King Leopold's Ghost

  Morel considered his movement to be in the grand tradition of such British humanitarian crusades as the righteous outrage provoked by the Turkish massacres of Bulgarians in 1876 and of Armenians in the 1890s. Above all, he saw himself as a moral heir to the antislavery movement. He began his blistering Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906 with an epigraph from the great American Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison:

  The standard of emancipation is now unfurled...

  I will not equivocate,

  I will not excuse,

  I will not retreat a single inch:

  And I will be heard,

  Posterity will bear testimony that I was right.

  The tradition of British radicalism from which Morel came was rooted in the Nonconformist—that is, Protestant, but not Church of England—churches and in the Clapham Sect, the humanitarian evangelical group to which the antislavery leader William Wilberforce had belonged. In the early nineteenth century these humanitarians had focused their zeal on improving the condition of all sorts of oppressed groups: prisoners, factory workers, child laborers, the insane. Theirs, however, was not the from-the-bottom-up politics later adopted by Marxists and trade unionists; it was the top-down reformism of the relatively well-born. They aimed at ending the death penalty, corporal punishment, and cruelty to animals. When they turned their attention overseas, it was to push for the abolition of the slave trade and to send missionaries abroad to uplift the "natives" in the far reaches of the world. (Indeed, it was the Nonconformist churches, especially the Baptists, that sent the British missionaries to the Congo.)

  Significantly, Morel's humanitarian political ancestors, unlike his socialist contemporaries, had firmly believed that improving the lot of downtrodden people everywhere was good for business. Better treatment of colonial subjects would "promote the civil and commercial interests of Great Britain...." declared a parliamentary select committee in the 1830s. "Savages are dangerous neighbours and unprofitable customers, and if they remain as degraded denizens of our colonies, they become a burden upon the State."

  Such humanitarians never saw themselves as being in conflict with the imperial project—as long as it was British imperialism. "Morally emancipation put the British on a special plane...." as James Morris sums it up in his history of the British Empire. "If so much could be achieved by agitation at home, what might not be done if the moral authority of England were distributed across the earth—to tackle the evils of slavery, ignorance and paganism at source, to teach the simpler peoples the benefits of Steam, Free Trade and Revealed Religion, and to establish not a world empire in the bad Napoleonic sense, but a Moral Empire of loftier intent? So was evolved the chemistry of evangelical imperialism."

  This was the tradition in which Morel felt at home, and it was a tradition that perfectly suited his organizational talent. Although without old-school ties to them, he had the knack of making the wealthy, the powerful, and the famous believe they did credit to themselves by supporting his Congo crusade. Month after month, the front page of the Congo Reform Association's periodical carried a full-page portrait photo of a prominent supporter—an earl, a mayor, a member of Parliament, a mustachioed retired colonial governor. After the association's founding in Liverpool, Morel saw to it that the first meeting of the group's executive committee was held in a room secured by a sympathetic M.P. at the House of Commons. Almost every major C.R.A. public meeting after that had at least one bishop on the platform. Having the apparent blessing of both church and state, Morel found that few influential Britons could resist his entreaties to lend their names to the cause of Congo reform.

  One of his political limitations was, in fact, a source of his immense success as an organizer. If he had believed, as we might conclude today, that Leopold's rape of the Congo was in part a logical consequence of the very idea of colonialism, of the belief that there was nothing wrong with a country being ruled other than by its own inhabitants, Morel would have been written off as being on the fringe. No one in England would have paid much attention to him. But he did not believe this; he believed with all his heart that Leopold's system of rule constituted a unique form of evil. People in England's ruling circles, therefore, could support his crusade without feeling their own interests threatened.

  Yet despite some blind spots, Morel was at the far edge of the humanitarian tradition. His beliefs were implicitly more subversive than he allowed himself to recognize. He saw brutality in the Congo not as a specific imperfection to be wiped out in the way one could wipe out child labor or capital punishment, by passing a law against it, but as part of a complex, deeply embedded "System," as he called it—forced labor plus the massive European takeover of African land. This angle of vision is much closer to Marxism than to uplift-the-downtrodden humanitarianism, although Morel probably never read a word of Marx in his life. He never resolved the conflict between these two ways of seeing the world, and much of the drama of his later life lay in the constant tension between them.

  ***

  "Morel has never had an equal as organizer and leader of a Dissenting movement," writes the historian A.J.P. Taylor. "He knew exactly where to look for rich sympathizers; and he took money from them without altering the democratic character of [his movement]. Millionaires and factory workers alike accepted his leadership." Among the millionaires were Quakers like the wealthy but plain-living chocolate manufacturer William Cadbury. Subsidies from these supporters kept the West African Mail alive, and it was the newspaper, not the Congo Reform Association, that paid Morel's salary. Paradoxically, Sir Alfred Jones of the Elder Dempster line also invested a little money in the paper, doubtless hoping to soften the attitude of his former employee. But his hopes were in vain; Morel repeatedly attacked Jones without mercy, exposing his doings as Leopold's major British ally. When Jones saw he would have no influence, he pulled his advertising from the paper.

  Morel knew exactly how to fit his message to his audience. He reminded British businessmen that Leopold's monopolistic system, copied by France, had shut them out of much Congo trade. To members of the clergy he talked of Christian responsibility and quoted the grim reports from the missionaries. And for all Britons, and their representatives in Parliament, he evoked the widespread though unspoken belief that England had a particular responsibility to make decency prevail in the universe.

  One of the more surprising things about the Congo crusade was that, except for forays to speak at meetings, Morel conducted it largely from his study. During the first half of the Congo Reform Association's nine-year lifetime, he didn't even live in London. Until December 1908, the C.R.A.'s head office was in Liverpool; from there and from his home in nearby Hawarden, Morel kept up a voluminous correspondence. In the first six months of 1906, for instance, he wrote 3700 letters. More important, his prodigious output of books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles about the Congo inspired people to write to him. He carefully crosschecked news items for accuracy, studied newspapers and documents from Belgium, and corresponded with government officials, journalists, and traders in Europe and Africa. By 1908, he estimated that he had amassed about twenty thousand letters concerning the Congo. They served as the basis for much of his published work.

  Despite his disdain for organized religion, his tone was that of an evangelical preacher. To him, Leopold and his supporters, such as "the reptile Congophile Press of Brussels and Antwerp," personified the Devil; the Congo administration was "a bad and wicked system, inflicting terrible wrongs upon the native races." Morel spoke effectively to the mood of the day because he shared it: the optimism, the boundless confidence of a society that had not yet seen or imagined the world wars, the belief that humankind had the capacity to briskly eradicate all barriers that lay in the path of progress. "Our forefathers smashed the over-sea slave-trade," he declared in his book King Leopold's Rule in Africa, "and we shall root out the modern inland slave-trade on the Congo."

  He was eager to raise the Con
go reform movement above partisan politics and religious differences. On the speaker's platform for his major events were always M.P.s from the three major parties, clergy from both the Church of England and the Nonconformist churches, and an assortment of right honourables, lord mayors, lord provosts, and other notables. He had a superb sense of how to build up to an event: a large regional Congo protest rally was often preceded by an afternoon meeting with the local mayor and dignitaries at city hall. The mayor would then be on stage that evening. Before the end of 1905, more than sixty mass meetings had adopted a resolution condemning Leopold's rule as a revival of the African slave trade and calling "upon His Majesty's Government to convoke an assembly of the Christian Powers ... in order to devise and put in force a scheme for the good government of the Congo territories." In Liverpool, an audience overflowed an auditorium that seated nearly three thousand and filled two adjoining halls. Cries of "Shame! Shame!" resounded at similar mass meetings throughout England and Scotland.

  A master of all the media of his day, Morel made particularly effective use of photography. A central part of almost every Congo protest meeting was a slide show, comprising some sixty vivid photos of life under Leopold's rule; half a dozen of them showed mutilated Africans or their cut-off hands. The pictures, ultimately seen in meetings and the press by millions of people, provided evidence that no propaganda could refute.

  Slides also showed charts and graphs estimating Leopold's Congo profits; they even displayed poems, which made up in passion what they lacked in art:

  No zeal, no Faith, inspired this Leopold,

  Nor any madness of half-splendid birth.

  Cool-eyed, he loosed the hounds that rend and slay,

  Just that his coffers might be gorged with gold.

  Embalm him, Time! Forget him not, O Earth,

  Trumpet his name, and flood his deeds with day.

  To flood Leopold's deeds with day required that Morel mobilize his fellow journalists. He knew the editors of most of the major British magazines and newspapers, and wrote regularly for many of them, including the most prestigious, the Times. When an editor needed to send a reporter to Belgium or the Congo, Morel always had a candidate to suggest. He engineered "the downfall," he happily claimed, of a Times Brussels correspondent whom he thought too friendly to Leopold. He fed information to sympathetic newspapers in Belgium, and through his connections to the Press Association wire service was able to distribute material worldwide. When the famous American correspondent Richard Harding Davis was sent to Africa by Collier's magazine, he went supplied with Morel's latest findings, and echoed them in what he wrote.

  With a powerful boost from Casement's report, the international campaign mounted by Morel reached newspapers all over the world. His carefully kept files contain, for the ten years starting in 1902, 4194 clippings relating to the drive for Congo reform. Nor did he focus on newspapers alone: The author of a 1906 boy's adventure novel, Samba: A Story of the Rubber Slaves of the Congo, thanks C.R.A. officials in his preface "for their kindness in reading the manuscript and revising the proofs of this book, and for many most helpful suggestions and criticisms."

  Morel described himself as "Congo possessed." A letter to his Quaker backer William Cadbury in 1906 shows how:

  Book. Out this week...[this was Red Rubber]

  Glasgow. Lord Provost has summoned a Town's meeting. Shall probably have to go. Am arranging for formation of local CRA.... Any prominent Friends in Glasgow you could drop a note to?

  France. A French C.R.A. will be formed this month....

  Rising tide. Demands for literature literally coming in shoals. ... Twelve to 20 letters per day for literature, information, etc.

  Like the Abolitionists before him, Morel understood that every national organization had to have local branches, so the C.R.A. had "auxiliaries" throughout England and Scotland. These groups organized their members to send funds, to write to their representatives in Parliament, and to produce an unending flow of letters to local newspapers. A Ladies' Branch had two representatives on the C.R.A. Executive Committee. Through such means, Morel applied steady pressure on the British government. He and his supporters never doubted that if only Britain were to act, it could force Leopold to mend his ways or could wrest the Congo entirely from his grasp.

  The most effective spokespeople of all, Morel knew, were those with firsthand knowledge. Starting in 1906, the returned Baptist missionaries the Reverend John Harris and his wife, Alice Seeley Harris—she had taken almost all the photographs Morel used—began working full time for the association. The Harrises' zeal matched Morel's. In their first two years with the C.R.A., one or both of them spoke in public on six hundred occasions. A woman in a large audience in Wales was so moved that she handed Alice Harris her jewels to be sold for the benefit of the movement. The Harrises displayed chicottes and shackles, and throughout England they led church congregations in special hymns on "Congo Sundays." To shocked audiences, they described personal experiences like this one, which John Harris later put down on paper:

  Lined up ... are 40 emaciated sons of an African village, each carrying his little basket of rubber. The toll of rubber is weighed and accepted, but ... four baskets are short of the demand. The order is brutally short and sharp—Quickly the first defaulter is seized by four lusty "executioners," thrown on the bare ground, pinioned hands and feet, whilst a fifth steps forward carrying a long whip of twisted hippo hide. Swiftly and without cessation the whip falls, and the sharp corrugated edges cut deep into the flesh—on back, shoulders and buttocks blood spurts from a dozen places. In vain the victim twists in the grip of the executioners, and then the whip cuts other parts of the quivering body—and in the case of one of the four, upon the most sensitive part of the human frame. The "hundred lashes each" left four inert bodies bloody and quivering on the shimmering sand of the rubber collecting post.

  Following hard upon this decisive incident was another. Breakfast was just finished when an African father rushed up the veranda steps of our mud house and laid upon the ground the hand and foot of his little daughter, whose age could not have been more than 5 years.

  ***

  As Morel's campaign surged forward in Europe, frantic messages flowed from Brussels to the Congo capital of Boma and from there to the most remote outposts. Near the British mission station where the Harrises had been working, the state posted a deputy public prosecutor. The governor general wrote to him:

  The main reason for your being placed at Baringa is to keep the government regularly informed of everything of interest in the Baringa region concerning the missionaries' agitation.... [It] will probably be necessary for you to have several blacks working for you who could gather useful information in the villages of the region, especially when the missionaries go traveling.

  I authorize you to hire five workers towards this end; I have given instructions to the commissioner-general of the Equator district to furnish you the necessary funds. You will use the funds as seems best to you, whether in hiring black workers ... or in giving presents to certain natives living in the villages who can keep you up to date....

  It goes without saying that this must be done with the greatest discretion.

  In the following months, the public prosecutor at Boma wrote to his deputy at Baringa asking him to find out what plans were to be hatched at a forthcoming meeting of Protestant missionaries. Some weeks later, this was followed by a collection of seven months' worth of Morel's West African Mail and the news that further issues would be forwarded as soon as they arrived at the capital:

  I particularly draw your attention to the importance for the Government in noting all the inaccuracies in the missionaries' accusations, in order to show the bad faith that inspires their attacks against the State. It is important that each of these issues ... be the object of your most careful examination, and of a report that you send me of inaccuracies....

  As the attacks on Leopold mounted, the regime steadily increased its scrutiny of Morel's
allies in the Congo. None was at more risk than Hezekiah Andrew Shanu.

  Britain had established its colonies in Africa long before Leopold, and in its early days the Congo state turned to these territories to recruit experienced laborers, soldiers, and other personnel. Shanu was born and educated in what is today Nigeria and became a schoolteacher. In 1884, he began working for Leopold's regime; one task was to recruit soldiers from his homeland for the Force Publique. When he became a clerk and French-English translator on the governor general's staff at Boma, he brought his wife, brother-in-law, and other members of his family from Lagos to live in the Congo. In 1893, he left state service to go into business for himself. The following year he went to Belgium, where he ordered himself a piano and a steam launch, and put his son in school. In all countries with colonies there is a ready audience for grateful subjects, and Shanu was received with much enthusiasm when he lectured on the Congo and thanked the Belgians for their good works. One newspaper noted approvingly that Shanu "expresses himself in French with the greatest correctness;" another patronizingly remembered him as "a striking example of the perfectibility of the negro race." An august-looking man, Shanu wore a starched white collar on public occasions, with the ribbon of a Congo state medal on his jacket lapel.

  After visits to England, France, and Germany, Shanu returned to the Congo and, in a remarkable move in this state set up by Europeans for their own benefit, became a successful businessman. In Boma, he opened a well-stocked store selling canned food and other supplies from Europe; in addition he operated a tailor's shop and laundry, and ran small lodging houses both in Boma and the railhead town of Matadi. He enjoyed photography, and had some of his pictures published in the Brussels magazine Le Congo Illustré. When he leased a house he owned to an early British vice consul, he made so great an impression that the man recommended Shanu to the Foreign Office as his replacement during a home leave. Shanu was also respected by his former employers. During a Force Publique mutiny at Boma in 1900, state officials gratefully accepted his help in preventing the rebellion from spreading to West Africans working in the town. He even offered to take up arms against the mutineers. "Monsieur Shanu, in these troubled moments, has given proof of his sincere loyalty to the State," wrote a high Congo official.