539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)

“A secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader”. In 1885 King Leopold of Belgium; an awkward, ruthless, selfish man, was recognised as the sovereign of the Congo. Long determined to carve out his very own private colonial domain, he had alighted upon the Congo - Africa’s vast and unplundered interior. With the help of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who had found a way to circumnavigate the Congo’s formerly insurmountable rapids, he concocted a cunning scheme to legally make it his own, while casting himself as a civilising saviour. Yet, despite his ostensibly philanthropic motivations, Leopold’s goal was always profit. More specifically, ivory, and later rubber, and before long a thriving hub of industry had been established in the Congo, bustling with soldiers, traders and missionaries. Meanwhile and most significantly, tens of thousands of Congolese people were being beaten, coerced and essentially enslaved into harvesting and carrying the riches of their land for their European oppressors. Their treatment was barbaric, the conditions in which they were made to live grotesque, and their suffering unimaginable. It was there, in King Leopold's Congo, that for years some of the worst violations of human life in all of human history were perpetrated. A terrible, secret heart of darkness, Until, at last, a young shipping clerk in Antwerp stumbled across something that would change the course of history forever... Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss Western history’s most brutal and barbaric colonial conquest: King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo Free State and her people. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Editor: Jack Meek Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:10Tom Holland?

  A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope. Each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bites swung between them, rhythmically clinking. All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill.

• 0:52Tom Holland?

  They passed me within six inches without a glance, with that complete, death-like indifference of unhappy savages. Behind this raw matter, one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off, and seeing a white man on the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be. He was speedily reassured, and with a large, white, rascally grin and a glance at his

• 1:35Tom Holland?

  charge, seemed to take me into partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings. Joseph Conrad, of course, writing in Heart of Darkness, which he wrote in 1899, and he sat down to write that nine years after he himself had visited the Congo Free State as a merchant seaman, captaining a steamer, the Rois de Belge, the King of the Belgians, up the Congo, deep into the interior, just as Marlowe in Heart of Darkness will do. And Marlowe is describing their experiences that Conrad himself, we know,

• 2:21Tom Holland?

  definitely had. He saw scenes like that preparatory to taking the steamer up the river to meet the mysterious and enigmatic, charismatic Mr. Kurtz. And what he's seeing, of course, is a chain gang of porters escorted by an armed African officer, building the railway that will facilitate Leopold II's control of this vast expanse of the Congo that he's been given at a conference in Berlin, where no Africans were in attendance. And Conrad, when he went to the Congo, initially was a true believer. He trusted the philanthropic

• 3:02Tom Holland?

  intentions of Leopold II, but by the time he left, he had a very, very different perspective. And, you know, the last line, Dominic, of that passage that we read, "I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings." I mean, a deep and painful sense of irony there, very

• 3:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Definitely.

• 3:22Tom Holland?

  self accusatory.

• 3:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely. A very self lacerating irony there, the high and just proceedings. And today's episode will be quite a dark subject. So we're going to get into the realities of the Congo Free State under the regime of King Leopold.

• 3:36Tom Holland?

  I mean, Dominic, just to emphasise, you said in the previous episode that this bears comparison with the great atrocities of the 20th century. So we should warn people that there are a lot of horrors in this.

• 3:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are indeed. Before we get into them, let's remind ourselves what happened last time. The central character was King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, this lonely, awkward, selfish, ruthless man whom we likened in that episode, Tom, to you. And he has carved out his own private colonial fiefdom, a huge chunk of Central Africa with the Congo snaking through its heart, somewhere between eight and 12 million people maybe living there. His agent, his operative, Henry Morton Stanley, the great explorer, though bloodstained explorer, has signed treaties with 450 different settlements, giving their land, their economic rights, and crucially, their labour to the International Association of the Congo,

• 4:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  which has proved to be a front for the Congo Free State, which has been set up from May 1885. In all this process, Leopold has assured the world, and in particular, the other governments of Europe, that his motives are philanthropic. Even six years later, he told the Belgian Prime Minister, "The Congo State is certainly not a business. If it gathers ivory on certain of its lands, that is only to lessen its deficit." In other words, we're paying out so much money because we're so committed to the philanthropic civilising mission that we promised, that we need to gather a little bit of ivory to make ends meet. This, it is worth saying very starkly, is completely untrue.

• 5:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  From the very beginning, Leopold is really interested, I think, only in one thing, and that is maximising his profits. And the proof of that is what he does on the very first day of the Congo Free State's existence. So on the 29th of May 1885, the day that it is proclaimed, he issues a decree that all vacant land now belongs to the state, i.e. to him. But because the word vacant is not defined, what is vacant land? What does that mean in a world like the Congo, where the locals don't necessarily have the same concept of property rights as Belgians do? That effectively means the entire land of the Congo.

• 6:00Tom Holland?

  In what court? Presumably, there are no courts in the Congo. Leopold is failing all this. I mean, who is this designed to impress? People back in Europe?

• 6:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  The decree?

• 6:11Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  The decree is, it's an order being sent out to operatives in the Congo. It's not a question of he's issuing orders to his officials. That's how it works.

• 6:21Tom Holland?

  But he's kind of garbing it in legalese.

• 6:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 6:24Tom Holland?

  Just in case outsiders might intrude.

• 6:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  As he has done with the treaties, right? He needs to have something to show the other European. If anyone asks, as we will discover in our next week, when people do start to ask, he needs to have a paper trail that he can show to say, I'm doing it all completely above board. So what now happens is that the territory of the Congo Free State, remember 67 times the size of Belgium, the size of Britain, Spain, Italy, France and Germany put together. This is carved up into gigantic territories, which are awarded as concessions to private companies. Now, most of these companies are owned by Belgian shareholders, but in most cases, at least 50% of the shares belong to King Leopold himself. In other words, even where he's handed out concessions, and it's not the Congo Free

• 7:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  State running the territory itself, he is going to get the lion's share of the profits. And what is more, when those companies pay tax or they pay tolls, they pay it to him. So he wins everywhere you look at it. So how is the Free State going to work? It is slightly different from other European colonies because it has a tiny, tiny infrastructure. So if you think about India in the same period, there was an Indian civil service in Britain. Thousands of people applied to it. There were exams, it was very sought after, prestigious, and thousands of people were sent out to work as kind of district commissioners and officials and all of this kind of thing.

• 7:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it's all very obvious what it is, it's very public.

• 7:58Tom Holland?

  And India is a very connected country. It's got the railroads now and all that kind of stuff. So people can see what is going on.

• 8:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 8:05Tom Holland?

  And there are newspapers and there are people on the spot and there are people literate in English among the Indians.

• 8:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, of course.

• 8:13Tom Holland?

  People know what's going on, but that's not the case in Congo.

• 8:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's not the case in the Congo, and the numbers are far, far smaller. So after five years of the Congo Free State's existence, there are still fewer than 500 Europeans working in the Congo as traders, soldiers, missionaries, officials and so on. The biggest of these groups, and it's no more than 80 people, are based in this new capital, which is the port of Boma. That's where, pretty much where Stanley had finished his famous trek across the heart of Africa. And so in Boma, they have built docks, they've built warehouses, there's a hotel, there's a military base, there's a hospital, there's a post office and so on. The governor general is based there, but the governor general really is a cipher. You know, we won't be mentioning any governors general because they're not important.

• 8:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  All the decisions are made in Brussels by a tiny cabinet of officials who are answerable to Leopold. So in effect, he rules the Congo. I've written in the notes, an absolute monarch, but that's not quite the right term. Actually, the right term is a proprietor. He is the owner of the Congo and he runs it as the, as the chairman of the board. He has the final decision. As for the other white men in the Congo, they are strung out along the river in a line of these kind of makeshift stations. So often, these stations are no more than a handful of thatched huts and kind of blockhouses with the flag of the Congo Free State, the blue flag with the gold staff.

• 9:40Tom Holland?

  And it's in, in one of these stations that Mr Kurtz in Conrad's novella is based.

• 9:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, the inner station, right in the heart of the interior. Now, if you are sent out there, if you go out there, you will have servants. Your contract stipulates that you can have a bottle of wine a day and your contract also promises you a regular supply of marmalade from England, butter from Denmark, foie gras, which would appeal to the air producer, canned meat and so on and so forth. But whether or not most of the men get these supplies regularly is of course a very different matter because it depends on the steamboats. Almost all of the men who go are single, very uncommon for them to take wives. Most of them take up with local women.

• 10:20Tom Holland?

  And they're not necessarily Belgian, are they? In fact, most of them aren't Belgian.

• 10:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, most of them are not Belgian because as we said in the last episode, most Belgians are not interested in having a colony. You know, they are, they're not.

• 10:32Tom Holland?

  Imperially minded people.

• 10:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, and they're not a particularly maritime people either. So the idea of, of getting on a ship and going out, you know, Belgium doesn't really have a merchant navy at this point.

• 10:42Tom Holland?

  Well, it's interesting, isn't it, that Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Conrad specifies that he's the son of Anglo-French Union.

• 10:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 10:50Tom Holland?

  And that all of Europe went into making him.

• 10:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's not Belgian, that, with Mr. Kurtz.

• 10:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  The one group that is very heavily represented among the people who work for the Congo Free States is people who have been in the military. And that, as we will see, tells its own story. So these guys have two things that other Europeans don't have, because people maybe who listened to the last episode may be wondering, if other Europeans found this so difficult and didn't go up the Congo, what do these chaps have? They have two things. One, they have automatic machine guns. So the Maxim gun, which was the first automatic repeating gun, was invented in 1884. That was the year that Stanley completed all the treaties for Leopold.

• 11:29Tom Holland?

  So whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not.

• 11:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And the second thing is modern medicine. So the thing that's always put people off going up the Congo was the threat that you would die of disease. In 1881, scientists had proved that yellow fever was carried by mosquitoes, so people are now travelling with mosquito nets. And they're also travelling with enormous quantities of quinine to fight malaria, which they have imported from plantations in the Dutch East Indies, a sign of the globalisation of the world.

• 12:00Tom Holland?

  Of course. And also, they've got steamboats. I mean, that's the other crucial thing to emphasise.

• 12:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  No steamboats, no colony. I think that's fair to say.

• 12:07Tom Holland?

  Yeah, because they couldn't get into the interior. The house that walks on water, the Congolese call these boats.

• 12:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Indeed. All of that said, the death rate is still actually quite high. So the question is, why on earth would you go? And I think the answer is that the Congo appeals to the kind of people who might otherwise have gone to the Klondike or to the Rand in South Africa, or indeed might have joined the French Foreign Legion or something like that.

• 12:33Tom Holland?

  Well, because Europe is at peace, isn't it? And it's it's a kind of bourgeois, faintly boring peace.

• 12:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 12:40Tom Holland?

  So if you want adventure, this would be perfect.

• 12:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly so. So Adam Hochschild, in his brilliant book, King Leopold's Ghost, that we've mentioned quite a lot, he says, "Someone fated for life as a small-town bank clerk or a plumber in Europe could instead become a warlord, an ivory merchant, a big game hunter, and a possessor of a harem." And he quotes a brilliant letter from a Belgian officer to his family in 1894. "Vive le Congo," says this guy. "There is nothing like it. We have liberty, independence, and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society. Here one is everything: warrior, diplomat, trader. Why not?"

• 13:20Tom Holland?

  But that sense of freedom is, as we will see, founded on the servitude of others.

• 13:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, it is. He uses the word trader, that Belgian officer. And of course, what lies behind that, and what lies behind the entire project, is the single word ivory. That is what they are here for. Getting ivory is dead easy. You just shoot and kill an elephant and then rip out its tusks. The hard part is getting the ivory out of the Congo. So Leopold, so far, is relying entirely on steamboats, but there is that 200-mile section around the rapids where you can't use the steamboat. So here you have to go overland, and ideally, what you need is not team supporters trudging up and down the trail, you want a railway.

• 14:05Tom Holland?

  Yeah, of course.

• 14:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  So by 1887, he has a team of surveyors sketching a route around the rapids, and it will take a very long time. They don't actually start laying tracks until 1890 because the terrain is so difficult and because of the threat of disease and so on. So for now, he has to rely on tens of thousands of porters, hence what we talked about in the introduction.

• 14:27Tom Holland?

  Again, isn't that kind of, I mean, a tremendous scam? That the, basically the servitude of these people, chained up, as we heard in that kind of opening passage from Conrad, is justified by saying, well, they need to do it so that we can have the railways so that we won't need porters.

• 14:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. They're building a railway in their own interests.

• 14:47Tom Holland?

  It's kind of progressive hard labour.

• 14:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because once we finish the railway, they'll have a brilliant life because there won't be porters anymore. That's basically the logic.

• 14:55Tom Holland?

  That's justification.

• 14:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And of course, what they're carrying, they're carrying the steamboats, but they're also carrying the marmalade, the foie gras, the rifles, machine gun ammunition, all of this stuff. They're not paid because under the Congo Free States laws, there is no money for Africans. Africans are not allowed money. So they are being paid generally in brass, sometimes in cloth, but in these kind of brass rods, which is a kind of strange makeshift currency. And we've quoted from Heart of Darkness already, but we don't need to go to fiction to know how they're treated. A Free State official in his memoirs, and this is a quotation that's so like Conrad's quotations, extraordinary. "A file of poor devils chained by the neck carried my trunks and boxes towards the dock." He says, "There

• 15:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  are a hundred of them, trembling and fearful, the overseer walking by with his whip. For each stocky and broad-backed fellow, how many were skeletons dried up like mummies, their skin worn out, seamed with deep scars, covered with separating wounds?" And then he says, again, with a kind of bitter irony, "No matter, they were all up to the job." And then a Belgian senator visited in 1896. Again, he says, "Everywhere we went, unceasingly we meet these porters, black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loincloth, frizzy and bare head supporting the load. They come and go like this by the thousand, requisitioned by the state, armed with its powerful militia, handed over by chiefs whose slaves they are

• 16:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  and who make off with their salaries, dusty and sweaty insects spreading out across the mountains and valleys, their task of Sisyphus dying alongside the road or the journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages."

• 16:35Tom Holland?

  So that's not an entirely positive report, is it?

• 16:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, that's a very critical report by this Belgian guy. But there's actually worse to come, because that first quotation, the Free State official mentioned an overseer twirling a whip, and this whip becomes the supreme symbol abroad of King Leopold's model colony, because this is a whip called the chicotte, and it's basically a strip of hippopotamus hide that's been dried in the sun.

• 17:02Tom Holland?

  It has a very sharp edge, doesn't it?

• 17:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Tom Holland?

  So it breaks the skin.

• 17:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Twenty-five strokes of that, you will pass out. A hundred strokes of that would almost certainly kill you. And there are all kinds of accounts from people who see Leopold's soldiers, his enforcers, flogging children who are sometimes as young as seven or eight. There's an official called Stanislas Le Fronck, a Belgian magistrate, who arrived in the Congo. He saw these boys being flogged. These are like eight-year-old boys, and the reason is that they had all laughed in the presence of an official, and he was so cross, he told his men to flog every boy, every servant boy in the town, fifty lashes.

• 17:41Tom Holland?

  So that's very like the SS officer in the Polish village with the schoolboys.

• 17:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it is.

• 17:47Tom Holland?

  Flogging them.

• 17:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and Le Fronck complained, and it was stopped. But afterwards, Le Fronck was called in by his superiors, and they said to him, don't do that again, because that undermines discipline. We need discipline in this town. And most Europeans just seem to have taken the use of the chicotte for granted. They don't wield it themselves, they get Africans to do it for them.

• 18:05Tom Holland?

  Well, they get people who've been flogged to kind of give a salute, don't they? They have to stand up and give the salute.

• 18:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely, you do. So the enforcers, this is a private army called the Force Publique, I mean, an absolutely terrifying organisation. By the mid 1890s, there were about 19,000 men in it. It's the biggest army in Central Africa, and it's a private army with a small group of white officers, and the men are all black Africans. The officers tend to be Belgian. The ordinary soldiers initially, they are mercenaries from West Africa or from Zanzibar, but over time, they're replaced with conscripts from the Congo. I say conscripts, but there is an argument, these are effectively slave soldiers. There are all kinds of, there's all kinds of evidence in the Belgian files of-

• 18:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Orders for chains and things, chains required to bring young men or boys from the interior to work in the force public. We know that agents were paid a bonus for how many men they provided for the force public. Some of them would buy teenage boys from friendly chiefs. And these teenage boys, when they were maybe chained, led to barracks, told they had to join the army, they would serve a seven year term. They were incredibly badly treated. I mean, they themselves are flogged with a chicote. And they spend an awful lot of time fighting among themselves, basically fighting mutinies. So in the book, King Leopold's Ghost, there are long narratives of kind of these hideous, bloody mutinies,

• 19:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  where force public units have turned against their officers and then other units have to be brought in to deal with them. And if they're not fighting mutinies, they're fighting rebels. Because we said last time how ethnically fragmented the Congo is. It has a long history of ethnic violence before the Belgians ever arrived, a history that never really goes away. And you could argue that the force public and indeed the free state generally is just a new player in an endlessly, a new and deadly player in an endlessly shifting world of kind of rivalries and alliances.

• 20:11Tom Holland?

  So this would be like the conquistadors turning up and

• 20:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Tom Holland?

  Kind of embroiling themselves in the politics of of Mexico.

• 20:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 20:18Tom Holland?

  But, I mean, the horror is off the scale. There's nothing ever been like, anything like this in the Congo.

• 20:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  No. I mean, these campaigns, these rebellions and kind of guerrilla campaigns and counterinsurgency operations can last for 10, 20 years. And they involve, I mean, when Francis Ford Coppola turned Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, there was a real logic to that, because actually, these counterinsurgency campaigns look very much like the Vietnam War. Villages being burned to the ground, civilians being routed up and murdered, women being raped, children being enslaved, it's kind of hideous, hideous scenes.

• 20:56Tom Holland?

  But the difference is, is that there are no journalists on the spot, there are no cameras, there's, there's, there's nothing to record this. It is happening, I suppose, in a kind of darkness, you would say.

• 21:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is indeed. It is indeed. Now. Some people listening to this may say, you're presenting a very, very dark picture. You've obviously read this, this book that presents a very bleak picture of life in the Congo. Is there a more positive side? Next week, we'll do a bonus episode for our Restless History Club members, talking about the critics of, of the Adam Horst Charles book and, and people who have said, oh, there's actually another side to the story. But just one note on this. Leopold, of course, had promised a civilizing mission, but it's fair to say there is actually very little evidence of that. So there are no state funded schools for African children, for example. There are some religious foundations, but there's no attempt whatsoever to set up a state educational infrastructure.

• 21:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does, however, have children's homes, which are called children's colonies. But the point of them is merely to provide recruits for the force public. So the world is told that these are orphanages for children with no parents, but often these are the surviving children of people who have been killed in the kind of counter insurgency operations and dragged back in these hideous forced marches in which maybe a third of the children will die. And then they're put in these children's homes where discipline is enforced by, with the chain and with the chikat. About half of the children in these homes die. And if you live, you then join the force public in your turn. And so the cycle continues.

• 22:35Tom Holland?

  How are the people who are organizing this feeling about this?

• 22:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  They feel great about it, by and much.

• 22:40Tom Holland?

  They have no moral qualms about what they're doing.

• 22:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, some do, of course, and we'll get on to this.

• 22:44Tom Holland?

  I mean, Conrad does famously.

• 22:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, but Conrad, we will do an episode on Heart of Darkness next week, in which we'll discuss how when Conrad went on his journey, on the way back, he's, he writes letters home to friends and relatives. And he says, you know, nobody, nobody talks to me. Everybody hates me. I'm very isolated. Everybody regards me as repugnant. And

• 23:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  An obvious explanation for this is that he has shown his shock at what he sees and his disgust, and other people say he is unsound, he's not to be trusted, he's not one of us.

• 23:18Tom Holland?

  Because he comes out of that absolutely traumatised, doesn't he?

• 23:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 23:22Tom Holland?

  I mean, he basically, he kind of crawls back to London and just can't talk about what he's seen.

• 23:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 23:28Tom Holland?

  But I can't believe that there aren't other people who...

• 23:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are other people, I mentioned that magistrate, Le Franc, who said, "Stop flogging the boys", and is then told off for it and said, "You're undermining discipline". So there are such people.

• 23:40Tom Holland?

  But going out and killing the parents of boys who you then enslave, I mean, that's a kind of, I mean, dare one say, evil?

• 23:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're speaking as somebody who's unaware of history. I mean, people often behave like this.

• 23:54Tom Holland?

  Well, I'm aware that similar things happened, for instance, in the conquest of Mexico, but there are Spanish priests who are opposing it. You know, there are voices of conscience in these expeditions.

• 24:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are voices of conscience, and we will come to some next week, we will come to the people who give information to the campaigns against King Leopold.

• 24:15Tom Holland?

  But they often seem to be missionaries, and, well, we'll come to that. I mean, there are a lot of missionaries who are not working for the Belgian state. I'm just thinking particularly about the officers who are presiding over this horrific system.

• 24:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  The military men, they were all for it. I mean, there are lots of accounts of military men who say, "The Congo is actually brilliant. You can do what you like, it's much better than being at home in Europe, you can be a big man, you can be a... Remember that quote? You can be a warlord if you want." I think that the truth of the matter is, we're not talking about huge quantities of men, remember, 500 maximum. By and large, if you go and if you stay more than a few weeks, you're signed up to the project. You know, if you don't like it, you go home straight away if you don't like that project, I would say. You know, you find a reason to get out. But if you go, you become desensitised very quickly. I mean, it's rather like asking, "How did, you know, Wehrmacht officers justify what they're doing in 1941?". They find a way of doing it.

• 25:12Tom Holland?

  That is a huge question.

• 25:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you see, I don't think that's a very hard question to answer, because I think human beings often... And behave like that in history because I have a very bleak view of human nature. It's not a puzzle to me because I just see it recur again and again.

• 25:22Tom Holland?

  I'm always surprised reading accounts of the Belgian officers. And we've talked about how Belgium is not an imperially minded nation. How few of them seem to have had any qualms at all.

• 25:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can argue that there are two things we have. Well, I mean, there's an imperialistic mentality and there's of course a racist mentality. So they don't regard the Africans as people like themselves and they believe they have a right to treat them as they choose.

• 25:45Tom Holland?

  I suppose also it's self selecting that perhaps, you know, you're going out in the middle of the jungle.

• 25:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  You don't go to the Congo to work as a mercenary. If you're a kind of, if you've got a bleeding heart, I think it's fair to say.

• 25:55Tom Holland?

  Yeah, but there are bleeding hearts and there are bleeding hearts. I still, I still think it is striking how few of these officers seem to have said, oh, I'm not sure about this.

• 26:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I think that tells its own story. I mean, that's the thing that they're self selecting and the weight of their prejudices, their cultural baggage means that they are perhaps predisposed to think it's okay.

• 26:19Tom Holland?

  It's also kind of what Heart of Darkness is about that, so we will come to that.

• 26:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  But just before we go to the break, there's one thing that we've completely missed in this episode. And that is an African voice. And the truth is they are really hard to come by because as we said before, people aren't writing things down. We do get fragmentary sources collected in interviews. So here's a really good example that also answers your question. There was a free state agent who I think was American born called Edgar Canizius. And later on, he ends up basically turning against the free state and giving a lot of information to campaigners against it. And he collected stories from people. And one of them is a woman called Elanga from the east of Congo, who had been kidnapped by the force public.

• 27:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  And she told her story to Canizius and he repeated it. He was convinced that she was telling the truth because he also met the men who had kidnapped her. So he said, I believe her when she's telling me what happened. I'll just read an extract before we go to the break to give you people a sense of what this was like on the ground. So this is Elanga. She says, we're all busy in the fields when a runner came to the village saying that a large band of men was coming and that many white men were with them. Three or four came to our house and caught hold of me, also my husband Alika and my sister Katanga. We were dragged into the road and tied together with cords about our necks. We were all crying for now. We knew that we were to be taken away to be slaves. We set off marching very quickly. My sister Katanga had her baby in her arms, but my husband Aleka was made to carry a goat.

• 27:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  We had nothing to eat, for the soldiers would give us nothing. On the fifth day, the soldiers took my sister's baby and threw it in the grass, leaving it to die, and made her carry some cooking pots. On the sixth day, we became very weak from lack of food and from constant marching, and my husband, who marched behind us with the goat, sat down beside the path and refused to walk more. The soldiers beat him, but still he refused to move. Then one of them struck him on the head with the end of his gun, and he fell upon the ground. One of the soldiers caught the goat, while two or three others stuck the long knives they put on the end of their guns into my husband. I saw the blood spurt out, and then saw him no more, for we passed over the brow of

• 28:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  a hill, and he was out of sight.

• 28:38Tom Holland?

  So that was the reality of what Marlowe called the high and just proceedings of King Leopold's Congo, and a somber moment, Dominic, on which I think we should go and take a break.

• 28:55Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 29:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 29:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair. They were dying slowly. It was very clear.

• 29:54Tom Holland?

  They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. So Conrad again, in Heart of Darkness, 1899, and his narrator Marlowe has arrived in the Congo and is climbing up the hills that lead to the Congo that is navigable, and

• 30:35Tom Holland?

  he is witnessing workers who are building the railway that will expedite European access to the Highlands. And he is not exaggerating there, is he? I mean, there were hundreds, thousands of people who died during the construction of that railway.

• 30:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's absolutely right, and we'll get on to the railway and the people who died working on it a little bit later. But to go back, Conrad made his journey up the Congo in 1890, and it was about this point that this terrible story entered a new chapter that was even darker than before. And this new period, this terrible period in the Congo's history traces its origin not to Belgium actually, but to Belfast in Northern Ireland. So in October 1887, an inventor called John Dunlop had attached a pneumatic rubber tyre to his son's tricycle as an experiment to see if this would work. And within three years, the Dunlop Company were making tyres commercially.

• 31:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  And from that point onwards, there's a huge bicycle craze, a bicycle boom with these rubber pneumatic tyres.

• 31:43Tom Holland?

  I mean, people have been familiar with rubber for a while, haven't they? Because it's the end of the 18th century that it gets its English name because somebody notices that you can use rubber to rub things out.

• 31:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think something like that. I mean, people have known about it certainly for decades. But it's only in this point in the early 1890s, the worldwide rubber boom really gets underway. And I guess it's because people need rubber insulation for the new telephone, for telegraphs, for electrical wiring. So electrification promotes rubber, the enthusiasm for rubber in bicycles, but also it's used in tubes and in factories and all these kinds of things.

• 32:18Tom Holland?

  So it's the great moor of industry.

• 32:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  It absolutely. Now, where do you get rubber? You can get wild rubber or you can get plantation rubber. In the Congo, in the forests of the Congo, rubber vines are very plentiful. The costs, as with ivory, are very low. You don't need to cultivate it, you don't need fertilizers, you don't need equipment, you just need people to go and collect the rubber, and I'll explain how they do that in a second. So for Leopold, this is amazing. A rubber boom has started, and as luck would have it, he has one of the world's great supplies of rubber. But he knows he's only got a limited window in which to do this, because investors are already pouring money into plantations of rubber trees in Asia and in South America, and rubber trees are much easier to tap than rubber vines.

• 33:03Tom Holland?

  And that would give him what, about 20 years?

• 33:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's got 20 years to tap the rubber vines in the Congo before these trees become, as it were, operational.

• 33:11Tom Holland?

  And also, his investments in the Congo, I mean, he's quite heavily in debt, isn't he?

• 33:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is.

• 33:17Tom Holland?

  So he needs to leverage his assets urgently if the whole thing isn't just going to come crashing down around his ears.

• 33:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely right. Now, how do you get the rubber? Here's the catch. Wild rubber comes from these gigantic vines that wind their way around these trees. And these vines can grow so high, 100 feet high, they go up to the sunlight. And then, once they're there, they're sort of corkscrew for hundreds more feet through the kind of jungle canopy, the forest canopy. And to get the rubber out of the vine, you basically have to slash the vine with a knife, and then you hung a pot or a bucket to collect this kind of milk, the sap that comes from the vine. Now, the downside of doing that in the Congo is when you go into the forest, a lot of it is swamp, so it's kind of flooded, you're wading through it and you're surrounded

• 34:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  by snakes, crocodiles and all this kind of thing. So it's a health and safety nightmare, I think it's fair to say, Tom. Now, once you've got the sap, the milky stuff, you need to dry it, you want it to coagulate into the rubber. So what a lot of gatherers would do is they would get it, they'd cut the vine, the stuff comes out, then they spread it. I know this sounds really weird, they spread it on their own body, they wait till it's dried and then they kind of rip it off their body. Imagine how painful that is.

• 34:34Tom Holland?

  Bits of hair in it.

• 34:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then they put it into baskets and carry it with the baskets on their heads, they will walk for tens and tens of miles down to the river to the nearest European agency. And here, the rubber will be again left out to dry and then it will be loaded onto barges for the coast. So as all of that makes clear, it's quite an operation for the person who's actually gathering the rubber. I mean, you don't want to be eaten by a crocodile.

• 34:59Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's not a great job, is it?

• 35:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, it's not something you choose to do. Podcasting is a better career choice, I think it's fair to say. Basically, nobody wants to do it. The only way you'll get people to do it is to force them to do it.

• 35:11Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so there's an official, isn't there, who says, "The native doesn't like making rubber, he must be compelled to do it." And there you have it.

• 35:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  So this is where the Force Publique, the sort of mercenary force, the private army of King Leopold, and the various militias that have been enlisted by the concession companies, where they come in, their job is to get, round people up and get them to go and get this rubber. And we know how they did it from the British Vice Consul, who wrote this report in 1899. And he said, "An officer told me what they do. They go into a village, the inhabitants all run away, they start looting the village, the sort of mercenaries who've gone in, then they seize the women of the village, they chase them, they seize the women, and they keep them as hostages until the men have gone and got enough rubber. And then when the men have got the rubber, they sell the women back to the men and then they move on to the next village."

• 36:04Tom Holland?

  So they're basically hostages?

• 36:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's the systematic, deliberate, planned taking of hostages. In the manual that was given to Congo Free State from the kind of company agents.

• 36:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are instructions about the best way to take hostages.

• 36:21Tom Holland?

  Do they use the word hostage?

• 36:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, they don't use the word hostage. They say it's a way of bargaining, it's a good way of negotiating, all this kind of thing.

• 36:28Tom Holland?

  So again, they're giving instruct, they're saying, basically, go and take hostages, but they're still dressing it up in language that might not ring too many alarm bells.

• 36:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  But we know that almost everybody does that. I mean, we know that the Nazis did that. Then, you know, people use legalistic language to disguise terrible things. They do it almost automatically, instinctively.

• 36:51Tom Holland?

  Sure, I accept that, but I mean, Leopold is still passing himself off as a humanitarian. Yeah. I mean, the Nazis are not passing themselves off as humanitarian. So there's a bit of a difference there, I think.

• 37:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  I suppose so.

• 37:01Tom Holland?

  It is kind of striking that they are able to square the circle of, yeah, go and get hostages, while simultaneously framing it in a way that makes Leopold look a brilliant guy who cares only for bringing enlightenment to the darkness.

• 37:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  They don't want this manual to kind of fall into the wrong hands, exactly. So basically, you take the hostages and then you would say, oh, you know, we need four kilograms of rubber every two weeks. And when you hit your quota, you know, you can have your hostages back. Are people paid to collect rubber? Some chiefs are paid with beads or with salt. Some chiefs are paid with slaves. We know that in 1901, a chief told a Belgian official, he said, oh, yeah, I was paid. I was given six women and two men. And I was told, quote, "I could eat them or kill them or use them as slaves as I liked." Eat them, but that's what he said. I mean, maybe that was the Belgian being, you know, the Belgian official mocking the chief. I mean, it's impossible for us to know.

• 38:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Cannibalism was not totally unknown in the Congo, but equally, it could be something that the Belgians, the Europeans are kind of projecting on. Now, in some areas, it really is a kind of like a police state. Workers would need a permit to leave their village because they're required for the rubber quota. In other areas, workers are actually given numbered metal discs to wear around their necks. I say workers, of course, that you could argue workers is the wrong word. They are effectively, this is slave labour.

• 38:29Tom Holland?

  And so these are slave collars, basically.

• 38:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Slave collars. And we are talking about enormous numbers of people. So one company. One of the biggest concession companies, the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, A B I R, in 1906 in its account books, it listed 47,000 Congolese workers, workers again in inverted commas, who are collecting rubber for it. And again, that's that weird thing that you're talking about, Tom. Do they even need to make a list? You know, why are they doing it? Because they're still so addicted to the kind of the formal legal paraphernalia. You know, they want to believe that what they're doing is not naked exploitation, but is good business practice, I suppose.

• 39:12Tom Holland?

  And can I ask about the Anglo in that?

• 39:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it had once been a British company. It is actually no longer at this point.

• 39:18Tom Holland?

  Right.

• 39:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Its shareholders, I think, are almost exclusively Belgian by the early 1900s. So there's one more thing, and this is the single most notorious aspect of life in the Congo, which many listeners may have heard of. A guy who describes this very well is, you mentioned missionaries, an American missionary called William Sheppard. In 1899, Sheppard was based in a region called the Kasai, which is in the south of the Congo. And this was an area that was plagued by fighting between loyalists to the Congo Free State and rebels. Sheppard went deep into the forests and he found abandoned villages that had been burned to the ground and were littered with corpses. And he was horrified and he kept going and he got to the camp of Leopold's loyalists,

• 39:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  to kind of tribes that were loyal, that had collaborated with the Congo Free State. And he was struck as he approached straight away by the smell of something being smoked, like meat being smoked. And he said, the chief took him to a sort of wooden framework of sticks, under which there was a fire burning. And on the framework, on the sticks, on the kind of frame, were hands, 81 right hands, human hands. And the chief said to him, see, here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the state how many we have killed. And the point of smoking them was that they wouldn't rot.

• 40:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Congo is very hot and humid, so you smoke them means you can preserve them. The chief could show them to Congo Free State or concession officials and then get his reward. Now, this is a very, very controversial subject among people who write about the Congo. Some people say it's a kind of long established practice. It's a practice that comes from African and Arab slave traders who've been cutting off people's hands, and it's unfair to blame this on King Leopold.

• 41:10Tom Holland?

  Well, I mean, it's a practice that goes back a very, I mean, it goes back to ancient Egypt.

• 41:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Others say, actually, what happens is that under the free state, other historians, under the Congo free state, this becomes institutionalised and sort of systematised in a way that it had never quite been before, that it almost, it becomes part of the box ticking, the accountancy.

• 41:30Tom Holland?

  Becomes industrialised.

• 41:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  It becomes industrialised, exactly. One common misconception that people will have is that these were cut off living people. That's perhaps because they'll have, you'll have seen photos of living people whose hands have been cut off.

• 41:43Tom Holland?

  Well, because it happened in Sierra Leone, didn't it, notoriously?

• 41:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  But most of the victims were already dead. There's another great book on the Congo by David Van Raebroek, a lot of it based on oral history. And that makes very clear that most of the people who had their hands cut off, I mean, they're already dead, they're corpses. Leopold himself, when he found, when there's a great storm, as we will come to next week about the cutting off of hands, he was very annoyed that people criticised him for it. He said, "Cutting off hands, that's idiotic." He said, "I'd cut off the rest of them, but not the hands. That's the one thing I need in the Congo, is people's hands to collect the rubber." I mean, that gives you some sense of Leopold's cynicism. But I think what happened is that among the force publique, cutting the hands off corpses does become almost an end in itself, because it's, they take them back to their officers,

• 42:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  their European officers, and this says, "I'm taking the job seriously, I've killed lots of people, here is the evidence." And there was, there was some suggestion, and I think is correct, that force publique officers were paid bonuses based on how many hands.

• 42:45Tom Holland?

  Well, so it's like scalp hunting in, in the Wild West.

• 42:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, it is. That's, that's a really, really good comparison. Now that we're at this point, I think it's fair to say that we really are kind of morally in the, in the heart of darkness. I mean, this is the kind of thing that really, if you're a sensitive listener, you've probably already stopped listening. There are some writers who think a lot of this has been exaggerated and sensationalised. For me... Well, I mean, we will talk about this a lot in next week's bonus. But for me, I think there are far too many accounts of European agents forcing people to eat excrement or to drink castor oil or shooting holes in people's earlobes and using them for target practice and stuff like that. I think there are far too many examples for them all to be exaggerated or indeed made up.

• 43:28Tom Holland?

  Well, also, aren't a lot of the accounts coming from either people like Conrad, people who had gone in as true believers and come out appalled by what they've seen, or by missionaries who think this is a great opportunity that Leopold has opened up the darkness of the Congo for the light of Christ, and likewise are traumatized by what they find. I mean, I don't see why they would make it up if it wasn't happening.

• 43:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, I agree. I think you have to believe that all these missionaries are inventing stories and that all the memories of these, I mean, there are some notorious examples. There was a guy called Leon Fievez. He collected more rubber than anybody else. He was from a farming family in Walloni or Belgium. He was the commissioner for the Equateur district. We know that he boasted about his methods, that he told his men, "Cut off heads." And he, you know, "Cut off heads to inspire loyalty and discipline because people weren't giving him food." You know, he cut off 100 heads. He would ask people to bring baskets full of hands. He was completely open and unashamed about it.

• 44:29Tom Holland?

  And that, again, is part of what Kurtz is about because Kurtz is the guy who's bringing in more ivory than anyone else.

• 44:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 44:36Tom Holland?

  And when he is praised, you know, as Marlowe is going up the river, as the guy who is bringing in more ivory, you already have a sense of what that actually means in practice.

• 44:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. So let's move the clock forward to 1895. So the Congo Free State is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Leopold is also celebrating his 60th birthday.

• 45:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  His life in many respects is now is absolutely miserable. His wife hates him, she spends all her time riding horses.

• 45:06Tom Holland?

  And laughing.

• 45:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  And laugh, well, she doesn't laugh anymore, actually. Laughter, laughter's fled, I think it's fair to say. His oldest daughter Louise has married a German prince and their wedding is of anything even worse than Leopold's. She tried to run away on her wedding night and she ends up being locked in a nursing home for six years. So that's, that's a bit miserable. Second daughter Stephanie, she married Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria and he killed himself at Myrling in a murder-suicide pact with his lover.

• 45:32Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so that's not good. And, and Leopold hates his daughters, doesn't he? And one of the great animating ambitions of his life is to ensure they don't inherit anything.

• 45:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, hates his wife, hates his daughter, hates Belgium and the Belgians.

• 45:44Tom Holland?

  And also he's got his sister Carlotta hanging around in the palace. Who's gone completely mad because she was married to Maximilian, who is the, the Habsburg who gets, becomes emperor of Mexico and then gets shot.

• 45:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  It'd make an amazing play, the home life of Leopold the Second. But also he's, he's pretty bonkers in his own way. He's a very lonely, he's a massive hypochondriac. He's such a hypochondriac that every day they have to boil the tablecloths to kill germs. And he wears a, when, when he goes outside and it's raining, he wears a waterproof bag over his beard to stop his beard getting wet, which seems very peculiar.

• 46:20Tom Holland?

  Why didn't he shave his beard off?

• 46:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Good question. I think he thinks the beard is a, it's a sign of his tremendous masculinity. I think it's what he thinks. His great pleasures, you mentioned one of them last week, which is he has a special ironed copy of the Times every day. His other great pleasures are spending money on monuments and pavilions and parks and stuff.

• 46:38Tom Holland?

  Golf courses.

• 46:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Golf courses.

• 46:40Tom Holland?

  He loves a golf course.

• 46:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  He does like a golf course and his other great pleasure is sleeping with very young girls. So in 1885, he was actually named in a British court as a client of a disorderly house in London. And he was accused of paying eight hundred pounds a month to have a supply of girls in their very early teens.

• 47:01Tom Holland?

  He's a bad man.

• 47:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think we can conclude that King Leopold the Second was a very bad man. Now, all of his spending, of course, reflects his big earnings from rubber. It's really hard for us to know how much money he made from all this rubber. But I mentioned one concession company, Anglo Belgian India Rubber.

• 47:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  They made a profit on their rubber of more than 700% and their stock price rose 30 times in four years after they started investing in rubber. So I think it's a fair assumption that Leopold is making tens of millions, maybe more, in enormous, in today's money, an enormous, enormous sum of money. And things are only going to get better for him. His railway, by the time he turns 60, his railway is finally nearing completion. It has been a gigantic and a hideous project. 60,000 people have worked on this 200 mile railway. They've built 99 bridges, but the project has eaten people because of dysentery, because of yellow fever, smallpox and so on.

• 48:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  They've had to bring in workers from West Africa. They've brought in hundreds of Chinese labourers from Hong Kong and Macau. These people have been brought often under false pretenses. They're chained together, they're flogged if they falter. There are constant rebellions. The death toll is impossible to estimate. The official figures say 1,800 Africans and Asians died, but it could be far greater. There are some historians who think maybe hundreds were dying every single month.

• 48:30Tom Holland?

  And just to reiterate though, this is progressive brutality because the goal is for their own benefit because in the long run, they won't then have to carry stuff up because there'll be a train.

• 48:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 48:39Tom Holland?

  It's all about the kindness.

• 48:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  It was said afterwards, every single sleeper on the railway, that's what Americans call the tie, which is the wooden slat that basically goes between the rails. That every single one of those planks cost one African life. And I don't think that's such a tremendous exaggeration. So Leopold, he thinks, well, when the railway is done, I can dream bigger with all my money. You know, we can push maybe the railway up to the Valley of the Nile. We can have a railway that goes up to the Sudan and to Egypt. He starts putting feelers out to Gladstone, the British Prime Minister. Would you be interested in selling me Uganda? And he says to his courtiers, you know, Belgium is an up and coming country. Spain, Portugal, the hated Dutch, you know, they're decadent.

• 49:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  We can move in on their colonies, actually, you know, we should be thinking big. We should dream bigger.

• 49:29Tom Holland?

  So in the Congo, he's a monopolist, but he wants to expand that monopoly into other fields.

• 49:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. Now, there are the first glimmers of criticism. The very first critic really is an African American missionary called George Washington Williams. He went to the Congo to try to save souls.

• 49:46Tom Holland?

  Well, he's an amazing man, isn't he?

• 49:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, an incredible man.

• 49:49Tom Holland?

  He fought against Maximilian in Mexico and with the Buffalo Soldiers on the Great Plains.

• 49:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 49:55Tom Holland?

  And am I not right that he, he goes to Brussels and it's kind of the toast of Brussels because he's black.

• 50:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 50:04Tom Holland?

  But I mean, he's kind of toasted by humanitarian, charitable, Christian, progressive elements within Brussels. And it's, it's as a representative of black slaves who, because he's actually born free. But I mean, there's this great tide of enthusiasm for abolishing black slavery. And as part of that, he goes to see Leopold. And Leopold says, what I do in Congo is done as a Christian duty to the poor African. And I do not wish to have one franc back of all the money I have expended.

• 50:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, shameless.

• 50:38Tom Holland?

  And this is where I think it's different to the Nazis is that the Nazis are not pretending. You know, they're not kind of lauding black missionaries in their town and saying that they care only for the lives of Africans. And they don't, I mean, it's the hypocrisy of it as well as the brutality that is so astonishing and striking.

• 50:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And this bloke, George Washington Williams, right, he's had this meeting with Leopold. And he goes to the Congo, he goes up into the interior and he's like, what? This is awful. This is a complete con and a fraud. And he publishes an open letter and he says, um, you know, this is unbelievable. Like the forced public are out of control. They're killing everybody. Your Majesty's government is engaged in the slave trade wholesale and retail. It buys and sells and steals slaves.

• 51:26Tom Holland?

  And is that where he uses the phrase crimes against humanity?

• 51:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think he does, yes. And now Leopold organizes a massive press counterattack. Says this guy's attention seeker, he's mad. And unfortunately for George Washington Williams, he dies of tuberculosis just months later. But this is the very first little dent in the edifice that Leopold has very carefully constructed, and there are more. So in 1896, another missionary, a Swede, tells an audience in London that the Force Publique are collecting human hands. There's an even bigger scare, and this tells its own story, the biggest scare of all. The Force Publique hanged an Irish ivory trader called Charles Stokes because they said they'd caught him

• 52:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  selling arms to Arab slave dealers. And the fact that they had hanged a white man, very shocking. And the European papers start to say, well, hold on, if they would hang a white man with impunity, what are they doing to the, you know, what are they doing to the Africans if that's how they behave? So actually, Leopold deals with this, again, very cunning. He sets up a fake commission for the protection of the natives with missionaries on its board. And he says, they'll look into this. I mean, they never actually really travelled to the Congo. They don't really have a proper meeting, but they issue a report, brilliant, all sorted, you know, necessary reforms have been made.

• 52:45Tom Holland?

  So then as now, if you've got a problem, set up a commission.

• 52:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Set up a commission, yeah. In 1897, Leopold arguably reached his apogee. A world's fair opened in Brussels. There were two great sites, built and decorated in the Art Nouveau style of the day. One of them was completely devoted to the Congo Free State. There were stuffed animals, there was coffee and chocolate and tobacco, there were ornaments and woodwork and all this stuff. But the highlight was 267 human beings that were exhibited in specially built villages like animals in the zoo. There was even a sign, "The blacks are fed by the organising committee", said the sign, because people were giving them sweets, throwing sweets to them, which was making them ill.

• 53:28Tom Holland?

  This was very popular at the time. So the 1889 world fair that they had in Paris that built the Eiffel Tower, which was staged, I think, wasn't it, to mark the storming of the Bastille?

• 53:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 53:39Tom Holland?

  So, you know, liberty, equality, fraternity. And they had, they had human zoos with people from Africa. And I've been and seen the site. In a kind of wood, a very sinister location and people just taking it completely for granted.

• 53:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  A million people went to this, went to see this exhibition in Brussels. And we have no indication that any of them thought anything but that it was absolutely brilliant. They loved it. And when the Africans were finally taken home to the Congo, one newspaper said, "The soul of Belgium follows them and like the shield of Jupiter protects them. May we always thus show the world an example of humanity." The smugness and the sort of right sense of righteousness off the scale. So Leopold, what could possibly go wrong? He's got his colony, he's got his rubber, he's got his money.

• 54:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, everything looks great. Nothing could could spoil it or could it? Because it's about this time that a young clerk on the docks at Antwerp, where the rubber is being unloaded, begins to wander about the trade. He sees all this rubber and ivory being unloaded. And he thinks it's weird because it's not really showing up in the company's accounts, like somebody's skimming off the top. What he also can't understand, this young shipping clerk, "If we're getting all this rubber and ivory in, what are they, what are we paying for it with? What are the people of the Congo getting back?" And when he looks into it, he finds something that really shocks him. Because the ships that are going back to the Congo are not being loaded with trade goods.

• 55:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  They are being loaded exclusively with rifles and ammunition. And it's at that point that this young bloke.

• 55:25Tom Holland?

  Yeah, the light bulb.

• 55:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  The light bulb goes off and as he later puts it, he said, "It was bad enough to stumble upon a murder, but I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader." And this young lad's name was Edmund Dean Morell. And as we'll find out next week, he is going to change the world.

• 55:47Tom Holland?

  So we will be hearing about that next week. But if you are a member of the Rest is History Club, you can of course hear his story and the extraordinary campaign that he launches against Leopold and what he's getting up to in the Congo right now. And if you're not a member, you can sign up at therestishistory.com. And for everyone else, we will be back on Monday with the next chapter in this terrifying story. Goodbye.

• 56:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Goodbye.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  We are getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with 350 passengers on board.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  The Great Game. Strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 56:43Speaker 04

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 56:52Speaker 06

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 57:08Speaker 05

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. Disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 57:19Speaker 07

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:26Speaker 05

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