In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo. Michela Wrong

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Far from being a free trade zone, the colony’s very raison d’être was to make money for the King. Anxious to attract the foreign capital needed to build railways and bridges, Leopold divided part of the country into concessions held by companies in which he held a 50 per cent stake, with exclusive rights over tracts of forest, ivory, palm oil and mineral wealth. The rest of the country was defined as Crown property, where state agents enjoyed a business monopoly. Independent merchants who ventured into the area in search of ivory found their way physically blocked by Leopold’s officials. When the Arab traders operating in the north and eastern reaches of Congo were eventually driven out after a vicious war against the Force Publique, it was not – whatever the Tervuren museum may claim – because of any outrage over their slaving activities, it was because they threatened Leopold’s commercial interests.

      By then, as the boom in the motor industry escalated Western demand for rubber, Leopold’s agents were knowingly mimicking the techniques of the Arab traders that Stanley had decried. Villagers, who had to tap the wild vines growing in the forest for gum, were set cripplingly high production quotas. If they failed to meet the targets, the Force Publique would descend on a village, burn its huts, kill at random and take womenfolk, children or chiefs prisoner until the villagers came to heel. Hostages were used as porters or sold as slaves to rival tribes in exchange for rubber or ivory, and thousands of orphaned children were marched off to Catholic missions to be trained as soldiers for the Force Publique.

      Driving the state agents on was a cynical commission system that could double their miserly salaries depending on output and a sliding scale of payment which ensured that those who paid the villagers least for their deliveries of ivory or rubber were rewarded most highly. The lack of compassion seems a little more understandable when one considers the risks inherent in working in the Congo Free State. A staggering one in three state officials desperate enough to try their luck in Africa did not survive their postings, felled by malaria, typhoid or sleeping sickness. With the likelihood of dying in service so high, these young men were none too fastidious about the methods used to ensure output targets were met.

      Looking at the mournful black and white photographs taken by appalled missionaries, it is sobering to register that around a century before the amputations carried out by Sierra Leone’s rebel forces sent shudders through the West – reinforcing stereotypes of African barbarism – a white-led, European-commanded force had already perfected the art of human mutilation. Soldiers in the Congo were told to account for every cartridge fired, so they hacked off and smoked the hands, feet and private parts of their victims. Body parts were presented to commanders in baskets as proof the soldiers had done their work well. Hence the photographs that, disseminated by the pioneering British journalist Edmund Morel, a precursor of campaigning human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, eventually shocked the outside world into action.

      The chicotte, the gallows, mass executions were all liberally applied in a campaign that often seemed to have extermination of races deemed inferior as an incidental aim. The brutality inevitably triggered uprisings. The ferocity of those revolts was glossed over by colonial officers and subsequently downplayed by academics. But Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem records the words of a Captain Vangele, who was attacked four times by canoes manned by tribesmen from Mobutu’s own equatorial region, as proof the Congolese were no walkover: ‘It was the fiercest battle I have ever experienced in Africa … During that fight that lasted nearly three hours, the Yakoma did not cry out once, there was something terrifying about their silence, their cold determination.’

      The Force Publique put down the resistance with ruthless effectiveness. Then, as today, no reliable census data existed in the Congo. But as the Force Publique stole children, destroyed families and spread hitherto unfamiliar diseases in its wake, missionaries began to notice an alarming incidence of depopulation taking place. Marchal hesitates to quantify the phenomenon, but Belgian officials were eventually to estimate that the country’s population had been halved since the founding of the Congo Free State, implying that 10 million people either died or fled the region. Professor Ndaywel puts the figure even higher, at 13 million.

      Leopold had done his best to keep Congo’s contacts with the outside world to a minimum, trying to ensure a good press by discouraging visitors and systematically bribing politicians and journalists in Europe. But by the first years of the twentieth century, works such as Heart of Darkness were echoing what Roger Casement, a British diplomat, was to officially establish in a 1903 report commissioned by the European powers. Detailing cases of natives being forced to drink white men’s urine, having their bound hands beaten till they dropped off, being eaten by maggots while still alive and fed to cannibal tribes on death, Casement destroyed any remaining illusions. What had been laughably dubbed the Congo Free State was an exploitative system premised on forced labour, terror and repression.

      Under pressure from foreign allies and his own parliament, the ailing Leopold agreed in 1908, after long negotiations, to hand over Congo to the Belgian state, instead of bequeathing it to his country on his death as he had originally planned. He died a little more than a year later, having never once set foot in the colony his policies had so devastated.

      But he had achieved his aim. Congo’s massive contribution to Belgium’s development is still on show in the capital, if only you know where to direct your gaze. Leopold was a king who wanted to leave his mark on the city of Brussels, and brand it he did, thanks to this independent monetary source he could tap at will.

      For visitors interested in the history of Brussels, several companies today offer themed coach trips around the city. A favourite is the Art Nouveau tour, which traces the rise and fall of the design movement that blossomed on the cobbled streets of the hilly city as nowhere else, and the high moment of the tour is undoubtedly the apricot-coloured Hotel Van Eetvelde on Avenue Palmerston, around the corner from the Jamaican embassy and a stone’s throw from the plate-glass horrors of Euroland.

      Here architect Victor Horta, guiding light of the Art Nouveau movement, was given free reign by Edmond Van Eetvelde, a wealthy diplomat who wanted a fitting venue in which he and his wife could receive business guests. ‘I presented him with the most daring plan I had ever, until that point, drawn up,’ recalled Horta. Taking advantage of the blank cheque issued him, he produced a building so lavishly decorated, so consistent in its artistic vision, the overall effect is almost nauseating.

      From the octagonal drawing hall to the mosaic floors, from the delicate tendrils of the wrought-iron banisters to the motif on the coloured glass roof, the Hotel Van Eetvelde is pure Horta. It is also pure Congo. The hardwoods that lined the ceilings, the marble on the floors, the onyx for the walls and the copper edging each step of the curving staircase all came from the colony. What did not come directly from the colony was paid for with its proceeds, for Van Eetvelde was more than just a well-connected diplomat – he was secretary-general to the Congo. One of Leopold’s most trusted collaborators, he was rewarded in 1897 for his loyal services with a baronetcy, before eventually being sidelined by a king whose judgement he had dared to question.

      The Hotel Van Eetvelde is only one of the many architectural extravagances Congo’s exploited labourers made possible. The Cinquantenaire arch, the grandiose baroque gateway to nowhere, built to celebrate Belgium’s golden jubilee; the endless improvements to the Royal Palace at Laeken, including the vast royal greenhouses, Chinese pavilion and Japanese tower; the museum at Tervuren; Ostend’s golf course and sea-side arcade and a host of other works were all provided by the Congo. But there was more, much more, and not all of it quite so obvious to public eyes: presents for Leopold’s demanding young mistress; a special landing stage for the yacht he, like Mobutu later, would use as a place to hide away from an increasingly hostile public, spending sometimes months aboard; Parisian châteaux; estates in the south of France and a fabulous villa in Cap Ferrat, not far from where Mobutu would buy a mansion.

      The two men shared more than just a knack for large-scale extortion and lavish spending tastes. Indeed, in money matters, the present СКАЧАТЬ