Of the Europeans who
scrambled for control of Africa at the end of the 19th century,
Belgium's King Leopold II left arguably the largest and most horrid
legacy of all.
While the Great Powers
competed for territory elsewhere, the king of one of Europe's smallest
countries carved his own private colony out of 100km2 of Central African
rainforest.
He claimed he was doing it to
protect the "natives" from Arab slavers, and to open the heart of Africa
to Christian missionaries, and Western capitalists.
Instead, as the makers of BBC
Four documentary White King, Red Rubber, Black Death powerfully argue,
the king unleashed new horrors on the African continent.
Torment and rape
He turned his "Congo Free
State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the
harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death
of perhaps 10 million innocent people.
|
"I
was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's
stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future
you will only kill them for crimes they commit"
John Harris
Missionary in Baringa |
What is now called the
Democratic Republic of Congo has clearly never recovered.
"Legalized robbery enforced by
violence", as Leopold's reign was described at the time, has remained,
more or less, the template by which Congo's rulers have governed ever
since.
Meanwhile Congo's soldiers
have never moved away from the role allocated to them by Leopold - as a
force to coerce, torment and rape an unarmed civilian population.
Chopping hands
As the BBC's reporter in DR
Congo, I covered stories that were loud echoes of what was happening 100
years earlier.
The film opens with the
shocking images of some of Leopold's victims - children and adults whose
right hands had been hacked off by his agents.
They needed these to prove to
their superiors that they had not been "wasting" their bullets on
animals.
This rule was seldom observed
as soldiers kept shooting monkeys and then later chopping off human
hands to provide their alibis.
'Foreign correspondents'
Director Peter Bate uses
documented accounts of such atrocities to present an imaginary court
case against the monarch who he compares to a subsequent European
tyrant, Adolf Hitler.
He has an actor play the
bearded, heavily-set Leopold, fidgeting nervously as damning testimonies
are read out, compiled by the foreign correspondents of the day, the
missionaries.
John Harris of Baringa, for
example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he felt moved to
write a letter to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo.
"I have just returned from a
journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and
utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your
Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising
them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit."
Positive legacy
In the film's most powerful
sequences we see reconstructions of the terror caused by Leopold's
enforcers and agents.
We see a village burnt without
warning and its people rounded up; its men sent off into the forests,
and its women tied up as hostages and helpless targets of abuse until
their husbands return with enough wild rubber to satisfy the agent.
This, we are told, was the
"moment of truth" for the whole community.
If the men did not bring back
enough and the agent lost his commission, he would order the deaths of
everyone.
There is no doubt that
Congo's history, and White King, Red Rubber, Black Death are almost too
upsetting to bear, however Leopold did leave, albeit unwittingly, one
positive legacy - the birth of modern humanitarianism.
The campaign to reveal the
truth behind Leopold's "secret society of murderers," led by diplomat
Roger Casement, and a former shipping clerk ED Morel, became the first
mass human rights movement.
Its successors like Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch and the Kinshasa-based Voix des Sans
Voix and Journaliste En Danger mean abuses in modern day DR Congo can
never be hidden for long.
Congo: White king, red
rubber, black death will be shown on BBC Four in the UK on Tuesday, 24
February at 2100