Congo

With an outburst of laughter still intended to cover his shame, he said: “In the jungle there were no chairs to sit on, like at the mission, the people there still sat on tree trunks! All they ate was bananas, yams, and beans. But one of the priests gave my father a rifle! Then he could hunt antelope, wild swine, and beavers!” More than a century later, he still sang the mission’s praise: “In the jungle they wore rags and tatters, but at the mission my father was given a pair of short trousers and my mother a boubou, a little smock. He even learned to write a bit. There were children there from all over the place. His native tongue was Kiyombe, but that’s how he also learned Lingala, Swahili, and Tshiluba.”

A few days later, in the shade of a little mango tree, I spoke with seventy-three-year-old Camille Mananga. He was blind as well and came from Mayombe too. He told me not about his father, but about his grandfather. “He never wanted to be baptized. He climbed in his palm tree and made palm wine. He had four wives and a great many children. The missionaries felt that he should keep only one of them, but he felt responsible for all of them. And he never argued with them.”

Converting adults was clearly a more difficult task.

The Protestant evangelists had looser ties with the state, but were not entirely independent of it either. In 1890, when the Free State requisitioned Grenfell’s steamboat for the war against the Afro-Arab traders to the east, he protested vehemently. How could they think that his Peace—the name alone said enough—might be used to wage war! One year later, however, he was all too pleased to accept a personal commission from King Leopold: he was charged with surveying the border between the Free State and the Portuguese colony of Angola. That area was not only subject to international conflicts, but was also the site of the most violent uprisings against the new regime. So he, Grenfell, a British cleric, set out with an escort of four hundred soldiers from the Force Publique to chart and pacify the region. He was given a mandate to sign treaties and establish borders. Disasi Makulo accompanied him on that exhausting trip overland through hostile territory, “the most painful and dangerous journey we had ever made.” He too noted the highly overt interweaving of mission and state: “The government provided our military equipment and porters.” Disasi Makulo wore the uniform, the plus fours and fez, of the Force Publique.

THE FINAL WAY in which young people came in contact with the Free State was through the armed forces. The Force Publique, a colonial army under the firm leadership of white officers, was set up in 1885. Most of those officers were Belgian, but there were also any number of Italians, Swiss, and Swedes. Without exception, the most prominent and highly valued foot soldiers were the Zanzibaris, men who had accompanied the explorers on their journeys, and then mercenaries from Nigeria and Liberia. These West Africans had a reputation as trustworthy and courageous soldiers. The first group of ten Congolese was conscripted in late 1885. They had been recruited in the rain forest by the Bangala, who took them to Boma. The Bangala themselves were known as a warlike tribe, and a great many of them would also be recruited in the years to come. As a result, their language, Lingala, began spreading rapidly: it would one day become the most important in the west of the country.

As the Free State’s capital, Boma was also the country’s first garrison town. It was there that young people, previously unable to tell time, learned to live by the minute. The recruits arose at six o’clock and went to bed at nine. The bugle’s blare divided the day into drill, roll call, parade and rest. Military discipline was hammered in. The recruits learned to shoot, clean their rifles, march, and even play martial music. Yet even this stringent military discipline could not entirely disguise a large component of clumsiness. The cavalry had no horses, but donkeys—seventeen, to be exact. The artillery had a number of Krupp cannons, but no moving targets on which to practice. The soldiers had to make do with aiming at and firing upon herds of antelope.

Nevertheless, the Force Publique would become a factor to reckon with. During the first few years of the Free State, King Leopold dedicated half his available budget to the army. For many young men it formed the most direct and drastic acquaintance with the state. In the year 1889 there were fifteen hundred recruits; by 1904 that number had risen to seventeen thousand. During the final days of the Free State, the Force Publique had twenty-five thousand Albini rifles with bayonet, four million rounds of ammunition, 150 cannons, and nineteen Maxim machine guns, making it the largest standing army in Central Africa.

Unlike in Belgium, the young Congolese recruits were allowed to take their wives with them when they entered military service. The wives even received a modest stipend; an allowance was also paid for any child that might come along. In this way the army, like the missions, promoted monogamy and the nuclear family.

True families of military careerists arose.

In Kinshasa in 2008 I met Eugène Yoka, who had been an air force colonel for decades, back when the national armed forces still had planes. In Mobutu’s day he had been part of the inner circle of pilots who flew French Mirage fighters in formation above the capital during national parades. His father, he told me, had been a professional military man as well and had experienced World War I. His grandfather, a Bangala tribesman from Équateur, was one of the first recruits in the Force Publique. Colonel Yoka had two sons, one of whom had joined the army and worked his way up to major.

Four generations of dedicated military men, serving the state for more than a century.

The Congo Free State’s first five years were the mildest by far. The administration was still quite scanty and there was as yet no widespread terror. But during this period a growing group of natives, mostly children and young people, became directly acquainted with the European way of life in Congo. As boy, as menagère, as Christian, or as recruit, they entered houses unlike any they had ever seen, wore clothing unknown to them till then, and tasted unfamiliar foods. They learned French and adopted new ideas. A handful of them even witnessed firsthand how things went in Europe. And some of them actually propagated this new lifestyle, or at least their interpretation of it. Young catechists tried to convince their family members and fellow villagers of the fact that they led heathen lives. Young recruits showed off their uniforms and soldier’s pay in their villages. Their wives went with them to the barracks, their children grew up there. A life outside the village began, just like with the chapel farms, where one no longer lived under the authority of the native chieftain, but under a strict European regime. The Free State brought about a deep change in the lives of many.

After 1890, though, things got grimmer. From then on, contact with the Free State no longer meant making acquaintance with another way of living, but a confrontation with violence, horror, and death. What’s more, this new type of encounter took place on an exponentially greater scale. There where the Free State had at first impacted thousands or tens of thousands of Congolese, now millions were subjected to the (iron-fisted) presence of the state. To understand this radical turnabout, we must look again to the mastermind of the Free State himself, the one who devised, carried out, profited from and bore final responsibility for the whole enterprise: Leopold II.

The Belgian ruler had acquired his Congo in 1885 by dint of three promises. At the Berlin Conference he had promised both to safeguard free trade and to do away with the slave trade. To the Belgian state he had promised never to request funding for his personal project. And until 1890 he stuck to those promises: free trade flourished, the Belgian treasury was left untouched, and, although the fight against the slave trade had not yet been won, the missions did regularly receive “freed” children as a present. These were, quite literally, lavish promises. To facilitate free trade the king had to expand the necessary infrastructure and administration at his own cost. An expensive business, and one profited from largely by others. Leopold launched into all this in the hope of making serious profits of his own, but was ultimately disillusioned.

Between 1876 and 1885 he invested no less than 10 million Belgian francs, but the revenues in 1886 amounted to no more than seventy-five thousand francs.

By 1890 he had already spent 19 million francs on Congo. The huge fortune inherited from his father had gone up in smoke. The king was virtually bankrupt.

It was at that point that he decided to break two of his promises. He solicited money from the Belgian state and set about obstructing free trade with a vengeance. Despite a growing number of “Congo-philes” among an elite of bankers and industrialists, however, the Belgian parliament was not at all inclined to take part in a colonial adventure. Yet it could not simply look on passively as the head of state went bust. Reluctantly, therefore, a loan was arranged: by way of capital injection the king was given 25 million gold francs, later supplemented with an additional 7 million.

The country also invested heavily in the construction of a railroad. The agreement was that, in the event of continuing financial malaise, Belgium would take over Congo.

Much more dramatic for the situation in Congo itself was Leopold’s unscrupulous series of decrees rendering all lands neither cultivated nor inhabited—including all raw materials to be found there—the immediate property of the Free State. For the European ivory merchants this constituted an enormous setback and for the locals it was an unmitigated disaster. At one fell swoop the king nationalized some 99 percent of the country. A Pygmy who shot an elephant and sold its tusks was no longer supporting himself in legitimate fashion, but stealing from the state. A British trader who bought the tusks was no longer participating in free trade, but receiving unlawfully obtained goods. On paper, free trade continued to exist—of course, it had to—but in practice it was dead as a doornail: after all, there was nothing left to trade, for the state now kept everything for itself.

In bookkeeping terms, Leopold’s coup de théâtre was doubtlessly clever and sly, but in terms of culture and community it was a fiasco. He seemed to assume, for convenience’s sake, that his subjects in the villages made use only of the spot where their huts and fields were located. In reality, however, the local communities needed areas many times that size. Extensive farming forced them to clear new fields each year, in the rain forest or on the savanna. What’s more, entire villages often changed locations. And because no one lived from farming alone, they also made use of vast hunting and fishing grounds. Leopold’s decision literally robbed the people of what was dear to them: their land. He had no idea of the extremely complex land-use rights in the region, let alone of local views on collective property ownership. He simply transplanted the Western European concept of private property to the tropics, and with that sowed the seeds of deep discontent within the Free State.

But what about his third promise, the fight against the slave trade? That was the only one he kept and actually focused on more intensely. That struggle, after all, provided him with the perfect cover for his expansionist ambitions. After a major antislavery conference was held in Brussels in 1890, the king stepped up his efforts. The battle was waged largely in three areas: ranging from south to north, those were Katanga, East Congo, and South Sudan. Those regions coincided with the historical spheres of influence of the three most important Afro-Arab slave traders: Msiri, Tippo Tip, and al-Zubayr.

Msiri’s empire in Katanga was annexed between 1890 and 1892. Leopold wasted no time, in the knowledge that Cecil Rhodes was advancing on that same area from South Africa. Rhodes, a British imperialist whose megalomania was every bit Leopold’s equal, was attempting to link up Britain’s colonial holdings “from Cape to Cairo.” But Katanga became Leopold’s, and this time not merely on the map he had pored over on that Christmas Eve in 1884.

The struggle against the slave drivers in the eastern Congo was more problematic; they were well-armed and wealthy and had a great deal of experience with waging war in that area. In 1886 they had attacked the government post at Stanley Falls. To quiet things down, Stanley—with Leopold’s permission—appointed Tippo Tip, the most powerful man in the region, as that post’s new provincial governor. For Tippo Tip himself, this resulted in a conflict of loyalties. In a letter to King Leopold he wrote: “None of the Belgians in Congo like me and I see that they only wish me ill. I am starting to regret having entered the service of the Kingdom of Belgium. I see that they do not want me. And now I find myself at odds with all the Arabs as well. They are angry at me, because I deliver more ivory to Belgium than to them.”

The economic interests of Europeans and Zanzibaris clashed so loudly that a confrontation could not be long in coming, especially as supplies of ivory began to dwindle. From 1891 to 1894, therefore, the Force Publique was sent out on the so-called Arab campaigns. Led by Lieutenant Francis Dhanis, those campaigns resulted in 1892 in the destruction of Nyangwe and Kasongo, the two major trading centers for Swahili-speaking Muslims in eastern Congo. The power of the Afro-Arab traders from Zanzibar was broken for good. Stronger both militarily and economically, their empire was nevertheless too politically divided. By that time, Tippo Tip had left Congo to retire on Zanzibar. In Maniema and Kisangani, however, Islam remains in place as minority religion to this day.

The hardest fighting took place in the north. For years Leopold persisted in his dreams of annexing southern Sudan. Under the spell of Egyptomania ever since since his honeymoon journey to Cairo in 1855, Leopold was obsessed with the Nile. Snatching southern Sudan would also allow him to seize the upper reaches of that legendary river. What’s more, the area was said to be rich in ivory. As early as 1886 he sent Stanley there to free Emin Pasha, governor of the Egyptian province of Equatoria but in fact a German physician from Silesia, from a hostile Mahdist army. In truth, the mission was an early attempt to make southern Sudan a part of Congo. In 1890 Leopold offered Stanley the staggering sum of 2.5 million gold francs to finish the job for him and even to capture the city of Khartoum, but the explorer was no longer interested.

The king therefore financed several expeditions of his own, led by Belgian officers: all of them failed miserably. In 1894 the British granted him a portion of southern Sudan in usufruct, but that did not satisfy him completely. One last time, he assembled an expeditionary force. In 1896 the Force Publique moved to northeastern Congo with the largest army Central Africa had ever seen, intending to advance from there to the Nile. But they never got that far. The soldiers mutinied en masse.

How could that have happened? Beginning in 1891, in the absence of enough volunteers to maintain a substantial army, the Free State had set up a draft system for the Force Publique. As they had for the mission posts, all village chieftains were now required to supply a few young men, one conscript for every twenty-five huts. The period of military service was seven years. It was an ideal way for village leaders to rid themselves of troublemakers, agitators, and prisoners. The Force Publique, therefore, was able to grow by virtue of the arrival of unruly characters with absolutely no desire to serve. That manifested itself as well during the expedition to Sudan. Such forays were no orderly march to the battlefield. Hundreds of women, children, and elderly people traipsed along with the soldiers through the jungle; uniformed men carrying Albini rifles fought side by side with traditional warriors who whooped and waved their spears. This was no regular, national army on the move, but a motley crew, a semi-organized gang reminiscent more of a messy eighteenth-century band of brigands than any tight Napoleonic infantry square. And the chaos was not limited to the margins and the camp followers, but extended into the very heart of the military apparatus. For such a huge group, victuals could not be carried along but had to be obtained by improvisation. The local population was sometimes willing to sell provisions, but more frequently refused. And so the army took what it needed. Plundering as they went, the troops blazed a trail toward the promised Sudan. Brussels chose to see things differently, but there was in fact little difference between the Force Publique and the Batambatamba, the Afro-Arab gangs of slave drivers described by Disasi Makulo. Unrest was inevitable.

In 1895 there had already been a barracks revolt in Kasai, with fatalities on the European side as well: several hundred mutineers there had thrown off the yoke of the state. But the fury unleashed by the troops on their way to Sudan was unparalleled. Ten Belgian officers were murdered. More than six thousand soldiers and auxiliaries turned on their commanders. Led by the Batetela, the mutiny became a rebellion that lasted four years. It was the first major, violent protest against the white presence in Congo. Military historians have often pointed out the troops’ low morale: ill and underfed, large numbers of soldiers died; many of them received almost no training; and the most recent additions were soldiers who had first fought on the side of the Afro-Arab slave drivers and now had little interest in doing battle for their conquerors. But the hardhandedness of the officers, in combination with their extreme incompetence when it came to logistics and strategy, also fed a deep-seated hatred. And that hatred rounded not only on the officers themselves, and not merely on the Belgians, but on whites in general.

A French missionary suffered a night of terror when he was taken prisoner by the mutineers. “All whites conspire together against the blacks,” he heard one of his captors argue against letting him live. “All the whites should be killed or chased away.” The heated discussion was finally decided in his favor, which was a stroke of good luck for historians as well. Later he described his ordeal in a letter to his bishop, giving us today a fairly precise view of the motives behind the mutiny. One rebel leader told him: “For three years now I have been choking back my anger against the Belgians, and especially against Fimbo Nyingi. Now we had the chance to avenge ourselves.” Fimbo Nyingi was the nickname of Baron Dhanis, the expedition’s commander, the same lieutenant who had led the troops in Eastern Congo. His nickname meant “many lashes.” The missionary resolved to listen to their grievances. “They even became friendly and offered me coffee—very nice coffee, in fact. What they told me about the Belgians was indeed shocking: sometimes they had to work hard for months without pay, and the wages for arriving too late were a sound beating with the kiboko. They were hanged or shot for the most minor offences. At least forty of their leaders, they told me, had been killed for trifling matters, and the number of fatalities among the foot soldiers was beyond count.” Belgian officers, they told him, sometimes had native chieftains buried alive. They cursed their troops and called them beasts and slaughtered them “as though they were goats.”

I had never thought I would still be able to pick up echoes from that dark and distant period in the early years of this third millennium. But one day, in the Kinshasa working-class neighborhood of Bandalungwa, I found myself at the home of Martin Kabuya. Martin was ninety-two years old, a former Force Publique soldier and a World War II veteran. He lived in the capital but his family came from Aba, the most northeasterly village in Congo, on the border with Sudan. His grandfather was a chieftain at the time of the Force Publique expeditions to southern Sudan. “His name was Lukudu, and he was extremely mean. That’s why they buried him alive, with his head just above the ground,” he recounted. A common practice, as it turned out. To break their resistance, recalcitrant chieftains were buried up to their necks, preferably in the hot sun and preferably close to an anthill. Some of them were forced to stare directly into the sun for hours. Their families, too, were destroyed: under the guise of “liberation,” their children were taken away. “The Marist Brothers took all his children to the boarding school at Buta [six hundred kilometers, or about 370 miles, to the west]. Including my father. There he became a Catholic. He married at the mission post and had three children. I’m the youngest.”

While King Leopold’s troops were combating the slave trade in the east, and trying out new methods of subjugation as they went along, things in the west of the country were not much better. There were no full-out wars there, but there were daily forms of coercion and terror. To circumvent the unnavigable stretch of the Congo, the railroad between Matadi and Stanley Pool was built between 1890 and 1898. Without such a railroad, Stanley had noted earlier, Congo was not worth a red cent. The system of porters was simply too costly and too slow, especially now that the state was the prime exporter. It took a caravan eighteen days to cover that route, a steam train—even with frequent stops for water and wood—only two.

With great difficulty, Leopold was finally able to scrape together the funding for that project (the money came from private investors and above all from the Belgian government): with even greater difficulty, the work commenced. During the first two years only eight of the total of four hundred kilometers (about five out of 250 miles) of rail were laid: the railroad had to wind its way through the desolate, mountainous countryside east of Matadi. Three years later the work was no further than kilometer marker 37 (milepost 23). Working conditions were extremely harsh. The crews were decimated by malaria, dysentery, beriberi, and smallpox. During the first eighteen months alone, nine hundred African workers and forty-two whites died; another three hundred whites had to be repatriated to Europe. Over the full nine years, the project claimed the lives of some two thousand workers.

The organization had a military feel to it: at the top of the chain was a Belgian elite, this time consisting of engineers, mining engineers, and geologists, led by Colonel Albert Thys, himself a military man and captain of industry. Working under them were the manual laborers from Zanzibar and West Africa, a crew of between two and eight thousand men. There were also a few dozen Italian miners. But as fewer and fewer Africans proved willing to work in the hell called Congo, the organizers began recruiting workers from the Antilles and had hundreds of Chinese laborers shipped in from Macao—almost all of whom succumbed to tropical diseases.

Just like in the army, the Congolese themselves barely took part at first. The argument given was they were still indispensible as porters. Only when the railroad had almost reached the halfway point at Tumba in 1895 were workers recruited from the local population. That was home ground to Étienne Nkasi, the old man I had met in Kinshasa. “I was twelve or fifteen at the time,” he told me during one of our conversations, “I was still a child, incapable of hard labor. Kinshasa and Mbanza-Ngungu didn’t exist yet.” Indeed, I reflected, Kinshasa was not yet a city at that time, at most only a cluster of settlements; Mbanza-Ngungu (the former Thysville) had yet to be built. It owed its existence to the railroad. At the highest point along the track, precisely halfway between Matadi and Kinshasa, there had once been a pleasantly cool and fertile hillside. It was there, between 1895 and 1898, that they built the town named after the project’s chief engineer. Travelers spent the night there during their two-day journey. It was a fresh and verdant spot, where European crops were raised on a large scale. Today it is marked by rusty boxcars on rusty tracks, beside rusty Art Nouveau–style colonial homes.

“I was there when they built Thysville,” Nkasi had remarked, amazing me for the umpteenth time with his memories of an incredibly distant past. “My father knew Albert Thys. He was the leader of a crew, my father was. Four black men pulled the white man’s cart over the rails. The white man wore one of those white helmets. I saw that.” He smiled, as though realizing only then how very long ago that was. “Papa worked at Tumba, at Mbanza-Ngungu, Kinshasa, Kintambo. I went with him everywhere.” Those were indeed the posts along the route under construction. The job was finished in 1898. At the festive opening, white people trundled along from Matadi to Kinshasa, a nineteen-hour journey, in tuxedo and décolleté. Along the way there were fireworks and here and there blacks in uniform stood and saluted. At some of the stations the travelers were treated to hymns sung by the choirs from the local mission posts, accompanied by a rickety harmonium.

The celebrated narrow-gauge railway was in fact merely a tramway with open carriages, yet the opening of it constituted a milestone in the opening up of Congo. For Nkasi, however, the grand opening meant it was time to go home. He had been gone for three years. “When the work was finished, Papa went back to the village, back to my mother. To make more children. I was still the only one they had. Two babies had died after I was born. When he came back from the railroad, he made five more.” I asked him about the trains back then. He remembered that too. “The engines, they ran on wood,” he explained. “And when they started moving …” He sat up a little straighter on his bed, clenched his old fists, and began rocking his thin arms back and forth. “It went: toooot … tacka, tacka, tacka.” Then he burst into noiseless laughter.

Working on the railroad was not the worst that could overcome a Congolese, especially not after 1895. For at the moment when the first native laborers were taken on, a premium system came into effect. The white yard supervisor would agree with the black headman on a term within which a certain stretch of railroad was to be finished. If that goal was met, his team received a preestablished bonus. A company culture of incentives, avant la lettre. On top of his daily wages of fifteen centimes and his ration of rice, biscuits, and dried fish, the worker could in this way earn a little extra cash, valid albeit only at government shops, in the absence of a monetary economy in the rest of the country. Louis Goffin, the engineer who devised the premium system, spoke of “une cooperation du travail des noirs et du capital européen” (a working arrangement between black labor and European capital). The objective, according to him, was to instill the Congolese with enthusiasm for their work, purchasing power, and pride. The idea was “to create among the natives new needs, which would result in a love of work, a rapid development of commerce and, in that way, of civilization.”

Once the railroad was finished a few Congolese remained employed as lathe operators in the machine shop, as stationmasters, or even as locomotive drivers. They were on the payroll, and therefore the first to be absorbed into the money economy. Each time I visited Nkasi, he spoke with great admiration of a man named Lema, his father’s cousin. Lema had served as boy-bateau on the ships to Antwerp, but went to work on the railroad in 1900. “He became stationmaster at Lukala.” “Where the cement factory is now?” “Yes, that’s right. Stationmaster! He knew the white people.”

Elsewhere in the Free State, monetization was yet to arrive. Barter was still the norm. That, however, made it rather hard to collect taxes. The Free State needed revenues and considered it expedient that its subjects help pay for their country’s development; no money, however, could be expected from those who had none. The beads, copper ingots, and bales of cotton of the past were of no interest to them. And so an arrangement had to be made for payment in kind: in goods or in labor. That, after all, was how it used to go, when a hunter presented a tusk or a portion of the spoils to the village chieftain. That had been a solid system in the past, but now it would lead to the total disjunction of Congolese society. The refusal to introduce a money economy to the interior, too, had painful consequences.

Leopold II played a rather dirty trick on free trade. As owner of almost all the ground in Congo, he himself was nonetheless unable to develop it. His solution was to grant huge concessions to a few commercial concerns: to the north of the Congo River, the Anversoise, a new company, was allowed to exploit an area of 160,000 square kilometers (about 62,400 square miles), approximately twice the size of Ireland. To the south of that same river, the ABIR (Anglo-Belgian Indian Rubber Company) received a permit for a comparable area. The king treated himself to an extremely generous chunk of jungle largely south of the equator: the Kroondomein (Domaine de la Couronne), covering 250,000 square kilometers (about 97,500 square miles), approximately ten times the size of Belgium. In order not to displease all the people all the time, Kasai remained a sort of natural reserve where free trade was allowed to muddle on for a while (it was later monopolized by the king anyway). The Compagnie du Katanga and the Compagnie des Grands Lacs also received enormous territories; their very names show that they were set up especially for the occasion. The major economic exploitation of the Congolese interior, therefore, lay in the hands of the king and a few privileged concessionaries. Yet these were not watertight worlds; Leopold himself was usually the main shareholder in the new companies or at the very least had a right to a substantial share in their profits. The concessionaries’ management councils always included top administrative officials from the Free State. In Belgium, the king’s financial adviser, Browne de Tiège, was not only chairman of the Anversoise and the Société Générale Africaine, but also a member of the board of ABIR, as well as the Société Internationale Forestière et Minière, the Société Belge de Crédit Maritime in Antwerp, and a handful of other partnerships.

Congo’s economic potential now no longer revolved solely around ivory. In 1888 a Scottish veterinarian, John Boyd Dunlop, had come up with an invention that would not only considerably improve the comfort of thousands of travelers in Europe and America, but also rule, or even end, the lives of millions of Congolese—the inflatable rubber tire. In an age in which new inventions like the car and the bicycle still had to make do with ironclad wooden wheels, the rubber tire was a godsend. The worldwide demand for rubber took off. For Leopold, it was nothing short of a miraculous deliverance. Fewer and fewer elephants roamed the Free State, but rubber trees abounded. The timing could not have been better. His Congo was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and Belgium was poised, however reluctantly, to take over. Suddenly, that turned out not to be necessary. In 1891 Congo was producing only a few hundred metric tons of rubber, but by 1896 that had grown to thirteen hundred tons (nearly 1,450 U.S. tons) and by 1901 to six thousand tons (6,600 U.S. tons).

From a moribund project in Central Africa, the Free State had suddenly become a true economic wonder. Leopold raked in millions and, after a very long wait and years of reckless entrepreneurship, finally received his return on investment. At last he could demonstrate what a colony was good for: economic boom, imperial fame, and national pride. With the revenues from Congo he was able to spruce up Belgium on a major scale. Brussels saw the construction of the Jubelpark Museum and a new royal palace, at Tervuren an immense colonial museum and park, inspired by Versailles, and at Ostend the celebrated Venetian esplanade.

The flip side was seen only in Congo itself, where—except for the tins of foie gras and bottles of champagne sent to government officials from Belgium—there was little glamour and glitter to be found. Not only did Leopold refuse to invest the proceeds from his rubber empire in Congo itself, he set about supervising the harvesting of that rubber in an extremely troubling fashion. There were nothing like plantations in Congo, only wild rubber. The harvesting of it was a long and arduous task that required the involvement of many manual laborers. The ideal form of taxation, therefore, had been found: the rubber itself. Natives had to go into the jungle to tap the rubber trees, collect the latex, and process it crudely into sticky clumps. Whereas taxes had formerly been collected in the form of manioc loaves or ivory, or by the impressments of porters, now the local population had to deliver baskets of rubber at prearranged intervals. The quota varied from region to region, but the principle remained the same. In the Crown Domain, the regional governor would draw up an estimate and the soldiers of the Force Publique would see to the collection of the rubber tax. In those areas where concessionaires operated, the collection was done by armed guards, the so-called sentries. In both cases it involved Africans with limited military training and little discipline.

The abuses to which this system led were, in fact, a foregone conclusion. The men paid to collect the rubber were paid for the quantity of rubber they collected. No rubber, no pay. They therefore did all they could to maximize yield. In actual practice that meant a universal reign of terror. Because they were armed, they were able to mercilessly terrorize the local population. The situation in the territories allotted to the concessionaires was appalling, but in the areas controlled by the Free State things were hardly better. Disasi Makulo witnessed it himself, at the mission post he had founded at Yalemba. Trouble awaited him not only from the heathen villagers of his region, he had to concede, but also from the Congolese from other parts of the country, now in the service of the Free State.

They often profited from the absence of their superiors. They abused, tortured and sometimes even murdered people … At the mission post at Bandu was a man whose nickname was Alio [the eagle], because of his cruelty. He was the general overseer for the rubber deliveries. That man was terribly cruel. He killed a great many people! One day he and his crew crossed the river to go to the Turumbu, a tribe that lived on the right bank. As usual, he demanded goats, chickens, ivory, et cetera et cetera from every village he went to. This time he caused very serious problems. He even killed a man.

When I heard that he was on his way to my village of Bandio … I took a few boys from the mission along and went looking for him. When we arrived, we found him just as he was busy beating people and torturing them and plundering the village! Without wasting a minute I went up to him and said: “You are in the service of the state only for the purpose of overseeing the deliveries of rubber, not to abuse, rob, and murder. Give back immediately all that you have confiscated, or else I will report these facts to the authorities in Basoko.”

Disasi also witnessed the shooting of a girl from his village by the guardian of the rubber depot. His experiences were typical of all those who came in contact with the rubber policies of that day. The men were sent into the forest to collect rubber, the women were held hostage until enough rubber had been delivered. Human lives were not worth much, as several disturbing eyewitness reports show. “Two sentries, Bokombula and Bokusula, arrested my grandfather Iselunyako, because his rubber basket was not full enough. They put him in a well and trampled him underfoot. That is what killed him. When we showed his body to the white man, he said: ‘Good. He was finished with rubber and therefore finished living.’”

Eluo, a man from Esanga, related the following: “We had to supply fifty baskets of rubber. One day, during the administration of the white man Intamba [Meneer Dineur], we came back with only forty-nine, and they declared war on us. The sentry Lomboto came to our village with a few others. Along the way, as they passed a swamp, he saw my sister fishing. For no reason at all, Lomboto shot her with his rifle and killed her.’”

Sexual violence took place in those days as well. A married woman recounted: “To punish me, the sentries Nkusu Lomboto and Itokwa removed my pagne and stuffed clay into my genitals. That was very painful.”

Cruelty had a function.