King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

by Adam Hochschild

  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.

  One member of the expedition packed the severed head of an African in a box of salt and sent it to London to be stuffed and mounted by his Piccadilly taxidermist.

  Of the 389 men in Stanley's vanguard, more than half died as they hacked their way with machetes through the Ituri rain forest, sometimes making only four hundred yards' progress a day. When they ran out of food, they roasted ants. They climbed over giant tree roots and had to pitch camp on swampy ground in the midst of tropical downpours, one of which lasted seventeen hours without interruption. Men deserted, got lost in the jungle, drowned, or succumbed to tetanus, dysentery, and gangrenous ulcers. Others were killed by the arrows and poisoned-stake traps of forest-dwellers terrified by these armed, starving strangers rampaging through their territory.

  By the time they finally reached Emin, Stanley and his surviving men were hungry and exhausted. Because most of the supplies were hundreds of miles behind them with the rear column and its mad commander, the explorer could offer the diminutive pasha little except some ammunition, fan mail, several bottles of champagne, and the new dress uniform—which turned out to be much too large. In fact, it was Stanley who had to ask Emin for supplies. The pasha met them, Stanley wrote, in "a clean suit of snowy cotton drilling, well-ironed and of perfect fit," his face showing "not a trace ... of ill-health or anxiety; it rather indicated good condition of body and peace of mind." Emin, still happily gathering specimens for the British Museum, politely declined Leopold's proposal to join his province to the new Congo state. Most embarrassing of all to the bedraggled vanguard of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, the rebel threat had eased since Emin's letters of several years earlier, and he turned out not to be eager for relief.

  Stanley greatly feared returning home without Emin. The pasha wrote in his diary, "For him everything depends on whether he is able to take me along, for only then ... would his expedition be regarded as totally successful.... He would rather perish than leave without me!" Stanley did at last succeed in persuading the reluctant pasha to head back to Europe with him, in part because the very arrival of the Relief Expedition's large trigger-happy force stirred up the Mahdist rebels all over again. So Stanley and Emin and their followers trekked for several months to the east African coast, reaching the sea at a small German post in today's Tanzania.

  A German battery fired an artillery salute in their honor, and officials gave the two of them a banquet at the local officers' mess. A naval band played; Stanley, Emin, and a German major gave speeches. "The wines were choice and well-selected and iced," writes Stanley. Then the nearsighted Emin, who had been moving up and down the banquet table, chatting with the guests and drinking champagne, stepped through a second-floor window that he apparently thought opened on a veranda. It didn't. He fell to the street and was knocked unconscious. He had to remain in a local German hospital for two months, and Stanley was unable to bring him back to Europe in triumph. Most embarrassing of all for Stanley was that Emin Pasha, once he recovered, went to work neither for his British rescuers nor for Leopold, but for the Germans.

  For some months after Stanley's return in 1890, a controversy boiled in England over the loss of more than half the expedition's men and over the atrocities committed under his command. One weekly lampooned him:

  And when the heat of Afric's sun

  Grew quite too enervating,

  Some bloodshed with the Maxim gun

  Was most exhilarating!

  The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition had indeed been brutal. But those who condemned it were unaware that, compared with the bloodshed beginning just then in central Africa, it was only a sideshow.

  7. THE FIRST HERETIC

  LEOPOLD'S WILL treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited real estate to be disposed of by its owner. In this the king was no different from other Europeans of his age, explorers, journalists, and empire-builders alike, who talked of Africa as if it were without Africans: an expanse of empty space waiting to be filled by the cities and railway lines constructed through the magic of European industry.

  To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap of empathy, a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold's regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as a theft of land and freedom. For the first time, however, a visitor now arrives in the Congo who sees the colony around him with such eyes. Let us catch up with him at a station on the banks of the Congo River, on the muggy mid-July day in 1890 when he first puts his feelings on paper.

  There are now a number of Leopold's stations on the river network, each a combination of military base and collecting point for ivory. Typically, a few buildings with thatched roofs and shady verandas, sheltered by palm trees, provide sleeping quarters for white officials. From a pole flies the blue flag with the gold star. Some food comes from banana trees, a garden growing manioc and other vegetables, and pens for chickens, goats, or pigs. A wooden blockhouse with rifle ports atop a small man-made hillock provides defense; often there is a stockade as well. Elephant tusks lie in a shed or in the open, guarded by armed sentries and awaiting transport to the coast. African dugout canoes are drawn up on the riverbank beside piles of wood cut in short lengths for steamboat boilers. One of the most important stations is a thousand miles upstream from Leopoldville at Stanley Falls, the upper limit of navigation on the main stretch of the Congo River.

  At the Stanley Falls station on this July day, a forty-year-old man sits down in a white-hot blaze of anger. In a graceful, energetic hand, he begins writing. Perhaps he sits outside, his back against a palm trunk; perhaps he borrows the desk of the station clerk. As we can see in the handful of stiff, formal portrait photos we have of him, his hair is cropped short; his mustache tapers to long tips; he wears a bowtie and a high, white, starched collar. Maybe it is too hot for the collar and tie this day on the riverbank, but maybe not: some visitors dress formally in the Congo at all times.

  The document that flows from the man's pen over the next day or two is a milestone in the literature of human rights and of investigative journalism. It is entitled An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, by Colonel the Honorable Geo. W. Williams, of the United States of America.

  George Washington Williams was indeed an American. He was not, however, a colonel, a claim that was to cause him problems later. And he was black. Largely because of that, he has long been ignored. Among the eager throng of visitors drawn to the Congo as Leopold began to exploit it, Williams became the first great dissenter. And like many travelers who find themselves in a moral inferno, he had begun in search of something he hoped would be more like paradise.

  ***

  Williams had come to the Congo over a route that seems almost as if it had taken him through several different lives. Born in Pennsylvania in 1849, he had only scanty schooling, and in 1864 he enlisted—semiliterate, underage, and with an assumed name—in the 41st U.S. Colored Troops of the Union Army. He fought in several battles during the drive on Richmond and Petersburg in the closing months of the war and was wounded in combat.

  Afterward, like some other Civil War veterans in search of work, he enlisted in the army of the Republic of Mexico, which was fighting to overthrow King Leopold II's ambitious but unlucky brother-in-law, Emperor Maximilian. When he returned home, with no job skills except soldiering, Williams reenlisted in the U.S. Army and passed the better part of a year with a cavalry regiment fighting the Plains Indians. Sometime during the second h
alf of 1867, when they both spent time at various army posts in Kansas, Williams's path may have crossed that of a young newspaper correspondent, Henry Morton Stanley.

  After leaving the army the next year, Williams studied briefly at Howard University, which, when he mentioned it in later years, sometimes came out sounding like Harvard University. Later in his life, he also claimed a doctoral degree he had never earned. He was a brilliant student, however, and, moving on to the Newton Theological Institution, outside Boston, managed to compress a three-year graduate theology curriculum into two. In letters he wrote just after his army days, barely a word is spelled correctly, and the sentences are painfully garbled. But a few years later he could compose fluently in the rolling cadences of the nineteenth-century pulpit. A speech he gave when he graduated from Newton in 1874 sounded the theme that would lead him to the Congo sixteen years later:

  For nearly three centuries Africa has been robbed of her sable sons.... The Negro of this country can turn to his Saxon brothers, and say, as Joseph said to his brethren, who wickedly sold him, "...we, after learning your arts and sciences, might return to Egypt and deliver the rest of our brethren who are yet in the house of bondage." That day will come!

  Williams had already begun writing and speaking about a bondage closer to home—the position of American blacks, enduring the long post-Civil War backlash of lynchings and Ku Klux Klan violence, and the return of white supremacist rule throughout the South. As a veteran, he was especially angry that so few hopes of the war that ended slavery had been realized.

  The year he graduated from the seminary, Williams married and became pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church, the major black congregation in Boston. In this job, as in others to come, he did not stay long. His life seems to have been infused with restlessness, for although he had considerable success in each new profession he took up, he seldom remained in it.

  After only a year as a minister, he moved to Washington, D.C., and founded a national black newspaper, the Commoner. The first issue proudly printed congratulatory letters from the famous Abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, but the paper soon folded, and Williams returned to the ministry, this time in Cincinnati. He became a columnist for a local newspaper and once again started a paper of his own. Then, in another abrupt turn, he resigned his pulpit, studied law, and apprenticed himself to a lawyer. In 1879, at the age of thirty, he was elected the first black member of the Ohio state legislature, where he raised hackles by trying to win repeal of a law banning interracial marriages. He left the legislature after only one term.

  In his next career, Williams made a much greater mark, and by the time he again moved on, he left something substantial and lasting behind him. It was a massive book, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens, together with a preliminary consideration of the Unity of the Human Family and historical Sketch of Africa and an Account of the Negro Governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Published in two volumes, in 1882 and 1883, the book took its readers from early African kingdoms all the way through the Civil War and Reconstruction.

  Williams was a pioneer among American historians in the use of nontraditional sources. He sensed what most academics only began to acknowledge nearly a hundred years later: that in writing the history of powerless people, drawing on conventional, published sources is far from enough. While traveling around the country, Williams did look through innumerable libraries, but he did much more. He wrote a letter to a national black newspaper asking readers to send him "minutes of any colored church organization" and other such documents. He wrote to General William Tecumseh Sherman, asking his opinion of his black troops. He interviewed fellow Civil War veterans. And when his 1092-page book appeared, it was widely and favorably reviewed. Several decades earlier, wrote the New York Times, patronizing but impressed, "it would have been very generally doubted if one of that race could be the author of a work requiring so much native ability." W.E.B. Du Bois would later call Williams "the greatest historian of the race."

  Williams began to travel the lecture circuit, addressing veterans' groups, fraternal organizations, and church congregations, black and white. He seemed to have a speech for any occasion, from Fourth of July celebrations to a meeting of the Philomathian Literary Society of Washington, and he soon signed up with the leading lecture agent of the day, James B. Pond, one of whose clients was Stanley. He managed to meet everyone from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Presidents Grover Cleveland and Rutherford B. Hayes; and many who met him came away with a positive impression of the earnest young man. Less impressed were many black Americans, who thought Williams too quick to turn his back on them in his eagerness to consort with the high and mighty.

  Despite his successes, money flowed through Williams's fingers, and he left a string of angry creditors behind him. He continued to pour his immense energy into a variety of projects. He wrote a second book, about the experience of black soldiers in the Civil War. He went to New Mexico in search of land for a possible settlement of black farmers. He fired off articles for newspapers. He worked as a lawyer for the Cape Cod Canal Company. He wrote a play about the slave trade. He threw himself into the work of Union veterans' organizations, receiving the honorary title of colonel from the most important of them, the Grand Army of the Republic. He testified before Congress in favor of a monument to black Civil War veterans. He was nominated as minister to Haiti by President Chester A. Arthur, for whom he had campaigned. But Arthur left office, and political enemies circulated rumors about Williams's debts, so the appointment did not take effect.

  Once when Williams was meeting with Arthur at the White House, someone else had chosen the same time to see the president: Henry Shelton Sanford, then lobbying in Washington for United States recognition of Leopold's Congo. The president introduced his two visitors to each other. In the embryonic Congo state that Sanford described, Williams saw a chance to pursue the dream he had first mentioned in his seminary graduation speech. He wrote to one of Leopold's aides, proposing to recruit black Americans to work in the Congo. In Africa, surely, there would be the chance for pioneering and advancement then denied blacks in the United States. He also submitted a statement to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations urging recognition of the International Association of the Congo and added the Congo to his list of lecture topics.

  In 1889, Williams won an assignment to write a series of articles from Europe for a press syndicate. He also tried but failed to be appointed an American delegate to the Anti-Slavery Conference in Brussels; nonetheless, he passed himself off as a delegate when he visited London. Brussels, he found, was a city filled with Europeans trying to outdo each other in condemning slavery, and in this atmosphere the young American descendant of slaves made a good impression. Yet despite his impressive list of achievements, Williams could not resist embellishing it:

  Colonel Williams [reported the newspaper L'Indépendance Belge], who won his rank during the Civil War ... has written at least five or six works about Negroes.... He was the first person to propose official recognition of the Congo state by the United States and was allowed, to this end, to give a major speech to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in Washington which was crowned with complete success.

  The first newspaper piece Williams sent home from Belgium was an interview with Leopold, whom he described as "a pleasant and entertaining conversationalist. His hair and full beard were carefully trimmed and liberally sprinkled with gray. His features were strong and clear cut and keen; and his eyes, bright and quick, flashed with intelligent interest from behind a pair of eyeglasses."

  When Williams asked what the king expected in return for all the money he had spent developing the Congo, Leopold replied, "What I do there is done as a Christian duty to the poor African; and I do not wish to have one franc back of all the money I have expended." On this first meeting, Williams, like many others, was dazzled by the man whom he called "one of the noblest sovereigns in th
e world; an emperor whose highest ambition is to serve the cause of Christian civilization, and to promote the best interests of his subjects, ruling in wisdom, mercy, and justice."

  Leopold clearly saw that the way to charm this particular visitor was to offer a sympathetic ear to his projects, for in the same article Williams reported that the king "proved himself a good listener." What he listened to, apparently, was Williams's long-cherished plan to put black Americans to work in Africa. Williams struck an agreement with a Belgian company to sign up forty skilled artisans and take them to work in the Congo, and also made plans to write a book about the territory. When he returned to the United States, however, and gave his recruitment pitch at a black college in Virginia, he found a skeptical audience with many questions about life in Africa that he could not answer. At that point he postponed the recruiting plan and decided to go first to the Congo and gather material for his book.

  That presented him with the job of raising the money for steamship tickets, food, supplies, and porters for the long trek around the rapids. The main patron he pursued was the American railroad baron Collis P. Huntington, who was a minor investor in the planned Congo railway. Williams sought him out and followed the visit with a stream of flattering letters, which eventually produced a small subsidy for his African travels.

  In December 1889, Williams met President Benjamin Harrison at the White House. It is not clear that Harrison did more than wish him a good trip to Africa, but, as was often the case in his life, Williams later used this meeting with a man of power to imply that he was carrying out an important confidential mission for him.

  As Williams prepared for his trip, dropping references to his connection with the president and Huntington, Leopold and his aides grew suspicious that he might be covertly serving American businessmen intent on moving into the territory. When Williams passed through Brussels on the way to the Congo, he later said: