The Congo
It was the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley who first unveiled the mysteries of the Congo to Europe. Stanley wrote and gave lectures throughout Great Britain and continental Europe, describing the potential wealth to be had from the region and the possibility of bringing the “…poor benighted heathen, into the Christian fold.” Stanley described more than 40 million such people, waiting to be clothed by the mills of Great Britain, and educated by the missionaries of the Christian denominations. While Stanley was well received personally, his ideas of colonization of the Congo were not, except for King Leopold II of Belgium.
Leopold was anxious to expand Belgian influence and power, though doing so in Europe was impossible. Leopold, a constitutional monarch, attempted to create or purchase Belgian colonies but the government resisted his schemes. In 1876 Leopold sponsored and hosted an international geographic conference as a cover for the establishment of the International African Association, a corporation in which the only shareholder was himself. He then hired Stanley, promising to back his goal of a railroad into the Congo. It was Stanley’s job to establish a colony, which would be chartered by Leopold’s shell company, making Leopold the sole authority of the Congo.
Stanley purchased or negotiated the cession of land from the native tribes occupying it, and began the construction of wagon roads connecting the trading stations he set up. When Stanley finally left the project, physically and mentally exhausted, he was replaced by Francis de Winton, a former officer of the British Army. Both Stanley and de Winton were not above playing the various tribes against each other and betraying alliances by killing recalcitrant tribal leaders and their followers. In 1885 Leopold announced a new name for his colony, the Congo Free State. During its existence the population of the region dropped by up to fifteen million according to some estimates.
His reign featured the mutilation of workers, child laborers, harsh reprisals against protesters, and the calculated destruction of whole villages. Paramilitary soldiers, hired to enforce labor policies which were established by the companies harvesting rubber, sometimes simply cut off the hands of protestors rather than kill them, establishing the proof of an action for which they would be paid and leaving the maimed to die or live as nature decided. As reports of the atrocities in the Congo reached Europe and the United States, international outrage grew, and the Belgian government was pressured to take action to suppress the violence. Leopold ignored the outcry.
Joseph Conrad based his novel Heart of Darkness on the situation in the Congo, and a campaign of reformers including Conrad, Mark Twain, and the popular British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle urged the international community to act. Both Britain and France considered annexing the Congo, an action opposed by the Germans as it would shift the strategic balance between the rival empires. Leopold and the companies in the Congo argued that the atrocities were exaggerated. Finally in 1908 the Belgian government annexed the Free State and it became the Belgian Congo, and Belgian law for the colony was established. Leopold died the following year, leaving behind a vast fortune attained through his personal colony.