Everything You Think You Know about the Belgian Congo Is Wrong

A Jewel of Africa, Not a Living Hell

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Since getting deeply into the Rhodesian story and what it should teach Americans, I have fallen down the rabbit hole of discovering what actually went on with colonialism. Particularly, I’ve taken my critical eye to the supposed atrocities we are told the “evil colonizers” committed in the lands they conquered.¹ To name but a few of the more prominent ones, I’ve started looking into the Indian Wars in America,² the Bengal Famine, the German genocide of the Herero, and the horrors of the Belgian Congo.

As should be entirely expected given the lies told about Rhodesia,³ those supposed atrocities and horrors are made up. The Germans didn’t genocide the Herero; they fought a very limited and justified counter-insurgency campaign against hordes of savages who were threatening to murder German civilians.⁴ Churchill, whatever his political faults,⁵ wasn’t responsible for the Bengal Famine.⁶ The American Indian Wars were justified, and our enemies were far more ruthless and savage than we.⁷

Most of all, however, the Belgian Congo was not the hell of forced labor, mutilating punishment, and casual murder it was made out to be. Or, at least, it wasn’t once the Belgians got there. In fact, it was the much-slandered King Leopold II and his Congo Free State (EIC) that first brought civilization to the region and stamped out the horrors that it was later accused of committing.

Leopold was not a greedy, murderous king, as is often alleged. Rather, he and his EIC began the 7-decade stretch of good rule that was the only period of peace and prosperity the horribly benighted region was ever to know.

The Magnificent Belgian Accomplishment

It is important to note that the Belgians, when Leopold was granted the Congo as his personal province during the Berlin Conference, weren’t walking into Wakanda. There wasn’t some thriving, peaceful civilization they were cruelly getting their grubby hands on and controlling.

In fact, there weren’t really roads, or even stoutly built buildings. There were certainly no hospitals, schools, or railroads. Nor was there justice; life there was exactly how Thomas Hobbes had described it centuries earlier: nasty, brutish, and short.

Livingstone and Stanley’s Horrific Adventure, and Worrisome Findings

Such is what Dr. Livingstone and Sir Henry Morton Stanley found as they cut into what became the Belgian Congo from the hellish, Arab state of Zanzibar and explored a vast land (three times as large as Texas) that was hardly out of the Stone Age. They found foul huts, subsistence agriculture, vast hordes of Arab slavers dragging their mutilated human chattel back to the coast, and all the other injustices attendant to a land in the pre-civilizational state.

Instead of prosperity, it had the ever-present spectre of famine. Instead of justice, it had continual bouts of small-scale warfare that mainly led to rape, slavery, and murder. Instead of gentlemen, it had cannibals. Instead of infrastructure, it had rotten vegetation and hostile wildlife.

It was, in short, a land ruled by worse versions of the sort of men Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness, a book that is actually about the pre-EIC anarchy in the Congo rather than what the Belgians wrought.⁸ It was an utter hell with no redeeming characteristics other than the beauty of some of its nature and the vast wealth of its resources.

Leopold Steps in and Establishes Order

Such is what Stanley and Livingstone exposed, and the state of things to which the horrified world’s attention was drawn with the explosive reception of Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone, a terrific book that not only tells an adventurous tale but exposes what life was like in that horror-afflicted land.

So, about a decade and a half later, King Leopold II was granted control over the Congo during the Berlin Conference. The purpose of his being granted control of it was largely humanitarian: to develop rule of the sort that was necessary for stamping out the horrors that had long afflicted the land. Yes, he could make a profit on the project, but the goal of the project was largely humanitarian.

Much as modern “historians” and those who believe them are loath to admit, Leopold largely succeeded, and the allegations of misrule are largely lies or misunderstandings. His rule was benevolent and just, not harsh or cruel.

The EIC and How It Funded Itself

The central problem at issue is that to establish order of the sort that would actually help the Congolese, Leopold needed to get Belgian administrators on the ground and running things. Not only that, but they needed to have the proper infrastructure in place to rule efficiently and effectively. Similarly, the trading and resource extraction ventures that could bring prosperity to the area needed much the same infrastructure.

So, not only did competent colonial administrators need to make their way into the country and start establishing order and just rule, but roads, railroads, hospitals, and modern towns and trading posts needed to be built and maintained. That could be done, but it was expensive and would require the most modern technology: before anti-malarial drugs, for example, 1 out of every 3 Europeans who stepped foot in the Congo died.

That, in turn, meant that Leopold needed to figure out how the organization he established to run the Congo—the Congo Free State, or EIC—could be mostly self-funding and not an endless drain on his somewhat limited finances.

Adding to the problem, however, was that the Congolese were poor. They had no hard money, or even excess agricultural products, that would make classic taxation of persons or property workable, even if nominally very light. The lack of resources and dearth of money would make it immensely burdensome.

The solution Leopold and the EIC came up with was corvée labor, or requiring the administrative units in the colony to provide a relatively small amount of labor to the EIC that could be used for agricultural work, resource extraction, or infrastructure construction. Professor Bruce Gilley, describing this system and the justice of it in his The Case for Colonialism, notes:

The use of mandatory ("forced") labor in many colonies was intended as a replacement for taxation and was, of course, historically common in places where taxation was impractical. It may rub our modern sensitivities the wrong way, but this was the most fair and liberal means of providing for public services and infrastructure.

Such was what Leopold settled on to fund his EIC as he started establishing Belgian officers and administrators in the state. It was they, along with a bevy of (less costly) monks, nuns, and traders, who were to bring Western civilization and justice to the country and, in the process, turn anarchy into a well-administered colony. They were to convert it from animist paganism to Christianity and transform it into a prosperous and stable land.

Particularly important was the enforcement arm of the EIC. Such was conducted by the Force Publique, something of a militarized police force that was mainly officered by Belgians and otherwise consisted of natives allied with the Congo Free State. It was they who were to aid the humanitarian mission by protecting the nuns and traders, while keeping the Arab slavers from Zanzibar.

All in all, those administrators were to first impose and then maintain order. And they were to be funded in that operation by the proceeds of the corvée, which fortuitously could be used to harvest not just the ivory present on wildlife in the territory, but the very valuable rubber crop that grew naturally all over the country and was much in demand in the industrializing world. Thus, with a minimum of labor, the EIC could be funded and justice established! It was out of that decision that the great allegations arose.

Hochschild’s Lie of Millions Dead

The main claim is, as Gilley characterizes it: “EIC officials throughout the territory sponsored violent actions such as chopping off hands to force natives to collect rubber, leaving millions dead in a horror that should be directly compared to the Holocaust.”⁹ Such is the claim put forth by Adam Hochschild in his slander and smear-filled book, King Leopold's Ghost, about the EIC’s rule.

In it, he claims that millions of natives—as many as 10 million—died as King Leopold’s troops waged murderous war upon the Congolese to force them into the rubber plantations so that every last drop of profit could be squeezed from the plantations. He tells tales of Belgians and their lackeys chopping off the hands of recalcitrant native workers, mass death on an unspeakable scale, and generalized cruelty to a nearly unimaginable degree.

The Rubber Lie

In reality, next to none of that happened. For one, it was utterly untrue of the areas where the EIC exercised firm control. In those areas, which worked out to much of the affected area as only 15% of the country was used for a rubber corvée, it was Belgian officers and administrators in control and they did a good job living up to the EIC’s expectations and ruling justly. As such, their rubber stations became much-desired living areas. As Gilley notes:

The rubber station at Irengi, for instance, was known for its bulging stores and hospitable locals, whose women spent a lot of time making bracelets and where "no one ever misses a meal" noted the EIC soldier Georges Bricusse in his memoirs.

However, that couldn’t be everywhere. The EIC was still new, was still building infrastructure, and was still getting administrators into the country. So, in some areas, natives working for the EIC were left in control.

In some rare cases, there were abuses. In even fewer cases, there were small-scale battles between the EIC troops and rebels, whether rebellious natives or Arab slavers fighting Leopold’s interdict disallowing slavery. In those cases, an age-old tradition of chopping off appendages to show the bullets had been used wisely was followed:

Elsewhere, however, absent direct supervision, and with the difficulties of meeting quotas greater, some native soldiers engaged in abusive behavior to force the collection. Bricusse noted these areas as well, especially where locals had sabotaged rubber stations and then fled to the French Congo to the north. In rare cases, native soldiers kidnapped women or killed men to exact revenge. When they fell into skirmishes, they sometimes followed long-standing Arab and African traditions by cutting off the hands or feet of the fallen as trophies, or to show that the bullets they fired had been used in battle. How many locals died in these frays is unclear, but the confirmed cases might put the figure at about 10,000, a terrible number.

So perhaps 10,000 Congolese died over years of rubber harvesting in a country of 20 million or so, some of them unnecessarily. Others who died were Arab slavers, cannibals, and the like, so their deaths are hardly tragedies. In any case, that was not a horror on a grand scale, as Hochschild claims it was.

In fact, the reality of the situation stands in stark contrast to the claim from Hochschild and others that 10 million Congolese died in some unspeakable genocide of half the Congolese people. That is simply untrue: any serious study of population estimates finds it held about stable, and there were no millions of deaths. As Gilley notes:

The most sophisticated modeling by French and Belgian demographers variously suggests a population of 8 to 11 million in 1885 and 10 to 12 million by 1908. The Belgian Jean-Paul Sanderson, using a backward projection method by age cohorts, found a slight decline, from 10.5 million in 1885 to 10 million in 1910. This estimated change in total population governed by changing birth and death rates over a 25 year period represents a negligible annual net decline in population.

That’s not all. Quite in contrast to the situation as presented by Hochschild and others, it was EIC rule that ended, rather than led to, those atrocities. As Gilley notes, what slight population decline there was occurred outside the EIC's control and ended as the EIC took over:

[In] the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control.

So yes, there were some injustices. In an area over three times the size of Texas, there were 10,000 slayings, some of which were justified, over the period encompassing 1885 to 1910. That is far smaller than critics of the EIC claim, for one. Further, data regarding EIC control leading to population increase rather than decrease seems to show—as does anecdotal evidence about its rule—that it was the Belgians who ended the injustices for which they were condemned.

Additionally, the few thousand deaths must be put in perspective of the fact that rubber extraction generally was a net positive for the Congolese natives in that it was the only reasonable way to keep the EIC project alive. That was a huge positive for them, as "the preservation of the EIC meant the preservation of its life-saving interventions against disease, tribal war, slavery, and grinding poverty that had bedeviled the region since recorded time."

The Hand-Chopping Lie

As indicated above, the same general fact pattern is true of the allegations that the Belgians chopped off the hands of natives to punish them for not working. It is mostly untrue, and in cases where it did occur, it was the work of other natives. Further, they generally did it before the EIC imposed control.

For example, Gilley notes that Hochschild cites black American missionary George Washington Williams's depiction of chopped-off extremities, which he saw during a 1890 visit, as evidence of EIC cruelty. The problem with that claim is that the scene Williams witnessed came from an area not controlled by the EIC. In fact, the practice was related to slavery and ended when the EIC gained control and kicked out the Arab slavers.

For those curious, Williams said, “Human hands and feet and limbs, smoked and dried, are offered and exposed for sale in many of the native village markets. From the mouth of the Lomami-River to Stanley-Falls there are thirteen armed Arab camps; and in them I have seen many skulls of murdered slaves pendant from poles and over these camps floating their blood-red flag.”

It was the slavers and barbaric chiefs (along with their soldiers) who did the extremity chopping...as was the case in all the famous photos of chopped off hands from the region. The EIC didn't do that, though liars with an eye for destroying it portrayed it as having done so.

For example, Gilley notes that the below picture is one that has long haunted the EIC...but in reality, the man's daughter's hands were chopped off when cannibals ate her, not because the EIC did anything to him or her. Instead, the EIC stamped out the behavior that led to the chopping and ensured it didn’t happen in the future.

Describing as much, Gilley notes that it was not only the above photo that was presented by Hochshild in a false way, but all of them: the photos he used were staged and came from squabbles and such between the natives, not as a result of Belgian cruelty. He notes:

Most memorably for readers, Hochschild reprints staged photographs taken by the English missionary Alice Seeley Harris and supplied to the anti-Léopold campaign through the English missionary John Weeks. The missionaries knew that showing these fake photos at “lantern shows” in community halls in Britain won more attention and donations than their detailed accounts of cannibalism and sleeping sickness ravaging their areas. Hochschild does not tell the reader that the photographs are staged, nor does he explain that the photographs of people with severed hands were victims of gangrene, tribal vendettas, or cannibalism having nothing to do with rubber. In the most famous photo of them all, a man whom Seeley got to sit on the veranda of her mission station with a severed hand and foot before him, the original caption given by Morel reads: “Sala of Wala and remains of his five year old daughter; both wife and child were eaten by king’s soldiers at a cannibal feast.”

The Project Ends

The EIC ended in 1908 because the rubber crash of 1906 made it uneconomic for the project to continue, and the Belgian Parliament wanted to strip the king of his possessions. They were spurred to doing so by falsified evidence of the sort Gilley calls out in the above quote.

So, Leopold II gave up his private African domain. However, as Gilley notes, Leopold remained proud of his accomplishments and thought he had acted in a humanitarian way (despite what modern propagandists say).

After it became a national colony, the Belgian Congo followed in the EIC's footsteps. Much like under Leopold, it worked to continue building infrastructure in the territory such as railroads, roads, schools, and hospitals. Meanwhile, it also ensured that there was justice, and the atrocities for which the area had been known, namely slavery and cannibalism, were stamped out. So the murders, slavery, cannibalism, and hand-chopping came to an end because of the Belgians…who are still falsely alleged to have committed those crimes.

That hard work of 1908-60 was a huge success. The Congo turned not only into a stable and prosperous place, but also a land so wonderful and safe that a great many Europeans went there on vacation. Decades of investment and administration turned what had been a no-go zone into a jewel of the continent.

Meanwhile, for the Congolese themselves, the 70-odd years of Belgian rule, public and private, were the only years of good governance and prosperity they ever got. Before then, they were a Stone Age landmass characterized by all the worst things. After then, they got decolonized and reverted back to primeval anarchy.

Leopold Was No Monster

King Leopold is falsely portrayed as a monster. As a greedy devil hiding in a faraway land while extracting everything—including life itself—from the poor and oppressed Africans. Nothing is further from the truth.

He was no monster. He EIC was a humanitarian operation that turned, at little cost to Europe or the natives, a land long characterized by the worst of everything into a relatively pleasant place to live. It, like Sarawak under the white rajahs, was turned from a land of horrors and injustice into a prosperous colony in which justice and development were the standard rather than a vanishingly rare exception. Further, the crimes he and the EIC are alleged to have committed on a grand scale mostly didn’t happen, and those that did occur were on a small scale and outside their control.

All in all, that is a great accomplishment, and Leopold should be praised rather than damned, as should his EIC.

Featured image credit: By Chaumot - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79742346

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1.

2.

3. Discussed in some depth here:

4. Professor Bruce Gilley discusses this in depth in the book reviewed here:

5. Discussed here:

6. https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/masani-bengal-famine/

7.

8. Professor Gilley demonstrates this conclusively in the book reviewed here:

9. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/king-hochschilds-hoax/