King Leopold’s Ghost

In the city of Brussels, there is still a Royal Museum for Central Africa, in which one can find a huge collection of Africana, almost entirely stolen from the Congolese during the reign of Leopold II. Nowhere in the entire museum is it stated that millions of Congolese people were murdered and tortured during Belgium’s occupation of the Congo. The entire city of Brussels is full of relics of Belgium’s time in the Congo: even the beautiful buildings and archways were paid for with funds stolen from Africa.

In short, “the Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting.” Leopold, and many of his successors in Belgian politics, worked hard to erase the records of human rights abuses in Africa. In 1908, the Belgian government spent eight full days burning records of the Belgian occupation of the Congo.

In the 1970s, a man named Jules Marchal was the Belgian ambassador to Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. He recalls a day when, walking down the street in Liberia, he noticed a newspaper story reporting that, under Belgian rule, 10 million people had died in the Congo in the early 20th century. Marchal was genuinely shocked—he immediately telephoned his superiors in order to fix the slanderous accusation, and asked for some historical information about the Congo. Marchal never received the information, so he began to research the history himself. He tried to get into the Foreign Ministry of Brussels to look over old records of the Congo administration, but he was refused entry. After he retired, Marchal devoted himself to researching Belgium’s behavior in the Congo full-time. In the end, he composed a four-volume history of the Belgian occupation of the Congo. The book was praised throughout Europe, but never reviewed or discussed in Belgium.

In part, Marchal decided to devote himself to studying the Belgian occupation of the Congo because, as a younger man, he’d worked for the Belgian diplomatic service in the Congo and had known nothing of Belgium’s horrific past. In 1948, he was sent to award medals to village chiefs who’d served in World War II. Once, he awarded a medal to a chief who’d collected large quantities of rubber to donate to the war effort; when the chief accepted his medal, he told Marchal, “The rubber this time, that was nothing. But the first time, that was terrible.” It took Marchal thirty years to understand what the chief was talking about.

Both in Belgium and in the Congo, Belgians wrote the school textbooks—for decades, Belgian and Congolese children grew up believing that Leopold II was a great leader. In many Congolese villages, however, the truth about Leopold II survived. Over time, a legend arose that Leopold had not died, but had been transformed into a Catholic bishop and had come to live in the Congo. But, of course, even without this legend, Leopold had left his mark on Congolese history.

For the rest of the 20th century, the Congo fared badly. The Belgian administrators hadn’t built many schools for the Congolese, nor had they tried to train Africans for elite administrative jobs. In the 1950s—the decade when the Congolese independence movement gained significant strength—there were fewer than thirty African university graduates in the entire Congolese territory, and there were no trained Congolese doctors or engineers. The new democratically-elected leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, promised to restore the people’s control over their own country’s resources—a claim that frightened many Western powers, who had major stakes in Congolese rubber, copper, gold, and zinc. Two months after Lumumba’s election, the CIA authorized his assassination, arguing that Lumumba “couldn’t be bought” and needed to be eliminated to protect American business interests. Lumumba was imprisoned, beaten, and shot.

Lumumba’s U.S.-backed replacement, Joseph Mobutu, remained the dictator of the country for thirty years. He accepted more than one billion dollars of military aid from America, in return for which he allowed American business to continue mining the area for resources. Mobutu murdered and tortured his political opponents; American presidents praised him as an honorable, reasonable leader. In many ways, Mobutu resembled King Leopold II: he was a tyrant, obsessed with money and power, and capable of incredible cruelty.

To return to a previous question—what, in the end, was the legacy of the Congo reform movement? First, and most obviously, Morel, Williams, and Sheppard succeeded in preserving a huge amount of information that the Belgian authorities would otherwise have censored and erased from history. But second, and more importantly, the Congo reform movement succeeded in keeping alive “a human capacity for outrage at the pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth.” Morel changed the structure of humanitarian movements by focusing not only on the specific acts of cruelty in the Congo but also the fundamental violation of rights implicit in the Belgians’ theft of Congolese land.

The Congo reform movement has provided inspiration to human rights activists around the world, encouraging them to fight against all odds for peace and freedom. Overall, we need to remember that, “at the time of the Congo controversy … the idea of full human rights, political, social, and economic, was a profound threat to the established order of most countries on earth. It still is today.”