Special to the Town Crier
Adam Hochschild, author of "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa," revealed some dark history of colonial Africa at his Morning Forum of Los Altos lecture March 2.
Hochschild told how King Leopold II of Belgium, hungry for unlimited power and frustrated by his small country and its lack of riches, hired Sir Henry Morton Stanley (of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" fame) to explore the Congo Free State.
Unlike other European colonies in Africa, the Congo, 1/13th of the African continent and 76 times the size of Belgium, was not owned by the government, but was held as Leopold's personal property, Hochschild said.
Hochschild said Leopold successfully portrayed himself to the world as a philanthropist who was bringing religion to the natives, while he was brutally enslaving them to advance his own wealth.
Originally, ivory was the main source of riches, Hochschild said, and Africans were conscripted to hunt for and retrieve elephant tusks from the jungle. The advent of the inflatable bicycle tire and the automobile in the 1890s made the regime even more brutal, Hochschild said, because the world appetite for rubber became enormous, and slave labor was needed to harvest wild rubber vines from the jungle.
Severed heads and hands became symbols of the regime's power. African women were taken hostage to force the men ever further into the jungle as the vines near the villages were depleted. The results, said Hochschild, were "catastrophic."
Some British and American missionaries, including William Shepherd, the first black American missionary in Africa, reported on the horrors of Leopold's regime, but were not "media-savvy" enough to get their message out, Hochschild said.
The hero of the story was a British shipping line employee named Edmund Morel, who saw ships from the Congo landing at Antwerp laden with rubber and ivory, but departing empty except for soldiers and firearms - with no food or other goods for trade. Morel deduced that slave labor was the source of the rubber and ivory, since nothing was being sent back to Africa in return.
Unable to convince his employers to act, Morel quit his job and spent the next 10 years investigating, writing articles and organizing demonstrations against the atrocities in the Congo, the first human rights movement of the century, Hochschild said.
The resulting world-wide firestorm of public opinion forced Leopold to relinquish his personal ownership of the Congo to the Belgian parliament in 1908.
The Morning Forum is a members-only lecture series held at the United Methodist Church of Los Altos. Membership is closed for this year. To get on a waiting list for membership, write to: Morning Forum, P.O. Box 274, Los Altos 94023-0274.