Violent Saviors, page 22
Laughlin was another member of that ever-more-slender band of anti-imperialist liberal economists. In a tract in 1899 he had embraced the “liberty party” that advocated “self-government,” and “liberty for all men in all lands” to apply to Filipinos. He hedged a little on having “no more of our presence over there than is necessary to protect the islands from foreign aggression” and “to assure the rights of liberty and property to foreigners.” But he forcefully rejected the “royalist party” who would “create a relation of master and subject races,” which “is vitally opposed to all the principles of free institutions.” This was the “great moral issue” for his generation.
Crucially, Laughlin quoted Lincoln on the dangers of hypocrisy. He said what Lincoln said about slavery could be said about the US conquest of the Philippines: “I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”43
Laughlin was to be all too correct in predicting that the enemies of freedom would exploit the Western hypocrisy on free institutions in the Philippines, not to mention in the West’s expanded colonial empires worldwide.
It would get even worse. Not only was colonialism expanding, but also events in the Congo would herald a new formulation of benevolent slavery under colonialism.
13
Leopold’s Congo and the Revival of Benevolent Slavery
Economic rights affect human rights. That was the insight of a British human rights campaigner and unofficial liberal economist named E. D. Morel, who campaigned against the Belgian King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo in the late 1890s and early 1900s. King Leopold’s men were forcing the Congolese to bring them ivory and rubber under the threat of whipping, chopping off hands, and killing. Morel argued such violence followed from the failure of the Belgians to recognize property rights and freedom of exchange for the Congolese, with Leopold giving a monopoly of trade to his own agents. It was the worst case of white oppression of Black people since the end of slavery. With forced labor, Leopold perpetrated a more malevolent exploitation of the Congo than the Americans did in the Philippines. The Congo at that point was Leopold’s own personal colony and not a colony of the Belgian state.
Forced labor would be a recurrent issue in colonialism after this. Morel’s Congo campaign was another major installment in the liberal critique of forced labor that went back to the benevolent-slavery rebuttals of Smith and Mill. The liberals in this round would be less successful than in the previous one. The use of forced labor in colonies would ultimately undermine the appeal of liberalism to people in the Rest, with fateful consequences in the twentieth century. At the time, there was little effort to hear the victims of forced labor, even by reformers. Some Congolese villagers were quoted by missionaries but lacked a forum otherwise to give their viewpoints.
Respecting economic rights and thereby human rights was a necessary condition for markets to be benevolent, Morel argued. Reducing violence required economic reforms. Most observers of the great campaign against Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo failed to appreciate the economics of human rights violations.
Perhaps the moral reformers as usual were a little unfair to their opponents, portraying them at their worst. Leopold gave the advocates the invaluable gift of himself as a cartoon villain. Morel exploited this gift in an international campaign against the Congo atrocities.
King Leopold began with strong claims for his benevolence in the Congo. In 1876, the Belgian king called a conference on the exploration of Africa. He inspired conference delegates with his call “to open to civilization the only portion of our globe to which it has not yet penetrated.” He used the venerable light-versus-darkness metaphor. He wanted “to pierce the darkness which envelopes entire populations.” It was, he said, a crusade “worthy of this century of progress.”1
To adjudicate the claims for African territory that Leopold disrupted, the colonial powers convened the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. The Berlin delegates agreed on the goal of “furthering the moral and material well-being of the native populations.” They offered this progress to the Africans they were conquering.
All the nations at the conference recognized King Leopold’s nascent Congo Free State, including the United States, France, Germany, and Britain. Leopold and other participants in the conference made a commitment to free trade in the Congo Basin.2
A few doubters wondered whether colonizers of Africa were progressive. In February 1899, the same month as Kipling published his poem “The White Man’s Burden,” the author of another literary masterpiece signaled his doubts. Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness continued the metaphor war of light versus darkness. Kipling and Twain had argued about whether white men really brought the light to replace the night in the Philippines. Now Conrad joined the argument on which side represented darkness in King Leopold’s Congo Free State.
Marlow, the narrator in Heart of Darkness, gets a job traveling to the heart of Africa with “the Company,” modeled on Leopold’s monopoly trading companies in the Congo. Marlow’s aunt embarrasses him by viewing him as an “emissary of light,” an “apostle” to save “those ignorant millions from their horrid ways.” When he arrives in the Congo, he hears of Mr. Kurtz, the chief of the Inner Station. The station is far up the Congo River, in the heart of ivory country. Kurtz collects as much ivory as all the other European agents put together.
Few of Conrad’s readers realize how much Kurtz starts off as a kind of development economist. Another agent in the Congo tells Marlow that Kurtz is “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress.” Indeed, a certain International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs commissioned Kurtz to write a report on the Congo. When Marlow and Kurtz finally meet, Kurtz shows him the report. In the first paragraph, Kurtz argues that whites, “from the point of development we had arrived at,” had a lot to offer the “savages.” Kurtz enthuses that “by the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.”3
Conrad reveals how this unbounded power for good turned out in one of the most notorious scenes in world literature. Marlow first glimpses Kurtz’s Inner Station from afar, where he sees some posts around the station topped by ornamental balls. When he gets closer, he sees that the balls are actually human heads impaled on stakes.4
Conrad gives us our first hint of Congo economics. Marlow hears from another European about Kurtz’s methods for trading for ivory with the natives. Even when Kurtz ran out of trading goods, he still had plenty of ammunition. He and his local henchmen collected ivory at gunpoint, “killing whom he jolly well pleased.” Marlow sees that Kurtz had added a handwritten postscript to his progress report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Attending Kurtz on his deathbed, Marlow hears his last words: “‘The horror! The horror!” Kurtz was not the light; he was the darkness.5
By the time Conrad published Heart of Darkness, reports of Belgian atrocities in the Congo were multiplying. An article in an American magazine, republished in a British periodical, gave a report from 1895 of a Belgian captain named Léon Rom at the Stanley Falls station deep in the Congo interior. Rom had decorated his flowerbeds with the heads of twenty-one Congolese killed by a punitive expedition, which may have inspired the Kurtz character for Conrad. Three other atrocity reports by missionaries from 1895 to 1897 generated fierce debates in the British press, which was already following events in the Congo. In The Times alone, there were 257 articles with Congo in the headline or byline from 1889 to 1899.6
An article in The Times on May 14, 1897, gave firsthand account from a Swedish missionary in the Congo, E. V. Sjöblom, of Belgian troops rampaging through the interior. Sjöblom also gave his account to British human rights advocates at a meeting of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, on May 12, 1897. The troops, made up of local auxiliaries, killed Congolese villagers and cut off the hands of the dead. The troops spared the lives of some villagers but cut off their hands. The local troops smoked the hands to prove to the Belgians how many they had killed. Severed and smoked hands were going to be the symbol of the horrors in the Congo. A later Belgian critic called the monuments built by King Leopold with his Congo profits “the Arches of the Severed Hands.”
What was going on? Sjöblom reported it was all part of the collection of wild rubber for export from the Congo. The Belgians demanded a quota of collected rubber from each village and killed or mutilated villagers that failed to meet their quota. Villagers had to roam far afield to find enough rubber. Some wound up dying of starvation before the Belgians could kill them. Sjöblom noted that the locals responded to the Belgian agents of progress by asking, “Why did the white man ever find his way to my country?”7
King Leopold offered in 1896 one of the classic solutions to any aid controversy—a commission. His Natives Protection Commission would investigate any violence against the natives and report such abuses directly to the governor-general for correction. Nothing changed.8
King Leopold in a speech published in 1898 further defended his mission against critics. His “firm and parental” rule only forced the insufficiently inclined Congolese to work hard for Congo’s own “development of civilization.” Previously, the nonhardworking natives produced barely enough for their own subsistence. Prosperity in the Congo, resulting from the imposition of hard work on the locals by the Free State, would serve both “the interests of whites and negroes.” Leopold was reviving the theory of benevolent slavery that liberals had seemingly defeated with American emancipation. Leopold said he was bringing “all the blessings of Christian civilization” to the Congo.9
In his many defenses of his Congo mission, Leopold did not advertise the blessings he had himself received. Congo profits bought him a 1,500-ton steam-powered yacht and an estate on the French Riviera.10
But any crusade against Belgian atrocities in the Congo was hard to get going when neutral observers did not know which side to believe. At this point, a whistleblower inside the Congo trading system changed the contest.
E. D. Morel was born in Paris on July 10, 1873, to a French father and English mother. His mother sent him to England for schooling after the death of his father. At the age of eighteen, he joined the Liverpool shipping firm of Elder Dempster as a clerk. Elder Dempster ships carried ivory and rubber exports from the Congo and goods from Europe back to the Congo. As he learned the business, the young shipping clerk supplemented his income with articles about Africa for English newspapers.11
Morel was far from the usual definition of an economist. However, if economists are defined as those who discuss economic ideas, Morel passes easily. He sounded more like today’s economists than many of the AEA founders. Morel had absorbed classical economics from some key mentors and his own reading.
One of the mentors was Mary Kingsley (1862–1900), another forgotten figure in the distinguished line of female economic thinkers. Kingsley was a British traveler and writer who made two remarkably adventurous trips through West Africa. She did not oppose colonial rule, and she had some insulting things to say about Africans. But at the same time, she celebrated African traders: “The journeys these bush traders make are often remarkable, and they deserve great credit for the courage and enterprise they display.” Like other liberal thinkers of this era, Kingsley wanted only a minimal colonial state that just facilitated commerce.12
Kingsley denounced the missionaries who for the sake of their fundraising painted “a distorted portrait of the African” as a “child” who needed saving. She thought that “the evil worked by what we must call the missionary party is almost incalculable.” She rejected this philanthropic mindset: “I confess I am not an enthusiast on civilising the African.” The missionaries had a regrettable influence over the statesmen who made colonial policy. As she wrote to a Black editor in Liberia: “The stay-at-home statesmen think that Africans are all awful savages or silly children—people who can only be dealt with on a reformatory penitentiary line. This view you know is not mine.” Sadly, Kingsley died in 1900 before the Congo campaign took off. Before her death, she had defended Morel when he started to get into trouble with his employer, Elder Dempster.13
Morel cited Kingsley’s “silly children” quote in a 1911 book on his later visit to Nigeria. He dedicated the book to Mary Kingsley, “WHO POINTED THE WAY.”14
The 1911 book illustrates his own economic thinking, and how it was similar to Kingsley’s. He traveled four hundred miles up the Niger in 1911, consulting with Indigenous leaders. Nigerian entrepreneurs impressed him with their thriving cocoa and oil palm industries. The philanthropic impulses of European missionaries impressed him less. They could see Nigerians only as “black with sin, black with lust, black with cruelty.” The missionaries saw Nigerians as waiting for Western salvation. In contrast, Morel’s image of the prototypical Nigerian was as “an active, hard-working individual,” who was also “a keen business man and a born trader.” Nigerians responded to market incentives just as Europeans did. As he described in another book later in 1920, the Ashanti farmers of the Gold Coast (Ghana) had shown similar initiative in capturing 30 percent of the world market for cocoa. Morel rejected the stereotype of the “incurable sloth of the aboriginal inhabitants” perpetrated by postclassical economists. Nigerians and Ghanaians had shown how hard they worked when the British let them work for themselves. This view of innate equality of economic agents went back to Smith. But Morel had a much rosier view of British colonizers than Smith had.15
Back at the beginning of the twentieth century, Morel as unofficial economist had begun analyzing the Congo trade. The Congo commerce did not seem to fit economic predictions. The ivory and rubber exports from the Congo should have generated income for the Congolese, some of which they would normally spend on imports from Europe. Examining commercial statistics and the Elder Dempster shipping manifests from the Congo to Antwerp, Morel indeed found the ivory and rubber cargoes. However, the Elder Dempster ships going back from Antwerp to Congo carried little besides rifles and ammunition for Congo Free State soldiers. The trade between Congo and Belgium was not really a trade. The Belgians were getting ivory and rubber; the Congolese were getting almost nothing. Why were the Congolese giving something for nothing? The rifles and ammunition were a clue that violence might be a factor. At this point, Morel started reading the atrocity reports of the missionaries.16
Morel now raised his concerns with his boss at Elder Dempster, Sir Alfred Jones. Although Elder Dempster got a lot of revenue from their customer King Leopold, Jones did discuss Morel’s findings with the king—who as usual promised to investigate and make changes. Not convinced, Morel persisted. Officials in Liverpool and Antwerp began to ostracize Morel, combined with hints of lucrative promotions to other positions that did not involve the Congo. Morel discovered the usual treatment of whistleblowers who refuse to shut up.
Morel kept escalating his personal campaign. On July 28, 1900, he published his first critical article in the English press on the Congo. He was working himself out of a good job at Elder Dempster—and into an uncertain future as a journalist working on a scandal that few British cared about. Finally, in February 1901, Morel left Elder Dempster. He asked himself: What chance did an obscure twenty-seven-year-old ex-clerk, semitrained economist, and inexperienced journalist have against King Leopold? As Morel later remembered saying at that moment, “The odds were heavy.”17
But Morel and his allies were ready three years later to launch the Congo Reform Association (CRA), one of the biggest Anglo-American human rights campaigns since the abolition of slavery. In the same critical year of 1904, an American Congo Reform Association emerged as well. American veterans of the Anti-Imperialist League on the Philippines now signed up to combat the evils of imperialism in the Congo.
The liberal side once again had some literary celebrities on its side. Mark Twain agreed to redeploy his satirical firepower from the Blessings of Civilization business in the Philippines to the same business in the Congo Free State. Joseph Conrad supplied a nonfictional attack to supplement Heart of Darkness. Conrad rejected Leopold’s justification of violence based on Congolese backwardness: “Barbarism per se is no crime deserving of a heavy visitation.” Morel published Conrad’s letter in 1905.18
Morel focused on economics as the best way to understand Leopold’s violence in the Congo. An Irish inventor had come up with an inflatable rubber tire for bicycles in 1888. Other industrial uses, such as insulation for electric and telegraph wires, also fueled a sharp increase in global demand for rubber. Congo had an abundance of wild rubber vines, but climbing up into the rainforest to extract the sap was tedious and dangerous work. The buyers had to pay the Congolese rubber harvesters a high price to induce a large supply.19
However, to achieve high profits, Leopold wanted to get rubber from Congolese producers at a price far below the world price. To achieve this, he surrounded the natives with a web of overlapping economic controls. His own trading monopoly would buy the rubber from producers in the Congo at a very low price. The Congolese could not sell to any other domestic buyer besides the monopoly. They could not sell the rubber to any other Europeans because Leopold banned other Europeans from importing rubber from the Congo (violating the free trade pledge Leopold had made in Berlin that had inspired the name Congo Free State). The Congolese could not use their land for something else besides rubber because he nationalized their lands for the Congo Free State. He did not allow them even to use their own labor for something else besides rubber production.
The normal outcome of severe price controls on a good such as rubber is a collapse in supply, because suppliers don’t want to supply much at low prices. Leopold’s taunt that the Congo natives did not want to work was true in a different way than he intended. Of course, the Congolese didn’t want to work if you didn’t pay them.
