The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (58 page)

One eyewitness described soldiers returning from a raid:

On the bow of the canoe is a pole, and a bundle of something on it. These are the hands (right hands) of sixteen warriors they have slain. “Warriors?” Don’t you see among them the hands of little children and girls? I have seen them. I have seen where the trophy has been cut off, while the poor heart beat strongly enough to shoot the blood from the cut arteries at a distance of fully four feet.
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Severed hands became a kind of currency—proof that orders were being obeyed. A basket of smoked hands covered any shortfall in production, and if there was no rubber to be had, the Free State’s security forces, the Force Publique, would go out to collect a quota of hands instead. Natives quickly learned that willingly sacrificing a hand might save their life.

And not just hands. After one commander grumbled that his men were shooting only women and children, his soldiers returned from the next raid with a basket of penises.

News of the atrocities didn’t reach Europe because travel to, from, and throughout the Free State was tightly regulated. If a bitter and disgusted employee hoped to get away, he “will probably never get out of the country alive, for the routes of communication, victualling stations, etc., are in the hands of the Administration, and escape in a native canoe is out of the question—every native canoe, if its destination be not known and its movements chronicled in advance from post to post, is at once liable to be stopped, for the natives are not allowed to move freely about the controlled water-ways.”
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The Story Leaks Out

In 1899, a Polish expatriate, writing in English under the name Joseph Conrad, serialized his novella,
Heart of Darkness
, in a British literary magazine. Based on the year Conrad had spent as a riverboat pilot on the Congo River, it told the story of a corporate agent traveling up a dark and mysterious African river to bring a rogue ivory trader back to civilization. The terrifying story of Mr. Kurtz, worshipped as a wrathful god by local natives, his station surrounded by a palisade topped with severed heads, was widely acclaimed when it first appeared. The readers assumed it was fiction.

Old-fashioned humanitarians from the anti-slavery era had been hearing and reporting horror stories from the Congo for years, but no one took them seriously. They were too closely aligned with radicals in the British Parliament, and their appeals to morality and goodwill were either ignored or ridiculed. Then an insider blew the whistle on the Congo Free State.

Of mixed Anglo-French parentage, Edmund Morel had become a clerk for Elder Demster Shipping in 1890, when he was seventeen. Operating out of Liverpool—long the center of the Africa trade—Elder Demster had a shipping contract to the Congo. For ten years Morel worked diligently as a clerk while moonlighting as a business journalist. His reputation as an expert on investment opportunities in Africa grew, and he handily defended the Congo Free State from all those annoying accusations of cruelty that hounded every colonial venture.
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Then in 1900, in his job as shipping clerk, Morel finally noticed the scarcity of exports to the Congo. The balance of trade was too good, the profits too easy. All that rubber was coming back to Europe, but nothing was going out to pay for it—only ammunition. The only available conclusion was that the trading companies were stealing it. He also noticed that the official books were doctored to hide this.
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He wrote an anonymous exposé that brought him to the attention of the professional do-gooders that everyone had been ignoring. He advised them to forget philanthropy and attack Leopold for creating monopolies, which violated the Berlin agreements that mandated free trade. He advised them to stir up resentment for excluding Britain from the lucrative commerce. Once they got people looking into the Congo, they’d see the atrocities for themselves.
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In 1903 Morel founded his own journal, and also started publishing a series of books, beginning with
Red Rubber
. He was not allowed into the Congo, but whistle-blowers soon came to him. Since mail out of the Congo was censored, his informants had to wait until they returned to Europe before they could get word to him.

The pressure paid off when the British foreign office asked its consul in central Africa, Roger Casement, to prepare a report. A thirty-eight-year-old Irishman, Casement had been bouncing around the Congo for nearly ten years, working awhile with Stanley, working for Elder Demster Shipping, moving ivory, joining Baptist missionaries, sometimes just disappearing into the jungle with his dogs for long stretches.
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“He could tell you things!” his friend Joseph Conrad said of Casement. “Things I have tried to forget, things I never did know.”
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But no one outside the Congo had been interested in what Casement had seen, until now. As British consul in the Congo, Roger Casement issued a report carefully based on reliable eyewitness accounts that revealed massive atrocities.

In 1904, Morel and Casement founded the Congo Reform Association. It quickly became the trendy cause among the celebrity activists of that era. Anatole France, Arthur Conan Doyle, Booker T. Washington, and Mark Twain lectured and wrote on the subject. Quaker chocolate millionaire William Cadbury contributed money.

Leopold struck back. In the early days of the exposure, a guest at a dinner party took Morel aside. He later described the conversation.

What were the Congo natives to me? I was a young man. I had a family—yes? I was running serious risks. And then, a delicately, very delicately veiled suggestion that my permanent interests would be better served if . . . “A bribe?” Oh! dear, no, nothing so vulgar, so demeaning. But there were always means of arranging these things. Everything could be arranged with honour to all sides. It was a most entertaining interview, and lasted until a very late hour. “So nothing will shake your determination?” “I fear not.” We parted with mutual smiles.
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All of the enemies of Leopold soon found themselves pressured. Morel was accused of being in the pay of Leopold’s business rivals. Several prominent German newspapers suddenly stopped criticizing conditions in the Congo and began to offer a more ambiguous viewpoint. No one could explain this surprising twist until Leopold accidentally failed to reimburse his bagman for the bribes he had paid these papers. A series of confused telegrams back and forth about who was supposed to pay whom for what soon became public.

One crusading journalist was discovered vacationing with his mistress, so Leopold invited the two of them to lunch. Despite his great personal charm, the king failed to discourage this journalist from reporting on the Congo, so Leopold exposed the man’s secret with a subtle touch. The king simply sent flowers to the man’s wife—and a note explaining how lovely it was to have had the pleasure of her company for lunch. There’s no telling what might have happened if Leopold had discovered that Casement was a closeted homosexual, this being only a few years after Oscar Wilde had been imprisoned for the same offense.
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The king visited America and connected with leaders of Congress and industry. He donated three thousand artifacts from the Congo to the Smithsonian and offered huge concessions to American businesses operating in the Free State. Although President Theodore Roosevelt favored Morel and the Congo reformists, Congress resisted when he tried to send investigators into the Congo.

Leopold made a big mistake hiring Henry Kowalsky, the flashiest lawyer in San Francisco, to improve his public image and generously lobby Congress. When Leopold began to realize how dangerously eccentric Kowalsky was, he tried to cut him loose. Angry and betrayed, Kowalsky sold Leopold’s letters to William Randolph Hearst, who now took up the cause of the Congo for his newspaper chain.
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The beloved explorer, Henry Stanley, died in 1904. Although he had long ago retired from public life, his reputation as a hero and visionary had shielded the Congo Free State from criticism. As long as Stanley vouched for Leopold, that was enough for many people. When Stanley died, Leopold was left unprotected.

By 1908, it had become undeniable how badly the people of the Congo had been abused, and the outcry was overwhelming. The international community finally forced Leopold to let go of the Congo. The Belgian parliament reluctantly bought the Congo from their king at an exorbitant price and promised to administer it openly and fairly. Leopold died a year later.

Death Toll

When Casement traveled through the rubber-producing districts preparing his report, it was obvious how badly these villages had suffered in the decade since he had first passed this way. As he noted in his diary:

June 5:
The country a desert, no natives left.

July 25:
I walked into villages and saw the nearest one—population dreadfully decreased—only 93 people left out of many hundreds.

August 6:
Took copious notes from natives. . . . They are cruelly flogged for being late with their baskets [of rubber]. . . .

August 22:
Bolongo quite dead. I remember it well in 1887, Nov., full of people then; now 14 adults all told. . . . 6:30 passed deserted side of Bokuta. . . . Mouzede says the people were all taken away by force to Mampoko. Poor unhappy souls.

August 30:
16 men women children tied up from a village Mboye close to the town. Infamous. The men were put in the prison, the children let go at my intervention. Infamous. Infamous, shameful system.
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Casement’s original report estimated that some 3 million Congolese had died. Morel estimated that the Congo’s population began with an original 20 or 30 million, and then collapsed and bottomed out at a mere 8 million. This became the most commonly quoted death toll through much of the twentieth century.
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In 1977, journalist Peter Forbath, in
The River Congo
, set the death toll at 5 million.
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The consensus nowadays follows the estimate offered by Adam Hochschild in
Leopold’s Ghost
, that the Congo’s original population of 20 million was cut in half by the atrocities.
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All anyone can say for certain is that the population of the Congo plummeted horribly in the two decades of the Free State. Most of the deaths were caused by diseases that spread as populations were shuffled around, starved, and overworked. Smallpox, originally endemic to the coasts, spread into the interior. Sleeping sickness, endemic in the interior, spread outward. Direct oppression also took its toll. In just one year in just one of the rubber districts, it was recorded that soldiers expended 40,000 rounds of ammunition, for which, presumably, they would have had to produce an equal number of severed hands to prove they weren’t wasting bullets.

CUBAN REVOLUTION

Death toll:
360,000
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Rank:
93

Type:
colonial rebellion

Broad dividing line:
Spain vs. Cuban rebels

Time frame:
1895–98

Location:
Cuba

Major state participant:
Spain

Quantum state participant:
Cuba

Winner:
United States

Who usually gets the most blame:
Spain

Economic factor:
sugar

The Second War of Independence

The first attempt by the Cuban people to throw off Spanish rule had been beaten down in the Ten Years War, 1868–78, at a loss of 200,000 lives. The next generation decided to have another go at it. The industrialization of sugar processing was concentrating the milling into fewer hands, causing widespread unemployment and bankruptcy, which in turn radicalized the poor.

In exile in New York, the poet and journalist José Martí declared Cuban independence in 1895 and returned home to lead the fight, but he was ambushed and killed within a few months. His followers pressed onward and scored tremendous success in 1896. Sympathetic peasants spied on the Spanish forces, whom the rebels harassed with raids and ambushes. The rebels tried to make Cuba worthless to Spain by suppressing sugar production. They destroyed isolated plantations and avoided open battle with well-armed regulars. To help contain the rebellion, the Spaniards split the island with the Trocha (the “Trench”), a chain of ditches, moats, barbed wire, and fortified blockhouses across Cuba that prevented free movement between the east and west halves of the island.

In January 1897, the Spanish government turned the rebellion over to General Valeriano Weyler, who was about to invent a brand new horror to let loose on the world—concentration camps. Within a month of arriving in Cuba, Weyler rounded up some 300,000 peasants in the war zone and stashed them in fortified camps, after which any Cubans caught at large would be considered rebels and killed. Weyler hoped to dry up the support for the rebels. Meanwhile, disease, hunger, and neglect swept through the camps, killing thousands.

In August 1897, an anarchist assassinated Canovas del Castillo, the conservative prime minister of Spain, and General Weyler lost his main supporter. He submitted his resignation to the new liberal government of Prime Minister Praxedes Mateo Sagasta.

Spanish-American War

One of the few things both sides agreed on was the need to keep the United States out of the war. Both Spain and the rebels knew that once provoked, the Americans would simply swoop down and take Cuba for their very own. American investors dominated the Cuban economy, and the United States had discussed annexing Cuba ever since American expansion had reached the Gulf of Mexico some eighty years earlier. It was vitally important not to give them an excuse to go through with it. The only major segment of the Cuban population that looked toward the United States for salvation were Cuban landowners. They just wanted the war to end and stability to return.

The American people generally sympathized with the rebels. American newspapers stoked hatred of the Spaniards by eagerly splashing every new atrocity across their front pages. The United States hovered on the edge of intervention and sent the USS
Maine
to Havana harbor to keep an eye on American interests during riots in the city. Then suddenly, on the night of February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped apart the American battleship, obliterating the front end and killing two-thirds of the crew. The explosion probably started as an accidental fire in a coal bunker, but at the time there was no doubt that those accursed Spaniards had attacked the
Maine
. War fever boiled over, and America issued an ultimatum to Spain to leave Cuba. The Spaniards refused.

The war was quick and to the point. In both the Philippines and Cuba, American warships easily destroyed the outdated and outgunned Spanish fleets from a safe distance with hardly a scratch to themselves. A hastily assembled American expeditionary force took Cuba in ten weeks, and the whole war cost the United States a mere 385 combat deaths.

The Americans had made such a big deal about supporting Cuban independence that they couldn’t annex their new conquest outright. They had to give Cuba the appearance of sovereignty, but they wrote clauses into the treaties to guarantee American control of the Cuban government for many years to come.
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