Congo Free State

"Papers from Count Jules Greindl, who was the main collaborator of Leopold II in this curious affair, the author has drawn a very precise account, supplemented by documents. To take advantage of the financial ruin of Spain to make the Philippines a kingdom of its own, distinct from Belgium and then to form a company which would exploit the islands in the name of Spain, such were the successive ideas of Leopold. They failed both for lack of capital and for the reaction of Spanish pride. But they show, in Leopold II, the progress of the colonial idea with all the aspects that will then be found in the Congolese affair. When Stanley discovered the Congo, Leopold was ready."

"I am a great admirer of Leopold II, although I think that he should be destroyed in the memory of mankind and reduced to the state in which I presented him in my play, namely a dirty goblin who as soon as he does something of any interest must be raised in order to become a fully-fledged human being."

"'Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero."

"He claims all successes and attributes the failures to others, he accepts no more criticism and he demands unquestioning obedience to his commands, his judgment must be the judgment of all, his logic must be that of his co-workers, his conscience must be the conscience of others, he is so accustomed to crushing any opposition or sensitivity in his associates that he dares to ask them anything."

"The young Prince Leopold has the nose of a fairytale prince who has been enchanted by an evil witch."

"The Duke of Brabant (Leopold II) takes me for a statistical office."

"My rights to the Congo are not for sharing; they are the fruits of my labours and my expenditures . . . The adversaries of the Congo are pressing for immediate annexation. These persons no doubt hope that a change of regime would sabotage the work now in progress and would enable them to reap some rich booty."

"If you yield so much as an inch of the Congo, your old King will rise from his grave to blame you."

"The mission which the agents of the State in Congo must fulfill is noble and of high purpose. Their task is to develop the work of civilization. They must gradually contain the primitive wildness, the bloodthirsty habits of thousands of years. They must subject the population to new laws. among which the most urgent and the most beneficial is undoubtedly that of labour."

"You would remember that when I decided that the state would exploit its domain and that any vacant land would be claimed by it as its own, you found me absolutely absolute. You have nevertheless very vigorously and very skillfully supported me. For the Nile, I also ask you to follow my instructions faithfully. I will not lead you to the shipwreck, I promise you. For the time being, I want to be as powerful as possible on the Nile."

"I am overwhelmed by your letter yesterday, and I hope with all my heart and for you and for the patriotic work that we are pursuing that you do not persevere in your desire to leave the administration of the Congo. Please come and see me in Brussels on Saturday at a quarter past one."

"It's my ruin you stipulate and you can't want it."

"I would like to do something in Africa; I've been thinking about this for a few days now and would like you to help me. Here are my first impressions, think about it. I know your talent and your sagacious and devoted mind; I know that the day you get down to it, I will be able to count on you. peaceful and humanitarianism is my only concern."

"Our only programme is the work of moral and material re-generation."

"The soldiers of the State are necessarily recruited among the natives. They don't immediately shed habits blood thirsty handed down from generation to generation. The example of white officers, discipline military, will inspire them with the horror of human trophies of which they are ready to be proud. It's in their leaders that they must see the living demonstration of this higher principle that the exercise of authority is not to be confused with cruelty: the second ruins the first. I like to think that our agents, almost all volunteers from the ranks of the Belgian army, are always present atmind the rules of the honorary career in which they are engaged."

"Hopefully they won't mess up my Congo!"

"I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there."

"I believe we must set up three children's colonies, the aim of these colonies is above all to furnish us with soldiers."

"In dealing with a race composed of cannibals for thousands of years, it is necessary to use methods which will best shape their idleness, and make them realize the sanctity of work."

"The Congo state is certainly not a business, if it gathers ivory on some of it's lands, that is only to lessen its deficits."

"You should purchase as much land as you will be able to obtain without losing one minute from all the chiefs from the mouth of the Congo to Stanley falls, I will send you more people and raw materials, and perhaps Chinese couriers."

"You don't have to worry in the least, because in Belgium you will be able to enjoy all the benefits with which I will shower you, choose your replacement carefully, and appoint him only with my approval, until then then you will remain on your post my faithful cloak. May God guide and support you in the missions I entrust to you for the sake of my subjects, I wish that all your duties have already been carried out, so that when you come to Belgium I can prove to you that I am a true friend my faithful cloak, I pray to God that he may protect you, Leopold."

"The terms of the treaties Stanley has made with native chiefs do not satisfy me. There must at least be an added article to the effect that they delegate to us their sovereign rights, the treaties must be as brief as possible and in a couple of articles must grant us everything."

"When the State of Congo was called to economic life by the King of the Belgians, trade was only possible on the ribs. Now, thanks to the activity of His Majesty, he is done safely above the cataracts. This is the result of the peace and order which were introduced by the King of the Belgians incountries where no white merchant could have shown himself before."

"I do not believe in the accusations made in England against King Leopold II, the Congo and I do not share the feelings of those who inspire them. No state would be willing to spend the money spent by the King of the Belgians and Belgium in the most dark places of darkest Africa. When I consider the few years that have passed since the Congo became a state, I believe that the work accomplished is a great honor to Belgium. You can be sure that the King of the Belgians is interested in every detail of his administration. I do not claim that he can monitor all the actions of each individual, what Government could? The stories of the atrocities that have been spread are almost all gossip. The English note of month of August is based on biased reports. I am convinced that Leopold II has been doing his best to prevent any crime in the Congo, he is not responsible for the crimes anymore that could be committed there than those that are sometimes committed in Belgium. The reason of all these slanders? Jealousy! The Congo is doing better than any other African state. Those stories of atrocities will not stop, they will persist with the little basis they had, this was never anything but pure invention."

"To my beginnings in colonial life, almost forty years ago, I found my first major lesson in studying the work of King Leopold II in the Congo: model of creation, practical organization and director, broad and liberal initiative, understanding the material, moral and social needs of natives, from whom all colonial works should be inspired and which, for so many years and over so many points, served as a guide."

"Tackling Leopold in Africa has set in motion a big movement – it must be a movement of human liberation all the world over."

"The apology cult must stop. But that does not mean that the atrocities of the past should be denied. This applies to Leopold II, but also to other culprits. And certainly for crimes that continue to this day in certain areas of the world such as slavery."

"England would not have managed the Congo better than King Leopold has done if she had been mistress of it, as she might have become in 1877."

"I crossed Africa from East to West and from West to East, and I never saw any excesses committed. I do not think that from this point of view there is a single sovereign living who has done so much for humanity as Leopold II.""

"The change which has occurred in the political condition of the African Coast, today calls for common action on the part of the Powers responsible for the control of that Coast. That action should tend to close all foreign slave markets and should also result in putting down slave hunting in the interior. The great work undertaken by the King of the Belgians, in the constitution of the Congo State, and the lively interest taken by His Majesty in all questions affecting the welfare of the African races, lead Her Majesty's Government to hope that Belgium will be disposed to take the initiative in inviting the Powers to meet in Conference at Brussels, in order to consider the best means of attaining the gradual suppression of the slave-trade on the Continent of Africa and the immediate closing of all the outside markets which the slave-trade daily continues to supply."

"The prevailing opinion at court was that the founding of a colony was beyond the strength of the Sovereign of a small state and that he would swallow up his private fortune, unable to create anything lasting. The King sought for the execution of his designs collaborators possessed of the faith which he himself had and which lifts mountains."

"By the end of 1892, all the King's collaborators during the first and second phases of Belgian work in the Congo had therefore ceased to participate. M. van Eetvelde, who had increasingly isolated himself from them, remained alone in possession of the sovereign's confidence, with the sole program of being the passive instrument of his designs. This third phase of the administration of the state of Congo affected all signs of impending dissolution."

"It would be difficult to imagine a more centralized organization than that which has been achieved in the central government of the Independent State of Congo. The Secretary of State is its absolute head, although he himself remains in the most absolute dependence of the Sovereign."

"Leopold II was able to push through his imperial wish and obtained that the fate of what would then be called the Congo Free State was linked to his own. He gave Congo its shape and dimensions, as well as a financial-capitalist structure. However, the debt burden that had become too heavy meant that the king handed over his colony to Belgium, a gift that the parliament was hesitant about but did not dare to refuse."

"In 1885, the whole of Africa was colonized or placed under trusteeship, but Congo climbed to the podium of the three existing sovereign countries. The borders that have been, since 1894, the crucible of Congolese identity were acquired, by treaty, by Leopold II. Thus, Congo has absolutely no debt to Belgium for its international existence. Later, it was through a bilateral treaty, between two sovereign states, regularly ratified, that the Kingdom of Belgium became the metropolis of the Belgian Congo (1908-1960). The little-known truth is that in 1960, Belgium did not grant Congolese independence, but it returned it."

"What does the greatness of a monarch consist in? I fit is the extent of his territory, then the Emperor of Russia is the greatest of all. I fit is the splendour and power of military organization, then William II [of Germany] takes first place. But if royal greatness consists in the wisdom and goodness of a sovereign leading his people with the solicitude of a shepherd watching over his flock, then the greatest sovereign is your own."

"As a constitutional monarch, Leopold II had no possibility of becoming a tyrant in Belgium. He could dismiss Parliament, but had to sign the bills it submitted to him, and to rule in consultation with his ministers. He did not even have a coronation, but an inauguration where he swore before Parliament to obey the Constitution. Yet Leopold had tremendous ambitions. He dreamed of a Belgium that could stand among the European powers, and for that he deemed colonies a necessity. By clever and stealthy means, he managed to gain control of a vast realm in Africa, the Congo, much of which became his personal property. Here, he indulged his desire for profit by exploiting the native population more ferociously than anyone before him. His excesses finally became so notorious that Belgium took control of the colony, giving the country the empire Leopold desired, but also blackening his memory."

"By 1891, six years into the attempt to build the EIC, the whole project was on the verge of bankruptcy. It would have been easy for Léopold to raise revenues by sanctioning imports of liquor that could be taxed or by levying fees on the number of huts in each village, both of which would have caused harm to the native population. A truly “greedy” king, as Hochschild repeatedly calls him, had many fiscal options that Léopold did not exercise."

"The abuses were first reported by an American missionary in The Times of London in 1895 and quickly brought Léopold’s censure: “If there are these abuses in the Congo, we must stop them,” he warned EIC officials in 1896. “If they continue, it will be the end of the state.” For the next ten years, reforming the Congo’s rubber industry absorbed an inordinate amount of attention in the British and American press and legislatures, not to mention within Belgium and the EIC itself, leading to formal Belgian colonization in 1908. Hochschild thus takes a very limited, unintentional, unforeseen, and perhaps unavoidable problem of native-on-native conflict over rubber harvesting and blows it up into a “forgotten Holocaust” to quote the subtitle given to the French edition of his book. Inside this great invention are many more perfidious Russian dolls."

"How can we explain the fact that Leopold II distinguished between his personality as the assignee of the removed Crown Foundation assets and the Free State, to the point that he felt he had to transfer all or part of these assets to the Free State, by a subsequent formal provision of the decree? In the simplest way in the world. By the fact that the King, who had only rather vague notions on the exact legal scope of his sovereignty, believed in the possibility of a disjunction, a duality between the absolute state that was the Congo Free State and the personality of his sovereign, whereas such a disjunction was contrary to the most elementary principles of public law."

"The Committee of the British Baptist Missionary Society, of London, desire most respectfully to address Your Majesty as Sovereign of the Congo Free State, and to express their grateful acknowledgments for Your Majesty's gracious and helpful sympathy with all wisely considered efforts put forth for the enlightenment and uplifting of Your Majesty's native subjects living within the territories of the Congo Free State."

"In the prosecution of these labours, the Committee of the Baptist Missionary Society desire gratefully to acknowledge the many signal and helpful proofs they have received of Your Gracious Majesty's approval and support; and very specially at this juncture they are pleased to express to Your Majesty their respectful appreciation of the great boon granted "to all religious, scientific and charitable institutions," by the reduction of direct and personal taxes by 50 per cent, from, on, and after the first day of July last, as proclaimed by Your Majesty's command in the May and June issues of the Bulletin officiel de I'Etat independant du Congo, which the Committee regard as a further and significant proof of Your Majesty's desire to promote the truest welfare of Your Majesty's Congo subjects, and to help forward all institutions calculated to produce enduring and beneficent results.""

"There is no longer a single government that colonizes. There is only individual colonization."

"We went to live in full Portuguese territory without the permission of Portugal. I don't quite understand our claim."

"I think sire, that you would be wrong to give the slightest publicity to this writing, and even to communicate it to the person who asked you for it."

"I am not telling you this, Monsignor, in the interest of the project that I am going to defend in the chamber and in front of the country, but in your personal interest. Believe me, Monsignor, we are entering an era where a Prince cannot be too circumspect and cautious. Avoid getting into our discussions and our controversies, avoid taking sides in our struggles."

"The ivory issue worries me more and more. I am not forgetting any of the considerations that Your Majesty has deigned to point out to me, but commerce will want to be reassured as to the limits of competition."

"You may want to, Sire, but then you will find someone other than me to carry out such a will."

"I will be more and more concerned with giving you sound and true political ideas, few people are better able to do this than I; since the age of 16 I have been involved in the big affairs of Europe."