It would be absurd in this context to speak of an act of “genocide” or a “holocaust”; genocide implies the conscious, planned annihilation of a specific population, and that was never the intention here, or the result. And the term Holocaust is reserved for the persecution and annihilation of the Jews during World War II. But it was definitely a hecatomb, a slaughter on a staggering scale that was not intentional, but that could have been recognized much earlier as the collateral damage of a perfidious, rapacious policy of exploitation, a living sacrifice on the altar of the pathological pursuit of profit. When sleeping sickness ravaged the population, Leopold II called in the assistance of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the most famous center for tropical medicine of its day. He would never have done that if his intention had been to commit genocide. But that does not mean that he immediately acknowledged his responsibility in the matter. That, in fact, was something he never did.
The bloodstained rubber policy, nicknamed “red rubber,” did not have the same impact everywhere. Équateur, Bandundu, and Kasai—the western part of the Congolese rain forest—were the hardest hit. That was where the exploitation was easiest to achieve, because of the big rivers. When I once asked old Nkasi, who came from Bas-Congo, about the days of the rubber quotas, he was unable to tell me anything. “That wasn’t where we were,” he said. “That was in the Mayombe.” He may very well have been right. The Mayombe was a stretch of equatorial forest north of Boma, close to the ocean and the Portuguese enclave of Cabinda. It was one of the few places in Bas-Congo where rubber was harvested. Nkasi knew about it only by word of mouth. “The Portuguese there cut off people’s hands,” he added, but he wasn’t completely sure about that. When I went on to ask whether he had witnessed the rapid spread of sleeping sickness, however, his nod was much more confident. “Yes, I saw that. Many young people died. A nasty disease.” He repeated that final sentence again in his simple French. “C’est mauvaise maladie” (It’s a bad disease).
FROM 1900 ON increasingly clear indications began coming in concerning the atrocities in the Free State. They were not immediately given credence. Protestant missionaries expressed their abhorrence in no uncertain terms, but in Belgium it was felt that they were simply frustrated about the influx of Catholic missionaries and the power they had lost. In Antwerp, Edward Morel, the employee of a British shipping company, began to realize that something was very wrong in Congo: he saw ships leave without cargo (except perhaps for guns and ammunition) and return full of rubber. That seemed more like plundering than bilateral trade, didn’t it? His objections, however, were dismissed lightly, as the typical moaning of those Liverpudlian traders who never stopped whinging about the decline of free trade. Did little Belgium really stand to learn anything from the British? That’s what they wanted to know. Weren’t those imperial browbeaters in fact the worst malefactors of all, now that they had made mincemeat out of the defenseless Boers down in South Africa? The Boer War, after all, had met with disapproval in Belgium as well.
The tenor of the discussion changed a bit, however, after Roger Casement, the British consul in Boma, wrote a thoughtful but damning report in 1904. Casement was a highly respected diplomat. This was no British dockworker, but an official envoy of Great Britain, a man of great moral authority and long acquainted with the Congolese interior. His objections could no longer be dismissed; they led to major protests in the British House of Commons. Authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain publicly voiced their disapproval. One year after the report appeared, King Leopold found himself compelled to send an international, independent investigative committee to Congo. Three magistrates, one Belgian, one Swiss, and an Italian, were allowed to travel around Congo for months and carry out interviews in his Free State. They would surely absolve him of all blame. But that is not how it went. The investigative committee went to work as a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission avant la lettre. They listened to hundreds of witnesses, compiled plaints, and wrote a down-to-earth report in which the Free State’s policies were quite accurately dissected. It was a dry but devastating text, stating that the “taking hostage and abduction of women, the subjugation of chieftains to forced labor, the humiliations to which they are subjected, the chicotte used by harvest overseers, the violent actions on the part of blacks ostensibly occupied in ‘guarding’ the prisoners” were the rule rather than the exception.74 The Brussels lawyer and professor Félicien Cattier followed the reasoning through to its most extreme conclusion: “The clearest and most incontrovertible truth arising from this report is that the state of Congo is no colonized state, barely a state at all, but a financial enterprise … The colony is not administered in the best interests of the natives, nor even in the economic interests of Belgium: to provide the sovereign with the greatest possible financial gain, that was the motivation.”75
The international pressure on King Leopold II was mounting. Something had to give, and the only option was for Leopold to part with his overseas territory and for Belgium to take over Congo. In December 1906 the knot was cut, but Leopold loitered over the modalities of the transfer for almost two more years. He wondered whether he might perhaps still be able to keep a piece of Congo for himself, the Crown Domain for example. It was with clear reluctance that he handed over his lifework. Shortly before the transfer he even ordered the Free State archives to be burned. But on November 15, 1908, the day finally arrived: on the occasion of the annual National Celebration of the Dynasty, the dynasty handed over Congo. The term free state itself had meanwhile become rather outmoded for a state without free trade, free employment, or free citizens. In its stead there had come a regime that revolved around a monopolistic economy, forced labor and bondage. From then on the region was to be called the Belgian Congo.
During the term of the Free State, the local population had had its first encounter with various aspects of the European presence. By the year 1908 some sixteen thousand children were attending missions schools, an estimated thirty thousand people had learned to read and write, sixty-six thousand had served in the army, and some two hundred thousand had been baptized.76 Directly or indirectly, hundreds of thousands of locals had been effected by the rubber policies. Millions had been struck down by sleeping sickness and other infectious diseases.
And Disasi Makulo had seen it all from close by. He had been involved in the ivory trade when it was still free, he had served as boy to a celebrated British missionary, he had made countless journeys on the man’s steamboat, he had literally experienced the interweaving of mission and state firsthand when—during one of his travels with Grenfell—he was conscripted into the Force Publique. He had been baptized, married a girl from a distant region, he swore by monogamy and the nuclear family, criticized traditional village life, and in the end became a catechist in order to Christianize his own region. And it was precisely at that point that he had personally witnessed the violence of the rubber policies.
But at his mission post, even more sorrow lay in store for him. His great mentor George Grenfell came to visit there in mid-1906. Grenfell looked like a man of eighty, but had still to turn fifty-seven. His years in the tropics had been long and grueling. He was worn out. Grenfell asked his former pupil and his converts to sing a hymn for him in their own language, Bobangi. Afterward he explicitly stated his desire to be buried at Yalemba, the mission post Disasi had founded himself. Disasi called him “he who remained our father until his death.”77
TODAY, IN KINSHASA, one sees very little that hearkens back to those early years, but during my very first trip to Congo in December 2003 I was granted access to the former garage for city buses in the borough of Limete. Buses had been absent from the capital’s streets for quite a few years already; the few broken-down examples that still existed had been converted into houses in which several families lived. The windshield wipers were used as clotheslines. The residents slept on the old seats, their arms draped over the aluminum bars. From the shadow of a hubcap or hood one heard the bleating of an unseen goat. It was an abandoned industrial estate, where nature was regaining its grip. After walking on a bit I saw, in the grass, a highly remarkable work of postmodern art. Never had I seen a more peculiar installation invested with such historical reminiscences. Lying on its stomach in a rusty steel boat was the bronze figure of a man at least twelve feet tall. I recognized the statue right away: it was the triumphant image