King Leopold's Ghost Read online

  ***

  For five years, Stanley was Leopold's man in the Congo. The explorer's combative energy was now directed mainly against the territory's forbidding landscape, not its people. His crews of workmen carved a rough track, more a trail than a road, around the big rapids, using existing paths in some areas, in others cutting through brush and forest, filling in gullies, and throwing log bridges over ravines. Then they moved more than fifty tons of supplies and equipment up the trail. Draft animals like horses and oxen could not survive the Congo's climate and diseases, so supplies traveled mostly on porters' heads.

  After two years of trail building, pulling, and hauling, two small steamboats were reassembled at the top of the rapids and puffed their way up the river to land parties that set up more bases on its banks. Names left no doubt whose colony this would be. The station established at the top of the big rapids, within earshot of their thunder, and featuring a heavily fortified blockhouse and a vegetable garden, was christened Leopoldville. Above it rose Leopold Hill. Soon maps showed Lake Leopold II and the Leopold River. One of the later-arriving steamboats, which would briefly be piloted by the Congo's most famous ship's officer, would be the Roi des Belges (King of the Belgians).

  Stanley was a harsh taskmaster. "The best punishment is that of irons," he explained in one of his letters to Brussels, "because without wounding, disfiguring, or torturing the body, it inflicts shame and discomfort." (Whites were not put in irons, of course; only blacks.) Illness and other dangers were even more deadly than Stanley's wrath. In the first year alone, six Europeans and twenty-two Africans under his command died, including one eaten by a crocodile.

  For the first time we are at last able to see Stanley in Africa through eyes not his own. A steamboat engineer named Paul Nève fell sick and wrote home:

  Mr. Stanley has taken great care of me during these bad days ... the sort of care a blacksmith applies to repair an implement that is most essential and that has broken down through too rough usage ... teeth clenched in anger, he smites it again and again on the anvil, wondering whether he will have to scrap it or whether he will yet be able to use it as before.

  Nève died several weeks later.

  Stanley himself might not have minded the blacksmith analogy. "Every cordial-faced aborigine whom I meet..." he wrote, "I look upon ... with much of the same regard that an agriculturist views his strong-limbed child; he is a future recruit to the ranks of soldier-laborers." It was during this period, when he was pushing his men so hard, that Stanley became known by the Africans who worked for him as Bula Matadi or Bula Matari, "Breakstones." Stanley himself preferred the grander translation "Breaker of Rocks," and claimed that it was bestowed on him when he taught awed Africans how to use a sledgehammer and when they saw giant boulders dynamited as he built the trail through the Crystal Mountains

  In Stanley's account of his labors, he snorts at Africans, who are lazy by definition, and at whites who are "weak-minded." He preaches "the gospel of enterprise," declaring that "the European middleman who has his home in Europe but has his heart in Africa is the man who is wanted.... They are the missionaries of commerce, adapted for nowhere so well as for the Congo basin, where are so many idle hands." And nowhere does he wax as passionate as when his moneymaking instincts and his Victorian prudery intersect. Getting the "clothesless and overtattooed" Africans out of their "unabashed nudity" and into European clothes is his continuing obsession:

  I foresaw a brilliant future of Africa, if by any miracle of good fortune I could persuade the dark millions of the interior to cast off their fabrics of grass clothing and don ... second-hand costumes.... See what a ready market lies here for old clothes! The garments shed by the military heroes of Europe, of the club lackeys, of the liveried servants of modern Pharaohs, the frockcoats of a lawyer, merchant, or a Rothschild; or perhaps the grave garb of these my publishers, might find people of the rank of Congo chieftainship to wear them.

  As Stanley shuttled back and forth on foot through the rugged, humid countryside, supervising construction, he carefully kept up his personal appearance, shaving and putting blacking on his mustache each day. During this sojourn, as during all his time in Africa, his sturdy, compact frame survived the diseases that sent so many European visitors to early graves. Several times he was delirious with fever and twice came near death. One bout of malaria, he wrote, reduced his weight to a hundred pounds, and he grew too weak to speak or raise his arms. For two weeks he lay in his tent, convinced that the end was near, then summoned his sun-helmeted European officers and African workers to give his last instructions, to say goodbye, and to make—so he claimed—one last profession of loyalty: "Tell the King ... that I am sorry not to have been able to carry out to a finish the mission he entrusted to me."

  He recovered, but some months later fell sick again and, brought downriver, was carried ashore at Leopoldville unconscious. In 1882, barely able to walk, he went back to Europe to recuperate, traveling on a slow Portuguese steamer. On this ship, he fulminated, "underbred" second-class passengers were allowed onto the first-class deck, where they "expectorated, smoked, and sprawled in the most socialistic manner." Worse yet was an invasion by third-class "females, and half a score of half-naked white children."

  At last he was rescued from these indignities by the ship's arrival in Europe. Doctors warned Stanley that it might be fatal for him to return to the Congo, but Leopold insisted: there was still much to be done. Not only did the king want his colony secured; he also wanted the explorer out of the way for a few more years because, always a loose cannon in public, Stanley continued to talk openly about his hopes for a British Congo. Leopold turned on the royal charm. "Surely, Mr. Stanley," he said, "you cannot think of leaving me now, just when I most need you?" Simultaneously fighting a painful relapse of illness and firing off orders for an array of new equipment and supplies, Stanley returned to the Congo after only two months.

  With the great prize almost within his grasp, Leopold wanted as much land in the Congo as possible, and he wanted it now. His instructions and letters to Stanley all through these years pulsate with his lust for territory.

  I take advantage of a safe opportunity to send you a few lines in my bad English.... It is indispensable you should purchase ... as much land as you will be able to obtain, and that you should place successively under ... suzerainty ... as soon as possible and without losing one minute, all the chiefs from the mouth of the Congo to the Stanley Falls.... If you let me know you are going to execute these instructions without delay I will send you more people and more material. Perhaps Chinese coolies.

  Although piously assuring the British minister in Brussels that his venture in Africa "had no commercial character; it did not carry on trade," Leopold had already written to Stanley, "I am desirous to see you purchase all the ivory which is to be found on the Congo, and let Colonel Strauch know the goods which he has to forward you in order to pay for it and when. I also recommend you to establish barriers and tolls on the parts of the road you have opened. It is but fair and in accordance with the custom of every country."

  Leopold and Stanley knew that other Europeans were beginning to nose around the basin. Their chief worry was the French explorer and naval officer Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who had landed on the coast north of the Congo River and headed inland. One day while he was still building his trail around the rapids, Stanley was startled to have the courtly Frenchman, in a white helmet and blue navy coat, show up at his tent. A still greater shock awaited him at Stanley Pool, where he found that de Brazza had signed a treaty with a chief ceding to France a strip of the northern shoreline. De Brazza had left a sergeant in command of an outpost there, flying the French flag.

  Stanley was a man who brooked no rivals, and over the next few years he and de Brazza carried on a loud feud. Stanley claimed the French explorer's treaty was based on trickery; his rival called Stanley a warrior who was no friend to the Africans. The Paris press loved it. While Leopold schemed with Stanley ab
out how to outfox de Brazza, behind Stanley's back the king invited the Frenchman to Brussels, gave him the Order of Leopold, and tried unsuccessfully to hire him.

  The comings and goings of Stanley and de Brazza began to arouse interest elsewhere. Doddering Portugal resurrected its old claim to the land surrounding the Congo River's mouth. Britain, worried by French interest in the Congo, backed the Portuguese. Leopold felt he had no time to waste.

  Stanley, under pressure, drove his men harder. He exploded at white subordinates who were drinking too much or who had let weeds grow around their river stations. "These people had already given me more trouble than all the African tribes put together. They had inspired such disgust in me that I would rather be condemned to be a boot-black all my life than to be a dry-nurse to beings who had no ... claim to manhood." Despite his own brief and inglorious career on opposite sides of the American Civil War, Stanley was at heart a military man. He liked order and discipline and was a terrifying but effective commander. By now he had amassed a powerful private army, equipped with a thousand quick-firing rifles, a dozen small Krupp cannon, and four machine guns. Among his Zanzibari soldiers there was a Swahili saying: Bunduki sultani ya bara bara (The gun is the sultan of the hinterland).

  Meanwhile, Leopold had hired an Oxford scholar, Sir Travers Twiss, to provide a learned legal opinion backing the right of private companies to act as if they were sovereign countries when making treaties with native chiefs. Stanley was under instructions to lead his well-armed forces up and down the river and do just that. "The treaties must be as brief as possible," Leopold ordered, "and in a couple of articles must grant us everything."

  They did. By the time Stanley and his officers were done, the blue flag with the gold star fluttered over the villages and territories, Stanley claimed, of more than 450 Congo basin chiefs. The texts varied, but many of the treaties gave the king a complete trading monopoly, even as he placated European and American questioners by insisting that he was opening up Africa to free trade. More important, chiefs signed over their land to Leopold, and they did so for almost nothing. At Isangila, near the big rapids, Stanley recorded, he was able to buy land for a station by paying some chiefs with "an ample supply of fine clothes, flunkey coats, and tinsel-braided uniforms, with a rich assortment of divers marketable wares ... not omitting a couple of bottles of gin." The conquerors of Africa, like those of the American West, were finding alcohol as effective as the machine gun.

  The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their X's to documents in a foreign language and in legalese. The idea of a treaty of friendship between two clans or villages was familiar; the idea of signing over one's land to someone on the other side of the ocean was inconceivable. Did the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela, for example, have any idea of what they agreed to on April 1, 1884? In return for "one piece of cloth per month to each of the undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand," they promised to "freely of their own accord, for themselves and their heirs and successors for ever ... give up to the said Association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories ... and to assist by labour or otherwise, any works, improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories.... All roads and waterways running through this country, the right of collecting tolls on the same, and all game, fishing, mining and forest rights, are to be the absolute property of the said Association."

  By labour or otherwise. Stanley's pieces of cloth bought not just land, but manpower. It was an even worse trade than the Indians made for Manhattan.

  ***

  What kind of societies existed in this land that, unknown to most of its inhabitants, Stanley was busily staking out for the King of the Belgians? There is no simple answer, for what would turn out to be the Congo's borders, if superimposed on the map of Europe, would stretch from Zürich to Moscow to central Turkey. It was as large as the entire United States east of the Mississippi. Although mostly rain forest and savanna, it also embraced volcanic hills and mountains covered with snow and glaciers, some of whose peaks reached higher than the Alps.

  The peoples of this vast territory were as diverse as the land. They ranged from citizens of large, organizationally sophisticated kingdoms to the Pygmies of the Ituri rain forest, who lived in small bands with no chiefs and no formal structure of government. The kingdoms, with large towns as their capitals, tended to be in the savanna, where long-distance travel was easier. In the rain forest, where paths had to be hacked through thick, rapidly growing foliage, communities were generally far smaller. These forest-dwellers were sometimes seminomads: if a group of Pygmies, for instance, killed an elephant, that site became a temporary settlement for a week or two of feasting, since it was easier to move a village than a dead elephant.

  Although some Congo peoples, like the Pygmies, were admirably peaceful, it would be a mistake to see most of them as paragons of primeval innocence. Many practiced slavery and a few ritual cannibalism, and they were as likely to make war on other clans or ethnic groups as people anywhere on earth. And traditional warfare in this part of Africa, where a severed head or hand was sometimes proof of an enemy killed in battle, was as harsh as warfare elsewhere. In the far northern Congo some women were maimed, as still happens today, by forced clitoridectomies, a practice no less brutal for being a cultural initiation rite.

  Like many indigenous peoples, inhabitants of the Congo basin had learned to live in balance with their environment. Some groups practiced what was, in effect, birth control, where couples had to abstain from sex before the men left on a hunting expedition, for example, or as long as the woman was breast-feeding a baby. Substances found in certain leaves and bark could induce miscarriages or had contraceptive properties. All these means of population control, incidentally, were strikingly similar to those which had evolved in another great rain forest an ocean away, the Amazon basin.

  Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso—who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries.

  It is easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond the sight of traditional European realism.

  The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as of those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered.

  ***

  In June 1884, his work for Leopold done and a sheaf of treaties in his baggage, Stanley sailed home to Europe. He grumbled a bit about his employer's greed; the king, he complained, had the "enormous voracity to swallow a million of square miles with a gullet that will not take in a herring." But it was Stanley who made the bi
g swallow possible.

  As he settled in England to write his usual thousand-page two-volume account of his travels, Stanley found around him a Europe that had awakened to Africa. The Scramble had begun. The treaty de Brazza had made at Stanley Pool would soon lead to a French colony on the northwest bank of the Congo River. In Germany, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck wanted colonies in Africa. The British, the outsiders with the most substantial foothold on the continent, were beginning to worry about competitors.

  Leopold was certain that none of these larger powers would be eager to recognize the one-man colony Stanley had staked out for him. Diplomatic recognition, however, is partly a matter of precedent. Once one major country recognizes another's existence, other nations are likely to fall into line. If no major European country would take this crucial first step, Leopold decided, he would look elsewhere. Unnoticed on his home continent, the king had already quietly begun making a dazzling end-run around Europe entirely.

  5. FROM FLORIDA TO BERLIN

  AN UNUSUALLY late spring snowfall lay thick on the White House lawn as President Chester A. Arthur, wearing a high silk hat, boarded a private car lent to him by the Pennsylvania Railroad and headed south for a vacation. High blood pressure and other complaints had left him tired, he told his staff, and he wanted a good rest in Florida. Traveling with the president as he left Washington, on April 5, 1883, were the secretary of the navy, Arthur's valet, his personal secretary, and his French chef, whom a journalist on the train described as "a gentleman with a well-developed waist ... evidently a good feeder." A friend of the president's was also on board, and several of his late wife's cousins joined the party as the train rolled south. After Petersburg, Virginia, as the private car moved onto the tracks of a new railroad, a gray-bearded conductor provoked great hilarity by walking into the car, counting the passengers, and trying to collect $47.50 in fares. A telegram ordering him to let the presidential party travel for free was waiting at the next stop.