The Red Rubber

12 Sep 1876

A crusade. On 12 September 1876 King Leopold II of the Belgians opened a conference of geographers in the royal palace at Brussels. Delegates came from Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Russia, Italy and Belgium. He called the opening of Africa to civilisation “a crusade worthy of this century of progress.” His invitation had spoken of abolishing slavery in Africa. The text comes from Henry Wellington Wack, a New York lawyer whose 1905 book defends the Free State.

1884

The King’s expeditions. Wack writes that paying the explorers and equipping the stations drew on Leopold’s private fortune. Henry Morton Stanley worked “in the King’s name” and made treaties with chiefs; Wack counts over five hundred. What those treaties meant to the chiefs who made them is not in these records. Leopold’s own counsel later told the U.S. President that Wack “has given us the truth.”

26 Feb 1885

Berlin. On 22 April 1884 the U.S. government recognised the Association’s flag as that of a friendly government. On 15 November Bismarck’s conference of fourteen states opened in Berlin. Its Act, signed on 26 February 1885, bound the powers in the region “to watch over the preservation of the native tribes.” The Association was not a signer; the powers signed separate conventions recognising it, and it adhered to the Berlin resolutions on 25 February 1885, Wack writes. In 2024 the Belgian Chamber’s experts wrote that the Free State’s practices appear plainly contrary to Article 6.

5 Aug 1889

His own. On 28 April 1885 Belgium’s Chamber authorised Leopold to be chief of the new State, with one vote against, and said the union between Belgium and the State would be “exclusively personal.” He ruled it as its sovereign, not as Belgium’s government. Yet in 1889 Leopold himself wrote that the State was “directed from Brussels” and that “Belgians administer it.” The Belgian experts of 2024 add that Belgium’s support was indirect: seconded officers, loans and shareholdings.

17 Sep 1903

What the State told the powers. In its note of 17 September 1903, answering a British circular of 8 August, the Free State said its rubber exports had been “hardly 30 tons” in 1887 and were now about 5,000 tons a year, sold at Antwerp. It said that “acts of violence have been committed against the natives in the Congo, as everywhere else in Africa,” that guilty officials were punished, and that such cases were “the exception.” These are the State’s own claims. The Belgian experts write that data on how much Leopold personally gained remain imprecise.

1905

Domain and concessions. The State declared “vacant lands” its own on 1 July 1885. The rubber was then gathered by State agents on the State’s domain, including what the Commission calls the Crown Domain exploited by State agents, and by concession companies such as Abir, in which the State often held half the stock. Casement wrote that no one he met denied armed men, in company pay or State service, had been widely used to enforce the demands. The Belgian experts say the State was sometimes the majority shareholder, a tangle of public and private interests. The Commission of Inquiry wrote that the companies had “profits and not civilisation or humanitarian ends” in view.

1905

Forced labour. A decree of 18 November 1903 set forty hours a month and let the Governor General empower company agents to collect it. The State’s Commission wrote that compulsion had been needed to make people gather rubber, that the amount for each gatherer varied, from 9 kilos in Mongalla to 6 in Abir, and that the time gathering rubber took was a “flagrant violation” of the forty hours. Agents had once received premiums on what they collected; the Commission said those were stopped about ten years before.

5 Jun 1903

The consul. Former State employees and Protestant missionaries had spoken out since the 1880s, the experts write. In 1903 the British consul at Boma, Roger Casement, went up the river for two and a half months. The State called his visits “rapid and hasty.” He wrote that around Lake Mantumba the fall in population and the empty villages were due “above all else” to years of effort to compel people to work rubber. He gave sleeping sickness a prominent place, but a lesser one.

Jul 1903

The refugees. In July 1903 Casement questioned people who had fled from the Crown Domain district to the country of their neighbours. In the Blue Book their names are letters. One said: “we were killed and starved.” Another said the soldiers told them “you are nyama (meat)” and killed those whose rubber was short; another said, “We are killed by the work you make us do.” Casement wrote: “Doubtless they exaggerated the numbers, but they were clearly telling what they knew and loathed.”

1903

Soldiers and hands. Around Lake Mantumba Casement saw two people whose hands had been cut off, one a boy of eleven or twelve. In both cases, he wrote, Government soldiers had been with white officers whose names he was given. A post chief told him men still came whose hands had been cut off by Government soldiers. Casement also copied a diary entry of a man he does not name: a corporal sent for rubber had to bring back a hand for every cartridge used. He gave it as one man’s account.

1903

Women held. On the Lulongo, in the district of the La Lulanga Company, Casement found sentries guarding fifteen women, five with infants at the breast. For eleven, the chief sentry said he had caught them so their husbands would bring in rubber. “At nightfall,” Casement wrote, “the fifteen women in the shed were tied together, either neck to neck or ankle to ankle.” La Lulanga was a company; the soldiers of the last scene served the State.

Nov 1904

Twigs and sticks. The chief Lontulu of Bolima came to the Commission’s hearing with 110 twigs, each one a life lost for rubber, in the missionaries’ notes that Doyle prints; Doyle writes that the Commission’s evidence was never published. At Baringa chiefs brought the Commission bunches of sticks, one for each person a sentry had killed; one chief said 120 in his village. The Commission added: “Whatever one may think of the amount of confidence that should be placed in a record of this sort.”

13 Mar 1904

The State’s rejoinder. On 13 March 1904 the Free State answered Casement’s report and asked for “the full Report, including names, dates, and places referred to.” It called the case of Epondo, a boy whose hand was cut off, a plot by villagers who wanted to avoid work; the Commission later said a medical examination convinced it that a wild animal took his hand. Casement had written that the village men declared they saw a La Lulanga sentry do it. The Commission nonetheless confirmed other mutilated people. Leopold’s counsel wrote in 1905 that departures from the State’s principles came from “the infirmities of the human instruments it has employed.”

Apr 1904

An association. The Congo Reform Association was formed in Britain in April 1904, with Earl Beauchamp as president. The Belgian experts write that Casement and Morel, an Elder Dempster shipping employee, co-founded it. Morel says the idea was his and describes the odds he faced. The experts also write that the Free State secretly set up a press bureau that paid journalists at home and abroad to present it well. Morel says critics called him the agent of “a syndicate of rubber merchants”; Doyle says the charge grew from his Liverpool shipping work.

5 Oct 1904

The Commission. On 23 July 1904 the Free State appointed a Commission of Inquiry: Edmond Janssens, Giacomo Nisco and E. de Schumacher. The Belgian experts of 2024 write that Leopold named the members himself and personally commented on the draft report, intending to soften some conclusions, and that it was mainly a chance to refute Casement. Doyle notes that Nisco was a Congo functionary himself. It left Antwerp on 15 September 1904 and sat at Boma, Leopoldville, Coquilhatville and in Abir’s district. The U.S. minister at Brussels judged a pamphlet summary of its report to be “made in a spirit of perfect fairness.” The experts’ verdict on the King: he did not order the abuses and archives show orders to stop them, but his repeated calls for profit kept the brutality going and he bears undeniable responsibility.

30 Oct 1905

What it confirmed. The Commission, which the King had named, reported on 30 October 1905 that punitive expeditions ordered to “punish or chastise” a village were often murderous; that in company raids “men have been killed as well as women and children, often even when they were fleeing”; that at Abir posts the lash and the imprisonment of women as hostages were habitual and never denied; and that the sentry system should be suppressed. Holding women hostage, it wrote, “outrages our notion of justice.” It said it could not say how many abuses sentries committed. But the essential charges “seem to be established,” and no agent tried to refute them.

7 Mar 2024

What it left out. The Commission confirmed that living people were mutilated by soldiers or sentries who took them for dead, among them Imponge, a boy of about fifteen, and Boali. But it found that mutilation “never had the character of torture inflicted voluntarily and knowingly” and wrote that cutting the dead was an old custom. Of the people it heard it wrote that “the black of the Congo has not the same notion of truth that we have,” adding that it did not mean he was a liar. The 2024 experts say the report adopts a racist view, presents the mutilations as customary and passes over 258 Congolese testimonies of prison, severed hands and massacres. It chose, they write, to bury those voices for decades.

15 Nov 1908

Belgium’s. On 23 January 1908 the U.S. and British ministers told Belgium’s foreign minister that their governments reserved their position on annexation, the U.S. on the humanitarian terms of the Berlin Act and the Brussels Act of 1890. In August 1908 Belgium’s Chamber adopted the treaty and a colonial law giving the colony “a legal status distinct from that of the mother country.” The law was published on 20 October. Belgium assumed sovereignty on 15 November 1908. The law changed; the experts write that most staff and practices stayed, forced labour was banned but not ended, and the Force publique and the chicotte whip remained.

1909

In print. Mark Twain’s “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (Boston, 1905) is a satire in the King’s voice. Its title page quotes a Belgian professor, Félicien Cattier, calling Leopold “the absolute Master” of the State. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Crime of the Congo” came in 1909, after Belgium took over. Doyle listed what the State’s defenders said, among them that the agitation was “a plot of the Liverpool merchants,” and answered each. He prints, undated, a sentence he gives to the King: the horrors “give way little by little before our intervention.”

7 Mar 2024

How many. No one has an exact count. The highest figure is ten million deaths, which the Belgian experts trace to Adam Hochschild (1998); another reading, from authors the experts do not name, is no net fall given migration. The experts find it impossible to deny that deaths rose, from violence, fewer births and disease among people driven from their land.

7 Mar 2024

Sanderson’s estimate. The demographer Jean-Paul Sanderson works back from 10 million people in 1935, using surveys and administrative counts. He calls 20 million in 1885 highly improbable, 15 million far likelier, 11.5 million conceivable. By subtraction that is a fall of 1.5 to 5 million people over fifty years, 27 of them under Belgium: a fall, not a death toll. The 1905 Commission wrote of “the absence of a census” and said that, if Stanley is accepted, “a large part of the population has disappeared.” The experts say the lack of exact figures casts no doubt on the decline nor on the massive scale of the violence. On genocide they find intent cannot be shown, since the rulers needed labour, and warn that the word must not hide the regime’s inherently violent nature.

30 Jun 2020

Regrets. On 30 June 2020 King Philippe wrote to Congo’s president that “acts of violence and cruelty were committed” at the time of the Independent State of the Congo, and expressed his regrets. He did not mention Leopold II by name, and the prime minister said he spoke in a personal capacity. He repeated the regrets in Kinshasa in 2022. It was no apology. The Chamber’s special commission, set up in July 2020, could not agree on an official apology at the end of 2022: JusticeInfo reports that liberal and Christian Democrat members refused to vote for the final report, fearing reparations. Belgium has apologised for Lumumba’s murder (2002) and for the injustices done to the métis (2019). The latest records read here, a 2023 report and the experts’ findings of March 2024, record no apology adopted by the Chamber for the Free State or for colonial rule.