King Leopold's Ghost

by Adam Hochschild

  ***

  In November 1908, as solemn ceremonies at Boma marked the Congo's formal change of ownership, an unusual drama was unfolding far inland. The mere fact that it had begun under Leopold's state and continued uninterrupted in the new Belgian colony suggests that the difference between the two regimes was not what the reformers had hoped for. At center stage was the black American missionary William Sheppard.

  Sheppard's article from a decade earlier, about his discovering eighty-one severed hands being smoked over a fire, had been one of the most widely quoted pieces of testimony about the Congo. "His eyewitness account," writes one scholar, "was cited by almost every American reformer, black or white." For some years now Sheppard had had a strong ally in his colleague, William Morrison, a white minister who had been with the Southern Presbyterian Congo mission since 1897. Morrison was a fearless opponent of the regime, a friend of Morel's, and a leader in inspiring his fellow missionaries, American, British, and Scandinavian, to speak out. He had bombarded officials in Boma with letters of protest, published an open letter to Leopold, and delivered an influential speech when passing through London. In the United States, he had led a group of Presbyterians to see President Theodore Roosevelt about the Congo. The regime, in turn, hated Morrison as much as it did Sheppard.

  Sheppard and Morrison were the most outspoken of any of the American Congo missionaries, whose protests had long nettled Leopold. He had ordered missionary magazines searched for their hostile articles; some copies still survive, heavily marked in blue pencil by palace aides. Leopold could not get at his real target, Morel, safe in England, but he had tried persistently to intimidate Morel's sources: in 1906 he had issued a decree mandating a fine or a five-year jail term for any calumny against a Congo state official. A British Baptist missionary who fed information to Morel was soon put on trial. He was convicted, fined a thousand francs plus court costs, and, less of a crusader than Sheppard or Morrison, he left the country. The little band of American Presbyterians saw it was now riskier to speak out; the authorities were watching them closely, both in Africa and abroad. Unknown to them, Moncheur, the Belgian minister to Washington, had attended in Virginia one of the many headline-making speeches denouncing Congo atrocities that was given by Sheppard, whose reputation for stirring oratory packed many a church or hall during his home leaves.

  As the end of Leopold's rule approached, the Compagnie du Kasai, a concession company of a new generation that was the de facto government of the area where the Presbyterians were working, was trying to extract all the rubber it could while the boom lasted. The Kasai River basin, where exploitation had begun a little later than elsewhere, had become the Congo's most lucrative source of rubber. And who now suddenly reappears on the scene, visiting the area for some months as inspector general of the Compagnie du Kasai, having risen in the world since we met him last? Léon Rom, the one-time collector of severed heads. His transformation into a Congo company official was a common one for retired Force Publique officers.

  In the Kasai region, the normally unwarlike Kuba people had risen in revolt against the rubber terror, spurred on, as in similar doomed uprisings elsewhere in southern Africa, by elders with a fetish said to change the white man's bullets into water. The rebels burned trading posts and a mission station; when bullets did not turn to water, some 180 of them were killed. Writing in the annual newsletter the American Presbyterians published for their supporters back home, the Kassai Herald, William Sheppard described the toll taken on the Kuba. Significantly, he first celebrated the Kubas' history, writing in a way that no white missionary would have done:

  These great stalwart men and women, who have from time immemorial been free, cultivating large farms of Indian corn, peas, tobacco, potatoes, trapping elephants for their ivory tusks and leopards for their skins, who have always had their own king and a government not to be despised, officers of the law established in every town of the kingdom, these magnificent people, perhaps about 400,000 in number, have entered a new chapter in the history of their tribe. Only a few years ago, travelers through this country found them living in large homes, having from one to four rooms in each house, loving and living happily with their wives and children, one of the most prosperous and intelligent of all the African tribes....

  But within these last three years how changed they are! Their farms are growing up in weeds and jungle, their king is practically a slave, their houses now are mostly only half-built single rooms and are much neglected. The streets of their towns are not clean and well-swept as they once were. Even their children cry for bread.

  Why this change? You have it in a few words. There are armed sentries of chartered trading companies who force the men and women to spend most of their days and nights in the forests making rubber, and the price they receive is so meager that they cannot live upon it. In the majority of villages these people have not time to listen to the Gospel story, or give an answer concerning their soul's salvation.

  Sheppard's story appeared in January 1908, the month Léon Rom returned to Belgium from a six-month business trip to the Kasai. Soon after, Rom's colleagues at the Compagnie du Kasai began to threaten, bluster, and demand a retraction, which Morrison and Sheppard refused to make. Morrison sent company officials forceful letters listing more specific charges, which upset them still further. The two missionaries were legally vulnerable, since technically they had published the article in the Congo itself. In England, Morel reprinted Sheppard's article, and also a photograph the missionaries had sent him, of forced laborers, tied to one another by ropes around their necks.

  While the company was still complaining about the offending article, the British vice consul to the Congo, Wilfred Thesiger, paid a three-month visit to the Kasai basin to prepare a report on conditions there. Nervous officials monitored his travels, remembering all too well the international furor caused by Roger Casement's report four years earlier. To the authorities' dismay, Thesiger stayed with the American Presbyterians at their mission and traveled on their steamboat, the Lapsley. As someone who understood the local languages and who knew the district well, Sheppard acted as guide to Thesiger, taking him to thirty-one Kuba villages. After they departed, a suspicious station chief grilled villagers the two men had spoken to, and worriedly reported to his superiors that "Sheppard pointed to the Consul and said, 'You see this white man, when he returns to Europe he will tell the State officials whatever you tell him, because he is very powerful.' In the Bakuba villages [Thesiger]...asked any questions Sheppard suggested." Thesiger soon submitted an excoriating report on starvation and brutality in the Kasai to the British Parliament. One passage, describing Kuba homes falling into ruin while people were put to work as rubber slaves, closely echoed Sheppard's article. The Compagnie du Kasai's stock price plummeted. Company and Congo state officials, furious, blamed Sheppard.

  The company could not legally punish the Presbyterians for helping Thesiger, but it could do so for their publishing Sheppard's 1908 article. In February 1909 it filed suit for libel against Sheppard, as writer of the article, and Morrison, as its publisher, demanding eighty thousand francs in damages. The two men, firm in their convictions, decided that if the judge ruled against them, they would, as Morrison wrote home, "prefer to go to prison rather than pay the fine." Abroad, their supporters rallied to their defense. "Morrison in the dock," wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (ignoring the black defendant, Sheppard), "makes a finer Statue of Liberty than Bartholdi's in New York harbour." In Washington, the affair was discussed at a Cabinet meeting. The American legation in Brussels informed the Belgian government that the United States viewed the trial with "acute interest and no little concern," and suggested that U.S. recognition of the new Belgian claim to the Congo might hinge on the result.

  The trial took place in Leopoldville, some six hundred miles down the Kasai and Congo rivers from the Presbyterian mission. A photo shows Morrison and Sheppard before the trial, standing under some palm trees on each side of a dozen Kubas who were prep
ared to testify in their defense. The Kubas are naked above the waist. Morrison, the white man, looks resigned behind his heavy beard, as if preparing for one more ordeal in a saintly life that will be rewarded in Heaven, but certainly not before then. He wears a black hat, black suit, and scuffed shoes. Sheppard, the black man, wears a white suit and white hat. His shoes gleam; his chest is arched out; he stands a head taller than everyone else and seems to be enjoying the moment immensely. There is something proud and inclusive in his stance toward the Kubas, as if they are junior kinsmen.

  The trial's opening date was set—deliberately, the missionaries thought—during the dry season on the Kasai River. After the steamboat carrying the two defendants and their Kuba witnesses encountered low water, the captain refused to go farther. A new date was fixed.

  Morel telegraphed his friend and ally Emile Vandervelde, leader of the Belgian socialists, asking him to recommend an "honest young Belgian lawyer" for the two missionaries. Vandervelde, a leading figure in European democratic socialism, was also an attorney. To everyone's surprise, he declared that he would take on the case himself, pro bono. The trial was postponed yet again so that Vandervelde could travel out to the Congo. As he was preparing to leave Belgium, someone criticized him for traveling all the way to Africa to defend a couple of "foreigners." Unspoken, perhaps, was the fact that one of those foreigners was black.

  Vandervelde replied, "No man is a stranger in a court of justice."

  Newly arrived in the Congo, the anticlerical Vandervelde, president of the Second International and friend or acquaintance of all the great left-wing figures of his day, found himself living in a mission station and cruising Stanley Pool in the mission steamboat, which flew the American flag. He watched with great amusement as missionaries carried out baptisms by total immersion and prayed for a favorable verdict.

  At last the trial began, in a Leopoldville courtroom of wood and brick, its windows open to the breeze. On a technicality, the court had dropped the charge against Morrison, leaving Sheppard the only defendant. In this frontier outpost, dotted with mango, palm, and baobab trees, and with its forced labor gangs, military barracks, and a firing range where Europeans practiced shooting on Sundays, the trial was definitely the biggest show in town. Over thirty foreign Protestant missionaries packed the courtroom in a show of support. They and other supporters of Sheppard sat on one side of the courtroom; on the other side were Catholic missionaries, Congo state officials, and other backers of the Compagnie du Kasai. Onlookers who couldn't fit in the room watched through the open door and windows. The Compagnie du Kasai officials wore white suits and white sun helmets; Sheppard looked natty in a dark coat with a handkerchief in his breast pocket.

  After the judge rang a small bell to begin the proceedings and the lawyer for the Compagnie du Kasai spoke, Vandervelde rose to make the most of his unusual forum. Sheppard, he told the judge, was "no longer of England or America, but of the Kasai.... His only motive in revealing the condition of the natives amongst whom he lives is humanitarian." Vandervelde "made a magnificent defense," Morrison reported. "His speech was a marvel of eloquence, invincible logic, burning sarcasm, and pathetic appeal for justice to be done not only for us Missionaries but especially for the native peoples. He held the audience in the Courtroom spell-bound for over two hours." Sheppard, the accused, was also moved. "The trial is the talk of the whole country," he wrote, and the spectators "were so affected that their handkerchiefs were freely used." According to Sheppard, even the Catholic priests—usually staunch allies of the state—were weeping, and one of them came up and congratulated Vandervelde after his speech. "It is said there has never been such a speech as that made in Congo."

  The trial won Sheppard some attention back home. Under the headlines AMERICAN NEGRO HERO OF CONGO and FIRST TO INFORM WORLD OF CONGO ABUSES, the Boston Herald wrote, "Dr. Sheppard has not only stood before kings, but he has also stood against them. In pursuit of his mission of serving his race in its native land, this son of a slave ... has dared to withstand all the power of Leopold."

  After the closing arguments, the judge announced that he would give his decision in two weeks. In the end, it was politics, not Vandervelde's eloquence or the missionaries' prayers, that dictated the results. The presence of the American consul general and vice consul in the courtroom was a reminder of the problems Belgium might face if Sheppard were found in the wrong. Similarly, the judge knew he would not have a promising career in the Congo if he found that Sheppard's accusations against the company were true. Steering a cautious middle course, he made adroit use of the fact that (even though there were no other such companies in the area) Sheppard's article had not specifically named the Compagnie du Kasai, but had only attacked "armed sentries of chartered trading companies." Thus, the judge declared, most improbably, "the defendant Sheppard did not intend to make an attack on the said company.... The article did not and could not refer to the Compagnie du Kasai." In effect, Sheppard was found innocent, without the Compagnie du Kasai's being found guilty. The company, however, had to pay court costs.

  Far up the Kasai River, the missionaries' wives knew that their husbands had vowed to go to jail rather than pay the damages if the judgment went against them. The sign that this had happened would be if the men were not on board the Presbyterian steamboat when it returned from Leopoldville. As people anxiously waited at the mission station, there seems to have been a warmth and camaraderie among these black and white Americans that would have been inconceivable back home. "Mrs. Morrison and I waited almost breathlessly for the return of our loved ones," wrote Lucy Gantt Sheppard. "As the Lapsley came steaming in, hundreds of Christians began singing hymns and waving their hands and shouting for joy. It was a glorious time—a time for thanksgiving."

  ***

  Back in Europe, there was no thanksgiving for Leopold. In December 1909, less than two months after the Sheppard trial, the seventy-four-year-old king fell gravely ill with an "intestinal blockage," possibly a euphemism for cancer. Crowded out of the château of Laeken by his endless renovations, surrounded as always by sheaves of architectural drawings, the king was living in an outbuilding, the Palm Pavilion, amid the great greenhouses. Caroline and their two sons rushed to Leopold's side, and Leopold's private chaplain performed a hasty wedding. With things now straightened out with the church, the king could receive last rites. Nonetheless, Caroline, who stayed by his side, had to disappear from sight every time a visitor arrived.

  Leopold's rejected daughters, Louise and Stephanie, came to Brussels, hoping for a reconciliation and for changes in their favor in the royal will. Obstinate to the last, their father turned them away. The royal physician, Dr. Jules Thiriar, who had also served as a dummy stockholder for the king in several Congo corporations, ordered an operation, but it was unsuccessful. Parliament had just passed a pet bill of Leopold's, instituting compulsory military service. When he came out of the anesthetic after his surgery, the king signed the bill with a trembling hand. The next day he seemed to rally, demanding newspapers and giving orders to prepare for a departure for the Riviera. A few hours later he was dead. One of the myriad of hovering officials led the weeping Caroline from his bedside.

  If we are to believe Caroline's account, Leopold, just after the secret wedding, had turned to Baron Auguste Goffinet, one of the plump, bearded, slightly cross-eyed twins who had been among his closest aides for more than thirty years, and declared, "I present you my widow. I place her under your protection during the few days she'll spend in Belgium after my death." It is likely that the king did say something like this, for he knew that his three daughters and the Belgian public hated Caroline—and that they would do so all the more when they discovered that in his last days he had transferred to her a fortune in Congo securities, on top of some six million francs he had already given her.

  Princess Louise's lawyers came after the securities, so when Caroline went to her Brussels villa, she found it padlocked and guarded, the windows boarded up. It was the sa
me story at the French castle she had been given by Leopold. But with the help of the king's loyalists, who were seen removing papers from his desk in his final hours, Caroline got herself and much of her money away to Paris.

  Less than a year later, she remarried—her husband none other than the former French officer, Durrieux, her original boyfriend and pimp. If she shared some of her fortune with him, his was surely one of the most successful feats of pimpery of all time. Of Caroline and Leopold's two sons, one died a few years after his father. The other lived a long, quiet life on the income from capital once wrested from the labor of Congo rubber slaves; he died in 1984. Perhaps the most interesting of Leopold's descendants was his granddaughter Elizabeth, the only child of Stephanie and Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary. She married a socialist politician and became known as the Red Archduchess.

  At his death, Leopold was little mourned by his people. They much preferred his nephew and successor, Albert I, modest, likable, and—extremely rare for a European monarch—visibly in love with his wife. As for the world outside Belgium, thanks to Morel and his allies, it now thought of Leopold not in terms of the monuments and buildings he was so proud of, but of the severed hands. The American poet Vachel Lindsay declaimed:

  Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost

  Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.

  Hear how the demons chuckle and yell

  Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

  But the battle over how Leopold and his works would be remembered had only begun.

  ***

  The life of a major figure in the early stages of that battle, Roger Casement, had now taken some new turnings. When Casement's report was published, he had been interviewed by newspapers, wined and dined by the London literary world, awarded a medal by the British king, attacked by the Belgian king, defended by Morel and the reform movement, and then vindicated triumphantly by Leopold's own Commission of Inquiry.