The Rest Is History - 539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

“A secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader”. In 1885 King Leopold of Belgium; an awkward, ruthless, selfish man, was recognised as the sovereign of the Congo. Long determined to carve out his very own private colonial domain, he had alighted upon the Congo - Africa’s vast and unplundered interior. With the help of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who had found a way to circumnavigate the Congo’s formerly insurmountable rapids, he concocted a cunning scheme to legally make it his own, while casting himself as a civilising saviour. Yet, despite his ostensibly philanthropic motivations, Leopold’s goal was always profit. More specifically, ivory, and later rubber, and before long a thriving hub of industry had been established in the Congo, bustling with soldiers, traders and missionaries. Meanwhile and most significantly, tens of thousands of Congolese people were being beaten, coerced and essentially enslaved into harvesting and carrying the riches of their land for their European oppressors. Their treatment was barbaric, the conditions in which they were made to live grotesque, and their suffering unimaginable. It was there, in King Leopold's Congo, that for years some of the worst violations of human life in all of human history were perpetrated. A terrible, secret heart of darkness, Until, at last, a young shipping clerk in Antwerp stumbled across something that would change the course of history forever... Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss Western history’s most brutal and barbaric colonial conquest: King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo Free State and her people. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Editor: Jack Meek Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is the restishistory.com. A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope, each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bites swung between them, rhythmically clinking. All their meager breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily

uphill. They passed me within six inches without a glance with that complete death-like indifference of unhappy savages. Behind this raw matter one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off, and seeing a white man on the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be. He was speedily reassured, and with a large white, rascally grin and a glance at his charge,

seemed to take me into partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings. Joseph Conrad, of course, writing in Heart of Darkness, which he wrote in 1899. And he sat down to write that nine years after he himself had visited the Congo Free State as a merchant seaman, captaining a steamer, the roade belge, the king of the Belgians, up the Congo deep into the interior, just as Marlow in Heart of Darkness will do. And Marlow is describing their experiences that Conrad himself, we know, definitely had. He saw scenes like that, preparatory to taking the steamer up the river to meet the mysterious and enigmatic, charismatic Mr. Kurtz. And what he's seeing, of course, is a chain gang

of porters escorted by an armed African officer building the railway that will facilitate Leopold II's control of this vast expanse of the Congo that he's been given at a conference in Berlin where no Africans were in attendance. And Conrad, when he went to the Congo, initially was a true believer. He trusted the philanthropic intentions of Leopold II, but by the time he left, he had a very, very different perspective. And you know, the last line, Dominic, of that passage that we read, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings. I mean, a deep and painful sense of irony there. Very definitely self accusatory. Absolutely. A very self lacerating irony there, the high

and just proceedings. And today's episode will be quite a dark subject. So we're going to get into the realities of the Congo Free State under the regime of King Leopold. I mean, Dominic, just to emphasise, you said in the previous episode that this bears comparison with the great atrocities of the 20th century. So we should warn people that there are a lot of, a lot of horrors in this. There are indeed. Before we get into them, let's remind ourselves what happened last time. Central character was King Leopold, the second king of the Belgians, this lonely, awkward, selfish, ruthless man, whom we likened in that episode, Tom, to you. And he has carved out his own private colonial fiefdom, a huge chunk of central Africa with

the Congo snaking through his heart, somewhere between 8 and 12 million people maybe living there. His agent, his operative Henry Morton Stanley, the great explorer, though bloodstained explorer, has signed treaties with 450 different settlements, giving their land, their economic rights and crucially their labour to the International Association of the Congo, which has proved to be a front for the Congo Free State, which has been set up from May 1885. In all this process, Leopold has assured the world, and in particular, the other governments of Europe, that his motives are philanthropic. Even six years later, he told the Belgian Prime Minister, the Congo state is certainly not a business.

If it gathers ivory on certain of its lands, that is only to lessen its deficit. In other words, we're paying out so much money because we're so committed to the philanthropic civilizing mission that we promised that we need to gather a little bit of ivory to make ends meet. This, it is worth saying very starkly, is completely untrue. From the very beginning, Leopold is really interested, I think, only in one thing, and that is maximizing his profits. And the proof of that is what he does on the very first day of the Congo Free State's existence. So on the 29th of May, 1885, the day that it is proclaimed, he issues a decree that all vacant land now belongs to the state, i.e. to him. But because

the word vacant is not defined, what is vacant land What does that mean in in a world like the Congo where? The the locals don't necessarily have the same concept of property rights as Belgians do that Effectively means the entire land of the Congo in what court presumably there are no courts in the Congo Leopold is failing all this. I mean, what is this? Who is this designed to impress people back in Europe? The decree. Yeah. The decree is, it's an order being sent out to operatives in the Congo. It's not a question of, he's issuing orders to his officials.

That's how it works. But he's kind of garbing it in legalese. Yes. Just in case outsiders might intrude. As he has done with the treaties, right? He needs to have something to show the other European. If anyone asks, as we will discover in next week, when people do start to ask, he needs to have a paper trail that he can show to say, I'm doing it all completely above board.

So what now happens is that the territory of the Congo Free State, remember, 67 times the size of Belgium, the size of Britain, Spain, Italy, France and Germany put together, this is carved up into gigantic territories which are awarded as concessions to private companies. Now most of these companies are owned by Belgian shareholders but in most cases at least 50% of the shares belong to King Leopold himself. In other words, even where he's handed out concessions, and it's not the Congo Free State running the territory itself, he is going to get the lion's share of the profits. And what is more, when those companies pay tax or they pay tolls, they pay it to him.

So he wins everywhere you look at it. So how is the Free state going to work? It is slightly different from other European columnists because it has a tiny, tiny infrastructure. So if you think about India in the same period, there was an Indian civil service in Britain. Thousands of people applied to it. There were exams. It was very sought after, prestigious, and thousands of people were sent out to work as kind of district commissioners and officials and all

of this kind of thing. And it's all very obvious what it is. It's very public. And India is a very connected country. It's got the railroads now and all that kind of stuff. So people can see what is going on. Exactly. And there are newspapers and there are people on the spot and there are people literate in English among the Indians. Yes, of course. So people know what's going on but that's not the case in the Congo. It's not the case in the Congo and the numbers are far, far smaller. So after five years of the Congo Free State's existence, there are still fewer than 500 Europeans working in the Congo as traders, soldiers, missionaries, officials and so on. The biggest of these groups, and it's no more than 80 people, are based in this new capital,

which is the port of Boma. That's pretty much where Stanley had finished his famous trek across the heart of Africa. And so in Boma, they have built docks, they've built warehouses, there's a hotel, there's a military base, there's a hotel, there's a military base, there's a hospital, there's a post office and so on. The governor general is based there, but the governor general really is a cipher. We won't be mentioning any governors general because they're not important. All the decisions are made in Brussels by a tiny cabinet of officials who are answerable to Leopold.

So in effect, he rules the Congo. I've written in the notes an absolute monarch, but that's not quite the right term. Actually, the right term is a proprietor. He is the owner of the Congo and he runs it as the chairman of the board. He has the final decision. As for the other white men in the Congo, they are strung out along the river in a line of these kind of makeshift stations. So often these stations are no more than a handful of thatched huts and kind of block houses with the flag of the Congo Free State, the blue flag with the gold staff.

And it's in one of these stations that Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's novella is based. Exactly, the inner station right in the heart of the interior. Now, if you are sent out there, if you go out there, you will have servants. Your contract stipulates that you can have a bottle of wine a day and your contract also promises you a regular supply of marmalade from England, Dutta from Denmark, foie gras, which would appeal to the airware producer, canned meat and so on and so forth. But whether, which would appeal to the air producer, canned meat and so on and so forth.

But whether or not the men get these supplies regularly is of course a very different matter because it depends on the steamboats. Almost all of the men who go are single, very uncommon for them to take wives. Most of them take up with local women. And they're not necessarily Belgian, are they? In fact, most of them aren't Belgian. No, most of them are not Belgian because as we said in the last episode, most Belgians are not interested in having a colony. You know, they are, they're not.

Imperially minded people. No, and they're not particularly maritime people either. So the idea of, of getting on a ship and going out, you know, Belgium doesn't really have a merchant Navy at this point. Well, it's interesting, isn't it? That Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Conrad specifies that he's the son of an Anglo-French union and that all of Europe went into making him.

He's not Belgian, that's Mr. Kurtz. The one group that is very heavily represented among the people who work for the Congo Free States is people who have been in the military. And that, as we will see, tells its own story. So these guys have two things that other Europeans don't have. Cause people maybe who listened to the last episode may be wondering if other Europeans found this so difficult and didn't go up the Congo, what do these chaps have? They have two things.

One, they have automatic machine guns. So the Maxim gun, which was the first automatic repeating gun was invented in 1884. That was the year that Stanley completed all the treatises for Leopold. So whatever happens, we've got the Maxim gun and they have not. Exactly. And the second thing is modern medicine. So the thing that was always poppable off going up the Congo was the threat that you would die of disease. In 1881, scientists have proved that yellow fever was carried by mosquitoes, so people are now traveling with mosquito nets. And they're also traveling with enormous quantities of quinine

to fight malaria, which they have imported from plantations in the Dutch East Indies, sign of the globalization of the world. Of course. And also they've got steamboats. I mean, that's the other crucial thing to emphasize. No steamboats, no colony. I think that's fair to say. Yeah, because they couldn't get into the interior. The house that walks on water, the Congolese call these boats. They did indeed. All of that said, the death rate is still actually quite high.

So the question is, why on earth would you go? And I think the answer is that the Congo appeals to the kind of people who might otherwise have gone to the Klondike or to the Rand in South Africa, or indeed might have joined the French Foreign Legion or something like that. Well, because Europe is a piece, isn't it? And it's the kind of bourgeois, faintly boring piece. Yes.

So if you want adventure, this would be perfect. Exactly so. So Adam Hochstrahlt in his brilliant book, King Leopold's Ghost, that we've mentioned quite a lot, he says, someone fated for life as a small town bank clerk or a plumber in Europe could instead become a warlord, an ivory merchant, a big game hunter and a possessor of a harem. And he quotes a brilliant letter from a Belgian officer to his family in 1894. Vive le Congo, says this guy, there is nothing like it. We have liberty, independence and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society. Here

one is everything. Warrior, diplomat, trader. Why not? But that sense of freedom is, as we will see, founded on the servitude of others. Exactly it is. He uses the word trader, that Belgian officer. And of course what lies behind that and what lies behind the entire project is the single word ivory. That is what they are here for. Getting ivory is dead easy. You just shoot and kill an elephant and then rip out its tusks.

The hard part is getting the ivory out of the Congo. So Leopold so far is relying entirely on steamboats, but there is that 200 mile section around the rapids where you can't use the steamboat. So here you have to go over land. And ideally what you need is not team supporters trudging up and down the trail, you want a railway. Yeah, of course. So by 1887, he has a team of surveyors sketching

a route around the rapids, and it will take a very long time. They don't actually start laying tracks until 1890, because the terrain is so difficult because of the threat of disease and so on. So for now, he has to rely on tens of thousands of porters, hence what we talked about in the introduction. Again, isn't that kind of, I mean, a tremendous scam that the basically the servitude of these people, you know, chained up as we heard in that kind of opening passage from Conrad, is justified by saying, well, they need to do it so that we can have the railways so that we won't need porters.

Yes, exactly. They're building a railway in their own interests. It's kind of progressive hard labor. Yeah. Because once we finished the railway, they'll have a brilliant life because there won't be porters anymore. That's basically the logic. That's the justification. And of course what they're carrying, they're carrying the steamboats, but

they're also carrying the marmalade, the foie gras, the rifles, machine gun ammunition, all of this stuff. They're not paid because under the Congo free states laws, there is no money for Africans. Africans are not allowed money. So they are being paid generally in brass, sometimes in cloth, but in these kind of brass rods, which is a kind of strange makeshift currency. And we've quoted from Heart of Darkness already, but we don't need to go to fiction to know how they're treated. A Free State official in his memoirs, and this is a quotation that's so like Conrad's quotation, it's extraordinary, a file of poor devils chained by the neck carried my trunks and boxes towards

the dock. He says there are a hundred of them trembling and fearful, the overseer walking by with his whip. For each stocky and broad-backed fellow, how many were skeletons dried up like mummies, their skin worn out, seamed with deep scars, covered with separating wounds. And then he says, again with a kind of bitter irony, no matter, they were all up to the job. And then a Belgian senator visited in 1896. Again, he says, everywhere we went, unceasingly we meet these porters, black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loincloth, frizzy and barehead, supporting the load. They come and go like this by the thousand, requisitioned by the state, armed with its

powerful militia, handed over by chiefs whose slaves they are and who make off with their salaries, dusty and sweaty, insects spreading out across the mountains and valleys, their task of Sisyphus, dying alongside the road or the journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages." So that's not an entirely positive report, is it? No, no, that's a very critical report by this Belgian guy. But there's actually worse to come because that first quotation, the Free State official mentioned an overseer twirling a whip. And this whip becomes the supreme symbol abroad of King Leopold's model colony, because this is a whip called the chicot.

And it's basically a strip of hippopotamus hide that's been dried in the sun. It has a very sharp edge, doesn't it? Yeah. So it breaks the skin. 25 strokes of that you will pass out. 100 strokes of that will almost certainly kill you. And there are all kinds of accounts from people who see Leopold's soldiers, his enforcers, flogging children who are sometimes as young as seven or eight.

There's an official called Stanislas Lefranc, a Belgian magistrate, who arrived in the Congo. He saw these boys being flogged. These are like eight-year-old boys. And the reason is that they had all laughed in the presence of an official. And he was so cross. He told his men to flog every boy, every servant boy in the town, 50 lashes. So that's very like the, um, the SS officer in the Polish village with the school boys. Yes, it is.

Flogging them. Yeah. And Lefronc complained and it was stopped. But afterwards, Lefranc was called in by his superiors and they said to him, don't do that again, because that undermines discipline. We need discipline in this town. And most Europeans just seem to have taken the use of the chicote for granted. They don't wield it themselves. They get Africans to do it for them. Well, they get people who've been flogged to kind of give a salute, don't they? They have to stand up and give the salute.

Absolutely, you do. So the enforcers, this is a private army called the Force Publique. I mean, an absolutely terrifying organisation. By the mid 1890s, there were about 19,000 men in it. It's the biggest army in Central Africa, and it's a private army with a small group of white officers and the men are all black Africans. The officers tend to be Belgian. The ordinary soldiers initially, they are mercenaries from West Africa or from Zanzibar, but over time they're replaced with conscripts from the Congo.

I say conscripts, but there is an argument these are effectively slave soldiers. There's all kinds of evidence in the Belgian files of orders for chains and things, chains required to bring young men or boys from the interior to work in the force public. We know that agents were paid a bonus for how many men they provided for the force public. Some of them would buy teenage boys from friendly chiefs. And these teenage boys, when they were maybe chained, led to a barracks, told they had to join the army. They would serve a seven year term. They were incredibly badly treated.

I mean, they themselves are flogged with a chicot and they spend an awful lot of time fighting among themselves, basically fighting mutinies. So in the book, King Leopold's Ghost, there are long narratives of kind of these hideous, bloody mutinies where forced public units have turned against their officers and then other units have to be brought in to deal with them. And if they're not fighting mutinies, they're fighting rebels. Because we said last time how ethnically fragmented the Congo is. they're fighting rebels because we said last time how ethnically fragmented the Congo is. It has a long history of ethnic violence before the Belgians ever arrived, a history that

never really goes away. And you could argue that the force public and indeed the free state generally is just a new player in an endlessly, a new and deadly player in an endlessly shifting world of kind of rivalries and alliances. So this would be like the conquistadors turning up and kind of embroiling themselves in the politics of Mexico. Exactly. But I mean, the horror is off the scale. There's nothing ever been like anything like this in the Congo. No, I mean, these campaigns, these rebellions and kind of guerrilla campaigns and counterinsurgency operations can last for 10, 20 years. And they involve, I mean, when Francis Ford Coppola turned Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse

Now, there was a real logic to that because actually these counterinsurgency campaigns look very much like the Vietnam War. Villages being burned to the ground, civilians being rounded up and murdered, women being raped, children being enslaved. It's kind of hideous, hideous scenes. But the difference is that there are no journalists on the spot, there are no cameras, there's nothing to record this. It is happening I suppose in a kind of darkness you would say. It is indeed. Now some people listen to this may say you're presenting a very, very dark picture. You've obviously read this, this book that presents a very bleak picture of life in

the Congo, is there a more positive side? Next week, we'll do a bonus episode for our Restless History Club members talking about the critics of, of the Adam Horschel's book and people who have said, oh, there's actually another side to the story but just one note on this leopold of course promise. A civilizing mission but it's fair to say there's actually very little evidence of that so there are no state funded schools for african children for example there are some religious foundations but there's no attempt whatsoever to set up a state educational infrastructure. He does, however, have children's homes, which are called children's colonies, but the point of them is merely to provide recruits for the force public. So the world is told that these are orphanages for children with no parents, but often these are the surviving children of people who have been killed in the kind of counterinsurgency operations and dragged back in these hideous forced marches in

which maybe a third of the children will die and then they're put in these children's homes where discipline is enforced by with the chain and with the chicot. About half of the children in these homes die. And if you live, you then join the force public in your turn. So the cycle continues. How are the people who are organizing this feeling about this? They feel great about it by and large. They have no moral qualms about what they're doing. Well, some do, of course. And we'll get on to this. I mean, Conrad does famously.

Yes, but Conrad, we will do an episode on Heart of Darkness next week, in which we'll get onto this. I mean, Conrad does famously. Yes. But Conrad, we will do an episode on Heart of Darkness next week in which we'll discuss how when Conrad went on his journey on the way back, he's, he writes letters home to friends and relatives. And he says, you know, nobody, nobody talks to me. Everybody hates me. I'm very isolated. Everybody regards me as repugnant. And an obvious explanation for this is that he has shown his shock at

what he sees and his disgust. And other people say he's, he is unsound. He's not to be trusted. He's not one of us. Because he comes out of that absolutely traumatized, doesn't he? Yeah. I mean, he basically, he kind of crawls back to London and just can't talk about what he's seen. Right. But I can't believe about what he's seen. Right. But I can't believe that there aren't other people who...

There are other people. I mentioned that magistrate, Lefranc, who said, stop flogging the boys and is then told off for it and said, you're undermining discipline. So there are such people. But going out and killing the parents of boys who you then enslave, I mean, that's a kind of, I mean, dare one say, evil? You're speaking as somebody who's then enslave. I mean, that's a kind of, I mean, dare one say evil. You're speaking as somebody who's unaware of history. I mean, people often behave like this. I'm aware that similar things happened in, for instance, in the conquest of Mexico,

but there are Spanish priests who are opposing it. You know, there are voices of conscience in these expeditions. There are voices of conscience conscience and we will come to some next week. We will come to the people who give information to the campaigns against King Leopold. But they often seem to be missionaries and well we'll come to that. I mean there are a lot of missionaries who are not working for the Belgian state. I'm just thinking particularly about the officers who are presiding over this horrific system. The military men, they're all for it. I mean, there are lots of accounts of military men who say, the Congo is actually brilliant.

You can do what you like. It's much better than being at home in Europe. You can be a big man. You can be a, remember that quote? You can be a warlord if you want. I think that the truth of the matter is we're not talking about huge quantities of men. Remember 500 maximum. By and large, if you go and if you stay more than a few weeks, you're signed up to the project.

If you don't like it, you go home straight away if you don't like that project, I would say. You find a reason to get out. But if you go, you become desensitized very quickly. I mean, it's rather like asking how did We you know, Wehrmacht officers justify what they're doing in 1941? They find the way of doing it. That is a huge question.

But you see, I don't think that's a very hard question to answer because I think human beings often behave like that in history because I have a very bleak view of human nature. It's not a puzzle to me because I just see it recur again and again. I'm always surprised reading accounts of the Belgian officers and we've talked about how Belgium is not an empirically minded nation, how few of them seem to have had any qualms at all. You can argue that there are two things we have. I mean, there's an imperialistic mentality and there's of course a racist mentality. So they don't regard the Africans as people like themselves and they believe they

have a right to treat them as they choose. I suppose also it's self-selecting that perhaps, you know, you're going out in the middle of the jungle. You don't go to the Congo to work as a mercenary if you're a kind of, if you've got a bleeding heart, I think it's fair to say. Yeah, but there are bleeding hearts and there are bleeding hearts. I still think it is striking how few of these officers seem to have said, oh, I'm not sure about this.

But I think that tells its own story. I mean, that's the thing that they're self-selecting and the weight of their prejudices, their cultural baggage means that they are perhaps predisposed to think it's okay. It's also kind of what Heart of Darkness is about. That, so we will come to that. But just before we go to the break, there's one thing that we've completely missed in this episode, and that is an African voice.

And the truth is, they are really hard to come by, because as we said before, people aren't writing things down. We do get fragmentary sources collected in interviews. So here's a really good example that also answers your question. There was a Free State agent who I think was American born called Edgar Canisius. And later on, he ends up basically turning against the Free State and giving a lot of information to campaigners against it. And he collected stories from people. And one of them is a woman called Ilanga from the east of Congo, who had been kidnapped by the Force public. And she told her story to Canisius and he repeated it.

He was convinced that she was telling the truth because he also met the men who had kidnapped her. So he said, I believe her when she's telling me what happened. I'll just read an extract before we go to the break to give you people a sense of what this was like on the ground. So this is a Alanga. She says, we're all busy in the fields when a runner came to the village saying that a large band of men was coming and that many white men were with them. Three or four came to our house and caught hold of me. Also my husband Alika and my sister Katinga. We were dragged into

the road and tied together with cords about our necks. We were all crying. For now we knew that we were to be taken away to be slaves. We set off marching very quickly. My sister Katinga had her baby in her arms, but my husband Alika was made to carry a goat. We had nothing to eat, for the soldiers would give us nothing. On the fifth day the soldiers took my sister's baby and threw it in the grass, leaving it to die, and made her carry some cooking pots. On the sixth day we became very weak from lack of food and from constant marching and my husband who marched behind us with the goat sat down beside the path and refused to walk more. The soldiers beat him but still he refused to move. Then one of them struck him on the head with the end of his gun and he fell upon the ground. One of the soldiers caught the

goat while two or three others stuck the long knives they put on the end of their guns into my husband. I saw the blood spurt out and then saw him no more, for we passed over the brow of a hill and he was out of sight." So that Dominic is the reality of what Marlow called the high and just proceedings of King Leopold's Congolese fiefdom. So that was the reality of what Marlow called the high and just proceedings of King Leopold's Congo and a sombre moment, Dominic, on which I think we should go and take a break. Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes

of pain, abandonment and despair. They were dying slowly, it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. So Conrad again, in Heart of Darkness 1899, and his narrator

Marlowe has arrived in the Congo and is climbing up the hills that lead to the Congo that is navigable. And he is witnessing workers who are building the railway that will expedite European access to the highlands and he is not exaggerating there, is he? I mean, there were hundreds, thousands of people who died during the construction of that railway. That's absolutely right.

And we'll get onto the railway and the people who died working on it a little bit later, but to go back, Conrad made his journey up the Congo in 1890. And it was about this point that this terrible story entered a new chapter that was even darker than before. And this new period, this terrible period in the Congo's history, traces its origin, not to Belgium actually, but to Belfast in Northern Ireland. So in October 1887, an inventor called John Dunlop had attached a pneumatic

rubber tire to his son's tricycle as an experiment to see if this would work. And within three years, the Dunlop company were making tires commercially. And from that point onwards, there's a huge bicycle craze, a bicycle boom with these rubber pneumatic tires. I mean, people have been familiar with rubber for a while, haven't they? Cause it's, um, is it end of the 18th century that it gets its English name because somebody notices that you can use rubber to rub things out. Yeah.

I think something like that. I mean, people have known about it certainly for decades, but it's only in this point in the early 1890s, the worldwide rubber boom really gets underway. And I guess it's because people need rubber insulation for the new telephone, for telegraphs, for electrical wiring, so electrification promotes rubber, the enthusiasm for rubber in bicycles, but also it's used in tubes and in factories and all these kinds of things. So it's the great more of industry.

Absolutely. Now, where do you get rubber? You can get wild rubber or you can get plantation rubber. In the Congo, in the forests of the Congo, rubber vines are very plentiful. The costs, as with ivory, are very low. You don't need to cultivate it, you don't need fertilizers, you don't need equipment, you just need people to go and collect the rubber and I'll explain how they do that in a second. So for Leopold, this is amazing. A rubber boom has started and as luck would have it, he has one of the world's great supplies of rubber. But he knows he's only got a limited window in which to do this because investors were already pouring money into plantations of rubber trees in Asia and in South America and rubber trees are much easier to tap than rubber vines.

And that will give him what, about 20 years? He's got 20 years to tap the rubber vines in the Congo before these trees become as it were operational. And also his investments in the Congo, I mean, he's quite heavily in debt, isn't he? So he needs to leverage his assets urgently if the whole thing isn't just going to come crashing down around his ears. Absolutely right. Now, how do you get the rubber? Here's the catch. Wild rubber comes from these gigantic vines that wind their way around these trees. And these vines can

grow so high, 100 feet high, they go up to the sunlight. And then once they're there, they'll sort of corkscrew for hundreds more feet through the kind of jungle canopy, the forest canopy. And to get the rubber out of the vine, you basically have to slash the vine with a knife, and then you hung a pot or a bucket to collect this kind of milk, the sap that comes from the vine.

Now the downside of doing that in the Congo is when you go into the forest, a lot of it is, is swamp. So it's kind of flooded, you're wading through it and you're surrounded by snakes, crocodiles and all this kind of thing. So it's, it's a, it's a health and safety nightmare. I think it's fair to say Tom. Now, once you've got the sap, the milky stuff, you need to dry it. You want it to coagulate into the rubber.

So what a lot of gatherers would do is they would get it, they'd cut the vine, the stuff comes out, then they spread it. I know this sounds really weird. They spread it on their own body. They wait till it's dried and then they kind of rip it off their body. Imagine how painful that is. Bits of hair in it. And then they put it into baskets and carry it with the baskets on their heads.

They will walk for tens and tens of miles down to the river to the nearest European agency. And here the rubber will be again left out to dry and then it will be loaded onto barges for the coast. So as all of that makes clear, it's quite an operation for the person who's actually gathering the rubber. I mean, you don't want to be eaten by a crocodile. Yeah. It's not a great job, is it? No, it's not something you choose to do. It's quite an operation for the person who's actually gathering the rubber. I mean, you don't want to be eaten by a crocodile. Yeah. It's not a great job, is it? No, it's not something you choose to do. It's podcasting is a better career choice.

I think it's fair to say basically nobody wants to do it. The only way you'll get people to do it is to force them to do it. Yeah. So there's, there's an official isn't there who says the native doesn't like making rubber, he must be compelled to do it. And there you have it. So this is where the force public, the sort of mercenary force, the private army of King Leopold and the various militias that have been enlisted by the

concession companies, where they come in, their job is to get round people up and get them to go and get this rubber. And we know how they did it from the British vice consul who wrote this report in 1899. And he said, an officer told me what they do. They go into a village, the inhabitants all run away, they start looting the village, the sort of mercenaries who've gone in, then they seize the women of the village, they chase them, they seize the women and they keep them as hostages until the men have gone

and got enough rubber. And then when the men have got the rubber, they sell the women back to the men and then they move on to the next village. So they're basically hostages. It's the systematic, deliberate planned taking of hostages in the manual that was given to Congo Free State from the kind of company agents, there are instructions about the best way to take hostages. Do they use the word hostage? agents, there are instructions about the best way to take hostages. Do they use the word hostage?

No, they don't use the word hostage. They say it's a way of bargaining, it's a good way of negotiating, all this kind of thing. So again, they're giving instructions, they're saying basically go and take hostages, but they're still dressing it up in language that might not ring too many alarm bells. But we know that almost everybody does that. I mean, we know that the Nazis did that. People use legalistic language to disguise terrible things. They do it almost automatically, instinctively. Sure. I accept that. But I mean, Leopold is still passing himself off as a humanitarian.

I mean, the Nazis are not passing themselves off as humanitarian. So there's a bit of a difference there, I think. I suppose so. It is kind of striking that they are able to square the circle of, yeah, go and get hostages while simultaneously framing it in a way that makes Leopold look a brilliant guy who cares only for bringing enlightenment to the darkness. They don't want this manual to kind of fall into the wrong hands. Exactly.

So basically you take the hostages and then you would say, oh, look, we need four kilograms of rubber every two weeks. And when you hit your quota, you know, you can have your hostages back. Are people paid to collect rubber? Some chiefs are paid with beads or with salt. Some chiefs are paid with slaves. We know that in 1901, a chief told a Belgian official, he said, oh yeah, I was paid. I was given six women and two men and I was told, quote, I could eat them or kill them or use them

as slaves as I liked. Eat them. But that's what he said. I mean, maybe that was the Belgian being the Belgian official mocking the chief. It's impossible for us to know. Cannibalism is not totally unknown in the Congo, but equally it could be something that the Belgian, the Europeans are projecting on. Now in some areas, it really is a police state. Workers would need a permit to leave their village because they're required for the rubber quota. In other areas, workers are actually given numbered metal discs to wear around their necks. I say workers, of course, that you could argue. Workers is the wrong word. They are effectively, this is slave labor. These are slave collars, basically. Slave collars. And we are talking about enormous numbers of people. So one company, one of the biggest concession companies, the Anglo-Belgian India

rubber company, ABIR, in 1906 in its account books, it listed 47,000 Congolese workers, workers again in inverted commas, who are collecting rubber for it. And again, that's that weird thing that you're talking about, Tom, do they even need to make a list? You know, why are they doing it? Because they're still so addicted to the kind of the formal legal paraphernalia. They want to believe that what they're doing is not naked exploitation, but is good business practice, I suppose. And can I ask about the Anglo in that?

Yes. It had once been a British company. It is actually no longer at this point. Right. It's shareholders, I think, are almost exclusively Belgian by the early 1900s. So there's one more thing, and this is the single most notorious aspect of life in the Congo, which many listeners may have heard of. A guy who describes this very well is, you mentioned missionaries, an American missionary called William Shepard. In 1899, Shepard was based in a region called the Kasai, which is in the south of the Congo.

And this was an area that was plagued by fighting between loyalists to the Congo Free State and rebels. Shepherd went deep into the forests and he found abandoned villages that had been burned to the ground and were littered with corpses. And he was horrified and he kept going and he got to the camp of Leopold's loyalists, to kind of tribes that were loyal, that had collaborated with the Congo Free State. And he was struck as he approached straight away by the smell of something being smoked, like meat being smoked. And he said the chief took him to a sort of wooden framework of sticks under which there was a fire burning and on the framework, on the sticks,

on the kind of frame were hands, 81 right hands, human hands. And the chief said to him, see, here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the state how many we have killed. And the point of smoking them was that they wouldn't rot. Congo is very hot and humid. So you smoke them means you can preserve them. The chief could show them to Congo free state or concession officials and then get his reward. Now, this is a very, very controversial subject among people who write

about the Congo. Some people say it's a kind of long established practice. It's a practice that comes from African and Arab slave traders who've been cutting off people's hands. And it's unfair to blame this on King Leopold. Well, I mean, it's a practice that goes back a very, I mean, it goes back to ancient Egypt. Others say actually what happens is that under the Free State, other historians under the Congo free state, this becomes institutionalized and sort of systematized in a way that it had never quite been before. That it almost, it becomes part of the box ticking, the accountancy. Becomes industrialized.

It becomes industrialized. Exactly. One common misconception that people will have is that these were cut off living people. That's perhaps because they'll have, you'll have seen photos of living people whose hands have been cut off. Well, because it happened in Sierra Leone, didn't it? Notoriously.

But most of the victims were already dead. There's another great book on the Congo by David Van Raybroek. A lot of it based on oral history. And that makes very clear that most of the people who had their hands cut off, I mean, they're already dead, they're corpses. Leopold himself, when he found when there's a great storm, as we will come to next week about the cutting off of hands, he was very annoyed that people criticized him for it. He said, cutting off hands, that's idiotic.

He said, I'd cut off the rest of them, but not the hands. That's the one thing I need in the Congo is people's hands to collect the rubber. I mean, that gives you some sense of Leopold's cynicism. But I think what happened is that among the force public, cutting the hands off corpses does become almost an end in itself because they take them back to their officers, their European officers, and this says, I'm taking the job seriously. I've killed lots of people. Here is the evidence. And there was some suggestion, and I think it's correct, that forced public officers were paid bonuses based on how many hands.

So it's like scalp hunting in the Wild West. Exactly it is. That's a really, really good comparison. Now that we're at this point, I think it's fair to say that we really are kind of morally in the heart of darkness. I mean, this is the kind of thing that really, if you're a sensitive listener, you've probably already stopped listening. There are some writers who think a lot of this has been exaggerated and sensationalized. For me, I mean, we will talk about this a lot in next week's bonus, but for me, I think there are far too many accounts of European agents forcing people to eat excrement or to drink castor oil or shooting holes in people's earlobes

and using them for target practice and stuff like that. I think there are far too many examples for them all to be exaggerated or indeed made up. Well, also aren't a lot of the accounts coming from either people like Conrad, people who had gone in as true believers and come out appalled by what they've seen, or by missionaries who think this is a great opportunity that Leopold has opened up the darkness of the Congo for the light of Christ, and likewise are traumatized by what they find. I mean, I don't see why they would make it up if it wasn't happening. No, I agree. I think you have to believe that all these missionaries are inventing stories,

and that all the memories of these, I mean, there's, there are some notorious examples. There was a guy called Leon Fierves. He collected more rubber than anybody else. He was from a farming family in Wallonia in Belgium. He was the commissioner for the Equator district. We know that he boasted about his methods, that he told his men cut off heads and he, you know, cut off heads to inspire loyalty and discipline because people weren't giving him food. He cut off a hundred heads. He would ask people to bring baskets full of hands.

He was completely open and unashamed about it. And that again is part of what Kurtz is about because Kurtz is the guy who's bringing in more ivory than anyone else. And when he is praised, you know, as Marlow is going up the river, as the guy who is bringing in more ivory, you already have a sense of what that actually means in practice. Exactly. So let's move the clock forward to 1895. So the Congo Free State is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Leopold is also celebrating his 60th birthday. His life in many respects is absolutely miserable. His wife hates him.

She spends all her time riding horses. And laughing. Well, she doesn't laugh anymore actually. Laughter has fled, I think it's fair to say. His oldest daughter Louise has married a German prince and their wedding is, if anything, even worse than Leopold's. She tried to run away on her wedding night and she ended up being locked in a nursing home for six years. So that's a bit miserable. Second daughter Stephanie, she married Crown Prince Rudolf

of Austria and he killed himself at Meiling in a murder-suicide pact with his lover. Yeah, so that's not good. And Leopold hates his daughters, doesn't he? And one of the great animating ambitions of his life is to ensure they don't inherit anything. Exactly. Hates his wife, hates his daughter, hates Belgium and the Belgians. And also he's got his sister Carlotta hanging around in the palace. He's gone completely mad because she was married to Maximilian, who is the Habsburg who becomes emperor of Mexico and then gets shot.

It would make an amazing play, the home life of Leopold II. But also he's pretty bonkers in his own way. He's very lonely, he's a massive hypochondriac. He's such a hypochondriac that every day they have to boil the tablecloths to kill germs. And when he goes outside and it's raining, he wears a waterproof bag over his beard to stop his beard getting wet, which seems very peculiar. Why didn't he shave his beard off? Good question. I think he thinks the beard is a sign of his tremendous masculinity.

I think it's what he thinks. His great pleasures, you mentioned one of them last week, which is he has a special ironed copy of the Times every day. His other great pleasures are spending money on monuments and pavilions and parks and stuff. Golf courses. Golf courses. He loves a golf course. He does like a golf course. And his other great pleasure was sleeping with very young girls. So in 1885, he was actually named in a British court as a client of a

disorderly house in London, and he was accused of paying 800 pounds a month to have a supply of girls in their very early teens. He's a bad man. I think we can conclude that King Leopold II was a very bad man. Now, all of his spending, of course, reflects his big earnings from rubber. It's really hard for us to know how much money he made from all this rubber. But I mentioned one concession company, Anglo-Belgian India Rubber. They made a profit on their rubber of more than 700% and their stock price rose 30 times in four years after they started investing in rubber.

So I think it's a fair assumption that Leopold is making tens of millions, maybe more, an enormous, in today's money, an enormous, enormous sum of money. And things are only going to get better for him. His railway, by the time he turned 60, his railway is finally nearing completion. It has been a gigantic and a hideous project. 60,000 people have worked on this 200 mile railway. They've built 99 bridges, but the project has eaten people because of dysentery, because

of yellow fever, smallpox, and so on. They've had to bring in workers from West Africa. They've brought in hundreds of Chinese laborers from Hong Kong and Macau. These people have been brought often under false pretenses. They're chained together. They're flogged if they falter. There are constant rebellions. The death toll is impossible to

estimate the official figures say 1800 Africans and Asians died, but it could be far greater. There are some historians who think maybe hundreds were dying every single month. Just to reiterate though, this is progressive brutality because the goal is for their own benefit because in the long run, they won't then have to carry stuff up because there'll be a train. Exactly. It's all about the kindness. It was said afterwards that every single sleeper on the railway, that's what Americans call the tie, which is the wooden slat that basically goes between the rails, that every single one of those planks cost one African life. And I don't

think that's such a tremendous exaggeration. So Leopold, he thinks, well, when the railway is done, I can dream bigger with all my money. You know, we can push maybe the railway up to the valley of the Nile. We can have a railway that goes up to the Sudan and to Egypt. He starts putting feelers out to Gladstone, the British prime minister. Would you be interested in selling me Uganda? And he says to his courtiers, you know, Belgium is an up and coming country, Spain, Portugal, the hated Dutch, you know, they're decadent. We can move in on their colonies actually, you know, we should be thinking big, we should

dream bigger. So in the Congo, he's a monopolist, but he wants to expand that monopoly into other fields. Yes. Now there are the first glimmers of criticism. The very first critic really is an African American missionary called George Washington Williams. He went to the Congo to try to save souls. Well, he's an amazing man, isn't he?

Yeah, an incredible man. He fought against Maximilian in Mexico and with the Buffalo soldiers on the Great Plains. And am I not right that he goes to Brussels and it's kind of the toast of Brussels because he's black. Yes. But I mean, he's kind of toasted by humanitarian, charitable, Christian, progressive elements within Brussels. And it's as a representative of black slaves who, because he's actually born free, but I mean, there's a kind of this great tide of enthusiasm for abolishing black slavery. And as part of that,

he goes to see Leopold and Leopold says, what I do in the Congo is done as a Christian duty to the poor African. And I do not wish to have one Frank back of all the money I have expended. Yeah. Shameless. And this is where I think it's different to the Nazis is that the Nazis are not pretending, you know, they're not kind of lording black missionaries in their town and say that they care only for the lives of Africans and they don't. I mean, it's the hypocrisy of it as well as the brutality that is so astonishing and striking. Exactly.

And this bloke, George Washington Williams, right, he's had this meeting with Leopold, and he goes to the conga, he goes up into the interior and he's like, what? This is awful. This is a complete con on a fraud. And he publishes an open letter and he says, you know, this is unbelievable. Like the forced public are out of control, they're killing everybody. Your majesty's government is engaged in the slave trade wholesale and retail. It buys and sells and steals slaves.

And is that where he uses the phrase crimes against humanity? I think he does. Yes. And now Leopold organizes a massive press counterattack, says this guy's intention seeker. He's mad. And unfortunately for George Washington Williams, he dies of tuberculosis just months later. But this is the very first little dent in the edifice that Leopold has very carefully constructed and there are more. So in 1896 another missionary of Swede tells an audience in London that the Force public are collecting human hands.

There's an even bigger scare and this tells its own story. The biggest scare of all the force public hanged an Irish ivory trader called Charles Stokes because they said they'd caught him selling arms to Arab slave dealers and the fact that they had hanged a white man, very shocking. And the European papers start to say, well, hold on. If they would hang a white man with impunity, what are they doing to the Africans if that's how they behave? So actually, Leopold deals with this again, very cunning. He sets up a fake commission for the protection of the natives with missionaries on this board. And he says they'll look into this. I mean, they never actually really

traveled to the Congo. They don't really have a proper meeting, but they issue a report, brilliant, all sorted, you know, necessary reforms have been made. So then as now, if you've got a problem, set up a commission. Set up a commission, yeah. In 1897, Leopold arguably reached his apogee. A World's Fair opened in Brussels. There were two great sites built and decorated in the Art Nouveau style of the day. One of them was completely devoted to the Congo Free State. There were stuffed

animals, there was coffee and chocolate and tobacco, there were ornaments and woodwork and all this stuff. But the highlight was 267 human beings that were exhibited in specially built villages like animals in the zoo. There was even a sign, the blacks are fed by the organizing committee, said the sign, because people were giving them sweets, throwing sweets to them, which was making them ill. This was very popular at the time. So the 1889 World Fair that they had in Paris that built the Eiffel Tower, which was staged, I think, wasn't it to mark the storming of the Bastille? Yes.

So, you know, liberty, equality, fraternity. And they had, they had human zoos with people from Africa. And I've been and seen the site. It's in a kind of wood, very sinister location and people just taking it completely for granted. A million people went to this, went to see this exhibition in Brussels and we have no indication that any of them thought anything but that it was absolutely brilliant. They loved it. And when the Africans were finally taken home to the Congo, one newspaper said, the soul of Belgium follows them and like the shield of Jupiter protects them.

May we always thus show the world an example of humanity. The smugness and the sort of right sense of righteousness, um, off the scale. So Leopold, what could possibly go wrong? He's got his colonies, got his rubber. He's got his money. You know, everything looks great. Nothing could, could spoil it or could it? Because it's about this time that a young clerk on the docks at Antwerp where the rubber is

being unloaded begins to wander about the trade. He sees all this rubber and ivory being unloaded and he thinks it's weird because it's not really showing up in the company's accounts like somebody is skimming off the top. What he also can't understand this young shipping clerk, if we're getting all this rubber and ivory in, what are we paying for it with? What are the people of the Congo getting back? And when he looks into it, he finds something that really shocks him because the ships that are going back to the Congo are not being loaded with trade goods.

They're being loaded exclusively trade goods, they are being loaded exclusively with rifles and ammunition. And it's at that point that this young bloke, the light bulb goes off. And as he later puts it, he said, it was bad enough to stumble upon a murder, but I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader. a secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader. And this young man's name was Edmund Dean Morell. And as we'll find out next week, he is going to change the world. So we will be hearing about that next week. But if you are a member of the Restless History Club, you can of course hear his story and the extraordinary campaign that he launches

against Leopold and what he's getting up to in the Congo right now. And if you're not a member, you can sign up at therestishistory.com. And for everyone else, we will be back on Monday with the next chapter in this terrifying story. Goodbye. Goodbye. Music