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In
the Heart of Darkness Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era La mémoire
du Congo: Le temps colonial La mémoire
du Congo: Le temps colonial,
catalog of the exhibition1
1. Recent decades have seen many
battles over historical memory. The Turkish government—and, for that matter,
our own—still refuses to speak of an Armenian genocide. Japan’s schoolbooks
still whitewash its troops’ atrocities in World War II. And a curious
conflict over memory is going on right now in Europe, where the battlefield
is a Belgian museum.2
The battle is over Belgium’s past
as a colonial power. For half a century it controlled the Congo, one
thirteenth the land mass of the African continent. Before that the Congo was
also linked to Belgium, as the private, personally owned property of the
shrewd and ambitious King Leopold II. Belgians had been initially slow to
colonize, but Leopold, who took his country’s throne in 1865, thought
differently. Openly exasperated with being king of such a small country, he
hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to stake out for him the boundaries
of a huge African territory. From 1885 to 1908, when it became the Belgian
Congo, the colony was known as l’État Indépendant du Congo, or the Congo Free State. Leopold
exercised absolute control, referring to himself as the state’s “proprietor.”
Fearful of tropical diseases, the
King never visited his prized possession. Instead, while living in Brussels,
on his yacht, or in several luxurious villas on the French Riviera, he made a
huge fortune off the Congo, conservatively estimated as at least $1.1 billion
in today’s dollars. In the early years, most of the money came from ivory.
Joseph Conrad unforgettably depicted the ivory trade in Heart of Darkness
in the severed heads of murdered African rebels Kurtz kept as trophies. From the early 1890s on, the major
source of Leopold’s Congo wealth was rubber. The Congo’s equatorial rain
forest was rich in wild rubber vines, and the inventions of the inflatable
bicycle tire and the automobile set off a worldwide rubber boom. Troops from
the King’s private army came into village after village and held the women
hostage in order to make the men go deep into the forest to gather their
monthly quota of rubber. As demand for rubber soared, quotas rose. Men were
forced to search for several weeks out of each month, sometimes having to
walk for days to reach vines that were not tapped dry. Many men were worked to death,
while the women hostages were starved. Not surprisingly, the birth rate
plummeted. Few able-bodied adults were left in the villages to harvest food,
hunt, or fish. Famine spread. During two decades of widespread but
unsuccessful rebellions more people died. Others fled the forced labor
regime, but they had nowhere to go except to more remote parts of the forest,
where there was little food or shelter. Years later, travelers would come
upon their bones. The greatest toll came as
soldiers, as well as caravans of porters and large numbers of desperate
refugees, moved throughout the country, bringing new diseases to people with
no resistance to them. Many illnesses, particularly sleeping sickness, became
far more lethal for people weakened by trauma and hunger. All these caused
the death of millions. Once it became clear how much money the King was
making, Leopold’s hostage system was copied in the other rubber-rich
territories nearby: French Equatorial Africa across the Congo River, the
Cameroons, then owned by Germany, and northern Angola under the Portuguese.
The results were equally catastrophic. One of the ways the King spent his
profits was to found a museum. Today the Royal Museum for Central Africa has
one of the world’s finest collections of African art and other materials
(some of which toured the United States during 1997–1998), including 70,000
maps, 8,000 African musical instruments, six million insect specimens,
600,000 photographs, and tens of thousands of other human artifacts. However,
until a few years ago, nothing on display gave any indication that millions
of Congolese died unnatural deaths while these riches were being brought back
to Europe. It was as if there were a huge museum of Jewish art and culture in
Berlin that made no mention of the Holocaust. The atrocities under Leopold’s
rule and the Belgian colonial regime that followed it (although, regrettably,
not the similar carnage in neighboring colonies) were the target of a huge
protest campaign, organized chiefly by a dedicated British journalist named
Edmund Dene Morel. Early in the twentieth century,
hundreds of mass meetings were held throughout Britain, the United States, Western
Europe, Australia, and New Zealand demanding “Congo reform.” Leopold’s rubber
system became the best-known human rights scandal of the era. Mark Twain
wrote a pamphlet on the subject, King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of
His Congo Rule (1905), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a book, The Crime of
the Congo (1909). But World War I, in which Belgium was a victim rather
than an oppressor, pushed these events out of European and American public
memory, and there they stayed. Statues of Leopold II still dot Belgian parks
and squares today. In 1998, I published a book about
the King’s rule over the Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost, which was
translated into Belgium’s two main languages, French and Dutch. Although very
little of what it described had not appeared in print in some form before,3
the book was furiously denounced by Belgium’s “old colonials,” while the
foreign ministry sent a confidential memo to Belgian diplomatic missions
throughout the world suggesting how to answer embarrassing questions about
Congolese history. (The advice: an active public relations effort would be
futile; instead, change the subject to Belgium’s work for peace in Africa
today.) In 1999, the myth of benign
colonialism in the Congo received another blow when a Belgian writer, Ludo De Witte, published much new detail on his country’s
complicity in the death of Patrice Lumumba.4
Soon afterward, the movie director Raoul Peck
incorporated some of these findings into his powerful film Lumumba.
The first and last democratically chosen leader of his country, Lumumba
became prime minister after the Congo won its independence in 1960. After a
few months in office he was deposed, imprisoned, beaten, and killed by his
political rivals, who were encouraged at every step by both the United States
and Belgium. De Witte’s book provoked a Belgian parliamentary inquiry and an
official apology from the government. The United States, however, has never
apologized, even though President Eisenhower gave his approval to the aim of
assassinating Lumumba. Discussion ignited by the two
books and the movie raised the question of what should be done with the Royal
Museum for Central Africa.5
The museum was under conflicting pressures: from the old colonials, from the
many Belgians genuinely concerned about human rights, from government
officials worried about the country’s image, and, it was rumored, from the
royal family. In 2001 the government appointed a
new director, who, in interviews with The New York Times and
elsewhere, promised big changes. This year, with much fanfare, the museum has
opened a major exhibit on the colonial period, accompanied by a catalog: a
large-format book, lavishly illustrated with photographs from the museum’s
great research archive. Unlike the exhibit, which is temporary, the catalog
seems intended to be a permanent contribution to the subject. It consists of
some three dozen articles on various aspects of Congo history and culture.
Many are by first-rate scholars, from Jan Vansina’s
essay on the earliest human inhabitants of the Congo basin to Wyatt MacGaffey’s on colonial ethnography. But, as we shall
see, in the selection of material, the book’s editors have left a significant
gap. With rare exceptions,6
the exhibit has been praised. The Associated Press approvingly quoted the
Belgian foreign minister, Karel De Gucht, who on opening night said, “That abuses were
committed during the time of the Congo Free State is undeniable. The
exhibition is unequivocally committed to showing them.”7
“The museum,” said Le Monde, “has done better than revisit a
particularly stormy page in history…. The institution has pushed the public
to join it in looking into the reality of colonialism.”8
The exhibit “lifts the veil,” declared a Belgian magazine.9
“Belgians are finally, and painfully, confronting a very different version of
their colonial past,” said the London Times.10
Other papers have expressed similar judgments, but there is much about the
exhibition that they have ignored. 2. To visit the Royal Museum for
Central Africa is to step back in time. The museum lies in the ancient ducal
borough of Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels,
at the end of a lovely trolley ride through a forest. Leopold II craved
grandeur above all, and, like many of the buildings into which he poured the
proceeds from his holdings in the Congo, this one was designed by his
favorite architect, the Frenchman Charles Girault.
Built in the style of a Louis XV château, it sits majestically on a rise,
looking down across reflecting ponds and a large park. Inside, there are some
twenty spacious galleries whose high ceilings dwarf the visitor. The entrance
rotunda is ringed with gilded, bigger-than-life statues with titles like Belgium
Bringing Security to the Congo (a white woman, with sword, flag, and two
black children at her feet). Amid the sculptures, a small placard promises “A
New Museum in 2010.” Perhaps a third of the museum’s
floor space is given over to its much-publicized exhibit devoted to the
colonial era. At the entrance are two life-size photographs, both from the
1890s. One shows a white colonial official wearing a fez and “sitting
comfortably,” the caption tells us, on a tribal chief’s carved wooden stool.
The other shows an African chief, standing next to a European-style wooden
chair, “proudly wearing the emblem of the new rule”—a white dress uniform,
military cap with visor, and sword. The two men are each enjoying the
accoutrements of the other’s world. This theme—two peoples, cheerfully
absorbing one another’s way of life—runs through many other photographs and
videos. We see Africans working in a bicycle factory; two white officials
riding zebras; black customers and a clerk in a shop stacked with European
goods; a smiling, sun-helmeted white official on a jungle trail; Congolese applauding
a visiting Belgian king. Similarly, the one-word titles of
the exhibit’s half-dozen sections are neutral-sounding terms like
“Transactions” and “Encounters,” which imply peaceful meetings between
equals. But is taking a wife hostage to compel the husband into forced labor
a “transaction”? Is the mass slaughter of rebels who resist an “encounter”?
There is little suggestion that for several decades the most consequential
white–black encounters in the Congo were at gunpoint. Though a deeply conservative
man, Joseph Conrad after his Congo experience had no illusions: “The conquest
of the earth,” Marlow says in Heart of Darkness, “which mostly means
the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly
flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too
much.” There is no danger here of
anyone’s looking into it too much. But the sense of denial that infuses this
exhibit is subtle not only in its suggestion of colonialism as a matter of
cultural exchange among equals, but in its emphasis. The museum is not so
unsophisticated, for instance, as to pretend that no bloodshed took place in
the Congo, or that the territory was not the object of a major international
human rights crusade. A few book covers and other items from this campaign
are tucked away in a corner. But the exhibit’s hundreds of photos include
only four of the famous atrocity images that once appeared in newspapers all
over the world, and these are only small reproductions, while more than a
dozen other photographs are blown up to life size, almost all of them
innocuous, such as several of Congolese musicians. The visitor comes away
with the impression that, yes, there were occasional “abuses”—the word,
implying an unfortunate departure from the norm, is used at least eight times
in the exhibit’s labels—but that the main experiences of colonial life for
Africans were of studying in schools run by kindly, bearded missionaries,
traveling on steamboats, working diligently in scientific laboratories, being
cared for in clinics, and spending money on dance records and in cafés. Colonialism’s defenders always
point out that Europeans left Africa with railroads, schools, newspapers, and
hospitals, and that these were not there before. True enough. But much of
human history is the story of conquests, and all kinds of useful things, from
the wheel to the written word, were spread by conquerors. Neither we nor the
Belgians would be using the Roman alphabet if the Romans had not conquered
most of Europe. Although seldom pleasant to experience, such conquests are
usually justified by the pretense that their primary purpose is to do good. People invade other peoples’ territory claiming they
are routing the barbarians, spreading Christianity, bearing the white man’s
burden, or, in the words of one governor general of the Congo, Pierre Ryckmans, that their purpose is dominer
pour servir. Seldom, however, does anyone
dominate anyone else only in order to serve them. The usual purpose of
conquest, whether of the Romans who spread throughout Europe or of the Eu- ropeans who colonized
Africa and the Americas, is to acquire something of value—land, the crops
that grow on it, minerals, or other natural resources—and often to gain
control of the labor to extract them. The Belgians did indeed build railroads
and steamboats in the Congo, but mostly to ship ivory, rubber, copper, and
other products to Europe. These aims determined where the railroads and
steamboats ran. The Belgians also built the
rudiments of a good public health network—but they did so on a large scale
only in the 1920s, when the system of forced labor had taken such a high toll
that colonial officials were panicked that they might soon have no workforce
left. Needing literate workers, they built what may have been colonial
Africa’s best network of primary schools. Higher education, however, was
scant and came late, for the Belgians assumed that independence would only
come in the distant future, and that even then they might still be running
the Congo. (When mass pressure did bring independence in 1960, only three of
some five thousand senior officials in the Congo’s civil service were
Congolese.) A fair assessment of colonialism, in a museum or anywhere else,
should acknowledge the maternity clinics and school classrooms, and the
people, often well intentioned and idealistic, who worked in them; but it
should also take account of the purposes that shaped their distribution. 3. Again and again, both the Royal
Museum’s exhibit and its catalog pass glancingly
over the darker side of an aspect of the Congo’s history, and then stress its
benign side. The technique is effective, because it doesn’t seem like denial
at all. While giving the casual viewer the impression that difficult matters
are dealt with, the aftertaste is upbeat. For example, a catalog article
about the art of the Pende people is beautifully
illustrated with color photographs of objects from the museum’s collection,
and the author briefly mentions that the fearsome, many-mouthed monsters of Pende masks may represent fear of brutal colonial agents
and forced labor recruiters. But nowhere in the book or the exhibit do we
hear any details about the great Pende rebellion of
1931, which was set off when white officials set out to conscript palm oil
workers by seizing Pende women as hostages. The
officials then raped some of the women, and the Pende
rose in revolt. Hundreds of troops were called out. By the time it was over,
344 Pende had been killed, forty-five wounded, and
1,356 arrested. Of the latter, two were sentenced to death, forty-seven to be
whipped, and thirty-nine to lengthy prison terms, nine of whom died in
confinement. When dealing with specific people,
the exhibit and catalog are also evasive. The catalog gives us a half-page
photograph from 1895 showing the state agent Captain Léon
Rom with several of his African workers (see illustration on page 39). But
neither book nor exhibit says anything more. Notorious for his brutality, Rom
kept a gallows permanently erected next to his house. The very same year that
this photograph was taken, a visiting British explorer noted that twenty-one
severed heads of African rebels “have been used by Captain Rom as a
decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house!”11
The resemblance to Mr. Kurtz and his skulls has caught many a scholar’s eye
ever since.12
There are other parallels as well.
Like Mr. Kurtz, Captain Rom had scientific pretensions: he collected
butterflies. And like Kurtz, Rom was a painter and a writer. Indeed, his
jaunty, arrogant little book Le Nègre du Congo
covers the same topics as Kurtz presumably does in his report to the Society
for the Suppression of Savage Customs. No one will ever know for certain if
Conrad met Rom, heard about him, or had him in mind when he created Mr.
Kurtz, but the museum chose to avoid showing anything that might even raise
the question. A pity, since while I was writing my book on the Congo a museum
archivist told me that its vaults hold five of Rom’s paintings and kindly
made a copy of Rom’s travel notebook for me, which, in an almost calligraphic
hand, shows him to have been in Leopoldville at the beginning of August 1890,
just when Conrad passed through on his way to begin working as a steamboat
officer. Another form of evasion is the
museum’s insistence that, while the “abuses” may have been regrettable, they
were, as the catalog puts it, “in breach of the law.” The exhibit, for istance, displays the text of an 1896 Congo regulation
which mandates good treatment of the natives. But it does not show any text
from the official Manuel du Voyageur et du Résident
au Congo, which provides detailed instructions on taking hostages in
order to force a village chief to obey your instructions—which usually meant
supplying men for labor. (Léon Rom was on the
editorial committee for that volume.) Nor does it show the printed forms sent
to state officials at the time, specifically for recording the names and
villages of hostages. A defensive-sounding placard at
this point in the exhibit acknowledges the “climate of brutality” of the
Leopold years, but suggests that this stopped with the end of the King’s
personal rule. It claims that, despite the brutality, colonialism in the
Congo constituted “a liberating progress…from the very beginning,” and
deplores the “extreme” writers who maintain otherwise. Here, the extremists
go unnamed, but in the catalog an entire article, by Phillipe
Marechal, chief of the museum’s history section,
denounces the author he considers the worst offender. I leave others to judge
whether he is right that my picture of Leopold is “un portrait caricatural.” I suspect readers may find odd Marechal’s assertion that the King’s regime could not
have been so deadly because there were so few white people in the Congo, and
they and their black soldiers were mostly armed only with single-shot rifles
or muskets. These factors did not prevent huge death tolls in many other
colonies, such as those caused by the conquistadors in Latin America. The museum’s numerous evasions and
distortions have provoked a group of Belgian leftists to prepare a lively
“alternative guidebook” to the exhibit, available free in French.13
Room by room, it discusses what is missing, quotes
passages from histories and memoirs, and refers the reader to other sources.
Sometimes it oversimplifies, implicitly blaming all of Africa’s problems on
colonialism. A sad truth is that some of what cripples Africa, such as ethnic
rivalries, the abysmal position of women, and the pervasive heritage of
indigenous slavery, existed long before any Europeans arrived. Still, a
visitor to the exhibit should take this provocative guidebook along to be re-
minded of how much is not being shown. Why has the museum been so
evasive? Although there are some factors peculiar to Belgium—the old
colonials, and the country’s unusually conservative senior Africa scholars,
some of whom helped to plan the exhibit—in the end, no nation anywhere likes
to confront difficult or shameful parts of its past. The increased attention
to slavery and Native Americans in our own schoolbooks came only after strong
pressure from the social movements of the 1960s. There has been nothing
comparable in Belgium, where the Congolese population is tiny and politically
powerless. Moreover, few museums anywhere have dealt honestly with
colonialism. Try to find an exhibit in the United States about our imperial
ventures in the Philippines or Central America. The Royal Museum’s mixed
effort is better than none at all. 4. On two matters, however, the
exhibit and its catalog are particularly lacking. In the first case, their
denial of the truth is of the old-fashioned, head-in-the-sand variety; in the
second it involves outright misrepresentation. As in most of early colonial
Africa, the Congo’s economy was based on compulsion. Forced laborers did not
just tap rubber; they were the porters who carried the white men’s supplies
into the interior and carried the ivory out to the coast. They were—after
being trained in special schools run by Catholic missionaries—the conscripts
who made up King Leopold’s private army. The exhibit has a few photographs
of porters carrying heavy loads, but a caption assures us that “the arrival
of the railroad, then steamboat navigation, allowed the reduction of the
human and economic costs of porterage.” This
ignores the fact that for several decades steamboat crews were conscripted
(depending on size, each boat required up to several dozen woodcutters to
fuel its boilers), and that building the railroads involved some of the
deadliest work of all. Even according to the understated official figures,
some 1,800 Africans died in the 1890s during the building of the 241-mile
line around the lower Congo River’s great rapids. And, contrary to what is
implied in the exhibit, forced labor in no way was eased in 1908, when the
Congo passed from Leopold’s personal rule to Belgium’s. When the same railway
line was widened and rebuilt between 1923 and 1932, the regime mobilized
68,000 forced laborers and members of their families, of whom 7,700 died.
(This was colonial business as usual: a competing railway built at the same
time in French Equatorial Africa cost 20,000 lives.) The practice of taking
family members or chiefs as hostages continued more than two decades after
Leopold’s death. According to one caption in the
exhibit, regulations against forced labor were put into effect in the 1930s.
This is nonsense. The late Jules Marchal, a retired
Belgian diplomat who was the greatest historian of the colonial Congo,
devoted three books to the forced labor system—in the mines, in railway
building, and in palm oil production—in the period between 1910 and 1945
alone.14
His work on a fourth volume, about World War II, when the legal maximum for
forced labor was increased to 120 days per man per year and the penalty for
refusal was six months in prison, came to a halt when the Belgian government
cut off his access to the colonial archives. Articles in the 271-page catalog
are concerned with Congolese music, art, national parks, and the bus system
of Léopoldville. There is a journal excerpt of a
visit to the Congo by Belgium’s Prince Albert. But not a single article—or a
single display case in the museum—is devoted to the foundation of the
territory’s colonial economy—forced labor. Nowhere in either book or exhibit
can you find the word “hostage.” The only subject touchier than
forced labor in colonial African history is population decline. Like most
other indigenous peoples who fell victim to rapid
conquest, from Native Americans to Australian Aborigines, the Congolese
suffered huge losses. As happened elsewhere, disease took a far greater toll
than outright killing. Accounts from the colonial period
itself are deeply alarmist. “We run the risk of someday seeing our native
population collapse and disappear,” declared the permanent committee of the
National Colonial Congress of Belgium in 1924, “so that we will find
ourselves confronted with a kind of desert.”15
Writing in 1920, R.P. Van Wing, a Jesuit missionary anthropologist, estimated
that the particularly hard-hit Bakongo had lost 80
percent of their people.16
Major Charles C. Liebrechts, a long-time high colonial official, estimated
the same year that since the beginning of colonization, the territory’s
overall population had been cut in half. The official Commission Instituée pour la Protection des Indigènes
made a similar reckoning in 1919.17
If these estimates of a 50 percent toll are correct, how many people would
that be? In the early 1920s the first territory-wide census, when adjusted
for undercounting, placed the colony’s inhabitants at some ten million. If
that figure is accurate and if it represents 50 percent of what the
population had been when the first white colonizers began arriving in 1879,
this would suggest a loss of some ten million people. The exhibit deals with this
question in a wall panel misleadingly headed “Genocide in the Congo?” This is
a red herring, for no reputable historian of the Congo has made charges of
genocide; a forced labor system, although it may be equally deadly, is
different. Dismissing the high estimates of earlier times, the wall panel
says that, by contrast, Today a scientific consensus has
been reached for the whole of Central Africa…. The history of demographic
decline in the period between 1875 and 1925/1930 [is] estimated at 20
percent. Is it? Apart from people
associated with the museum, most scholars would not agree. David Levering
Lewis in his 1987 The Race to Fashoda: European
Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa set the
figure at eight million, a loss of only slightly less than 50 percent. A
Congolese historian writing in 1998, Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, a member of
the exhibit’s advisory committee, estimated the death toll at roughly 13 million,18
which would mean an even greater percentage loss. Daniel Vangroenweghe,
a Belgian anthropologist, one of whose books is based on extensive fieldwork
in the Congo,19
also believes that there was a loss of 50 percent, although he feels the first
census set the population figure far too high. The most authoritative voice
belongs to the Belgian-born Jan Vansina, Vilas
professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of
Wisconsin, one of the most distinguished scholars in African studies, and the
author of more than a dozen books on the peoples of the Congo basin. From
“innumerable local sources from different areas: priests noticing their
flocks were shrinking, oral traditions, genealogies, and much more,”20
he estimates that between 1880 and 1920 the population of the Congo was cut
“by at least a half.”21
The museum placard claiming a
“scientific consensus” for the much lower figure is strange for another
reason: the sole text in the entire exhibit with a bibliography, it lists
three books. Are these, then, the studies on which the consensus figure is
based? A reader who consults the books will find that they do not support it.
Of the population decline, one book listed says only, “A tenth? A quarter? A
half? One cannot have any idea.”22
A second estimates the drop at “30 percent to 50 percent.”23
In the third, Léon de St. Moulin, author of many
studies on Congo demography, concludes: “The population declined…by at least
a third, possibly by half.”24
To claim a consensus for your
position when none exists is to deceive. And to cite sources that in fact
contradict what you say is not only deceptive but embarrassing. The Royal
Museum for Central Africa has the collections, the space, the funding, and
the archival resources to be one of the great specialized museums of the
world. But without admitting to so much of its subject’s history, it is a long
way from that now. Letters 'In
the Heart of Darkness'
January 12, 2006
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