The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (57 page)

After a decade and a half of ignoring the Sudan, the British worried that the French, who had been consolidating an empire across the African interior, were now approaching the Nile. This could not be allowed. If the French got a foothold on the upper Nile, the British feared they could use modern engineering to divert all of its precious water away from Egypt.

In 1898 an army of 17,000 Egyptians and 8,000 British set out to retake Sudan, led by Sir Herbert Kitchener. Awesomely mustached and fluent in Arabic, Kitchener had been a subordinate officer in Wolseley’s campaign of 1884–85. Since he had no besieged compatriot to rescue, he now could move at a more leisurely pace than Wolseley had done.

The British killed 3,000 Mahdists at their first clash in April, when a dervish column tried to destroy the railroad the British were building at Atbara to support their offensive. The Mahdists had a reputation of being unstoppable and fanatically impervious to pain, which led British riflemen to use dumdum bullets, soft lead projectiles that expanded, blew away entire body parts, and left gaping holes wherever they hit. The British often shot wounded dervishes on the ground rather than risk being killed with their last stubborn burst of strength. The Sudanese have never forgiven them for this.

After a methodical march toward Khartoum, the British were hit by the full Mahdist army outside Omdurman in September. The British had brought along a marvelous new invention—the Maxim machine gun—so when the screaming dervishes attacked, they were cut down by the thousands. Omdurman was one of the most lopsided battles in history. Ten thousand dervishes were killed; 20,000 more were wounded too seriously to flee. The British lost only a half a percent of that, forty-eight killed, most of them when one glory-seeking British cavalry officer led his men in a totally unauthorized, unsupported, and unnecessary charge into the massed enemy. It was the last cavalry charge the British army ever attempted.

The British blew up the Mahdi’s tomb and swept his bones into the Nile, except for his skull, which was offered to Kitchener, then to a museum in England, and finally was reburied with full Muslim rites after a disgusted Queen Victoria heard about it and ordered her troops to leave that man’s remains alone.

The last glimmer of the Mahdist state was finally extinguished when the fugitive Khalifah Abdullahi was hunted down and killed in battle in November 1899.

CONGO FREE STATE

Death toll:
10 million

Rank:
14

Type:
commercial exploitation

Broad dividing line:
Europeans exploiting natives

Time frame:
1885–1908

Location:
Congo basin, central Africa

Major state participants:
none

Major non-state participants:
Congo Free State

Who generally gets the most blame:
King Leopold II of Belgium

Economic factors:
rubber, timber, ivory

By this time [Africa] was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can’t trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water—steamboats! Why shouldn’t I try to get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

The man who put the Congo River on the map was the jungle-whacking journalist Henry Stanley. After earning his fame by presumably discovering Dr. Livingstone in 1871, he returned to Africa to settle all of the big questions of geography. Carrying the
Lady Alice
, a fold-up boat, inland from Zanzibar along the Arab slaving routes of East Africa, he first circumnavigated Lake Tanganyika, then Lake Victoria, and thereby determined the source of the Nile once and for all. Having solved the great geographic mystery of the era, he launched his portable boat—along with canoes bought locally—down a big mystery river that flowed westward from the lakes. It turned out to be the Congo River. Henry Stanley’s fabled expedition down the Congo River brought modern firepower to the exploration of Africa, blasting away any native opposition he encountered. When Stanley emerged from the Congo onto the Atlantic coast in 1870, the golden age of African exploration was over.

His dispatches from Africa stirred the imagination of the West. Unfortunately, via letters that had been waiting patiently for him for several years, Stanley learned the horrible news that his fiancée, Alice, whose memory had cheered and inspired him while he rode her namesake boat in darkest Africa, had married someone else about a year after Stanley disappeared. He moped around, inconsolable, and edited his journals into a best seller about his adventures in the Dark Continent.

Impressed by the vast richness of the country, Stanley had hoped to get the British government to set up a colony there, but it wasn’t interested. He was only the latest major explorer to fail to get a government interested in the Congo basin. These advocates arranged meetings and wrote passionate editorials that expounded on the value of having markets for European goods, on the number of heathen souls that needed saving, on the rich natural resources free for the taking, on the savage cannibals that needed dietary reform, and on the wretched slave markets that needed to be shut down.

No one was interested. The European governments took the sensible middle-class attitude that colonies cost more than they were worth. As late as 1870 the only northern European officials south of the Sahara were in South Africa—where the climate was suited to white settlement—and in coastal towns like Libreville and Freetown that had been established as part of the anti-slavery movement. Missionaries prowled deep into the heart of Africa, but they did so at their own risk, without the protection of their governments.

A Man of Wealth and Taste

Among those failing to convince a government to take up the “white man’s burden” was King Leopold II of Belgium, a hedonistic and dangerously clever person who was looking around for stray lands to take over. Born in 1835, he was only five years younger than his little country, but he had big ambitions.

“There are no small nations,” Leopold said, “only small minds.” Would Spain be willing to sell the Philippines? No one seems to be using that desolate stretch of Argentina—how about letting us have it? Maybe Borneo is available, or New Guinea. Unfortunately, the Belgian parliament was no more interested in taking on colonies than its British counterparts had been. Leopold’s ambitions were going nowhere.

After reading Stanley’s book, Leopold tried to woo a reluctant Stanley into a partnership. As Stanley traveled around Europe promoting his books, he received a number of pleasant invitations to lunch and tea whenever the king was in the same town. Leopold was floating an idea to bypass the governments of Europe entirely and create an independent colony, the Congo Free State. He pointed to the older, smaller settlement of former slaves in Liberia as his model. The Congo Free State would prohibit the importation of guns and alcohol. It would impose peace on all of the tribes, abolish the slave trade, and establish a protected zone of free trade where the three C’s—commerce, Christianity, and civilization—could flourish.

Leopold sponsored a conference in September 1876 in Brussels, during which scientific and anthropological papers about Africa were presented, and then he created a front organization called the Association Internationale Africaine. This group met once more, a year later, and faded away. No matter. It had served its purpose. It had lasted long enough to convince the world that Leopold was on the up-and-up.

Stanley agreed to return to the Congo and build a road around Livingstone Falls, the long stretch of cliffs and rocky water that separated the coastal estuary from the wide, sluggish sweep of navigable river that penetrated a thousand miles into the heart of Africa. Beginning in 1879, he established posts along the river and negotiated with local chiefs, exchanging trade goods for rights-of-way.

Rubber Stamp

The British occupation of Egypt in 1879 did more than anger the natives and stir up the revolt described in the last chapter (see “Mahdi Revolt”). It also annoyed the rest of Europe.

Although no one in Europe actually wanted Africa for themselves, they’d be damned if they would let anyone else have it, so as soon as the British made their tentative grab, the rest of Europe jumped up and demanded their share. With the British in control of Egypt, everyone else—France, Germany, Portugal, Italy—wanted a piece of the action. In 1884, representatives of over a dozen nations gathered in Berlin to divide Africa fairly among all of the claimants. Of course, none of the nations represented at the conference were African, but did I really need to tell you that? Even Westernized African states like Transvaal and Liberia were shut out.

In addition to parceling out national spheres of influence, the delegates formally backed Leopold’s scheme. The Congo would become a private colony under the personal rule of King Leopold—not a possession of the state of Belgium. Partly, Leopold was allowed to take the Congo as a compromise. No major power wanted to let it fall into the hand of another major power, but giving it to the king of neutral little Belgium seemed safe.

During that era of unbridled capitalism, allowing corporations to function as sovereign nations had solid precedent. The Dutch East India Company had operated colonies and navies in the Far East without government oversight throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The British East India Company conquered India and governed independently until the Crown took over in 1858. Hudson’s Bay Company controlled one-sixth of North America until 1868. The Congo Free State was just one more private colony.

Red Rubber

The Free State was not a successful operation at first. As skeptics in the Belgian parliament had predicted, colonies cost more and produced less than Leopold had originally imagined. After ten years, the Free State was heading toward bankruptcy, and Leopold was about to ask the Belgian government to take it off his hands. He was saved by a worldwide surge in demand for rubber. In 1888, Dunlop had invented the pneumatic rubber tire for bicycles, and in 1895, Michelin did the same for automobiles. Suddenly, Leopold had something that everyone wanted.
¹

In many ways, the Free State operated by elaborate sleight of hand. On paper, an incredibly complex organization could be charted with boxes and arrows that only served to disguise the fact that all of the money was being funneled directly into Leopold’s pocket.

His colony was divided into two parts. The lesser was designated as a free trading zone, in which investors would be granted leases that guaranteed exclusive commercial rights over a specific service, product, region, or industry. One syndicate was sold the contract to build the railroad around Livingstone Falls. Another was granted exclusive rights to develop the minerals of Katanga, while another developed the diamond fields of Katai. Leopold almost always managed to own substantial stock in these operations, such as the 50 percent he owned of the Anglo-Belgian India-Rubber Company.
²

The greater part of the colony was designated the private property of the state (the Private Domain). Government officials were paid low salaries, but they earned lucrative commissions based on how much they could wrest from their district. The money they sent upward went back into the state treasury to cover operating expenses.

Once expenses were covered, a third zone (the Crown Domain) was established as the personal property of Leopold himself. It was run on the same lines as the Private Domain, but this money went directly to Leopold.

In addition to the natural resources of the Congo basin, the Free State plundered the abundant local labor. The entire population of any nearby town could be drafted to cut a road or lay rails through the jungle. Inhabitants could be taken away as porters for as long as the company needed them, and if these overworked porters died of exhaustion, there were plenty more to be found at the next stop on the trail.

Villages were given regular quotas of rubber, ivory, or timber to harvest from the jungle. Any workman who failed to produce his quota of rubber was liable to be punished. A heavy flogging with a hippopotamus whip was just the start. His wife might be seized and held for ransom in rubber.
³
Most company outposts had any number of dirty, emaciated women chained outside to posts waiting for their husbands to bring their quota of rubber to the post commander. When corporate security squads were sent on punitive raids, they were told not to waste ammunition—one bullet, one kill. They were not supposed to use company ammunition hunting big game for sport. As proof of their frugality, they were expected to bring back one severed human hand for every bullet expended.
⁴