Belgian King Leopold II: The Scramble For Africa

What became known as “The Scramble for Africa” began with the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 when the continent was partitioned among several European powers into several colonies. One of those countries represented at the Berlin Conference was Belgium . The African territory which Belgium presided over was the Congo region. Unlike the other European nations that occupied African territory, Belgium did not immediately annex the Congo. Instead, the Belgian King Leopold II made the region his own personal plantation under the name the Congo Free State . During this period, between 1885 and 1908, he administered severe brutality onto of the Congolese people. Simultaneously, the King authorized several Catholic missionaries to convert the
black natives to Christianity. This paper argues that since the missionaries who were authorized by Leopold II himself did nothing to stop the genocide-like abuse in the Congo Free State.
Despite not officially controlling the area until 1885, Belgian interest in the Congo, however, can be traced back to 1876, when Leopold II proposed what would eventually become the Association Internationale Africaine, which ultimately became a tool for Leopold in the form of a development company.
Around 1879, he subsequently organized the Comité d'Études du Haut-Congo - an international commercial, scientific, and humanitarian committee. Both companies were used to gain Belgian influence and sovereignty in the Congo region. His initial end goal was to gain control by creating an ivory trade route through the Upper Congo. Once the Congo Free State was established, Leopold called upon Belgian Catholic missionaries to carry out his demands. He wrote to the missionaries located in the Congo in 1883, one year before the Berlin Conference. King Leopold II told the missionaries, who were there in the region to gain Belgian influence, to pay attention to the “niggers,” but especially keep their eyes on the Congolese children under the assumption that they are more impressionable than their parents and more easily indoctrinated against their own traditions. Furthermore, he wrote at the conclusion of his letter, “Never invite him for dinner even if he gives you a chicken every time you arrive at his house.” Essentially, he means in his outline to bring Christian, Belgian influences into the Congo, but keep the black and whites apart on a social level. He demands that they do
not treat the natives with much, if any, respect. To King Leopold, gaining influence meant a greater chance at establishing an ivory trade route. To affirm, his 1883 letter to the Congo missionaries is essentially an outline of what he expects them to do once the territory is acquired.
While the Catholic missionaries grew to become the King’s strongest accomplices in The Congo Free State, it did not always come without a price tag. For example, in 1906, a Concordat between Belgium and Vatican provided that the schools run by these missionaries were subsidized by the state of Belgium. The Belgian Catholic Party, which represented Catholic interests at the time, were able to dominate colonial interests because there was little interest among the Belgian citizens in settling this area, a combination of pride that the country via King Leopold possessed an area seventy-six times the size of Belgium and a fear that a foreign power might take that area away, and that other political parties emphasized domestics issues compared to international ones . Meanwhile, the curriculum in these schools was set up in the Congo so that the evangelization of the natives was forced and the students were theoretically indoctrinated against “…a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba…” whom represented the indigenous deities to the Congolese. On the other hand, the King merely assumed that they knew that God exists and not to murder, lie, insult, and cheat because Western civilization at the time held itself to these standards and he did not regard the culture of the Congolese. One could rightfully assume that the Belgian Catholic missionaries served the interests of the King by assuming the responsibility of spreading influence and Catholicism to Africa. Once King Leopold II gained possession of the Congo Free State, the “civilizing task” of industrial education began as requested by the Belgian government to serve the government’s industrial and progressional needs . The Catholic missionaries themselves were ironically reluctant to do so because they had minimal use and need for skilled craftsmen since part of their subsidies included loans of workmen and raw materials for buildings . Additionally, most missionaries lacked interest in offering skilled labor for wages and introducing technology to an indigenous, forested environment because the African environment had little place for industrialization and that Christianization should take place without Westernization. Keeping Leopold’s letter in mind, the likely reason they saw Africa as unfeasible was that the missionaries portrayed the “niggers” as an inferior race of people and wanted the whites and blacks kept as separate as possible. Instead, cultivation of mission fields was sufficient enough in regards to skilled labor. This field work could be seen as a downplayed version of the Congo when rubber was demanded because it might as well have been like working on a plantation but with significantly less brutality. Overall, the Belgian Catholic missionaries lacked interest to give industrial education to the native African population, but had incentive to do so since they were subsidized and their own interests aligned closely with those of King Leopold II. Joining the Belgian Catholic missionaries in the Congo to boot were foreign Protestant missionaries, mostly of American or British nationality. If the former were reluctant to provide industrial education to the Congolese, then the latter were even more reluctant as they had no government subsidies to pay for these expenses. Not only that, but their different nationalities and religious faiths set them up for harassment from Belgian Catholic orders and the wrath of the colonial administration. Nevertheless, Protestant societies undertook industrial education because it saved money in regard to the expense of coast labor. Protestant missions hired skilled craftsmen-carpenters, masons, bricklayers, blacksmiths, coopers- mostly from British-ruled West Africa, came under a written contract, and not only expected good wages--preferably paid in gold-but round- trip transportation. The Protestant and Catholic missionaries each had different reactions to the atrocities that would eventually surround them. Many Protestant missionaries witnessed and publicized state and charter company abuses against the population during rubber- and ivory-gathering operations firsthand. Roger Casement, a British Consul, published a report in 1903 about the abuses in the Congo. Following his lead, the American and British Protestant missionaries located in the Etat indépendant du Congo spread the news of the horrors out into the public and vocally rallied for the first human rights movement of the twentieth century. One Protestant protestor was no other than Booker T. Washington. Due to international pressure, King Leopold II relinquished control of the Congo Free State and the state of Belgium formally annexed it in 1908. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, defended Leopold more frequently. In the Vatican, Pope Pius X had favored Leopold II as he hid his true motives by expressing a desire to improve the material and moral situation of the African people, via promoting Christianity, winning over several Roman Catholic prelates who supported his regime and interests from start to end. They then blamed the reforms and protests on British greed, as it did not help that the Anglican Church was a rival to Catholicism. By and large, most Protestants (missionaries and otherwise) opposed the brutality occurring in the Congo while Catholics enabled their occurrences by supporting the monarch.
As the demand for rubber increased worldwide for automobile tire production, Belgium immediately turned to the Congo Free State to tap rubber for international trade.
The Congolese subsequently collected harvested from vines and trees in order to collect the resource, most of which was acquired by a handful of private companies, mainly the Abir Congo Company. The government, backing these companies, imposed a rubber tax on the natives. As a result of the rubber tax in addition to the rubber demand, rubber was collected twenty loads at a time by each village. As rubber got scarcer and they had to retreat further into the forest to find more rubber, the quantity demanded loosened. Still, the Congolese got little to nothing in return for these taxes. As a testament to the harsh-plantation like conditions of this process, exposure to the elements and carnivorous leopards were there to finish them off as they picked away. Possible consequences for not do their job, arriving late with their rubber, or not meeting their quotas, included the burning of villages, mutilation of body parts, the inability to harvest crops (usually resulting starvation of the villagers), and even being directly shot and killed by troops authorized by the Belgian King. In total, roughly 6 to 10 million natives died directly or indirectly at the hands of the Belgians, and millions more lived in constant fear. This was not so much what King Leopold called his “final solution” as it was an ends to
justify the means of rubber extractions. However, “the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide does not require that there be an attempt to kill every single person in a given population.” The King very well knew that several people would die as a result of his endeavor. So, the horrific atrocities that occurred to the natives could arguably be seen as taken to genocidal proportions. This paper argues that since the missionaries who were authorized by Leopold II himself did nothing to stop the genocide-like abuse in the Congo Free State. Even before King Leopold II acquired the Congo Free State in 1885 at the Berlin Conference, he was interested in investing in and eventually receiving sovereignty over the Congo region as early as 1876. To represent those interests, he sent mostly Roman Catholic missionaries there to spread Belgian influence. Once the Etat Indépendant du Congo was established, Westernization became emphasis for these missionaries. Simultaneously, both Protestant and Catholic missions witnessed the abuse and murder of millions of Congolese citizens. While the Protestants acted upon this, the Catholics stood by idly. This was because the interests of the Roman Catholic Belgian missionaries aligned more in-synch with those of Belgian King Leopold II than the interests of the Protestant foreign (mostly American and British) missionaries.