Jules Marchal - Lord Leverhulmes Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo

The territory that Jules Marchal writes about in this book has had one of the most violent and unhappy histories of any on the African continent. Parts of that history have become better known in recent years, but not the chapter of it that he tells here, involving the raw materials that fed the factories of the great Lever Brothers soap empire. As with so much of the history of central Africa, it is a story of atrocities hidden from view, of white men in Africa portraying themselves to the world as philanthropists, of human suffering that lay behind a product millions of Europeans and Americans used daily, and, above all, a story of forced labour.

To set Marchals account in context, it is first worth carefully reviewing the long chain of events, over several centuries, that preceded the period about which he writes.

The country that is today the Democratic Republic of Congo largely consists of the great swathe of central Africa drained by the Congo River. The river is the worlds second biggest; only the Amazon carries more water. It descends over more than 200 miles of enormous intermittent rapids before pouring into the Atlantic Ocean, and, until late in the nineteenth century, these rapids blocked the efforts of European explorers to get their boats on to the upper reaches of the river and the tributaries they presumed must flow into it.

The rapids did not, however, prevent exploitation of the regions people by outsiders. Portuguese mariners first landed near the great rivers mouth in 1482; missionaries, soldiers and adventurers soon followed, and by several decades later thousands of Africans were being shipped every year as slaves from this area to the New World. The land that surrounded the rivers mouth and extended some distance inland and to the south, the kingdom of Kongo, was controlled by a ruler known as the ManiKongo. In 1506, a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba took the throne. He learned Portuguese and took on the name of Affonso. During the nearly 40 years of his rule, he saw his kingdom decimated by the slave trade. An eloquent set of letters from Affonso to successive kings of Portugal are the first known documents written by a black African in a European language. Each day, Affonso wrote in desperation to King Joo III of Portugal in 1526, the traders are kidnapping our peoplechildren of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family Our land is entirely depopulated.

Affonsos pleas were in vain. For several centuries the Atlantic slave trade continued to victimise both the people of his kingdom and Africans living for hundreds of miles into the interior. All told, several million Africans were taken from the region around the rivers mouth and its hinterland, chiefly to work on the plantations of Brazil.

Similarly, over an even longer period of time, Arab and Afro-Arab slave traders had been ravaging the east coast of Africa, buying slaves as far inland as the eastern side of the Congo River basin, and shipping them to the Arab and Islamic world. Slave ship captains and traders could buy slaves so easily on both coasts because most people in Africa south of the Sahara Desert lived in slave societies. The ethnic groups of the Congo River basin were no exception; Affonso himself, for example, owned slaves. In some ways indigenous African slavery was less brutal than slavery in the Americas: slaves were more status objects than a source of labour; they could often intermarry with free people and could frequently earn their freedom after several generations. But in other ways, African slavery was harsh: slaves were sometimes killed in human sacrifice ritualsmany might be slain when an important chief died, for example, to give his soul company on its journey to the next world. When a treaty was made between two rival tribes or groups, a slave might have his bones broken and be left to die painfully in a remote spot, as a symbol of what might happen to anyone who broke the treaty. People could become slaves in Africa as a punishment for a crime, or as payment for a family debt, or, most commonly, by being captured as prisoners of war. The widespread heritage of indigenous slavery would eventually mean that when the Congo became notorious as the site of forced labour systems run by King Leopold II of Belgium and his successors, and by private companies like the one described in this volume, there were local chiefs willing to collaborate in supplying these labourers.

Soon after the Atlantic slave trade finally came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, the major part of Europes conquest and colonisation of Africa began. The Scramble for Africa, as it is often called, was one of the greatest land grabs in historyand one of the swiftest. In 1870, roughly four fifths of sub-Saharan Africa was governed by local chiefs, kings or other indigenous rulers. A mere 40 years later, in 1910, nearly all of this vast expanse of territory had become colonies or protectorates controlled by European countries or, as in South Africa, by white settlers. The bloodiest single phase of Africas colonisation was centred on the territory known, from the river that flowed through it, as the Congo.

Besides the rivers huge rapids, heat and tropical diseases had long kept the Congos interior a mystery to Europeans. The big step forward for themalthough arguably a step backward for Africanscame between 1874 and 1877, when the British explorer-journalist Henry Morton Stanley (18411904) made an epic journey across Africa from east to west. Stanleys travels made him a great celebrity. He was also a brutal taskmaster, quick to flog his porters or to lay waste any African villages that threatened to impede his progress, and, at all times, to shoot first and ask questions later. These traits were visible in the best-selling books he wrote about his journeys, but biographers and historians did not begin to focus on them until some three quarters of a century after his death, in a world that had left outright colonialism behind.