In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz. Michela Wrong

Braving rapids, ambushes, smallpox and starvation, he followed the river, emerging at the Atlantic Ocean after a journey that lasted nearly three years. He had not only established that the Lualaba had no connection with the Nile, which he had shown to spring from Lake Victoria, he had also opened up a huge swathe of central Africa until then known only to the ‘Arab’ merchants (in actual fact Swahili-speaking, Moslem traders from Africa’s east coast) to greedy Western eyes.

      In the books Stanley wrote after each extraordinary trip he showed a near-obsession with the dangers posed by perspiration and sodden underwear, which he blamed for malarial chills. But his eccentricities did not prevent him from accurately sizing up the potential of the land he had passed through. Its forests were full of precious woods and ivory-bearing elephants. Its fertile soils supported palm oil, gums and, most significantly, wild rubber, about to come into huge demand with the invention of the pneumatic tyre. Its inhabitants presented a ready market for European goods and, once the rapids were passed, the river offered a huge transport network stretching across central Africa.

      Stanley was far from being the first white man to reach this part of central Africa. Late fifteenth-century emissaries from Portugal, looking for the fabled black Christian empire of Prester John, had stumbled on the Kongo kingdom, a Bantu empire spreading across what is today northern Angola, western Congo and edging into Congo-Brazzaville.

      A feudal society led by the ManiKongo, this kingdom proved surprisingly open to the arrival of the white man, perhaps encouraged by a spiritual system which identified white, the skin colour of these strange visitors, as sacred. It had welcomed missionaries, embraced Christianity and entered into alliance with the Portuguese. But by the time Stanley was tracing the course of the river, the Kongo kingdom had been in decline for more than two centuries, devastated by endless wars of succession, attacks by hostile tribes and, above all, the flourishing slave trade.

      Although it was clearly in his interest to play up the horrors of what he found, for it made the alternative of colonial subjugation seem so much more attractive, Stanley appears to have been genuinely horrified at the damage the ‘Arabs’ had wrought along the river.

      ‘The slave traders admit that they have only 2300 captives in their fold, yet they have raided through the length and breadth of a country larger than Ireland, bearing fire and spreading carnage with lead and iron,’ he reported in The Congo and the founding of its free state. ‘Both banks of the river show that 118 villages, and forty-three districts have been devastated, out of which is only educed this scant profit of 2300 females and children and about 2000 tusks of ivory … The outcome from the territory with its million of souls is 5000 slaves, obtained at the cruel expense of 33000 lives!’

      But his hopes that Britain, his mother country, would seize the opportunities presented were dashed. With London refusing to take the bait, King Leopold II stepped in. One of the last pieces of unclaimed land in a continent being portioned off by France, Portugal, Britain and Germany, Congo fitted his requirements perfectly. Leopold recruited Stanley to return to the Congo, set up a base there and establish a chain of trading stations along the navigable main stretch of the river which would allow the European sovereign to claim the region’s riches.

      Stanley found himself in a race against Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, a naval officer who was energetically signing up local chiefs on France’s behalf. With the northern shoreline lost to him – hence the eventual establishment of French Congo, with Brazzaville as its capital – Stanley had to content himself with the southern shore of the river, pushing his treaties on hundreds of chieftains. Leopold’s insignia – the gold star on a blue background later, bizarrely, revived by the anti-colonial Laurent Kabila – was raised over village upon village.

      Further exploration confirmed Stanley’s first impressions of vast natural riches just waiting to be exploited. ‘We are banqueting on such sights and odours that few would believe could exist,’ he wrote after another trip up river. ‘We are like children ignorantly playing with diamonds.’

      Leopold had found his colony. Privately he raved about the potential of ‘this magnificent African cake’. But he was careful to present the situation in less enthusiastic terms to other European powers, wary of signs of expansionism by the Belgian newcomer. The flag flown at the newly established Congo stations ostensibly belonged to the International African Association, a philanthropic organisation Leopold had set up with the stated aim of wiping out the slave trade and spreading civilisation. Leopold encouraged missionaries to set out for the Congo and at the Berlin conference of 1884–5, at which the world powers carved up Africa, he triggered unanimous applause by proposing the Congo as a free trade zone, open to all merchants. His ambitions for the nation, he said, were purely philanthropic. In return, the Congo Free State was recognised as coming under his personal – as opposed to Belgium’s – control.

      But, as Marchal’s work makes clear, the situation on the ground was to prove rather less high-minded. Clearing the jungle to build roads, stations and – eventually – a railway linking the hinterland with the sea, Stanley’s ruthless treatment of his native labourers won him the sobriquet ‘Bula Matari’ (Breaker of Rocks).

      Unable to read the treaties they had signed, local chiefs discovered they had handed over both their land and a monopoly on trade. King Leopold, noted Stanley, in words that could have been used of Mobutu a century later, had the ‘enormous voracity to swallow a million of square miles with a gullet that will not take in a herring’.

      If the signatures were given ‘freely’, Stanley left the clan leaders in no doubt that he had the force with which to pursue his interests. He took great delight in demonstrating the wonders of the Krupp canon, the latest in modern weaponry. ‘Notwithstanding their professions of incredulity as to its power,’ he recounted with satisfaction, ‘it was observed that the chiefs took great care to keep at a respectful distance from the Krupp, and when finally the artillerist, after sighting the piece to 2,000 yards, fired it, and the cannon spasmodically recoiled, their bodies also instantaneously developed a convulsive moment, after which they sat stupidly gazing at one another.’

      Later on, the Force Publique, a 15,000–19,000-strong army of West African and Congolese mercenaries, was established to ensure Leopold’s word became law. Weapons and ammunition poured into the region. Just as Mobutu was later to give the nod to a system of organised looting by instructing his soldiers to ‘live off the land’, Leopold expected the Force Publique to provide for itself, pillaging surrounding villages in search of food.

      Far from being a free trade zone, the colony’s very raison d’être was to make money for the King. Anxious to attract the foreign capital needed to build railways and bridges, Leopold divided part of the country into concessions held by companies in which he held a 50 per cent stake, with exclusive rights over tracts of forest, ivory, palm oil and mineral wealth. The rest of the country was defined as Crown property, where state agents enjoyed a business monopoly. Independent merchants who ventured into the area in search of ivory found their way physically blocked by Leopold’s officials. When the Arab traders operating in the north and eastern reaches of Congo were eventually driven out after a vicious war against the Force Publique, it was not – whatever the Tervuren museum may claim – because of any outrage over their slaving activities, it was because they threatened Leopold’s commercial interests.

      By then, as the boom in the motor industry escalated Western demand for rubber, Leopold’s agents were knowingly mimicking the techniques of the Arab traders that Stanley had decried. Villagers, who had to tap the wild vines growing in the forest for gum, were set cripplingly high production quotas. If they failed to meet the targets, the Force Publique would descend on a village, burn its huts, kill at random and take womenfolk, children or chiefs prisoner until the villagers came to heel. Hostages were used as porters or sold as slaves to rival tribes in exchange for rubber or ivory, and thousands of orphaned children were marched off to Catholic missions to be trained as soldiers for the Force Publique.

      Driving the state agents on was a cynical commission system that could double their miserly salaries depending on output and a sliding scale of payment which ensured that those who paid the villagers least for their deliveries of ivory or rubber were rewarded most highly. The lack of compassion seems a little more understandable when one