THE SECOND BRUSSELS CONFERENCE
[Sidenote: King and Cardinal.]
The zealous labours of Cardinal Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers,
who had founded the Mission of the White Fathers in 1878 to convert
the Soudan and the Congo regions to Christianity, had always been
generously supported by the personal munificence of King Leopold.
The rescript issued to this devoted and untiring apostle by Pope Leo
XIII. had inaugurated endeavours on behalf of civilisation unexcelled
in any colony in the world. King Leopold’s earnest and generous
encouragement of this evangelistic work equalled the broad-minded
and hopeful manner in which he supported Stanley and others in their
early expeditions through the unknown forests of the Congo. There
was, therefore, a sympathetic tie between His Holiness, the King, and
the Cardinal in the world’s task in Congoland.
[Sidenote: The Anti-Slavery Crusade.]
Early in 1888 Cardinal Lavigerie visited Belgium, and, being
convinced by his long African experience of the necessity for an
organised anti-slavery crusade, opened a campaign in the Brussels
Cathedral which, by its popular interest, carried him to many parts
of Europe. The eloquence of this truly great prelate was born of
that deep sympathy for the African black derived from his intimate
knowledge of the debasing conditions still prevalent in those parts
of the Congo Basin where, for many practical reasons, the Belgians
had not penetrated with their work and influence. The Cardinal
exhorted the Belgians, first of all, to support and emulate their
King, who, he said, “would open before you a country seventy times as
large as your own—an immense field for the spread of your religion
and for charity.... You have not given to the struggle with barbarism
all the assistance that was incumbent upon you.”
[Illustration: Postmaster’s House, Suruango, 1904.]
[Illustration: House of Vice-Governor-General, Stanleyville.]
To the avowed support given by his Majesty to the movement which the
Cardinal’s numerous sermons inspired, may largely be attributed the
Belgian campaigns against the Arab slave-raiders which the Brussels
Conference of the following year urged upon the interested Powers.
The hundred admirable articles of the General Act of the Conference
do not all concern the reader. Their general purpose, already
indicated in a previous chapter, was the suppression of the slave
trade, the protection of the natives, and the provision of revenue
from import duties wherewith to maintain a practical executive to
accomplish both aims.
The Conference convened on November 18, 1889, and held the last
of its thirty-three sessions on the July 2, 1890. The King of the
Belgians had again welcomed the representatives of all the Powers
party to the Berlin Act. Persia, having meantime adhered to that Act,
was also represented. The Prince de Chimay, Belgian Minister for
Foreign Affairs, presided at the formal opening of the Conference.
At its first session Baron Lambermont was unanimously elected to
preside over its deliberations. His able associate at Berlin, M.
Emile Banning, also represented Belgium at this Conference, while
Baron Van Eetvelde, for many years devoted to its moral and material
development, represented the Congo Free State. Chief among other
distinguished representatives were Count von Alvensleben for Germany,
M. Bourée for France, Lord Vivian and Sir John Kirk for Great
Britain, Mr. Terrell, Minister at Brussels, for the United States,
and Prince Ourroussof and Professor Martens for Russia.
Foremost in the work of framing a proposed Act, under which the Congo
Free State inherited great responsibility and a tremendous task, were
the Belgian representatives. The other interested Powers pledged
themselves to join, each in its own territory, in the anti-slavery
campaign which the Act prescribed. Briefly stated, the signatories to
the General Act of this Conference declared that they were “animated
by the firm intention of putting an end to the crimes and devastation
engendered by the traffic in African slaves, of protecting
effectually the aboriginal populations of Africa, and of insuring for
that vast continent the benefits of peace and civilisation.”
[Sidenote: The General Act.]
The first article, relating to effective methods of suppressing
slave-raiding in the Congo Basin, was divided into seven sections:
The first provided for the progressive organisation of
administrative, judicial, religious, and military services—in
fact, the whole machinery of government. The second remedy was to
be the gradual establishment in the interior of strong protective
and repressive stations. The third clause provided for the
construction of roads and railroads, so that human porterage might
be ended. The fourth, for the placing of steamers on the lakes
and inland waters. The fifth, for the laying down of telegraph
lines. And the sixth, for the organisation of expeditions by
movable columns. While these clauses were of an active character,
the seventh came under the head of prohibition. It provided for
restriction in the import of firearms, and especially of modern
rifles and ammunition, within the whole extent of the territory
affected by the slave trade. The General Act only provided for
the _restriction_ in the import of firearms; but the King, in the
administrative decree, applying its provisions to the Congo State,
interdicted the importation, traffic, and transport of all rifles,
as well as of powder, bullets, and cartridges. The same decree
imposed severe penalties on those who in any way violated these
regulations.
The second article of the Act laid down that “the stations and
the interior cruisers shall have for their object the prevention
of the capture of slaves, and the interception of the routes of
transit. They shall extend their efficacious protection over all
the dependent populations within the range of their authority, by
prohibiting intestine war, and by initiating them into agricultural
labour. They will assist commerce, verifying labour contracts;
they will aid the missions, and they will organise a sanitary
service.”[13]
The second article, recognising the duty of the Powers to prevent
slave-raiding in the territory under their control, adopted, amongst
others, the following prescription:
To support and, if necessary, to serve as a refuge for the native
populations; to place those under their sovereignty in a position
to co-operate for their own defence; to diminish intertribal wars
by means of arbitration; to initiate the natives in agricultural
pursuits and industrial arts, so as to increase their welfare;
to raise them by civilisation and bring about the extinction of
barbarous customs, such as cannibalism and human sacrifices; and,
in giving aid to commercial enterprises, to watch over their
legality, controlling especially the contracts for service entered
into with natives.
The third and fourth articles contained the pledge of all the
interested Powers to assist in enforcing these commendable provisions
for the betterment of the black races in Africa. The succeeding
apathy of the Powers in no wise abated the energy of the Congo Free
State in its heroic effort to realise for civilisation the views
which Belgian statesmen had largely inspired at the Conference. The
Belgian campaigns against the Arabs, briefly narrated in succeeding
chapters, were only one phase of those multiform difficulties which
beset the pioneer in savage lands where the heralds of civilisation
find it necessary to suppress the old and impose a new order of life
upon untutored human beings.
[Sidenote: Alcohol and Civilisation.]
The second chapter referred, amongst other things, to caravan
routes, the transport of slaves by land, and to providing means of
livelihood and education for liberated slaves. The sixth chapter
enumerated the measures to be taken to restrict the trade in
spirituous liquors. The six articles composing this chapter forbid
the importation of distilled drinks “in the regions where they have
not yet penetrated,” and “each Power will determine for itself the
limit of this zone within its own possessions.” It is in reference
to these infirm clauses, as elastic as Congo rubber, that the Free
State has fulfilled promise with performance that puts her neighbours
to shame. Each year of Belgian rule in the Congo has been marked by
a contraction of the area in which alcoholic liquors are legitimate
traffic even in a restricted form. To-day spirituous liquors are
practically excluded from more than four-fifths of the entire
State. The Sovereign of the Congo Free State does not respect that
colonising enthusiasm which is founded on deleterious Scotch whiskey,
Holland gin, and Jamaica rum. He has, therefore, carried out the
spirit as well as the letter of the liquor clauses in the Brussels
Act, and lost revenue for the State from a source which, to a large
degree, supports the budgets of neighbouring colonies.
[Illustration: A Street in Coquilhatville, 1896 (Equateur).]
In the eighth article it is declared that
the experience of all nations who have intercourse with Africa has
shown the pernicious and preponderating part played by firearms
in slave trade operations as well as in intertribal wars, and has
clearly proved that the preservation of the African populations is
a radical impossibility unless restrictive measures against the
trade in firearms and ammunition are established.
It was, therefore, stipulated that in those parts of Africa between
the twentieth parallel of north latitude and the twenty-second
parallel of south latitude the importation of firearms, and
especially of rifles and weapons of precision, powder, balls,
and cartridges, should be greatly restricted, and as far as
possible prohibited. The only exceptions in later articles to
this prescription were made in favour of “measures directly by
governments for arming of a _force publique_ and the organisation of
their defence.”
[Sidenote: Attitude of the Powers.]
To carry out the onerous duties imposed by the Brussels Act upon
all the interested Powers required more than a Conference and its
lofty ideals and appropriate resolutions. By the Berlin Act import
duties had been prohibited in the Congo Basin only as an experiment.
The attitude of the Powers towards this question was now more
enlightened and more reasonable. Experience, and admiration for King
Leopold’s rapid achievements in the development of the new State,
combined, in the face of the slave-raiding enemy, to predispose the
representatives of the Powers to a rational view of the practical
necessities of governments which were called upon to establish order
and a civil community upon the trail of the murderous slave-chaser.
[Sidenote: Import Duties.]
At the thirteenth session of the Conference, held on May 10, 1890,
it was proposed that the stipulation of the Berlin Conference
prohibiting all import duties for twenty years should be withdrawn,
and that the “assenting Powers having possessions or protectorates in
the Conventional Basin of the Congo shall be at liberty, so far as
authority to this end is required, to establish duties on imported
goods, the scale of which shall not exceed a rate equivalent to
ten per cent. _ad valorem_ at the port of entry, always excepting
spirituous liquors.” Applying especially to spirituous liquors are
the provisions of articles 90 to 95 of the General Act.
In supporting this measure, Baron Lambermont said:
Not only has geographical acquaintance with the Congo Basin
revealed the wealth of the vast regions it comprises, but European
commerce, which was blocked at a short distance from the coast,
has penetrated the heart of Africa, in countries hitherto utterly
unknown. Civilisation, in divers forms, has made no less progress,
and has been permanently established in the very centre of Africa.
The rapidity with which this transformation has been accomplished
would seem to make it a duty to hasten the revision of the
free-trade rule temporarily laid down by the Berlin General Act.
The protection due to commerce and missions, the establishment of
systematic justice, the opening up of easier means of communication
with the interior of the continent, the organisation of public
services as auxiliaries to private enterprises, require financial
resources which it is reasonable to obtain, by means of imposts,
from those who profit by the new order of things. While in most
of the African colonies tariffs are among the principal sources
of revenue, the countries situated in the Conventional Basin of
the Congo alone are deprived of the right of levying customs
duties; and yet these are the countries that find themselves at
the front in the crusade against the slave trade! The resolutions
of the Brussels Conference, in imposing on them new tasks, will
also increase the expenses necessary for the carrying out of their
civilising mission. The legitimacy of import duties destined to
meet these expenses cannot be denied.
In the debate which naturally ensued upon such an important measure,
Baron Gericke d’Herwijnen, representing Holland, which has a large
spirit trade along the West Coast of Africa, opposed views for a time
unfavourable to the adoption of this supplementary Declaration[14] to
the General Act. Notwithstanding his views, the Dutch representative
gracefully alluded to “the well-merited homage it [Holland] had
rendered to the work of the King of the Belgians from its very
commencement.”
On the part of Great Britain, Lord Vivian supported the proposition
in words which should sear the few unkindly, astigmatic eyes of those
who regard King Leopold’s rule in Africa with splenetic gaze and
caterwauling. His lordship spoke aptly when he said:
As to the question whether this modification is opportune, the fact
must not be lost sight of that the Berlin Conference never intended
to fix unalterably the economic system of the Free State, which,
as was already then foreseen, would undergo radical modifications
under the influence of progress, nor to establish for an indefinite
period regulations which may hinder, check, and even arrest its
development. Provision was wisely made for the probability of
future changes, which would require a certain latitude in economic
matters in order to secure their easy realisation....
The moment has now come when the marvellous progress made by the
infant State is creating fresh needs, when it would be only in
accordance with wisdom and foresight to revise an economic system
primarily adapted to a creative and transitional period.
_Can we blame the infant State for a progress which, in its
rapidity, has surpassed the most optimistic forecasts? Can we
hinder and arrest this progress in refusing her the means necessary
for her development? Can we condemn the Sovereign who has already
made such great sacrifices to support for an indefinite period a
burden which daily becomes heavier, and at the same time impose
upon him new and heavy expenses necessitated by the suppression of
the slave trade?_
_We are convinced that there will be but one answer to these
questions._
[Illustration: Camp on Line of Cataracts Railroad, Songololo.]
Following the British representative in support of the proposal,
Count von Alvensleben, the German Minister, expressed himself as
follows:
The Imperial Government will be glad to have such an opportunity of
showing its sentiments of sympathy for the Congo Free State, which,
under the wise direction of its august Sovereign, has given such
striking proofs of vitality.
The German Government will willingly lend its help in placing the
Congo Free State in a position to acquire the means which may seem
necessary to assist its development and to enable it to continue
its valuable services to the cause of civilisation and humanity.
[Sidenote: France and the Slave Trade.]
Indeed, the expressions of appreciation of the Belgian work in the
Congo were unanimous and enthusiastic. The Declaration was adopted,
and became part of the General Act of the Brussels Conference by the
ratification of all the Powers—the Dutch Chambers sanctioning the
ratification on the intervention of the Queen Regent, mother of the
present Queen, Wilhelmina. In giving her adhesion France did so with
the reservation that she “would not recognise the articles relating
to the zone of maritime search, jurisprudence, arrest, seizure, and
condemnation of suspected ships.” This has always been regarded as a
flaw in the effort of the Powers to suppress the slave traffic with
unity of force and aim. France’s remarkable reservation has had the
effect of affording to slave-dealers the only existing protection of
a civilised Government on the East African Coast. The motive for this
is revealed in the fact that slave-dealers are still employed in the
French possessions of the Indian Ocean.[15] It is to be regretted
that republican France should stand out from that solid phalanx of
the Powers by which alone the abominable institution of slavery can
be stricken from the calendar of modern crime.
[Illustration: Baluba Chiefs.]
[Illustration: Return from the Hunt at Bumba (Bangala).]
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Boulger, _The Congo State_, 1898.
[14] See Appendix for full text.
[15] Boulger.