The Congo Free State propaganda war was a worldwide media propaganda campaign waged by both King Leopold II of Belgium and the critics of the Congo Free State and its atrocities. Leopold was very astute in using the media to support his virtual private control of the Congo. British campaigner Edmund Dene Morel successfully campaigned against Leopold and focused public attention on the violence of Leopold's rule. Morel used newspaper accounts, pamphlets, and books to publish evidence from reports, eye-witness testimony, and pictures from missionaries and others involved directly in the Congo. As Morel gained high-profile supporters, the publicity generated by his campaign eventually forced Leopold to relinquish control of the Congo to the Belgian government.
Background The Congo Free State propaganda war (1884–1912) occurred at the height of European imperialism. Demand for goods drove European imperialism, and the European stake in Asia was confined largely to trading stations and strategic outposts necessary to protect trade. The advent of industrialization, however, dramatically increased European demand for raw materials which were scarce in Europe. The severe Long Depression of the 1870s provoked a scramble to develop new markets for European industrial products and financial services. European nations became determined to exploit the natural resources of Africa and develop new markets there.
Leopold's acquisition
Leopold thought overseas colonies were of critical importance to become a great power, and worked to establish colonial possessions for Belgium. The national legislature did not authorize the colonial enterprise, and Leopold eventually acquired a colony in the Congo for himself with money loaned by the Belgian government for the purpose.
After a number of unsuccessful schemes for colonies in Africa and Asia, he organized a private holding company in 1876, disguised as an international scientific and philanthropic association, called the International African Society (IAA). It had a flag and an executive council which he chaired. Leopold formulated and used the following explicit goals of the IAA to justify his ambitions in the Congo:
to suppress the slave trade in Equatorial Africa, to unite the native tribes, to modernize the peoples of the Congo River, to bring morality and an understanding of sin to the natives, and to advance the economy of the region.
In 1878 Leopold's holding company hired the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley to establish a colony in the region of the Congo.Hochschild, Adam: King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Mariner Books, 1998. pp. 62. . Before Stanley left for Africa, Leopold created an exploratory committee with funds of a million francs in gold. Chaired by Stanley, it promised to abide by the IAA's goals set forth by Leopold.
During the spring of 1884, Leopold started a campaign to convince the Great powers that the Congo Free State should be a sovereign nation and he its head of state. Much diplomatic maneuvering resulted in the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which representatives of fourteen European countries and the United States recognized Leopold as sovereign of most of the area he and Stanley had laid claim to.
After the conference Leopold told the members and reporters:
Using public diplomacy Leopold "conceived the idea of a Congo Free State, with himself as the Sovereign ruler."Jesse Siddall Reeves. "The International Beginnings of the Congo Free State." Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 12, no. 11–12 (1894), p. 26 The name suggested individual, economic, and religious freedoms. Leopold began a publicity campaign in Britain, drawing attention to Portugal's record of slavery to distract critics. He offered to drive slave traders from the Congo basin. He also secretly told British merchant houses that if he had formal control of the Congo, he would give Britain the same "most-favored-nation" status Portugal offered. At the same time, Leopold promised Otto von Bismarck he would not give any one nation special status, and that German traders would be as welcome as any other.
Leopold then offered France the Association's support for French control of the entire northern bank of the Congo River, and sweetened the deal by proposing that if his personal wealth proved insufficient to hold the entire Congo, as seemed inevitable, then control of the Congo would revert to France.
Leopold sent United States President Chester A. Arthur carefully edited copies of cloth-and-trinket treaties obtained by Stanley. He proposed that, as an entirely disinterested humanitarian body, the Association administer the Congo for the good of all, handing power to the local inhabitants as soon as they were ready for that grave responsibility. He worked to convince the United States, with its growing economic and military power, to recognize the treaties and the Congo Free State. Leopold's men told Southern congressmen that the Congo Free State could be a new home for freedmen from the Deep South. The politicians loved the idea. He promised the President open and free trade.
In April, the U.S. Congress decided that the treaties had legal standing and that the Congo was a sovereign state under the Belgian king. France's recognition soon followed, and then Germany, and soon all the other European nations. Since the IAA was seen as a legitimate government of a recognized sovereign state, Bismarck invited King Leopold to discuss African affairs with the Great Powers of Europe.
On November 15, 1884, the International Conference met to resolve "the African question" concerning the disposition of African territories among European powers. After long debate and ten sittings, the Great Powers agreed on borders for their colonies, without input from any African leader or thought to the deeply rooted ethnic and tribal politics. The Congo Free State encompassed nearly , the largest claim in central Africa.
"Red Rubber"
Leopold profited from the ivory of the resource-rich Congo and even more from its rubber, a primary product of the Congo. Rubber vines grew throughout central Africa; but harvesting rubber from a vine was more difficult than that from a tree. So prices for African rubber went up, and Asian producers of less expensive rubber gained market share.
Consequently, Leopold demanded very high productivity from workers and a system of extracting rubber with minimal expense. Leopold's agents used forced labor or slave labor to get rubber and ivory, a clear violation of the Berlin Conference Act.The Berlin Conference, The General Act of Feb 26, 1885. Chap I, VI. To keep high production numbers constant, Leopold created an army of enforcers called the Force Publique (FP) in 1885, when he ordered creation of military and police forces. In 1886, he sent a number of Belgian officers and non-commissioned officers to the territory to create this military force.
Humanitarian disaster
The Force Publique became slave drivers, forcing people to work for nothing. They also enforced Leopold's law forbidding the sale of rubber and ivory to foreign nations. The FP's methods included mutilation, village destruction, killings, and mass murder to motivate the slaves and locals to higher outputs. Cutting off right hands and daily slave whippings were most common.
This brutality would later be dubbed "Red Rubber", in reference to the blood of Africans. The FP caused millions of deaths, perhaps tens of millions, and even more widespread mutilation.
Leopold denied knowing any of these details. Belgian professor estimated Leopold gained present day euros from the exploitation of the Congolese people, mainly from rubber. Other Belgian sources calculated that the profits from the Congolese exploitation prior to 1905 were some present-day euros..
Rubber yielded huge profits for the state and for companies like the Abir Congo Company. The value of Abir shares went from 500 francs (1892 gold francs) to 15,000 gold francs in 1903. The dividend in 1892 was 1 franc. In 1903 the dividend was 1,200 francs, more than double of the original price of a share.
The media war
The missionaries and the Congo King Leopold allowed several hundred foreign Protestant missionaries from Britain, the United States, and Sweden to travel to the Congo. Leopold welcomed the missionaries into the colony, given that their presence would help legitimize his rule to the outside world. The missionaries travelled to the Congo to evangelize, to fight polygamy, and to create a fear of sin in Africans. But the Congolese would run and hide at the mere sight of a European.
One British missionary wrote that his African congregation asked, "Has the Savior you tell us of any power to save us from the rubber trouble?" Other missionaries became aware of bloody events around their posts. One Swedish missionary noted a sorrowful song about death and tyranny that many sang at his post. Some missionaries began to protest the violence through personal letters to Leopold, as well as through letters to newspapers and magazines. Their efforts had little effect in drawing public attention to the situation.
William Sheppard
In the late 1880s William Sheppard, an African-American Protestant missionary, started to write to American newspapers and magazines about the mutilations and murder that he witnessed. With threats of taxation and deportation, Leopold put a stop to Sheppard's writing. Leopold subsequently demanded that missionaries direct all concerns to him and not to the press.
E. V. Sjöblom Swedish Baptist missionary E. V. Sjöblom spoke of the atrocities to all who would listen. In 1896 he published in the Swedish press a detailed article on the Congo's rubber industry, and this was reprinted elsewhere. He spoke about the brutality of the Force Publique at a public meeting attended by the press. Congo State officials counterattacked with newspaper articles, letters, and comments from Leopold in the Belgian and British press, and quickly silenced Sjöblom.
George Washington Williams
Colonel George Washington Williams served in the Union army during the Civil War. Williams entered a seminary and became a pastor. After moving to Washington, D.C., he started a national black newspaper, the Commoner. The newspaper folded and so did one in Cincinnati. He became a well-respected historian through his writings and lectures.
In 1889, Williams began writing for the European press syndicate. After an interview with Leopold, Williams went to the Congo to see "Christian civilization" in action. In early April 1891 Williams wrote a letter to Leopold entitled An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo about the suffering of the region at the hands of Leopold's agents. The letter helped sway European and American public opinion against the Congo regime.Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold's Ghost, Pan Macmillan, London (1998). . Williams' last pages accuse Leopold of a list of crimes, including manipulation of the general public. He voiced his disbelief: "How thoroughly I have been disenchanted, disappointed, and disheartened."George Washington Williams, "An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of the Congo" repr., John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 243–254.
He then wrote A Report upon the Congo-State and Country to the President of the Republic of the United States of America describing how Leopold had manipulated the United States. By the time President Benjamin Harrison received his copy, the open letter had appeared in European and American newspapers. On 14 April 1891, The New York Times ran a front-page article on the full list of allegations.
Leopold vs. Williams