The crime was the rape of the Congo by Leopold II, King of Belgium.
The part-time journalist who made it his business to expose the crime was Edmund Morel. His persistence sparked the first human rights movement of the 20th century.
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Morel was born in Paris 1873. His father died four years later and his mother – a Quaker – returned to England. Morel was fifteen when financial difficulties meant that he had to go to work as a clerk for a shipping company in Liverpool. To make extra money, he began writing newspaper stories based on conversations with the merchants and captains he met on his rounds each day.
Many of the ships that entered the great trading port arrived from Africa. They brought cargoes of elephant ivory, palm oil, and – following the invention of the pneumatic tire in 1888 – bales of raw rubber. They also brought stories of adventure and death, mighty rivers and mysterious mountains, and of encounters with people whose customs seemed to be at once exotic, alluring, alarming and frightening.
Africa fascinated Europeans in the late-Victorian era. They welcomed returning explorers as heroes and revered missionaries such as David Livingston. They also schemed to grow rich from African resources and labour. This was the time of the so-called “scramble for Africa” and the continent was the focus of intense rivalry among the great powers of Europe.
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At a conference in Berlin in 1884-85, the Europeans agreed to divide Africa among themselves. Through shrewd manoeuvring, Leopold II of Belgium won recognition for a claim to the Congo River basin in central Africa. It was an area of nearly a million square miles, 80 times larger than Belgium. The people of the Congo had no part in the Berlin Conference and no way of knowing about their enslavement that would follow.
The Congo Free State – as it was known – was neither free nor
a state, but instead the personal possession of Leopold to do with as he pleased. The inhabitants could trade only with his agents or with private companies that paid him 50 percent of their profits. When the people refused to work for these companies, the regime paid Congo chiefs to supply "volunteers". The Free State also purchased or forcibly took slaves from Muslim slave traders to work as labourers or soldiers.
At first, Leopold's Congo enterprises made no profit. But his fortunes changed in the mid-1890s. The invention of the inflatable tire led to a boom in the demand for rubber. Leopold and his licensed concessions now needed even more workers to go deeper into the forest in search of wild rubber. Free State officials ordered local chiefs to supply the workers. They held wives and children as hostages until the men returned with their quota.
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The Congolese rebelled by ambushing army units, fleeing their villages to hide in the wilderness, and setting the rubber vine forests on fire. Leopold's crushed the rebellion with a Force Publique of 16,000 African mercenary soldiers led by some 350 European officers. They burned villages, cut off the heads of uncooperative chiefs, and slaughtered the women and children of men refusing to collect rubber.
Force Publique officers sent their soldiers into the forest to find and kill rebels hiding there. To prove they had succeeded, soldiers were ordered to cut off and bring back the right hand of every rebel they killed. Often, however, soldiers cut off the hands of living persons, even children, to satisfy the quota set by their officers. This terror campaign succeeded in getting workers back to collecting rubber.
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This was the story that Edmund Morel would bring to the attention of the world in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th. Periodically, his company sent him to the Belgian port of Antwerp to supervise the loading and unloading of ships. What he could not help observing was that while many ships arrived from the west coast of Africa loaded with raw rubber, very little was shipped back except guns and bullets. He guessed rightly that the many natives needed to collect the rubber were forced to do so at gunpoint.
"I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a [partner]," he later wrote.Morel searched through shipping manifests to document his suspicions and he learned more about the impact of European enterprise in Africa from missionaries and the remarkable anthro-pologist Mary Kingsley. In 1900 he published a series of articles entitled The Congo Scandal.
One immediate result of this action was that Morel lost his job. His own company, Elder Dempster, was involved in the trade and he was forced to resign. He now became a full-time journalist, working at first for the newspaper West Africa, and then in 1903, founding his own newspaper, West African Mail. While it failed to make a profit, the Mail did serve as a vehicle for continued investigation and exposure of the imperial system in Africa.
Morel’s reporting on the abuse of the people of the Congo, and his relentless output of speeches, books and pamphlets finally paid off.
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The British government sent the Irish-born diplomat Roger Casement to the Congo Free State to investigate. Casement discovered widespread evidence of hostage-taking, floggings, mutilation, forced labour, and outright murder.
Following the publication of his report in 1904, he joined Morel to organize the Congo Reform Association to persuade European governments to take action against those guilty of human rights abuses in west Africa.
The Congo association made effective use of the media of the day. To expose Leopold's bloody methods, Morel used photographs and slide shows picturing children whose hands had been cut off. He also reached to the United States where he met with President Theodore Roosevelt and enlisted the support of Booker T. Washington and Mark Twain.
Leopold struck back with a massive propaganda effort, which included lobbying both the British Parliament and U.S. Congress. But public opinion had turned against the Belgian king. Under pressure from Britain and the United States, Leopold ceded ownership of the Congo Free State to the Belgian government in 1908. It was by no means the end of suffering for the people of the Congo. Belgium would retain control over their lives until their independence in 1960 and civil war, murder and the destruction of communities continue to this day.
Today, we might pigeon-hole an Edmund Morel as a “human rights activist” but in fact he provided the 20th century with a model of the informed, involved and effective campaigner for political and social reform. He was a harsh critic of Britain’s role in the secret diplomacy that led to the First World War and the British government imprisoned him as a leader of the peace movement during the war. As a candidate for the Labour party, he defeated Winston Churchill in the general election of 1922 and as a Member of Parliament supported Britain’s recognition of the communist government of the Soviet Union. He died of a heart attack in 1924.
- Ian Porter
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