Chapter VI: Voices From the Darkness

I will now return to the witnesses of the shocking treatment of the natives. Rev. Joseph Clark was an American missionary living at Ikoko in the Crown Domain, which is King Leopold's own special private preserve. These letters cover the space between 1893 and 1899.

This is Ikoko as he found it in 1893:

"Irebo contains say 2,000 people. Ikoko has at least 4,000 and there
are other towns within easy reach, several as large as Irebo, and two
probably as large as Ikoko. The people are fine-looking, bold and
active."

In 1903 there were 600 people surviving.

In 1894 Ikoko in the Crown Domain began to feel the effects of "moral and material regeneration." On May 30th of that year Mr. Clark writes:

"Owing to trouble with the State the Irebo people fled and left their
homes. Yesterday the State soldiers shot a sick man who had not
attempted to run away, and others have been killed by the State
(native) soldiers, who, in the absence of a white man, do as they
please."

In November, 1894:

"At Ikoko quite a number of people have been killed by the soldiers,
and most of the others are living in the bush."

In the same month he complained officially to Commissaire Fievez:

"If you do not come soon and stop the present trouble the towns will
be empty.... I entreat you to help us to have peace on the Lake.... It
seems so hard to see the dead bodies in the creek and on the beach,
and to know why they are killed.... People are living in the bush like
wild beasts without shelter or proper food, and afraid to make fires.
Many died in this way. One woman ran away with three children--they
all died in the forest, and the woman herself came back a wreck and
died before long--ruined by exposure and starvation. We knew her well.
My hope in 1894 was to get the facts put before King Leopold, as I was
sure he knew nothing of the awful conditions of the collection of the
so-called 'rubber tax.'"

On November 28th he writes:

"The State soldiers brought in seven hands, and reported having shot
the people in the act of running away to the French side, etc."

* * * * *

"We found all that the soldiers had reported was untrue, and that the
statements made by the natives to me were true. We saw only six
bodies; a seventh had evidently fallen into the water, and we learned
in a day or two that an eighth body had floated into the landing-place
above us--a woman that had either been thrown or had fallen into the
water after being shot."

On December 5th, he says:

"A year ago we passed or visited between here and Ikoko the following
villages:

Probable population
Lobwaka 250
Boboko 250
Bosungu 100
Kenzie 150
Bokaka 200
Mosenge 150
Ituta 80
Ngero 2,000
-----
Total 3,180

"A week ago I went up, and only at Ngero were there any people: there
we found ten. Ikoko did not contain over twelve people other than
those employed by Frank. Beyond Ikoko the case is the same."

April 12th, 1895, he writes:

"I am sorry that rubber palavers continue. Every week we hear of some
fighting, and there are frequent 'rows,' even in our village, with
the armed and unruly soldiers.... During the past twelve months it has
cost more lives than native wars and superstition would have
sacrificed in three to five years. The people make this comparison
among themselves.... It seems incredible and awful to think of these
savage men armed with rifles and let loose to hunt and kill people,
because they do not get rubber to sell at a mere nothing to the State,
_and it is blood-curdling to see them returning with hands of the
slain and to find the hands of young children, amongst bigger ones,
evidencing their 'bravery.'_"

The following was written on May 3rd, 1895:

"The war on account of rubber. The State demands that the natives
shall make rubber and sell same to its agents at a very low price. The
natives do not like it. It is hard work and very poor pay, and takes
them away from their homes into the forest, where they feel very
unsafe, as there are always feuds among them.... The rubber from this
district has cost hundreds of lives, and the scenes I have witnessed
while unable to help the oppressed have been almost enough to make me
wish I were dead. The soldiers, are themselves savages, some even
cannibals, trained to use rifles and in many cases they are sent away
without supervision, and they do as they please. When they come to any
town no man's property or wife is safe, and when they are at war they
are like devils.

"_Imagine them returning from fighting some 'rebels'; see, on the bow
of the canoe is a pole and a bundle of something on it.... These are
the hands (right hands) of sixteen warriors they have slain.
'Warriors!' Don't you see among them the hands of little children and
girls (young girls or boys)? I have seen them. I have seen where even
the trophy has been cut off while yet the poor heart beat strongly
enough to shoot the blood from the cut arteries to a distance of fully
four feet._"

"A young baby was brought here one time; its mother was taken
prisoner, and before her eyes they threw the infant in the water to
drown it. The soldiers coolly told me and my wife that their white man
did not want them to bring infants to their place. They dragged the
women off and left the infant beside us, but we sent the child to its
mother, and said we would report the matter to the chief of the post.
We did so, but the men were not punished. The principal offender was
told before me he would get fifty lashes, but I heard the same mouth
send a message to say he would not be flogged."

Compare with this the following extracts from King Leopold's _Officiel Bulletin_, referring to this very tract of country:

"The exploitation of the rubber vines of this district was undertaken
barely three years ago by M. Fievez. The results he obtained have been
unequalled. The district produced in 1895 more than 650 tons of
rubber, bought (_sic_) for 2-1/2_d._ (European price), and sold at
Antwerp for 5_s._ 5_d._ per kilo (2 lbs.)."

A later bulletin adds:

"With this development of general order is combined an inevitable
amelioration in the native's condition of existence _wherever he comes
into contact with the European element_....

"Such is, in fact, one of the ends of the general policy of the State,
to _promote the regeneration of the race by instilling into him a
higher idea of the necessity of labour_."

Truly, I know nothing in history to match such documents as these--pirates and bandits have never descended to that last odious abyss of hypocrisy. It stands alone, colossal in its horror, colossal, too, in its effrontery.

A few more anecdotes from the worthy Mr. Clark. This is an extract from a letter to the Chief of the District, Mueller:

"There is a matter I want to report to you regarding the Nkake
sentries. You remember some time ago they took eleven canoes and shot
some Ikoko people. As a proof they went to you with some hands, of
which three were the hands of little children. We heard from one of
their paddlers that one child was not dead when its hand was cut off,
but did not believe the story. Three days after we were told the child
was still alive in the bush. I sent four of my men to see, and they
brought back a little girl whose right hand had been cut off, and she
left to die from the wound. The child had no other wound. As I was
going to see Dr. Reusens about my own sickness I took the child to
him, and he has cut the arm and made it right and I think she will
live. But I think such awful cruelty should be punished."

Mr. Clark still clung to the hope that King Leopold did not know of the results of his own system. On March 25th, 1896, he writes:

"_This rubber traffic is steeped in blood, and if the natives were to
rise and sweep every white person on the upper Congo into eternity
there would still be left a fearful balance to their credit._ Is it
not possible for some American of influence to see the King of the
Belgians, and let him know what is being done in his name? _The Lake
is reserved for the King_--no traders allowed--and _to collect rubber
for him hundreds of men, women and children have been shot_."

At last the natives, goaded beyond endurance, rose against their oppressors. Who can help rejoicing that they seem to have had some success?

_Extracts from letter-book commencing January 29th, 1897_:

"The native uprising. This was brought about at last by sentries
robbing and badly treating an important chief. _In my presence_ he
laid his complaint before M. Mueller, reporting the seizure of his
wives and goods and the personal violence he had suffered at the hands
of M. Mueller's soldiers stationed in his town. _I saw M. Mueller kick
him off his veranda._ Within forty-eight hours there were no
'sentries' or their followers left in that chief's town--they were
killed and mutilated--and soon after M. Mueller, with another white
officer and many soldiers, were killed, and the revolt began."

Such is some of the evidence, a very small portion of the whole narrative furnished by Mr. Clark. Remember that it is extracted from a long series of letters written to various people during a succession of years. One could conceive a single statement being a concoction, but the most ingenious apologist for the Congo methods could not explain how such a document as this could be other than true.

So much for Mr. Clark, the American. The evidence of Mr. Scrivener, the Englishman, covering roughly the same place and date, will follow. But lest the view should seem too Anglo-Saxon, let me interpolate a paragraph from the travels of a Frenchman, M. Leon Berthier, whose diary was published by the Colonial Institute of Marseilles in 1902:

"Belgian post of Imesse well constructed. The Chef de Poste is absent.
He has gone to punish the village of M'Batchi, guilty of being a
little late in paying the rubber tax.... A canoe full of Congo State
soldiers returns from the pillage of M'Batchi.... Thirty killed, fifty
wounded.... At three o'clock arrive at M'Batchi, the scene of the
bloody punishment of the Chef de Poste at Imesse. Poor village! The
debris of miserable huts.... One goes away humiliated and saddened
from these scenes of desolation, filled with indescribable feelings."

In showing the continuity of the Congo horror and the extent of its duration (an extent which is the shame of the great Powers who acquiesced in it by their silence), I have marshalled witnesses in their successive order. Messrs. Glave, Murphy and Sjoblom have covered the time from 1894 to 1897; Mr. Clark has carried it on to 1900; we have had the deeds of 1901-4 as revealed in the Boma Law Courts. I shall now give the experience of Rev. Mr. Scrivener, an English missionary, who in July, August and September, 1903, traversed a section of the Crown Domain, that same region specially assigned to King Leopold in person, in which Mr. Clark had spent so many nightmare years. We shall see how far the independent testimony of the Englishman and the American, the one extracted from a diary, the other from a succession of letters, corroborate each other:

"At six in the morning woke up to find it still raining. It kept on
till nine, and we managed to get off by eleven. All the cassava bread
was finished the day previous, so a little rice was cooked, but it was
a hungry crowd that left the little village. I tried to find out
something about them. They said they were runaways from a district a
little distance away, where rubber was being collected. They told us
some horrible tales of murder and starvation, and when we heard all we
wondered that men so maltreated should be able to live without
retaliation. The boys and girls were naked, and I gave them each a
strip of calico, much to their wonderment....

"Four hours and a half brought us to a place called Sa.... On the way
we passed two villages with more people than we had seen for days.
There may have been 120. Close to the post was another small village.
We decided to stay there the rest of the day. Three chiefs came in
with all the adult members of their people, and altogether there were
not 300. And this where, not more than six or seven years ago, there
were at least 3,000! It made one's heart heavy to listen to the tales
of bloodshed and cruelty. And it all seemed so foolish. To kill the
people off in the wholesale way in which it has been done in this Lake
district, because they would not bring in a sufficient quantity of
rubber to satisfy the white man--and now here is an empty country and
a very much diminished output of rubber as the inevitable
consequence...."

Finally Mr. Scrivener emerged in the neighbourhood of a "big State station." He was hospitably received, and had many chats with his host, who seems to have been a very decent sort of man, doing his best under very trying circumstances. His predecessor had worked incalculable havoc in the country, and the present occupant of the post was endeavouring to carry out the duties assigned to him (those duties consisting, as usual, of orders to get all the rubber possible out of the people) with as much humanity as the nature of the task permitted. In this he, no doubt, did what was possible as one whom the system had not yet degraded to its level--one of the rare few: and one cannot wonder that they should be rare, seeing the nature of the bonds, and the helplessness in which an official is placed who does not carry out the full desires of his superiors. But he had only succeeded in getting himself into trouble with the district commander in consequence. He showed Mr. Scrivener a letter from the latter upbraiding him for not using more vigorous means, telling him to talk less and shoot more, and reprimanding him for not killing more than one man in a district under his care where there was a little trouble.

Mr. Scrivener had the opportunity while at this State post, under the _regime_ of a man who was endeavouring to be as humane as his instructions allowed, to actually see the process whereby the secret revenues of the "Crown Domain" are obtained. He says:

"Everything was on a military basis, but, so far as I could see, the
one and only reason for it all was rubber. It was the theme of every
conversation, and it was evident that the only way to please one's
superiors was to increase the output somehow. I saw a few men come in,
and the frightened look even now on their faces tells only too
eloquently of the awful time they have passed through. As I saw it
brought in, each man had a little basket, containing, say, four or
five pounds of rubber. This was emptied into a larger basket and
weighed, and being found sufficient, each man was given a cupful of
coarse salt, and to some of the head-men a fathom of calico.... I
heard from the white men and some of the soldiers some most gruesome
stories. The former white man (I feel ashamed of my colour every time
I think of him) would stand at the door of the store to receive the
rubber from the poor trembling wretches, who after, in some cases,
weeks of privation in the forest, had ventured in with what they had
been able to collect. A man bringing rather under the proper amount,
the white man flies into a rage, and seizing a rifle from one of the
guards, shoots him dead on the spot. Very rarely did rubber come in
but one or more were shot in that way at the door of the store--'to
make the survivors bring more next time.' Men who had tried to run
from the country and had been caught, were brought to the station and
made to stand one behind the other, and an Albini bullet sent through
them. 'A pity to waste cartridges on such wretches.' Only the roads to
and fro from the various posts are kept open, and large tracts of
country are abandoned to the wild beasts. The white man himself told
me that you could walk on for five days in one direction, and not see
a single village or a single human being. And this where formerly
there was a big tribe!...

"As one by one the surviving relatives of my men arrived, some
affecting scenes were enacted. There was no falling on necks and
weeping, but very genuine joy was shown and tears were shed as the
losses death had made were told. How they shook hands and snapped
their fingers! What expressions of surprise--the wide-opened mouth
covered with the open hand to make its evidence of wonder the more
apparent.... So far as the State post was concerned, it was in a very
dilapidated condition.... On three sides of the usual huge quadrangle
there were abundant signs of a former population, but we only found
three villages--bigger, indeed, than any we had seen before, but sadly
diminished from what had been but recently the condition of the
place.... Soon we began talking, and, without any encouragement on my
part, they began the tales I had become so accustomed to. They were
living in peace and quietness when the white men came in from the Lake
with all sorts of requests to do this and to do that, and they thought
it meant slavery. So they attempted to keep the white men out of their
country, but without avail. The rifles were too much for them. So they
submitted, and made up their minds to do the best they could under the
altered circumstances. First came the command to build houses for the
soldiers, and this was done without a murmur. Then they had to feed
the soldiers, and all the men and women--hangers-on--who accompanied
them.

"Then they were told to bring in rubber. This was quite a new thing
for them to do. There was rubber in the forest several days away from
their home, but that it was worth anything was news to them. A small
reward was offered, and a rush was made for the rubber; 'What strange
white men, to give us cloth and beads for the sap of a wild vine.'
They rejoiced in what they thought was their good fortune. But soon
the reward was reduced until they were told to bring in the rubber for
nothing. To this they tried to demur, but to their great surprise
several were shot by the soldiers, and the rest were told, with many
curses and blows, to go at once or more would be killed. Terrified,
they began to prepare their food for the fortnight's absence from the
village, which the collection of the rubber entailed. The soldiers
discovered them sitting about. 'What, not gone yet?' Bang! bang! bang!
bang! And down fell one and another, dead, in the midst of wives and
companions. There is a terrible wail, and an attempt made to prepare
the dead for burial, but this is not allowed. All must go at once to
the forest. And off the poor wretches had to go, without even their
tinderboxes to make fires. Many died in the forests from exposure and
hunger, and still more from the rifles of the ferocious soldiers in
charge of the post. In spite of all their efforts, the amount fell
off, and more and more were killed....

"I was shown around the place, and the sites of former big chiefs'
settlements were pointed out. A careful estimate made the population,
of say, seven years ago, to be 2,000 people in and about the post,
within a radius of, say a quarter of a mile. All told, they would not
muster 200 now, and there is so much sadness and gloom that they are
fast decreasing.... Lying about in the grass, within a few yards of
the house I was occupying, were numbers of human bones, in some cases
complete skeletons. I counted thirty-six skulls, and saw many sets of
bones from which the skulls were missing. I called one of the men, and
asked the meaning of it. 'When the rubber palaver began,' said he,
'the soldiers shot so many we grew tired of burying, and very often we
were not allowed to bury, and so just dragged the bodies out into the
grass and left them. There are hundreds all round if you would like to
see them.' But I had seen more than enough, and was sickened by the
stories that came from men and women alike of the awful time they had
passed through. The Bulgarian atrocities might be considered as
mildness itself when compared with what has been done here....

"In due course we reached Ibali. There was hardly a sound building in
the place.... Why such dilapidation? The Commandant away for a trip
likely to extend into three months, the sub-lieutenant away in another
direction on a punitive expedition. In other words, the station must
be neglected, and rubber-hunting carried out with all vigour. I stayed
here two days, and the one thing that impressed itself upon me was the
collection of rubber. I saw long files of men come, as at Mbongo, with
their little baskets under their arms, saw them paid their milk-tin
full of salt, and the two yards of calico flung to the head-men; saw
their trembling timidity, and, in fact, a great deal more, to prove
the state of terrorism that exists, and the virtual slavery in which
the people are held....

"So much for the journey to the Lake. It has enlarged my knowledge of
the country, and also, alas! my knowledge of the awful deeds enacted
in the mad haste of men to get rich. So far as I know, I am the first
white man to go into the _Domaine Prive_ of the King, other than the
employees of the State. I expect there will be wrath in some quarters,
but that cannot be helped."

So far Mr. Scrivener. But perhaps the reader may think that there really was a missionary plot to decry the Free State. Let us have some travellers, then. Here is Mr. Grogan from his "Cape to Cairo":

"The people were terrorized and were living in marshes." This was on
the British frontier. "The Belgians have crossed the frontier,
descended into the valley, shot down large numbers of natives, British
subjects, driven off the young women and cattle, and actually tied up
and burned the old women. I do not make these statements without
having gone into the matter. I remarked on the absence of women and
the reason was given. It was on further inquiry that I was assured by
the natives that white men had been present when the old women had
been burned.... They even described to me the personal appearance of
the white officers with the troops.... The wretched people came to me
and asked me why the British had deserted them."

Further on he says:

"Every village had been burned to the ground, and as I fled from the
country I saw skeletons, skeletons everywhere. And such postures! What
tales of horror they told."

Just a word in conclusion from another witness, Mr. Herbert Frost:

"The power of an armed soldier among enslaved people is absolutely
paramount. By chief or child, every command, wish, or whim of the
soldier must be obeyed or gratified. At his command with rifle ready a
man will ... outrage his own sister, give to his persecutor the wife
he loves most of all, say or do anything, indeed, to save his life.
The woes and sorrows of the race whom King Leopold has enslaved have
not decreased, for his Commissaire officers and agents have introduced
and maintain a system of deviltry hitherto undreamed of by his
victims."

Does this all seem horrible? But in the face of it is there not something more horrible in a sentence of this kind?--

"Our only programme, I am anxious to repeat, is the work of moral and
material regeneration, and we must do this among a population whose
degeneration in its inherited conditions it is difficult to measure.
The many horrors and atrocities which disgrace humanity give way
little by little before our intervention."

It is King Leopold who speaks.