Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts

Colonial Exploitation in the Congo

Jules Marchal, Martin Thom

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784786311
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784786328
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Geschichte

In the early twentieth century, the worldwide rubber boom led British entrepreneur Lord Leverhulme to the Belgian Congo. Warmly welcomed by the murderous regime of King Leopold II, Leverhulme set up a private kingdom reliant on the horrific Belgian system of forced labour, a programme that reduced the population of Congo by half and accounted for more deaths than the Nazi Holocaust. In this definitive, meticulously researched history, Jules Marchal exposes the nature of forced labour under Lord Leverhulme's rule and the appalling conditions imposed upon the people of Congo.

With an extensive introduction by Adam Hochschild, Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts is an important and urgently needed account of a laboratory of colonial exploitation.

1

The Early Years (1911–1922)

A magnate, purportedly a philanthropist,
launches himself upon the Congo

At the beginning of 1911, William Lever, the soap magnate from Port Sunlight in the suburbs of Liverpool, set foot in the Congo in order to secure raw material for his industry. This raw material, the oil of fruit taken from natural palm groves, was to be found in abundance in British West Africa, where it was freely sold by Africans to Europeans. Lever, however, was bent on gain, and therefore wished to circumvent this trade, and to obtain palm groves from the British government in the form of a concession. Because the latter decided that it could not expropriate collective property, Lever looked to achieve his goal in one of the other colonies in Africa. He settled on the Belgian Congo, where the government regarded all land, save that occupied or cultivated by Africans, as state property.

We have it on the authority of a then ailing Alfred Jones, the celebrated consul for the Congo in Liverpool, that Lever first made contact with Jules Renkin, the Belgian Colonial Minister, towards the end of 1909. With Max Horn of Antwerp, Renkin’s emissary, acting as an intermediary, Lever obtained on behalf of his company, Lever Brothers, through a Convention signed on 21st February 1911, the option to purchase 750,000 hectares of natural palm groves at a knock-down price. He was free to choose them within five “circles” measuring sixty kilometres in radius, around Bumba and Barumbu on the river Congo, Lusanga on the river Kwilu, Basongo on the river Kasai, and Ingende on the river Ruki.¹

These localities had been chosen by the Belgian Henri Dekeyser, in 1910, while on a mission to the Congo undertaken on Lever’s behalf.² Dekeyser had embarked upon his colonial career in 1892, in Bumba, and had served from 1896 to 1898 in Basoko (opposite Barumbu) as district commissioner. These facts explain why the above names headed the list of “circles”. In Barumbu there had been a coffee plantation, established by the Belgian State, since 1896. As for the Basongo and Ingende circles, they had been added to the list in order to allow for a wider choice in types of land occupied by palm groves.

Dekeyser was not unknown in England. In September 1896, the British press had made much of his role as the commandant of soldiers who, in Bumba region, had cut off the feet of a chief’s daughter, in order to seize the heavy brass anklets she was wearing.³ At the end of March 1904 his name had again featured prominently in the same press, as principal plaintiff in a libel trial in London against the author and publisher of The Curse of Central Africa. In this book, Guy Burrows had accused Dekeyser of committing atrocities in Basoko district. The defendants had failed to produce any witnesses to corroborate their accusations; the judge therefore found in Dekeyser’s favour, and awarded him substantial damages.⁴

Dekeyser had resigned from the service of the Congo Free State five years earlier, but in March 1911 he returned to the country, now called the Belgian Congo,⁵ in the company of Lichfield Henry Moseley, a former employee of the Bank of Nigeria who was reputed to be an expert in West African affairs.⁶ Their aim was to pave the way for the Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB), a company set up by Lever, in accordance with the terms of the Convention with Renkin, in order to exploit the palm groves. They chose the berths required for the river fleet of the recently founded company, namely, a strip of about 100 metres on the banks of the river Matadi, a one-hectare plot at Kinshasa, and a number of sites for the storage of logs to be burnt in the steamers, along the banks of the Congo, the Kwilu and the Kasai.⁷ Dekeyser and Moseley noted that Lusanga circle, the nearest one to Kinshasa, contained the most dense palm groves.

Lever invested whatever capital was needed to equip his Congolese project with modern machinery. A thousand tons of such machinery were dispatched from Liverpool to Matadi in the summer of 1911, for the equipping of a factory at Lusanga, now renamed Leverville, and situated at the confluence of the Kwilu and Kwange rivers. The transportation of this heavy freight on the small railway line between Matadi and Kinshasa, which could carry only thirty tons a day, was effected with the utmost difficulty.⁸ Nonetheless, the factory at Lusanga was ready that same year, and the first consignment of oil that had been pressed there arrived in Antwerp in March 1912. The following month the first tablet of soap made of Congolese palm oil was placed in an ivory casket, and solemnly presented to Albert I, King of the Belgians.

In November 1912, at the age of 61, Lever set out once again for the Congo, together with his wife and a number of company agents. He was determined to make a success of the HCB, and visited each of the five circles in an HCB steamer. He decided to set up a factory immediately at Ebonda, which was near to Bumba, another at Lukutu, twenty kilometres east of Barumbu, and a third in Lusanga circle, at Tango, not far from Bulungu. Ebonda and Lukutu were renamed Alberta and Elisabetha respectively. Lever appointed Moseley director general of the HCB at Kinshasa, Dekeyser director at Ebonda and Lukutu,⁹ and Sidney Edkins, an Englishman, itinerant agent general. He gave orders for the HCB steamers to be fitted out as tankers, which would transport the palm oil in bulk to Kinshasa, and came to an arrangement with the Jesuits over the founding of a mission in Lusanga. The latter would be responsible for the school for Africans which, in accordance with the Convention with Renkin, Lever had promised to set up in Kwilu circle, as, indeed, he had undertaken to do in all the other circles. The mission would be founded in February 1915, at the confluence of the Kwenge and Kwilu rivers.¹⁰

William Lever passed in Europe for a philanthropist with enlightened views, on account of the excellent conditions under which the workforce lived and worked at Port Sunlight. It was for this reason that the socialist deputy Emile Vandervelde, during a debate in the Belgian Parliament on the Lever–Renkin Convention, had been persuaded to back the latter, being convinced that the English magnate’s future concessions would not be to the detriment of Africans. Lever, for his part, reserved a proxy vote for the Belgian socialist on the HCB’s Board.

In May 1911, in England, E.D. Morel¹¹ had reproached Lever for having negotiated a Convention with Renkin which turned Africans, who had been owners of palms, into wage-earners working for him. He had asked Lever how he proposed to get the palm fruit from the Africans if they withheld them. Lever had answered that he counted upon buying them at a tempting price. The Lever–Renkin Convention had been vague about prices, but it had on the other hand fixed the workers’ wages at 25 centimes a day. Lever counted upon having the fruit cut down for him, rather than buying it, and for such hard work the aforementioned wage was wholly inadequate. To be employed as a cutter of palm-fruit clusters was no laughing matter, since it involved using a large belt in order to climb the tall palm trees to the very top, where the clusters containing the fruit grew. In order to climb the trunk of a palm tree, the cutter makes himself a belt out of two detachable pieces of vegetable material. The larger piece serves as a back, while the smaller is supposed to clasp the trunk of the palm tightly. The two parts are joined together by simple knots. At the foot of the tree, the cutter undoes the second knot, throws the free end round the tree and re-attaches it to the back. He begins his climb. He leans against the back, with his two feet on the bark. By bringing his body closer to the tree, he lets the belt hang free and is able to raise it 20 to 30 centimetres. He presses up against the tree again and moves his feet higher. The alternation of these movements brings him gradually closer to the crown. Once he has reached the top, he adopts a stable position and leans against the back, opposite the cluster of fruit that he plans to pick. A few blows from the machete enable the cutter to detach a frond (leaf) from its base. He then cuts the cluster that has grown in the axilla of the leaf, and lets it fall to the ground.¹²

When in the Congo, Lever was able to ascertain for himself that the wage he was paying for the cutting of clusters was insufficient. Indeed, in a diary entry for Christmas Eve 1912, he noted that the problem of the cutters of palm fruit “has grown as an ominous dark cloud”, and that the people of Lusanga were no longer bringing fruit, after having done so for barely a year.¹³ From this Lever did not conclude that it was necessary to reduce the number of clusters to be cut each day. He did not want to devote money to ensuring the fair remuneration of Africans, who, given such circumstances, would have worked quite willingly. Instead, he adopted the method generally used during this period to make Africans work, namely, coercion. In mid-December 1912, prior to Lever’s arrival in the Congo, his agent general had anyway asked the governor-general of the colony to set up a State military post in the vicinity of Lusanga, with patrols travelling the length and breadth of the region.

Intent upon turning his concessions in the Congo into a personal “kingdom”, Lever returned to Europe in March 1913. He was now less than ever disposed to buy the fruit at a tempting price. The Africans would have to work “his” palm trees as wage-labourers, on the pittance he chose to pay them. Where Africans were concerned, Lever would prove to be not a philanthropist but an oppressor. The HCB was not destined to be the great enterprise which Lever, who was to become Lord Leverhulme in 1922, declared it to be, and that his admirers would subsequently take it to be. He had launched himself upon the Congo in order to turn the HCB into a sordid affair of large-scale profiteering, not heeding the harm done to Africans.

First beginnings at Lusanga

The report on HCB operations for the period between 1st July 1912 and 30th June 1913 reformulated the request made in mid-December by the company’s agent general as follows:

The crucial problem of labour is still complicated by various causes … It would be desirable to set up, at any rate temporarily, in the vicinity of Leverville, a military post consisting of two whites, one of whom would be an officer, and two platoons, and to let the patrols travel through the region … We should brook no further delay in defining the boundaries of the chefferies,¹⁴ or chiefdoms, and in issuing medals¹⁵ to the chiefs in the Leverville region.

This last observation referred to the fact that at this period a system was developing whereby chiefs supplied workers and were rewarded with subsidies paid to them by the employers.

On 28th November 1913 Jules Renkin, the Colonial Minister, forwarded the above text to Governor-General Felix Fuchs, adding that it hardly seemed possible to meet the company’s request as formulated. Indeed, the request too obviously amounted to a call for a system of coercion. The real solution to the problem, the minister added, seems to him to be to occupy and administer the region as a territoire,¹⁶ with Lusanga-Leverville as its administrative centre.¹⁷ In other words, Renkin proposed detaching the post of Lusanga from Bulungu territoire, to which it then belonged.

In January 1914, Moseley, who had become the managing director of the HCB in Brussels, complained in an interview with Renkin that the engineers then building the railway line between the Bas-Congo and Katanga were recruiting temporary workers at “unreasonably high” salaries. Moseley expressed the hope that the minister would ensure that a more prudent policy would be followed in future, for such exceptional wages were giving Africans a false notion of the value of their labour. The engineers employed on the above-mentioned line, Moseley proposed, should be instructed not to exceed the going rate of pay in the regions in which they were operating.¹⁸ Once one knows the wretched wages paid by the railway companies in the Congo, one may all too easily imagine what Lever’s Englishmen were paying.

In a letter dated 14th April 1914, Jules Vanwert, commissioner for the Kwango district, of which the Kwilu basin formed a part, responded to Renkin’s suggestion that the HCB region become a territoire with Lusanga as its administrative headquarters. He wrote to the governor-general as follows:

Given that the English like to remain masters in their own houses, they are not likely to relish the establishment of an administrative capital in Leverville and, as far as I am concerned, the structures that we would be able to build in this spot with the limited funds available, would cut a sorry figure beside the impressive company buildings. This issue is therefore liable to do serious damage to our prestige … The steps recently taken to accelerate the administrative organisation of the country will certainly help with the recruitment of workers for the HCB.

Vanwert added—and here he was in error—that the Company desired nothing more than a sub-commissariat of police with a handful of soldiers to keep the peace in its post. He then proposed to the governor-general that such a sub-commissariat be created, with one European and fifteen soldiers. Fuchs issued an ordinance to that effect on 29th May 1914. In response to a request made by the inspector of state, Auguste Gérard, he decreed that the future police superintendent would combine with his other official duties that of tax collector in the region worked by the HCB. He further specified that the company should at its own expense provide accommodation for police personnel, black and white, within its compounds.

On 7th July 1914, Moseley wrote to Renkin to complain that the police force set up at Leverville fell far short of what the Company had been requesting for the past two years. He asked that this force’s role not be restricted to keeping the peace in Leverville, and that it should be authorised to conduct patrols in the neighbouring region, within a fifty kilometre radius of the station. Renkin replied as follows on 17th July:

Our understanding is that, just as you have presumed, the local police force assigned to Leverville will be placed under the command of a white agent. As regards “patrols in the neighbouring region, for example, within a fifty kilometre radius of the station”, they could be arranged, if the need arose, but only to keep the peace, and to co-operate within pre-defined limits in the implementation of due legal process and of warrants for arrest.¹⁹

If those running the HCB set such store by military patrols in the Lusanga region, this was because they feared they would not be able to continue with the system of forcible recruitment employed by their numerous agents, accompanied by armed auxiliaries. These agents had encountered more and more resistance during their tours, or else the villages had emptied before they reached them. Indeed, the first clashes between labour recruiters and villagers took place precisely in July 1914:

•a recruiter by the name of Buelens was met with a volley of arrows in the village of Kasamba, whose chief was Mosenge; he was slightly wounded in the chest;

•a recruiter by the name of Vanherenthals was attacked in the village of Kisimuna, one hour’s journey from Leverville; he suffered serious arrow wounds in the arm and the chest;

•a recruiter by the name of Sosson was met with a volley of arrows, and the man in command of his escort received a wound in the leg;

•a recruiter by the name of Monard was also greeted with arrows.²⁰

In two letters dated mid-July, the director of Lusanga circle, one Howell A. Hopwood, brought the above facts to the notice of Alfredo Bonelli, the deputy district commissioner, who was then on a tour of duty at Mitshakila. In the second of the two letters, Hopwood added:

On all sides our agents record growing hostility in the region … We see only too clearly that if the unrest is not promptly put down, the situation will once more take a turn for the worse. We therefore ask and request of you, as th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• List of Abbreviations
• Note to Readers
• 1. The Early Years (1911–1922)
• 2. The Lejeune Report (1923)
• 3. The Establishment of a Monopoly in the Circles (1924–1926)
• 4. In Barumbu Circle (1917–1930)
• 5. In the Basongo and Lusanga Circles (1923–1930)
• 6. The Portuguese of Bumba Against the HCB, Act Two (1928–1930)
• 7. The Compagnie du Kasai Proves to be Worse Than the HCB (1927–1930)
• 8. Pierre Ryckmans’ Report on Lusanga (1931)
• 9. The Revolt of the Pende (1931)
• 10. The Lusanga HCB Transformed into a “Model Employer” (1931–1932)
• 11. Coercion and Consolidated Monopolies (1933–1935)
• 12. The Years Between 1935 and 1939
• 13. The Apogee of Forced Labour During the War (1940–1945)
• Afterword
• Sources
• Notes Referring to Primary Sources
• Index