POLITICAL HISTORY, PAGE 12
Mustering opposition to the horrors of the Congo proved a difficult task. Africans could do little to make a case to the outside world. Missionaries, the self-appointed messengers of Christ, had the best view of the savagery but, with few notable exceptions, remained silent. The French, carefully manipulated by Leopold, could not expose him without incriminating themselves. The Germans kept quiet fearing the overthrow of Leopold would lead to French annexation of the whole of central Africa. The British refused to risk their budding entente with France which itself was a provocation to Germany. This was big power politics to the core, motivated by imagined self-interest with no regard for the people who bore its consequences.
There had been a few scattered voices in the wilderness, however. Slowly, at the beginning of the twentieth century, they became a rousing chorus. Led by E. D. Morel, a shipping clerk turned investigative journalist, the Congo reform movement raised a crescendo of alarm. Based on evidence gleaned from his years in the Congo department of Elder Dempster shipping lines, Morel wrote a series of newspaper articles in 1900 stating the case against Leopold. He found not only that exports from the Congo far exceeded imports, an indication that Africans weren't receiving adequate compensation for their produce, but that, "much of the ivory and rubber shipped from the Congo by the Elder-Dempster line was not included in the returns published by the Congo Government, that firearms were being imported in large quantities into the Congo, and that the concessionnaire companies there were making large profits."44 Others, emboldened by Morel's actions, began to speak out. Mainstream British newspapers took up the cause. In 1903 the British House of Commons passed a motion calling on the government to meet with the other parties to the Berlin Act to see what could be done to eliminate the deplorable situation. The British administration directed its Congo consul, Roger Casement, to investigate conditions in the interior.
Casement's report in February 1904 dropped like a bombshell in London. Full of Africans' accounts of the atrocities committed by Leopold's agents, often backed up by testimony from missionaries, it gave official credence to Morel's claims. Morel would later write of listening to Casement, "The daily agony of an entire people unrolled itself in all the repulsive terrifying details. I verily believe I saw those hunted women clutching their children and flying panic stricken to the bush: the blood flowing from those quivering black bodies as the hippopotamus hide whip struck and struck again; the savage soldiery rushing hither and thither amid burning villages; the ghastly tally of severed hands." 45 British newspapers trumpeted the findings to an outraged public. Morel founded the Congo Reform Association to keep attention focused on the issue. The clamor in Britain began to spread to France where questions were raised about its Congo administration. Early in 1905 the French government summoned Brazza from retirement to head a commission that would investigate conditions in the colony he had created.
Weak and aged beyond his years, Brazza made a final journey to Africa only to find his beloved Congo in an appalling state. The whispers and rumors of outrageous acts by the concessionary companies and the colonial administration proved to be all too true. Brazza listened to sickening testimony of Africans from the Gabon coast to the heart of the Congo basin, stories much the same as Casement had reported from Leopold's Congo a year earlier. Brazza died on the return trip to France, but his commission drafted a scathing report to the government in Paris. Such condemnation from its own commission was not what the politicians wished to hear, however. The French parliament voted overwhelmingly to suppress it.
Publication of Casement's report also compelled Leopold to appoint a commission of inquiry. The King's commission, while approving the use of forced labor, confirmed much of Casement's findings in its highly diluted report. Nevertheless it created enough of a stir to force creation of another commission to recommend reforms. Meanwhile the Congo Reform Association's activities had spread to the United States where Mark Twain (ironically, a friend of Stanley) issued his biting satire, King Leopold's Soliloquy. A rising sense of outrage prompted the U.S. administration to advocate for reform.
The solution to the Congo Free State problem was all too obvious, although far short of leaving Africa to the Africans. It had been talked about on and off for years: Belgium should relieve the Congo from Leopold's reign of terror by annexing the territory for itself. Belgium's public and its politicians, wanting no part of any colony, had long resisted such an idea, but British and American pressure along with internal revulsion at the king's excesses forced a collective change of mind. On November 15, 1908, Belgium reluctantly took control of the Congo from its discredited sovereign. Leopold died the following year without once setting foot in that faraway land where for twenty-four years he had caused so much misery.
Leopold's bequest was welcomed in Belgium with about as much enthusiasm as Stanley had been received by his mother some sixty years earlier. Both offspring were unplanned and largely unwanted. Stanley died in 1904 as the shock waves from Roger Casement's report reverberated across London. The 900,000 square miles of central Africa he had carved out for the king covered eighty times the area of tiny Belgium. The saddened land sustained an estimated five to six million people of more than 200 national groups, many of whom were cut off from their brothers and sisters by colonialism's illogical, arbitrary boundaries. The remnants of the once proud Kongo Kingdom that Diogo Cão had met now found themselves in territories ruled by Portugal (Angola and Cabinda), Belgium, and France.
Across the Congo River in 1910, France combined its territories, Congo (what they called Moyen Congo or Middle Congo), Gabon, Oubangi-Chari (today's Central African Republic), and Chad, to form the Federation of French Equatorial Africa, the rough equivalent in size and even more thinly populated than the Belgian Congo. But reform remained elusive on both sides of the river. Abetted by the colonial governments, the well-entrenched concession companies clung tenaciously to their privilege. Meanwhile the elephants were fighting again, this time in far off Europe, and the grass of Africa would suffer still more for it.
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