The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  ‘- “What a career!”’

  Not everyone was as admiringly sympathetic as the correspondent of Le Figaro. Many of Curie’s colleagues resented having a woman in their midst. Their hour came five years later, in 1911, when the widow became sentimentally attached to a fellow scientist, Paul Langevin, who decided to seek a divorce. Formerly admiring of their Nobel Prize-winning star, the press now attacked Marie Curie without mercy as the ‘Polack’ who had ruined a good French family, the woman who did not know her place. Curie was disgusted, more so when, despite her obvious achievements, she failed to be elected to the Académie des Sciences. Reviled in France, the scientist found more respect abroad when she was nominated, in that same year, for her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry.

  ‘The discovery hit me with frightful force, as if the end of the world had come. All things became transparent, without strength or certainty.’ So Vassily Kandinsky responded after reading about Rutherford in 1911. More than ever before, science gave answers to ancient questions, possibilities to industry and new dreams to ordinary men and women. The price for these exciting prospects was the solid, tangible nature of the old world. Certainties tumbled as possibility emerged.

  5

  1904: His Majesty and Mister Morel

  It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day’s work. Some women ... were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing ... I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest. He fell like a stone ... Immediately a volley was poured into the village.

  - Captain William Grant Stairs, Congo diary, 28 September 1887

  In early 1904, a thick typewritten report by an obscure civil servant in the colonial administration was filed in the London Colonial Office. Commissioned to investigate a clutch of rumours about the goings-on in an African colony sharing a border with British-owned Rhodesia, the document was not thought to be of any special importance. Yet it contained the greatest tale of horror and inhumanity the world had seen.

  The author of this tale was Roger Casement (1864-1916), an Irishman who had spent two decades of his professional career as Their Britannic Majesties’ Consul in various African territories. During the previous year he had been dispatched to the Congo Free State to report on allegations of mistreatment of natives at the hands of their colonial masters. What Casement found and recorded in the detached language of a seasoned diplomat was a catalogue of atrocity, mass mutilation, state-sponsored slavery and murder, and monumental greed. Whole ethnic groups, it seemed, had all but vanished:

  When I visited [Lukolela] in 1887 it numbered fully 5,000 people; today, the population is given, after a careful enumeration, at less than 600 …

  ... [in 1887] the population of the three towns [in another area] had numbered some 4,000 to 5,000 people ... Scores of men had put off in canoes to greet us with invitations that we should spend the night in their village. On steaming into Irebu on the 28 of July of this year, I found the village had entirely disappeared and its place was occupied by a large ‘camp d’instruction’ (training camp), where some 800 native recruits, brought in from various parts of the Congo State, are drilled into soldierhood …

  In addition to the wholesale disappearance of villages, the report soberly chronicled a pattern of savage floggings and mutilations, particularly the hacking off of hands:

  Two cases of the kind came to my actual notice while I was in the lake [area]. One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of rifles against a tree, the other young lad of 11 or 12 years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist. This boy described the circumstances of his mutilation and, in answer to my enquiry, said that although wounded at the time he was perfectly sensible of the severing of his wrist, but lay still fearing that if he moved he would be killed. In both these cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names were given to me.

  The report meticulously documented many such instances, as well as uncommonly cruel executions (in one case a man was hung head-down over a low fire, women were repeatedly raped and then disembowelled, many were whipped to death) and countless incarcerations of women and children.

  The unlikely reason for this unimaginable terror inflicted on native peoples by their European colonizers was an invention made some years earlier by a genial Irish veterinarian, Doctor John Dunlop of Belfast. He had devised air-filled rubber tubes for his son’s tricycle and had begun to market them. Soon the demand was so great that in 1890 he had ceased to look after horses and invested in the transport of the future. Fitted with miraculously shock-absorbent rubber tyres, bicycles became a cultural phenomenon, a symbol for the young generation and its time, for speed, freedom and physical fitness. The worldwide demand for rubber boomed.

  Enter the ultimate businessman who quickly understood this demand to be an historic opportunity: King Leopold II of the Belgians (1835-1909). Through the good offices of the legendary explorer Henry Morton Stanley, the King had acquired in 1885 a chunk of the Congo as big as Europe. He wanted the territory not for his country, but as a personal possession, and from the very start he treated his colony, which he baptized Congo Free State, as a profit-making concern. There was ivory inland, and there were countless natives who could be pressed into service. When the rubber boom occurred Leopold found that his colony happened to be rich in wild caoutchouc vines and so had the potential to exercise a virtual monopoly on the world rubber market, at least until rubber plantations planted elsewhere were mature enough to go into production. The King understood that there was no time to be lost: an immense fortune could be made. He set to work, or rather, he set tens of thousands of natives to work by implementing a regime of systematic terror geared to deliver maximum yields of exportable rubber, regardless of the human cost. As the wild vines necessitated climbing into the trees of densely forested areas, the King’s officials managed the men, who could not climb while in chains, by holding women and children hostage until production quotas were fulfilled. Any opposition, and even any failure to meet these quotas, was punished by military expeditions which burned and murdered whole villages. As proof of execution the black soldiers, who might otherwise waste precious cartridges for hunting game, were ordered to bring back their victims’ hands from the campaigns, which often took several weeks, making it necessary to smoke the severed limbs for preservation. The military units involved had a special post, the ‘keeper of the hands’. Soldiers who wanted to better their killing premium were given to severing the hands of the living as well as the dead, leaving their victims where they had cut them down. Forced labour, mass rape and hostage-taking, thousandfold murder and endemic brutality were key components of the rubber with which the Free State supplied a voracious market in Europe and the United States. In his Belgian palace, King Leopold became rich beyond his wildest dreams.

  Unfair Trade

  The reality of what was going on in the Congo Free State was uncovered, almost by accident, by Edward Dene Morel (1872-1924), an English shipping clerk, whose task it was to verify cargoes transported to and from the colony by his employer, a Liverpool shipping company. Being of French extraction and a fluent French-speaker, his duties frequently took him to Belgium, where he would supervise the loading and unloading of the Congo ships: ivory and rubber from Africa, and items of daily use as payments and for trade, according to the official Belgian statistics. One day, while he was attending a meeting with the highest-ranking official in the Belgian Congo administration, the young book-keeper was privy to a scene that aroused both his suspicions and his curiosity, as he himself later remembered with the rhetorical flourishes that would make him such a formidable journalist:

  A room whose windows look upon the back of the Royal Palace at Brussels. A gloomy room, thick-carpeted, heavy curtains; a room of oppressive shadows. In its centre a man, seated at a desk. A man thin to emaciation, with
narrow, stooping shoulders; with a receding forehead, high curved nose, large ears set far back: lantern jawed, cold eyed. A face in repose passively inhuman, bloodless, petrified, all sharp bones and gaunt cavities: the face of the then ‘Secretary of State’ for the Congo Free State ... He leans forward and in rapid staccato accents complains that confidential information as to the last outward-bound steamer’s cargo has been divulged to the press…The paragraph is pointed out. It looks innocent enough, being a list of the principal articles on board. But that list contains an enumeration of the cases of ball cartridges, the cases of rifles and the boxes of percussion-cap guns ... That is the fault. That is the lapse from professional secrecy. As the enormity of the indiscretion is denounced, the speaker rises, the cadaverous cheeks flush, the voice trembles ... He will hear no excuses; allow no interruption. Again and again he repeats the words secret professionnel with passionate emphasis.

  The face of mass murder: King

  Leopold of the Belgians. Some ten

  million people were killed in the

  Congo Free State, his personal

  fiefdom.

  Astonished at this scene, Morel verified the records by using his company’s shipping lists and found that the official statistics were pure fiction. Outgoing cargoes consisted overwhelmingly of small arms and ammunition. There was no evidence of any trading with those who produced the rubber imported from the Congo. He also noticed that the official statistics reported only a fraction of the profits made. Someone, it seemed, was very discreetly earning tens of millions of Belgian francs from the colony. Morel had enough experience with statistics and profit margins to know what this meant:

  These figures told their own story ... Forced labour of a terrible and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard-of profits…forced labour in which the Congo Government was the immediate beneficiary; forced labour by the closest associates of the King himself ... I was giddy and appalled at the cumulative significance of my discoveries. It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman.

  A man of exceptional determination and courage, Morel had found his life’s mission: to expose and to end the terrors of the Congo.

  A true hero: Edward Dene Morel worked tirelessly to

  expose the crimes committed in the Congo.

  Morel was not the only observer to be horrified by the atrocities perpetrated in the Congo. The black American journalist George Washington Williams had already exposed Leopold’s regime in the 1890s and Mary Kingsley’s book-length reportage Travels in Africa had been popular since its publication in 1897. But Morel was by far the most effective champion of the cause. His information was always accurate, his tenacity legendary, his style as vivid as it was energetic, and his outrage as raw as on the day he had made his first discovery. Morel was determined to force the world to take notice, and he had a phenomenal capacity for work. At twenty-eight, he resigned from his job (turning down several offers to buy his silence), raised money, corresponded with hundreds of eyewitnesses and people in influential positions, collected information from missionaries and documents from contacts within the colonial administration, founded a newspaper in which he published the damaging information, gave speeches and lectures, wrote hundreds of articles and thousands of letters, and lobbied politicians. The brutally exploited people of the Congo found their champion in a small, mustachioed Liverpudlian with neither a steady income nor influential friends, who was en route to becoming the most persistent, most stinging antagonist of a European monarch, and who would never even set foot on the African continent.

  Supplied with inside information by Morel, newspapers throughout Europe and the United States began to print damaging revelations about Leopold’s regime; lecture halls were regularly crammed to bursting when Morel gave his famous talks on the colonial atrocities, and members of parliament and other decision-makers would receive letters of searing eloquence. After several years of this campaign, the Colonial Office could no longer ignore the troubling news coming from the Congo Free State and sent one of its most reliable and experienced men, Roger Casement, to investigate.

  Casement had set off in 1903 and spent several months travelling through the Free State on a hired steamer - an important fact, as it made him not only independent of the concessionary rubber companies and the administration in the area, but also impossible to control. When he finally returned, he decanted his rage into a book-length report which he submitted to the foreign secretary. Casement’s findings bore Morel out in every gruesome detail. It detailed a war of destruction perpetrated against Africans: ‘One of the largest Congo Concession Companies,’ Casement wrote, ‘had ... addressed a request to its Directors in Europe for a further supply of ball-cartridge. The Directors had met his demand by asking what had become of the 72,000 cartridges shipped some three years ago, to which a reply was sent to the effect that these had all been used in the production of india-rubber.’

  While native women would be held in detention camps (where they were routinely raped by their guards) to ensure the return of their menfolk sent to harvest resin, the men themselves would be punished severely if they failed to return with a sufficient amount of raw materials: ‘As to the condition of the men who paid by detention in the “maison des otages” their shortcomings in respect of rubber, I was assured by the local agent that they were not badly treated and that “they got their food”. On the other hand, I was assured in many quarters that flogging with the chicotte - or hippopotamus-hide whip - was one of the measures used in dealing with refractory natives in that institution.’ On page upon page, individual acts of European barbarism were painstakingly detailed, with places, dates, and names of witnesses. Several appendices supplied additional proof.

  Casement’s cautious and official report gained much of its quiet power from its disinterested tone. It calculated the profits made in different areas, the number of workers needed, the impact of death tolls on production, in much the same way as one would have analysed a factory. When it was published in the Parliamentary Reports of April 1904, the calm enumeration of margins realized and people tortured or killed in the process was a great boost to Morel’s campaign. Soon the two men met and became firm friends, as Morel recounts:

  I saw before me a man, my own height, very lithe and sinewy, chest thrown out, head held high - suggestive of one who had lived in the vast open spaces. Black hair and beard covering cheeks hollowed by the tropical sun. Strongly marked features. A dark blue, penetrating eye sunken in the socket. A long, lean, swarthy Vandyck type of face, graven with power and withal of great gentleness. […] I often see him now in imagination as I saw him at that memorable interview, crouching over the fire in the otherwise unlighted room ... unfolding in a musical, soft, almost even voice, in language of peculiar dignity and pathos, the story of a vile conspiracy. For hours he talked on, with now and again a pause, as the poignancy of recollection gripped him, when he would break off the narrative and murmur beneath his breath, ‘Poor people; poor, poor people.’

  Casement was driven by the same zeal for justice and he helped the Congo campaign in whichever way he could. His own motivation for taking the side of the underdog may have been rooted in his personal experience. As an Irishman, he increasingly resented the English rule to which his country was subjected, a fact that brought him into direct conflict with his employers and presumably did nothing to further his career. A man of outstanding abilities, he was given minor, unimportant postings at the margins of the empire for his entire career, presumably because he did not belong to the aristocratic, public-school and overwhelmingly English elite (he himself had been sent to a minor school) from which the higher echelons of the service were drawn. Casement was marginal in another way: he was a homosexual. To admit to his passion was unthinkable, and so he was reduced to consummating it in countless casual encounters with young men in harbours and on remote postings, all of which he recorded in his diaries, the record of h
is true feelings, in which he makes no attempt to mask his emotions about the exploitation he was there to witness: ‘Sunday 30 August. Spent quiet day. In afternoon saw M. Lejeune at Abir. 16 men women & children tied up - from a village Mboyo close to the town. Infamous! The men were put in the prison the children let go at my intervention. Infamous! Infamous shameful system.’ The entries dealing with his sexual encounters are remarkably frank: ‘Agostinho kissed many times. 4 dollars’; ‘Down and oh! oh! quick, about 18’; ‘Tall, “How much money?”’

  An outsider himself in so many ways, the charismatic Casement made it his business to defend those who could not defend themselves. His duties as a consul, which more often than not involved negotiating with the police on behalf of drunken soldiers who had got into trouble, or listening to the indignant tirades of wronged British travellers, were tiring and frustrating, and the quest for justice seemed finally worthy of his intelligence and his passion.

  Boosted by his new, invaluable ally, Morel was now heading an effective international publicity campaign reinforced by first-hand testimonies like that of the Reverend John Harris and his wife Alice Seely Harris, Baptist missionaries who had come back from the Congo not only with moral outrage but also with photos they had taken themselves, as well as sad souvenirs: whips and manacles which they displayed at public lectures. As these instruments of terror made the rounds among the spectators, Reverend Harris read out reports, this one among them: