The White Horseman

PATRIA MEMOR.
Photo by EmDee / CC BY-SA 3.0

One of the most liveable and respected cities in the world, Brussels has a lot to offer. Home to more than 100 museums, 20 theatres, and 9 palaces, the capital of Belgium is proud of the cultural heritage that is truly immense. A fully-fledged world city despite its small-town feel, Brussels is a melting pot of numerous cultures and ethnicities, not to mention its own enduring bilingual status. Enriched by the presence of many EU institutions, as well as the NATO headquarters, the Belgian capital has firmly entrenched its status of the de facto capital of Europe.

The architecture is captivating. Though never an imperial capital of the kind of London or Vienna, Brussels has more than enough to beguile a less sophisticated guest. The magnificent Arcade du Cinquantenaire inspires awe and respect. The royal palaces are well worth a visit. Numerous monuments and statues adorn its streets and alleys, including the city’s unofficial symbol, the famous Manneken Pis.

And yet it is another, unassuming monument, in the very heart of the city, which deserves a second, cautious look. Walking past a magnificent park and several palaces, on the way to the European Parliament, a busy tourist may spot an equestrian statue. The rider, tall and well built, has the appearance of a victor and conqueror. His large leonine beard stands out, but one can hardly recognise him. A brief glimpse on the name plaque, plain and modest as it is, will likely explain little more. And yet it is exactly this statue of a horseman which is a vivid memento of Belgium's much darker and dishonourable past.

* * *

Belgium has a curious and complicated history. A part of other states for centuries, it won its independence from the Netherlands in the wake of the 1830 revolution. The Great Powers of the time, unwilling to aid the troubling France with the gift of some French-speaking provinces, agreed to allow for a new independent and non-aligned state. The victors of the revolution, themselves deeply divided, understood the existential threats from both North and South and agreed on the need for a conciliatory figure to head the new constitutional monarchy. Months of gruelling deliberations after, the crown was offered to Leopold, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. A scion of a respected German dynasty, a Russian general of the Napoleonic Wars, and a relative of George IV of the United Kingdom, Leopold ticked many boxes. The first King of the Belgians promptly married a French princess and used his extensive connections and diplomatic skills to steer the new country through the storm of its early independence. The rule of King Leopold I was long and firm. Belgium survived.

When the young crown prince, aged only thirty, succeeded his father to the throne in 1865 as King Leopold II, the new monarch was almost as old as the country itself. An educated and well-travelled man for his time, Leopold witnessed the riches of faraway lands in North Africa and the Middle East and begrudged Belgium’s wealthier neighbours their colonial might.  Stern and strange in his own ways, the King was shunned by other royals and unloved by the less royal folk. The monarch’s notable appearance was of little help too. When mocked in political cartoons, his large nose, dwarfed only by the 12-inch beard, was the signature feature.

Ambitious and determined, the King deeply resented the sinecure of his modest office. Dissatisfied with Belgium’s absence from the colonial race, Leopold pushed hard for higher international profile. Yet the government, concerned mainly with internal political divisions and the country’s own viability in the face of persistent foreign threat, showed little taste for overseas adventures. “There is really nothing left for us kings except money”, he reputedly told William II, his German counterpart.

Known for his business acumen and not known for timidity, Leopold decided to go it alone. However, much of the world was already divided by the time, thus leaving the King with meagre opportunities. Having experienced several major setbacks, including places as far as the Philippines, the King resolved to try his luck in Africa.

It was the second half of the 19^th century, and the Conquest of Africa was fast approaching its zenith. Vast swathes of the Dark Continent, terra incognita no more, were flying European flags. The basin of the river Congo, still a poorly explored land, was a notable white spot on the map. Leopold II, hardly indifferent to progress and discovery, saw his opportunity.

In 1876, Leopold II financed a major expedition to the Congo Basin led by Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley, still in his mid-thirties, was a man of many talents and a life more astonishing than fantasy fiction. A penniless orphan from Wales, he emigrated to America as a teenager, assumed a new identity, and managed to make a name for himself in the strange land. He joined the Confederates and fought for them in the American Civil War. Later, in a remarkable volte–face, he served in the Union Army and the Union Navy. He became a journalist and went to dangerous places around the world, including the restless American frontier, the Ottoman Empire, Ethiopia, and Spain in the midst of a revolution. Having reached world fame after his historic rendezvous with Dr David Livingston in Central Africa, then as a correspondent of the New York Herald, Stanley was a celebrity adventurer determined to outshine his legendary compatriot. When King Leopold offered to sponsor a new expedition to find the source of the river Congo, Stanley was quick to agree.

The offer, however, came with strings attached. Much of the territory to explore was still the fiefs of local tribal chiefs. In addition to the exploration per se, the monarch told Stanley to negotiate ‘administration agreements’ between the chiefs and the International African Association, Leopold’s newly founded humanitarian and scientific vehicle. The King offered his royal support and protection to the natives. The tribal chiefs were reputedly less than enthusiastic about the King’s offer, but Leopold’s determined and persuasive envoyé knew his trade. Three gruelling years after, Stanley returned to Brussels with a sizeable pile of paper in his luggage. The mission was accomplished.

By mid-1880s, as the Conquest moved on, tensions between the colonial powers started to rise. In 1884, their representatives gathered in Berlin. The stakes were high, and they had a lot to discuss. France and Portugal were eager to expand their existing Congolese domains. Germany, still run by the competent and ambitious Otto von Bismarck, was unwilling to strengthen its competitors. Neither were the United Kingdom and the United States. The neutral and unassuming Belgium, on the other hand, was a far safer choice. Eventually, after months of tough negotiations and elaborate horse-trading, the parties of the Berlin Conference reached an agreement. France and Portugal were to keep their existing colonies in the Congo Basin (which were to become the modern-day Congo-Brazzaville and Angola), but the new claims were rejected. Freedom of trade was secured and guaranteed for all. In a surprising diplomatic coup de maître, an enormous territory, more than 80 times Belgium’s own size, was recognised as Leopold’s private colony in all but name. Having fended off all other claimants, it was the King of the Belgians who went on conquering and to conquer.

Europe in Africa in the nineteenth century (1895) by E. W. Latimer (1822-1904)

When Leopold II first outlined his vision of a new state in the Congo Basin to the adventurers at the Brussels Geographic Conference, six years before Berlin, he pictured a bright future. Enlightening, progress, and salvation were waiting for the natives. The great achievements of the European science and culture were to be enriched, the benefits were to be shared with many of those less fortunate. “Our roads and posts,” proclaimed the monarch, “will greatly assist the evangelisation of the blacks and the introduction among them of commerce and modern industry”. The evangelisation, however, was never intended to be fully altruistic. Not unlike existing European colonies, it was of little secret that commerce was to lie in the heart of the endeavour, and the king was generous in his promises. Opportunities for development were a win-win. International investors, some of the notable financiers of the era among them, though sceptical at first, flocked in later years.

However, many of them were deeply disappointed. The Congo Free State, as the post-Berlin colony went on to be known, appeared to be not nearly as rich as expected. Though not a barren land by a mile, Congo soon proved to be bereft of some of the most precious resources. There were no gold and no diamonds. Those few European and American missionaries and entrepreneurs who dared to brave the unknown were given a free hand, but the costs of doing business were high, with climate and tropical diseases taking their toll. A few lean years after, the investors were gone, and the country’s sovereign was left alone with his folly. The private colony, once expected to bear the riches of ivory, turned out to be a colossal white elephant of its own.

And yet Leopold II had history on his side. It was late 19^th century, the time of what was later dubbed the Second Industrial Revolution. Automobile and bicycle manufacturing were expanding at a breakneck pace. The demand for rubber, the newly discovered material used to produce tyres, industrial belts, and wire coating, soared. In Congo, rubber trees were abundant. Difficult to cultivate and long to mature, the source of the sought after goo was quickly driven into short supply. The Congo Free State, not known for a booming economy, became a major producer and exporter. A few years after the historic discovery, the sticky material, surprisingly cheap to extract and collect, yielded eye-watering triple-digit returns.

It was in the late 1880s when certain rumours started to spread. Some of the Congo labour practices were apparently less than exemplary. Edmund Morel, then a clerk of a British shipping company stationed in Belgium, famously noted that ships from Congo return with rubber cargo and leave mainly with guns and ammunition. Aware of King Leopold’s humanitarian enterprise in Africa, Morel questioned the low amount of finished goods and building materials needed for large-scale development, and thus the perceived inconsistence with the stated mission. European and American missionaries in Africa, having something to tell the developed world, shared disturbing stories with newspapers. However, sporadic testimonies of unrelated people, none of them trustworthy enough, were dismissed as mere slander.

In 1890, six more years after the Congo Free State was established, a dramatic change took place. An American historian and correspondent by the name of George Washington Williams travelled to Brussels and was granted a tête-à-tête with His Majesty. Leopold’s narrative of a prosperous state in the heart of the Dark Continent was too fascinating for a seasoned journalist to ignore. Williams wanted some first-hand experience. The King personally discouraged him, citing safety reasons, but his guest, a veteran of several wars, was resolute. A few weeks after the interview, he boarded a steamship and embarked on his voyage to Africa.

Williams was not a man easy to impress. A scholar of African American history, he knew a lot about oppression and injustice. And yet what Williams witnessed in Congo left him, by his own account, in the state of deep shock and disgust. In a carefully worded, yet damning open letter of full 4,000 words addressed to his ‘Good and Great Friend’ Williams meticulously listed many of the abuses he observed.

The Congo Free State turned out to be a big lie. Behind the façade of a “benevolent enterprise” laid the grim reality of “deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave-raiding, and general policy of cruelty”. “Your Majesty’s Government”, wrote Williams, “has sequestered [the natives’] land, burned their towns, stolen their property, enslaved their women and children, and committed other crimes too numerous to mention in detail … There has been, to my absolute knowledge, no “honest and practical effort” made to increase their knowledge and secure their welfare. Your Majesty’s Government has never spent one franc for educational purposes, nor instituted any practical system of industrialism.”

Williams was not the first to break silence on the true nature of the Congo Free State, and yet his was the loudest voice. A respected journalist known in the White House and Capitol Hill, he ensured his words were heard. One may doubt the reasons for his open letter were purely humanistic, and yet it had the desired effect. The story of his journey, published with many lurid details, led to the uproar and disgust of educated readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Uncomfortable questions had to be raised in Brussels, much to His Majesty’s quiet irritation. Williams’s unforgiving exposé was not left unnoticed. The retaliation was swift and brutal.

In a matter of days, other stories started to appear, this time doubting the veracity of Williams’s heartfelt account and shedding light on the less glorious parts of his personal life. Williams did not live long enough to fight back (he died of tuberculosis shortly after his return from Africa), and yet the process was set in motion. Further testimonies followed, some of them in the British press. The Congo Reform Association, a joint effort of investigative journalists, missionaries, and diplomats, was busy printing books and delivering lectures. Perhaps even more important, the Congo Free State drew the ire of some of the finest literary talent of the era. Mark Twain penned a caustic Soliloquy satirising Leopold’s purported mission of enlightenment.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in contrast to his timeless detective fiction, produced a piece of sombre and thoughtful factual work.

At the turn of the century, it was the other aspect of technological progress that allowed for the graphic evidence of the Congo crimes. Photography, once of very limited use, became more affordable. The missionaries started to carry cameras with them. To their and the world’s horror, they had a lot to see and share.

In Congo, oppression of the natives, as reported by R. Casement, a British consul, and E. D. Morel, a journalist, was especially gruesome: “So when the soldiers killed us … then they cut off those things and took them to the white men, who said, "It is true you have killed men." The infamous practice of mutilations, often chopping hands off to prove or punish, took a uniquely insidious form. Needing able-bodied men to collect rubber, the authorities resorted to taking their women and children as hostages. For far too many, meeting the ever-increasing rubber quotas proved an impossible task.

Nsala of Wala with His Daughter’s Hand and Foot by A. Harris / Public Domain

The pictures of murdered and mutilated Congolese men, women, and children made it to the front pages. The Belgian public, abhorred and ashamed, demanded the end to atrocities. In 1908, after more than 20 years of rule, Leopold II, aided by a handsome pay-off, relinquished his faux country to the Belgian state.

The enormity of Leopold’s rule is to remain unknown. Adam Hochschild, an American journalist and historian, relying on the estimates by Professor Jan Vansina, arrived at the figure of around 10 million deaths, roughly the half of Congo’s population. Not all loss of life can be directly attributed to the King’s actions (Casement, in his 1904 diplomatic report, mentions the devastating effect of diseases), and yet from today’s viewpoint, the guilt is hard to refute. It appears to be unlikely that Leopold II personally wanted to kill the Congolese out of hatred, yet his predatory plundering, together with his evident gross disregard for human life, made the mass murder possible.

Nearing the end of his life, Leopold II showed little remorse or regret. Challenged by an American reporter, the King pointed out his many good works: “We have been fortunate in reducing smallpox in Central Africa by the introduction of vaccine. We have stopped the Congo slave trade and prohibited alcohol from entering the country … have built and are building railways and introduced the telegraph. Now we are sending out motor cars.”  When asked about the rubber fortune, the King was adamant in his defiance: “In no shape or form have I bettered myself financially through my relationship with the Congo. On the contrary, I have spent large sums of my own in developing the country, sums amounting in the aggregate to millions. I am poorer, not richer, because of the Congo. The betterment of the country and the improvement of the conditions of the natives are the only objects of my efforts.”

King Leopold II lived a long and pleasant life. Though an avid traveller in his youth, he never set foot in Congo, opting instead for Nice and other lavish European resorts. He died in his palace in 1909, at the respectable age of 74. One of the richest men in the world, the King was surrounded by the haut monde of his royal court till he breathed his last. The day of his death was also the anniversary of his ascension to the throne: the King of the Belgians ruled for exactly 44 years.

In Belgium itself, the second king is forgiven but not forgotten. As the scandals surrounding his erratic private life and heinous mistreatment of the Congolese faded away, it is the other evidence of Leopold’s reign that stands firm. The King shared a large part of his wealth with his nation. Many of the most notable works of architecture across the whole country, including the impressive Arcade du Cinquantenaire, were funded from his own deep pocket.

A number of places across the whole country (as well as abroad, in cities like Paris) still bear Leopold’s name. In Brussels itself, the statue of the Builder King stands tall. An even taller structure decorates Ostend, the place of Leopold’s favourite seaside retreat. The mounted King, atop of a grand pillar, is surrounded by his loyal subjects. An African man stands among them. In 2004, someone stole his hand.

* * *

The rotten legacy of Leopold II, who never cared to establish the genuine rule of law, reverberated for many decades. What became Belgian Congo in 1908, after the King gave the country away, though less atrocious to the natives, was little different from many other extractive European colonies across the world. In 1960, after years of struggle for independence and in the midst of a massive international crisis, the country was finally granted freedom.

Yet the national renaissance proved to be short lived. The brief rule of the idealistic and patriotic Patrice Lumumba, a veteran of the independence movement and the country’s first elected leader ever, ended in a tragedy. Though not a die-hard communist, he tried to side his fledgling country with the Soviet Union, a development which was less than welcome in the West in the middle of the Cold War. Lumumba was overthrown and executed only a few months after assuming office. A bloody civil war, which was to claim more than 100,000 lives, intensified shortly afterwards.

The Soviet Union lionised Lumumba as a communist martyr. Many streets across the vast country were named after him, as well as one of the most prestigious seats of learning in Moscow, the People’s Friendship University. However, little was done to aid Lumumba’s troubled motherland which by that time slided into chaos. His eventual successor, a colonel who staged a coup, proved to be a man of few democratic inclinations but much better political longevity.  Mobutu Sese Seko’s oppressive dictatorship lasted for 25 years.

In late 1990s, the country experienced yet another coup d'état, followed, in a few disorderly years, by a presidential assassination. It was in 1997 when the country’s old name of Zaire, as the long-time dictator preferred to call it, was abandoned. His successors opted to rename the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thus echoing the unfortunate moniker given to the land by its former white masters, that of the Congo Free State. Democracy itself, however, is elusive. The presidential elections to replace the ruler for the last 16 years, originally scheduled for the end of 2016, were postponed, yet again.

The Congo of today is still a very different place. The third biggest nation in Africa, the country’s population is roughly equal to that of the United Kingdom. Leopoldville, a trading post Stanley founded in 1881 and named after his benefactor, is now Kinshasa, the country’s capital and the third biggest city of the continent of the size exceeding that of London. The efforts of many Western missionaries were not in vain: roughly 80% of Congo's population identity themselves as Christians.

Though not as blessed with oil as the neighbouring Angola, the DRC’s mineral resources endowment is enormous. And yet, for all its natural wealth, it is still one of the ten poorest countries in the world, plagued by endemic corruption and still haunted by its awful past. However, some progress takes place, and there is hope that the much-suffered country still has the best of the days ahead of it.

In the closing remark of his another Congo document, the report to the President of the United States, Williams was optimistic: “I indulge the hope that when a new Government shall rise upon the ruins of the old, it will be simple, not complicated, local, not European, international, not national, just, not cruel, and, casting its shield alike over black and white, trader and missionary, endure for centuries”. For all the injustice suffered by troubled land for many decades, the just and noble vision is yet to come true.