King Leopold's Ghost

An extract from the chapter called The Reckoning
“So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt, so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941.

In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo annals abound in cases like that of René de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late 1890s. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bas genoux, on your knees), because he always made people kneel before him. He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If he found a leaf in a courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he or- dered a child killed in the nearest village.

Two Force Publique officers, Clément Brasseur and Léon Cerckel, once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a fire was lit beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.

Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the Vietnam War, captures the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: “We'd rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can't shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?” When another American, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to put the blood lust of that war on film, where did he turn for the plot of his Apocalypse Now? To Joseph Conrad, who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.”

At times, this has been a brutal read that highlights man's inhumanity to his fellow human being. It has also highlighted others courage in the pursuit of justice.

I had been aware of the treatment of the peoples of the Congo via Mathew White's atrocity website. His site stated the following.

• Roger Casement's original 1904 report estimated that as many as 3 million Congolese had died of disease, torture or shooting since 1888 (cited in Gilbert's History of the Twentieth Century; also in Colin Legum, Congo Disaster (1972)).
• E.D. Morel estimated that the Congo's population began with an original 20 or 30 million, and bottomed out at a mere 8 million. Morel, The Black Man's Burden, 1920, Chapter 9 (“[W]hen the country had been explored in every direction by travellers of divers nationalities, estimates varied between twenty and thirty millions. No estimate fell below twenty millions. In 1911 an official census was taken. It was not published in Belgium, but was reported in one of the British Consular dispatches. It revealed that only eight and a half million people were left.”). This estimate also appears in
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Congo Free State,” v.3, p.535
- Bertrand Russell, Freedom and organization 1814-1914 (first published, George Allen & 1934) p.453 in the 2001 Routledge ed., citing Sir H. H. Johnston, The Colonization of Africa (Cambridge Historical Series) p. 352
- Fredric Wertham A Sign For Cain : A Exploration of Human Violence (1966): the population of the Congo dropped dropped from 30M to 8.5M, a loss of 21.5 million
• Peter Forbath, The River Congo (1977) p.375: “at least 5 million people were killed in the Congo.”
• John Gunther (Inside Africa (1953)): 5-8 million deaths.
• Adam Hochschild (Leopold's Ghost, (1998)): 10 million, or half the original population.
• Rummel:
- 2,150,000 democides, 19th Century (based on 10% of Wertham)
- 25,000 democides, 1900-1910.
• AVERAGE:
- Median: ca. 8M
- Mean: ca. 8.5M
• NOTE: Because this event began in 1886, it tend to get relegated to the 19th Century; however, 40% of it occured in the 20th Century, so we need to keep this in mind when splitting the death toll into century-based subtotals. Also, it took awhile for the atrocities to get up to speed, so the dying probably intensified as more time passed.


As the reader can see this book by Hochschild is at the high end of deaths. Hochschild does cover the slaughter in the same chapter I have quoted above, called A Reckoning. He states he did not think that the authorities were of a genocidal nature to the Congolese peoples, they just worked them as slave labour and to death, profit was everything in the pursuit of ivory and rubber with rebellion ruthlessly put down. So that meant that murder through to starvation played a part in the plummeting drop in population numbers. There was also a huge fall of the birth-rate as men left their villages with women under hostage so as to force them to not abscond and join rebellions.

There have been some historical characters in this book that were unknown to me prior. Roger Casement and E D Morel, campaigners from Ireland and England, both deserve further reads, they lead fascinating lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Casement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Morel

As does George Washington Williams from the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Williams

All three contributed heavily to the public campaign to expose the inhumanity that was the Congo Free State.

Known to me, but more as someone taught to the English schoolboy with stories of derring-do was Henry Morton Stanley. He does not come out of this book with any honour.

There are 2 sets of illuminating black and white plates and an excellent bibliography. I have David van Reybrouck's Congo to read and will do so sometime into the future.

This was a fascinating if sad history and highly recommended.