The Lazy Native
Leopold’s will treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited real estate to be disposed of by its owner. In this the king was no different from other Europeans of his age, explorers, journalists, and empire-builders alike, who talked of Africa as if were without Africans: an expanse empty space waiting to be filled by the cities and railway lines constructed through the magic European industry.
To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold’s regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as theft of land and freedom.
Talk of the lazy native accompanied the entire European land grab in Africa, just as it had been used to justify the conquest of the Americas. To an American reporter, Leopold once declared, “In dealing with a race composed of cannibals for thousands of years it is necessary to use methods which will best shake their idleness and make them realize the sanctity of work.”
To Europeans, Africans were inferior beings: lazy, uncivilized, little better than animals. In fact, the most common way they were put to work was, like animals, as beasts of burden. In any system of terror, the functionaries must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation.
Pursuing the Ivory with Forced Labor
As the 1890s began, the work whose sanctity Leopold prized most highly was seizing all the ivory that could be found. Congo state officials and their African auxiliaries swept through the country on ivory raids, shooting elephants, buying tusks from villagers for a pittance, or simply confiscating them. Congo peoples had been hunting elephants for centuries, but now they were forbidden to sell or deliver ivory to anyone other than an agent of Leopold.
For Africans, transactions in money were not allowed. Money in free circulation might undermine what was essentially a command economy. The commands were above all for labor. At the beginning, the state most wanted porters. The death toll was particularly high among porters forced to carry loads long distances. Edmond Picard, a Belgian senator, described a caravan of porters he saw on the route around the big rapids in 1896:
“Unceasingly we meet these porters … black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loin-cloth for clothing, frizzy and bare head supporting the load – box, bale, ivory tusk, barrel; most of them sickly, drooping under a burden increased by tiredness and insufficient food – a handful of rice and some stinking dried fish; pitiful walking caryatids, beasts of burden with thin monkey legs, with drawn features, eyes fixed and round form preoccupation with keeping their balance and form the daze of exhaustion. They come and go like this by the thousands, requisitioned by the State armed with its powerful militia, handed over by chiefs whose slaves they are and who make off with their salaries, trotting with bent knees, belly forward, an arm raised to steady the load, the other leaning on a long walking stick, dusty and sweaty, insects, dying along the road or, the journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages.”
Stanislas Lefrance, a devout Catholic and monarchist, was a Belgian prosecutor who had come to the Congo to work as a magistrate. Lefranc learned that several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all servant boys in town be given fifty lashes of whom several were seven or eight years old, lined up and waiting their turn, watching, terrified, their companions being flogged.
Lefranc was seeing in use a central tool of Leopold’s Congo. It was the chicotte – a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim’s bare buttocks. Its blows would leave permanent scars; more then twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more – not an uncommon punishment – were often fatal.
The bulk of the chicotte blows were inflicted by Africans on the bodies of other Africans. This, for the conquerors, served a further purpose. It created a class of foremen from among the conquered, like the kapos in the Nazi concentration camps.
