White King, Red Rubber, Black Death

Jacquelyn Suter

Remember Joseph Conrad? You probably were

forced to read his 1902 novel Heart of Darkness in
school. On the other hand, you probably schlepped
along quite willingly to see the 1979 film Apocalypse
Now, loosely based upon this novel. The film’s crew
trampled through a fantasy jungle to bring us a story
of how violence and bizarre characters fit together
rather nicely for your viewing pleasure.

But Conrad did the real thing. In 1890, he joined a

steamship company that went into the African Congo.
Hiking miles around treacherous river rapids to meet
his steamer ‘round the bend’ so to speak, he records
this in his diary: “Saw another dead body lying in the
path in an attitude of meditative repose.” On another
day, “passed skeleton tied-up to a post.”

And Conrad’s main character, Marlow, in Heart of

Darkness hears this: “A slight clinking behind me
made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in
a file, toiling up the path…each had an iron collar on
his neck, and all were connected together with a
chain whose bights swung between them,
rhythmically clinking.” The fictitious Marlow sees as
much as Conrad: “the body of a middle-aged negro,
with a bullet-hole in the forehead.”

Conrad says this about his novel’s origins, “it is well known that curious men go prying into all
sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all kinds of spoil.” One
might well wonder about this spoil…. Actually, we don’t need to do that. We now know it to be
ivory, followed by raw rubber destined for tires to fuel the up and coming auto industry.

During the time the Congo was being plundered, there were a few men who were curious enough
to want to know, let’s say, the ‘business model’ of how this natural wealth was coming out of the
area, and they were willing to risk their lives to expose it.

Their stories, and the heart-rending story of the Congo itself, have been meticulously researched
by another man gone a-prying into this largely forgotten history. That man would be Adam
Hochschild in his 1998 book, King Leopold’s Ghost. And it’s no exaggeration for me to say that
this book is one of the most spellbinding non-fiction works I’ve read in some time.

The cast of characters is outsized and legendary – starting with the renowned explorer, H. M.
Stanley of ‘Livingstone-I-presume’ fame, to King Leopold II of Belgium. And weaving through the
whole sordid saga is a giant of a man whose name and deeds have unfortunately passed into
obscurity, E. D. Morel.

Conrad’s Marlow tells us that the Congo was “an exotic Immensity ruled by an august
Benevolence.” Hardly. Benevolence would scarcely be the right word for King Leopold’s colonial
flights of fancy. He desperately wanted to put his little kingdom of Belgium on the map by having
an empire; however, the European powers had already carved up the known world. What to do?

In 1877, the flamboyant explorer H. M. Stanley enters the scene, arriving at the mouth of the
Congo River as the first man to chart its entire course. He also happened to be the second
explorer to have crossed the entire continent, east to west, trekking over 7,000 miles. Stanley
knew the Congo. Leopold told his factotum in London, “I’ll just give Stanley some job of
exploration which will offend no one, and will give us the bases and headquarters which we can
take over later on.”

For the next five years, Stanley became Leopold’s ‘man in the Congo’, helping the king to “secure
for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake.” And from this moment, this area of Africa,
formerly left blank as unfathomable on 19th c. maps, now became the private preserve of King
Leopold – not a colony of Belgium as it turned out, but sole province of the king to be exploited for
his personal profit. And this profit was huge.

One of the first men to expose King Leopold’s theft of land and enslavement of people was a
black American missionary by the name of George Washington Williams. In his short Open
Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II – the first comprehensive, systematic indictment of the
king – Williams revealed Leopold’s activities for what, at a later time, would be called crimes
against humanity. This document is now seen as a landmark in the literature of human rights and
investigative journalism.

Williams of course was not the only person to have noticed atrocities. There was another black
American missionary, William Sheppard who documented the severing of hands, as a form of
discipline to achieve quotas. It was largely because of Sheppard’s writings that the outside world
began to associate the Belgian Congo with severed hands.

But perhaps the man who had the most long-reaching effect on exposing the king’s brutalities and
publicizing them widely to the world was E. D. Morel. As an employee of a shipping company, he
watched on the Antwerp dock as huge quantities of arms were shipped to the Congo and as vast
amounts of ivory and rubber returned to these same docks.

Morel wrote, “How, then, was this rubber and ivory being acquired? Certainly not by commercial
dealing….Forced labour of a terrible and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard of
profits….I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers.” It was Morel who entitled one of his
books, Red Rubber.

Morel’s legacy and superb achievement was that his movement “kept alive a tradition, a way of
seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no
matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another
end of the earth.”

It was only in 2005 that Belgium was able to mount an exhibition acknowledging publicly for the
first time the atrocities that occurred in the Congo Free State – and, yes, it displayed many photos
of Africans missing a right hand.

In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlowe encounters a Belgian agent living deep in the jungle, Mr.
Kurtz, perhaps better known to us from Apocalypse Now as the character played by Marlon
Brando. Kurtz’s insane cry “The horror! The horror!” still reverberates through the Congo to this
day, with the world paying as scant attention now as it did then.

parhamw@ymail.com