings of the Leopoldian era.³⁰

Following Hochschild, much recent criticism tends to see Africa’s colonial history as an interaction between two sides, namely violent and dominant European imperialists on the one hand and theretofore largely peaceable African victims on the other.

Evil Europeans (Leopold II and CFS agents) caused a crisis that European and U.S. heroes (Morel et al.) then solved. Here it is worthwhile returning to the story of the Stairs expedition recounted at the outset of the chapter, which clearly was not a case of dominant Europeans imposing their will on non-violent African victims. On the contrary, it was the Europeans who stood in a position of weakness relative to Msiri, and Bodson and Stairs had to stoop to trickery and assassination to get their way. The cruelties that occurred in the CFS had multiple causes and did not erupt in a time or place of peace. As Robert Harms put it in regards to the massive ABIR concession in the northern part of Leopold’s colony:

Although turmoil and plunder reached an unprecedented scale during the time of Abir, these phenomena were themselves nothing new to the inhabitants of the Maringa-Lopori basin. Small-scale wars and raids throughout the nineteenth century had produced a significant flow of slaves toward markets scattered from Stanley Pool to the middle Ubangi, and by the 1880s the western parts of the basin were regularly being raided for slaves and ivory by well-armed and well- organised war parties under the command of traders from Irebu, along the Zaire River, who sought commercial dominance of the region.³¹

Consider also the Chokwe, at first a comparatively small, obscure group in central Africa that became active in the latter half of the 1800s after the decline of Atlantic slaving and the rise of legitimate trade. As ivory exports grew, so did gun imports, and the Chokwe took advantage, organising armed squads and small armies to control trade. Ranging far and wide in a search for ivory, they brought the Luba-Lunda kingdoms of the central African savanna to an end, and eventually fought against Leopold’s Force Publique for twenty years before being defeated.³²

Thus Europeans neither held a monopoly on violence and power nor were they the only outsiders intervening in central Africa at the time.³³ Tippu Tip was another interloper from east Africa who, like Msiri, created a trading empire in the Congo.

Born in Zanzibar around 1830, Tippu Tip was a Nyamwezi-Arab trader who by the 1860s had established a base much further inland at Kasongo on the Lualaba, a major tributary of the Congo. He built up a trading empire using military force, transforming himself into a sort of traderraider. Through a questionable claim of blood ties to a chieftaincy among the Tetela in the Lomani area, he established himself as a chief, controlling a vast area in the Lomani and Lualaba basins, collecting taxes, building roads, staking out plantations and regulating the hunting of elephants. It was Tippu Tip who helped Henry Morton Stanley cross the African continent in 1877. By 1883 he had extended his authority down the Congo River as far as Stanley Falls. When Leopold II later appointed Tippu Tip governor of the eastern province of the CFS, he was merely recognising the reality on the ground. Tippu Tip, from the east, competed with the CFS encroaching from the west, paralleling other confrontations over resources such as that between the Manyeman and ABIR at the Maringa-Lopori basin. Of the latter, one scholar has noted how ‘the two conquerors were remarkably similar: both depended on foreign capital and international markets and both had developed systems of organised plunder to strip the area of its resources’.³⁴

Africans were not passive victims. As numerous scholars have shown, Africans historically competed with each other just as other peoples did the world over.³⁵ They fought back against intrusions and obligations—whether by Europeans or other Africans—in myriad ways. One conservative assessment reckons the number of peasant uprisings in the Congo during the early colonial period at more than ten per year. A military revolt in 1897, led by a Force Publique sergeant named Kandolo, sought to usurp CFS authority and take control of the eastern half of the Congo, roughly the territory ruled earlier by Tippu Tip.³⁶ The Pende or Kwango revolt of 1931 destabilised the western Belgian Congo, and official figures placed the death toll of the colonial state’s repression at 344.³⁷

Although few people would assert that Europeans were the only violent people in central Africa or that Africans were submissive, many have made the mistake of haphazardly lumping the post-1908 era of Belgian state rule together with the CFS period, sometimes to argue that Belgium has a uniquely brutal colonial past.

Historian David Bell characterised the whole of Belgium’s rule in the Congo as ‘a crime of genocidal dimensions’, writing that after Leopold II’s acquisition of the Congo, ‘Over the next several decades, Belgium exploited its colony’s riches, particularly rubber, with unparalleled ruthlessness, causing the deaths of millions of Africans forced into virtual slave labor’.³⁸ Yet the rubber boom lasted only several years, and most colonial revenue after 1908 came from other sources such as mining. There were important continuities, in some ways disturbing, including the ongoing use of forced labour and the chicotte, but the nature of colonialism in the Congo changed profoundly after the First World War: it was much more Belgian, the economy depended on mining, and administrative reforms and decreasing rubber production dramatically lessened overt violence.³⁹

By confounding Belgian state rule and the CFS period, the mistake is made of reading Belgian imperialism back into the past. Belgians themselves did this after 1908 by rewriting history to make out the CFS period as having been much more ‘Belgian’ than it really was in order to nationalise the colonial past.⁴⁰ We should not make the same error. The story of the Stairs expedition, led by a Briton, illustrates how the CFS was not a strictly Belgian undertaking. Those who supported the CFS or worked for Leopold II in central Africa came from diverse backgrounds, Welsh-American Henry Morton Stanley being perhaps the best known. Sir William Mackinnon and James Hutton, big backers and admirers of Leopold’s African adventure, were British, as was the CFS’s first administrator-general, Sir Francis de Winton. Joseph Conrad is rightly pointed to as a critic of Leopoldian rule, but Heart of Darkness reminds us that Leopold’s colony was an international regime because Conrad was after all a Pole who based the novel on his experiences working there. Georges-Antoine Klein, a possible inspiration behind Conrad’s Kurtz character, was a French agent working for an ivory trading company. Two other possible inspirations behind Kurtz were Arthur Hodister, an English ivory trader active along the Lualaba, and Edmund Barttelot, an Englishman who ‘went mad’ in Africa.⁴¹ The vast majority of doctors in the CFS and 350 of the Force Publique’s officers were Italian, and Italy sent more than 600 men to work on the Matadi-Leopoldville rail line between 1890 and 1898.⁴² It seems that for each Belgian CFS officer like Charles Massard there was a non-Belgian such as Norwegian Konstant Halling. For Belgian Leon Fievez there was Swede Knut Svensson, who killed 572 people during just four months in Bikoro. Svensson’s tactic was to call a village’s people together ostensibly to recruit porters or to sign a peace treaty, whereupon he massacred all who showed up.⁴³ The number of Belgians in the CFS grew from only 46 in 1886 to a mere 1,713 by 1908, while total Europeans numbered 254 and 2,943 in those years, respectively. Not until 1893 did the number of Belgians in the CFS surpass the number of other Europeans.⁴⁴ To point out the CFS’s international nature does not excuse Leopold II nor the Belgians who committed violence any more than pointing out that Poles killed Jews during the Second World War is to excuse Hitler and the Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust.⁴⁵ This only suggests that the picture is more complex than a straightforward ‘Belgian’ imperialism in the Congo.

Another area of complexity often muddled since the appearance of King Leopold's Ghost is the nature of the deaths that occurred from 1885 to 1908. Hochschild’s book affirmed estimates that reckon population decline in the CFS at 50 per cent, or some ten million deaths. Although Hochschild averred that this was not genocide, his use of language in King Leopold’s Ghost and elsewhere has strongly implied that Europeans committed genocide in the Congo. The book refers to ‘a death toll of Holocaust dimensions’, characterises the deaths as a ‘holocaust in central Africa’ and alludes to similarities among the regimes of Leopold, Hitler and Stalin.⁴⁶ The title of the 1998 French translation of the book—Les fantomes du roi Leopold: un holocauste oublie, ‘King Leopold’s Ghosts: A Forgotten Holocaust’— reinforced this impression. Hochschild continues to draw parallels between the deaths in the Congo and the Holocaust.⁴⁷

Put simply, Leopoldian and Belgian rule in the Congo was not genocidal. The CFS killed a dreadfully large number of people, but most of the deaths that occurred from 1885 to 1908 were not caused by direct killing. It is true that CFS agents, the Force Publique and concessionary companies like ABIR committed innumerable atrocities against people, but the biggest killers ‘were lung and intestinal diseases’, followed by smallpox, sleeping sickness and other diseases.⁴⁸ Population displacements caused by Leopold’s agents spread disease, but there occurred no attack on any whole population (or populations) that had as its end goal the eradication of that population. In fact, what first Leopold and later the Belgians needed more than anything else was more people: more villagers to tap rubber vines, more consumers to buy Belgian goods, more labourers to work the Katanga copper mines, additional farmers to harvest crops. In short, ‘Hyperexploitation, not genocide per se, was the cause of the immiseration and collapse of the Congo basin population’ during the period of Leopoldian rule.⁴⁹

One reason the CFS needed more African manpower was the paucity of Europeans in the Congo, which also makes it unlikely genocide occurred. At the peak (or nadir) of the rubber and ivory boom in 1900, there were only 1,958 Europeans in the Congo, so few as to make it improbable Leopold’s reign included a serious effort to eliminate an entire population.⁵⁰ Hochschild has dismissed such reasoning.⁵¹ Nonetheless, the 1,958 whites spread across the Congo at the turn of the century represented, on average, but one white person for every 1,158 square kilometres, the equivalent of just 260 people spread out across Italy or 124 in Bangladesh, the latter of which would represent less than one millionth of Bangladesh’s population density in 2013.⁵²

It is also likely that the shocking figure Hochschild cited—ten million deaths—is too high. One of Hochschild’s sources was Leon de St Moulin, who estimated that ‘the population declined for the whole of Zaire by at least a third, possibly by half.⁵³ Hochschild claimed the high end of decline, which de St Moulin only speculated, and he failed to stress de St Moulin’s explanations for the decline: trypanosomiasis, diseases introduced by Europeans and Arabs including influenza and smallpox, disruption of farming, and a fertility crisis caused in part by venereal disease brought in by Arabs and Europeans. Moreover the earliest year for which de St Moulin provided a population estimate for the Congo (10,300,000) was 1925, nearly a generation after the end of Leopoldian rule. In short, we do not know how many people died prematurely under the CFS and a figure of ten million deaths remains speculative.

Finally, there is the question of history, memory and responsibility. King Leopold's Ghost accused Belgians of forgetting their dark colonial past. As noted earlier, Michela Wrong identified Belgium not only as the worst abuser but also the most reluctant of the West’s former imperial powers to accept its culpability. ‘On the roll-call of Africa’s colonial and post-independence abusers’, Wrong wrote, Belgium ‘undoubtedly holds unenviable pride of place’.⁵⁴ Whether Leopold’s colonial system was worse than, say, Italy’s calculated use of 500,000 troops and mustard gas to crush Ethiopia or France's two drawn-out colonial wars from 1946 to 1962 is debatable. Regardless, Belgians have not been unusually slow to come to terms with their imperial history seeing as how there has been no shortage of blindness to past colonialism across the Western world. Pierre Nora’s far-reaching multivolume Les lieux de memoire (1984—1992) on French sites of memory included but a single essay on overseas empire.⁵⁵ France did not recognise the Algerian conflict as a war until 1999, and although first- and second-hand knowledge of torture in Algeria never disappeared in France, it suddenly re-emerged from oblivion only in 2001.⁵⁶ Germany and Italy have said little about their colonial pasts, in part no doubt because they lost their empires to other Europeans rather than through wars of liberation and because of the looming shadows of the Second World War. Not until 2004 did a German official ask for forgiveness for Germany’s ruthlessness in south-western Africa.⁵⁷ Angelo Del Boca’s prodigious research has exposed Italy's violent colonial past, but Italians' incognisance of it has long made him a lone voice in the wilderness.⁵⁸ In the British case, only in 2012 did we learn more about the torture, murder and abuse the British used to put down Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising and the widespread cover-up that followed.⁵⁹ The attempt to single out the Belgians or anyone as the worst of the European colonisers obscures more than it reveals. As so often is the case, the history is simply more complex.

Notes

1 The author thanks the editors, David LaFevor and Christy Snider for assistance on earlier versions of this essay.

2 A. Delcommune, Vingt annees de vie africaine, Vol. II (Brussels, 1922), p. 274.

3 Jim House and Neil Macmaster, Paris 1961:Algerians, State Terror and Memory (Oxford, 2006).

4 Lyndall Ryan, ‘Settler Massacres on the Australian Colonial Frontier, 1836-1851’, in Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (eds), Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History (New York, 2012), p. 101.

5 Gerhard L. Weinberg and Wilfried Wilms, H-Diplo, review of Jorg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, www.h-net.org/~diplo/books/PDF/TheFire-DualReview.pdf (accessed 20 June 2012), p. 5.

Wm. Roger Louis, ‘The Stokes Affair and the Origins of the Anti-Congo Campaign, 1895-1896', Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1965), p. 580.

Missionary Scrivener, quoted in Roger Anstey, ‘The Congo Rubber Atrocities: A Case Study', African Historical Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1971), p. 68.

Seamas O. Siochain and Michael O'Sullivan, The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement's Congo Report and 1903 Diary (Dublin, 2003), p. 122.

Scrivener, quoted in Anstey, ‘The Congo Rubber Atrocities', p. 68.

Daniel Vangroenweghe, Du sang sur les lianes: Leopold II et son Congo (Brussels, 1986), p. 60. Ibid., p. 231.

Philippe Marechal, ‘La controverse sur Leopold II et le Congo dans la litterature et les medias: reflexions critiques', in Jean-Luc Vellut (ed.), La memoire du Congo: le temps colonial (Tervuren, 2005), pp. 45-46.

Elikia M'Bokolo, ‘Afrique centrale: le temps des massacres', in Marc Ferro (ed.), Le livre noir du colonialisme XVIe-XXIe siecles: de l'extermination a la repentance (Paris, 2003), pp. 439-440.

Robert Harms, ‘The World Abir Made: The Maringa-Lopori Basin, 1885-1903', African Economic History, No. 12 (1983), p. 135.

Matthew G. Stanard, Selling the Congo: A European History of Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism (Lincoln, 2011).

Debora L. Silverman, ‘Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I', West 86th, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2011), pp. 139-181.

Dibwe Dia Mwembu, ‘La peine du fouet au Congo Belge (1885-1960)', Les Cahiers de Tunisie, No. 135-136 (1986), pp. 127-153.

Jean-Luc Vellut, ‘Mining in the Belgian Congo', in David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin (eds), History of Central Africa, Vol. II (London, 1983), p. 130.

Horst Gründer, Geschichte der deutsche Kolonien (4th edn) (Paderborn, 2000), p. 121.

James A. Chandler, ‘Spain and Her Moroccan Protectorate 1898-1927', Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1975), pp. 301-322; Giuseppe Finaldi, Mussolini and Italian Fascism (Harlow, 2008), pp. 79-80.

Finaldi, Mussolini, p. 82.

Giuseppe Finaldi, ‘Method in Their Madness: Understanding the Dynamics of the Italian Massacre of Ethiopian Civilians, February-May 1937', in Dwyer and Ryan (eds), Theatres of Violence, pp. 247-249.

Jean Fremigacci, ‘La verite sur la grande revolte de Madagascar', L'Histoire, No. 318 (March 2007), pp. 36-43.

Daniel Vangroenweghe, Rood Rubber: Leopold II en zjn Kongo (Brussels, 1985), Du sang sur les lianes: Leopold II et son Congo (Brussels, 1986).

Jacques Delpechin, Review of Daniel Vangroenweghe, Du sang sur les lianes: Leopold II et son Congo (Brussels, 1986), African Economic Review, No. 16 (1987), pp. 154-156.

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, 1998). Michela Wrong, ‘Belgium Confronts its Heart of Darkness', The Independent, 23 February 2005, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/belgium-confronts-its-heart-of-darkness-6151923. html# (accessed 20 June 2012).

Robert B. Edgerton, The Troubled Heart of'Africa: A History of the Congo (New York, 2002), pp. xii-xiii. John Peffer, ‘Snap of the Whip/Crossroads of Shame: Flogging, Photography, and the Representation of Atrocity in the Congo Reform Campaign', Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2008), pp. 55-77, esp. p. 67.

Adam Hochschild, ‘In the Heart of Darkness', New York Review of Books, 6 October 2005. Harms, ‘The World Abir Made', p. 125.

A. Isaacman and J. Vansina, ‘African Initiatives and Resistance in Central Africa, 1880-1914', in A. Adu Boahen (ed.), The General History of Africa VII: Africa under Colonial Domination 1880-1935 (Paris, 1985), p. 178.

See Jean-Luc Vellut, ‘Garenganze/Katanga—Bie—Benguela and Beyond: The Cycle of Rubber and Slaves at the turn of the 20th century', Portuguese Studies Review, Vol. 19, No. 1-2 (2011), pp. 133-152. Harms, ‘The World Abir Made', pp. 129-130.

Joseph C. Miller, ‘The Paradoxes of Impoverishment in the Atlantic Zone', in David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin (eds), History of Central Africa, Vol. I (London, 1983), pp. 118-159.

36 Isaacman and Vansina, ‘African Initiatives and Resistance in Central Africa', pp. 185, 189.

37 Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 302.

38 David A. Bell, ‘Leopold's Ghost: Belgium's Delusions of Grandeur', The New Republic, 10 September 2001, p. 16. My emphasis.

39 Matthew G. Stanard, ‘Digging-In: The Great War and the Roots of Belgian Empire', in Andrew Jarboe and Richard S. Fogarty (eds), Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict (London/New York, forthcoming).

40 Matthew G. Stanard, Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism (Nebraska, 2011).

41 Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, p. 144.

42 Jean-Luc Vellut, ‘European Medicine in the Congo Free State (1885-1908)', in P.G. Janssens, M. Kivits and J. Vuylsteke (eds), Health in Central Africa Since 1885: Past, Present and Future (Brussels,

1997), pp. 67-87; Rosario Giordano, ‘Acteurs et temoins: officiers italiens dans l'Etat Independant du Congo', in Vellut (ed.), La memoire du Congo, pp. 228-231.

43 Vangroenweghe, Du sang sur les lianes, pp. 58-59.

44 Ministere de l'Industrie et du Travail, Commissariat general du Gouvernement, Exposition universelle et internationale de Bruxelles 1910: catalogue special officiel de la Section Belge (Brussels, 1910), p. 565; Guy Vanthemsche, Belgium and the Congo, 1885-1980, Alice Cameron and Stephen Windross (trans.) (Cambridge, 2012), p. 279.

45 Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York, 2001).

46 Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, pp. 4, 225, 294-295.

47 Adam Hochschild, ‘Looking Back: A Personal Afterward', Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reader's guide to Kng Leopold's Ghost, September 2005, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/ hochschild_king_leo.shtml (accessed 30 January 2013).

48 Harms, ‘The World Abir Made', p. 135

49 Mark Levene, ‘Empires, Native Peoples, and Genocide', in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, 2010), p. 194.

50 Many of those whites were Force Publique officers commanding African soldiers, but the Force Publique itself numbered only several thousand men.

51 Hochschild, ‘In the Heart of Darkness', p. 41.

52 Vanthemsche, Belgium and the Congo, p. 279.

53 Leon de St Moulin, ‘What is Known of the Demographic History of Zaire Since 1885?' in Bruce Fetter (ed.), Demography from Scanty Evidence: Central Africa in the Colonial Era (Boulder,

1990), p. 303.

54 Wrong, ‘Belgium Confronts its Heart of Darkness'.

55 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de memoire, Vols. I-III (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); Rethinking France: Les lieux de memoire, Vols. I-IV (Chicago, 1999-2010).

56 William B. Cohen, ‘The Sudden Memory of Torture: The Algerian War in French Discourse, 2000-2001', French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2001), pp. 82-94.

57 Susanne Sporrer, ‘Wieczorek-Zeul bat um Vergebung: Hundert Jahre nach Volkermord an Hereros in Namibia', Welt am Sontag, 15 August 2004, www.welt.de/print-wams/article114391/ Wieczorek-Zeul-bat-um-Vergebung.html (accessed 13 September 2013)

58 James Walston, ‘History and Memory of the Italian Concentration Camps', The Historical Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (1997), pp. 169-183.

59 Ian Cobain, Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Britain Destroyed Records of Colonial Crimes', The Guardian, 17 April 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed- records-colonial-crimes (accessed 11 October 2012).

Western colonial violence and the historiography of Belgian imperialism

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