EDMUND D. MOREL
KING
LEOPOLD'S RULE IN AFRICA (1904)
Working at a
shipping firm in Liverpool, England, Edmund D. Morel (1873-1924) heard horrible
stories and rumors about the activities of British and other European merchants
working in Africa. He began working as
a part-time journalist to investigate the stories and focused his
investigations on the rubber trade in the Congo Free State. In the treaties of the Berlin Conference in
1885, King Leopold II of Belgium had gained private authority over the Congo as
his personal fiefdom. Leopold
established a series of trusts to manage the Congo, which soon implemented a
viciously coercive system of forced labor.
The Congolese had to fulfill work quotas, especially to supply rubber,
which grew wild in the region. In 1904,
Morel founded the Congo Reform Association to pressure European governments to
act against those guilty of human rights abuses and to persuade the Belgian
government to overthrow Leopold's private rule of the Congo by annexing the
territory and reforming its administration.
In the same year, he published King Leopold's Rule in Africa, excerpted
below, to make the public case against unrestrained imperialism as practiced in
the Congo.
[E]verywhere [in the Congo] we see the same policy
[of forced labor] at work, with the same results. What are the chief symptoms of the effects of that policy upon
native life?
Outwardly the most striking effect is depopulation:
slaughter, mutilation; emigration; sickness, largely aggravated by cruel and systematic
oppression; poverty, and even positive starvation, induced by unlimited
taxation in food‑stuffs and live stock; a hopeless despair, and mental
depression engendered by years of grinding tyranny; neglect of children by the
general maltreatment of women, one of the most odious and disgraceful features
of the system‑these are some of the many recorded causes of depopulation
which, in certain districts, has assumed gigantic proportions...
What a sum total of human wretchedness does not lie
behind that bald word “depopulation”! To my mind, the horror of this curse
which has come upon the Congo peoples reaches its maximum of intensity when we
force ourselves to consider its everyday concomitants; the crushing weight of
perpetual, remorseless oppression; the gradual elimination of everything in the
daily life of the natives which makes that life worth living. Under the prevailing system, every village
is a penal settlement. Armed soldiers
are quartered in every hamlet; the men pass nearly the whole of their lives in
satisfying the ceaseless demands of the “Administration,” or its affiliates the
Trusts.
The cumulative effects of depopulation and infantile
mortality by dragging women away from their homes for forced labor requisitions‑seizing
them as “hostages,” and “tying them up,” whether virgins, wives, mothers, or
those about to become mothers, in order to bring pressure to bear upon
brothers, husbands, and fathers for the adequate supply of rubber or food
taxes; flinging them into “prison,” together with their children, often to die
of starvation and neglect; flogging them, sometimes even unto death; leaving
them at the mercy of the soldiers; distributing them after punitive raids among
hangers-on‑must be enormous.
There we have depopulation through the infamous torture of women‑often
enough shot outright or mutilated‑and the neglect and the mutilation of
young children and boys; most of whom, it may be presumed, when so mutilated do
not survive the operation, in order to have “the bad taste to show their stumps
to the missionaries,” [1] as one of the Belgian deputies said in the course of
the Congo debate in the Belgian House last year.
What has come over the civilized people of the globe
that they can allow their Governments to remain inactive and apathetic in the
face of incidents which recall in aggravated form the worst horrors of the
over-sea slave trade, which surpass the exploits of Arab slave catchers? What could be worse than scenes such as
these, which can be culled by the dozen....
The Congo Government boasts that, in stopping
intertribal warfare, it has stopped the selling of tribal prisoners of war into
domestic slavery. The condition of the
domestic slave under the African system is blissful beyond words, if you
compare his lot with that of the degraded serf under the Leopoldian system....
Enough has been said to show that under this system
of “moral and material regeneration,” constituting a monstrous invasion of
primitive rights which has no parallel in the whole world, the family life and
social ties of the people are utterly destroyed....
If Gladstone [2] had been alive he would perhaps
have found a phrase adequate to describe the revival of the slave trade under
the aegis of a European Sovereign in Equatorial Africa, and the forms which
that revival takes. But I doubt if even
he could have found one more fittingly characterizing it than that he so truly
applied to other quarters. The
“Negation of God” erected with a system‑yes, indeed!
Why are these people allowed to suffer thus cruelly? What crime have they collectively committed
in past ages that they should undergo to‑day so terrible an
expiation? Are they “groaning and
dying” under this murderous system as a great object‑lesson to
Europe? What price, then, will Europe
later on have to pay for the teaching?
Inscrutable are the decrees of Providence. One wonders whether the deepening horror of this colossal crime
will end by a reaction so violent that an era of justice will, for the first
time in the history of Caucasian relationship with the Dark Continent, arise,
never to be eradicated, for the peoples of Africa. Or that some day tropical Africa may breed brains as she breeds
muscles, and then...?
But it bodes little to dwell among the mists of
conjecture. The future is closed to
us. We grope in the dark, puzzled,
incensed, impatient. The future is with
God. To the past man may look and
gather consolation in the knowledge that evils such as these bring their own
Nemesis upon the nation whose moral guilt is primarily involved. Belgium, technically unconcerned, is morally
responsible, and Belgium will suffer...
If the policy of the Congo State were a national policy; if the Congo
tribes were being systematically bled to death either through distorted
zeal...or through lust of conquest; if the Congo Basin were capable of being
colonized by the Caucasian race, the policy we condemn and reprobate would
still be a crime against humanity, an outrage upon civilization. But the Congo territories can never be a
white man's country; the “Congo State” is naught but a collection of
individuals‑with one supreme above them all‑working for their own
selfish ends, caring nothing for posterity, callous of the present, indifferent
of the future, as of the past, animated by no fanaticism other than the
fanaticism of dividends‑and so upon the wickedness of this thing is
grafted the fatuous stupidity and inhumanity of the Powers in allowing the
extermination of the Congo races to go on unchecked, barely, if at all,
reproved.
1. Amputation of a hand was a common form of
punishment in the Belgian Congo.
1. What rhetorical tools does
Morel use to describe the evil of Leopold's rule in the Congo? What “standards” does Morel call on in
defining various actions in the Congo as evil?
2. How does Morel use the word
“civilization” in his argument? How
does his use of the word compare to Fabri's (Source 4) and to Chamberlain's
(Source 5)?
3. How does Morel use religion in
his argument? Does Morel's use of
religion create a sense of a “civilizing mission”?
4. In what sense does Morel's argument
transcend nationalist sentiment?