European Atrocity, African Catastrophe

Leopold II, the Congo Free State and its Aftermath

Sir Martin Ewans, Martin Ewans

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700715893
• eBook ISBN: 9781317849070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There is a broad consensus among those who are concerned with Africa that the plight of the continent is approaching the catastrophic. Partly the roots of the problem are historical, stemming from the exploitation and colonisation of the continent by European powers. An appreciation of the history of the relationship between Europe and Africa, a major episode of which this book examines, is indispensable to an understanding of the continent's present predicament. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries King Leopold II of the Belgians established a colony in Africa, which, as the Congo Free State, became a byword for unremitting exploitation and widespread atrocities. This book describes the creation, the development and the collapse both of this regime and of the Belgian colony that replaced it. Conclusions are drawn about the nature of European colonialism in Africa and the consequences for Europe itself.

Part One
Antecedents: Belgium and Africa

Chapter One
Belgium, the Coburgs and the Quest for Colonies

As the year 1831 dawned, Belgium was searching rather desperately for a King. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the country had been ceded by Austria to France, a move that, despite its undoubted commercial advantages, was highly unpopular with the majority of Belgians. Then in 1815, in the process of redrawing the map of Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the Congress of Vienna decided that the country should be incorporated into the Netherlands. The British, who took the initiative in this, had a straightforward strategic motive, to prevent any risk of the reversion to French control of a coastline so near to Britain. In Belgium, however, the move again provoked strong opposition, particularly among the French-speaking Walloons. Dutch rule proved oppressive and the feeling grew among the Belgians that they were being exploited to an intolerable degree. The union did not, therefore, last; and in July 1830, when a popular revolution took place in France which brought Louis-Philippe, the Duc d’Orleans, to the throne, repercussions quickly followed in Belgium. A performance of Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici, with its theme of a Neapolitan revolt against Spanish rule, aroused strong patriotic emotions and the audience took to the streets. The proletariat joined in, the revolt quickly spread, a Dutch force was repulsed when it tried to intervene and, by October, Belgium had declared itself an independent state.

It was touch and go whether the new state would survive. The Dutch were held at bay, but refused to renounce their sovereignty. In an attempt to settle the issue, a conference assembled in London towards the end of the year, at which Talleyrand and Palmerston played leading roles. Talleyrand proposed that Belgium should be split between Austria and France, but this was firmly rejected by Palmerston, whose government remained wholly opposed to any extension of French territory. Eventually the conference secured an armistice, later followed by agreement on Belgium’s independence and guarantees of her neutrality. The Belgians, however, were less than satisfied. They at first rejected both the guarantee and the frontiers proposed for them, and they petitioned Louis-Philippe, whom they saw as the only European ruler who was at all sympathetic, to allow his young son, the Duc de Nemours, to become the King of the Belgians. However Louis-Philippe, under pressure from Prussia and Austria as well as from Palmerston, turned down the request, while in Belgium itself anarchy started to spread. Faced with an urgent need to acquire leadership, stability and international acceptance, the Belgian government turned to a new candidate for the monarchy, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

Coburg was a minuscule Dukedom, with an area of just eighteen square miles and a population of around 40,000, lying some sixty miles north of Nuremberg. Despite its obscurity, however, it was to become, in Bismarck’s words, the ‘stud farm of Europe’.¹ Born in 1790, Leopold was the third son of the heir to the Dukedom, and his prospects would have been as obscure as his origins had his siblings not made a series of brilliant matches around the European courts, including two at that of Russia. On the recommendation of his brother, Ernest, who was already in the Tsar’s service, Leopold had little difficulty in obtaining a commission in the Russian army. At the unlikely age of fifteen, he became, in title at least, a colonel, but, no doubt fortunately, saw no action. Coburg was later occupied by the French and incorporated into the Confederation of the Rhine, and Ernest and Leopold spent much time and effort in trying, without success, to gain concessions from Napoleon. In 1813, Leopold again entered Russian service, as a colonel in charge of a cavalry division, and this time he seems to have been in action. The following year he accompanied the victorious Tsar of Russia to Paris and thence to London.

An extremely handsome and intriguingly reserved young cavalry officer, Leopold was a social success in both cities, and before long he seems to have caught the eye of Princess Charlotte, the Prince Regent’s only child and hence the heir presumptive to the British throne. As the most eligible princess in Europe, she had been engaged to William, Prince of Orange, but now proceeded to throw him over. Her relationship with Leopold was interrupted by the Congress of Vienna, at which Leopold enjoyed a prolonged social whirl (‘le Congrès dance, mais ne marche pas’, commented one wit²), but in 1816, while he was still abroad, he was invited back to London, where he was told that the Regent would be prepared to give him Charlotte’s hand in marriage.

Not one to pass up such an opportunity, Leopold promptly accepted, the engagement was speedily announced and the marriage took place in May of that year. To accord with his new status, he was given British citizenship, a dukedom, £50,000 a year, a generalship in the British Army and the Orders of the Garter and the Bath. The couple went to live at Claremont, near Esher, on the estate originally built by Clive of India, and there followed what was undoubtedly the happiest year in Leopold’s life. Late in 1817, however, tragedy struck. Following two miscarriages, Charlotte again became pregnant, but a difficult labour ensued, at the end of which the baby was stillborn and she herself died. A principal cause seems to have been anaemia, brought on by a degree of incompetence which was perhaps not unusual for those times, her doctors having prescribed bleeding and put her on a diet which excluded nourishing food. Thus at the age of twenty-six, Leopold found himself deprived not only of a wife he seems to have grown to love, but also of the prospect of an eminent career, very probably as Prince Consort. He was given the ranks of Royal Highness and Field Marshal, and his pension was continued, but these were hardly adequate compensation for his loss.

Leopold’s influence in Britain was not, however, altogether at an end. With the deaths of Charlotte and her infant, the direct succession to the throne had lapsed, and it was made clear to the Dukes of Clarence and of Kent (the one with eleven natural children and the other with a long-standing mistress) that it was their duty to marry and produce the next royal generation. Seizing the opportunity, Leopold summoned his sister Victoria, the widow of an obscure German prince, and she was duly married to the Duke of Kent. The outcome, in June 1819, was the birth of another Victoria, ensuring Leopold, on the death of the Duke the following year, the position at least of uncle to the future Queen, or possibly, should she be a minor at the time of her succession, even that of Regent. He made Victoria and her mother welcome at Claremont and supported them financially.

Over the next few years, Leopold travelled extensively across Europe, while in England the feeling grew that he might well be fitted for some international position which would at the same time further British interests. In 1828 the Greeks gained their independence and opened negotiations with Leopold with a view to his becoming their King. Leopold at first accepted, but complications arose and he had second thoughts. He was attracted and flattered by the prospect, but was reluctant to leave England, with which his affinities had grown over the years and where his niece was now at the centre of his ambitions. Also the political situation in Greece was confused and the Greeks could give him no guarantees of stability. Eventually he turned the offer down, but it was not long before the revolution took place in France, followed by the Belgian revolt against the Dutch. This time, Leopold had fewer hesitations. With British approval, not unmixed with a concern in some quarters to remove him from proximity to the throne that Victoria was now almost certain to occupy, he accepted the Belgian invitation, although insisting that Belgium must first sign a formal peace treaty drawn up by the European powers. He was elected overwhelmingly and in July 1831 was sworn in as King in Brussels, where he quickly reinforced his position by marrying Louis-Philippe’s daughter Louise-Marie.

In retrospect, Leopold seems to have felt that he would have been better off in Greece, but he applied himself conscientiously to his responsibilities in Belgium. Almost immediately, he had to face a Dutch invasion. The small and ill-trained Belgian army was put to flight and he was compelled to call on the British and French to honour their guarantees. The British did little, but the French sent in troops and forced the Dutch to withdraw. There was then in turn the problem of persuading the French to leave,-and this was only accomplished with the help of a British ultimatum. It was to be several years before the Dutch were to recognise Belgian independence, but Leopold was now secure and proceeded to consolidate his rule.

The Belgian constitution, which had been drafted by an interim National Congress, was exceptionally liberal and democratic for its time, and the monarchy was added more in order to gain foreign acceptance and support than as a matter of principle. However Leopold managed to manoeuvre himself gradually into a situation where his influence in government was predominant. In this, he was aided by the fact that he was Commander-in-Chief of the Belgian armed forces, and hence in effect Minister of War. His extensive connections with the European royal houses meant that he was also virtually Foreign Minister. He arranged a succession of dynastic marriages, including that of his nephew Prince Albert to Queen Victoria. He was always close to Victoria and remained her ‘favourite uncle’, and he had some success in influencing her on issues in which the peace of Europe, and hence the vital interests of Belgium, seemed to him to be at stake. Louise for her part proved a dutiful, if rather dull and pious, wife and, after one son had died in infancy, secured the succession by producing two more.

During Leopold’s reign, Belgium made considerable economic progress. In the 1830s and 1840s there was widespread poverty and even malnutrition, and one in four Belgians were said to be on some form of relief. However railways were built, industry developed and standards of living gradually rose. Leopold safeguarded the country’s neutrality and avoided the revolutions that took place elsewhere in Europe around the middle of the century. He also handled the endemic internal tensions, between Flemish and Walloons, Liberals and Catholics, with a fair degree of success. Altogether, therefore, he well justified the trust placed in him by the Belgian people. Nevertheless it is clear that he was a less than contented monarch. He had lost his position in Britain, he retained a nostalgia for Greece and now found himself at the head of a small and relatively insignificant country, whose people were correspondingly parochial and small-minded. As he told³ Victoria, he was bored – ‘here one is shut up as if one was in a menagerie, walking round and round like a tame bear’.

Leopold’s solution was to try to transform Belgium into a colonial power. He had seen while in Britain the power, wealth and status that accrued to a nation with a colonial empire, and he was very conscious that the Netherlands had, to its considerable advantage, taken its colonies with it when it was separated from Belgium. The problem was that the Belgian government, parliament and people viewed such prospects with almost total indifference: their horizons stretched no further than western Europe and they were opposed to spending money on what they saw as pointless adventures. It was several years before Leopold was able to persuade parliament even to discuss the question. Faced with its firm opposition, he turned to private enterprise, and a society was formed which in 1843 proceeded to found a colony at Santo-Tomas in Guatemala. However the scheme was a resounding failure: conditions were atrocious, there were no opportunities for gainful occupation, money ran out and some three hundred of the colonists died. At the end of two years the survivors were brought home. At different times, Leopold tried unsuccessfully to purchase Crete from Turkey and the Faroes from the Dutch. A ship was sent out to prospect in South America and West Africa, but parliamentary opposition ensured that nothing came of the venture. He tried to purchase part of Texas, but ran up against the Monroe Doctrine. He personally financed an expedition to the New Hebrides, but the government took the view that it was too far from Belgium. In 1859 he tried to secure Belgian participation in an expedition which the British and French governments were proposing to send to China, with an eye to securing commercial, and possibly even territorial, concessions, but neither power took to the idea and it was finally vetoed by the Belgian cabinet, on the grounds that Belgium’s policy of neutrality would be infringed. In the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Turveren, outside Brussels, there is a map of the world showing the locations of some fifty colonial ventures which Leopold reviewed at one time or another. Some he attempted to realise on the ground, while others seem to have existed merely on paper, but what they all had in common is that none of them came to fruition. It was not until towards the end of his life that Leopold finally threw in the towel.

Leopold’s eldest son, the Duke of Brabant and the future King Leopold II, then took up the quest. As a child, the younger Leopold had been sickly and unattractive, with a sciatic leg which gave him a limp and features that were dominated by a massive nose. Worse than this, he was unloved by his aloof and domineering father, while his mother, who may have had some affection for him, died before he reached his teens. Then at the age of eighteen he was the victim of a dynastic marriage, the wife chosen for him being the Hapsburg Archduchess Marie-Henriette, with whom he was totally incompatible and certainly never came to love, and probably not even to like. Where he was serious and dull, she was spirited, fond of music and a horsewoman, to the extent that Madame de Metternich described⁴ the union as one between ‘a stable boy and a nun, Leopold being the nun’. Leopold thus grew up as a gauche, withdrawn and arrogant young man, and there is much to be said for the view that it was as a compensation for this thoroughgoing lack of domestic affection that he developed the highly ambitious, ruthless and cynical qualities of character which were to become the hallmarks of his reign. As he approached manhood, however, his personality began to expand. His intellect matured, his horizons broadened and he started to take a keen interest in politics, geography and travel. By the time of his succession, he had become a man of considerable energy, subtlety and intelligence. He never inspired affection, but his gauchness was replaced by an unusual ability to charm and persuade. From the late 1850s onwards, he increasingly applied himself to the question of colonies.

At the age of eighteen, the younger Leopold became, as of right, a member of the Belgian senate and began to address it from time to time on national issues. In 1860, he started to speak explicitly about the advantages of colonies, illustrating his thesis that Belgium needed to acquire some by referring in detail to the financial benefits that Holland was deriving from the activities of the Dutch East India Company. T believe’, he declared,⁵

that the time has come to spread ourselves outwards; we cannot afford to lose more time, under penalty of seeing the best positions, which are already becoming rare, successively occupied by nations more enterprising than our own.

At the same time, he began to study the question seriously and to compile a ‘sort of library’ on the possibilities. He remained particularly interested in the Dutch example and pestered various contacts for as much information as they could obtain. Taking his cue from his father, he saw the acquisition of colonies as opportunities for national and personal aggrandisement. There can be no doubt that there was a personal aspect to it: naturally the younger Leopold kept his own counsel on the subject, but it is clear from all his subsequent actions that personal ambition – the acquisition of wealth and status for himself and his dynasty – formed a significant part of his motivation. Nevertheless he was also genuinely patriotic, and it would be unjust to see him as guilty of hypocrisy when, in his public and private utterances, he laid stress on the advantages of colonies for the nation as a whole. As he put it in a missive⁶ to a member of his staff,

Surrounded by the sea, Holland, Prussia and France, our frontiers can never be extended in Europe. … But the sea bathes our coast, the universe lies in front of us, steam and electricity have made distances disappear, all the unappropriated lands on the surface of the globe may become the field of our operations and of our successes. … Since history teaches us that colonies are useful, that they play a great part in that which makes up the power and prosperity of states, let us strive to get one in our turn. Before pronouncing in favour of this or that system, let us see where there are unoccupied lands. … where there are to be found peoples to civilise, to lead to progress in every sense, meanwhile assuring to us new revenues, to our middle classes the employment that they seek, to our army a little activity, and to Belgium as a whole the opportunity to prove to the world that it is also an imperial people capable of dominating and of enlightening others.

Some of Leopold’s apologists suggest that as a young man, he may have possessed a degree of idealism and a concern for the betterment of the indigenous peoples who might be brought under Belgian colonial rule. It is doubtful, however, if this was ever the case. Such evidence as there is suggests strongly that, despite his self-promotion as a philanthropist and humanitarian, Leopold never genuinely subscribed to the concept that a colonial power had a serious responsibility for the well-being and advancement of its subjects. On the contrary, as his earliest writings make clear, his outlook was essentially exploitative: in his eyes the advantages of colonialism lay in the benefits it offered to the colonial power in the shape of employment, raw materials and markets for its industry, openings for profitable investment and, above all, the transfer of revenue and riches to the metropolis. In 1862, he spent a month in Seville studying at the General Archive of the Indies, in order to ‘calculate the profit which Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies’.⁷ He was also much struck by the wealth that the Netherlands was, in the 1850s and 1860s, deriving from Java and its other East Indian possessions; and a book by a British judge, J.W.B.Money, ‘Java, or how to manage a colony’, which appeared in 1861, made a considerable impression on him. It so happened that the agricultural produce coming from Java, principally coffee, was at that period enjoying a boom and that this was the main, if not the only, basis for its profitability. Leopold, however, seems to have believed that the profitability of colonies could be taken for granted, provided that they were appropriately administered (although, in the case of the Congo, his faith was to be justified only at the eleventh hour and by the most unforeseeable piece of good fortune). ‘If Belgium’, he wrote,⁸

which already possesses its railways, could add to them some [colonies] near Java, one might be able to hope for a reduction in the salt duty, the suppression of customs dues, etc., etc., etc., all achieved without the smallest call on our own resources or on our current expenditure’.

When at a later stage Java went into deficit, his conclusion was that it was the Dutch administration which was to blame, rather than the terms of trade. Also instructive is Leopold’s use of language – his unequivocal references to ‘booty’ and ‘spoils’, and his later remark to an associate, in the context of the Congo, that ‘we must procure for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake’.⁹ Sir James Brooke, the ‘Rajah of Sarawak’, was one of the earliest to see through him. ‘The views of the Duke of Brabant’, he wrote,¹⁰ ‘are at once narrow and arbitrary and his prevailing idea seems to be to introduce the Dutch system into Sarawak with the help of a Belgian garrison. He has no notion of native rights or native government’. Brooke’s associate, Spenser St. John, was even more explicit. ‘I found no enlarged views’, he recorded,¹¹ ‘no liberality of sentiment, he thought of nothing but how he could squeeze money out of the people. … He laughed at the idea of respecting the rights of the native, and talked of having a garrison to coerce them into paying revenue’. From the outset, at the centre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• PART ONE ANTECEDENTS: BELGIUM AND AFRICA
• PART TWO FOUNDATIONS
• PART THREE ACQUISITION
• PART FOUR EXPANSION
• PART FIVE EXPLOITATION
• PART SIX NEMESIS
• PART SEVEN AFTERMATH
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index