POLITICAL HISTORY, PAGE 10
The old African saying, "when two elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers," could not be more aptly applied than to the European-Arab conflicts. Africans were the ones who took the casualties. The land being ravaged belonged to them. And no matter which elephant won the battle, they would be the worse for it.
The fall of the Arabs was an unexpected bonus for the Belgian king. His thoughts had been occupied by the colony's deficit and how it could be reversed. Leopold would later write: "The Congo has been, and could have been, nothing but a personal undertaking. There is no more legitimate or respectable right than that of an author over his own work, the fruit of his labour....My rights over the Congo are to be shared with none; they are the fruit of my own struggles and expenditure."34 In 1891 he moved to minimize what little sharing there was by secretly decreeing a state monopoly for the collection of ivory in the northeast. Thomas Pakenham reports that "coupled with the decree came a new interpretation of who owned the Congo. All land belonged to the state except that actually occupied or cultivated by the natives, and the price of its two most valuable products—ivory and rubber—was to be decided by the only buyer."35
The next year Leopold spelled out his contravention of the Berlin accords more openly. The land north of the equator, roughly one-third of the state, was declared to be a domaine privé open only to exploitation by the state. A central slice of territory was left to the commercial companies. Katanga and the Arab east were closed for security reasons, although Katanga was already being secretly exploited by Leopold's Compagnie du Katanga. In return for taxes, commercial companies were licensed as agents of the state each with exclusive rights to exploit the resources of its particular tract. By the end of the century Leopold's Congo deficit had turned to handsome profit.
Rubber and ivory brought Leopold a fortune, but Africans and elephants paid the bitter price. Thousands upon thousands of elephants were slaughtered for their valuable tusks. Millions of Africans were enslaved anew to extract their continent's wealth for Europe. A network of state agents who earned commissions on the collection of ivory and rubber administered the territories. African soldiers and police enforced the agents' demands. Some Africans went directly from slavery at the hands of the Arabs to that of the Europeans. As Ruth Slade explains, "The state needed more and more men as soldiers, labourers and porters. On the one hand it was very difficult to persuade the local Bantu peoples either to leave their villages or to undertake regular work [for the Europeans], and on the other hand it was both difficult and expensive to recruit labour abroad. The answer seemed to be to buy slaves who would then be technically free men, but who would in fact remain in the service of the State for a certain number of years at least."36
Labor was also coerced in other ways Slade reports: "A labour tax was imposed which would compel Africans to work, and a system was introduced by which it was hoped that they would be persuaded to work for remuneration....State or company officials were left to determine the amount of labour required and the remuneration to be assigned to it, and they were paid commission on the ivory or rubber which they secured."37 When flogging by the feared chicotte, a hippopotamus-hide whip, failed to wring out the quantities demanded, people were hunted down and shot, their villages plundered and burned. A missionary on the scene described the rubber "question" as "being accountable for most of the horrors perpetrated on the Congo. It has reduced the people to a state of despair. Each town in the district is forced to bring a certain quantity to the headquarters of the commissaire every Sunday. It is collected by force. The soldiers drive the people into the bush. If they will not go they are shot down, and their left hands cut off and taken as trophies to the commissaire. The soldiers do not care who they shoot down, and they more often shoot poor helpless women and harmless children. These hands, the hands of men, women and children, are placed in rows before the commissaire, who counts them to see that the soldiers have not wasted the cartridges."38 It was a sorry but profitable system that did not go unnoticed by the French.
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