Transcript of 538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)

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When I was a little chap, I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America or Africa or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time, there were many blank spaces on the Earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map, I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up, I will go there. There was one, the biggest, the most blank, so to speak, that I had a hankering after. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery, a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river, especially, a mighty big river that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country. And its tail lost in the depths of the land. Dash it all, I thought to myself. They can't trade without using some craft on that lot of fresh water.

Steamboats. Why shouldn't I try to take charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me. That is Marlowe, the hero and the narrator of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart Darkness, which was first published in Blackwoods magazine in 1899. It famously provided the inspiration for Apocalypse Now, about the American experience in Vietnam. But it was originally written about the European colonial experience in Africa, probably the greatest, the most influential, possibly the most controversial book about that ever written, about the moral dangers of colonialism, and also about the sense of the darkness that lurks in the heart of the human soul, because the darkness in that title, Heart of Darkness, has many different levels. There's also the darkness that is London. Marlowe is talking about this on a boat on the River Thames, narrating it to three friends. The sense that the darkness in Africa is reflecting the darkness in the heart of the European is at the heart of the idea of the book, isn't it, Dominic?

It is indeed, Tom. Yeah, absolutely. We'll get on to Heart of Darkness next week because we'll do an episode about Joseph Conrad and about this book, which is one of the most influential books, I would argue, of the modern age. It's a book that I think anticipates so much of the culture of the 20th century in wrestling with man's capacity for evil and the possibilities of violence and brutality that have been opened up by globalization and by history. We'll get onto that next week. It's a book rooted in Conrad's own experience. Just to give people a sense, he had visited a specific place at a specific point of time. That place is the Congo Free State under the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium. Conrad had visited it nine years before he wrote the book as a merchant seaman, steering a boat as Marlowe does into the heart of Africa. We'll talk about his experience, as I said next week. But this week, we're going to look at the real history that underpins that story. The story of the Congo free state, probably the darkest stain in the history of European colonialism, what Conrad himself called, and I quote, The Vilist Scramble for dilute that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.

To give people a sense, we are in Central Africa between 1885 and 1908. It's the country that is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an enormous country, a country that is as big as Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain put together. Indeed, it's as big as the entire United States, east of the Mississippi, and is actually largely unknown outside its own borders, isn't it, Tom?

I guess people have a vague sense of Congo because it became Zaira under President Mobutu, who was the archetype of the kleptocratic African strongman. And yet there's a sense that no one was quite as kleptocratic or brutal, actually, as Leopold II. There's a case for saying that he is the model for much that goes wrong with Africa in the wake of independence, wouldn't you say?

I would, absolutely. I would. I think lots of people would say that this is a foundational moment for the Congo from which nothing ever goes right thereafter. In that 23-year period when King Leopold is in charge of the Congo, there's a fair claim that it's one of the worst places to live that has ever existed. There's a brilliant book on this called King Leopold's Ghost by the American writer Adam Hochschild. We'll be borrowing from that book very liberally. So a big shout out to Adam Hochschild's book at the beginning. Not an uncontroversial book itself. In the next week's bonus episode, we'll talk about some of the arguments about that book. But anyway, in King Leopold's Ghost, he says this is one of the great mass killings in human history. A death told, he says, of Holocaust dimensions. Exactly how many people die in the Congo free state is disputed.

But it's millions, isn't it?

It's millions. It's almost certainly millions. Some estimates would go as high as 10 million. It's not just a story about horror. It's a story about celebrity, about international relations, royalty. There's a lot of sex in it. There's loads of politics. It's a story about modernity as well, because this is a new age. It's the age of the camera. So lots of photography. Photography is really important, newspapers, telegraphs, and so on. Actually, as we're getting on to in our third episode, it proves the provocation, the cause for one of the great human rights campaigns in all history, arguably the foundational human rights campaign of the 20th century.

Yeah, you say of the 20th century, it joins the abolitionist movement of the late 18th and early 19th century, which gets rid of slavery, with the human rights movements of the late 20th century. It's interesting that it It's very anglophone, isn't it? It's very centered in Britain and in the United States. Again, Britain's role in all this is really, really intriguing. It's quite, I mean, intriguingly ambivalent, really.

It is indeed. It's such a rich and interesting story, so it definitely merits a series. Like all good series, it needs a riveting central character, in this case, a villain. History has absolutely provided us with one. This is King Leopold II of Belgium. Who Hostard says is as interesting, as multilayered, as greedy, as cunning, as charming, and as untrustworthy as any of Shakespeare's villains. If he is the villain, the great irony is he never, ever sets foot in the Congo. He never lays eyes on the Congo. His villain, as it were, is carried out from afar, which makes him a very 20th century figure. You think of all these dictators who kill so many millions of people without ever shedding blood themselves.

But also, you could say if you were an anti capitalist, that he's the exemplification of great corporations now who leach money from distant parts of the world, rely on products made by slave labor. Leopold is the archetype of that as well, wouldn't you say?

He is indeed. He is. We'll absolutely get into that. This is the classic example, you might say, of the rapacity of corporate capitalism carried to its ultimate murderous extreme. But let's start with Leopold himself. He was born in 1835, when Belgium had been independent from the Netherlands for five years. He's the son of the very first king of the Belgians, who's also called Leopold. He's brought up at a castle called Lachen, which is outside Brussels, where he spends most of his time. He speaks French, German, and English, not interestingly, Flemish, which is the language of most of his subjects. Now, Leopold's parents, Leopold and Louise, had a pretty miserable, loveless marriage, and they treated their son very, very coldly. If he wanted to talk to his father, he had to apply through a secretary for an audience. When his father wanted to tell his son something, he got a secretary to do it for him.

To be fair, that is how I communicate with Katie and Eliza.

You know what? When I was reading this, the parallels between you and King Leopold were leaping off the page. Un Unbelievable.

Yeah, what is it about me and 20th century monarchs, the Is that Leopold II?

Yeah, it's chilling. Leopold, maybe this will ring a bell with you, Tom. He grows up a moody, gangling and humorless boy. That's me. But the thing is, even at the time, his father says of him, he's very cunning. His father compares him with a fox, says, Leopold is like a fox. He slowly and stealthily,picks out his path.

Stalks the chickens.

Exactly. And then he makes his move. By the 1850s, Leopold is in his teens. He's become, I think it's fair to say, an extremely awkward and unattractive young man. People always comment on how unbelievably tall he is. He's a bit like baron Trump. He's massively tall and awkward-looking.

But with less knowledge of crypto, presumably.

Presumably, yes. He's got an enormous beard, and everybody comments on his absolutely enormous nose. So Disraeli said of it, It's such a nose as a young prince has in a fairy tale, thanks to the intervention of a malignant fairy. So he's not a looker, I think it's fair to say, and he's very, very charming homeless. So he has to compensate for that with his cunning. When he's 18 years old, his father takes him to Vienna to get a Hapsberg bride. And this is a 16-year-old called Archdeuchess Marie-Henriette, and she's great.

She's like the Emperor Claudius and Carmen Harris, isn't she? She has a tremendous braying laugh.

Yes, she does.

She's got a great laugh. That echoes around Belgium.

And she loves laughing. She loves laughing. Leopold is shocked by this because he hates laughing. They go to Venice on holiday, and he behaves really coldly to her. He won't let it go on a gondola that she's booked and all this, and she bursts into tears. People see this in public. They say, Oh, dear, this is an ill-starred marriage. A month after they got married, she tells one of her friends, If God hears my prayers, I shan't go on living much longer.

That's not what you want to hear after, how do you mean?

No. So much of Leopold's colonial ambitions, there is an argument that basically it stems from his own insecurity and misery, that it's a massive displacement exercise. Anyway, he doesn't actually become king of Belgium until 1865. So he spends a lot of time waiting for his father to die. And while he's doing that, he has this annoying insecurity that he's going to be inheriting a country that is just a pathetic minnow on the world stage. Of course, Belgium is squash between France and an increasingly unified Germany. And Leopold feels this very keenly. He says of Belgium, Petit pays, petit gens, a little country, little people. He thinks, I deserve better than the Belgian people. What he really wants is an empire. He wants colonies, and he's very aggrieved that he's inheriting a kingdom that doesn't have any. Three years before he becomes king of the Belgians, he goes on holiday to Spain, and he goes to Seville, and he spends his time in Seville. He spends weeks at the great archive of the Indies, going through the records, looking at just how much money Spain had made from its colonies.

This is the 16th century, isn't it? The conquistadors.

The conquistadors, how much money they had made from the territories they exploited. This fires his imagination. He makes trips to Ceylon and to Burma to see how the British make money from their colonies. He reads a book called Java or How to Manage a Colony, which is all about the Dutch in the East Indies. This is written, unbelievable. You've seen the bloke who wrote this book?

Yeah, very funny.

J-w-b Money.

You see, if he ran a bank, I'd very happily advertise his bank on the rest of the system.

Would you?

Jwb Money Bank. Invest your money in it.

Well, you should advertise his book. Money's book is all about how you get a colony to turn a profit. She See, that's what Leopold is interested in. Even more than the prestige, and certainly a lot more than any possible civilizing mission aspect of colonialism, what he cares about is cash. In this book, JwB Money says, The Dutch have turned a profit from Java by using forced labor to have plantations and all this thing.

Dominic, the fact that it's Dutch colonies, that must have really irritated him.

Of course, they're great rivals.

They're great rivals. Even more than the Germans or the French having colonies, the Dutch, awful.

He looks at the Dutch and he says, They're very unsentimental. They've used forced labor. It is clear, he writes, The only way to civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples is basically by forcing them to work so that we can make money. So here's the great paradox. Other Belgians don't really care about colonies. They are very conscious they're only a small and newly independent country. They don't even really have a merchant navy of their own. So how could they possibly maintain a colonial empire? But for Leopold, all of his misery, all of his loneliness and awkwardness, I think he has poured into this great project of acquiring colonies. And he believes this is the only thing that will make him happy.

Well, it's interesting, isn't it? That geography, apparently, was his only subject that he was interested in as a boy. It's a little bit like Marlowe at the beginning of this episode, this idea of looking at the world. Marlowe dreams of going on an adventure there, and Leopold dreams of basically grabbing bits of it and using it to make money.

He absolutely does indeed. He reminds me reading the book by Adam Hochschild, I was reminded of Scrooge. Scrooge who deep down what Scrooge wants. Scrooge wants love, and he's become a miser and a terrible person.

You are a sentimentalist.

Well, no. I don't think you can be sentimental about King Leopold II, as we will see.

But you're saying that all the horrors of the Congo is because he didn't have love as a child.

I think his loveless life and his obsessiveness. He's not just an ordinary colonialist, as we will see. There is something really weirdly obsessive about him, and I wonder how much of that... I mean, also the way he behaves, the stuff, as we will see, his obsession with hygiene is very peculiar.

And with very young ladies.

And with very young girls, exactly. There's a lot of bad things to be said, I think it's fair to say about King Deabole II. Anyway, 1865, he becomes king at last. Now, for the next 10 years, he doesn't actually manage to get the empire he wants. He investigates various schemes. He'd like to buy a bit of Argentina. He'd like to buy a bit of the Nile Delta. He even talks about acquiring Fiji, but he doesn't really get anywhere.

But not Greenland.

They're not Greenland, no. But in 1875, he thinks he might be onto something. He's offered Spain, cash for the Philippines for the second time. To his deep disappointment, they turn him down again. He says to one of his courtiers, Okay, I'm going to have a look at Africa now. Maybe Africa is the place. Now, at last in this story, we come to Africa. Now, the great scrambles symbol for Africa, which people think of as a 19th-century thing, is actually really only concentrated in the final decades of the 19th-century. At this point, 1875, it hasn't happened. The French are in Alger, the Portuguese are in what become Mozambique and Angola, The British and the Burrs both have footholds in South Africa, and various countries have trading ports and enclaves on the Coast of West Africa. But about three quarters of Africa, really meaning the interior, has not yet been penetrated by European empires.

For Europeans, the wealth of Africa is associated with the Coast. There's the assumption that there's nothing in the middle that would be worth the effort of colonizing.

Exactly. People just think, Well, it's just impenetrable jungle. What could possibly be there? It's a blank space, as Conrad puts it. But by this point, the mid-1870s, Africa is making the news in a way it hasn't ever done before. There have been a series of very eye-catching expeditions. Of course, the most famous one, which lots of listeners will have heard of, is the expedition by the journalist Henry Morton Stanley to find the missionary David Livingston in modern day Tanzania in 1871, which was financed by the New York Herald. Thanks to these new innovations of cheap newspapers and the Telegraph, Stanley and Livingston become international celebrities far beyond Britain and America. They're making front page news in Belgium. And King Leopold, we know, follows the story very closely and actually kept a scrapbook, including handwritten notes that he was making following Stanley's journey.

It's interesting because Livingston is all about fighting slavery. His heart is in the right place. Stanley, a much more ambivalent figure. He's looking for Livingston, basically, to make a name for himself.

Exactly. For celebrity and for money, are two things which will play a big part in this story. The question for Leopold is, he wants a colony that will turn a profit. Can he make money from Africa? The answer is yes, not through slavery, as you once could, but through something that is extremely fashionable and very lucrative, and that something is ivory. Now, the Victorians are obsessed by ivory. It's exotic because, of course, it comes from elephant tusks, but it's also unbelievably useful and malleable because it's really easy to carve ivory. If you went into a genteel Victorian household, anywhere in the Western world, in the 1870s or 1880s, there would be the handles of cutlery, there There would be billiard balls, there would be combs, fans, there would be brooches, there would be chess pieces, piano keys, false teeth. All of these kinds of things are made of ivory.

Because Hochstral compares it actually to plastic, doesn't he? It's such a useful product, which is brilliant for the Victorians and obviously very bad news for the elephants.

Exactly. You can make so much money from it. Two elephant tusks will give you hundreds of piano keys or thousands upon thousands of false teeth. It sounds comical, but there's an awful lot of money to be made here. Stanley, after returning from his expedition, has gone around telling people, My God, there is so much ivory in Equatorial Africa that the people there use it for their doorposts because it's just so plentiful.

It's an ivory equivalent of El Dorado, that sense. This is portable wealth, which is the key to gold in the new world, wasn't it, in the 16th century? Exactly.

But the difference between the 16th century and now is that to acquire a colony, I think you have to try much harder to present it as part of a civilizing mission. This is the high point of high Victorianism, the belief in moral uplift and Europe's right to the moral leadership of the planet and all these things that we may well think of as now as being freighted with hypocrisy or of patronizing condescension. But at the time, people do actually take genuinely seriously. So Leopold knows that he will have to, I think, tick three boxes if he wants a colony. First of all, he has to present it as a scientific project, an intellectual project. So literally filling in those blank spaces, mapping what has previously been unknown. Secondly, I think he has to tick the moral uplift box. He has to say, Well, I only want a colony because I want to spread the gospel of Christianity. Of course, something that matters tremendously to the Victorians.

But also, Dominic, the spreading of Christianity is also intimately associated with the campaign to abolish slavery. Yes, that's the third thing. Britain has been leading that campaign since the early 19th century, and it has provided an absolutely crucial moral justification for what has been a process of expansion of British Imperial control. Livingston, even though he's not overtly an imperialist, the fact that he is carving out a moral mission for Britain in the middle of Africa is obviously very useful from an imperial point of view. I guess that Leopold is... I guess that Leopold is, he reads the Times, doesn't he, every morning? Yeah. He is very alert to the symbiosis between that moral mission to eradicate slavery and imperialism in the British form, and he wants a bit It's the same as it is.

I think you're absolutely right. I think he absolutely sees what's going on with the other empires. I think in Leopold's case, what makes him slightly unusual is that all the evidence we have of his letters and so on is that for him, the profit motive is all and that the rest of it is effectively just a justification for making money. I mean, he's pretty shameful about that, I would say. This is how he proceeds. I have to say he's a terrible man, King Leopold, but he really is a cunning and a methodical and a clever man.

A vulpine figure.

He is. His first step is to convene a big geographical conference in Brussels at the end of 1876. He invites all the big celebrities of the Africa industry of the day. There are explorers from France and Germany. He's got a celebrity explorer called Gerhard Wolfs, who had actually had himself circumcised so that he could pass for a Muslim in the Sahara. Somebody who had suffered for his quest. His expiration. His expiration. He's got the President of the British Anti-slavery Society, Sir Thomas Fowle-Buxton. He's got the President of the Church Missionary Society, Sir John Kenway. He's even got the bloke who used to command the Royal Navy's Indian Ocean Anti-slavery Squadron. So he is ticking all of those boxes. He's inviting a lot of people who are genuinely animated by what we might call humanitarian as well as imperialistic concerns. He welcomes them and he says, I dream of a crusade worthy of this century of progress to open to civilization, the only part of our globe which has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples. That word darkness, again, which is going to come up throughout this series. He says to them, Don't think that I want anything for myself, he says.

I have no ambition other than to serve Belgium. Now, that's as we've seen as a lie. He despises Belgium, and as we will also see, he doesn't want to serve Belgium at all. He only wants to serve himself. He says to them, Look, I've assembled you because I think it would be nice for us to identify places in the blank spaces of Africa Which could be bases, which could be hospitals, they could be scientific research centers, they could be trading stations.

With an emphasis on the trading aspect of it.

And these will be run. I don't want to... I mean, Belgium won't run them because we don't want to. The last thing we'd want is a colony. He says, We'll set up an international African Association. Why not base it in Brussels, actually? For It's first chairman. I mean, if no one else wants to do it, I'd very happily- What? Yeah, happily put myself forward. And everybody, they all fall for this. Oh, what a lovely idea. What a kind man.

We're recording this today after the Trump inauguration, where all these heads of tech companies that until Trump won the election were all over their mission being to spread happiness and joy and promote diversity and equity, and now they've binned all that very nakedly. Do you think that this is the first example of avaricious corporations dressing up their greed behind a show of piety?

It's got to be one of the first, hasn't it? One of the early ones. One of the most eye-catching early ones, definitely.

Because it is a brilliant maneuver. Of course it is. If you have global ambitions.

And all these people believe it. They completely believe it. Here's the thing, the International African Association, which sounds like it's a and which they have all endorsed, is actually a private company run by Leopold himself for his benefit. The only thing he doesn't have actually is the colony. He's got the association, but he doesn't have the colony. Where is he going to get the colony? Well, the answer is from the one person who wasn't there at that meeting in Brussels. This is the most famous of all African explorers. We've already mentioned him, Henry Morton Stanley. Now, we'll just sketch Stanley very briefly because he really is worthy of a Arrestus History series in himself. He had an amazing life, Stanley. He was born in Wales in 1841, and he was born as John Rawland's Bastard. He was the illegitimate son of a housemate. That's the entry that is in the Book of Earth. He spends his childhood in a workhouse. He emigrates to New Orleans when he's 18 years old. He fought for the Confederates. Then he fought for the Union. Then he joined the Union Navy. Then he renamed himself Henry Morton Stanley after a New Orleans businessman.

Then he became a journalist. He went to the Ottoman Empire, he went to Persia, he went to the Crimea, he went to Abyssinia with a British expedition. But most famously, the New York Hérald sent him to Central Africa to find Dr. Livingston, which he did in Lake Tanganyika in 1871. Then he, almost certainly, invented this fantastic lion.

So disappointing.

I know, it's disappointing. Let's pretend that he said it. Dr. Livingston, I presume, when he met Livingston, which flashed around the world and made him a household name, a genuine international celebrity.

He writes it up in enormously long books, doesn't he?

Yes, he does, which are great sellers.

He gets commissioned to write one book and he ends up writing three.

That's very familiar. Nothing wrong That's how I got that, Tom. I commend that behavior.

Very familiar.

Then he went on another expedition, three years later, sent this time by the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London, to map the Great Lakes and to look for the source of the Nile. That's where he's been during Leopold World Conference.

He has begun that, hasn't he, on the East Coast of Africa at Zanzibar? Yeah. He's heading westwards. He wouldn't be the first European to have gone from East to West Coast, but he is the first who does it, basically, by following the line of the Congo.

Exactly. An incredibly well-publicised journey, one that was followed by newspaper readers across the world, as you would follow reports of great sporting fixtures or something. Tremendous excitement. In August 1777, Stanley reached the trading post of Boma, which is on the right bank of the Congo River near the Coast. An extraordinary, extraordinary achievement. 7,000 miles, Tom, in three years, he did on foot. Now, Leopold has been doing this with great interest. As soon as he hears the news that Stanley has got to the West Coast, he sends him a telegram of congratulations. Then Leopold says to his ambassador in London, This is the man. This is the man I need to get this colony in the heart of Africa. However, Leopold says, we have to be careful. And I quote, If I quite openly charged Stanley with the task of taking possession in my name of some part of Africa, the English will stop me. I don't want to risk losing a fine chance to secure for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake. So I will just give Stanley some job of exploration which would offend no one and will give us the bases and headquarters which we can take over later on.

The Fox. The fox. So Leopold's intermediaries and emissaries keep offering Stanley. They write to Stanley and they say, The International African Association, this fake charity, would love to offer you a job. Now, Stanley turns it down at first because he wants to go back to England and to see what he could get there. But when he gets back to London, although, of course, he's a big celebrity, the establishment are very suspicious of him, the Royal family, the foreign office and so on, because they have heard reports that Stanley has treated people extremely brutally, and I think reports that are completely justified. About half of Stanley's porters, African porters had died on his trip of starvation or disease, and he had flogged them mercilessly, and basically, he'd driven them into the ground. This makes people very anxious.

Richard Burton, another great explorer, and not a man who himself is prone to behaving quite extremely, but he said of Stanley that he shoots Africans as if they were monkeys in a tone of great disapproval. Yes. I mean, we keep using the word darkness. That is a shadow of darkness over Stanley's reputation.

Absolutely, it is.

He's very awkward in his relationship with the other sex, isn't he? The fairer sex.

He is indeed.

I lose track of the women he's basically left, and he's dreaming vaguely that he'll come back and marry them. There's a sense that he's going off into the jungle for three years, so he doesn't have to deal with women.

Exactly. Exactly. Because they will often marry somebody else while he's gone. He comes back and he pretends to be disappointed, but actually he's quite relieved. Anyway, and there's also a class issue. He says, They despise me because I'm Welsh. The English are not giving me any credence at all. They don't listen to a word I say. They make up these lies about me and all this thing. In the summer of 1878, Stanley is very disappointed by his reaction, and he gets an invitation from Leopold to visit him in Brussels, and he says to himself, Why not? Okay, I'll go and see him. On the 10th of June, 1878, Stanley walks into Leopold's office in the Royal Palace in Brussels for the meeting that will seal the fate of the Congo.

And blight the lives of millions. We will be back after the break. Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world when vegetation rioted on the Earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvary sandbanks, hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands. You lost your way on that river you would in a desert and butted all day long against Shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once, somewhere, far away in another existence. That's from Heart of darkness. It's Joseph Conrad's hero, Marlowe, driving a steamboat up the river Congo. Dominic, the thing that always strikes me about that passage is it has echoes of Conan Doyle's book, the lost world, the sense that going into the jungle is somehow to go back into the prehistoric past.

In fact, in the decades that follow, there will be stories told of a great long-neck dinosaur that lurks in the depths of the Congo. There's a sense that Conrad is… I mean, he's articulating that in a very powerful and not uncontroversial way.

Yeah, it's a very controversial passage. That's a very evocative passage. The deeper and deeper they go into Africa, the further and further they're going back in time. For Conrad's critiques, post-colonial critiques, they say that is so loaded and so dodgy to be basically saying that to visit Africa, the deeper you go, the further backwards you travel to this primeval world. But we'll unpack all that next week, Tom. But first of all, the Congo. When Leopold and Stanley sit down that day in June 1878, which we ended the first half with, what do they actually know about this world that Conrad himself visited, this landscape the jungle, the river, and whatnot? Europeans have known about the existence of the river Congo for 400 years. The first to lay eyes on it was a Portuguese captain called Diogo Kau in 1482. He had been sailing south along the Coast of Africa like so many Portuguese sailors did. You remember Tom, their caravels with their triangular sails?

That's right. They're putting up little stone markers, aren't they?

They're putting up stone markers. He put one on the far bank of the Congo what's now Angola. That King Jau II of Portugal did order this land to be discovered and this pillar of stone to be erected by Diogo Kau, a squire of his household. But of course, they weren't really discovering. I mean, they were discovering it from their own perspective, but they weren't the first to discover it because, of course, there were a lot of people there already. When the Portuguese arrived at the end of the 15th century, there were probably about 3 million people who were subjects of the Kingdom of the Congo with the capital K. That was ruled by a monarch called the Manny Congo, and his capital was probably just over the border in what's now Angola. The people of the Congo, they were farmers. They raised pigs and yams and stuff. They didn't have wheels, they didn't have writing, but they did have a state system. They had judges, they had a calendar, they had a tax system, they used shells as currency, and they already had slavery, which was to prove a disaster for the Congo because the Portuguese were delighted to find people, to find chiefs who were happy to sell them human beings that the Portuguese could put to work, particularly in Brazil.

Congo becomes a huge supplier of slaves to the Portuguese. By the 17th century, the Portuguese are probably shipping 15,000 slaves a year in horrific conditions, initially to Brazil. Later on, they start selling them to North America as well. In the American South, about one in four of the slaves in the 19th century had roots in Equatorial Africa, which includes the Kingdom of the Congo. What the Congolese made of this is very, very hard for us to tell, because until the modern era, the Congolese had no written language, which is why this episode so far has been from a European perspective. Even in King Leopold's time, in the time of the Congo free state, there is not a single memoir written by a Congolese African. That's a problem for us as historians, because it means that African voices are silenced compared with European ones.

Wasn't there a king? There was a king. Yes. A Christian king in the 16th century writes to the Pope.

Yeah, He wrote to the Portuguese king.

And he complained about the slavery.

He did indeed.

The looting of his people. I would guess from that that probably they're not thrilled about it.

No, he wrote to the Portuguese king and he said, You're taking too many slaves. There's nobody left. And the Portuguese king actually wrote back him, sent him a letter and said, I've heard there's loads of people in the Congo. What are you complaining about? Shut up. And that was the extent of this meeting of minds between these two kings. In the years that followed, the Congo became prey to all kinds of inroads in the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch. There's lots of factualism, the civil wars, and basically the kingdom falls apart. But much of this is a mystery to Europeans. Europeans can't get into the interior. They know that the Congo River is a vast river. It's the second largest river in Africa, third largest by volume in the world. But they can't go up it because once you start to go upstream, once you go up river, very quickly, the river gives way to 200 miles worth of rapids and gorges and canyons and so on. You have to get out of your ship and walk. At that point, it's very rocky terrain, what's called the Crystal Mountains. And Europeans, as soon as they started to do that, they would get malaria or yellow fever, and they'd basically all die.

Dominic, there There is a British expedition in 1816. There is indeed. Led by a Royal Navy captain who describes the scenery as beautiful and not inferior to any on the banks of the Thames, which is obviously the highest praise. The highest, very highest. That can possibly give any river.

But he's a good example. He only gets a little bit of the way, and then they basically- They have to go back. They have to go back because they were all four horribly ill. Even in the 1870s, the vast Basin of the Congo, we're talking about one and a half million square miles of territory That's about what?

The size of India?

Yeah. I mean, it's a massive, massive stretch of land. Home to, now this is very controversial, but let us say somewhere between roughly 8 and 12 million people. It is almost completely unknown to Europeans. They still talk about the blank space on the map, an empty space on the map, which is, of course, quite wrong. Now, Stanley has been through it, but not all of it. Stanley had tracked the river for about 1,500 miles. That's only about half the length of the Congo River. He's only had limited interactions with the locals, but he does know two crucial things which he's able to tell Leopold that day in the palace. First of all, the people of the Congo, they don't have anything like the military technology to resist a European takeover. It's a myth that they're completely unsophisticated. They have brilliant pottery, they're brilliant woodworkers and so on. But in terms of weapons, they only have spears and arrows and some very ancient Portuguese muskets. An invading European force would be able to wipe the floor with them. The second thing, even more important, there is no one powerful state in the Congo Basin. There are more than 200 different ethnic groups They speak 400 different languages and dialects.

There's a massive variety. Some of them are pygmies who live in the forests, and some of them are more settled farming peoples who live on the savanas.

But they're very fragmented.

They're always fighting each other. It's a a little bit like when Cortés arrived in Mesoamerica and found there were all kinds of rivalries and things that he could exploit.

But there isn't an equivalent of the Aztecs.

There's no equivalent of the Aztecs. There's no equivalent of that. It's even better than that. For a European predator, the people of the Congo are the perfect prey.

Dominic, isn't there one other factor that Stanley has discovered by going along the river, which is that if you can get past the rapids up into the highlands, then the Congo is very, very navigable, and there are all these tributaries. There are thousands and thousands of miles of navigable water. It's like railways have been laid or something. If you can just get your steamboat up past these rapids, then you can use the river to go very, very deep into the Congo. If there is raw material, say, ivory, or perhaps in due course, rubber, then you can use it to bring it back.

Exactly. In other words, there are the lineaments of your transport infrastructure right there waiting for you. For Leopold, all of this is absolutely great news. He seems to have hit it off with Stanley straight away. Leopold spoke perfect English despite his enormous nose and his gangling awkwardness. He can He's really charming when he wants to, and he flatter Stanley. Stanley has got a desperate for flattery because he hasn't had it in London. That autumn, 1878, Leopold says, I'd like to offer you a five-year contract. For every year you spend in Africa, I will pay you 50,000 francs, and I will pay for an expeditionary force to go with you up the Congo. In terms of Stanley's earnings, in today's money, Leopold is effectively offering him £2 million, a lot of money for a journalist.

He's buying Stanley's knowledge, presumably. Yes. But is he also buying Stanley's prestige as the man who knows the Congo, the sense that if he's got Stanley with him, then the project must be a realistic one, it must be a serious one.

I think he's buying three things, actually. So I think he's buying Stanley's knowledge. Stanley knows he's gone along the river. Number two, I do think you're absolutely right. He's buying the prestige and the celebrity. Stanley will become the face of this charitable expedition. But the third thing is he's genuinely buying Stanley's... Stanley is going to have to do the work. He's going to have to put the work in on the ground. Now, Leopold knows that Stani…

Is a hard worker.

Is a hard worker, and he drives other people very hard. He says to Stanley, What I want you to do, I want you to establish a station at the mouth of the Congo that will be our big space. Then, and this will be a really important thing, build a road or indeed a railway around these rapids through these mountains. Basically, what I want you to do, start with a road and get porters to carry disassembled steamboats through this territory to the other side of the rapids 200 miles, then reassemble the steamboats and then head up river on the steamboats for a thousand miles, establishing trading posts and stations and whatnot as you go. So this is a pretty big operation. Stanley says, Fine. Now, the fine point of this contract is deliberately ambiguous. The contract leaves it very unclear who Stanley is working for? Is he working for Leopold himself? Is he working for the International African Association? Or is he working for yet another organization called the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo, which is another of Leopold's front organizations, the he has set up. Stanley must have known that something was a bit off about this because he demands, he says, I must have all the money up front.

This plan to use porters to carry bits of steamship up to the Congo. Presumably, that will require a fair degree of force. Yes. Is Stanley knowingly buying into that? Because Stanley had employed porters on his previous journeys, and that had often involved a degree of payment, but also a degree of force as well. But to carry a steamship is a different business from carrying- It is. Supplies or whatever. That's a pretty military operation. It is.

But remember, Leopold has promised he will pay for an expeditionary force, basically a mercenary force, to go up over with Stanley.

But just to be clear, Stanley is walking into this with his eyes wide open.

His eyes are definitely open. And his subordinates, they have to sign the equivalent to nondisclosure agreements. They have to sign strict confidentiality clauses. They can't tell anybody about what they're doing. Again, a pretty dodgy sign, I would say. Now, Leopold, of course, he wants to hide this from foreign competitors. He's paranoid that the Germans or the French will get in on the act, but he also wants to hide this from his own people. Because remember, here's the really remarkable thing. Unlike some of the rest of the scramble of Africa, this is not being done for Belgium. It's not been done for the people or the government of Belgium. It's being done for one man, King Leopold, and that's what makes it different. So February 1879, Stani sets off, and as part of the confidentiality, he travels under an alias. He calls himself Monsieur Henri. So Monsieur Henri goes off to Africa. Meanwhile, back in Belgium, Leopold has set up yet another organisable Organization, another front group called the International Association of the Congo. Now, people may have lost track at this point of all the different associations. That's the point. That's what Leopold wants you to do.

Because the names are all They're vaguely similar.

They're very similar. He wants you to think that this is the International African Association set up at his conference.

And that's a charitable one.

A charitable one because it has the same flag, the same iconography, the flag is blue with a gold star. But this one is answered just to him, the International Association of the Congo. And this is the organization that he intends will run his new fiefdom.

It's like if you set up a very sinister exploitative organization called Oxfim.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Help the children.

Yeah.

So equally, you're doing nothing but evil.

Exactly. If you actually set up two groups, one called Save the Children and one called Help the Children. Save the Children pretends to be charitable, you've got lots of pop stars. And help the children. It's just a money-making. You're just selling merch.

You're using them to dig out gold.

Exactly. That's exactly what it is. Now, Leopold, whilst Danny's gone, Leopold gets his tame client journalists to start placing articles about this in the world's press. This is brilliant. I have to say it really is brilliant because in each country, they sell a different message based on that country. In Britain, in the Times, they place articles to say that what Leopold is doing is he's setting up a, and I quote, a Society of the Red Cross. They'll establish hospices along the banks of the Congo to help travelers and to fight slavery. Of course, people in Britain will be like, Their Victorians will be all over this. In the German papers, Leopold's agents say it's going to be a Hanseatic League of the Congo, a succession of Congolese free cities based on, and I quote, Bremen, Lubeck, and Hamburg.

So lots of mazopan shops running the line of the Congo.

That lovely stepped gable architecture. Yes. And in an American papers, Stanley has been sent to establish, and I quote, a Confederation of Free Negro Republic. So basically like Liberia that will become part of a United States of the Congo that will be supervised by the benevolent King Leopold. Whenever anybody reads this, they say, God, what's not to like? This sounds great. So kind. Meanwhile, Stanley is hard at work. And he's, again, as whatever you might think of him, he's good at doing it. In two years, he gets these colossal teams of workmen to carve this trail around the rapids and then to move 50 tons worth of equipment up the trail. Once they got past the rapids, they established a post at a place that's, say, called Leopoldville. This is the birthplace of modern-day Kinshasa, which is now the capital of the Democratic Republic, Congo, the largest city in Africa. Is it? The largest city in Africa? It is indeed. I did not know that. This is where they will reassemble the steamboats and then head upriver. But at this stage, we're literally talking about a fortified block house. That's all it is.

Fine, yes.

This is an extraordinary achievement, but in a sign of things to come, it comes at a horrendous, horrendous human cost. Stanley's subordinates, his workers, whether white or black, they die of disease, of exhaustion, of overwork. One of them is eaten by a crocodile.

Because, Dominic, just to say that it's not just humans who are prone to the diseases, but pack animals as well. You can't use oxen or donkeys or whatever to transport stuff.

It has to be You have to use human beings. We know that he treated Europeans badly, too. We have a letter from a steamboat engineer who was called Paul Neve, who fell ill, probably of malaria or yellow fever. Neve wrote home and he said, Stanley treats me with the care a blacksmith applies to repair and implement that has broken down through too rough usage. Teeth clenched in anger, he smites it again and again on the Anvil. And Nevev died a few weeks after writing that letter because basically Stanley had driven him into the ground. Of course, if Stanley does that to the European subordinates, what is he like with his African porters? Now, you mentioned, Tom, how does he enforce this? He has a private army, they have a thousand rifles, and they have four machine guns, maxim guns. If any African questions his instructions or if they even collapse, Stanley klaps them in irons as an example to the others.

It's not really a justification, but just a counterpoint. Stanley works himself insanely hard as well, doesn't he?

He does.

He's relentless on his own body and health.

Yeah, and he nearly dies a couple of times. He has to be invalided home to Europe. And as soon as he's got better, he comes back out. He takes the job very seriously. He Which is himself incredibly hard, but in doing so, he kills quite a lot of other people. All the time, Leopold is saying to him, hurry, hurry, get as much land as you can, get as much ivory as you can, because Leopold is terrified that the French and the Germans will beat him to it. Now, this question of getting the land, how is Stanley going to do that? Well, as so often in the story of European colonialism, this comes down to an issue of treaties. Leopold has enlisted the aid of the former Regis Professor of Law at Oxford University, who rejoices in the name, Satrava's Twis, a very- That's not a real name. A very Dekensian name.

Yeah, that's from a novel.

Sir Travers Twis has provided him with a legal opinion that a private company, i. E. The International Congo Association, is within its rights to sign treaties with African chiefs just as a sovereign country can. When Leopold has got that opinion, he sends orders to Stanley. He He goes, Right, start signing the treaties, make them as brief as possible, and in a couple of articles, these chiefs have to give us everything. So as they go at River, Stanley will stop and he will get out and he will start talking to the local bigwigs. Of course, when he raises the issue of treaties through various interpreters, the local chiefs have no idea what he's talking about. Remember, most of them have never seen writing before. So when Stanley says, I'd like you to make your ex, your cross on this document, they have no idea what they are giving away.

I mean, as you say, this is very reminiscent of episodes we've done before, of course, 16th century Mexico or Native America, the Great Plains, the 19th century. Absolutely.

But there's a brilliant example in the book, King Leopold's Ghost, a terrifying example. On the first of April, 1884, the chiefs of N'Gombi and Mafella signed a deal with Stanley. Leopold would give them each one piece of cloth per month, so they're very excited at getting this cloth. In return, they give him the rights to all their territories, all tax and toll rights, all game, fishing, mining, and forest rights for all time. They're giving these rights to the Congo Association. Here is the really crucial thing. The treaty that they have signed with their mark says, They will assist by labor or otherwise any works improvements or expeditions which the said association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories. This is the real kicker. This is what actually makes it different from the treaty signed with, let's say, Native Americans, the Plains Indians or whatever. Because Stanley and Leopold have not just bought land. They've bought their labor forever, for all time. Any improvement, any work that the Congo Association wants to be carried out, you have to do for them. There's no mention of what you'll get in return here.

They've given away everything.

So as a trade deal, not brilliant.

It's a very poor trade deal, I think it's fair to say. Stanley is great at getting these deals. By June 1884, he has signed contracts with more than 450 different chiefs. He sails home to Europe with the treaties in his pocket, giving these people's land and labor to King Leopold.

Dominic, a question. Bearing in mind what we know is going to happen, did they need them at all? Would it have made any difference if they hadn't got these treaties?

Yes, I think it would have made a difference. These treaties are not really… They're not done because Leopold cares what the Africans think. They're done to show to the rest of Europe.

So these are publicized?

Yes, I've done all these deals with local chiefs. I'm very friendly with the local chiefs. This is going to be for their benefit. Everybody wins. This has been done completely legally. It is not 16th century style conquistador conquest.

It's a bit like the Chinese with their Belt and Road. Belt and Road, yes.

I suppose so, though Chinese listeners might raise an eyebrow in parallel to them. But yeah, no. I It's a deal that Leopold is selling as it's a deal that benefits Africa, it benefits me. It's great. Everybody wins. Whether everybody does win, we will see. So he's got the treatise. He's got his steamboats going up and down the river. What he needs now is somebody to recognize this as his because there is a problem. While Stanley has been up the Congo, a French explorer has landed on the other side of the river, a guy called Pierre Savognon de Brazza, The Brazza has established his own trading post on the North bank, and this becomes known as Brazzaville, which today is the capital of the formerly French Republic of the Congo. So a rival Congolese territory There's a massive media row between Stanley and Brazza. The Portuguese hear about this, and the Portuguese say, What? We were the first to the Congo. What's going on here? Get out. The British say, Well, if there's any dispute about this, we would really much prefer that Portuguese have the Congo. This is a problem for Leopold. He needs somebody to back him, and he does something here very clever.

He goes outside Europe to another relatively new country like Belgium, and another country that has a history of signing treaties with indigenous people, slightly one-sided treaties, some people might say, that end up not being worth the paper they're written on.

But complemented by a love of liberty.

Right. This country is, of course, the United States of America. He has the perfect intermediary, another Dekensian character called Henry Shelton Sanford, who had previously been the American ambassador to Brussels. Henry Shelton Sanford, if you look him up, he's got a big stove pipe hat, he's got the a star. She's got the gold pince-a-nez glasses.

And he's got the gold poulsine glasses. He's got the title General, hasn't he? Yeah, a fake- He got given because he donated artillery or something to the Union during the Civil War, and he uses it all the time, but it's completely bogus.

He's a fake general. I mean, It's perfect.

He's a massive investor in Florida.

Yeah, and he's lost loads of money in Florida, Florida railroads. So he needs money, which makes him the perfect porn for Leopold. He needs a rich friend. Leopold sends him to Washington with a personal letter to the Republican President, Chester Arthur. Leopold says, I'm setting up this colony in the Congo. Really, it's about two things. It's about fighting slavery and about free trade. As it happens, Arthur Arthur is a Republican, and that's basically what the Republican Party in the 1870s and 1880s stands for. Arthur says, Oh, my God, this sounds absolutely brilliant. In April 1884, the US State Department becomes the first official recognition of Leopold colony. They don't understand what it is because at this stage- Because they think it's going to be like the United States only in Africa. They absolutely think it's going to be the United States and what is worse, in the official statement, they muddle up the International Association of the Congo the International African Association. They use both names within about three sentences. Of course, that's exactly what Leopold wanted. That was why he did it, because he wants everybody to be confused.

He is cunning, isn't he?

He is a fox. He is a fox. Now, at this point, when the Americans have recognized it, the French are the next to get on board. Why? Because even though they wanted it themselves, they become paranoid that Leopold is going to run out of money and sell it to the British.

Is that because of Stan Exactly.

The Stanley would be the intermediary.

Hanging out in London and everything.

That is the last thing they want.

Also, the French don't need to feel intimidated by Belgium, do they?

No, I guess not. They are still thinking, Well, if the Belgium is going to, at least it's not the Germans. Next are the Germans. Now, Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, the great statesman of Germany, he sees through Leopold, I think, a little bit, because on the documents that he gets, he writes the words swindle and fantasies.

He's not wrong, is he?

But, Bismarck thinks, I don't want the French to get the Congo or Britain. So maybe if little Belgium gets it, yeah, fine.

It's the weakness of Belgium that Leopold is basically leveraging Even though Belgium is not going to get it.

But Leopold himself, that's the great irony of all this. All this comes to a head at the conference in Berlin that opens at the end of 1884. This is the great conference that marks the high point. The Israeli and the scramble for Africa.

Bismarck.

There are delegates from America, from Russia, from the Ottoman Empire. Of course, no Africans deciding their own destiny. Nobody thinks that would be remotely appropriate. Now, actually, Stanley is there as an advisor to the American delegation. It says something that Stanley himself feels a little bit queezy about this spectacle. He says that the sight of all the delegates rushing to carve up Africa reminded him of when he was on an expedition and they would kill some beast. He says, My porters, they would rush with gleaming knives for slaughtered game. That's what these delegates are like.

Well, I suppose to hackhack of the ivory, to hack off the ivory, to hack off the- Hack off the ivory, exactly.

The tusks. By February 1885, the conference has reached an agreement. For Leopold, it is the perfect result. It's a total triumph. All the powers agree that they will recognize the International Congo Association as the owner of almost all of the Congo Basin.

That's the dodgy one, not the humanitarian one.

Exactly, the dodgy one. Leopold's a private company. He has got a territory 76 times the size of Belgium, and it will belong not to Belgium, but to Leopold personally. At last, he has the fiefdom he wanted. Three months later, in May 1885, he drops all the fiction. The International Congo Association is allowed to lapse. The only thing that remains of it is its flag, the blue flag with the gold star. On the 29th of May, by a royal decree, its lands, this huge stretch of territory, is renamed the Etaindépendant du Congo, the free state of the Congo, and Leopold is named as its founding sovereign.

He briefly considered calling himself Emperor of the Congo, didn't he? He did. And giving all the various chieftains who'd sign treaties with him, outfits modeled on the uniforms of the beef eaters.

Yeah, be very hot.

Very sensible wearing.

Inappropriate garb. Banks of the Congo. Exactly. But now that the Congo free state has been set up with Leopold as its monarch. For the people of the Congo, the real horror begins.

The horror, the horror, one might almost say. If you are a member of the Rest of its History Club, then you can hear the next two episodes right now. If not, you can sign up at therestlesshistory. Com, and we will be back next time, continuing our journey into the Heart of darkness.