08.25.03 - 11:12 a.m.

This weekend, I finished reading King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild, one of the best books I've read lately. What with heartbreaking stories from Liberia on the front page of the NYT, it was a timely read. I knew, vaguely, that the huge country in the middle of Africa formerly known as Zaire had been the Belgian Congo before that, if only because my parents have the world's most outdated atlas (since replaced, though they still have the old one) and when I poured over the brightly colored maps as a child, half of Africa was improperly bordered and wrongly named, and I think the Zaire was still the Belgian Congo (now, it is the Democratic Republic of Congo, if you're following such things) in that old atlas.

So, I knew that much. And I knew that Mobutu Sese Seko, the former dictator of the Democratic Republic of Congo, robbed the countyr blind, and that a bloody civil war - augmented by refugees from the Rwandan genocides and various extra-national militias and other nation's soldiers and whatnot - in the mid to late 1990s would have been called a World War had it happened in Europe, or perhaps Western Europe, since I suppose we never called the Bosnia/Serbia/Croatia/Albania/Kosovo/whoever-else-was-involved a World War.

That covers my knowledge of the country, though I suspect that that is more than most people in the US know, so I could almost be considered an expert. Except not.

What is the tendency we, as human beings, have for seeing our age as a particularly unique age, and our feelings as particularly unique feelings, and considering the past as something fixed, dusty, immutable and fundamentally different from our own, more lively, present. I suppose it's a function of the discipline of history: all those dates, generals, presidents and nations make it all seem inevitable, while the few distinct incidents (e.g. the Boston Tea Party) of which most people are generally aware are so mythologized as to be likely unidentifiable to those who participated in them. The tea party, the Boston massacre (Crispus Attucks, anyone?), the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Chicago fire and Mrs. O'Leary's fabled cow: and so on.

I think the Civil War is the only major event/series of events of which many Americans have a deeper and broader understanding, and that for a number of reasons: Ken Burns' documentary, the sheer volume of the evidentiary record: the young men writing home to loved ones or keeping diaries throughout the course of the war. Even then, though, with the outcome of each battle already pretty much set in stone, it's impossible to imagine how turbulent and frightening that time must have seemed. It's all laid out for us, bricks in a row, and mortared by a century's distance.

Anyway: King Leopold (he of the ghost) was the King of Belgium during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Belgium was a small country at the time, and had only recently gained its independence. Leopold's was a constitutional monarchy, and the King was well beholden to his Parlaiment. And yet, Leopold had big, nasty dreams. England had colonies. France had colonies. America had colonies. The Netherlands had colonies. Even dottering Portugal had colonies: Leopold wanted a colony! Leopold deserved a colony, man, someplace those whining babies in Parlaiment couldn't touch, someplace all his own.

In Henry Stanley (n�e John Rowlinds, he of the "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" fame), Leopold found just the person he needed. After Stanley completed his trek across the middle of the continent (contrary to popular belief, he was not the first man recorded to have done so, and not even the first person with European root) and mapped, in large part, the bottom 2/3s of the Congo (whose course was until then unknown to Europeans, who, although they had been in contact with and slaving from the area since the Portugese first sailed into the mouth of the Congo River and met with the manikongo of the Kingdom of Kongo in the fifteenth century, had not bothered going very far inland, and certainly not across the continent until the later portion of the twentieth century, when the Victorian gentleman/explorer/scientist was still in vogue, and every layperson could contribute to science by drawing the bugs in his back yard.

Damn: I can get long-winded.

So, Leopold found his empire-builder and courted Stanley, who went back to the Congo as Leopold's agent and got native chiefs to sign over all their land and trading rights for basically nothing, no doubt lying to them, or not fully explaining to them, what they were signing, or even the significance of the signature.

(Another excellent story from the book: during one of his first African expeditions, Stanley met some African king and converted him to Christianity. Stanley allowed as how he simply explained the 10 commandments, and the King converted. A Frenchman who was also present, however, said that Stanley actually sold the King 11 commandments, with the 11th being something about that old medieval standby, the Divine Right of Kings: something like, Kings are My Right Hand, all their Power Flows from Me.)

Meanwhile, Leopold engaged a fascinating, reprehensible campaign to conceal his motives and interests in the Congo, claiming that he was interested in the territory only as a humanitarian, and that he wanted to put an end to the Afro-Arab slave traders who operated in the area while seeing to the enlightenment of the supposedly benighted peoples of the area. Stanley too had dreams for the area: apparently he thought it was the PERFECT market for cast-off European clothes. Congolese chiefs, he thought, could wear the Rothschilds' old duds, while presumably lesser folks would have lesser things.

The smokescreen worked, and eventually most European nations recognized Leopold's claim to the Congo. Note that was Leopold's claim, not Belgium's claim, for Leopold wanted sole authority over the new territory, without a nasty little Parlaiment looking over his royal shoulder.

With such approval, Leopold proceeded to rape the country. From, say, 1878 until 1910, approximately half the population of the Congo was exterminated, whether through outright violence or the inevitable corollaries to violence: famine and disease. At first, Leopold concentrated on collecting ivory from the interior, but after the invention of rubber tires for bicycles, it was all rubber, all the time. Rubber grows throughout the rainforest. The wild vines can be tapped for the sap without killing the plant, and the rubber thus harvested, but sending people out to harvest rubber, which is unpleasant, and forcing them to neglect their crops and animals, which is deadly, is hard to do. Pretty please doesn't usually work. Force does, though: try holding a man's wife and children hostage, and see what he'll do for you. Try whipping resisters with a long whip of dried hippopotamus hide, or burning down whole villages that oppose you. Offer your soldiers - largely conscripts themselves - a reward for each severed hand they bring in, and require that they account thus for each bullet they use. Turn one ethnic group against another, support vicious, predatory men and warlords: anything for rubber, everything for profit.

And back home? Back home, smile and attend a world-wide antislavery conference. Talk about how you're fighting the slave-traders, as you enslave and murder half a country.

The unique thing about the Belgian Congo - or the Congo Free State, as it was deceptively known when it was the sole property of Leopold - is that at the turn of the century an international human rights campaign formed to fight against human rights abuses there, with Leopold - despite his best efforts at obfuscation - demonized as the architect of the horror.

The people who built this movement were brave: George Washington Williams (a fascinating figure himself) was one of the early critics. William Sheppard, an African-American missionary, Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society (he penetrated the territory of the Kuba and became the first outside to meet with their King, mapped and heretofore unknown-to-Europeans lake, which was named after him), risked life and limb and freedom, and was actually prosecuted for publishing slanderous opinions about the client-companies that administered large portions of the territory, along with another American missionary. E.D. Morel risked and lost a promising career with a British company involved in supplying the colony, and became the driving force behind the international movement. James Casement, the consul from the British Foreign Office, traveled through the interior of the country and documented the government's abuses, then went on to do the same in the Putomayo region of the Amazon. Eventually, however, he made the link between the colonization of Ireland and the rest of the world, and headed to Germany during WW I hoping to recruit Irish POWs to form an Irish brigade that would band together with Arabs in Egypt to push the British out of Egypt (if he couldn't fight for his own homeland, he wanted to fight for another). He was captured on his return to England, tried for treason, and executed.

Heh: had to have that litany of characters in case I forget their names. Anyway: the movement really was international, and enjoyed support from a huge variety of interests: European socialists and religious Americans, free trading Quakers and homespun matrons, writers and artists of every stripe. Eventually, Leopold was sort-of-maybe-not forced to sell the colony to Belgium, which took possession in 1908ish, and without a villain the movement began to peter out, particularly when overshadowed the by ever-growing specter of war.

Except the exploitation continued thereafter, and hte exploitation was not limited to the Congo. The French used much the same tactics in French West Africa, and so did trading companies deep in the Brazilian rain forest. After the U.S. gained the Phillipines from the Spanish in the Spanish-American war, we proceeded to fight a vicious war against insurgents and exploit the natural resources of the islands. The British engaged in a campaign to exterminate and/or assimilate the aborigines in Australia. We did much the same thing with the native Americans.

So... so, what? My brain is tired now, and I have work to do: I never get as far in one of these things as I want to. Somehow I always run out of steam before I get to the real wrestling-with-issues part. Hopefully: tomorrow.

But anyway: the book? A+ Excellent. There are no saints, it's readable and interesting, the author doesn't shy away from negative material, and certainly doesn't try to make the heros of his story into more than they were. Somehow, the warts and character flaws make them seem all the more heroic. I was also particularly intrigued by George Washington Williams (classic huckster, but with more: great character) and E.D. Morel, who was a free trade disciple, and unknowingly one of the most radical and perceptive critics of colonialism (even though he thought he supported British colonialism, and thought he found the Congo to be a special case) and James Casement, who, well, damn, went the whole half-circle somehow so it almost makes me wanna cry. Actually, I did cry a little bit.

Mmm. Hopefully, more tomorrow.