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15. Like Fighting an Avalanche
- University of Michigan Press
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15 Like Fighting an Avalanche “B lood, grime, sweat, earth,” Hammarskjöld wrote in his journal years ago, in 1954, “where are these in your world of will? Everywhere—the ground from which the flame ascends straight upwards.”1 His faith in ascending transformation met its harshest test in the Congo Crisis of 1960–61. A long arc links the late nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa by European nations greedy for colonies to Hammarskjöld’s moment when colonial power receded from the continent. The scramble had been solemnized in 1884–85 by the Berlin Conference, which laid ground rules for cooperation and agreed on the territorial claims of five nations and one individual, King Léopold II of Belgium.2 Léopold had resourcefully hired the famed explorer of the Congo Basin, Henry Morton Stanley, to make treaties far and wide in the Congo with many hundreds of local chiefs—treaties the chiefs did not begin to understand—and to create what came to be known as the Congo Free State. It was a possession not of the Belgian nation but of Léopold himself through a seemingly benign organization he controlled, the International Association of the Congo. Among its stated goals were to eliminate the slave trade, bring the Christian faith and other benefits to the region, and ensure free trade. Its actual goal was to enrich Léopold personally, initially through the ivory trade and soon the trade in rubber, which overnight became a major commodity in the industrial world for the manufacture of tires and other products. But the term “trade” is a misnomer: through his armed and typically brutal agents, Léopold established the nearest thing imaginable to a slave labor colony, which disrupted and destroyed the traditional order of life in the Congo and subjected village Congolese to terror and mutilation, murder, exhaustion, and famine. The population declined under Léopold’s regime from an estimated twenty-five million to fifteen million. What he had set in motion from afar—he never visited the Congo—went largely unnoticed until 1890, when there occurred the first of an accelerating series of informed protests. The author of this groundbreaking document was an African American, George Washington Williams—a Civil War veteran, ordained minister, and writer who, though he had met and been charmed 388 Hammarskjöld | A Life by Léopold, felt conscience bound to send him a harsh indictment of the regime in the Congo Free State after traveling there for some months. His open letter, soon published as a pamphlet, found its way into major newspapers in Europe and the United States. Slightly more than a decade later, he was followed by a remarkable crusading journalist and author, the Anglo-French E. D. Morel, and by a man of great gifts and ultimately tragic fate, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, then serving as British consul to the Congo Free State. Casement was the author of an investigative report published by the British government in 1904.3 His narrative had the cool formality of a proper government report, but its content—as he well knew—recorded the inexcusable treatment of Congolese villagers, men, women, and children, by the militarized agents of Léopold. Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Arthur Conan Doyle also joined the assault on what Morel had called “a secret society of murderers” headed by a king.4 The American’s contribution was an odd piece, not his best, entitled King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule, published as a pamphlet in 1905.5 By 1907, it had appeared in a new edition with Morel’s introduction. One of the vivid moments in Mark Twain’s indictment has Léopold railing against the camera, the “kodak”: “The kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has confronted us. . . . I was looked up to as the benefactor of a down-trodden and friendless people. Then all of a sudden came the crash! That is to say, the incorruptible Kodak. . . . The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe.” It was photographs of maimed children, chained village women, and much more that drove home to European and American public opinion the truth of written accounts. Like many others of his generation, Hammarskjöld would first have thought about the Congo thanks to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, serialized in 1899, published as a book in 1902, recognized as a...