Congo Free State
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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| The loss of life and atrocities inspired literature such as [[Joseph Conrad]]'s ''[[Heart of Darkness]]'', and raised an international outcry. Excess deaths in this period are believed to number up to 10 million. | The loss of life and atrocities inspired literature such as [[Joseph Conrad]]'s ''[[Heart of Darkness]]'', and raised an international outcry. Excess deaths in this period are believed to number up to 10 million. | ||
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| - | ==Humanitarian disaster== | ||
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| - | === Mutilation === | ||
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| - | Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide a hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting. As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in chopped-off hands. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighbouring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill. A Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river three hundred miles north of [[Pool Malebo|Stanley Pool]]: | ||
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| - | <blockquote>All blacks saw this man as the devil of the [[Equator]]...From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets...A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river...Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or [[rape]] their own mothers and sisters. | ||
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| - | One junior European officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The European officer in command 'ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades ... and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross.'<ref>{{cite book |last=Bourne |first=Henry Richard Fox |title=Civilisation in Congoland: A Story of International Wrong-doing |url=http://books.google.com/?id=jWccAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1&dq=%22Civilisation+in+Congoland%22#PPR3,M1 |accessdate=2007-09-26 |year=1903 |publisher=P. S. King & Son |location=London |pages=253}}</ref> After seeing a Congolese person killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote: 'The soldier said "Don't take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service."'<ref>{{cite book |last=Forbath |first=Peter |title=The River Congo: The Discovery, Exploration and Exploitation of the World's Most Dramatic Rivers |year=1977 |publisher=[[Harper & Row]] |location= |isbn=0-06-122490-1 |pages=374}}</ref> In Forbath's words: | ||
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| - | <blockquote>The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. ''Force Publique'' soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the ''Force Publique'' soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.</blockquote> | ||
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| - | In theory, each right hand proved a killing. In practice, soldiers sometimes "cheated" by simply cutting off the hand and leaving the victim to live or die. More than a few survivors later said that they had lived through a massacre by acting dead, not moving even when their hands were severed, and waiting till the soldiers left before seeking help. In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread mutilations and dismemberment. | ||
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The Congo Free State was a large area in Central Africa that was privately controlled by Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold was able to procure the region by convincing the European community that he was involved in humanitarian and philanthropic work; through the use of several smokescreen organizations he was able to lay claim to most of the Congo Basin. Leopold eventually allowed the concept of a philanthropic International Association of the Congo involved in the Congo to end. On May 29, 1885, the king named his new colony the Congo Free State. The state included the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo and existed from 1885 to 1908.
Leopold's reign in the Congo eventually earned infamy due to the increasing mistreatment of the local peoples. Leopold extracted ivory, rubber, and minerals in the upper Congo basin for sale on the world market, even though his nominal purpose in the region was to uplift the local people and develop the area. Under Leopold II's administration, the Congo Free State became one of the greatest international scandals of the early 20th century. The report of the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who had been responsible for killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903.
The loss of life and atrocities inspired literature such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and raised an international outcry. Excess deaths in this period are believed to number up to 10 million.
