Reaction from Renier Nijskens, president and Baudouin Peeters, director of URBA.
Ben Affleck. (c) Reuters
KING LEOPOLD II AND THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CONGO
The Board of Directors of the Royal Belgian-African Union (www.urba-kbau.be), the successor to UROME-KBUOL, has learned through the press that the project to produce and direct a film on King Leopold II’s legacy in the Independent State of Congo (EIC) has been revived.
We hope that the team responsible for preparing this highly controversial subject (see MIKE FLEMING JR’s article of Thursday 12 September 2013) since 2013 has been able to gather reliable, if not truly scientific, information on the subject.
In the absence of reliable data, we can only hope that impartial experts will be brought in to build a truthful story, as opposed to the kind of documents full of baseless accusations so often published by the horde of anti-colonial ideologues.
If you want to know more about the Independent State of Congo, we highly recommend reading Frederick Starr’s 15 articles that appeared in the Chicago Tribune from 20 January to 3 February 1909 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50567/50567-h/50567-h.htm).
This American anthropologist, a self-proclaimed anti-colonialist, spent 13 months in the Congo basin to verify for himself the allegations against King Leopold II.
Since the beginning of the anti-Leopold II campaign, which originated in the UK in 1895/1910, bona fide historians have published so much that their contributions can no longer be ignored. Unfortunately, too many pseudo-historians and even genuine but ideologically biased historians do not hesitate to violate the truth and invent a manipulated history.
In response to this evil, our association recently published a booklet entitled “Regard sur le passé” (Looking at the past) with an anthology of ignored facts and “disturbing” testimonies from neutral observers from different countries. Four of our members have also published a book based on evidence and facts: “Le Congo au temps des Belges. Une réalité qui dérange. Bilan et réalisations (1885- 1960)”, (Editions Dynamedia, Brussels, 2019). This book refutes the lies incessantly spread in the smear campaign, which was originally launched in the UK and replicated in the US (we explain the origins of this campaign in a later section).
Here are some facts about issues that are systematically raised when the issue of the Independent State of Congo comes up:
1. Impartial historians agree that the population decline observed at the time was due to several causes, including diseases (sleeping sickness, smallpox, malaria, etc.), poor hygiene, widespread famine and, above all, incessant tribal wars, with their inherent widespread cannibalism and, last but not least, the trade in slaves from the East that was carried on for centuries by Arab-Swahili such as Rumalisa, Rashid and Tippo Tip. While the crimes of certain individuals related to the rubber trade are indisputable and must be condemned, it certainly cannot be said that they had a decisive impact on the decimation of the population.
2. As the wealthy king of the second largest industrial power in the world at the time, and one of the only heads of state in the advanced Western world without a colony, Leopold II wanted to join his peers who all had colonial empires. After several failed attempts in different parts of the world, King Leopold II set his sights on the Congo Basin. The Belgian government itself did not want to become a colonial power at all, and the Belgian parliament only reluctantly supported the king’s personal efforts to create an independent state in Central Africa. The monarch pursued this goal on his own and always hoped that this state would eventually become a reality for the Kingdom of Belgium. His real goal was to increase his power within the group of advanced nations, to pacify his Independent State of Congo by ending the incessant tribal wars and resulting atrocities, such as cannibalism, poisoning, human sacrifice and mutilation, and to eliminate the Arab-Swahili slave traders who were decimating the population of the eastern part of the country.
3. Using a very clever diplomatic strategy, he managed to convince the other colonial powers to let him establish a state in the Congo River basin in exchange for a promise to allow free trade for all nations, eradicate slavery and introduce civilisation; the Berlin Treaty of 1885 is absolutely clear in this respect. King Leopold became the sovereign of the Independent State of Congo thanks to the diplomatic recognition of all the major states of the time. There were never any plans to organise a military expedition to “subdue” the Congo tribes. After international recognition, the Belgian parliament authorised Leopold II to be sovereign of the Congo Independent State in his personal capacity in addition to being King of the Belgians (this was common practice at the time). The distinction is important and all official documents signed by Leopold II bear the double mention: “Leopold, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of the Congo”. The government of the Kingdom of Belgium had no say in Leopold II’s administration of Congo Free State and therefore bears no legal responsibility for the period of Congo Free State.
4. Having been recognised as sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, he immediately began the massive process of pacification and development, pouring all his energy and his own money into the implementation of massive infrastructure works to open up this vast territory and introduce factors of progress the establishment of a network of administrators and outposts, the organisation of the Force Publique, the arrival of missionaries with their educational programmes, the construction of an extensive transport and communication infrastructure, such as the railway from Matadi to Léopoldville and the development and operation of waterways with a large fleet of steamships, the exploration of the mining sector, etc. To achieve all this in record time, he was forced in 1890 to supplement his huge personal investments with a loan of 25 million gold francs from the Belgian government.
5. In the very first official legal provision, the “Ordonnance” of 1 July 1885, published in the Bulletin officiel de l’Etat no. 1 (page 30), the land issue was clearly defined as follows: “Article 2. No one shall have the right to occupy untitled fallow land, nor to deprive the natives of the land they occupy; fallow land must be considered as the property of the State“. This is an established practice in other colonial territories: see the “Crown Lands” in the British Empire. And the principle of state ownership of fallow land guaranteed that indigenous people would be protected by preserving their territories.
6. The different tribes were allowed to live according to their own customs and culture. Only practices considered inhuman were prohibited, such as cannibalism, mutilation, burying a dead chief with his living wives and killing servants.
7. It is true that young men were requisitioned to strengthen the Force Publique and gradually replace the few thousand West African mercenaries hired in the early years, and that tribal chiefs had to provide the labour needed to maintain roads, portage and canoe, develop economic activities and provide products for export, such as rubber and ivory. Introducing a work culture for men, in societies where traditionally only women were responsible for work, was in itself a very difficult development. The creation of the Force Publique had nothing to do with rubber collection, which was mainly in the hands of private companies. The Force Publique was mainly used in the anti-slavery campaigns against the Arab-Swahili. It should be remembered that the Force Publique had only 6,051 troops in 1892, 10,294 in 1895, 14,799 in 1900 and 15,908 in 1905, of which senior Belgian officers were always only a small minority.
8. Indeed, since on the one hand the administration officials, who were few in number, were very powerful and had little control, and on the other hand the traders and companies who owned large concessions wanted to make profits to maintain and expand their operations, several atrocities and brutal abuses were committed. The use of local “sentinels” to oversee rubber collection and the system of bonuses for official collectors undeniably led to abuses. But this was not a systematic or deliberate modus operandi and certainly not the king’s intention: as early as 1896, he established a “Commission for the Protection of the Indigenous Population”, composed of representatives of Christian religious orders and American Baptist missionaries and charged with direct communication with the governor-general. In July 1904, when reports of new abuses with frightening elements came in, he decided to send an International Commission of Inquiry to the area, which, after four months of intensive contacts, issued a very frank report with a long list of reforms. The scathing report was published in full in the official gazette of the Independent State of Congo (unlike what was customary in other colonial states). The king approved them without reservation and converted them into no less than twenty-four executive orders with corrective measures (full text of the report: see www.kaowarsom.be/documents/BOC/BOEIC1905.pdf, pp 145-299). The results were so stunning that a local chief, Manangana of Avakubi, in a tasteful message to a Swedish officer (Eskill Sundhagen) acknowledged the progress made as follows: ” During the time when the Arabs ruled our land, they took us, our women and our children as slaves. They burned our villages. The white man never burns villages and when we bring him chickens or bananas, he pays us well. He also pays us fairly for the mupira (rubber) we collect. The white man has ended slavery…. But we blacks still want the whites to go home, because we have to maintain the roads and we can no longer fight with the neighbouring tribes and eat our captives, because if we eat them, we hang! “.
9. As for the deep-rooted story of “severed hands”, the custom of chopping off the hands of thieves and mutilating enemies was a local custom (still prevalent in current conflicts in Africa). Chopping off the hands of thieves was introduced in Africa for centuries by the Arab-Swahili and was based on Islamic Sharia law, but the custom spread to other tribes, as explained by African-American Sowell. The first penal code introduced by Leopold II in 1888 strictly prohibited this cruel practice. The 1905 “Commission of Inquiry” report is absolutely clear in this regard.
10. The income from the sale of rubber mainly helped finance the development budget of the Independent State of Congo and repay the King’s heavy debts; it did not increase his immense personal fortune before the colonial period. One week of rubber production went to the state as a form of tax; the revenue from the other three weeks of the month went to the tapper himself.
It is true that the king used the income from the rubber trade in Belgium for some well-known architectural projects, which are now criticised. But at the time, it was common for all colonial powers to develop major architectural projects using colonial revenues.
11. Belgium (Independent State of Congo/Belgian Congo) was the only colonial power that never engaged in the slave trade. The indigenous peoples were not enslaved, but freed from the barbaric slave trade led by the Arab-Swahili who were responsible for unspeakable atrocities. The King’s administration succeeded in developing peaceful relations with most of the tribes and, with the Force Publique – a force gradually composed of indigenous people and led in the early years by officers of various European nationalities, before being led exclusively by Belgians – achieved pacification over almost the entire vast territory (even in 1905, the total presence of non-indigenous people in the EIC was only 2,511 people, including 1,410 Belgians. The vast majority of these Belgians were active in administration, trade, religious missions and the private sector).
12. Some authors do not hesitate to claim, without any evidence, that Leopold II’s regime was responsible for the deaths of millions of Congolese. This claim is simply a repetition of the accusation of genocide, which has never been proven due to lack of statistics and knowledge about the size of the population in 1885, when the Independent State of Congo was established.
It is well known that Stanley estimated the size of the indigenous population based on a very limited number of observations along the Congo River and on dubious methods of extrapolation calculation that contained multiple errors. In fact, no one, even today, can give reliable figures. One may wonder why so many different groups of people who arrived in Congo Free State between 1885 and 1908 (missionaries who settled in different regions of Congo, engineers, administrators, etc.) never sounded the alarm on this issue when it was systematically reinforced and emphasised only by Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian Protestants and not supported in the conclusions of the Independent Commission of Inquiry.
It is worth noting that the creation of the Independent State of Congo was the result of a diplomatic campaign and not a bloody military conquest as was the case, for example, with the Spanish colonies or the war between the US army and the indigenous Indian tribes who were deprived of their land and confined in so-called reservations.
It can also be interesting to look at the abuses that were commonplace in our own ‘enlightened’ American and European societies of the time (child labour, exploitation of workers, etc.).
Why this anti-King Leopold II / anti-Belgian smear campaign? The British agenda!
At the Berlin Conference, no colonial power showed any interest in the Congo Basin. Only later did it turn out that this vast area was much more interesting than initially thought and that the representatives of the colonial powers at the Berlin Conference had been misled by Belgian diplomats. The British and French, however, were not worried as they were convinced that the Belgian newcomers to the colonial scene would not be able to manage this vast territory anyway. But when it finally turned out that the king and his government were living up to their promises, the Belgians had to somehow get out of the way so that the Congo basin could be divided among the other colonial powers. What better way to expel the Belgians than a smear campaign?
As Liverpool merchants saw the centre of colonial trade gradually shift to Antwerp, they supported the smear campaign of E.D. Morel’s Association for the Reform of the Congo. Morel, originally an admirer of Belgian colonisation (” The work done by the Belgians in tropical Africa is comparable to that of any other nation…Despite the behaviour of half a dozen scoundrels to be found in every country under the sun, the Belgians have something to be proud of. We cannot do them full justice” ) would later admit that in his action against colonisation in general, he dared not attack the great powers, especially the British and the French (he had both nationalities) and had to attack the weakest link in the chain.
Some Protestant missionaries also had a grudge against King Leopold II because the King relied heavily on Catholic missionaries in his quest for civilisation. The Protestant missions there initially felt aggrieved by what they saw (probably rightly) as favouritism towards the Catholic missions.
For other colonial powers, the smear campaign against Leopold II was also a welcome distraction. Is it not interesting to note that the campaign more or less coincided with the censorship of Savorgnan de Brazza’s (until recently hidden) 1905 report on the situation in French Congo? With the German genocide of the Nama and Herrero peoples? And with the British behaviour during the Boer War?
In 1904, tired of accusations of serious misconduct against Belgian officers in the UK, King Leopold II asked for libel charges to be filed in a London court. The British defendants (Burrows and Everett) were convicted of libel because they could not prove their allegations. The case, which had a huge impact in the UK, ended the libel campaign of the time.
British consul Roger Casement, at the invitation of an American missionary, brought back what he described as “irrefutable evidence of Belgian cruelty”. He had found a living person (the one and only) who claimed his hand had been cut off by a Congolese soldier. However, it was later established that the unfortunate young man had lied because his hand had been clinically amputated after an infection caused by an animal bite. It should be noted that Casement’s reliability was rather questionable. This Irish diplomat was eventually hanged by the British for treason.
13. King Leopold’s sovereign rights over Congo were ceded to Belgium by a narrow majority in a divided parliament in 1908, because the Belgian business elite was not interested in it at all, preferring its investments in China, Russia, Egypt and South America! But the Belgian government quickly took responsibility and the fundamental rights of the Congolese people were strengthened (cf. the “Colonial Charter” published in the Bulletin Officiel du Congo Belge No 1).
The Belgian state ensured the further development of this vast territory, 80 times larger than its own, and established the “Pax Belgica” everywhere, right up to the national borders. This laid the foundation for an extraordinarily rapid and substantial development on all fronts. In three generations, this vast country was thrust into the 20th century. At its independence in 1960, Belgian Congo was the richest country in Africa, with a level of development approaching that of Canada and exceeding that of South Korea at the time.
Above all, the Belgian colonisers managed to establish in the country they governed what is known as the GNW (Gross National Welfare) consisting of the following elements:
– Peace, order and security everywhere
– No major famines
– Free high-quality medical services available everywhere, even in the most remote areas
– Free high-quality education
Your project to make a film on this theme is a good opportunity to put certain historical facts in context and objective reality. We remain at the disposal of your team to help them document their research with top-quality, reliable and non-manipulated information.
For the Board of Directors,
Renier NIJSKENS, Baudouin PEETERS,
Chairman and Managing Director
P.S. Below is a list of documents and books we highly recommend:
1. The Fall of the Congo Arabs, Sidney LANGFORD HINDE, Ostara Publications, 1897
2. The Truth about the Congo, Frederick STARR, Forgotten Books, 1907
3. The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to his death, David LIVINGSTONE, Horace Wallers, 2 vol., 1866-1868
4. Across Africa, Verney Lovett CAMERON, Daldy, Isbister Co., 2 vol., 1877
5. The Congo State or the Growth of civilization in Central, Charles Demetrius BOULGER, Thacker, 1898
6. The Congo state is not a slave state: A reply to Mr. E.D. Morel’s pamphlet entitled “The Congo slave state” , University of Michigan Library, Jan. 1903
7. The King Incorporated: Leopold the Second and the Congo, Neal ASCHERSON, Granta Books, 1963
8. Leopold II of the Belgians: King of colonialism, Barbara EMERSON, St. Martin’s Press, 1979
9. New Africa. An Essay over Government Civilization in New Countries and on the Foundation, Organization and Administration of the Congo Free State, Edouard DESCAMPS, Sampson Low, Marston C°, 1904
10. Six years of adventure in Congo-land, Edward-James GLAVE, S. Low, Marston, Ltd, 1893
11. Cruelty in the Congo Free State, Century Magazine, Sept. 1897
12. Colonialism in Africa (1870-1960), Jean STENGERS, Peter Duignan and L.H. Gann, 1969
13. E.D. Morel’s, History of the Congo, Reform Movement, Roger LOUIS Roger Jean STENGERS, Clarendon press, Oxford, 1968
14. The Congo Free State, Guido DE WEERD, Dynamedia, 2017
15. Glance at the past, UROME/KBUOL, 2017
16. L’Etat Indépendant du Congo (1885-1908), André-Bernard ERGO, L’Harmattan, 2013
17. L’Etat Indépendant du Congo, Guido DE WEERD, Dynamedia, 2015
18. Le Congo au temps des Belges, André DE MAERE D’AERTRYCKE, André VLEURINCK, André SCHOROCHOFF, Pierre VERCAUTEREN, Dynamedia, 2019
19. Congo mythes et réalités, Jean STENGERS, Racine, 2017, pp 307 et 308, (l’historien livre une critique en français de l’ouvrage de HOCHSCHILD. Ce document que vous trouverez en annexe pourrait être traduit en anglais).
20. Léopold II Le plus grand Chef d’Etat du Congo, J-P NZAZA KABU ZEX-KONGO, L’Harmattan, 2019
21. Léopold II Potentat Congolais, Pierre-Luc PLASMAN, Racine, 2019
22. Congo. Mémoires à vif , Luc BEYER DE RYKE, Editions Mols, 2019
23. Congo, l’autre histoire, Charles LEONARD, Editions Masoin / Dynamedia, 2014
24. Congo Belge. La colonie assassinée, André-Bernard ERGO, L’Harmattan, 2009