by Simon Winder
Bullets, tusks and rubber
One of my more recent moral collapses has been to start picking up old copies of Le Petit Journal at French flea-markets. This addictive paper produced lavish colour supplements from the 1890s onwards, wallowing in a particularly lurid, feverish chauvinism mixed up with wonderfully unregulated advertisements: for example urging women to increase the allure of their breasts by dosing up on rather vaguely named ‘Oriental Pills’ (results within two months), or extolling the virtues of hammerless revolvers, exotic pomades, beautiful, sturdy accordions and Royal Windsor, ‘the celebrated hair regenerator’ which returns grey hair ‘to the natural beauty of youth’. I hesitate even to mention Le Petit Journal it is so addictive. A remarkably cheap pile of them in the superb market inside Lille’s Old Stock Exchange made all my other plans for the day seem flimsy and missable – how could some second-division cathedral compete with flipping through grotesque murders, royal visits and colonial derring-do, all told in a wonderfully lip-smacking, pudeur-laden prose? The distance it provides from, say, the British experience in the same period is like holding up a dirty mirror to one’s own country – it seems so much more chauvinist, vicious and weird, but only because the topics and language are unfamiliar. The issue of Le Petit Journal I have to hand deals with the capture of the African leader Samory Touré with a terrific front-cover picture: two snorting horses galloping side by side, on one the cloaked Samory, on the other plucky Lieutenant Jacquin, waving his sabre and clutching the rebel by the throat. Or there is a painting of a French submarine in harbour, with a cheering crowd looking on, from straw-hatted young men gawping at this miracle of modern technology to older gaffers in bowler hats, baffled by these new-fangled techno-marvels, yet proud to be French (‘The British, it should be noted, despite their habitual phlegm, did not have the strength to hide their disquiet…’).
These illustrated newspapers are a curse – like the internet, they are stronger than the reader and can draw you into any number of disgraceful and bizarre stories (my eye wavered over one issue with the headline ‘Nuns burn alive in their own convent’). As you can pick them up individually and more or less at random (I have ones in front of me now, for example, from July 1901 and October 1898) you are only dipped briefly into a story and with no possible follow-up. But this makes their vivid oddness and hysteria all the more striking: a very brief insight, say, into the still-unfolding Fashoda Incident or ‘an abominable crime’ with no solution. Anarchist outrages, flag-strewn opening ceremonies, caravans of Roma (‘savages’) mingle freely with moustache wax and anti-hernia gadgets. It’s all-polluting yet gripping. The most famous of all Petit Journal covers was from the Dreyfus scandal. Captioned ‘The Traitor’, it showed the Alsatian colonel surrounded by rows of French troops, a magnificently breast-plated and plumed officer snapping Dreyfus’s sword over his knee. Despite the caption, it is fair to say that our eyes have moved on since that issue was published: we all look at the almost blank figure of Dreyfus and think of the nightmare of treachery that has engulfed this blameless man – but at the time, almost every reader would have gloated over the traitor’s humiliation, and a striking number would have equated Dreyfus’s treason with his being Jewish.
Colonial adventures are central to the lurid press. The capture of Samory Touré and the destruction of his West African army are discussed in Le Petit Journal, while decrying how ‘certain powers’ had supplied him with modern weaponry. Two years later the Brussels Convention, which was set up to take further action against slaving, slipped in an extra clause in which its European signatories agreed to stop selling Africans guns – a key moment in inter-colonial control and the point when the system became a completed cage for the Continent. The ghoulish pre-1914 European enthusiasm for colonial violence was essentially fictional – an endless series of fights, shocks and lurid excesses with no risk to the actual reader or his country. A temporary setback during the conquest of Indochina may have made honest French patriots excoriate their government, but no Vietnamese army was ever going to bombard Calais.
This was a golden era for two massive colonial ports: Rotterdam and Antwerp. Rotterdam drew on centuries of Dutch control over the East Indies and parts of the West Indies, now operating on a phenomenal extractive scale. Antwerp, though, was something new. It at last recovered its great place in European commerce, having been blocked up and pickled for much of two centuries. In 1900 its population had grown by six times in a hundred years. Beginning in the 1870s, King Leopold II was able to use Belgium’s neutrality to pose as the benevolent guiding force behind his International African Association, penetrating the Congo basin for scientific and philanthropic reasons. Leopold would have grabbed anything – he tried at various times to buy the Philippines, Taiwan and Borneo – but the Congo actually worked out, not least through his employing the loathsome Welsh-American Henry Morton Stanley. Under the cover of Leopold’s amazing, all-encompassing lie, Belgians who would have lived blameless lives in the factories of Liège found themselves standing in tropical forests trying to persuade the local people to work for them. Most famously, a bureaucratic method to account for each bullet issued to Congolese enforcers was invented: a severed hand of the person killed by the bullet had to be brought back to base. Photos of this innovation gradually reached a wider and ever more appalled public.
Antwerp’s huge new cargo sheds were heaped with tusks and rubber and a smallish number of Belgian and other investors made a lot of money. But in the process – through disease, dislocation, overwork and massacre – the Congo Basin probably lost half its population. Even the shape of the modern state of Congo on a map makes clear that it was created as a huge reservoir, with a little tap in its south-west corner by the old port and capital city of Boma to drain off everything of value and transfer it to Antwerp.
Leopold’s position was confirmed in 1885 and he ran the ‘Congo Free State’ in seeming total indifference to the moral cost. His most famous employee proved to be Joseph Conrad, the temporary captain of a Congo steamer. The hallucinatory, nauseated visions of Africa in Conrad’s short story ‘An Outpost of Progress’ and novella Heart of Darkness have fixed for ever a specific place and time. Just as sinister is his vision of Brussels as a ‘whited sepulchre’, with the surreal company offices filled with barely animated ghosts and its director with ‘his grip on the handle-end of ever so many millions’.
The weakness of Leopold’s monstrous personal estate turned out to be that Belgian neutrality set it aside from the tougher power blocs of the other European empires, whose owners could more closely control who visited their colonies and why. The French expeditions against Samory Touré, relished by the Petit Journal, were, just as in the Congo, the most incredible, careless bloodbaths, and if Conrad had been employed to help out Cecil Rhodes during the Matabele Wars, we would perhaps have as vivid a sense of Britain’s ability to create a charnel-house as we do Belgium’s. In any event, a number of foreign experts could not be prevented from investigating, most importantly Roger Casement. Oddly the two men who would define the Congo, Conrad and Casement, met there years before when one was just a sailor and the other a railway engineer. Casement’s later reports turned Leopold’s Congo Free State into a moral monster in the clutches of what Conrad called Leopold’s ‘masquerading philanthropy’. It was taken over from Leopold by the Belgian state in 1908 – becoming the Belgian Congo – and was from then on ruled with merely the same sort of impatient violence as its neighbours.
Some 5,800 tons of elephant ivory landed in Antwerp in 1901. Incredibly, a key use for the ivory was in billiard balls. The superb, if sometimes harrowing, Museum by the River (MAS) in Antwerp has a photo of the English billiards mogul James Burroughes sitting nonchalantly on a net-bagged heap of twenty thousand balls and even wearing a Leopold II-like beard, as though this was the sign for a poorly concealed freemasonry of scoundrels. It was estimated that this many balls would have required some 2,100 elephants to be shot. In return for such cargoes Antwerp
exported Belgian railway and building materials, canned goods and weapons. There is a 1909 photo of a festive carnival float in central Antwerp heaped with tusks and rubber and everyone seems entirely cheerful.
The continuities for Antwerp are definitely very odd. Back in 1508 a Zeelandic ship arrived with the first sugar cargo from the Canary Islands, and in the late nineteenth century the craze for bananas was fed by cargoes into Antwerp from the Canaries, later replaced by new plantations developed around Boma. It is so difficult to write about colonialism as a separate topic because it is so intimately entangled in Europe’s own history – cheap bananas may seem trivial (as indeed do billiard balls) but they were a part of a global system which shaped Europeans’ behaviour, development and history. When in 1891 another upriver expedition by Leopold’s goons marched into the Yeke Kingdom they simply shot dead Msiri, its long-time ruler, and annexed the entire region to the ‘Free State’, just in time to thwart Cecil Rhodes. This led to the creation by Leopold of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga, which soon left in the dust the little bits of money got from poor elephants, pouring out vast amounts of copper, manganese, tin, cobalt and (somewhat later) the uranium used in the Manhattan Project.
The Union Minière changed the shape of Belgium’s economy and defined many thousands of lives. Somehow the horrors of what went on and their more banal impacts have to be intertwined. Leopold and his associates (and Rhodes and his) genuinely thought they were bringing light into the darkness. This feeling was much added to by the importance of Belgian missionaries, whose activities provided an intimate link to countless Catholic congregations back home – a spiritual shock-force in parallel to the mercenaries and oddballs clearing the ground militarily for them, and immortalized in Hergé’s thoroughly awkward Tintin in the Congo.
One of the great non-human dramas of the Congo was the discovery of that wonderfully elegant giraffid the okapi. As an okapi enthusiast I felt it was almost too much to take in that Antwerp Zoo (in perhaps the only entirely positive legacy of the Congo) was the home of the international okapi stud-book, with okapi bloodlines treated much like horses’. Europe’s first okapi arrived here just after the First World War – a traditional Antwerp exotic import with roots in the far, far earlier arrival of dodos, sloths and cassowaries.
The First World War ended this long period of low-risk, high-entertainment sunshiny European fighting. Colonial wars were cheap and created an endlessly unrolling narrative of excitements, generally with almost no sense at all that colonies themselves might be problematic. They happened off-stage – it never crossed Leopold II’s mind to visit the Congo himself. There is a self-congratulatory but beautiful monument to French colonial military prowess put up in Boulogne’s Upper Town in 1898. Its opening ceremony would surely have been celebrated in Le Petit Journal if I could dig up the right issue. It very precisely lists the names of the Boulonnais killed in France’s post-Napoleonic wars and ‘repacification’ campaigns, in date order. This precision is itself interesting, as in early periods nobody had any records of this kind. So it is a bureaucratic monument among other things and gives a fair sense of the relative levels of risk and violence to which European troops were exposed. Twenty years after its first unveiling, the structure of the monument had to be drastically changed and individual soldiers’ names dropped for the last addition.
Deaths
Campaign
4
Madagascar
3
Senegal
1
‘Other colonies’
2
Mexico
2
China
26
Crimea
29
1870–1 [Franco-Prussian War]
17
Tonkin [Vietnam]
5
Algeria
4
Tunisia
1,642
1914–1918
Rays and masks
I had got off the train in Ostend and was walking towards the seafront when I found myself, quite unconsciously, developing a slightly rolling gait. To my horror I felt a desire to stick my thumbs into my belt and tip a non-existent hat further back on my head. When I glanced up at the sky to tell whether or not a storm was brewing, then instinctively glanced across at the Van Eyck pub with a view to wetting my whistle, it became clear that I had fallen victim to another bout of camp suggestibility and that at some unconscious level just seeing a few flags, seagulls and boats had made me start channelling various idiotic dredged ideas about being some sort of Jack Tar on the spree. Hitching my non-existent bell-bottoms and shifting my non-existent chaw of tobacco from one cheek to the other, I tried to take control of myself, disciplining and restraightening my H.M.S. Pinafore legs.
Being in Ostend, it did strike me as unsurprising I should start channelling my inner hornpipe. For quite accidental reasons I had spent some eight years writing only about places which were inland aside from Hamburg and a couple of spots in the Baltic, a sea that I find hard to feel is fully legitimate. In the superb Asterix in Switzerland one of the running jokes is that Asterix’s enormous and not very bright companion Obelix is throughout the story always asleep, underground, indoors or drunk, or it is night-time. He therefore never actually sees the country he and Asterix are visiting, and is able to report back to his Gaulish village on the last page that Switzerland is flat. I feel rather the same about Europe. Endless trips around the Carpathians or the Swabian back country had blinded me to the way that Europe, far more than any other continent, is defined by its sea-coasts. Indeed it is the strange, gnarled sea geography that runs from St Petersburg round to Istanbul that makes Europe quite different from any of its gigantic neighbours. Its superfluity of navigable rivers rushing down from random heaps of mountain terrain both break Europe up and connect it together, generating a mass of attractive sub-units for human use.
This new enthusiasm for a bit of salt spray made me a bit uncritical of Ostend, with its joyless, heaped-up apartment blocks, the result not least of relentless Second World War bombing. To celebrate my new, nautical mental reorientation I plunged into the North Sea Aquarium. It proved to be a classic of the genre, featuring a poorly gurnard, a lumpsucker which appeared to be having a nervous breakdown and some chipper blennies. There was also the wonderful issue of fish names in different languages – with the lumpfish also being a Seehase, Lompe or Snotolf. A huge stuffed sunfish (always my favourite) once again raised the old issue of its being called a moonfish by all our neighbours (poisson lune, Mondfisch or maanvis). We will never know what ancient piece of somewhat unimaginative naming associated its bizarre circular shape with either the one of the other heavenly body. The pleasures of the aquarium were endless, with bits of fishing equipment, bones, old maps, helpful advice about eating prawns and a tank full of turbot, the latter with that curious camouflage stippling of black and yellow dots which makes them look pre-breaded for frying – as though you would expect them to also have a helpful slice of lemon tied to their tails. There was a sad lobster with such low energy and so little room to move around in that various red growths had sprung up from his armour. One particularly happy surprise was an energetic thornback ray, flapping against the glass. I suddenly realized that this must be the same species of ray that features in Hogarth’s painting The Gate of Calais.
Ostend on balance did turn out, once you had got used to the salt smell and the gulls (and setting the aquarium aside), to be slightly disappointing. When Belgium became independent its short coastline had to have a resort somewhere and so, by default, Ostend got the job. I had assumed, given the region’s enthusiasm for allegorical railway stations, that on arrival there I would be greeted by some huge fresco, or a statue of a semi-nude figure of Belgica being embraced by a bearded, trident-wielding Poseidon.Presumably there had once been such characters but, again, bombing wrecked them all. This sense of exhaustion is shared with Calais and Dunkirk, both also so devastated in 1940 and 1944 that they have never really reco
vered their grace. They all cry out for some huge plan to start again from scratch and there are few traces of what made them, at different points in their history, so historically dense and powerful.
Ostend was very much the vision of Leopold II, who poured some of the money he made from the Congo into its development. This genuinely evil figure is still commemorated on the seafront by a statue, his immense beard prominent, surrounded on one side by cheering, heavily clothed Belgians and on the other – incredibly – by cheering, clothing-free Congolese. There is also a tablet recording locals who had died in the good cause of civilizing the Congo. In the light of the system used at one point to check that Congolese trackers chasing runaways were not secretly hoarding bullets, someone recently had the brilliant idea of cutting off the hands of the Congolese, turning what had been stuffy and offensive into a genuine artwork for the first time. With any luck the hands will never be repaired.
