Belgian Congo - Congo Free State, 1884–1908

Congo Free State, 1884–1908

Until the latter part of the 19th century, the Europeans had not yet ventured into the Congo. The rainforest, swamps and accompanying malaria, and other diseases, such as sleeping sickness, made it a difficult environment for European exploration and exploitation. In 1876, King Léopold II of the Belgians organized the International African Association with the cooperation of the leading African explorers and the support of several European governments for the promotion of African exploration and colonization. After Henry Morton Stanley explored the region, a journey that ended in 1878, Leopold courted the explorer and hired him to help establish Leopold’s interests in the region. Léopold II had been keen to acquire a colony for Belgium even before he ascended to the throne in 1865. He was convinced that the acquisition of a colony would bestow international prestige on his relatively young and small home country and that it might provide a steady source of income. Belgium was not greatly interested in its monarch’s dreams of empire-building. Ambitious and stubborn, Léopold II decided to pursue the matter on his own account.

European rivalry in Central Africa led to diplomatic tensions, in particular with regard to the largely unclaimed Congo river basin. In November 1884, Otto von Bismarck convened a 14-nation conference (the Berlin Conference) where Africa was referred to as "the magnificent cake" by King Leopold II. To find a peaceful resolution to the Congo crisis. After three months of negotiation on 5 February 1885, the Berlin Conference reached agreement. While it did not formally approve or disapprove the territorial claims of the European powers in Central Africa, it did agree on a set of rules to ensure a conflict-free partitioning of the region. Key among those were the recognition of the Congo basin as a free-trade zone, and the general acceptance of the principle that any territorial claim needed to be backed up by evidence of actual and durable occupation of that territory. In reality, Léopold II emerged triumphant from the Berlin Conference. In a series of bilateral diplomatic agreements, France was given 666,000 km2 (257,000 sq mi) on the north bank of the Congo river (modern Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic), Portugal 909,000 km2 (351,000 sq mi) to the south (part of modern Angola), and Léopold’s wholly owned, single-shareholder “philanthropic” organization received the balance: 2,344,000 km2 (905,000 sq mi), to be constituted as the Congo Free State.

The Congo Free State was a corporate state privately controlled by Léopold II, King of the Belgians through a dummy non-governmental organization, the Association Internationale Africaine. Léopold was the sole shareholder and chairman. The state included the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo and existed from 1885 to 1908, when it was annexed by the government of Belgium. Initially, the occupation and exploration of the immense territory of the Congo Free State proved a heavy burden on the monarch’s purse. Twice, state bankruptcy was avoided by the Belgian state granting Léopold II emergency loans. In the 1890s, the tide turned dramatically. Through the forced exploitation of rubber, copper, and other minerals in the upper Lualaba River basin, together with the global rubber boom, huge surpluses were generated. Léopold II used part of this new wealth for the embellishment of his native country: the Royal Galleries in Ostend, the Palace of the Colonies in Tervuren, or the triumphal arch in Brussels were funded from the profits generated by the Congo. It soon became clear that these profits were generated on the back of brutal mistreatment of the local people and plunder of the Congo’s natural resources.

Thus, under Léopold II’s administration, the Congo Free State became the site of one of the worst man-made humanitarian disasters of the turn of the 20th century. The report of the British Consul Roger Casement, published in early 1904, was an irrefutable indictment of the “rubber system”: “… the drowsy, unsupervised machine of coercion which wore out the people and the land”. In the absence of a census (the first was made in 1924), it is difficult to quantify the population loss of the period, but it must have been very high. According to Roger Casement’s report, depopulation was caused mainly by four causes: “indiscriminate war”, starvation, reduction of births, and tropical diseases. Adam Hochschild argues that roughly 10 million perished. The human suffering inflicted by the rapacious exploitation of the colony was immense.

The European and American press exposed the conditions in the Congo Free State to the public in the early 1900s. In 1904, Léopold II was forced to allow an international parliamentary commission of inquiry entry to the Congo Free State. The report of the commission (1905) confirmed most of the charges formulated by Edmund Morel and Roger Casement, but also by Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries. By 1908, public pressure and diplomatic maneuvers led to the end of Léopold II’s rule and to the annexation of the Congo as a colony of Belgium, known as the Belgian Congo.