POLITICAL HISTORY, PAGE 11
Brazza's relatively benign but deficit-ridden administration in the French Congo had been a target of critics for nearly its entire twelve years of existence. But when the rubber boom of the 1890s hit, due chiefly to the demand for bicycle tires, the sniping became a fusillade. In the words of Edmond Dene Morel who spearheaded the crusade to end the company system, "The contrast of the French Congo stagnating and the Congo Free State pouring out rubber and ivory, and Belgian companies making enormous profits, was gall and wormwood to French 'Colonials' and to French finance."39 Why couldn't the French Congo turn a profit like Leopold's dominion across the river? The answer, for many, was that without Brazza's restraining hand, it could. Brazza had to go, and go he did at the beginning of 1898.
Much of the attack on Brazza originated from the royal palace in Brussels. Leopold, under increasing scrutiny as the horrors of the Congo Free State began to filter out, needed an ally to deflect attention from his own criminality. He relentlessly fanned the flames under Brazza through skillful use of French business interests and the press. It was, as Richard West points out, a nineteenth century precursor to today's practice whereby governments hire public relations firms to bolster their images abroad.
With Brazza out of the way, France expelled long-established British trading firms and parceled out the country to some forty French companies, many of which were at least partially owned by Leopold and his Belgian cronies. For a percentage of the action, the government granted concessionaires exclusive rights to the land. To enforce those rights France encouraged the companies to employ their own police. "In other words," wrote Morel, "the status of the aboriginal inhabitants of the French Congo, as in the Congo Free State, had on paper been changed from that of a man of commerce gathering his produce and disposing of it to the White merchant against merchandise, to that of a serf, deprived of all his economic rights. The native of a French Congo found himself, as it were in a single night, robbed of his land and all it contained: robbed of the means of earning money, and robbed of his personal freedom....The only form of actual and potential wealth possessed by the African in his economic relationship with the European had become the property of Franco-Belgian financial corporations."40
Mimicking their Belgian counterparts the French taxed their own "lazy" Africans to stimulate production. "By imposing a punitive tax on the local producers of salt," reports Richard West, "the government obliged the Africans to buy imported French salt from the stores of the concessionary companies. Another tax, most blatantly cruel, was imposed on the playing of tam-tam drums, so that the Africans, after a day of remorseless labour, were not allowed the consolation of music. A head tax, payable only in money, was widely abused by the collectors. Villagers were forced to pay the same tax two or three times; the soldiers took 'hostages' from defaulters, often their wives, whom they raped and mistreated at will."41
One estimate had it that 30,000 people of the Congo Free State had fled across the river to the French side. When the French instituted their own system of extortion, thousands fled back. Famine spread as people on both sides of the river abandoned hunting and farming in order to satisfy the demands of the concession companies. Flight from ancestral lands, murder at the hands of state agents, and death from famine and harsh working conditions, led to significant depopulation of the two territories. As Ali Mazrui puts it, "When Leopold's ambition arrived in the Congo, it was not the natives who needed to be civilised; it was the newly arrived white man."42
As if enslavement in their own land at the hands of foreigners weren't sufficient humiliation, Africans received little benefit from the massive profits generated by their labor. The modern steamboats on the Ogowé and the Congo operated for the removal of produce. The new railroad line around the cataracts on the lower Congo, built by forced African labor in yet another harsh and deadly episode, sped the rich African harvest closer to the factories of Europe. Even schools were built with an eye toward staffing the expanding apparatus of exploitation. Ivory and rubber created European millionaires but only tired and broken bodies in the Congo. Thomas Pakenham writes, "It was these secret profits from the Congo, many times the size of the original investment, that supported the King's lavish spending in Belgium—for the arches and avenues, the parks and the palaces, which made up the donation royale—as well as a private paradise at Cap Ferrat in the French Riviera, to which he would slip away with [his mistress], whenever the cares of the Belgian state and of his own African empire allowed."43
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