In trying to sum up what I found in the Congo Free State, I think
what one fails to find there is of the greatest significance. To tell
what the place is like, you must tell what it lacks. One must write of
the Congo always in the negative. It is as though you asked: “What sort
of a house is this one Jones has built?” and were answered: “Well, it
hasn't any roof, and it hasn't any cellar, and it has no windows,
floors, or chimneys. It's that kind of a house.”
When first I arrived in the Congo the time I could spend there
seemed hopelessly inadequate. After I'd been there a month, it seemed
to me that in a very few days any one could obtain a painfully correct
idea of the place, and of the way it is administered. If an orchestra
starts on an piece of music with all the instruments out of tune, it
need not play through the entire number for you to know that the
instruments are out of tune.
The charges brought against Leopold II, as King of the Congo, are
three:
(a) That he has made slaves of the twenty million blacks he
promised to protect.
(b) That, in spite of his promise to keep the Congo open to
trade, he has closed it to all nations.
(c) That the revenues of the country and all of its trade he
has retained for himself.
Any one who visits the Congo and remains only two weeks will be
convinced that of these charges Leopold is guilty. In that time he will
not see atrocities, but he will see that the natives are slaves, that
no foreigner can trade with them, that in the interest of Leopold alone
the country is milked.
He will see that the government of Leopold is not a government. It
preserves the perquisites and outward signs of government. It coins
money, issues stamps, collects taxes. But it assumes none of the
responsibilities of government. The Congo Free State is only a great
trading house. And in it Leopold is the only wholesale and retail
trader. He gives a bar of soap for rubber, and makes a “turn-over” of a
cup of salt for ivory. He is not a monarch. He is a shopkeeper.
And were the country not so rich in rubber and ivory, were the
natives not sweated so severely, he also would be a bankrupt
shopkeeper. For the Congo is not only one vast trading post, but also
it is a trading post badly managed. Even in the republics of Central
America where the government changes so frequently, and where each new
president is trying to make hay while he can, there is better
administration, more is done for the people, the rights of other
nations are better respected.
Were the Congo properly managed, it would be one of the richest
territories on the surface of the earth. As it is, through ignorance
and cupidity, it is being despoiled and its people are the most
wretched of human beings. In the White Book containing the reports of
British vice-consuls on conditions in the Congo from April of last year
to January of this year, Mr. Mitchell tells how the enslavement of the
people still continues, how “they” (the conscripts, as they are called)
“are hunted in the forest by soldiers, and brought in chained by the
neck like criminals.” They then, though conscripted to serve in the
army, are set to manual labor. They are slaves. The difference between
the slavery under Leopold and the slavery under the Arab raiders is
that the Arab was the better and kinder master. He took “prisoners"
just as Leopold seizes “conscripts,” but he had too much foresight to
destroy whole villages, to carry off all the black man's live stock,
and to uproot his vegetable gardens. He purposed to return. And he did
not wish to so terrify the blacks that to escape from him they would
penetrate farther into the jungle. His motive was purely selfish, but
his methods, compared with those of Leopold, were almost considerate.
The work the State to-day requires of the blacks is so oppressive that
they have no time, no heart, to labor for themselves.
In every other colony—French, English, German—in the native
villages I saw vegetable gardens, goats, and chickens, large,
comfortable, three-room huts, fences, and, especially in the German
settlement of the Cameroons at Duala, many flower gardens. In Bell Town
at Duala I walked for miles through streets lined with such huts and
gardens, and saw whole families, the very old as well as the very
young, sitting contentedly in the shade of their trees, or at work in
their gardens. In the Congo native villages I saw but one old person,
of chickens or goats that were not to be given to the government as
taxes I saw none, and the vegetable gardens, when there were any such,
were cultivated for the benefit of the chef de poste, and the
huts were small, temporary, and filthy. The dogs in the kennels on my
farm are better housed, better fed, and much better cared for, whether
ill or well, than are the twenty millions of blacks along the Congo
River. And that these human beings are so ill-treated is due absolutely
to the cupidity of one man, and to the apathy of the rest of the world.
And it is due as much to the apathy and indifference of whoever may
read this as to the silence of Elihu Root or Sir Edward Grey. No one
can shirk his responsibility by sneering, “Am I my brother's keeper?”
The Government of the United States and the thirteen other countries
have promised to protect these people, to care for their “material and
moral welfare,” and that promise is morally binding upon the people of
those countries. How much Leopold cares for the material welfare of the
natives is illustrated by the prices he pays the “boys” who worked on
the government steamer in which I went up the Kasai. They were bound on
a three months' voyage, and for each month's work on this trip they
were given in payment their rice and eighty cents. That is, at the end
of the trip they received what in our money would be equivalent to two
dollars and forty cents. And that they did not receive in money, but in
“trade goods,” which are worth about ten per cent less than their money
value. So that of the two dollars and eighty cents that is due them,
these black boys, who for three months sweated in the dark jungle
cutting wood, are robbed by this King of twenty-four cents. One would
dislike to grow rich at that price.
[Illustration: English Missionaries, and Some of Their Charges.]
In the French Congo I asked the traders at Libreville what they paid
their boys for cutting mahogany. I found the price was four francs a
day without “chop,” or three and a half francs with “chop.” That is, on
one side of the river the French pay in cash for one day's work what
Leopold pays in trade goods for the work of a month. As a result the
natives run away to the French side, and often, I might almost say
invariably, when at the poste de bois on the Congo side we would
find two cords of wood, on the other bank at the post for the French
boats we would count two hundred and fifty cords of wood. I took
photographs of the native villages in all the colonies, in order to
show how they compared—of the French and Belgian wood posts, the one
well stocked and with the boys lying about asleep or playing musical
instruments, or alert to trade and barter, and on the Belgian side no
wood, and the unhappy white man alone, and generally shivering with
fever. Had the photographs only developed properly they would have
shown much more convincingly than one can write how utterly miserable
is the condition of the Congo negro. And the condition of the white man
at the wood posts is only a little better. We found one man absolutely
without supplies. He was only twenty-four hours distant from
Leopoldville, but no supplies had been sent him. He was ill with fever,
and he could eat nothing but milk. Captain Jensen had six cans of
condensed milk, which the State calculated should suffice for him and
his passengers for three months. He turned the lot over to the sick
man.
We found another white man at the first wood post on the Kasai just
above where it meets the Congo. He was in bed and dangerously ill with
enteric fever. He had telegraphed the State at Leopoldville and a box
of medicines had been sent to him; but the State doctors had forgotten
to enclose any directions for their use. We were as ignorant of
medicines as the man himself, and, as it was impossible to move him, we
were forced to leave him lying in his cot with the row of bottles and
tiny boxes, that might have given him life, unopened at his elbow. It
was ten days before the next boat would touch at his post. I do not
know that it reached him in time. One could tell dozens of such stories
of cruelty to natives and of injustice and neglect to the white agents.
The fact that Leopold has granted to American syndicates control
over two great territories in the Congo may bring about a better state
of affairs, and, in any event, it may arouse public interest in this
country. It certainly should be of interest to Americans that some of
the most prominent of their countrymen have gone into close partnership
with a speculator as unscrupulous and as notorious as is Leopold, and
that they are to exploit a country which as yet has been developed only
by the help of slavery, with all its attendant evils of cruelty and
torture.
That Leopold has no right to give these concessions is a matter
which chiefly concerns the men who are to pay for them, but it is an
interesting fact.
The Act of Berlin expressly states: “No Power which exercises, or
shall exercise, sovereign rights in the above-mentioned regions, shall
be allowed to grant therein a monopoly or favor of any kind in matters
of trade.”
Leopold is only a steward placed by the Powers over the Congo. He is
a janitor. And he has no more authority to give even a foot of
territory to Belgians, Americans, or Chinamen than the janitor of an
apartment house has authority to fill the rooms with his wife's
relations or sell the coal in the basement.
The charge that the present concessionaires have no title that any
independent trader or miner need respect is one that is sure to be
brought up when the Powers throw Leopold out, and begin to clean house.
The concessionaires take a sporting chance that Leopold will not be
thrown out. It should be remembered that it is to his and to their
advantage to see that he is not.
In November of 1906, Leopold gave the International Forestry and
Mining Company of the Congo mining rights in territories adjoining his
private park, the Domaine de la Couronne, and to the American
Congo Company he granted the right to work rubber along the Congo River
to where it joins the Kasai. This latter is a territory of four
thousand square miles. The company also has the option within the next
eleven years of buying land in any part of a district which is nearly
one-half of the entire Congo. Of the Forestry and Mining Company
one-half of the profits go to Leopold, one-fourth to Belgians, and the
remaining fourth to the Americans. Of the profits of the American Congo
Company, Leopold is entitled to one-half and the Americans to the other
half. This company was one originally organized to exploit a new method
of manufacturing crude rubber from the plant. The company was taken
over by Thomas F. Ryan and his associates. Back of both companies are
the Guggenheims, who are to perform the actual work in the mines and in
the rubber plantation. Early in March a large number of miners and
engineers were selected by John Hays Hammond, the chief engineer of the
Guggenheim Exploration Companies, and A. Chester Beatty, and were sent
to explore the territory granted in the mining concession. Another
force of experts are soon to follow. The legal representative of the
syndicates has stated that in the Congo they intend to move “on
commercial lines.” By that we take it they mean they will give the
native a proper price for his labor; and instead of offering “bonuses"
and “commissions” to their white employees will pay them living wages.
The exact terms of the concessions are wrapped in mystery. Some say the
territories ceded to the concessionaires are to be governed by them,
policed by them, and that within the boundaries of these concessions
the Americans are to have absolute control. If this be so the
syndicates are entering upon an experiment which for Americans is
almost without precedent. They will be virtually what in England is
called a chartered company, with the difference that the Englishmen
receive their charter from their own government, while the charter
under which the Americans will act will be granted by a foreign Power,
and for what they may do in the Congo their own government could not
hold them responsible. They are answerable only to the Power that
issued the charter; and that Power is the just, the humane, the
merciful Leopold.
The history of the early days of chartered companies in Africa,
notoriously those of the Congo, Northern Nigeria, Rhodesia, and German
Central Africa does not make pleasant reading. But until the Americans
in the Congo have made this experiment, it would be most unfair (except
that the company they choose to keep leaves them open to suspicion) not
to give them the benefit of the doubt. One can at least say for them
that they seem to be absolutely ignorant of the difficulties that lie
before them. At least that is true of all of them to whom I have
talked.
The attorney of the Rubber Company when interviewed by a
representative of a New York paper is reported to have said: “We have
purchased a privilege from a Sovereign State and propose to operate it
along purely commercial lines. With King Leopold's management of Congo
affairs in the past, or, with what he may do in an administrative
way in the future, we have absolutely nothing to do.” The italics
are mine.
When asked: “Under your concessions are you given similar powers
over the native blacks as are enjoyed by other concessionaires?” the
answer of the attorney, as reported, was: “The problem of labor is not
mentioned in the concession agreement, neither is the question of local
administration. We are left to solve the labor problem in our own way,
on a purely commercial basis, and with the question of government we
have absolutely nothing whatever to do. The labor problem will not be
formidable. Our mills are simple affairs. One man can manage them, and
the question of the labor on the rubber concession is reduced to the
minimum.” This answer of the learned attorney shows an ignorance of
“labor” conditions in the Congo which is, unless assumed, absolutely
abject.
If the American syndicates are not to police and govern the
territories ceded them, but if these territories are to continue to be
administered by Leopold, it is not possible for the Americans to have
“absolutely nothing to do” with that administration. Leopold's sole
idea of administration is that every black man is his slave, in other
words, the only men the Americans can depend upon for labor are slaves.
Of the profits of these American companies Leopold is to receive
one-half. He will work his rubber with slaves.
Are the Americans going to use slaves also, or do they intend “on
commercial lines” to pay those who work for them living wages? And if
they do, at the end of the fiscal year, having paid a fair price for
labor, are they prepared to accept a smaller profit than will their
partner Leopold, who obtains his labor with the aid of a chain and a
whip?
[Illustration: The Laboring Man Upon Whom the American
Concessionaires Must Depend.]
The attorney for the company airily says: “The labor problem will
not be formidable.”
If the man knows what he is talking about, he can mean but one
thing.
The motives that led Leopold to grant these concessions are possibly
various. The motives that induced the Americans to take his offer were
probably less complicated. With them it was no question of politics.
They wanted the money; they did not need it, for they all are
rich—they merely wanted it. But Leopold wants more than the half
profits he will obtain from the Americans. If the Powers should wake
from their apathy and try to cast him out of the Congo, he wants,
through his American partners, the help of the United States. Should he
be “dethroned,” by granting these concessions now on a share and share
alike basis with Belgians, French, and Americans, he still, through
them, hopes to draw from the Congo a fair income. And in the meanwhile
he looks to these Americans to kill any action against him that may be
taken in our Senate and House of Representatives, even in the White
House and Department of State.
For the last two years Chester A. Beatty has been visiting Leopold
at Belgium, and has obtained the two concessions, and Leopold has
obtained, or hopes he has obtained, the influence of many American
shareholders. The fact that the people of the United States possessed
no “vested interest” in the Congo was the important fact that placed
any action on our part in behalf of that distressed country above
suspicion. If we acted, we did so because the United States, as one of
the signatory Powers of the Berlin Act, had promised to protect the
natives of the Congo; and we could truly claim that we acted only in
the name of humanity. Leopold has now robbed us of that claim. He hopes
that the enormous power wielded by the Americans with whom he is
associated, will prevent any action against him in this country.
But the deal has already been made public, and the motives of those
who now oppose improvement of conditions in the Congo, and who support
Leopold, will be at once suspected.
To me the most interesting thing about the tract of land ceded to
Mr. Ryan, apart from the number of hippopotamuses I saw on it, was that
the people living along the Congo say that it is of no value. They told
me that two years ago, after working it for some time, Leopold
abandoned it as unprofitable, and they added that, when Leopold cannot
whip rubber out of the forest, it is hard to believe that it can be
obtained there legitimately by any one else. On the bank I saw the
“factories” to which the unprofitable rubber had been carried from the
interior. They had formerly belonged to Leopold, now they are the
property of Mr. Ryan and of the American Congo Company. In only two
years they already are in ruins, and the jungle has engulfed them.
I was on the land owned by the company a dozen times or more, but I
did not go into the interior. Even had I done so, I am not an expert on
rubber, and would have understood nothing of Para trees, Lagos silk,
and liane. I am speaking not of my own knowledge, only of what was told
me by people who live on the spot. I found that this particular
concession was well known, because, unlike the land given to the
Forestry and Mines Company, it is not an inaccessible tract, but is
situated only eight miles from Leopoldville. In our language, that is
about as far as is the Battery to 160th Street. Leopoldville is the
chief place on the Congo River, and every one there who spoke to me of
the concession knew where it was situated, and repeated that it had
been given up by Leopold as unprofitable, and that he had unloaded it
on Mr. Ryan. They seem to think it very clever of the King to have got
rid of it to the American millionaire. To one knowing Mr. Ryan only
from what he reads of him in the public press, he does not seem to be
the sort of man to whom Leopold could sell a worthless rubber
plantation. However, it is a matter which concerns only Mr. Ryan and
those who may think of purchasing shares in the company. The
Guggenheims, who are to operate this rubber, say that Leopold did not
know how to get out the full value of the land, and that they, by using
the machinery they will install, will be able to make a profit, where
Leopold, using only native labor, suffered a loss.
To the poor the ways of the truly rich are past finding out. After a
man has attained a fortune sufficient to keep him in yachts and
automobiles, one would think he could afford to indulge himself in the
luxury of being squeamish; that as to where he obtained any further
increase of wealth, he would prefer to pick and choose.
On the contrary, these Americans go as far out of their way as
Belgium to make a partner of the man who has wrung his money from
wretched slaves, who were beaten, starved, and driven in chains. This
concession cannot make them rich. It can only make them richer. And not
richer in fact, for all the money they may whip out of the Congo could
not give them one thing that they cannot now command, not an extra
taste to the lips, not a fresh sensation, not one added power for good.
To them it can mean only a figure in ink on a page of a bank-book. But
what suffering, what misery it may mean to the slaves who put it there!
Why should men as rich as these elect to go into partnership with one
who sweats his dollars out of the naked black? How really fine, how
really wonderful it would be if these same men, working together,
decided to set free these twenty million people—if, instead of joining
hands with Leopold, they would overthrow him and march into the Congo
free men, without his chain around their ankles, and open it to the
trade of the world, and give justice and a right to live and to work
and to sell and buy to millions of miserable human beings. These
Americans working together could do it. They could do it from
Washington. Or five hundred men with two Maxim guns could do it. The
“kingdom” of the Congo is only a house of cards. Five hundred
filibusters could take Boma, proclaim the Congo open to the traders of
the world, as the Act of Berlin declares it to be, and in a day make of
Leopold the jest of Europe. They would only be taking possession of
what has always belonged to them.
Down in the Congo I talked to many young officers of Leopold's army.
They had been driven to serve him by the whips of failure, poverty, or
crime. I do not know that the American concessionaires are driven by
any such scourge. These younger men, who saw the depths of their
degradation, who tasted the dirty work they were doing, were daily
risking life by fever, through lack of food, by poisoned arrows, and
for three hundred dollars a year. Their necessity was great. They had
the courage of their failure. They were men one could pity. One of them
picked at the band of blue and gold braid around the wrist of his
tunic, and said: “Look, it is our badge of shame.”
To me those foreign soldiers of fortune, who, sooner than starve at
home or go to jail, serve Leopold in the jungle, seem more like men and
brothers than these truly rich, who, of their own free will, safe in
their downtown offices, become partners with this blackguard King.
What will be the outcome of the American advance into the Congo?
Will it prove the salvation of the Congo? Will it be, if that were
possible, a greater evil?
E.R. Morel, who is the leader in England of the movement for the
improvement of the Congo, has written: “It is a little difficult to
imagine that the trust magnates are moulded upon the unique model of
Leopold II, and are prepared for the asking to become associates in
slave-driving. The trouble is that they probably know nothing about
African conditions, that they have been primed by the King with his
detestable theories, and are starting their enterprises on the basis
that the natives of Central Africa must be regarded as mere 'laborers'
for the white man's benefit, possessing no rights in land nor in the
produce of the soil. If Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are going to
acquire their rubber over four thousand square miles, by 'commercial
methods,' we welcome their advent. But we would point out to them that,
in such a case, they had better at once abandon all idea of three or
four hundred per cent dividends with which the wily autocrat at
Brussels has doubtless primed them. No such monstrous profits are to be
acquired in tropical Africa under a trade system. If, on the other
hand, the methods they are prepared to adopt are the methods King
Leopold and his other concessionaires have adopted for the past
thirteen years, devastation and destruction, and the raising of more
large bodies of soldiers, are their essential accompaniments; and the
widening of the area of the Congo hell is assured.”
The two things in the American invasion of the Congo that promise
good to that unhappy country are that our country is represented at
Boma by a most intelligent, honest, and fearless young man in the
person of James A. Smith, our Consul-General, and that the actual work
of operating the mines and rubber is in the hands of the Guggenheims.
They are well known as men upright in affairs, and as philanthropists
and humanitarians of the common-sense type. Like other rich men of
their race, they have given largely to charity and to assist those less
fortunate than themselves.
For thirteen years in mines in Mexico, in China, and Alaska, they
have had to deal with the problem of labor, and they have met it
successfully. Workmen of three nationalities they have treated with
fairness.
“Why should you suppose,” Mr. Daniel Guggenheim asked me, “that in
the Congo we will treat the negroes harshly? In Mexico we found the
natives ill-paid and ill-fed. We fed them and paid them well. Not from
any humanitarian idea, but because it was good business. It is not good
business to cut off a workman's hands or head. We are not ashamed of
the way we have always treated our workmen, and in the Congo we are not
going to spoil our record.”
I suggested that in Mexico he did not have as his partner Leopold,
tempting him with slave labor, and that the distance from Broadway to
his concessions in the Congo was so great that as to what his agents
might do there he could not possibly know. To this Mr. Guggenheim
answered that “Neither Leopold nor anyone else can dictate how we shall
treat the native labor,” that if his agents were cruel they would be
instantly dismissed, and that for what occurred in the Congo on the
land occupied by the American Congo Company his brothers and himself
alone were responsible, and that they accepted that responsibility.
But already on his salary list he has men who are sure to get him
into trouble, men of whose dossiers he is quite ignorant.
From Belgium, Leopold has unloaded on the American companies several
of his “valets du roi,” press agents, and tools, men who for years have
been defenders of his dirty work in the Congo; and of the Americans,
one, who is prominently exploited by the Belgians, had to leave Africa
for theft.
That Mr. Guggenheim wishes and intends to give to the black in the
Congo fair treatment there is no possible doubt. But that on Broadway,
removed from the scene of operations in time some four to six months,
and in actual distance eight thousand miles, he can control the acts of
his agents and his partners, remains to be proved. He is attacking a
problem much more momentous than the handling of Mexican peons
or Chinese coolies, and every step of the working out of this problem
will be watched by the people of this country.
And should they find that the example of the Belgian concessionaires
in their treatment of the natives is being imitated by even one of the
American Congo Company the people of this country will know it, and may
the Lord have mercy on his soul!