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

by Adam Hochschild

  Question: Did M. Hottiaux [a company official] ever give you living women or children?

  Answer: Yes, he gave me six women and two men.

  Question: What for?

  Answer: In payment for rubber which I brought into the station, telling me I could eat them, or kill them, or use them as slaves—as I liked.

  ***

  The rain forest bordering the Kasai River was rich in rubber, and William Sheppard and the other American Presbyterians there found themselves in the midst of a cataclysm. The Kasai was also the scene of some of the strongest resistance to Leopold's rule. Armed men of a chief allied with the regime rampaged through the region where Sheppard worked, plundering and burning more than a dozen villages. Floods of desperate refugees sought help at Sheppard's mission station.

  In 1899 the reluctant Sheppard was ordered by his superiors to travel into the bush, at some risk to himself, to investigate the source of the fighting. There he found bloodstained ground, destroyed villages, and many bodies; the air was thick with the stench of rotting flesh. On the day he reached the marauders' camp, his eye was caught by a large number of objects being smoked. The chief "conducted us to a framework of sticks, under which was burning a slow fire, and there they were, the right hands, I counted them, 81 in all." The chief told Sheppard, "See! Here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the State how many we have killed." He proudly showed Sheppard some of the bodies the hands had come from. The smoking preserved the hands in the hot, moist climate, for it might be days or weeks before the chief could display them to the proper official and receive credit for his kills.

  Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold's rubber system. Like the hostage-taking, the severing of hands was deliberate policy, as even high officials would later admit. "During my time in the Congo I was the first commissioner of the Equator district," recalled Charles Lemaire after his retirement. "As soon as it was a question of rubber, I wrote to the government, 'To gather rubber in the district ... one must cut off hands, noses and ears.'"

  If a village refused to submit to the rubber regime, state or company troops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby villages would get the message. But on such occasions some European officers were mistrustful. For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone, not "wasted" in hunting or, worse yet, saved for possible use in a mutiny. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. "Sometimes," said one officer to a missionary, soldiers "shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man." In some military units there was even a "keeper of the hands"; his job was the smoking.

  Sheppard was not the first foreign witness to see severed hands in the Congo, nor would he be the last. But the articles he wrote for missionary magazines about his grisly find were reprinted and quoted widely, both in Europe and the United States, and it is partly due to him that people overseas began to associate the Congo with severed hands. A half-dozen years after Sheppard's stark discovery, while attacking the expensive public works Leopold was building with his Congo profits, the socialist leader Émile Vandervelde would speak in the Belgian Parliament of "monumental arches which one will someday call the Arches of the Severed Hands." William Sheppard's outspokenness would eventually bring down the wrath of the authorities and one day Vandervelde, an attorney, would find himself defending Sheppard in a Congo courtroom. But that is getting ahead of our story.

  As the rubber terror spread throughout the rain forest, it branded people with memories that remained raw for the rest of their lives. A Catholic priest who recorded oral histories half a century later quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of a particularly hated state official named Léon Fiévez, who terrorized a district along the river three hundred miles north of Stanley Pool:

  All the blacks saw this man as the Devil of the Equator.... From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets.... A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a big net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river.... Rubber caused these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.

  A Force Publique officer who passed through Fiévez's post in 1894 quotes Fiévez himself describing what he did when the surrounding villages failed to supply his troops with the fish and manioc he had demanded: "I made war against them. One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies at the station ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people ... but that allowed five hundred others to live."

  With "humanitarian" ground rules that included cutting off hands and heads, sadists like Fiévez had a field day. The station chief at M'Bima used his revolver to shoot holes in Africans' ear lobes. Raoul de Premorel, an agent working along the Kasai River, enjoyed giving large doses of castor oil to people he considered malingerers. When villagers, in a desperate attempt to meet the weight quota, turned in rubber mixed with dirt or pebbles to the agent Albéric Detiége, he made them eat it. When two porters failed to use a designated latrine, a district commissioner, Jean Verdussen, ordered them paraded in front of troops, their faces rubbed with excrement.

  As news of the white man's soldiers and their baskets of severed hands spread through the Congo, a myth gained credence with Africans that was a curious reversal of the white obsession with black cannibalism. The cans of corned beef seen in white men's houses, it was said, did not contain meat from the animals shown on the label; they contained chopped-up hands.

  11. A SECRET SOCIETY OF MURDERERS

  ONCE WHEN Leopold and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany were watching a parade in Berlin, Leopold, grumbling about the erosion of royal authority, remarked to the kaiser, "There is really nothing left for us kings except money!" Rubber would soon bring Leopold money beyond imagining, but the Congo alone was never enough to satisfy him. Fantasizing an empire that would encompass the two legendary rivers of Africa, the Congo and the Nile, he imagined linking the rivers by a great railway, and in the early 1890s dispatched expeditions northeast from the Congo toward the Nile valley. One of these claimed the ancient copper mines of Bahr-el-Ghazal, taking care to claim the mines for Leopold personally while committing the Congo state to provide military protection.

  The French finally blocked the king from further moves toward the Nile, but he was already dreaming of new colonies elsewhere. "I would like to make out of our little Belgium, with its six million people, the capital of an immense empire," he said. "The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, are in a state of decadence and their colonies will one day or another come on to the market." He asked Prime Minister William Gladstone of England about the possibility of leasing Uganda.

  Leopold was quick to embellish his imperial schemes with any humanitarian sentiment in the air. In 1896, he proposed to another surprised British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, that a Sudanese army under Congo state officers be used "for the purpose of invading and occupying Armenia and so putting a stop to the massacres [of Armenians by the Turks] which were moving Europe so deeply." (Queen Victoria thought her cousin Leopold was becoming delusional.) When there was a crisis in Crete, he suggested that Congolese troops help restore order. After the United States won the Spanish-American War, he proposed that a corporation lease some of Spain's remaining territories, such as the Canary Islands in the Atlantic or the Carolines in the South Pacific. The corporation, he suggested, could be registered in a "neutral" state, such as, for example, the État Indépendant du Congo.

  None of these dreams distracted Leopold from managing his main source of income. He kept the Con
go's growing profitability as secret as possible, however, lest it stir up demands that he pay back the Belgian government's big loan. For as long as Leopold could get away with it, the Congo state did not publish a budget. When at last it did so, it presented revenue figures that grossly understated the state's real profits.

  One advantage of controlling your own country is that you can issue bonds. This eventually was to become a source of revenue for Leopold almost equal to that of rubber. All told, the king issued bonds worth more than a hundred million francs, or roughly half a billion of today's dollars. Some bonds he sold; some he gave to favorites; some he kept for his personal portfolio; some he used in lieu of cash to pay for public works projects in Belgium. Since the bonds were for terms as long as ninety-nine years, Leopold knew that paying back the principal would be somebody else's problem. Supposedly the bond money was for development in the Congo, but little of it was ever spent there.

  Leopold much preferred to spend it, and his Congo rubber profits, in Europe. For such a shrewd and ambitious man, he was notably unimaginative in his tastes, and used his vast new fortune in ways that would earn him a place less in the history books than in the guidebooks. A string of monuments, new palace wings, museums, and pavilions began going up all over Belgium. At his favorite seaside resort, Ostend, Leopold poured millions of francs into a promenade, several parks, and an elaborately turreted gallery (decorated with eighty-five thousand geraniums for its opening) for the racetrack he frequented. Rubber earnings also financed a golf course at nearby Klemskerke, a royal chalet at Raversijde, and endless renovations and the enlargement of the château of Laeken. Many of these riches Leopold officially gave to his country with much fanfare as a Royal Gift, although he continued to live in the castles and palaces in the same manner as he always had. His real purposes in bestowing the Royal Gift were to have the nation pay for the upkeep of these properties and to keep them out of the hands of his three daughters, to whom Belgian law required that he leave his personal possessions.

  In 1895, Leopold turned sixty, and as he grew older he became a hypochondriac. Any aide who coughed risked banishment for several days. Always fearful of getting a cold, he wore a waterproof bag around his beard when he went outside in wet weather or swam in the sea. He demanded that the palace tablecloths be boiled daily to kill germs.

  When not traveling, he lived mostly at Laeken. He rose early, had a cold shower, trimmed his great beard, received a massage, read the early morning mail, and ate a huge breakfast—a half-dozen poached eggs, a stack of toast, and an entire jar of marmalade. Then he spent much of the day walking around his beloved gardens and greenhouses, often reading mail and dictating answers while on the move; his secretaries had to learn to write while walking. Lunch lasted precisely half an hour; the king read newspapers and letters while eating and sometimes scribbled instructions in the margins of letters in nearly illegible handwriting that his staff spent anxious hours each day deciphering. Other family members at the table were expected to remain silent.

  In the afternoon, he was driven to the Royal Palace in downtown Brussels to meet officials and visitors, then back to Laeken for the evening meal. The high point of his day was the arrival of the Times of London. Each afternoon a carefully wrapped copy of that morning's paper was tossed from the Ostend-Basel express as the train passed the private railway station, bearing the royal coat of arms, at Laeken. A footman ironed the paper—germs again—and the king read it in bed at night. (When the Times later joined his chorus of critics, Leopold angrily announced that he was stopping his subscription. But he secretly sent his valet to the Brussels railway station each day to buy him a copy.)

  Perhaps Leopold liked the Times because it was a newspaper written not for a small country but for a powerful one. In any case, his lust for colonies still extended to all corners of the world. In 1897, he started to invest Congo state profits in a railway in China, eventually making big money on the deal. He saw that country as he had seen the "magnificent African cake," a feast to be consumed, and he was as ready as ever to invite himself to the table. Of the route he hoped to get for his railway line he said, "This is the spine of China; if they give it to me I'll also take some cutlets." He tried to arrange an exchange—Chinese laborers for the Congo; Congolese soldiers for China—that would give him a military foot in the door, like the other Western powers now maneuvering in the Far East. He bought several small parcels of land in China in the name of the État Indépendant du Congo. When Leopold sent a Congo state delegation—all Belgians, of course—for negotiations, the Chinese viceroy Li Hung-Chang feigned surprise: "Am I right in thinking that Africans are black?"

  ***

  Back in the Congo, the rubber boom gave added urgency to the territory's major construction job: the narrow-gauge railway from Matadi to Stanley Pool, around the big rapids. This project required up to sixty thousand workers at one time. Although the line was only 241 miles long, and little more than half the width of American standard-gauge tracks, climate, disease, and terrain made it one of the more daunting railway construction projects in history. It took three years to build just the first fourteen miles. An early surveyor of this forbidding stretch of land described it as "a piling up of enormous stones which, in certain places, seem to have been thrown on top of each other by the hands of giants." The whole route required ninety-nine metal bridges, totaling more than twelve miles in length.

  Construction workers were brought in from British and French territories in West Africa, from Hong Kong and MaCão, and from the British West Indies. Leopold remained fascinated with the idea of using Chinese workers in the Congo. "What would it cost," he wrote to an aide, "to establish five big Chinese villages in the Congo? One in the North, another in the Northeast, one in the East, another in the South, and one between Matadi and Leopoldville. Two thousand Chinese to mark our frontiers, what would it cost?" The idea of five villages vanished, but Leopold's dream did cost the lives of many of the 540 Chinese brought to work on the railway in 1892. Three hundred of them died on the job or fled into the bush. Most of the latter were never seen again, although several were later found more than five hundred miles in the interior. They had walked toward the rising sun, trying to get to Africa's east coast and then home.

  Several hundred laborers from the Caribbean island of Barbados had evidently been told they were being recruited for somewhere else; when their ship tied up at Boma in September 1892 and they realized they were in the Congo, they rebelled in fury. Soldiers fired at them, killing two and wounding many more; the rest were sent on to the railhead at Matadi the same day and put to work.

  The railway was a modest engineering success and a major human disaster. Men succumbed to accidents, dysentery, smallpox, beriberi, and malaria, all exacerbated by bad food and relentless floggings by the two-hundred-man railway militia force. Engines ran off tracks; freight cars full of dynamite exploded, blowing to bits workers, black and white. Sometimes there were no shelters for the people to sleep in, and recalcitrant laborers were led to work in chains. The European construction foremen and engineers could cancel their contracts and go home, and a steady flow did so. The black and Asian workers could not. When bugles sounded in the morning, crowds of angry laborers laid at the feet of European supervisors the bodies of their comrades who had died during the night.

  In a metaphor that is echoed elsewhere in Africa, local legend along the railway line has it that each tie cost one African life and each telegraph pole one European life. Even in the rosy official figures, the railway death toll was 132 whites and 1800 nonwhites. Some estimates, however, place the nonwhite toll close to 1800 a year in the first two years, which were the worst. Cemeteries dotted the rail line. Again and again workers tried to escape; three hundred men from Sierra Leone, brandishing hammers, shovels, and pickaxes, stormed the port of Matadi and tried to commandeer a ship at the dock to take them home. Club-wielding guards—themselves recruited from Zanzibar—forced them back. Other workers went on strike or fled to
nearby Portuguese territory.

  In 1898, eight years after construction started, the first short, stumpy steam engine, bedecked with flags, pulled two railway cars all the way up the narrow-gauge track from Matadi to Stanley Pool. A large tent decorated with flowers awaited its arrival; state officials, military men, officers of the railway, and a bishop all banqueted and drank to Leopold's health in champagne. The assembled VIPs ceremonially bolted the last rail, a cannon fired a twenty-one-gun salute, and all the steamboats in Stanley Pool blew their whistles. Officials erected a monument on the old caravan route that the rail line had replaced: three life-size metal figures of porters—one carrying a large box on his head, two collapsed in exhaustion beside him. The inscription read: THE RAILWAY FREED THEM PROM PORTERAGE. It said nothing about who made them become porters in the first place.

  Although it included hairpin turns and steep grades that stretched a one-way trip to two days, the railway added enormously to the state's power and wealth. The more than eleven million pounds of rubber a year the Congo was producing by the turn of the century could now reach the sea from the steamboat docks of Stanley Pool without being carried for three weeks on men's heads. Rail cars going the other direction moved steamboats around the rapids in far larger pieces than porters could carry. Leopoldville quickly became the busiest river port in central Africa, home to steamers of up to five hundred tons. One sidewheeler on the river, the sixty-ton Ville de Paris, had begun life as an excursion boat on the Seine.

  ***

  Except for those employed by the state or on projects like the railway, Leopold was wary of foreigners in the Congo. He was, however, saddled with one group of them, several hundred foreign Protestant missionaries like William Sheppard and his colleagues. Almost all had come from England, the United States, or Sweden, countries where Leopold hoped to curry favor. The missionaries had come to the Congo eager to evangelize, to fight polygamy, and to impart to Africans a Victorian sense of sin.* Before long, however, the rubber terror meant that missionaries had trouble finding bodies to clothe or souls to save. Frightened villagers would disappear into the jungle for weeks when they saw the smoke of an approaching steamboat on the horizon. One British missionary was asked repeatedly by Africans, "Has the Savior you tell us of any power to save us from the rubber trouble?" Unexpectedly, certainly without intending to take on such a role, the missionaries found themselves acting as observers on a battlefield, and Sheppard was by no means the only one who bore witness. In 1894, a Swedish missionary recorded a despairing Congolese song: