White King, Red Rubber, Black Death (2003) - full transcript
Documentary about how King Leopold II of Belgium acquired Congo as a colony and exploited it by reign of terror.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] When a series
of missionary photographs
arrived in England in
the late 19th century,
they caused outrage.
The mutilations had been
strategically photographed
against white for maximum impact.
The children came from the Congo,
but the man accused of
their suffering was white,
European, and royal.
(tense music)
For almost 100 years,
evidence has lain dormant
of one of the greatest mass murders.
Millions of Africans
died in one man's quest
for wealth and glory.
Until Adolf Hitler arrived on the scene,
the European standard for
cruelty was set by a king.
Leopold II, King of the Belgians,
was the personal owner
of 1,000,000 square miles
of Central Africa, and king sovereign
of 20 million Africans.
(tense music)
In the 1880s and '90s,
the world outside Africa
wanted rubber for its new
bicycle and car industries,
and Leopold's Congo Free State
had the world's largest
supply of wild rubber.
(tense music)
The king had struck gold, black gold.
He was determined to get
as much rubber to Europe
as he could, and as fast as he could.
- The rubber in this district
has cost hundreds of lives,
and the scenes I have witnessed
while unable to help
the oppressed have been
almost enough to make me
wish that I were dead.
- [Narrator] Over a period of 20 years,
Leopold turned the Congo
into a vast labor camp
80 times the size of Belgium,
in the process, making himself
into one of the richest men
in the world.
As the number of deaths
grew, so did his profits.
- This rubber traffic is steeped in blood.
And were the natives to rise
and sweep every white person
on the Upper Congo into eternity,
there would still be left a
fearful balance to their credit.
- [Narrator] But the longer
the king stayed in the Congo,
the greater the evidence against him.
Missionaries, travelers, and the victims
all added to the clamor
for the king to be stopped.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Astonishingly, for the time,
there were calls for Leopold to be hanged
at the new International
Court of Justice in the Hague.
- [Missionary] If there were such thing
as criminal prosecutions
in international affairs,
then assuredly, a true bill would be found
against the sovereign, who obtained
not a paltry sum of money,
but a whole empire by false pretenses.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Instead of being
hanged, Leopold was reinvented
as a great humanitarian
king, a great civilizer.
(pensive music)
The Congolese historian, Alekhya Umbicolo,
believes that the truth
about Leopold's crimes
was deliberately hidden to protect Belgium
and Belgian interests in the Congo.
This film details the
charges against King Leopold,
and reveals a cover-up of
monumental proportions.
(tense music)
The signs of the wealth
that Leopold amassed
are everywhere in Brussels,
and on an enormous scale.
The king built the Cinquantenaire
to celebrate the country's
50th anniversary.
It's become part of the national identity.
- The Cinquantenaire is
a very expressive symbol
of Belgium and of the proud Belgium.
In fact, King Leopold paid
for it with his own money,
but he didn't say so openly
because this would prove
that, first of all,
he had a lot of money.
People would ask questions
where it came from,
and then he would have to admit
that it came from the Congo.
So, the Cinquantenaire
symbolizes this lie about Belgium
and about the royal
implication in politics,
about the colonial exploitation.
(tense music)
(flag flapping)
(screeching eerie music)
- [Narrator] The Royal
Museum for Central Africa
was also built by Leopold,
and paid for with Congo money.
It's a vision of Africa
through Leopold's eyes,
and with a huge dose of homage;
homage to Leopold, who
gave the Belgians a colony,
and a homage to the pioneers
who died carrying out the king's wishes.
White conquest is
mythologized as benevolence,
as bringing civilization to the Congo.
(eerie music)
- There is no doubt that
a lot of things happened
in Congo Free State under King Leopold II
that are clearly unacceptable,
that are even scandalous.
But one has to look at
the sign of the times,
and the, sort of, none
of the colonial powers,
in those days, were really softies,
and had a fairly human approach.
I mean, you only look at
what the Brits and the French
and the Dutch, who introduced slave trade,
or the Germans were doing,
so it's not a period of
which we can be very proud.
But one has to look at it
in a particular perspective
of time and of history.
(mysterious tense music)
- [Narrator] Leopold's
Congo was a prison state.
Africans had no rights, no
justice, and no freedom.
They were there to serve
a voracious European king.
Thousands of miles away,
Leopold was content
that the end always justified the means,
and the end was to make money.
Leopold dominated the Congo
for a quarter of a century.
But in the last years of his reign,
the Congo was handed over
to the Belgian state,
which gratefully kept control
in his name until 1960.
(singing in foreign language)
- [Narrator] The king no
longer has pride of place.
The Congo is independent.
Leopoldville is now Kinshasa,
and Leopold is in a junkyard.
(chattering in foreign language)
- [Narrator] But it takes
more than destroying symbols
to wipe out generations
of foreign occupation.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Leopold once wrote,
"A people which is
content with its homeland,
"and which dreads even
the shadow of a conflict,
"lacks the characteristics
of a superior race."
- A Belgian officer had been dispatched
with the force of some 50 or
60 men to capture a chief.
In rummaging in the huts for plunder,
they came upon two women,
a mother and daughter,
who'd not had the time to get away.
They were brought up before the officer,
who demanded of them where
the chief was in hiding.
They either did not
know or would not tell.
He ordered them to be secured
and laid out on the ground,
and a stalwart soldier then
proceeded to administer
50 strokes of the chicotte to each.
The flogging continued until
each had received 200 lashes.
Finally, this Belgian
officer ordered his men
to cut off the breasts of the women,
and left them to die where they lay.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] In Brussels,
the statues of Leopold
have not been pulled down.
The old king is still
part of a Belgian dynasty.
Leopold's Saxe-Coburg
pedigree was impeccable.
His father, Leopold I, was
Queen Victoria's uncle.
His mother, Louise Marie d'Orleans,
the eldest daughter of the French king.
His father hadn't much
time for the young prince,
describing him as the little tyrant,
and his mother remarked, unkindly,
how he was disfigured
by his enormous nose,
which gives him a bird-like air.
- I think his mother was
rather insignificant there,
and maybe also this explains
a lot about his character,
the lack of love, the lack of affection,
which he compensated by
saying that affection
didn't bother him or,
as he told at the end of his life,
when he was very unpopular,
that he was not interested in popularity.
Of course, this was a way of saying
I'm very sad about the
fact that I'm not popular.
- [Narrator] Leopold's arranged marriage
to the 16-year old Archduchess
Maria Theresa was a disaster.
A society lady summed up
the match as being between
a stable boy and a nun,
and by nun, she meant Leopold.
(pensive music)
The couple had to get sex
advice from Aunt Victoria
and Uncle Albert on a visit to London.
They did have three daughters.
Their son died young, so there
was no surviving male heir.
(curious music)
At the start of his
reign, Leopold proclaimed,
"My ambition is to make Belgium greater,
"stronger, and more beautiful."
He had no doubts that the
country needed improving.
- Leopold had always
complained that Belgium
was a small country with small people,
but he certainly wasn't a small king.
I mean, not only was he extremely tall,
but I think he had enormous
ambitions for himself.
And I think he felt resentment
about his relatively low
and humble role within
the Saxe-Coburg dynasty.
I mean, he really wasn't very important,
compared with Victoria,
compared with the kaiser.
And I think that he, therefore,
felt that personally,
if you like.
I mean, he was somebody for whom
(speaking in foreign
language) was definitely
(speaking in foreign
language), and therefore,
the elevation of Belgium was necessarily
the elevation of himself.
- [Narrator] Like his
father, Leopold believed
that having a colony was the
way to achieve greatness.
Leopold I made over 50
attempts to get a colony,
all to no avail.
His son was going to be more successful.
Even before Leopold became king,
he had sent the Belgian finance minister
a piece of marble from the Acropolis,
inscribed Belgium must have a colony.
(tense music)
(cicadas chirping)
- [Narrator] Leopold set
about scouring the globe.
He tried Sarawak, the New Hebrides,
the Fiji Islands, and the Philippines,
until there was practically nowhere else
left for him to look,
apart from one place.
At the start of Leopold's reign,
the Congo was unknown
territory to Europeans.
For Leopold, it represented
his last chance.
The Congo was to be his
new colony at any cost.
(clattering)
The man who is going to make this possible
was Henry Morton Stanley.
A former workhouse boy from Wales,
he had made himself
into one of the greatest
explorers of the age,
and one of the roughest.
(clattering and screeching)
His expedition to cross
Africa from east to west
was the most expensive ever undertaken.
Stanley, coming from the East,
was getting into the Congo
through the back door.
(clattering)
No white man had ever
crossed the continent before.
Stanley would have to
walk or canoe 7,000 miles.
Leopold knew that if Stanley succeeded,
he would effectively open up the Congo.
(whooshing by)
(curious tense music)
In the 19th century,
London was the epicenter of colonization.
At Claridge's, Leopold
entertained explorers,
geographers, and generals,
all to sell his Congo venture.
He went to see his Aunt Victoria
and gave the queen more of the same spin.
He told her, "I have sought
to meet those most interested
"in bringing civilization to Africa."
Back home, he organized a
geographical conference,
turning his palace into a
luxury hotel for the delegates
and supervising every detail.
He declared that his aims in Africa
were completely charitable
and philanthropic.
The Congo was about to
receive all the benefits
of civilization and Christianity.
- [Narrator] Each of
the conference delegates
received a portrait of the king.
Leopold knew exactly how to
use snobbery as a weapon.
The news that Stanley had
successfully crossed Africa
was a signal for Leopold to act.
In his scrolling handwriting,
he wrote to an aide
that he did not want to miss out
on this magnificent African cake.
(mysterious music)
Stanley today, like Leopold,
is unwanted in Kinshasa.
But in 1887, Stanley was the
man that the king needed.
Under the guise of a
charitable organization,
the International Africa Association,
Leopold hired Stanley to make
the Congo fit for a king.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Stanley established
a network of steamers,
built roads and bridges,
and even a small railway.
He soon earned the name Bula
Matari, The Smasher of Rocks.
But behind Stanley's
back, Leopold was changing
the charitable African Association
into a commercial company.
His new Congo Association would be run
exclusively for profit.
He wrote to an aide, "Care must be taken
"not to let it be obvious
that the Congo Association
"and the African
Association are different.
"The public doesn't grasp that."
(tense music)
The king issued new orders.
He now wanted official treaties
to show that the Congo belonged to him.
Stanley was told to get
the chief to sign up.
Stanley's men used bribes and trickery
to obtain the Congolese chief's agreement.
They claimed that the
white man even had power
over the sun.
- Unscrupulous, though
Leopold was, he realized
that he needed to have
some veil of legality.
And Leopold was very clever.
He'd investigated the precedence for this.
He looked at the sultans of Sarawak,
he looked at North American Indians,
he looked even at some
of the Indian treaties
that the British had established,
and he realized that
with these bits of paper,
if he ever came to be
challenged, as he was later,
over his authority over this territory,
he would be able to produce
these ostensible contracts.
So, Stanley was absolutely
crucial in achieving that.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Having tricked the Africans,
the king now set about
convincing the European powers
that he should be allowed to
own this vast African colony.
This time, it wasn't
magic, it was diplomacy.
(mysterious music)
By 1884, the great powers
were all lined up in Berlin
to hand over the Congo to the king.
No Africans were invited.
- [Narrator] The conference gave Leopold
everything he wanted.
- It's very remarkable
to see that King Leopold
managed to trick the
great powers at that time.
He promised that everybody
would have access to that,
there would be free trade,
that if there was anything to be gained,
that everybody could
participate in their loot.
And there was quite
some remorse afterwards,
in other countries, that
he got away with it,
but he did.
(tense music)
(tense music)
(water sloshing)
- [Narrator] To enforce his rule,
the sovereign king had created an army.
In time, it would be 16,000 strong,
equipped with modern
Belgian-made automatic rifles.
The novelist, Joseph Conrad,
was in the Congo Free State
from the start.
As a result of what he saw there,
he wrote Heart of Darkness.
- [Joseph] They grabbed
what they could get
for the sake of what was to be got.
It was just robbery with violence,
aggravated murder on a great scale,
as is very proper for those
who tackle a darkness.
(tense music)
(water sloshing)
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Fear, like forced labor,
was an integral part of the king's plans
to make the Congo profitable.
To administer his new territory,
Leopold appointed executives in Brussels,
and a governor-general in the Congo.
But in fact, he ran it himself.
His agents, his soldiers,
carried out his wishes.
(pensive music)
(tense music)
- [Joseph] The conquest of the earth,
which mostly means they're taking it away
from those who have a different complexion
or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,
is not a pretty thing when
you look into it too much.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Despite
Leopold's armed soldiers
and his labor camp methods,
the Congo was not paying its way,
and it was crippling Leopold's finances.
As the months went by,
the king was getting
increasingly desperate.
(car rumbling)
What saved Leopold was the
demand for cars and bicycles.
When John Dunlop, an obscure Scottish vet,
invented the first pneumatic tire,
suddenly, there was a
huge market for rubber,
and the Congo had rubber.
(clanging)
(tense music)
In the years to come,
there would be competition
from rubber plantations
in Asia and South America,
but for now, the king had
the market all to himself.
(water sloshing)
The more rubber he could get to Europe,
before the new plantations came on-stream,
the greater the killing.
(tense music)
- Leopold's got mind of a
business man, an entrepreneur,
on one side, and the mind of
a political megalomaniac
on the other side.
Two are very much linked together.
Certainly, in that time, the second half
of the 19th century, there's a clear link
between economic power
and political power.
If you wanted to mean something,
you had to have a lot of money,
and that was what he intended
to do with the Congo.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] For Leopold,
transforming his new assets
into cash simply meant
ratcheting up the level of force.
Villages in the rubber areas
were set heavy targets,
and punished violently for
refusal or failure to deliver.
The reign of terror had begun.
(tense music)
(coughing)
(fire crackling)
(yelling in foreign language)
(melancholic music)
(yelling in foreign language)
(melancholic music)
(screaming)
(fire crackling)
(melancholic music)
(fire crackling)
(melancholic music)
(fire crackling)
(melancholic music)
(cicadas chirping)
(fire crackling)
- King Leopold certainly
did not deliberately,
going to, sort of, murder or whatever.
King Leopold was part of a regime
and part of an economic, sort of, system,
that basically considered
that part of the work
of his private property,
and that he could rule as he wished.
And King Leopold, also,
he was a man of vision.
You can strongly disagree
with that vision,
but he did have a vision.
And Congo, of course,
whether you want it or
not, but has meant a lot
to the Belgian economy.
So, for Belgium, there
has been huge benefits
to the involvement in Central Africa.
(eerie screeching music)
- [Narrator] In Leopold's
time, the main witnesses
to the atrocities were the missionaries.
Living in the rubber districts
meant it was impossible for them
not to see what was going on.
(eerie music)
- On December the 23rd, 1893,
the state sent down some
canoes on the cover of night
to the town of Ikengo.
(yelling in foreign language)
The people were quietly
sleeping in their beds
when they heard a shot fired,
and ran out to see what was the matter.
Finding the soldiers
had surrounded the town,
their only thought was to escape.
As they ran out of their homes,
men, women, and children,
they were ruthlessly shot down.
The town was utterly destroyed,
and is ruined unto this day.
The only reason for this fight
was that the people had
failed to bring in food
to the state upon that one day.
(eerie music)
(water sloshing)
- [Narrator] At first, the
missionaries wrote privately
to each other about the cruelties
they had seen traveling
around their areas.
But after a while, they started writing
to their home missions.
- The poor people are crying out
against the cruel oppression of the state,
and well they might.
I can scarcely keep my tongue silent
when I hear of and see such villainy.
- [Narrator] In 1895, a
missionary, on leave in London,
did go public, but was
forced to remain anonymous.
He feared for his safety
when he went back.
(tense music)
(lashing)
By now, the missionaries knew all too well
the severity of the punishments
the state handed out.
(lashing)
They saw how villagers were
flogged with a chicotte,
a whip made of rhinoceros
hide, dried in the sun,
till it could rip a man's skin to shreds.
(sobbing loudly)
They saw men tortured to
death with burning copal.
A missionary described how the soldier
found horrible pleasure
in pouring the copal
over a prisoner's head.
(birds chirping)
Eventually, the Reverend Seurblum,
a veteran Congo missionary,
reached the point where
he had to go public.
What he had come across
went beyond anything
he had ever imagined.
His reports first appeared
in a missionary magazine,
but soon found their way
into national newspapers
in Europe.
It was Seurblum's report that
first revealed to the world
the state practice of cutting off hands.
(eerie music)
- When I crossed the stream,
I saw some dead bodies
hanging down from the
branches in the water.
As I turned my face away
at the horrible sight,
one of the native corporals
who was following us down said,
"Oh, that's nothing.
"A few days ago, I returned from a fight
"and I brought the white man 160 hands,
"and they were thrown into the river."
That was about the time
that I saw a native killed
with my own eyes.
The soldier said, "Don't
take it to heart so much.
"They'd kill us if we
don't bring the rubber."
The commissioner's promised us
that if we have plenty of hands,
he will shorten our service.
I have brought him
plenty of hands already,
and I expect my service
will soon be finished.
- [Narrator] Leopold's
soldiers were being ordered
to cut off the right
hands off dead bodies.
Each soldier was issued a
fixed number of cartridges
before a raid.
And to prove to the white officers
that he hadn't wasted any,
the soldier had to bring back a cut hand
for each cartridge that he'd fired.
(eerie music)
- [Narrator] In each army unit,
solders were designated
to smoke the cut hands
to preserve them.
The hands were then taken to the officers
to show that all the
ammunition had been well-used.
- On the 14th of December, 1895,
Mr. Seurblum, Mrs. Banks, and myself
saw one of these sentries with
a basket full of smoked hands.
We got the sentry to stop
and show us how many he had.
He took them out of the basket
and laid them in a row before us.
18 right hands of men,
women, and children.
The sentry wanted to beat the woman
who was carrying them for him,
as he said there ought to
be 19, and she had lost one.
Surely, the King of the
Belgians cannot be cognizant
of these barbarous proceedings
on the part of his servants.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] A confidential
letter sent by a courtier
to the chief executive
of the Congo Free State
revealed that Leopold was
angry about being criticized
for the cruelties in the Congo.
But the letter also
quotes the king as saying,
"I know that atrocities are
being committed in the Congo.
"It is useless to try to deny it."
- I think one can assume that he knew,
maybe not all the details,
but that he knew that
the system of exploitation
of rubber in the Congo
had gruesome effects.
The point is did he
consider it too gruesome?
Probably not.
He thought this was the
price that has to be paid
for economic development or whatever.
He didn't care very much.
He thought that the profits
were more important.
(tense pensive music)
(water splattering softly)
(bells ringing melodically)
- [Narrator] Antwerp was where
the Congo rubber arrived.
According to legend, the city's name
comes from a confrontation
between a Roman soldier
and a giant who also cut off hands.
(bells ringing melodically)
Any connection between the city's symbol
and cut hands in the Congo
is seldom made in Antwerp.
It's as though the crimes of the Congo
are totally forgotten,
or worse, never happened.
(melancholic pensive music)
(eerie screeching music)
(birds chirping)
(chattering in foreign language)
- [Narrator] It was in
the Equator Province
where many of the worst abuses occurred.
Leopold had divided the Congo
into separate districts,
each under the control of a commissioner,
most often recruited from
and paid by the Belgian Army.
The Equator was run by an official
who stands out as one
of the great villains
of the Congo Free State.
Leon Fievez was a master
in the use of violence
to increase the rubber exports.
- He collected rubber
in enormous quantities,
at a rate of one ton a day, it's said.
Common report on the Congo
states that he caused
more than 1,000 persons to be mutilated.
It's also reported that he
boasted of the cruelties,
and certainly, the result of
them is evident to this day,
for the people fled from the
district in their thousands,
and have never returned.
(tense pensive music)
- [Narrator] When General Wahis,
Governor-General of the Congo,
made an official visit to
the equator region in 1896,
even he called it the land of horrors.
Fievez had no qualms about
the level of brutality.
He perfectly understood
that the state existed
only to make money, and
that rubber was the key.
For Leopold, Fievez was
the perfect employee,
loyal, efficient, and resourceful.
(mysterious music)
(foliage rustling)
- [Narrator] All that mattered to Leopold
was to keep up the supply of rubber.
But to get the Congolese to work hard,
he had to find a way to make
his agents work hard as well.
A confidential message went
to the governor-general.
Leopold was transmitting
his greed to the agents.
The state was going to pay
commission to stimulate zeal.
(tense music)
- Native life is considered
of no value by the Belgians.
No wonder the state is hated.
They talk of philanthropy
and civilization.
Where it is, I do not know.
(tense pensive music)
(chains rattling)
The state does not suppress slavery,
but established a monopoly by driving out
the Arab competitors.
This is no reasonable
way of settling the land,
it is merely persecution.
If the Arabs had been the masters,
it would be styled iniquitous trafficking
in human flesh and blood.
But being under the administration
of the Congo Free State,
it is merely a part of
liberating the natives.
(tense pensive music)
- [Narrator] Charles
Stokes, a British trader
working for the Germans,
was about to cause the king
his first major political problem.
Leopold was jealously guarding
his trade in the Congo,
completely against the agreements
made with the European powers at Berlin.
The king's orders were to
enforce the monopoly fiercely.
(pensive music)
Stokes was arrested for
trading in state territory,
and sentenced to death by
Captain Hubert Lothaire,
an officer well-known in the Congo.
- The people on the Lulange River call him
(speaking in foreign language).
Some four years ago, he
arrived with black troops
and pitched his camp.
He sent over to the missionary
to use his influence
to get the natives back.
The missionary, supposing he
was dealing with an officer
and a gentleman, induced the
natives to come to the station.
As soon as they did so,
Lothaire and his men opened fire on them.
(pensive music)
(clattering)
- [Narrator] The hanging was
a major political mistake.
Up till then, the victims
of the Congo Free State
had been African.
There was outrage in Britain and Germany.
In the end, the king
had to pay compensation
to both countries, and from now on,
the European powers were
increasingly weary of Leopold.
(chattering)
(tense music)
- [Joseph] To tear treasure
out of the bowels of the land
was their desire.
With no more moral
purpose at the back of it
than there is in burglars
breaking into a safe.
(tense music)
(rooster crowing)
- [Narrator] Leopold's response
to the pressure on him,
after the Stokes Affair, was very Leopold.
He set up new concessions
to exploit the rubber.
He claimed he was opening
the Congo to outsiders,
but the king made sure
his men were on the boards
of the new companies, and
he took 50% of the profits.
(tense music)
(chattering)
One of the concessions was given to ABIR,
the Anglo-Belgian Rubber
Company at Basankusu.
Here, the rubber was dried
before it was sent downriver
to be shipped to Antwerp,
and the concession
companies had found new ways
of maximizing profit.
(tense music)
Leopold's new companies
were taking the wives
of the rubber collectors hostage.
The women were only released
when sufficient rubber
had been collected.
The hostage system was organized
by the concession companies
with the full knowledge of the state
and of the king himself.
(tense music)
On official company forms,
the names of the hostages
were recorded, along with the
details of their condition,
and the length of time
they were to be detained.
(tense music)
The procedure was so institutionalized
that each of the company's agents
was given an official hostage license
authorizing them to detain women at will.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] When a
missionary asked a chief
how many women had been taken
hostage, the chief replied,
"Count the grains of sand, white man."
(tense music)
(yelling in foreign language)
(melancholic music)
The moment of truth in
Leopold's Congo Free State
came once every 15 days, when
the rubber was handed in.
The state talked about the rubber harvest
and the rubber market,
but the reality was completely different.
(melancholic music)
For the collectors, this was
when they would either get
their wives back or face
more punishment, even death,
if they had not met their targets.
For the agents, this was when
they would be able to start
calculating their commission,
and for the king, this was the proof
that his new concession companies worked
and brought him even more wealth.
(melancholic music)
(melancholic music)
- [Narrator] Leopold's
stranglehold on the rubber market
lasted for over 10 years
till the plantations of
Asia and South America
became serious competition.
The profits all went to Belgium,
but how much remains in the
hands of the royal family today
is still a matter of speculation.
(melancholic music)
Leopold once said about his Congo,
"What I do there is
done as a Christian duty
"to the poor Africans,
"and I do not wish to have one franc back
"of all the money I have expended."
As the 20th century began,
King Leopold found himself
facing the first major challenge
to his rule in Africa,
and it came from London.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Edmund Dene
Morel is one of history's
most underestimated heroes.
He rose from being a shipping clerk
to Leopold's foremost adversary.
He didn't have Leopold's royal pedigree,
but in everything else,
Morel was more than a match
for the king.
A Liverpool shipping line
handled Leopold's rubber cargoes,
and Morel got his first job there,
but he soon became a leading journalist
on West African affairs.
- Because he's working in
the West African trade,
he specializes in West African news,
so he's somebody who becomes
a specialist and expert
in Western Central African affairs.
And when he becomes chief
clerk to the Congo business,
he's somebody who does
a lot of to and froing,
between Antwerp and Liverpool,
because Antwerp is where a great deal
of the Congo trade is unloaded.
- [Narrator] At Antwerp docks,
Morel started unraveling
the truth about Leopold's Congo.
He described it as stumbling
upon a secret society
of murderers.
- [Narrator] Morel moved
to Harden in Wales,
left his job at the shipping line,
and began a personal
campaign against the king.
(pensive music)
In six months, he sent
out 15,000 brochures
and 3,700 letters.
Within a year, Morel
had his own newspaper,
the West African Mail.
Now he could get his message
to an even wider audience.
From his offices in Liverpool,
Morel gathered together
all the stories he could
about the events in the Congo,
and he set about trying to
enlist the missionaries' help.
But since the first wave of
outbursts against Leopold,
the missionaries had gone silent.
- They had the evidence,
they had the details,
they had the stories
that were going to grab
popular imagination,
that were going to make
the campaign take off.
But selfishly, the missionary societies
didn't want these stories circulated
because they didn't
want to offend Leopold.
They felt if they were critical at all,
they would be thrown out,
and that meant that they wouldn't achieve
their ultimate end,
which was the maximum
conversion of African souls.
I think they had a rather mechanistic view
of what they were doing.
And one soul converted was one step nearer
the Second Coming, if you like.
And if those converted souls
were subsequently mutilated
or murdered, well, so be it.
They died Christian, so what?
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Step by step,
Morel persuaded the missionaries
to come forward with articles
for his West African Mail.
One of the first was Charles
Banks from the Equator region.
- We heard a report
that the state soldiers
had attacked the village of Bandako Ajiko
because the rubber was
not of the best quality.
In a little shed, lay one
of my late school children,
a promising young lad.
I lifted the leaves by
which he was covered and
saw that his right hand had been cut off.
I then went through the
village and saw the people
burying their dead.
I counted over 20 bodies
of newly-filled graves.
All the bodies had the right hand cut off.
(tense music)
(singing in foreign language)
- [Narrator] 7,000 miles away,
Morel now had a new ally.
A stream of letters arrived at
the foreign office in London.
The British government
had appointed a consul
to Leopold's Congo Free State,
and the new consul was outraged.
- [Roger] Captain Van Kerckhoven told me
that he used to pay his native soldiers
five brass rods per human
head they brought him in
during the course of
any military operations.
- [Narrator] The consul
was Roger Casement,
a man with 20 years of African experience.
- Casement is a hugely romantic figure.
He's somebody rather
like Lawrence of Arabia.
He's someone who, I think, one could say
was probably a generation,
or a generation a half,
ahead of his time, in
terms of his attitude
towards the Africans.
He said himself that he loved
the Africans, he liked them.
He liked their company.
He wanted them to be friends.
They liked him.
He was someone who treated Africans
with much more gentility,
with much more consideration
than was usual for the time.
(water sloshing)
(eerie screeching music)
- [Narrator] In 1903,
Casement spent two months
traveling into the Upper Congo.
Morel's campaign had pressured
the British government
into conducting an official investigation.
Wherever Casement went,
he talked to Africans
and recorded their testimony.
(rumbling)
(splashing)
- [Narrator] Casement
realized, as had Morel,
that the missionaries
were the key witnesses,
and he wanted to persuade
them to go public
with what they knew.
(chattering)
(yelling)
He visited the town of
Ikoko on Lake Tumba,
where the missionary Joseph Clark lived.
(chattering in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Joseph Clark
was known to the Africans,
then and now, as (speaking
in foreign language).
He had been in the
Congo for over 20 years.
Clark and his wife supplied
evidence and witnesses
of the state's atrocities.
Casement stayed with them for 17 days.
(tense melancholic music)
(tense melancholic music)
- [Narrator] The villagers of Ikoko
still have to use the
same school and church
that Joseph Clark built
for them 100 years ago.
(tense melancholic music)
- [Narrator] On a beach by Lake Tumba,
Casement recorded how a
boy had both his hands
beaten off by soldiers
while a white officer
known as (speaking in foreign language),
The Leopard's Paw, stood by.
- [Roger] The white man,
(speaking in foreign language)
was not far off, and could
see what they were doing.
(chattering in foreign language)
(speaking in foreign language)
was drinking palm wine
while the soldiers beat
the boy's hands off
with their rifle butts against a tree.
(chattering in foreign language)
- [Narrator] The boy's name was
(speaking in foreign language).
Morel published his photograph
in the West African Mail.
(tense music)
Casement was so horrified
by everything that he'd seen
that on the day he left for England,
he delivered a vitriolic
letter to the governor-general,
knowing full well that meant
that he would never be allowed
to return.
(pensive music)
From the earliest days
of the Congo Free State,
book after book had
appeared regaling readers
with tales of the horrors
to be found there.
Others, like Stanley, had
told a different story,
but the king was facing a
mounting tide of criticism.
A war of words started.
Leopold commissioned books
and bribed journalists.
He established propaganda
offices in Brussels,
Frankfurt, and America
to defend his regime.
He published a monthly magazine
that was circulated around Europe.
Morel fought back, and now he
had another secret to reveal.
The West African Mail published a report
on a part of the Congo that
no one had known even existed.
(pensive music)
(birds chirping)
- [Narrator] The crown domain,
10 times the size of Belgium,
was completely sealed off,
but a missionary had managed to get in.
Morel got hold of his journal
and published the atrocities
committed by Shel
Massau, a Belgian officer
known to the Africans as
(speaking in foreign language).
- The white man, (speaking
in foreign language)
I feel ashamed of my color
every time I think of him,
would stand at the door of the store
to receive the rubber from
the poor, trembling wretches,
one man bringing in
under the proper amount.
The white man flies into a rage,
and seizing a rifle
from one of the guards,
shoots him dead on the spot.
The men who had tried
to run from the country
and had been caught were
brought to the station
and made to stand one behind the other,
as an Albini bullet was sent through them.
A pity to waste bullets on such wretches.
(pensive music)
(flies buzzing)
(gun fires)
Some of the stories are unprintable,
and much that I heard would
not pass muster in court,
but there were too many
witnesses and the consistencies
were too many for it all to be lies.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Baron Jules
Jacques is a Belgian hero
of the First World War.
In Leopold's time, he was one of the men
that the king trusted
to run the crown domain.
His behavior is well-illustrated in a memo
that is kept by the
Belgian foreign ministry,
but which is officially a
secret document to this day.
- [Narrator] Leopold's personal
profit from his crown domain
was 231 million euros.
(lively music)
As the movement against
Leopold gathered momentum,
Morel decided to turn up the pressure.
Liverpool became the headquarters
of the new Congo Reform Association.
(soft piano music)
- [Narrator] Morel's
Congo Reform Association
took the cruelty of Leopold's
Congo to public meetings
across the country.
A hymn was especially composed.
Britains awake, let righteous ire
kindle, within your soul, a fire.
Let indignation's sacred flame
burn for the Congo's wrongs and shame.
- He was a genius propagandist.
He really dragged the issue
to the center of the international stage.
He had the brilliant idea, in 1906,
when his book, Red Rubber, was published,
of putting on the front of it a picture
drawn from the Egyptian book of the god
of souls being weighed in the scales.
And in one pan of the scales,
they had a picture of Leopold
in all of his regalia,
and in the other side, they
had a simple black hand,
a severed hand.
And that's an extraordinary
symbol, really, of a movement.
That is really how to imprint something
on people's understanding,
to sum it all up in a single image.
And so, I think that,
you know, he really is
one of the fathers of
investigative journalism,
and of pressure group politics,
and of 20th century humanitarianism.
- [Narrator] Morel was
waiting for the publication
of Casement's report.
When it came, he was not disappointed.
The report ran for over 50 pages.
The British foreign secretary called it
proof of the most painful kind.
For Leopold, the report was a fatal blow.
(eerie screeching music)
- [Narrator] The Casement
report so unnerved the king
that he made a serious mistake.
In 1904, he sent his own
international commission
to the Congo to investigate.
He thought he could
control what they said.
He was wrong.
He hadn't counted on the
determination of one man,
John Harris, a missionary at Baringa.
Harris and his wife had set up a mission
right in the heart of a concession area.
Every day, they saw the crimes
that were being committed
against the Congolese.
As a result, Harris was waging his own war
against the state.
- To His Excellency, the
Vice Governor-General.
I have just returned from a journey inland
to the village of Insongo Mboyo.
The abject misery and utter abandon is
positively undescribable.
A few months ago, Monsieur
Piles took his sentries there.
A young woman, Iminega,
was tied to a forked tree
and chopped in half with a machete,
beginning at her left shoulder,
chopping through the chest and abdomen,
and out to the side.
It was in this way the sentries
punished the woman's husband.
Another woman, Balumba,
wishing to remain faithful
to her husband,
had a pointed stake forced into her womb,
and as this did not
kill her, she was shot.
I found that, as in other towns,
enforced public incest formed
amusement for the sentries.
I was so moved, Your Excellency,
by these people's stories
that I took the liberty of promising them,
in the name of the Congo Free State,
that in future, you will
only kill them for crimes.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Baringa, then and now,
was at the end of the Earth.
The Harrises set up a hospital
that still struggles on.
Then, like now, the missionaries
dealt with the impact
of war, terror, and deprivation.
(pensive music)
Then, like now, they face the
scourge of sleeping sickness.
(pensive music)
In Harris's day, the Congo
was torn apart for its rubber.
Now, it's ravaged for diamonds,
gold, and other minerals.
The result for the Congolese is the same:
generations of pain,
a whole archaeology of oppression.
(pensive music)
(chattering)
(water sloshing)
100 years ago, two
steamers came to Baringa.
On board were judges,
secretaries, state officials,
and soldiers.
Leopold's international
commission had arrived.
(tense music)
The commission judges had been
carefully chosen by the king
to ensure that the outcome
would be in his favor.
But John Harris had gathered
a host of Congolese witnesses
to testify.
As the judges listened to their evidence,
Leopold's plans were coming unstuck.
The villagers were confirming a truth
of Casement and Morel's accusations.
And worse still for the king,
Harris had made arrangements
for the evidence to be published by Morel.
(tense music)
(tense music)
(birds chirping)
(melancholic music)
- [Narrator] For three
months, Leopold's commission
collected the evidence for their report.
One incident stands out.
Lontulu, a chief from
a village near Baringa,
arrived unannounced.
He brought with him 110 twigs.
Each twig represented one of his villagers
killed by the state.
As he laid the twigs
in front of the judges,
he named each twig.
(melancholic music)
The state never forgave Lontulu,
and some weeks later, he
was tortured to death.
But when the commission
finally left the Congo,
the governor-general committed suicide.
He slit his throat with a razor.
(melancholic music)
When John Harris came back to England,
the journalist, W.T. Stead,
asked him if Leopold should be hanged
at the new International
Court of Justice at the Hague.
Harris replied, "I think
any international tribunal
"which had powers of a criminal court,
"would, upon the evidence
of the commission alone,
"send those responsible to the gallows."
- Well, the idea of one
of the great perpetrators
of European colonialism,
and one of the perpetrators
of European colonialism
at its most callous and unpleasant
being brought before
international court is,
I'll have to admit, not
an unattractive one.
And I suppose what we're
seeing at this time,
and of course, it's parse and parcel,
of this new imperialism,
this crude heavy-handed
aggressive violent imperialism,
is criticism in the worst.
One is seeing the development
of an international radical movement,
and people like Stead,
and people like Morel,
are the beginnings of a movement,
which eventually will
produce the League of Nations
and the UN.
And it would be attractive
to think that Leopold
could have been an early victim,
but unthinkable, I think, at the time.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] The commission's report
had vindicated Casement and Morel,
and when it was published, it
even had an effect in Belgium.
Leopold had tried to make
it as anodyne as possible,
but he had failed.
For the first time, Belgian intellectuals
and religious leaders came
out openly against the king.
(pensive music)
There was a real chance of annexation,
that Belgium would take
over control of the Congo.
Morel watched eagerly as, step by step,
the king's reign in the
Congo was drawing to its end.
(pensive music)
Red Rubber was published in 1906.
Morel knew the king was isolated.
Belgian annexation of
the Congo was inevitable,
but Morel was still pushing.
He wanted the change to happen now.
- [Morel] We demand that this shall stop,
not 15 years or five
years, or one year hence,
but now.
- [Narrator] Almost as
an admission of guilt,
Leopold ordered the burning of all
incriminating Congo state records.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Right to the
end, the king insisted
that the Congo was his and his alone,
but no one was listening anymore.
In 1908, the Congo
became a Belgian colony.
Belgium gave the king 50 million francs
as a mark of gratitude.
(tense music)
Leopold died the following year.
He had asked for a private funeral,
but he lost that request too.
At the funeral, his cortege
was booed as it passed.
Leopold, by the end of his reign,
had become the most hated man in Europe.
It seemed that justice had been done.
(tense music)
(tense music)
Leopold's statues are, in reality,
monuments to a nation's denial.
Despite being put in place after the king
had died in disgrace,
he is unashamedly
represented as a civilizer
and benefactor.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Almost as soon
as the Congo became Belgian,
the new owners began preaching
their colonial gospel,
the litany of how Belgium
was bringing civilization,
turning a wilderness into paradise,
was repeated over and
over to willing listeners.
- [Narrator] And the new Belgian
Congo made financial sense.
There were diamonds, gold,
and a whole host of minerals
that Belgium could exploit.
Leopold, before giving
up the Congo to Belgium,
had set up a giant mineral
exploitation industry.
Why shouldn't Belgium
take advantage of that
and enjoy the profits
without any of the guilt?
Belgians could feel comfortable
knowing their investments
in the Congo were for a good cause,
and enjoying the returns without shame.
Africans were being civilized,
and Belgium was getting richer.
Leopold had been right all along.
(upbeat music)
(melancholic music)
- [Narrator] In the years
since the Congo Reform Association,
Casement and Morel have also
sunk into the Congo amnesia.
Casement became an Irish nationalist
and was executed by the British
for plotting with the Germans
in the First World War.
Morel's pacifist views
made him deeply unpopular,
and he too was accused
of pro-German sympathies.
- Morel and Casement did both become,
in the course of the First World War,
associated with Germany.
They were seen as tainted figures,
and I think that's one reason that,
actually, the quite heroic achievements
of the Congo Reform Association
have been forgotten.
I think the other reason
it's been forgotten
is that the Congolese themselves
have not had the power or the leverage
on the international stage
in the way that Jews have,
in the way that black Americans have,
to push the Congo as one of
the world's great holocausts.
(melancholic music)
(water sloshing)
- [Narrator] The bloody history
of the Congo has continued.
Since 1998, perhaps as
many as four million people
have died there during a civil war.
Before that, a cruel
dictatorship imposed by the West.
Before that, colonization.
The UN regularly issues reports
on how the country is
still being exploited.
(melancholic music)
Yet another homage paid
to Leopold in Brussels,
this one put up just a few years ago.
Leopold would be proud.
As far as we know, nowhere
in the surviving records
of his reign, or of his Congo Free State,
is there ever an admission of guilt,
or a scintilla of remorse.
But who will ever know what
was going on in his mind
in 1909, as he lay dying?
(melancholic music)
- [Joseph] I saw, on that ivory face,
the expression of somber pride,
of ruthless power, of craven terror,
of an intense and hopeless despair.
Did he live his life again
in every detail of desire,
temptation, and surrender
during that supreme moment
of complete knowledge?
He cried in a whisper at
some image, at some vision.
He cried out twice,
a cry that was no more than a breath,
"The horror,
"the horror."
(tense pensive music)
- [Narrator] When a series
of missionary photographs
arrived in England in
the late 19th century,
they caused outrage.
The mutilations had been
strategically photographed
against white for maximum impact.
The children came from the Congo,
but the man accused of
their suffering was white,
European, and royal.
(tense music)
For almost 100 years,
evidence has lain dormant
of one of the greatest mass murders.
Millions of Africans
died in one man's quest
for wealth and glory.
Until Adolf Hitler arrived on the scene,
the European standard for
cruelty was set by a king.
Leopold II, King of the Belgians,
was the personal owner
of 1,000,000 square miles
of Central Africa, and king sovereign
of 20 million Africans.
(tense music)
In the 1880s and '90s,
the world outside Africa
wanted rubber for its new
bicycle and car industries,
and Leopold's Congo Free State
had the world's largest
supply of wild rubber.
(tense music)
The king had struck gold, black gold.
He was determined to get
as much rubber to Europe
as he could, and as fast as he could.
- The rubber in this district
has cost hundreds of lives,
and the scenes I have witnessed
while unable to help
the oppressed have been
almost enough to make me
wish that I were dead.
- [Narrator] Over a period of 20 years,
Leopold turned the Congo
into a vast labor camp
80 times the size of Belgium,
in the process, making himself
into one of the richest men
in the world.
As the number of deaths
grew, so did his profits.
- This rubber traffic is steeped in blood.
And were the natives to rise
and sweep every white person
on the Upper Congo into eternity,
there would still be left a
fearful balance to their credit.
- [Narrator] But the longer
the king stayed in the Congo,
the greater the evidence against him.
Missionaries, travelers, and the victims
all added to the clamor
for the king to be stopped.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Astonishingly, for the time,
there were calls for Leopold to be hanged
at the new International
Court of Justice in the Hague.
- [Missionary] If there were such thing
as criminal prosecutions
in international affairs,
then assuredly, a true bill would be found
against the sovereign, who obtained
not a paltry sum of money,
but a whole empire by false pretenses.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Instead of being
hanged, Leopold was reinvented
as a great humanitarian
king, a great civilizer.
(pensive music)
The Congolese historian, Alekhya Umbicolo,
believes that the truth
about Leopold's crimes
was deliberately hidden to protect Belgium
and Belgian interests in the Congo.
This film details the
charges against King Leopold,
and reveals a cover-up of
monumental proportions.
(tense music)
The signs of the wealth
that Leopold amassed
are everywhere in Brussels,
and on an enormous scale.
The king built the Cinquantenaire
to celebrate the country's
50th anniversary.
It's become part of the national identity.
- The Cinquantenaire is
a very expressive symbol
of Belgium and of the proud Belgium.
In fact, King Leopold paid
for it with his own money,
but he didn't say so openly
because this would prove
that, first of all,
he had a lot of money.
People would ask questions
where it came from,
and then he would have to admit
that it came from the Congo.
So, the Cinquantenaire
symbolizes this lie about Belgium
and about the royal
implication in politics,
about the colonial exploitation.
(tense music)
(flag flapping)
(screeching eerie music)
- [Narrator] The Royal
Museum for Central Africa
was also built by Leopold,
and paid for with Congo money.
It's a vision of Africa
through Leopold's eyes,
and with a huge dose of homage;
homage to Leopold, who
gave the Belgians a colony,
and a homage to the pioneers
who died carrying out the king's wishes.
White conquest is
mythologized as benevolence,
as bringing civilization to the Congo.
(eerie music)
- There is no doubt that
a lot of things happened
in Congo Free State under King Leopold II
that are clearly unacceptable,
that are even scandalous.
But one has to look at
the sign of the times,
and the, sort of, none
of the colonial powers,
in those days, were really softies,
and had a fairly human approach.
I mean, you only look at
what the Brits and the French
and the Dutch, who introduced slave trade,
or the Germans were doing,
so it's not a period of
which we can be very proud.
But one has to look at it
in a particular perspective
of time and of history.
(mysterious tense music)
- [Narrator] Leopold's
Congo was a prison state.
Africans had no rights, no
justice, and no freedom.
They were there to serve
a voracious European king.
Thousands of miles away,
Leopold was content
that the end always justified the means,
and the end was to make money.
Leopold dominated the Congo
for a quarter of a century.
But in the last years of his reign,
the Congo was handed over
to the Belgian state,
which gratefully kept control
in his name until 1960.
(singing in foreign language)
- [Narrator] The king no
longer has pride of place.
The Congo is independent.
Leopoldville is now Kinshasa,
and Leopold is in a junkyard.
(chattering in foreign language)
- [Narrator] But it takes
more than destroying symbols
to wipe out generations
of foreign occupation.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Leopold once wrote,
"A people which is
content with its homeland,
"and which dreads even
the shadow of a conflict,
"lacks the characteristics
of a superior race."
- A Belgian officer had been dispatched
with the force of some 50 or
60 men to capture a chief.
In rummaging in the huts for plunder,
they came upon two women,
a mother and daughter,
who'd not had the time to get away.
They were brought up before the officer,
who demanded of them where
the chief was in hiding.
They either did not
know or would not tell.
He ordered them to be secured
and laid out on the ground,
and a stalwart soldier then
proceeded to administer
50 strokes of the chicotte to each.
The flogging continued until
each had received 200 lashes.
Finally, this Belgian
officer ordered his men
to cut off the breasts of the women,
and left them to die where they lay.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] In Brussels,
the statues of Leopold
have not been pulled down.
The old king is still
part of a Belgian dynasty.
Leopold's Saxe-Coburg
pedigree was impeccable.
His father, Leopold I, was
Queen Victoria's uncle.
His mother, Louise Marie d'Orleans,
the eldest daughter of the French king.
His father hadn't much
time for the young prince,
describing him as the little tyrant,
and his mother remarked, unkindly,
how he was disfigured
by his enormous nose,
which gives him a bird-like air.
- I think his mother was
rather insignificant there,
and maybe also this explains
a lot about his character,
the lack of love, the lack of affection,
which he compensated by
saying that affection
didn't bother him or,
as he told at the end of his life,
when he was very unpopular,
that he was not interested in popularity.
Of course, this was a way of saying
I'm very sad about the
fact that I'm not popular.
- [Narrator] Leopold's arranged marriage
to the 16-year old Archduchess
Maria Theresa was a disaster.
A society lady summed up
the match as being between
a stable boy and a nun,
and by nun, she meant Leopold.
(pensive music)
The couple had to get sex
advice from Aunt Victoria
and Uncle Albert on a visit to London.
They did have three daughters.
Their son died young, so there
was no surviving male heir.
(curious music)
At the start of his
reign, Leopold proclaimed,
"My ambition is to make Belgium greater,
"stronger, and more beautiful."
He had no doubts that the
country needed improving.
- Leopold had always
complained that Belgium
was a small country with small people,
but he certainly wasn't a small king.
I mean, not only was he extremely tall,
but I think he had enormous
ambitions for himself.
And I think he felt resentment
about his relatively low
and humble role within
the Saxe-Coburg dynasty.
I mean, he really wasn't very important,
compared with Victoria,
compared with the kaiser.
And I think that he, therefore,
felt that personally,
if you like.
I mean, he was somebody for whom
(speaking in foreign
language) was definitely
(speaking in foreign
language), and therefore,
the elevation of Belgium was necessarily
the elevation of himself.
- [Narrator] Like his
father, Leopold believed
that having a colony was the
way to achieve greatness.
Leopold I made over 50
attempts to get a colony,
all to no avail.
His son was going to be more successful.
Even before Leopold became king,
he had sent the Belgian finance minister
a piece of marble from the Acropolis,
inscribed Belgium must have a colony.
(tense music)
(cicadas chirping)
- [Narrator] Leopold set
about scouring the globe.
He tried Sarawak, the New Hebrides,
the Fiji Islands, and the Philippines,
until there was practically nowhere else
left for him to look,
apart from one place.
At the start of Leopold's reign,
the Congo was unknown
territory to Europeans.
For Leopold, it represented
his last chance.
The Congo was to be his
new colony at any cost.
(clattering)
The man who is going to make this possible
was Henry Morton Stanley.
A former workhouse boy from Wales,
he had made himself
into one of the greatest
explorers of the age,
and one of the roughest.
(clattering and screeching)
His expedition to cross
Africa from east to west
was the most expensive ever undertaken.
Stanley, coming from the East,
was getting into the Congo
through the back door.
(clattering)
No white man had ever
crossed the continent before.
Stanley would have to
walk or canoe 7,000 miles.
Leopold knew that if Stanley succeeded,
he would effectively open up the Congo.
(whooshing by)
(curious tense music)
In the 19th century,
London was the epicenter of colonization.
At Claridge's, Leopold
entertained explorers,
geographers, and generals,
all to sell his Congo venture.
He went to see his Aunt Victoria
and gave the queen more of the same spin.
He told her, "I have sought
to meet those most interested
"in bringing civilization to Africa."
Back home, he organized a
geographical conference,
turning his palace into a
luxury hotel for the delegates
and supervising every detail.
He declared that his aims in Africa
were completely charitable
and philanthropic.
The Congo was about to
receive all the benefits
of civilization and Christianity.
- [Narrator] Each of
the conference delegates
received a portrait of the king.
Leopold knew exactly how to
use snobbery as a weapon.
The news that Stanley had
successfully crossed Africa
was a signal for Leopold to act.
In his scrolling handwriting,
he wrote to an aide
that he did not want to miss out
on this magnificent African cake.
(mysterious music)
Stanley today, like Leopold,
is unwanted in Kinshasa.
But in 1887, Stanley was the
man that the king needed.
Under the guise of a
charitable organization,
the International Africa Association,
Leopold hired Stanley to make
the Congo fit for a king.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Stanley established
a network of steamers,
built roads and bridges,
and even a small railway.
He soon earned the name Bula
Matari, The Smasher of Rocks.
But behind Stanley's
back, Leopold was changing
the charitable African Association
into a commercial company.
His new Congo Association would be run
exclusively for profit.
He wrote to an aide, "Care must be taken
"not to let it be obvious
that the Congo Association
"and the African
Association are different.
"The public doesn't grasp that."
(tense music)
The king issued new orders.
He now wanted official treaties
to show that the Congo belonged to him.
Stanley was told to get
the chief to sign up.
Stanley's men used bribes and trickery
to obtain the Congolese chief's agreement.
They claimed that the
white man even had power
over the sun.
- Unscrupulous, though
Leopold was, he realized
that he needed to have
some veil of legality.
And Leopold was very clever.
He'd investigated the precedence for this.
He looked at the sultans of Sarawak,
he looked at North American Indians,
he looked even at some
of the Indian treaties
that the British had established,
and he realized that
with these bits of paper,
if he ever came to be
challenged, as he was later,
over his authority over this territory,
he would be able to produce
these ostensible contracts.
So, Stanley was absolutely
crucial in achieving that.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] Having tricked the Africans,
the king now set about
convincing the European powers
that he should be allowed to
own this vast African colony.
This time, it wasn't
magic, it was diplomacy.
(mysterious music)
By 1884, the great powers
were all lined up in Berlin
to hand over the Congo to the king.
No Africans were invited.
- [Narrator] The conference gave Leopold
everything he wanted.
- It's very remarkable
to see that King Leopold
managed to trick the
great powers at that time.
He promised that everybody
would have access to that,
there would be free trade,
that if there was anything to be gained,
that everybody could
participate in their loot.
And there was quite
some remorse afterwards,
in other countries, that
he got away with it,
but he did.
(tense music)
(tense music)
(water sloshing)
- [Narrator] To enforce his rule,
the sovereign king had created an army.
In time, it would be 16,000 strong,
equipped with modern
Belgian-made automatic rifles.
The novelist, Joseph Conrad,
was in the Congo Free State
from the start.
As a result of what he saw there,
he wrote Heart of Darkness.
- [Joseph] They grabbed
what they could get
for the sake of what was to be got.
It was just robbery with violence,
aggravated murder on a great scale,
as is very proper for those
who tackle a darkness.
(tense music)
(water sloshing)
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Fear, like forced labor,
was an integral part of the king's plans
to make the Congo profitable.
To administer his new territory,
Leopold appointed executives in Brussels,
and a governor-general in the Congo.
But in fact, he ran it himself.
His agents, his soldiers,
carried out his wishes.
(pensive music)
(tense music)
- [Joseph] The conquest of the earth,
which mostly means they're taking it away
from those who have a different complexion
or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,
is not a pretty thing when
you look into it too much.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Despite
Leopold's armed soldiers
and his labor camp methods,
the Congo was not paying its way,
and it was crippling Leopold's finances.
As the months went by,
the king was getting
increasingly desperate.
(car rumbling)
What saved Leopold was the
demand for cars and bicycles.
When John Dunlop, an obscure Scottish vet,
invented the first pneumatic tire,
suddenly, there was a
huge market for rubber,
and the Congo had rubber.
(clanging)
(tense music)
In the years to come,
there would be competition
from rubber plantations
in Asia and South America,
but for now, the king had
the market all to himself.
(water sloshing)
The more rubber he could get to Europe,
before the new plantations came on-stream,
the greater the killing.
(tense music)
- Leopold's got mind of a
business man, an entrepreneur,
on one side, and the mind of
a political megalomaniac
on the other side.
Two are very much linked together.
Certainly, in that time, the second half
of the 19th century, there's a clear link
between economic power
and political power.
If you wanted to mean something,
you had to have a lot of money,
and that was what he intended
to do with the Congo.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] For Leopold,
transforming his new assets
into cash simply meant
ratcheting up the level of force.
Villages in the rubber areas
were set heavy targets,
and punished violently for
refusal or failure to deliver.
The reign of terror had begun.
(tense music)
(coughing)
(fire crackling)
(yelling in foreign language)
(melancholic music)
(yelling in foreign language)
(melancholic music)
(screaming)
(fire crackling)
(melancholic music)
(fire crackling)
(melancholic music)
(fire crackling)
(melancholic music)
(cicadas chirping)
(fire crackling)
- King Leopold certainly
did not deliberately,
going to, sort of, murder or whatever.
King Leopold was part of a regime
and part of an economic, sort of, system,
that basically considered
that part of the work
of his private property,
and that he could rule as he wished.
And King Leopold, also,
he was a man of vision.
You can strongly disagree
with that vision,
but he did have a vision.
And Congo, of course,
whether you want it or
not, but has meant a lot
to the Belgian economy.
So, for Belgium, there
has been huge benefits
to the involvement in Central Africa.
(eerie screeching music)
- [Narrator] In Leopold's
time, the main witnesses
to the atrocities were the missionaries.
Living in the rubber districts
meant it was impossible for them
not to see what was going on.
(eerie music)
- On December the 23rd, 1893,
the state sent down some
canoes on the cover of night
to the town of Ikengo.
(yelling in foreign language)
The people were quietly
sleeping in their beds
when they heard a shot fired,
and ran out to see what was the matter.
Finding the soldiers
had surrounded the town,
their only thought was to escape.
As they ran out of their homes,
men, women, and children,
they were ruthlessly shot down.
The town was utterly destroyed,
and is ruined unto this day.
The only reason for this fight
was that the people had
failed to bring in food
to the state upon that one day.
(eerie music)
(water sloshing)
- [Narrator] At first, the
missionaries wrote privately
to each other about the cruelties
they had seen traveling
around their areas.
But after a while, they started writing
to their home missions.
- The poor people are crying out
against the cruel oppression of the state,
and well they might.
I can scarcely keep my tongue silent
when I hear of and see such villainy.
- [Narrator] In 1895, a
missionary, on leave in London,
did go public, but was
forced to remain anonymous.
He feared for his safety
when he went back.
(tense music)
(lashing)
By now, the missionaries knew all too well
the severity of the punishments
the state handed out.
(lashing)
They saw how villagers were
flogged with a chicotte,
a whip made of rhinoceros
hide, dried in the sun,
till it could rip a man's skin to shreds.
(sobbing loudly)
They saw men tortured to
death with burning copal.
A missionary described how the soldier
found horrible pleasure
in pouring the copal
over a prisoner's head.
(birds chirping)
Eventually, the Reverend Seurblum,
a veteran Congo missionary,
reached the point where
he had to go public.
What he had come across
went beyond anything
he had ever imagined.
His reports first appeared
in a missionary magazine,
but soon found their way
into national newspapers
in Europe.
It was Seurblum's report that
first revealed to the world
the state practice of cutting off hands.
(eerie music)
- When I crossed the stream,
I saw some dead bodies
hanging down from the
branches in the water.
As I turned my face away
at the horrible sight,
one of the native corporals
who was following us down said,
"Oh, that's nothing.
"A few days ago, I returned from a fight
"and I brought the white man 160 hands,
"and they were thrown into the river."
That was about the time
that I saw a native killed
with my own eyes.
The soldier said, "Don't
take it to heart so much.
"They'd kill us if we
don't bring the rubber."
The commissioner's promised us
that if we have plenty of hands,
he will shorten our service.
I have brought him
plenty of hands already,
and I expect my service
will soon be finished.
- [Narrator] Leopold's
soldiers were being ordered
to cut off the right
hands off dead bodies.
Each soldier was issued a
fixed number of cartridges
before a raid.
And to prove to the white officers
that he hadn't wasted any,
the soldier had to bring back a cut hand
for each cartridge that he'd fired.
(eerie music)
- [Narrator] In each army unit,
solders were designated
to smoke the cut hands
to preserve them.
The hands were then taken to the officers
to show that all the
ammunition had been well-used.
- On the 14th of December, 1895,
Mr. Seurblum, Mrs. Banks, and myself
saw one of these sentries with
a basket full of smoked hands.
We got the sentry to stop
and show us how many he had.
He took them out of the basket
and laid them in a row before us.
18 right hands of men,
women, and children.
The sentry wanted to beat the woman
who was carrying them for him,
as he said there ought to
be 19, and she had lost one.
Surely, the King of the
Belgians cannot be cognizant
of these barbarous proceedings
on the part of his servants.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] A confidential
letter sent by a courtier
to the chief executive
of the Congo Free State
revealed that Leopold was
angry about being criticized
for the cruelties in the Congo.
But the letter also
quotes the king as saying,
"I know that atrocities are
being committed in the Congo.
"It is useless to try to deny it."
- I think one can assume that he knew,
maybe not all the details,
but that he knew that
the system of exploitation
of rubber in the Congo
had gruesome effects.
The point is did he
consider it too gruesome?
Probably not.
He thought this was the
price that has to be paid
for economic development or whatever.
He didn't care very much.
He thought that the profits
were more important.
(tense pensive music)
(water splattering softly)
(bells ringing melodically)
- [Narrator] Antwerp was where
the Congo rubber arrived.
According to legend, the city's name
comes from a confrontation
between a Roman soldier
and a giant who also cut off hands.
(bells ringing melodically)
Any connection between the city's symbol
and cut hands in the Congo
is seldom made in Antwerp.
It's as though the crimes of the Congo
are totally forgotten,
or worse, never happened.
(melancholic pensive music)
(eerie screeching music)
(birds chirping)
(chattering in foreign language)
- [Narrator] It was in
the Equator Province
where many of the worst abuses occurred.
Leopold had divided the Congo
into separate districts,
each under the control of a commissioner,
most often recruited from
and paid by the Belgian Army.
The Equator was run by an official
who stands out as one
of the great villains
of the Congo Free State.
Leon Fievez was a master
in the use of violence
to increase the rubber exports.
- He collected rubber
in enormous quantities,
at a rate of one ton a day, it's said.
Common report on the Congo
states that he caused
more than 1,000 persons to be mutilated.
It's also reported that he
boasted of the cruelties,
and certainly, the result of
them is evident to this day,
for the people fled from the
district in their thousands,
and have never returned.
(tense pensive music)
- [Narrator] When General Wahis,
Governor-General of the Congo,
made an official visit to
the equator region in 1896,
even he called it the land of horrors.
Fievez had no qualms about
the level of brutality.
He perfectly understood
that the state existed
only to make money, and
that rubber was the key.
For Leopold, Fievez was
the perfect employee,
loyal, efficient, and resourceful.
(mysterious music)
(foliage rustling)
- [Narrator] All that mattered to Leopold
was to keep up the supply of rubber.
But to get the Congolese to work hard,
he had to find a way to make
his agents work hard as well.
A confidential message went
to the governor-general.
Leopold was transmitting
his greed to the agents.
The state was going to pay
commission to stimulate zeal.
(tense music)
- Native life is considered
of no value by the Belgians.
No wonder the state is hated.
They talk of philanthropy
and civilization.
Where it is, I do not know.
(tense pensive music)
(chains rattling)
The state does not suppress slavery,
but established a monopoly by driving out
the Arab competitors.
This is no reasonable
way of settling the land,
it is merely persecution.
If the Arabs had been the masters,
it would be styled iniquitous trafficking
in human flesh and blood.
But being under the administration
of the Congo Free State,
it is merely a part of
liberating the natives.
(tense pensive music)
- [Narrator] Charles
Stokes, a British trader
working for the Germans,
was about to cause the king
his first major political problem.
Leopold was jealously guarding
his trade in the Congo,
completely against the agreements
made with the European powers at Berlin.
The king's orders were to
enforce the monopoly fiercely.
(pensive music)
Stokes was arrested for
trading in state territory,
and sentenced to death by
Captain Hubert Lothaire,
an officer well-known in the Congo.
- The people on the Lulange River call him
(speaking in foreign language).
Some four years ago, he
arrived with black troops
and pitched his camp.
He sent over to the missionary
to use his influence
to get the natives back.
The missionary, supposing he
was dealing with an officer
and a gentleman, induced the
natives to come to the station.
As soon as they did so,
Lothaire and his men opened fire on them.
(pensive music)
(clattering)
- [Narrator] The hanging was
a major political mistake.
Up till then, the victims
of the Congo Free State
had been African.
There was outrage in Britain and Germany.
In the end, the king
had to pay compensation
to both countries, and from now on,
the European powers were
increasingly weary of Leopold.
(chattering)
(tense music)
- [Joseph] To tear treasure
out of the bowels of the land
was their desire.
With no more moral
purpose at the back of it
than there is in burglars
breaking into a safe.
(tense music)
(rooster crowing)
- [Narrator] Leopold's response
to the pressure on him,
after the Stokes Affair, was very Leopold.
He set up new concessions
to exploit the rubber.
He claimed he was opening
the Congo to outsiders,
but the king made sure
his men were on the boards
of the new companies, and
he took 50% of the profits.
(tense music)
(chattering)
One of the concessions was given to ABIR,
the Anglo-Belgian Rubber
Company at Basankusu.
Here, the rubber was dried
before it was sent downriver
to be shipped to Antwerp,
and the concession
companies had found new ways
of maximizing profit.
(tense music)
Leopold's new companies
were taking the wives
of the rubber collectors hostage.
The women were only released
when sufficient rubber
had been collected.
The hostage system was organized
by the concession companies
with the full knowledge of the state
and of the king himself.
(tense music)
On official company forms,
the names of the hostages
were recorded, along with the
details of their condition,
and the length of time
they were to be detained.
(tense music)
The procedure was so institutionalized
that each of the company's agents
was given an official hostage license
authorizing them to detain women at will.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] When a
missionary asked a chief
how many women had been taken
hostage, the chief replied,
"Count the grains of sand, white man."
(tense music)
(yelling in foreign language)
(melancholic music)
The moment of truth in
Leopold's Congo Free State
came once every 15 days, when
the rubber was handed in.
The state talked about the rubber harvest
and the rubber market,
but the reality was completely different.
(melancholic music)
For the collectors, this was
when they would either get
their wives back or face
more punishment, even death,
if they had not met their targets.
For the agents, this was when
they would be able to start
calculating their commission,
and for the king, this was the proof
that his new concession companies worked
and brought him even more wealth.
(melancholic music)
(melancholic music)
- [Narrator] Leopold's
stranglehold on the rubber market
lasted for over 10 years
till the plantations of
Asia and South America
became serious competition.
The profits all went to Belgium,
but how much remains in the
hands of the royal family today
is still a matter of speculation.
(melancholic music)
Leopold once said about his Congo,
"What I do there is
done as a Christian duty
"to the poor Africans,
"and I do not wish to have one franc back
"of all the money I have expended."
As the 20th century began,
King Leopold found himself
facing the first major challenge
to his rule in Africa,
and it came from London.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Edmund Dene
Morel is one of history's
most underestimated heroes.
He rose from being a shipping clerk
to Leopold's foremost adversary.
He didn't have Leopold's royal pedigree,
but in everything else,
Morel was more than a match
for the king.
A Liverpool shipping line
handled Leopold's rubber cargoes,
and Morel got his first job there,
but he soon became a leading journalist
on West African affairs.
- Because he's working in
the West African trade,
he specializes in West African news,
so he's somebody who becomes
a specialist and expert
in Western Central African affairs.
And when he becomes chief
clerk to the Congo business,
he's somebody who does
a lot of to and froing,
between Antwerp and Liverpool,
because Antwerp is where a great deal
of the Congo trade is unloaded.
- [Narrator] At Antwerp docks,
Morel started unraveling
the truth about Leopold's Congo.
He described it as stumbling
upon a secret society
of murderers.
- [Narrator] Morel moved
to Harden in Wales,
left his job at the shipping line,
and began a personal
campaign against the king.
(pensive music)
In six months, he sent
out 15,000 brochures
and 3,700 letters.
Within a year, Morel
had his own newspaper,
the West African Mail.
Now he could get his message
to an even wider audience.
From his offices in Liverpool,
Morel gathered together
all the stories he could
about the events in the Congo,
and he set about trying to
enlist the missionaries' help.
But since the first wave of
outbursts against Leopold,
the missionaries had gone silent.
- They had the evidence,
they had the details,
they had the stories
that were going to grab
popular imagination,
that were going to make
the campaign take off.
But selfishly, the missionary societies
didn't want these stories circulated
because they didn't
want to offend Leopold.
They felt if they were critical at all,
they would be thrown out,
and that meant that they wouldn't achieve
their ultimate end,
which was the maximum
conversion of African souls.
I think they had a rather mechanistic view
of what they were doing.
And one soul converted was one step nearer
the Second Coming, if you like.
And if those converted souls
were subsequently mutilated
or murdered, well, so be it.
They died Christian, so what?
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Step by step,
Morel persuaded the missionaries
to come forward with articles
for his West African Mail.
One of the first was Charles
Banks from the Equator region.
- We heard a report
that the state soldiers
had attacked the village of Bandako Ajiko
because the rubber was
not of the best quality.
In a little shed, lay one
of my late school children,
a promising young lad.
I lifted the leaves by
which he was covered and
saw that his right hand had been cut off.
I then went through the
village and saw the people
burying their dead.
I counted over 20 bodies
of newly-filled graves.
All the bodies had the right hand cut off.
(tense music)
(singing in foreign language)
- [Narrator] 7,000 miles away,
Morel now had a new ally.
A stream of letters arrived at
the foreign office in London.
The British government
had appointed a consul
to Leopold's Congo Free State,
and the new consul was outraged.
- [Roger] Captain Van Kerckhoven told me
that he used to pay his native soldiers
five brass rods per human
head they brought him in
during the course of
any military operations.
- [Narrator] The consul
was Roger Casement,
a man with 20 years of African experience.
- Casement is a hugely romantic figure.
He's somebody rather
like Lawrence of Arabia.
He's someone who, I think, one could say
was probably a generation,
or a generation a half,
ahead of his time, in
terms of his attitude
towards the Africans.
He said himself that he loved
the Africans, he liked them.
He liked their company.
He wanted them to be friends.
They liked him.
He was someone who treated Africans
with much more gentility,
with much more consideration
than was usual for the time.
(water sloshing)
(eerie screeching music)
- [Narrator] In 1903,
Casement spent two months
traveling into the Upper Congo.
Morel's campaign had pressured
the British government
into conducting an official investigation.
Wherever Casement went,
he talked to Africans
and recorded their testimony.
(rumbling)
(splashing)
- [Narrator] Casement
realized, as had Morel,
that the missionaries
were the key witnesses,
and he wanted to persuade
them to go public
with what they knew.
(chattering)
(yelling)
He visited the town of
Ikoko on Lake Tumba,
where the missionary Joseph Clark lived.
(chattering in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Joseph Clark
was known to the Africans,
then and now, as (speaking
in foreign language).
He had been in the
Congo for over 20 years.
Clark and his wife supplied
evidence and witnesses
of the state's atrocities.
Casement stayed with them for 17 days.
(tense melancholic music)
(tense melancholic music)
- [Narrator] The villagers of Ikoko
still have to use the
same school and church
that Joseph Clark built
for them 100 years ago.
(tense melancholic music)
- [Narrator] On a beach by Lake Tumba,
Casement recorded how a
boy had both his hands
beaten off by soldiers
while a white officer
known as (speaking in foreign language),
The Leopard's Paw, stood by.
- [Roger] The white man,
(speaking in foreign language)
was not far off, and could
see what they were doing.
(chattering in foreign language)
(speaking in foreign language)
was drinking palm wine
while the soldiers beat
the boy's hands off
with their rifle butts against a tree.
(chattering in foreign language)
- [Narrator] The boy's name was
(speaking in foreign language).
Morel published his photograph
in the West African Mail.
(tense music)
Casement was so horrified
by everything that he'd seen
that on the day he left for England,
he delivered a vitriolic
letter to the governor-general,
knowing full well that meant
that he would never be allowed
to return.
(pensive music)
From the earliest days
of the Congo Free State,
book after book had
appeared regaling readers
with tales of the horrors
to be found there.
Others, like Stanley, had
told a different story,
but the king was facing a
mounting tide of criticism.
A war of words started.
Leopold commissioned books
and bribed journalists.
He established propaganda
offices in Brussels,
Frankfurt, and America
to defend his regime.
He published a monthly magazine
that was circulated around Europe.
Morel fought back, and now he
had another secret to reveal.
The West African Mail published a report
on a part of the Congo that
no one had known even existed.
(pensive music)
(birds chirping)
- [Narrator] The crown domain,
10 times the size of Belgium,
was completely sealed off,
but a missionary had managed to get in.
Morel got hold of his journal
and published the atrocities
committed by Shel
Massau, a Belgian officer
known to the Africans as
(speaking in foreign language).
- The white man, (speaking
in foreign language)
I feel ashamed of my color
every time I think of him,
would stand at the door of the store
to receive the rubber from
the poor, trembling wretches,
one man bringing in
under the proper amount.
The white man flies into a rage,
and seizing a rifle
from one of the guards,
shoots him dead on the spot.
The men who had tried
to run from the country
and had been caught were
brought to the station
and made to stand one behind the other,
as an Albini bullet was sent through them.
A pity to waste bullets on such wretches.
(pensive music)
(flies buzzing)
(gun fires)
Some of the stories are unprintable,
and much that I heard would
not pass muster in court,
but there were too many
witnesses and the consistencies
were too many for it all to be lies.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Baron Jules
Jacques is a Belgian hero
of the First World War.
In Leopold's time, he was one of the men
that the king trusted
to run the crown domain.
His behavior is well-illustrated in a memo
that is kept by the
Belgian foreign ministry,
but which is officially a
secret document to this day.
- [Narrator] Leopold's personal
profit from his crown domain
was 231 million euros.
(lively music)
As the movement against
Leopold gathered momentum,
Morel decided to turn up the pressure.
Liverpool became the headquarters
of the new Congo Reform Association.
(soft piano music)
- [Narrator] Morel's
Congo Reform Association
took the cruelty of Leopold's
Congo to public meetings
across the country.
A hymn was especially composed.
Britains awake, let righteous ire
kindle, within your soul, a fire.
Let indignation's sacred flame
burn for the Congo's wrongs and shame.
- He was a genius propagandist.
He really dragged the issue
to the center of the international stage.
He had the brilliant idea, in 1906,
when his book, Red Rubber, was published,
of putting on the front of it a picture
drawn from the Egyptian book of the god
of souls being weighed in the scales.
And in one pan of the scales,
they had a picture of Leopold
in all of his regalia,
and in the other side, they
had a simple black hand,
a severed hand.
And that's an extraordinary
symbol, really, of a movement.
That is really how to imprint something
on people's understanding,
to sum it all up in a single image.
And so, I think that,
you know, he really is
one of the fathers of
investigative journalism,
and of pressure group politics,
and of 20th century humanitarianism.
- [Narrator] Morel was
waiting for the publication
of Casement's report.
When it came, he was not disappointed.
The report ran for over 50 pages.
The British foreign secretary called it
proof of the most painful kind.
For Leopold, the report was a fatal blow.
(eerie screeching music)
- [Narrator] The Casement
report so unnerved the king
that he made a serious mistake.
In 1904, he sent his own
international commission
to the Congo to investigate.
He thought he could
control what they said.
He was wrong.
He hadn't counted on the
determination of one man,
John Harris, a missionary at Baringa.
Harris and his wife had set up a mission
right in the heart of a concession area.
Every day, they saw the crimes
that were being committed
against the Congolese.
As a result, Harris was waging his own war
against the state.
- To His Excellency, the
Vice Governor-General.
I have just returned from a journey inland
to the village of Insongo Mboyo.
The abject misery and utter abandon is
positively undescribable.
A few months ago, Monsieur
Piles took his sentries there.
A young woman, Iminega,
was tied to a forked tree
and chopped in half with a machete,
beginning at her left shoulder,
chopping through the chest and abdomen,
and out to the side.
It was in this way the sentries
punished the woman's husband.
Another woman, Balumba,
wishing to remain faithful
to her husband,
had a pointed stake forced into her womb,
and as this did not
kill her, she was shot.
I found that, as in other towns,
enforced public incest formed
amusement for the sentries.
I was so moved, Your Excellency,
by these people's stories
that I took the liberty of promising them,
in the name of the Congo Free State,
that in future, you will
only kill them for crimes.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Baringa, then and now,
was at the end of the Earth.
The Harrises set up a hospital
that still struggles on.
Then, like now, the missionaries
dealt with the impact
of war, terror, and deprivation.
(pensive music)
Then, like now, they face the
scourge of sleeping sickness.
(pensive music)
In Harris's day, the Congo
was torn apart for its rubber.
Now, it's ravaged for diamonds,
gold, and other minerals.
The result for the Congolese is the same:
generations of pain,
a whole archaeology of oppression.
(pensive music)
(chattering)
(water sloshing)
100 years ago, two
steamers came to Baringa.
On board were judges,
secretaries, state officials,
and soldiers.
Leopold's international
commission had arrived.
(tense music)
The commission judges had been
carefully chosen by the king
to ensure that the outcome
would be in his favor.
But John Harris had gathered
a host of Congolese witnesses
to testify.
As the judges listened to their evidence,
Leopold's plans were coming unstuck.
The villagers were confirming a truth
of Casement and Morel's accusations.
And worse still for the king,
Harris had made arrangements
for the evidence to be published by Morel.
(tense music)
(tense music)
(birds chirping)
(melancholic music)
- [Narrator] For three
months, Leopold's commission
collected the evidence for their report.
One incident stands out.
Lontulu, a chief from
a village near Baringa,
arrived unannounced.
He brought with him 110 twigs.
Each twig represented one of his villagers
killed by the state.
As he laid the twigs
in front of the judges,
he named each twig.
(melancholic music)
The state never forgave Lontulu,
and some weeks later, he
was tortured to death.
But when the commission
finally left the Congo,
the governor-general committed suicide.
He slit his throat with a razor.
(melancholic music)
When John Harris came back to England,
the journalist, W.T. Stead,
asked him if Leopold should be hanged
at the new International
Court of Justice at the Hague.
Harris replied, "I think
any international tribunal
"which had powers of a criminal court,
"would, upon the evidence
of the commission alone,
"send those responsible to the gallows."
- Well, the idea of one
of the great perpetrators
of European colonialism,
and one of the perpetrators
of European colonialism
at its most callous and unpleasant
being brought before
international court is,
I'll have to admit, not
an unattractive one.
And I suppose what we're
seeing at this time,
and of course, it's parse and parcel,
of this new imperialism,
this crude heavy-handed
aggressive violent imperialism,
is criticism in the worst.
One is seeing the development
of an international radical movement,
and people like Stead,
and people like Morel,
are the beginnings of a movement,
which eventually will
produce the League of Nations
and the UN.
And it would be attractive
to think that Leopold
could have been an early victim,
but unthinkable, I think, at the time.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] The commission's report
had vindicated Casement and Morel,
and when it was published, it
even had an effect in Belgium.
Leopold had tried to make
it as anodyne as possible,
but he had failed.
For the first time, Belgian intellectuals
and religious leaders came
out openly against the king.
(pensive music)
There was a real chance of annexation,
that Belgium would take
over control of the Congo.
Morel watched eagerly as, step by step,
the king's reign in the
Congo was drawing to its end.
(pensive music)
Red Rubber was published in 1906.
Morel knew the king was isolated.
Belgian annexation of
the Congo was inevitable,
but Morel was still pushing.
He wanted the change to happen now.
- [Morel] We demand that this shall stop,
not 15 years or five
years, or one year hence,
but now.
- [Narrator] Almost as
an admission of guilt,
Leopold ordered the burning of all
incriminating Congo state records.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Right to the
end, the king insisted
that the Congo was his and his alone,
but no one was listening anymore.
In 1908, the Congo
became a Belgian colony.
Belgium gave the king 50 million francs
as a mark of gratitude.
(tense music)
Leopold died the following year.
He had asked for a private funeral,
but he lost that request too.
At the funeral, his cortege
was booed as it passed.
Leopold, by the end of his reign,
had become the most hated man in Europe.
It seemed that justice had been done.
(tense music)
(tense music)
Leopold's statues are, in reality,
monuments to a nation's denial.
Despite being put in place after the king
had died in disgrace,
he is unashamedly
represented as a civilizer
and benefactor.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Almost as soon
as the Congo became Belgian,
the new owners began preaching
their colonial gospel,
the litany of how Belgium
was bringing civilization,
turning a wilderness into paradise,
was repeated over and
over to willing listeners.
- [Narrator] And the new Belgian
Congo made financial sense.
There were diamonds, gold,
and a whole host of minerals
that Belgium could exploit.
Leopold, before giving
up the Congo to Belgium,
had set up a giant mineral
exploitation industry.
Why shouldn't Belgium
take advantage of that
and enjoy the profits
without any of the guilt?
Belgians could feel comfortable
knowing their investments
in the Congo were for a good cause,
and enjoying the returns without shame.
Africans were being civilized,
and Belgium was getting richer.
Leopold had been right all along.
(upbeat music)
(melancholic music)
- [Narrator] In the years
since the Congo Reform Association,
Casement and Morel have also
sunk into the Congo amnesia.
Casement became an Irish nationalist
and was executed by the British
for plotting with the Germans
in the First World War.
Morel's pacifist views
made him deeply unpopular,
and he too was accused
of pro-German sympathies.
- Morel and Casement did both become,
in the course of the First World War,
associated with Germany.
They were seen as tainted figures,
and I think that's one reason that,
actually, the quite heroic achievements
of the Congo Reform Association
have been forgotten.
I think the other reason
it's been forgotten
is that the Congolese themselves
have not had the power or the leverage
on the international stage
in the way that Jews have,
in the way that black Americans have,
to push the Congo as one of
the world's great holocausts.
(melancholic music)
(water sloshing)
- [Narrator] The bloody history
of the Congo has continued.
Since 1998, perhaps as
many as four million people
have died there during a civil war.
Before that, a cruel
dictatorship imposed by the West.
Before that, colonization.
The UN regularly issues reports
on how the country is
still being exploited.
(melancholic music)
Yet another homage paid
to Leopold in Brussels,
this one put up just a few years ago.
Leopold would be proud.
As far as we know, nowhere
in the surviving records
of his reign, or of his Congo Free State,
is there ever an admission of guilt,
or a scintilla of remorse.
But who will ever know what
was going on in his mind
in 1909, as he lay dying?
(melancholic music)
- [Joseph] I saw, on that ivory face,
the expression of somber pride,
of ruthless power, of craven terror,
of an intense and hopeless despair.
Did he live his life again
in every detail of desire,
temptation, and surrender
during that supreme moment
of complete knowledge?
He cried in a whisper at
some image, at some vision.
He cried out twice,
a cry that was no more than a breath,
"The horror,
"the horror."
(tense pensive music)