The Congo Free State was a corporate state privately controlled by Leopold II, King of the Belgians through a dummy non-governmental organization, the Association Internationale Africaine. Leopold was the sole shareholder and chairman. The state included the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo and existed from 1885 to 1908. Immensely profitable, the Congo Free State eventually earned infamy due to the brutal mistreatment of native peoples and plunder of natural resources.

Under Leopold II's administration, the Congo Free State became the site of one of the most infamous international scandals of the turn of the twentieth century. The report of the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who had been responsible for killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903 (including one Belgian national for causing the shooting of at least 122 Congolese natives). Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. In the absence of a census (the first was made in 1924), it is even more difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. Roger Casement's famous 1904 report set it at 3 million. According to Roger Casement's report, this depopulation was caused mainly by four causes: "indiscriminate" "war", starvation, reduction of births and tropical diseases.

The European and U.S. press agencies exposed the conditions in the Congo Free State to the public in 1900. By 1908, public pressure and diplomatic maneuvers led to the end of Leopold II's rule and to the annexation of the Congo as a colony of Belgium, known as the Belgian Congo.

After 1879, the work was under the auspices of the Comité d'Études du Haut Congo, which developed into the International Association of the Congo. This organization sought to combine the numerous small territories acquired into one sovereign state and asked for recognition from the European Powers. On April 22, 1884, the United States government, having decided that the cessions by the native chiefs were lawful, recognized the International Association of the Congo as a sovereign independent state, under the title of the Congo Free State, and this example was followed by Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and Sweden. The international conference on African affairs, which met at Berlin, 1884–85, determined the status of the Congo Free State.[1]

King Leopold initially gained ownership of the Congo largely through the cooperation on the part of the major powers of Europe. Leopold's profits from the region and a general increase in European interest in colonizing Africa led to greater competition in the continent. Leopold's activities in the Congo had already pushed the French into claiming an area (the modern Republic of the Congo) on the northern shore of Stanley Pool. While no one (bar Leopold) particularly wanted such economically unpromising colonies, the other European powers were not prepared to stand idly by and see land snapped up by their rivals, particularly the French.

In a succession of negotiations, Leopold, professing humanitarian objectives in his capacity as chairman of the Association Internationale Africaine, played one European rival against the other.

The Berlin Conference

In November 1884, Otto von Bismarck convened a 14-nation conference (the Berlin Conference) to find a peaceful resolution to the Congo crisis. After three months of negotiation on February 5, 1885, Leopold emerged triumphant. France was given 666,000 km² (257,000 square miles) on the north bank (modern Congo-Brazzaville and the Central African Republic), Portugal 909,000 km² (351,000 square miles) to the south (modern Angola), and Leopold's wholly owned, single-shareholder "philanthropic" organisation received the balance: 2,344,000 km² (905,000 square miles), to be constituted as the Congo Free State. It still remained though for these territories to be occupied under the conference's Principle of Effectivity.

In a display of diplomatic virtuosity, Leopold had the conference agree not to a transfer of the Congo to one of his many philanthropic shell organisations, nor even to his care in his capacity as King of the Belgians, but simply to himself. He became sole ruler of a population that Stanley had estimated at 30 million people, without constitution, without international supervision, without ever having been to the Congo, and without more than a tiny handful of his new subjects having heard of him.

Turning a profit

Leopold was one of the richest men in Europe, but not even he could afford the expense. He needed to extract riches from the Congo, not expend them. He set in train a brutal colonial regime to maximise profitability. The first change was the introduction of the concept of terres vacantes — "vacant" land, which was anything that no European was living on. This was deemed to belong to the state, and servants of the state (i.e., any white men in Leopold's employ) were encouraged to exploit it.

Next, the Free State was divided into two economic zones: the Free Trade Zone was open to entrepreneurs of any European nation, who were allowed to buy 10- and 15-year monopoly leases on anything of value: ivory from a particular district, or the rubber concession, for example. The other zone — almost two-thirds of the Congo — became the Domaine Privé: the exclusive private property of the State, which was in turn the exclusive private property of King Leopold.

On this basis, the Congo became financially self-sufficient. This did not satisfy Leopold, however. In 1893 he excised the most readily accessible 259,000 km² (100,000 square miles) portion of the Free Trade Zone and declared it to be the Domaine de la Couronne. Here the same rules applied as in the Domaine Privé except that all revenue went directly to Leopold. He did not publicly disclose his profits made from the Congo Free State, but it was estimated at many tens of millions (and this in a time when even one million was a massive fortune), and vastly more than Leopold could spend.

Meanwhile the quest for income was unrelenting. District officials' salaries were reduced to a bare minimum, and made up with a commission payment based on the profit that their area returned to Leopold. After widespread criticism, this "primes system" was substituted for the allocation de retraite in which a large part of the payment was granted, at the end of the service, only to those territorial agents and magistrates whose conduct was judged "satisfactory" by their superiors. This meant in practice that nothing changed.

The rubber came from wild vines in the jungle, unlike the rubber from Brazil, which was tapped from trees. To extract the rubber, instead of tapping the vines, the natives would slash them and lather their bodies with the rubber latex. When the latex hardened, it would be scraped off the skin in a painful manner, as it took off the natives' hair with it. This killing of the vines made it even harder to locate sources of rubber as time went on, but the government was relentless in raising the quotas.

The Force Publique (FP) was called in to enforce the rubber quotas. The officers were white agents of the State. Of the black soldiers, many were cannibals from the fiercest tribes from upper Congo while others had been kidnapped during the raids on villages in their childhood and brought to Roman Catholic missions, where they received a military training in conditions close to slavery. Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte — a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide — the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages (mostly women), flogged, and raped the natives. They also burned recalcitrant villages, and above all, took human hands as trophies on the orders of white officers to show that bullets hadn't been wasted. (As officers were concerned that their subordinates might waste their ammunition on hunting animals for sport, they required soldiers to submit one hand for every bullet spent.)[6]

[edit] Severing hands
Native labourers who failed to meet rubber collection quotas were often punished by having their hands cut off.
Native labourers who failed to meet rubber collection quotas were often punished by having their hands cut off.

One junior white officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The white officer in command "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades ... and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross."[7] After seeing a native killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote: "The soldier said 'Don't take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service.'"[8] In Forbath's words:

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

In theory, each right hand proved a killing. In practice, soldiers sometimes "cheated" by simply cutting off the hand and leaving the victim to live or die. More than a few survivors later said that they had lived through a massacre by acting dead, not moving even when their hands were severed, and waiting till the soldiers left before seeking help. In some instances a soldier could shorten his service term by bringing more hands than the other soldiers, which led to widespread mutilations and dismemberment.

Demographic catastrophe

Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. The reduction of the population of the Congo was noted by all who have compared the country at the beginning of the colonial rule and the beginning of the 20th century. Estimates of observers of the time, as well as modern scholars (most authoritatively Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin), show that the population halved during this period.[9]

Eventually the most telling blows came from a most unexpected source. E. D. Morel, a clerk in a major Liverpool shipping office and a part-time journalist, began to wonder why the ships that brought vast loads of rubber from the Congo returned full of guns and ammunition for the Force Publique. He left his job and became a full-time investigative journalist and then a publisher with help from merchants who wanted to break into Leopold's monopoly or, in the case of chocolate millionaire William Cadbury, philanthropists. Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness was released in 1902. Based on his brief experience as a steamer captain on the Congo ten years before, Conrad's novel encapsulated the public's growing concerns about what was happening in the Congo.