Congo the tip has been given out from those higher up at Brussels to
"close up" the atrocities; and for the present the evil places in
the Tenderloin and along the Broadway of the Congo are tightly shut.
But at those lonely posts, distant a month to three months' march
from the capital, the cruelties still continue. I did not see them.
Neither, last year, did a great many people in the United States see
the massacre of blacks in Atlanta. But they have reason to believe
it occurred. And after one has talked with the men and women who
have seen the atrocities, has seen in the official reports that
those accused of the atrocities do not deny having committed them,
but point out that they were merely obeying orders, and after one
has seen that even at the capital of Boma all the conditions of
slavery exist, one is assured that in the jungle, away from the
sight of men, all things are possible. Merchants, missionaries, and
officials even in Leopold's service told me that if one could spare
a year and a half, or a year, to the work in the hinterland he would
be an eye-witness of as cruel treatment of the natives as any that
has gone before, and if I can trust myself to weigh testimony and
can believe my eyes and ears I have reason to know that what they
say is true. I am convinced that to-day a man, who feels that a year
and a half is little enough to give to the aid of twenty millions of
human beings, can accomplish in the Congo as great and good work as
that of the Abolitionists.
Three years ago atrocities here were open and above-board. For
instance. In the opinion of the State the soldiers, in killing game
for food, wasted the State cartridges, and in consequence the
soldiers, to show their officers that they did not expend the
cartridges extravagantly on antelope and wild boar, for each empty
cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or
child. These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts
along the river. They are no longer in evidence. Neither is the
flower-bed of Lieutenant Dom, which was bordered with human skulls.
A quaint conceit.
The man to blame for the atrocities, for each separate atrocity, is
Leopold. Had he shaken his head they would have ceased. When the hue
and cry in Europe grew too hot for him and he held up his hand they
did cease. At least along the main waterways. Years before he could
have stopped them. But these were the seven fallow years, when
millions of tons of red rubber were being dumped upon the wharf at
Antwerp; little, roughly rolled red balls, like pellets of
coagulated blood, which had cost their weight in blood, which would
pay Leopold their weight in gold.
He can not plead ignorance. Of all that goes on in his big
plantation no man has a better knowledge. Without their personal
honesty, he follows every detail of the "business" of his rubber
farm with the same diligence that made rich men of George Boldt and
Marshall Field. Leopold's knowledge is gained through many spies, by
voluminous reports, by following up the expenditure of each centime,
of each arm's-length of blue cloth. Of every Belgian employed on
his farm, and ninety-five per cent. are Belgians, he holds the
_dossier_; he knows how many kilos a month the agent whips out of
his villages, how many bottles of absinthe he smuggles from the
French side, whether he lives with one black woman or five, why his
white wife in Belgium left him, why he left Belgium, why he dare not
return. The agent knows that Leopold, King of the Belgians, knows,
and that he has shared that knowledge with the agent's employer, the
man who by bribes of rich bonuses incites him to crime, the man who
could throw him into a Belgian jail, Leopold, King of the Congo.
The agent decides for him it is best to please both Leopolds, and
Leopold makes no secret of what best pleases him. For not only is he
responsible for the atrocities, in that he does not try to suppress
them, but he is doubly guilty in that he has encouraged them. This
he has done with cynical, callous publicity, without effort at
concealment, without shame. Men who, in obtaining rubber, committed
unspeakable crimes, the memory of which makes other men
uncomfortable in their presence, Leopold rewarded with rich
bonuses, pensions, higher office, gilt badges of shame, and rapid
advancement. To those whom even his own judges sentenced to many
years' imprisonment he promptly granted the royal pardon, promoted,
and sent back to work in the vineyard.
"That is the sort of man for _me_," his action seemed to say. "See
how I value that good and faithful servant. That man collected much
rubber. You observe I do not ask how he got it. I will not ask you.
All you need do is to collect rubber. Use our improved methods. Gum
copal rubbed in the kinky hair of the chief and then set on fire
burns, so my agents tell me, like vitriol. For collecting rubber the
chief is no longer valuable, but to his successor it is an
object-lesson. Let me recommend also the _chicotte_, the torture
tower, the 'hostage' house, and the crucifix. Many other stimulants
to labor will no doubt suggest themselves to you and to your
cannibal 'sentries.' Help to make me rich, and don't fear the
'State.' '_L'Etat, c'est moi!_' Go as far as you like!"
I said the degradations and tortures practised by the men "working
on commission" for Leopold are unprintable, but they have been
printed, and those who wish to read a calmly compiled, careful, and
correct record of their deeds will find it in the "Red Rubber" of
Mr. E.R. Morel. An even better book by the same authority, on the
whole history of the State, is his "King Leopold's Rule in the
Congo." Mr. Morel has many enemies. So, early in the nineteenth
century, had the English Abolitionists, Wilberforce and Granville
Sharp. After they were dead they were buried in the Abbey, and their
portraits were placed in the National Gallery. People who wish to
assist in freeing twenty millions of human beings should to-day
support Mr. Morel. It will be of more service to the blacks than,
after he is dead, burying him in Westminster Abbey.
Mr. Morel, the American and English missionaries, and the English
Consul, Roger Casement, and other men, in Belgium, have made a
magnificent fight against Leopold; but the Powers to whom they have
appealed have been silent. Taking courage of this silence, Leopold
has divided the Congo into several great territories in which the
sole right to work rubber is conceded to certain persons. To those
who protested that no one in the Congo "Free" State but the King
could trade in rubber, Leopold, as an answer, pointed with pride at
the preserves of these foreigners. And he may well point at them
with pride, for in some of those companies he owns a third, and in
most of them he holds a half, or a controlling interest. The
directors of the foreign companies are his cronies, members of his
royal household, his brokers, bankers. You have only to read the
names published in the lists of the Brussels Stock Exchange to see
that these "trading companies," under different aliases, are
Leopold. Having, then, "conceded" the greater part of the Congo to
himself, Leopold set aside the best part of it, so far as rubber is
concerned, as a _Domaine Privé_. Officially the receipts of this pay
for running the government, and for schools, roads and wharfs, for
which taxes were levied, but for which, after twenty years, one
looks in vain. Leopold claims that through the Congo he is out of
pocket; that this carrying the banner of civilization in Africa
does not pay. Through his press bureaus he tells that his sympathy
for his black brother, his desire to see the commerce of the world
busy along the Congo, alone prevents him giving up what is for him a
losing business. There are several answers to this. One is that in
the Kasai Company alone Leopold owns 2,010 shares of stock. Worth
originally $50 a share, the value of each share rose to $3,100,
making at one time his total shares worth $5,421,000. In the
A.B.I.R. Concession he owns 1,000 shares, originally worth $100
each, later worth $940. In the "vintage year" of 1900 each of these
shares was worth $5,050, and the 1,000 shares thus rose to the value
of $5,050,000.
These are only two companies. In most of the others half the shares
are owned by the King.
As published in the "State Bulletin," the money received in eight
years for rubber and ivory gathered in the _Domaine Privé_ differs
from the amount given for it in the market at Antwerp. The official
estimates show a loss to the government. The actual sales show that
the government, over and above its own estimate of its expenses,
instead of losing, made from the _Domaine Privé_ alone $10,000,000.
We are left wondering to whom went that unaccounted-for $10,000,000.
Certainly the King would not take it, for, to reimburse himself for
his efforts, he early in the game reserved for himself another tract
of territory known as the _Domaine de la Couronne_. For years he
denied that this existed. He knew nothing of Crown Lands. But, at
last, in the Belgian Chamber, it was publicly charged that for years
from this private source, which he had said did not exist, Leopold
had been drawing an income of $15,000,000. Since then the truth of
this statement has been denied, but at the time in the Chamber it
was not contradicted.
To-day, grown insolent by the apathy of the Powers, Leopold finds
disguising himself as a company, as a laborer worthy of his hire,
irksome. He now decrees that as "Sovereign" over the Congo all of
the Congo belongs to him. It is as much his property as is a
pheasant drive, as is a staked-out mining claim, as your hat is your
property. And the twenty millions of people who inhabit it are there
only on his sufferance. They are his "tenants." He permits each
the hut in which he lives, and the garden adjoining that hut, but
his work must be for Leopold, and everything else, animal, mineral,
or vegetable, belongs to Leopold. The natives not only may not sell
ivory or rubber to independent traders, but if it is found in their
possession it is seized; and if you and I bought a tusk of ivory
here it would be taken from us and we could be prosecuted. This is
the law. Other men rule over territories more vast even than the
Congo. The King of England rules an empire upon which the sun never
sets. But he makes no claim to own it. Against the wishes of even
the humblest crofter, the King would not, because he knows he could
not, enter his cottage. Nor can we imagine even Kaiser William going
into the palm-leaf hut of a charcoal-burner in German East Africa
and saying: "This is my palm-leaf hut. This is my charcoal. You must
not sell it to the English, or the French, or the American. If they
buy from you they are 'receivers of stolen goods.' To feed my
soldiers you must drag my river for my fish. For me, in my swamp and
in my jungle, you must toil twenty-four days of each month to
gather my rubber. You must not hunt the elephants, for they are my
elephants. Those tusks that fifty years ago your grandfather, with
his naked spear, cut from an elephant, and which you have tried to
hide from me under the floor of this hut, are my ivory. Because that
elephant, running wild through the jungle fifty years ago, belonged
to me. And you yourself are mine, your time is mine, your labor is
mine, your wife, your children, all are mine. They belong to me."
[Illustration: "Tenants" of Leopold, Who Claims that the Congo
Belongs to Him, and that These Native People Are There Only as His
Tenants.]
This, then, is the "open door" as I find it to-day in the Congo. It
is an incredible state of affairs, so insolent, so magnificent in
its impertinence, that it would be humorous, were it not for its
background of misery and suffering, for its hostage houses, its
chain gangs, its _chicottes_, its nameless crimes against the human
body, its baskets of dried hands held up in tribute to the Belgian
blackguard.
III
THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO
Leopold's "shop" has its front door at Banana. Its house flag is a
golden star on a blue background. Banana is the port of entry to the
Congo. You have, no doubt, seen many ports of Europe--Antwerp,
Hamburg, Boulogne, Lisbon, Genoa, Marseilles. Banana is the port of
entry to a country as large as Western Europe, and while the imports
and exports of Europe trickle through all these cities, the commerce
of the Congo enters and departs entirely at Banana. You can then
picture the busy harbor, the jungle of masts, the white bridges and
awnings of the steamers. By the fat funnels and the flags you can
distinguish the English tramps, the German merchantmen, the French,
Dutch, Italian, Portuguese traders, the smart "liners" from
Liverpool, even the Arab dhows with bird-wing sails, even the steel,
four-masted schooners out of Boston, U.S.A. You can imagine the
toiling lighters, the slap-dash tenders, the launches with shrieking
whistles.
Of course, you suspect it is not a bit like that. But were it for
fourteen countries the "open door" to twenty millions of people,
that is how it might look.
Instead, it is the private entrance to the preserves of a private
individual. So what you really see is, on the one hand, islands of
mangrove bushes, with their roots in the muddy water; on the other,
Banana, a strip of sand and palm trees without a wharf, quay,
landing stage, without a pier to which you could make fast anything
larger than a rowboat.
In a canoe naked natives paddle alongside to sell fish; a peevish
little man in a sun hat, who, in order to save Leopold three
salaries, holds four port offices, is being rowed to the gangway; on
shore the only other visible inhabitant of Banana, a man with no
nerves, is disturbing the brooding, sweating silence by knocking the
rust off the plates of a stranded mud-scow. Welcome to our city!
Welcome to busy, bustling Banana, the port of entry of the Congo
Free State.
[Illustration: The Facilities for Landing at Banana, the Port of
Entry to the Congo, Are Limited.]
In a canoe we were paddled to the back yard of the café of Madame
Samuel, and from that bower of warm beer and sardine tins trudged
through the sun up one side of Banana and down the other. In between
the two paths were the bungalows and gardens of forty white men and
two white women. Many of the gardens, as was most of Banana, were
neglected, untidy, littered with condensed-milk tins. Others, more
carefully tended, were laid out in rigid lines. With all tropical
nature to draw upon, nothing had been imagined. The most ambitious
efforts were designs in whitewashed shells and protruding beer
bottles. We could not help remembering the gardens in Japan, of the
poorest and the most ignorant coolies. Do I seem to find fault with
Banana out of all proportion to its importance? It is because
Banana, the Congo's most advanced post of civilization, is typical
of all that lies beyond.
From what I had read of the Congo I expected a broad sweep of muddy,
malaria-breeding water, lined by low-lying swamp lands, gloomy,
monotonous, depressing.
But on the way to Boma and, later, when I travelled on the Upper
Congo, I thought the river more beautiful than any great river I had
ever seen. It was full of wonderful surprises. Sometimes it ran
between palm-covered banks of yellow sand as low as those of the
Mississippi or the Nile; and again, in half an hour, the banks were
rock and as heavily wooded as the mountains of Montana, or as white
and bold as the cliffs of Dover, or we passed between great hills,
covered with what looked like giant oaks, and with their peaks
hidden in the clouds. I found it like no other river, because in
some one particular it was like them all. Between Banana and Boma
the banks first screened us in with the tangled jungle of the
tropics, and then opened up great wind-swept plateaux, leading to
hills that suggested--of all places--England, and, at that,
cultivated England. The contour of the hills, the shape of the
trees, the shade of their green contrasted with the green of the
grass, were like only the cliffs above Plymouth. One did not look
for native kraals and the wild antelope, but for the square,
ivy-topped tower of the village church, the loaf-shaped hayricks,
slow-moving masses of sheep. But this that looks like a pasture
land is only coarse limestone covered with bitter, unnutritious
grass, which benefits neither beast nor man.
At sunset we anchored in the current three miles from Boma, and at
daybreak we tied up to the iron wharf. As the capital of the
government Boma contains the residence and gardens of the governor,
who is the personal representative of Leopold, both as a shopkeeper
and as a king by divine right. He is a figurehead. The real
administrator is M. Vandamme, the Secrétaire-Général, the
ubiquitous, the mysterious, whose name before you leave Southampton
is in the air, of whom all men, whether they speak in French or
English, speak well. It is from Boma that M. Vandamme sends
collectors of rubber, politely labeled inspecteurs, directeurs,
judges, capitaines, and sous-lieutenants to their posts, and
distributes them over one million square miles.
Boma is the capital of a country which is as large as six nations of
the European continent. For twenty-five years it has been the
capital. Therefore, the reader already guesses that Boma has only
one wharf, and at that wharf there is no custom-house, no warehouse,
not even a canvas awning under which, during the six months of rainy
season, one might seek shelter for himself and his baggage.
Our debarkation reminded me of a landing of filibusters. A wharf
forty yards long led from the steamer to the bank. Down this marched
the officers of the army, the clerks, the bookkeepers, and on the
bank and in the street each dumped his boxes, his sword, his
camp-bed, his full-dress helmet. It looked as though a huge eviction
had taken place, as though a retreating army, having gained the
river's edge, were waiting for a transport. It was not as though to
the government the coming of these gentlemen was a complete
surprise; regularly every three weeks at that exact spot a like
number disembark. But in years the State has not found it worth
while to erect for them even an open zinc shed. The cargo invoiced
to the State is given equal consideration.
"Prisoners of the State," each wearing round his neck a steel ring
from which a chain stretches to the ring of another "prisoner,"
carried the cargo to the open street, where lay the luggage of the
officers, and there dropped it. Mingled with steamer chairs, tin
bathtubs, gun-cases, were great crates of sheet iron, green boxes of
gin, bags of Teneriffe potatoes, boilers of an engine. Upon the
scene the sun beat with vicious, cruel persistence. Those officers
who had already served in the Congo dropped their belongings under
the shadow of a solitary tree. Those who for the first time were
seeing the capital of the country they had sworn to serve sank upon
their boxes and, with dismay in their eyes, mopped their red and
dripping brows.
[Illustration: "Prisoners" of the State in Chains at Matadi.]
Boma is built at the foot of a hill of red soil. It is a town of
scattered buildings made of wood and sheet-iron plates, sent out in
crates, and held together with screws. To Boma nature has been
considerate. She has contributed many trees, two or three long
avenues of palms, and in the many gardens caused flowers to blossom
and flourish. In the report of the "Commission of Enquiry" which
Leopold was forced to send out in 1904 to investigate the
atrocities, and each member of which, for his four months' work,
received $20,000, Boma is described as possessing "the daintiness
and _chic_ of a European watering-place."
Boma really is like a seaport of one of the Central American republics.
It has a temporary sufficient-to-the-day-for-to-morrow-we-die air.
It looks like a military post that at any moment might be abandoned.
To remove this impression the State has certain exhibits which seem
to point to a stable and good government. There is a well-conducted
hospital and clean, well-built barracks; for the amusement of the
black soldiers even a theatre, and for the higher officials
attractive bungalows, a bandstand, where twice a week a negro band
plays by ear, and plays exceedingly well. There is even a
lawn-tennis court, where the infrequent visitor to the Congo is
welcomed, and, by the courteous Mr. Vandamme, who plays tennis as
well as he does every thing else, entertained. Boma is the shop
window of Leopold's big store. The good features of Boma are like
those attractive articles one sometimes sees in a shop window, but
which in the shop one fails to find--at least, I did not find them
in the shop. Outside of Boma I looked in vain for a school
conducted by the State, like the one at Boma, such as those the
United States Government gave by the hundred to the Philippines. I
found not one. And I looked for such a hospital as the one I saw at
Boma, such as our government has placed for its employes along, and
at both ends of, the Isthmus of Panama, and, except for the one at
Leopoldville, I saw none.
In spite of the fact that Boma is a "European watering-place," all
the servants of the State with whom I talked wanted to get away from
it, especially those who already had served in the interior. To
appreciate what Boma lacks one has only to visit the neighboring
seaports on the same coast; the English towns of Sierra Leone and
Calabar, the French town of Libreville in the French Congo, the
German seaport Duala in the Cameroons, but especially Calabar in
Southern Nigeria. In actual existence the new Calabar is eight years
younger than Boma, and in its municipal government, its
street-making, cleaning, and lighting, wharfs, barracks, prisons,
hospitals, it is a hundred years in advance. Boma is not a capital;
it is the distributing factory for a huge trading concern, and a
particularly selfish one. There is, as I have said, only one wharf,
and at that wharf, without paying the State, only State boats may
discharge cargo, so the English, Dutch, and German boats are forced
to "tie up" along the river front. There the grass is eight feet
high and breeds mosquitoes and malaria, and conceals the wary
crocodile. At night, from the deck of the steamer, all one can see
of this capital is a fringe of this high grass in the light from the
air ports, and on shore three gas-lamps. No cafés are open, no
sailors carouse, no lighted window suggests that some one is giving
a dinner, that some one is playing bridge. Darkness, gloom, silence
mark this "European watering-place."
"You ask me," demanded a Belgian lieutenant one night as we stood
together by the rail, "whether I like better the bush, where there
is no white man in a hundred miles, or to be stationed at Boma?"
He threw out his hands at the gas-lamps, rapidly he pointed at each
of them in turn.
"Voilà, Boma!" he said.
From Boma we steamed six hours farther up the river to Matadi. On
the way we stopped at Noqui, the home of Portuguese traders on the
Portuguese bank, which, as one goes up-stream, lies to starboard.
Here the current runs at from four to five miles an hour, and has so
sharply cut away the bank that we are able to run as near to it with
the stern of our big ship as though she were a canoe. To one used
more to ocean than to Congo traffic it was somewhat bewildering to
see the five-thousand-ton steamer make fast to a tree, a sand-bank
looming up three fathoms off her quarter, and the blades of her
propeller, as though they were the knives of a lawn-mower, cutting
the eel-grass.
At Matadi the Congo makes one of her lightning changes. Her banks,
which have been low and woody, with, on the Portuguese side,
glimpses of boundless plateaux, become towering hills of rock. At
Matadi the cataracts and rapids begin, and for two hundred miles
continue to Stanley Pool, which is the beginning of the Upper Congo.
Leopoldville is situated on Stanley Pool, just to the right of where
the rapids start their race to the south. With Leopoldville above
and Boma below, still nearer the mouth of the river, Matadi makes a
centre link in the chain of the three important towns of the Lower
Congo.
When Henry M. Stanley was halted by the cataracts and forced to
leave the river he disembarked his expedition on the bank opposite
Matadi, and a mile farther up-stream. It was from this point he
dragged and hauled his boats, until he again reached smooth water at
Stanley Pool. The wagons on which he carried the boats still can be
seen lying on the bank, broken and rusty. Like the sight of old gun
carriages and dismantled cannon, they give one a distinct thrill.
Now, on the bank opposite from where they lie, the railroad runs
from Matadi to Leopoldville.