C—EPISODES IN CAPITALISTIC
EXPLOITATION
FOREWORD
We have now to record the operations of a System which Conan Doyle has described as the "greatest crime in all history"; Sir Sidney Olivier as "an inversion of the old Slave-Trade"; the British Primate as a matter "far transcending all questions of contemporary politics"; and a British Foreign Secretary as "bondage under the most barbarous and inhuman conditions, maintained for mercenary motives of the most selfish character." These are quotations taken from a mass of similar utterances. It would be an easy matter to fill an entire volume with similar denunciations by men of many countries and of all classes and professions, which resounded in Legislative Chambers, from platform, pulpit, and throughout the world's Press for over a decade. And it is undeniable that all the misdeeds of Europeans in Africa since the abolition of the over-sea slave trade, pale into insignificance when compared with the tragedy of the Congo. Indeed, no comparison is possible as regards scale, motive, and duration of time alike.
There is much that is removed from the merely covetous in the ambitions of statesmen to extend their country's dominion over alien peoples and territory, and in the imperialistic impulses of nations from which statesmen derive the necessary support for their actions. A restricted section of the community may, and does, benefit pecuniarily, but lucre is not usually the originating influence.
The clash between civilised and uncivilised man for possession of the soil may lead to injustice and cruelty which a wider vision would recognise as short-sighted and unnecessary, and a wise statesmanship avoid. But the driving forces are those of instinctive and uncontrollable racial movements.
No such considerations apply in the case of the Congo. There, the motive from first to last was despicably sordid. Whatever may have been King Leopold's original purpose in seeking to acquire a vast African demesne, the acquisition of wealth and of power through its systematised pillage soon became his fixed design. The capitalists he gathered round him and who shared his spoils never had any other. The extension of this System to the French Congo was the result of a combination of circumstances. Venality in French political circles made its extension possible. Once introduced, a vested interest was created which proved too strong fer every successive Minister who spent a precarious and short-lived tenure at the Colonial Ministry, and which gradually obtained entire mastery over administrative policy. This can be doubted only by those who are unaware of the part which la haute finance plays in French internal politics, and who are unacquainted with the evidence of it in this particular case. When indications of the inevitable consequences of the System began to filter through, and inspired some generous minds—with which France abounds—to indignant protest, numerous causes combined to defeat these efforts and to perpetuate the evil. This will be made clear to the reader as the narrative proceeds.
Let us not lose sight of the following point, which is of capital importance in considering the Congo "System." The barbarities which disgrace the culmination of impolicy and wrong, and which are familiar to us in the story of German South-West Africa, of Southern Rhodesia, of Tripoli, and so many others—these are episodical, temporary. They do not represent a permanent state of affairs. Once the recalcitrant African community has been defeated and "punished," there is no longer any intelligent reason for continuing the killing process. On the contrary, the utilitarian motive of preservation steps in. The interest of the conqueror is to conserve—for no African land is of use to the white man without black labour. Injustice, cruelty—these may persist. But self-interest stops short at destruction. The purpose in hand has the character of permanence—whether the object be white settlement or political control.
But the motives and circumstances operating in the Congo differed absolutely in those vital respects. The beneficiaries aimed at no work of permanence, no constructive national task. They had no enduring interest in the Congo. Their one and only object was to get as much indiarubber out of it as they could in the shortest possible time, and to inflate their rubber shares on the stock exchange. And a perennial state of warfare all over the Congo was necessary to the accomplishment of that object, because there was no finality in the demand. It was incessant. An act of political submission after the usual massacre of unarmed—in the modern sense—men by armed men did not suffice. The community, clan or tribe, must produce india rubber and continue to produce it, and must be fought and fought and fought again, tortured through its women, deprived of homesteads and foodstuffs; until broken, hunted, starving, fugitive, despairing, every capacity to resist demands, however outrageous, every shred of self-respect, had vanished. For twenty years in the Congo Free State, for ten years (at least) in the French Congo this process continued, its victims being numbered by millions.
What I desire to emphasise in these introductory lines is the importance of the System itself, and of the claims upon which it is based, being thoroughly grasped by the public. In the latter years of the Congo Reform movement they had become well understood, and people had seized hold of the essential fact that the real issue was not the saturnalia of atrocity raging in the Congo forests, but the reason of it, viz: The avowed principles upon which King Leopold's administration in the Congo Free State, and the French Government's administration in the French Congo were based, and officially defended by the Belgian and French Governments and by a cohort of international lawyers. It had become clear that in those principles, which differentiated radically and completely from the principles governing the exercise of political power by European Governments in every part of tropical Africa, including the French dependencies themselves, was involved the future of the black man and the future character of European policy in Africa; that if they prevailed, if the contagion spread, the future of Africa was a future of slavery imposed in the interests of European capitalism, degrading by its accompanying and resultant effects the whole political life of Europe, and owing to its nature, calculated rapidly to destroy the African race, thereby sterilising the natural resources of the Dark Continent.
There is need for this appeal. The vividness of the conviction that an issue of transcendental potency, a something elemental, going right down to the roots of human morality, was at stake in the Congo controversy, faded with the eventual success which attended the Reform movement so far as the Congo Free State was concerned. But although that final success was registered no further back in point of time than the spring of 1913, humanity has gone through such convulsions since then, the thinking mind has been so wholly turned from its normal functional methods, that pre-war events have a tendency to appear vague and shadowy, dim ghosts of some ancient epoch. Things are forgotten, or but half remembered. And, too, the peoples of Europe have for the past four and a half years been so fed with lies; history has been so cynically falsified to serve the momentary interest of Governments; changes so revolutionary in the structure of European policy and sociology have occurred; misery so profound and loss of life on so huge a scale have eventuated—that the collective reasoning power has got out of focus. It is at such times of cataclysmic upheaval that the dark forces in the nations see their opportunity, and if public opinion be not vigilant, make haste to use it.
There is a movement on foot to apply to British tropical Africa the self-same policy, based upon the self-same principles, which decimated and ruined the Congo. The motive behind it is identical. It is being astutely engineered, sophistically urged, presented in a new garb. It is a real danger, for it is supported by great wealth and also by democratic influences, either suborned, or, as one would prefer to believe, misled by ignorance.