Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960

3. Incidental Conquest

58 3 Incidental Conquest Recently the history of the Congo Independent State returned to the attention of a wider public when a sensational, century-old controversy flared up again. The original controversy had started in the 1890s when indignant missionaries began to report and denounce the atrocities they had witnessed. The scope and the tenor of such accusations grew until the British government ordered its consul Roger Casement to investigate in 1903. His report then led E. D. Morel to launch the Congo Reform Association in Great Britain and to orchestrate one of the first successful mass media campaigns there and elsewhere . The international success of the campaign led to the demise of the Independent Congo State when King Leopold was forced to hand over the colony to Belgium in 1908. This issue flared up again in the early 1980s and has reached a large international audience since 1998 as a result of Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, a Pulitzer Prize–winning book. He argues that the atrocities were all too true, that they included murder on a very large scale, that they caused demographic losses that he estimates at around ten million people or half of the total population over some thirty years, and finally that Leopold II and his government were well aware of the situation and hence were fully responsible for the huge loss of lives. The main rebuttal of this position involves two points: first, atrocities are far from the whole story of colonial Congo, so focusing exclusively on them wholly distorts what is in reality quite a complex history, and second, the mortality figures quoted are unreliable and highly inflated, to say the least. No credible population counts had been conducted during the period, and hence all the figures we have are more or less wellinformed guesses. In any case, such population losses as occurred did not result for the most part directly from the atrocities themselves. As it happens, the regional experience of the Kuba kingdom allows us to evaluate these claims and counterclaims in a concrete manner, which we do in this and the following two chapters. According to some of the best-known accounts of the Congo Reform Association as well as those contained in Hochschild’s book, the Kuba are alleged to have suffered two rounds of atrocities, one in 1899 and the other between 1905 and 1908. Both were linked to the gathering of rubber, and both are alleged to have triggered huge demographic losses. By using the Kuba experience , the reader can gain more familiarity with the kind of evidence that backs the allegations made in the early 1900s and a better sense of the historical context in which that evidence should be evaluated. A New Dispensation for Congo In the same year that business suddenly began to pick up at Luebo, King Leopold decreed a completely new dispensation on the colony. For several years it had become painfully clear to him and his closest advisers that Congo was headed for bankruptcy in the near future because significant revenues to cover the costs of the colony could not be raised. That resulted from one of the conditions that the main powers in 1885 had attached to their recognition of the state—trade in Congo was to be totally free, and hence no customs duties would ever be levied there. But by 1890 the king found a brilliant solution to this predicament, a solution known as the régime domanial, and he imposed it immediately. The new dispensation started with the definition of the state’s selfproclaimed ownership over all “vacant” land, defined as land that was not physically occupied by houses and standing crops. By definition this domain encompassed almost the whole country. Moreover, ownership of vacant land included everything it contained, such as elephants or rubber vines. Hence the solution for Congo’s financial problem was for the state to become a business enterprise. From then on the main task of the agents of the state would be to gather ivory, rubber, and whatever other products were valuable in return for a commission. The state then sold these products on the European market. Incidental Conquest 59 However, the king realized that the country was too vast, the number of his agents too small, and the impression his business empire would create in the chanceries of Europe too unsavory to keep the whole exploitation for...