540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)

Exposing the dark pit of human suffering, cruelty and corruption that had long been secretly festering in King Leopold’s Congo, would reveal one of the greatest abuses of human rights in all history, and instigate a human rights campaign that would change the world. Having established it as what was essentially his own private colonial fiefdom in 1885, Leopold had grown rich off the vast quantities of rubber and ivory that his congolese labourers reaped and transported in unimaginably brutal conditions. The man to finally discover the horrendous scheme, and Leopold’s personal corruption, was Edmund Dene Morel, a young shipping clerk who noticed something deeply suspicious about the exports being sent back to the Congo from Belgium. With the backing of a wealthy tycoon, and in tandem with extraordinary individuals such as the magnetic Roger Casement who had personally experienced the horrors of the Congo, Stanley would for the next decade and more of his life embark upon an excoriating attack on Leopold and his regime. He interviewed countless first hand witnesses, published an outpouring of articles detailing the truth of what was going on, spoke convincingly at public gatherings, and set up an influential organisation, all of which served to attract much popular support and attention to the campaign. Soon, the question of the Congo had become an international political affair. But would it be enough to quell the horrific treatment of the Congolese people and discredit Leopold once and for all? Join Dominic and Tom as they describe the discovery, expose, and excoriation of King Leopold’s appalling human rights abuses in the Congo, resulting in one of the most important human rights campaigns of all time. Did it succeed? And, with some of Europe’s major colonial powers clamouring to condemn Leopold, what were the long term implications for European imperialism overall? _______ 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.

• 0:02Tom Holland?

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 0:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 0:45Tom Holland?

  So they asked over 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory and keep thinking.

• 1:16Tom Holland?

  The quay at Antwerp, a steamer moored alongside. The musical chimes ringing from the old cathedral spire. The sound of the Brabant Song, the Belgian national anthem. On the quay and on the steamer's decks, a jostling motley crowd. Military uniforms, the flutter of women's dresses. Ships officers gliding to and fro. The hatches battening down, steam getting up. Surrounded by groups of relatives or boon companions. Passengers bound Congo woods. Men of whose fitness for residing and governing in tropical Africa, even a novice would have doubts.

• 2:00Tom Holland?

  Young mostly, and mostly of a poor type, undersized, pallid wastrels.

• 2:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  But here and there, an older bronzed individual, one who has obviously been through all this before, the faces of these distinctly not good to look upon, scarred with brutality, with cruel and lustful eyes, faces from which one turns with an involuntary shudder of repulsion.

• 2:32Tom Holland?

  So that is the scene at Antwerp, it's Great Port in Belgium, from where the steamships head west and south to the Congo Free State in the late 1890s, as described by a barrel-chested, handlebar-moustachioed young man called Edmund Dean Morell. And Dominic, I hope that you admire the way in which I evoked the sense of a barrel-chested, handlebared, moustached young man there.

• 3:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, the one thing that was missing, so two things that were missing, Morell was born in France and his father was French, and then he went to boarding school in England. So you should have done an accent that was a cross between-

• 3:11Tom Holland?

  Oh, like Theo Young Smith.

• 3:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, like Theo Young Smith. That's the voice you should have done.

• 3:15Tom Holland?

  Theo has many qualities, but he's not barrel-chested.

• 3:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's not barrel-chested, he's not barrel-chested. So yes, I think you captured the barrel chest very nicely there, Tom. Congratulations.

• 3:24Tom Holland?

  Thank you, Dominic. The reason we're talking about this guy, Edmund D. Morell, is that basically he is the hero of today's episode, isn't he? He is the man who draws the crimes of King Leopold's Congo Free State to the world's attention and is probably the most effective human rights campaigner of the 20th century. He establishes the template for all the human rights campaigns that have followed.

• 3:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he absolutely is. He is the link between the abolitionist movement that fought slavery in Britain, America and elsewhere a generation before, and the human rights campaigns of the later 20th century, the anti-apartheid campaign and so on and so forth. And today's episode really is the story of how he and his friends and his allies bring down Leopold's regime. Last week, we heard about how since 1885, King Leopold, the second of Belgium, has presided over this reign of terror in the Congo Free State in pursuit of ivory and rubber and, of course, money. And this is the story of how he loses his grip. The Congo doesn't become independent or free, of course, it passes into Belgian government hands. But Leopold loses this prize

• 4:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  that he has spent all his life trying to seize and then trying to sort of hide from the world's gaze. So yeah, this is Edmund de Morel's story, really. So let's talk a little bit about him, Tom. He is born in Paris in 1873, father French, mother an English Quaker, which may be maybe relevant.

• 4:56Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  His father died when he was young, he went to boarding school in England, he ended up becoming a British subject and becoming a clerk. And he's an obscure man. When he's 18 years old, he starts work for a Liverpool shipping company called Elder Dempster. And as luck would have it, this shipping company has the contract for the steamship trade to the Congo. They have a monopoly. So they handle all the steamships that go to and from the Congo.

• 5:21Tom Holland?

  And and that is very much dependent on the company retaining the favor of Leopold the second personally, isn't it?

• 5:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. They have been given the contract by the Congo Free State and obviously they don't want to lose it. It brings them in a lot of money. Now, by the late 1890s, at which point Morel is in his mid mid twenties, they are sending him often every month to Antwerp. Because of course, he speaks French. So, you know, he's a he's a useful employee. He's the ideal person basically to stand there at the quayside supervising the arrivals and departures of all these steamships. He's already interested in Africa. Why wouldn't he be? You know, Africa is a very exotic and exciting subject in the 1890s. He thinks the Congo Free State is brilliant. He believes what he reads in the newspapers about its civilizing mission. He actually writes articles about about Africa and about the Congo Free

• 6:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  State for industry magazines because he fancies himself as a bit of a writer. And he says, it's got a great future. King Leopold, what a tremendous fellow, all of this kind of thing.

• 6:22Tom Holland?

  But also, I suppose, because he's investing his future in the company.

• 6:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course.

• 6:27Tom Holland?

  Why wouldn't you want to read up about business that you're involved in?

• 6:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely, absolutely. But he's standing there on the quayside at Antwerp and he's watching that scene that we described earlier. And he starts to become

• 6:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Suspicious of the ships that he sees, because as we described at the end of last week's episode, he sees all this rubber and ivory being unloaded from the ships. But nothing is going back the other way. So he kind of thinks, well, what are we, what are we trading for? What are we giving them in return? Now, at one point, he's called in by the Secretary of State of the Congo, who's this, he describes as a man thin to emaciation, inhuman, bloodless, petrified. I mean, there is a quality of Bram Stoker to quite a lot of what he's writing about. Sinister things in crates. Exactly. I was about to say there was something of the Hollywood melodron, but actually the comparison with Dracula is a really nice one. This man calls him in and

• 7:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  he's, he's absolutely furious. He says, the newspapers have reported what was in one of our recent shipments back to the Congo, a huge consignment of guns. And this sort of stuff shouldn't be appearing in the newspapers. Make sure it doesn't happen again. And Morell is confused by this. He thinks, well, why are we shipping so many guns back to the Congo? Why? And why can't the newspapers report it? Why is it, um, why is it such a big deal? I mean, it's interesting that the, the guy assumes that Morell would understand. Yes, exactly. Isn't that so interesting? Well, I think a lot of people perhaps would not have been curious. Morell has a, he's curious. So he goes away and he starts just

• 8:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  idly, almost looking into the account books, looking into the figures in, in the office. And he thinks this is weird. Nothing really adds up. The accounts that he sees, the figures written down, the ledgers, don't match what he can see coming off the ships, the massive consignments of rubber and ivory. And that's not reflected in the earnings. And he, he becomes obvious to him that there's a lot of fraud going on. Somebody is skimming off the top. And this, the answer, of course, is King Leopold. King Leopold is lying about the, about the amount coming in and about how much money he's making. But the other thing that becomes obvious to him, once he starts going through all these kind of dusty ledgers, is that consignment of guns was the, not the exception, it was the rule. They

• 8:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  are sending thousands and thousands of guns and rounds of ammunition to the Congo and nothing else. And we ended last week's episode with his great moment of revelation, a very kind of Hollywood scene. I was giddy and appalled at the cumulative significance of my discoveries. It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader.

• 9:13Tom Holland?

  It would make a great film, wouldn't it?

• 9:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  It would, absolutely. Tabby, our assistant producer, said it reminded her of the Robert Harris novel about the Dreyfus case, an officer and a spy, and it very much has that quality.

• 9:23Tom Holland?

  Yeah, kind of whistleblower.

• 9:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So Morrel goes to see the head of the company, who's a man called Sir Alfred Jones, the head of the shipping magnate.

• 9:31Tom Holland?

  So he must be thrilled.

• 9:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, Sir Alfred Jones is horrified when Morrel says, I've found all these discrepancies and I'm extremely concerned. Jones says, well, listen, I'll go to Brussels myself and I'll talk to the king about it. Then Jones calls in Morrel a few weeks later and says, well, I've been to Brussels, I saw the king. The king said, yes, he's very disturbed about what you've discovered.

• 9:51Tom Holland?

  He'll set up a commission.

• 9:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, reforms will be carried out. And Sir Alfred says to Morrel, you know, don't worry, the Belgians are doing great things and we have to give them time to get their African house in order. In the next few months, Morrel finds that he's been frozen out. He's not going to Antwerp as much as he was. Then he's offered a promotion. Great news, you've done so well and you're going to be posted overseas. And then he says, no, I don't want to go overseas, I want to stay in Britain. And then he is offered another promotion to become a consultant, pushed up the ladder of the company. And it's very clear to him that the company are now trying to shut him up.

• 10:29Tom Holland?

  Or to offer him a bribe.

• 10:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Effective or both? I mean, that's both, that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to get him out, either get him out of the picture or push him upstairs, push him into a back office. Well paid, stay quiet. So in 1901, at the age of 28, he resigns from Elder Dempster and he resigns to become a full-time writer, but not just any writer. As he wrote himself, his goal was, and I quote, "to do my best to expose and destroy what I then knew to be a legalized infamy, accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for a vast destruction of human life." In other words, he has quit the company to become a full-time campaigner, to become an activist, effectively. Now, the real puzzle is, why?

• 11:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  What is it in him that makes him want to do this?

• 11:18Tom Holland?

  See, I don't think it's a puzzle at all.

• 11:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know what you're going to say.

• 11:21Tom Holland?

  Well, and I think Hoxchild actually agrees because he wrote a kind of second edition about this.

• 11:29Tom Holland?

  So I think it's the influence of his mother.

• 11:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Tom Holland?

  Who's a Quaker.

• 11:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Tom Holland?

  And throughout this podcast, we've talked about the role played by Quakers in human rights campaigns. Abolition of slavery being the obvious example. And although it is true, as Hoxton says, that

• 11:48Tom Holland?

  Morel is not conventionally religious. He's not, he doesn't attend Quaker meetings or Church of England services or anything like that. Nevertheless, it's clear that he has absorbed values, I would say, from his parents, probably particularly from his mother, you know, and that this is manifesting itself through his moral assumptions and his campaigning zeal.

• 12:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's the only, that is one possible explanation. The only downside with that is there's absolutely no evidence for it because we do know that he's in no way personally religious and there's no evidence that his mother did have this influence on him. So it's a supposition and it's not an unreasonable one, but it's only a supposition.

• 12:28Tom Holland?

  He has values.

• 12:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, he does.

• 12:30Tom Holland?

  Where do these values come from? I mean, they don't just magically materialize.

• 12:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Maybe they come from his boarding school, Tom. You're underplaying the importance of a school, which is sad.

• 12:37Tom Holland?

  Well, maybe. I mean, you have a sense of campaigning zeal of a particular commitment to notions of human rights, a long historical tradition. His mother belongs to that tradition. He manifests that tradition. I would say it's the likeliest explanation.

• 12:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, the truth of the matter, of course, is we don't know. What we do know is he does feel personally responsible because he has worked for the company. And I think that's a huge part of this story. And it is also with his great ally, who we'll come to later. This is the story of two men who both felt implicated because they had both been perhaps naive in some way.

• 13:12Tom Holland?

  Well, but think of Benjamin Lay going to the Caribbean and feeling personally implicated in slavery there. I think, I think the parallels are very, very clear.

• 13:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a very common story, actually. Some of the keenest abolitionists tend to be people who've been involved with the trade in some way. Anyway. At first, he struggles. And this is something actually that Adam Hochschild's book doesn't really capture, that actually at first, he succeeds only because he gets funding from a rival Liverpool shipping tycoon. And this is a guy called John Holt, who's a rival of Sir Alfred Jones and gives him the money to found his own paper, The West African Mail. So there's a really good article on this by a scholar called Dean Clay. And he points out that basically, this is a question not just of altruism, but of business rivalry. This rival tycoon wants to bring down elder demstor, or at least do them down a bit.

• 14:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he gives Morell the money to do his campaign. And Morell starts to pour out not just dozens of articles, thousands of words, but millions of words. So an enormous quantity of what we have been saying in this podcast about the Congo, comes from Edmund D. Morell, because he is the single biggest source. He's publishing books, he's publishing articles, editorials. When you look behind so many of the anecdotes and the quotations, and indeed, the statistics, they come from this one man. And he never goes to the Congo, that's the thing, rather like King Leopold. But the extraordinary thing is, he is absolutely brilliant at persuading

• 14:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  insiders, even people within the mercenary force, the force public, to leak material to him. Which goes back to your question, Tom, last week, about, are there people who feel guilty? Are there people who feel, who have regrets or have doubts? There clearly are, because from 1901, they are feeding this guy information, the facts and figures and anecdotes and all of these kinds of things.

• 15:10Tom Holland?

  And I suppose the situation for them was that if they're feeling a sense of guilt about what they've been doing, they don't have a vent for it. But Morell's appearance on the scene provides them with just that vent.

• 15:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. He gets so much information, he starts to taunt the administration of the Congo. He'll print lists of things that their own employees have offered to sell him. He'll say, basically, here the bullet pointed list of the things that I'm being offered. At one point, they issue an instruction to their subordinates. They say, stop writing things down, because Morell is reprinting them in his newspaper. He gets hold of that order, and he prints that in his newspaper as well. So he's mocking them the whole time. But his single most powerful source, actually, this will please you, Tom?

• 15:54Tom Holland?

  This doesn't please me, but it doesn't support. Let's put it like that.

• 15:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's not from within the administration, but it's missionaries. So many of the most shocking stories that we mentioned last week about floggings, about beatings, about these horrendous atrocities, these are from Protestant missionaries, often British, American or Scandinavian.

• 16:15Tom Holland?

  So we said in the previous episode about the hand chopping, the most notorious manifestation of barbarism in the Congo, that these were usually from corpses, from dead people. But there is one horrible account by an American missionary where he describes seeing soldiers cut off someone's hand and quote, "while the poor heart beat strongly enough to shoot the blood from the cut arteries at a distance of fully four feet." I mean, once you read details like that, they kind of sear it on the mind, aren't they?

• 16:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  They are sear it on the mind, and that's partly why his campaign is so effective. So by about 1903, within two years of leaving his job, Morel has managed to, by writing and writing and writing, and he's got all these great journalistic contacts, he places pieces everywhere, he's managed to make this a political issue in Britain. And in May 1903, the House of Commons actually holds a debate on the Congo Free State. There is a motion to call upon the signatories to the Conference of Berlin to take measures to ensure that the Congolese people are going to be treated with greater humanity. And the motion is introduced by the Liberal MP Herbert Samuel. And he, in his speech, so I had a look at Hansard for the text of the debate.

• 17:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  He deplores what he calls "the seething turmoil and barbarous acts of repression under King Leopold." You know, he doesn't hold back. But the brilliant thing for us, Tom, is that he presents this as a great patriotic British endeavour to clean this up. "It's always been the boast of this country," says Herbert Samuel. "Not only that our own native subjects are governed on principles of justice, but that ever since the days of Wilberforce, England has been the leader in all movements on behalf of the backward races of the earth. Here is an occasion when those responsible for our policy might pursue these great traditions and add to the annals of the good deeds of this country."

• 18:10Tom Holland?

  I mean, there is, of course.

• 18:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  A lot going on there.

• 18:13Tom Holland?

  There's a lot going on there, but just to point out that, of course. Britain's preponderance in the anti-slavery campaign, and now, as is being proposed in the campaign against the depredations in the Congo, is dependent on her global power.

• 18:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, of course.

• 18:31Tom Holland?

  Dependent on the navy and dependent by implication on the possession of her empire. And so essentially, what is being offered is a kind of form of liberal imperialism, isn't it?

• 18:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely, it is.

• 18:41Tom Holland?

  That the British Empire exists as a force for good. And, I mean, this is, this is something that has been manifest in the campaign against slavery right from the time of Napoleon. So the Congress of Vienna, it is mass demonstrations in Britain that forces Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, to go to the Congress of Vienna and say, guys, I'm really sorry. You know, we've got to write in all this anti-slavery stuff.

• 19:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Tom Holland?

  And kind of the same thing is happening now because the motion is carried in the Commons. And it is proposed that all the countries that had been participants in the Berlin Conference should get together.

• 19:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Tom Holland?

  And press for a Congo state that is governed with humanity.

• 19:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. So supreme irony is that it's Britain's imperial position that allows it to take this view, which of course, some listeners may say is though is rank hypocrisy, but others may say is an example of the kind of ambiguity of empire, right?

• 19:39Tom Holland?

  Well, we will be talking about this, won't we, in our bonus episode?

• 19:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Now, the Foreign Office, when it hears about this debate, says, okay, you know, let's not rush into anything. Let's actually try to get some hard evidence ourselves rather than relying on us activists. We have a man on the ground in the Congo and we'll ask him to find out exactly what's going on. And now we come to the other great hero of this story. And this is a man called Roger Casement. And next week, Tom, I know you're going to be talking to the Irish novelist, the great, not prize-winning novelist, John Banville, about Roger Casement's story. He's an extraordinarily interesting figure. There's a richly fascinating life.

• 20:21Tom Holland?

  So John Banville will be talking about him because in John Banville's opinion, Roger Casement is the greatest of Irishmen.

• 20:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. High praise.

• 20:29Tom Holland?

  Because we should mention, he's the British consul, but he is Irish.

• 20:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. So just very quickly on Casement, because we'll be doing him next week. Casement, born to a Protestant family in Dublin. He went to the Congo when he was 19 years old. He is implicated. He had worked for Henry Morton Stanley as a surveyor. He'd worked on the route for Leopold's Railway. Casement is a very handsome, striking man, an enormous black beard, great sense of natural dignity, very polite. He's a great talker. Everybody comments about his voice, says what a beautiful voice he has. No sense of humour whatsoever, I think it is fair to say, which is always a good thing in an activist, by the way. You don't want them to be sort of ironic. You want them to be earnest. And everybody always remarks how kind and gentle he is.

• 21:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Even when he first arrived in the Congo, people said, he's very nice to the Africans. People said he was too nice. He gives away too much. Joseph Conrad had met him in his journey in 1890.

• 21:27Tom Holland?

  Well, they'd gone together on the Rois de Belge, the steamship.

• 21:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  They had hung out together. Conrad had written in his journal that Casement was most intelligent and very sympathetic. And Casement undoubtedly had heard stories about the darkness. Because we know that in 1887, he'd been on the steamboat with a Belgian officer who said, ah, life in the Congo is brilliant. I pay my men five brass rods for every severed head they bring me.

• 21:53Tom Holland?

  Well, I think the assumption is, isn't it, on the darkening sense Conrad has of imperialism derives a lot from Casement.

• 22:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Casement had joined the British Colonial Service, he'd worked elsewhere in Africa. And then in 1901, the Foreign Office sent him back to the Congo as Britain's consul. And before going to the Congo, he went to see King Leopold in Brussels. King Leopold said, oh, brilliant. I hope you have a great time in the Congo. If you've got any issues, come to me first. You know, if you saw anything wrong.

• 22:20Tom Holland?

  I'm the father of the Congolese.

• 22:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Casement goes to the Congo and quite clearly he's very disturbed by what he sees. He says it's beastly. He, he starts asking the Foreign Office if he can go on a fact finding trip to the interior and for various reasons it doesn't happen. But then after this Commons debate, they say, okay, you can go, please go and find out what on earth is going on. So Casement goes off on this mission. He is not, I think it's fair to say, a happy or a well man. He's got malaria, he's got dysentery. He's also plagued, I'm sure you'll talk about this with John Bamford on, he's plagued by doubt and guilt because Casement is gay and his sexuality is a kind of a torment to him in many ways.

• 23:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, he's got, has all these sort of agonies of fear and doubt and whatnot. Anyway, he goes up river by steamboat. He spends three months in the interior. Have you seen this? So for company, he has a bulldog called John and he has a servant called Hairy Bob. And Hairy Bob can cook only three dishes, chicken, custard and boiled sugar.

• 23:26Tom Holland?

  Chicken and custard is delicious.

• 23:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I mean, if you've got dysentery, is this the ideal diet? That's my question. No wonder he's, Casement's so miserable. So he goes into the interior and what he finds is even worse than he feared. And we know this from his daily diary. The country a desert, no natives left. I walked into villages and saw the nearest one. Population dreadfully decreased, only 93 people left out of many hundreds. And then a really sort of moving entry in his way. August 30th, 16 men, women and children tied up from a village and boy, close to the town, infamous. The men were put in the prison, the children let go at my intervention. Infamous, infamous shameful system. Now, all the time he is sending dispatches back to London and he says, oh, this is dreadful.

• 24:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Leopold has on a quote, put the natives on a path to their final extinction and the universal condemnation of civilized mankind. And you can well imagine the Foreign Office getting these, thinking, oh, come on, oh, no, because they don't want to cause a huge fuss.

• 24:25Tom Holland?

  But also lurking in that sense of the shameful system, the infamous shameful system. I mean, is, is the system that he's talking about specifically the Belgian Congo?

• 24:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 24:36Tom Holland?

  Or is it the broader apparatus of imperialism per se?

• 24:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 24:40Tom Holland?

  And Casement is on a kind of journey, isn't he? That will lead him to condemn not just. Leopold's empire in the Congo, but imperialism full stop.

• 24:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. Because that, of course, is the worry for the Foreign Office and for the British government generally, is that, you know, sure, look into the Congo Free State, but stop there. You know, you shouldn't be looking into other colonies, because of course our colonies are perfect. Anyway, he gets back to London eventually, goes back to England in 1903. He writes his report. He actually finished the report coming home from a country house weekend with his old pal Joseph Conrad. Now, his report is written in this kind of legalese.

• 25:18Tom Holland?

  Hogstail describes it, I thought, in fascinating terms, the language that amnesty and similar groups would later make their own formal and sober, assessing the reliability of various witnesses, filled with references to laws and statistics and accompanied by appendices and depositions. And that's the key, isn't it, that it's not written in a tone of moral outrage. It's sober, cool, designed to appeal to bureaucrats and functionaries.

• 25:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you mentioned the depositions. So at the end, he has kind of witness statements that go into all the horrors. And the Foreign Office are really shocked by the witness statements. The British Ambassador to Belgium says, I can't believe that the Belgians would have done this. They're cultivated people, even under a tropical sky. Surely the Belgians couldn't have lowered themselves to this. Anyway, this report is finally published. Britain sends copies at the beginning of 1904 to every signatory to the Conference of Berlin. Even Leopold can't ignore this. I mean, this is a big story. And he says, well, I'll set up my own commission to investigate it. That's his usual ploy. And in the second half, we'll see how that turns out for him. But casement is not yet finished. He now

• 26:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  really has the zeal of a convert. He gets in touch with Morrel. They have dinner in London, and they talk until two o'clock in the morning. And Morrel gave a wonderful, a wonderful, vivid account of their first meeting, which I will read. He said, from the moment our hands gripped and our eyes met, mutual trust and confidence were bred, and the feeling of isolation slipped from me like a mantle. Here was a man indeed, one who would convince those in high places of the foulness of the crime committed on a helpless race. Morel said in his memoir, you know, I often see him, Casement now in imagination, as I saw him at that memorable interview, crouching over the fire in the otherwise unlighted room, unfolding in a musical, soft, almost even voice, in language of peculiar

• 27:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  dignity and pathos, the story of a vile conspiracy. And as Casement talks in this beautiful voice of his, Morel said, I believe that I saw those hunted women clutching their children, flying, panic-stricken to the bush, the blood flowing, the ghastly tally of severed heads, and all this kind of thing. You know, Casement's, Casement's skill as a storyteller is so important.

• 27:38Tom Holland?

  This voice that everyone talks about.

• 27:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Now, Casement says to him that night, and afterwards, look, I think we should set up a big new organisation devoted to the Congo. And Casement says to him, you know, the Congo is, is different from other campaigns. The Congo is a unique evil. And if we can rouse the British people, the world might be roused. Britain had played that part before, meaning in the campaign against slavery. Could we raise a throbbing in that great heart of hers?

• 28:09Tom Holland?

  Right.

• 28:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is a tremendous story. It's about kindness, but it's also about how brilliant Britain is.

• 28:14Tom Holland?

  But, but this is, I mean, will become the key point of divergence between Morel and Casement.

• 28:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 28:20Tom Holland?

  Because for Morel, Congo is sui generis. It's, it's so, it's hideous, it has nothing to do with the broader imperial context. And Casement will come to a very different conclusion.

• 28:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And listeners, we'll discuss this in the bonus episode. Is the Congo unique? Or is the Congo symptomatic of the crimes of imperialism? And this is an issue for historians to this day.

• 28:42Tom Holland?

  And indeed for moralists and theologians.

• 28:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 28:45Tom Holland?

  Ongoing debate at the moment.

• 28:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very, very, a very bitter debate, I think is fair to say. So anyway, Morel says, look, I mean, the new organisation, I don't really have the money to set this up. Casement says, here's a cheque for a hundred pounds.

• 28:57Tom Holland?

  Which he can't afford.

• 28:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's more than a month's salary for Casement, a lot of money. Morel uses this to buy a typewriter. And the Congo Reform Association is born, one of the great human rights campaigning organisations. Now, after this, Casement slightly drops out of the story. The Foreign Office give him a promotion. They promote him to consul in Lisbon. So off he goes to Portugal.

• 29:20Tom Holland?

  Which he doesn't like because he finds it too civilized.

• 29:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, too, it's boring. He and Morel are still great pals. They had a code, they had nicknames for each other. So Casement was Tiger, Morel was Bulldog, and Leopold was the King of Beasts.

• 29:32Tom Holland?

  You see, I find that odd because I would have thought that Casement would be Bulldog because he's got John, his bulldog.

• 29:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Morel is more...

• 29:40Tom Holland?

  He looks like a bulldog.

• 29:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he looks like a bulldog. And maybe there's a sort of patriotic thing there. You know, he's kind of British bulldog with his barrel chest.

• 29:46Tom Holland?

  Maybe, but I think of John.

• 29:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, I don't think Casement is a tiger. If you're going to be an animal, Casement's not a tiger.

• 29:52Tom Holland?

  No.

• 29:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think he's a puma.

• 29:54Tom Holland?

  A puma?

• 29:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because he goes to South America and he's a kind of man of the shadows.

• 29:59Tom Holland?

  Yes, I suppose. Yes, I can see that.

• 30:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, that's...

• 30:03Tom Holland?

  But it's good to have a dog in the story.

• 30:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  I love a dog on The Rest Is History. We're very keen on dogs. So Morel throws himself into this new association. He has his first meeting in Liverpool, of course, the great shipping port, in 1904. And it gets 1,000 people. Now, this is, it's slightly different from other human rights campaigns. And this is perhaps why it's more effective. It's a very establishment campaign. He has all kinds of endorsements from Earls and Viscounts, especially bishops. He loves a bishop and he loves an MP.

• 30:33Tom Holland?

  Bishops, bishops very big in the anti apartheid campaign.

• 30:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Indeed. He loves an MP. And he never, Morel never criticizes the British Empire or colonialism per se. He loves Britain, he loves Britain's empire.

• 30:47Tom Holland?

  So that's not just a tactical move.

• 30:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  He genuinely thinks Britain is top nation and also top nation for kindness. And that that's why Britain is peculiarly well equipped to lead this campaign. I think he genuinely thinks this. And he is, for somebody who basically was a shipping clerk, he turns out to be absolutely brilliant at running this campaign. He works incredibly hard. He writes 600 letters a month, which is 20 letters a day on average. He's a brilliant speaker. He will talk without notes to audiences of thousands, you know, week after week after week. He's great at tailoring his message to different audiences. So to businessmen, he will talk about Leopold as monopoly betrays free trade. To bishops, he says, it's our Christian duty.

• 31:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  To audiences of the sort of common people, he says, it's Britain's responsibility as top nation to lead the world. He always makes sure he has MPs from different parties, sitting on the platform, as well as all the local bigwigs. He's great at wooing rich supporters, so the Cadbury's chocolate family, we did a podcast about them last year, they're Quakers, they see themselves as great philanthropists, he gets loads of donations from them. He likes a celebrity, so Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes creator, he gets Conan Doyle to rallies, he gets him to write his own book on the Congo, The Crime of the Congo.

• 32:08Tom Holland?

  I mean, the thing about that is, Conan Doyle is very keen, say, on the war against the birds in South Africa that the British are fighting. So he sees no contradiction between supporting British imperialism in South Africa and excoriating Belgian imperialism in the Congo.

• 32:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  What a perfect recruit, probably the most famous writer of the day, very patriotic. You know, you can't write him off as a do-gooding, bleeding-hearted, you know, he loves a campaigning cause, Conan Doyle, but there's no doubt that he also loves Britain. So the perfect, perfect person to have. And Morrel also knows the value of the modern image. So it's Morrel who really pioneers the use of slideshows with all these pictures of people with their hands cut off. And this is, in a way, the highlight of his rallies. It's the bit that everyone's been waiting for and that everyone will remember. He shows them the pictures and that's the thing that really, really has an effect. A J P Taylor, the great historian,

• 33:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  himself from a dissenting background, said that Morrel was, in his view, the single best, most effective activist, most effective leader of a campaign in British history. And I don't think he's wrong, actually.

• 33:23Tom Holland?

  I mean, the thing is that he is kind of going with the grain of British public opinion. A part of their patriotism is a sense that, you know, this is the country that abolished the slave trade, they're on the side of the angels, all of that. But in government, there is still a kind of a slight cynicism, a slightly more Machiavellian approach to things. So there's a Belgian newspaper editor, who is quoted by Hoxell, who once shrewdly remarked that Lord Salisbury, who was, you know, Prime Minister throughout much of this period, is, and I quote, "is not a man to care much about the fate of the blacks, any more than that of the Armenians or the Bulgarians." And Morel himself, writing about Sir Edward Gray, Foreign Secretary, of course, in the build-up to the-

• 34:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Great hero of yours, Tom.

• 34:07Tom Holland?

  Great hero of mine, great fisherman, great bird watcher. However, Morel does say of Sir Edward Gray that he would act only when kicked, and if the process of kicking is stopped, he will do nothing. And basically, Morel sees it as his job to do that kicking.

• 34:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  But as kickers go, he's probably the best kicker, or one of the best kickers-

• 34:28Tom Holland?

  The Johnny Wilkinson-

• 34:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 34:30Tom Holland?

  Moral kicking.

• 34:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  And not just in Britain. So by the middle of the 1900s, there are branches of his association in France, in Germany, in the countries of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in Australia, in New Zealand. And he has put the issue of the Congo Free State on the front pages of newspapers in almost every country on earth. So the question is, is this enough to trouble Leopold? How will the king fight back?

• 34:57Tom Holland?

  Can I just read what you've put in your notes, the concluding question? So just a quote, this is what you've written, Dominic. "So the tide seems to be turning, but will this be enough to trouble Leopold? How will he fight back? And how does it involve one of the, and now capitals, fattest men in history?"

• 35:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  The fattest men in history. Come back after the break to meet this extraordinary man.

• 35:21Tom 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.

• 35:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Up front 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.

• 36:03Tom Holland?

  These meddlesome American missionaries, these frank British consuls, these blabbing Belgian-born Twitter officials, those tiresome parrots are always talking. They have told how for twenty years I have ruled the Congo State, seizing and holding the state as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private swag. Mine, solely mine, claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves, the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land, mine, mine

• 36:45Tom Holland?

  solely, and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children, under compulsion of lacha and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation and the altar. These pests, they have kept nothing back. They have revealed these and yet other details which shame should have kept them silent about, since they were exposures of a king, a sacred personage and immune from reproach, by right of his appointment to his great office, by God himself.

• 37:23Tom Holland?

  So that was King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, as ventriloquized by Mark Twain in his satirical monologue King Leopold's Soliloquy, which he published in 1905. Mark Twain, of course, one of the greatest American writers, and we've already had a lot of great writers in this series, but it's good to get Twain in, isn't it?

• 37:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Definitely. So we'll come to Twain a little bit, because Twain joins the campaign against the Congo Free State. But first of all, well, how's Leopold? How's he reacted to all this? I mean, I think it's fair to say he probably does think what the words that Twain has put into his mouth. Leopold is now, he turns sixty in 1895. He's a very rich man, but he's very unpopular in Belgium.

• 38:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  He has all these villas on the French Riviera, he's got a massive yacht, he spends a lot of his time in the south of France. A lot of Belgians say to themselves, well, he's got this massive colony, all this money, but we're not seeing any benefits from it.

• 38:21Tom Holland?

  Dominic, what about his love life?

• 38:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, he's disgraced himself, Tom, I think. He's let Belgium down. So he has got this new mistress who is exceedingly controversial. She's a young French prostitute called Caroline de Lacroix, or Lacroix, the different versions of her name. They probably met when he was 65 and she was 16. They probably met at a brothel or hotel in Paris.

• 38:45Tom Holland?

  And Dominic, am I right that she was probably pimped by a guy who'd been her lover?

• 38:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's right.

• 38:53Tom Holland?

  Who's a former soldier called Antoine Emmanuel Duryer. And as we will see, he remains very much on the scene. He's always lurking in the background, adding to the general quality of moral property.

• 39:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, Leopold's wife, who of course he hated, died in 1902, and he now becomes completely obsessed with Caroline. He installed her near his castle at Lacan outside Brussels. He spent millions of francs on jewels and clothes for her. He gave her a retinue of servants. I mean, disgracefully, Tom, he took her with him to Queen Victoria's funeral, which was an enormous scandal. She bore him two children in 1909 and 1910. And actually, far more than the issue of the Congo Free State, this is what destroys his reputation in Belgium. But the two issues become slightly conflated in the world's press. So when her second son was born, there was some issue with his hand. I'm not exactly sure what

• 39:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  it was, but whether he had a withered arm or what it was. But anyway, there's an issue with his hand. And Punch Magazine in England, then very, very popular, published a cartoon showing Leopold holding this baby with a kind of injured hand. And he's surrounded by African corpses with severed hands. And the caption says, vengeance from on high. In other words, God has punished you for what you've done to these people. Pretty punchy.

• 40:14Tom Holland?

  Yeah, well, literally.

• 40:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Literally, yeah, exactly. Now Leopold is very upset by all this, of course, and he does something very modern. He employs a PR campaign of his own. They place articles in the newspapers about abuses in British colonies, i.e. he's saying, "You are the most dreadful hypocrites." You know, "You think I'm bad? Look at what you're doing in Nigeria, or Sierra Leone, or Africa."

• 40:38Tom Holland?

  He's got a point.

• 40:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, we'll discuss whether he's got a point in the bonus episode, but it's fair to say, I think it's absolutely fair to say, all European empires have skeletons rattling around in their closets. He's not wrong about that, that's for sure. He gets his tame shipping companies to sponsor books and articles. He sets up lobby groups with, I mean, all with these sort of comical names. The Committee for the Protection of Interests in Africa.

• 41:02Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Federation for the Defence of Belgian Interests Abroad. You know, all of these groups that, again, sound very contemporary, don't they? I mean, the kind of thing you see all the time.

• 41:11Tom Holland?

  Well, it's what South Africa did during the apartheid campaign.

• 41:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course.

• 41:15Tom Holland?

  And I suppose it's also, to a degree, kind of what big tobacco or big oil tend to do.

• 41:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course it is, of course it is. They subsidise magazines, which he does. He has a magazine called New Africa, The Truth About the Congo Free State. You know, that, that, these, this is classic. You know, it's so common now, but at the time it is groundbreaking. And he spends a lot of money on journalists. And then we know about this because we have the paper trail of his attempts to bribe the German press. Entertainingly, his chief agent in Germany, who was a guy called Ludwig van Steube, claimed that the Belgians were very slow about handing over, about reimbursing him for his costs. And he wrote to Brussels and said, "Where's my reimbursement?" And he said, "Now, you keep asking me for receipts. Obviously, I don't have any receipts."

• 42:02Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's all underhand.

• 42:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because I'm giving people cash brown envelopes or whatever. By the way, one issue for Leopold is that our old friend, the Kaiser in Germany, the Kaiser absolutely despises Leopold. He called him Satan and Mammon in one person.

• 42:19Tom Holland?

  Is this the same Kaiser who is leading the country that is simultaneously practising genocide in Namibia?

• 42:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's the man. Yeah, right.

• 42:28Tom Holland?

  Okay.

• 42:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think there's a fair bit of double standards in this.

• 42:32Tom Holland?

  Pot, kettle.

• 42:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Now, the battle moves in about 1904 to America. America, of course, was the first country to recognise the Congo Free State.

• 42:41Tom Holland?

  It's a bit of an embarrassment, do you think?

• 42:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, I think so. And Edmund D. Morell says... You know, the United States has a special responsibility to, to, to address this because they are the country that basically opened the door to Leopold getting this territory.

• 42:57Tom Holland?

  And but also, is it the, the sense, as in the abolitionist movement, that there is a kind of congruity, a moral congruity between British and American takes on this?

• 43:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely. So missionaries will often do tours, speaking tours, British missionaries in America, American missionaries in Britain. There is an app, there is a sense of, dare I say, a special relationship, a sort of moral relationship on this front. So in 1904, Morel goes to America. He meets Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. He recruits Mark Twain. Twain is then in his 60s. He's probably the most famous author in America. He, he's all in on the campaign. He goes-

• 43:35Tom Holland?

  And he's a man who knows the world. I mean, he's been around the world. He's seen, he can absolutely-

• 43:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely.

• 43:39Tom Holland?

  Understand how this could happen.

• 43:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he's a great activist. He's a great campaigner, Twain. He goes to Washington three times to lobby the president, to lobby Congress, and it becomes this huge crusade. Petitions signed by thousands of people, by governors, by senators, university presidents and so on. Now Leopold again doesn't take this lying down. He fights back. He mounts a lobbying campaign in America. He offers Congo concessions to the Guggenheim family, to John D Rockefeller. He gives artifacts to the American Museum of Natural History because he knows that JP Morgan is on the board. And he pays American academics to defend him. So to give you just one example, a guy called Frederick Starr from the University of Chicago,

• 44:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  he's paid by Leopold to write a series of articles for the Chicago Tribune called The Truth About the Congo Free State. But then Leopold makes a terrible mistake. And Tom Weh promised a very large man, and now he, he rumbles, he looms into view.

• 44:40Tom Holland?

  Large is he? Just so we get that he's established.

• 44:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's about 21 stone. I don't know whether that is in American measurements.

• 44:47Tom Holland?

  So you've you've so heavy. One journalist said he made President Taft look like a top worker in a team of acrobats.

• 44:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 44:53Tom Holland?

  President Taft is famously large.

• 44:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's the fattest president in American history, and this bloke makes Taft look like a kind of gymnast.

• 44:59Tom Holland?

  Like a sylph.

• 44:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So this guy is called Colonel. I mean, you couldn't make it up. He's called Colonel Henry I Kowalski. And Leopold takes him on as his chief lobbyist and pays him the equivalent of about a million dollars a year today, 100,000 francs. Now, Kowalski has a series of problems. One, he's a total fraud. And two, he's a narcoleptic. So and this may be related, I think, Tom, to his fatness. So he will fall asleep unexpectedly. He's a lawyer. He'll fall asleep in court. He falls asleep when he's waiting to meet people in hotel lobbies. And he also, I read, falls asleep in the street. So he'll be like walking down the street or something. Or and well, I don't know what does he is he still standing up? Is he fall over?

• 45:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, he's a large man.

• 45:45Tom Holland?

  Don't sheep go to sleep standing up?

• 45:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Standing up, exactly. So you'd you'd hope that he wouldn't fall. There's sort of tremors.

• 45:50Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 45:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Echoing across New York. Anyway, the Belgian ambassador, when he hears that Leopold has employed this guy, says, what? This man is a notorious fraud. Like, don't. What are we doing? So basically, after the first year, the Belgians don't renew this guy Kowalski's contract. You know, actually, no, we've changed our minds. Kowalski, when he's not asleep, is outraged by this. And do you know what he does? He goes straight to the newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst, and he says, I've been working as a paid lobbyist. Right. Of the Second of Belgium. Would you like the story? And to Leopold's horror, in December 1906, the New York American, one of Hearst's papers.

• 46:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Banner headline on its front page, King Leopold's amazing attempt to influence our congress exposed. And Kowalski has told them everything, including the fact that he's been paying a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to basically derail congressional resolutions on the Congo. And for every day for a week, Hurst's papers lead with the Congo. Pictures of the severed hands, shocking missionary accounts, the works. It's a massive story. And basically, by the time it's all over, Leopold has comprehensively lost American public opinion.

• 47:12Tom Holland?

  Because I remember when that campaign is launched that leads to the United States being the first country to recognise Leopold's jurisdiction over the Congo, there was somebody said, oh, he's the kind of person who gives kings a good name.

• 47:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Tom Holland?

  But presumably, the fact that he is a king actually just makes him seem even worse in American eyes.

• 47:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, an evil corrupt European king. I mean, he's the perfect villain, isn't he? With his sort of 12-year-old mistress or whatever she is. I mean, it's a terrible, he is a, he is a very bad standard bearer for European colonialism, I think it's fair to say. So Leopold has probably only one card left now. Remember that he had set up one of his little fake commissions to investigate the casement report. So this has three judges on it. There's one Italian, there's one Belgian, and there's one Swiss. And Leopold is pretty confident that they will fall into line because the Italian bloke already works in the Congo as his chief appeal court judge. So he thinks, well, what could possibly go wrong? And unbelievably,

• 48:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  to his complete horror, the judges, they take it far too seriously. They say, well, we'll obviously go to the Congo and we'll investigate the abuses. It's like, you know, oh, no. They go up the river by steamboat, Joseph Conrad style. They talk to 400 witnesses. They talk to Africans who've been flogged with a chicotte. They talk to people who've been held hostage, all of this kind of thing. Leopold meanwhile is lurking back in Brussels, waiting for their report. And he starts to hear rumours that one of the judges, we don't know which one, has started crying during the interviews, has been so moved by the stories. That's a very bad sign for Leopold. Then a terrible sign. The judges come back and they go to brief the governor general.

• 49:03Tom Holland?

  So that's in Leopoldville?

• 49:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  I guess it's in Leopoldville at this point, or Boma, the original capital, I'm not sure which. This is a guy called Mr. Kostamans. They go to brief him about their findings. Kostamans, when they leave Kostamans's office, Kostamans is so shocked that he doesn't speak to anybody for days. And then two weeks later, he cuts his throat with a razor and kills himself.

• 49:26Tom Holland?

  I mean, it's interesting that it seems genuinely to have shocked him.

• 49:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, of course, if he's the governor general, he probably hasn't even gone upriver into the interior and seen what's going on.

• 49:37Tom Holland?

  But the impression I've had is that everybody there knows what's going on.

• 49:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think there are people who probably work in the, who are, as it were, civil servants, who perhaps have just closed their eyes. Do you think? I don't know. He perhaps, in part of it, I think it's very common in history, you have people who in part of their mind, they kind of know what's going on, but they've, you know, they've closed that door.

• 50:01Tom Holland?

  Maybe it's guilt.

• 50:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Maybe it's guilt, yeah.

• 50:03Tom Holland?

  As well as shock. I don't know.

• 50:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the report came out in November 1905. And again, it's a very lawyerly kind of report, not sensational at all. The individual statements were not released, the witness statements. They actually weren't open to researchers until the 1980s.

• 50:19Tom Holland?

  But they do preserve the voices of the Conkalese. So throughout this story, we've been saying, we haven't got them, but now we do have them.

• 50:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Do you want to read a couple of extracts, Tom, to give people a sense of it?

• 50:29Tom Holland?

  So you, yeah, so you've not included them as shocking. But here's a flavour. So he's talking about an official. He told his sentries to tie us to two trees with our feet off the ground. Our arms were stretched over our heads. We were hanging in this way several days and nights. Whilst we hung there, three sentries and the white man beat us in the private parts on the neck and other parts of the body with big hard sticks till we fainted. When I was very small, the soldiers came to make war in my village because of the rubber. A soldier used a knife to cut off my right hand and took it away. So again, there is testimony to living people having their hands cut off. It's not just corpses. I saw that he was carrying other cut off hands. The same day, my father and mother were killed,

• 51:12Tom Holland?

  and I know that they had their hands cut off. So, I mean, living, dead, it's all about the hands. And then a final one. I knew Jongi well. The white man held his head. While Nakoi, standing at his feet, hit him with a cane. Finally Nakoi kicked Jongi several times and told him to get up. When he didn't move, Akate said to the white man, "This man is dead. You've killed him." The white man replied, "I don't give a damn. The judges are white men like me." So no wonder they kept him hidden in Belgium.

• 51:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that report really was Leopold's last chance to recapture the narrative and obviously he completely failed. By this point, he's become an even more grotesque figure than ever. He's in his early seventies. He's a massive hypochondriac. He's riding round Belgium on a gigantic tricycle, drinking decanters of hot water, which he thinks are good for his health. Everyone in Belgium hates him. And once this Kowalski business comes out in America and then the reports, obviously by his own tame judges, he realises the game is up. And effectively, at this point, he realises, "I'm going to have to get rid of the Congo, and I want my money back." And so he decides he's going to sell it to the Belgian state, the one thing, of course, at the beginning, he didn't want to do.

• 52:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, unfortunately, for those of us who would like to see justice done, Leopold is in a very strong position here. This has been horrendous publicity for Belgium.

• 52:34Tom Holland?

  Dominic, I mean, important justice say that there are a lot of Belgians who have also been participating in this campaign. A lot of journals, a lot of magazines, a lot of newspapers. So it's not like... There are Belgians who are not appalled by what's been going on, just like everyone else.

• 52:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, especially in the Belgian politicians, who are absolutely mortified by this and horrified that the name of their country has been associated with this. Absolutely. I mean, this isn't, because this has been King Leopold's project. There have been Belgians involved, be absolutely right, there have been Belgians who have blown the whistle and there have been Belgians who have been really, really shocked and campaigned against it. But for the Belgian government, I mean, could you get worse publicity for a small country? Obviously, you couldn't. And the British and the Americans are putting them under intense pressure. You cannot let Leopold sell this to France or Germany. We don't want the French or the Germans to get hold of the Congo and all of its rubber and all

• 53:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  of this. So the Belgians decide, under this Anglo-American pressure, they're going to have to buy it off him themselves. And they do. Because of his dodgy accounts, the negotiations take ages, more than a year. But in March 1908, they finally agree they will pay him 50 million francs, which is the equivalent of billions of pounds or dollars today. Thankfully, Leopold doesn't have very long to spend his winnings because he died in December 1909, probably of cancer. Of course, Leopold being Leopold, his death is a massive scandal because it turned out that he'd secretly married his mistress Caroline just before his death and he'd left her most of his fortune, not his daughters.

• 54:13Tom Holland?

  Because we talked about that this was the great ambition of his life, is to disinherit his daughters. And also, just to add, that seven months after Leopold's death, Caroline, who is now enormously rich, marries Dureux.

• 54:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  The pimp.

• 54:29Tom Holland?

  The pimp. And I think Hoxchild says that Dureux may well be the most successful pimp in the history of pimping.

• 54:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  My word.

• 54:37Tom Holland?

  He kind of reaps in the largest

• 54:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Tom Holland?

  financial reward.

• 54:42Tom Holland?

  Because basically, I mean, he's made millions and millions and millions.

• 54:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a massive scandal, a huge legal battle, three-way legal battle between Leopold's daughters, Caroline and the Belgian government for control of his estate.

• 54:55Tom Holland?

  I can't believe Robert Harris hasn't written a novel about this.

• 54:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the thing is, you see, it ends up being forgotten because just five years after his death, plucky little Belgium becomes, you know, the Casus Belti for Britain in the First World War. And it has a new king now, his nephew Albert.

• 55:12Tom Holland?

  Albert. And he becomes the great symbol of Belgian resistance, doesn't he?

• 55:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  So everybody is like, let's, let's forget Leopold ever existed.

• 55:18Tom Holland?

  So, so the kind of the Belgian royal family get, what, kind of great war washed, I suppose?

• 55:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  They do get, yes, they do get great war washed, exactly. So let's just say very quickly about what happened to the other characters in this story. Stanley, at the time, actually, came out of this pretty untainted by the Congo scandal. He'd become an MP, a Liberal Unionist MP. He died in 1904, so round about the time the, the furore is reaching its peak, but it never really seemed to sort of engulf him, although of course now, you know, modern historians and biographers, when they write about Stanley, I mean, obviously the Congo plays a very large part in his story.

• 55:54Tom Holland?

  There was a big debate, wasn't there, whether to remove a statue of him from his birthplace in Wales?

• 55:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's right, yeah.

• 55:59Tom Holland?

  I think they kept the statue, I think it's still there.

• 56:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Casement, who we'll be hearing lots more about next week with you and John Banville, he ended up becoming the champion of another great humanitarian campaign. So rubber workers in the Peruvian Amazon, he's a great champion of them. He's knighted in 1911, but then he becomes absorbed by another cause, which is Irish freedom.

• 56:23Tom Holland?

  An extraordinary story.

• 56:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he ends up on a U-boat with a load of guns, trying to smuggle weapons in.

• 56:28Tom Holland?

  Kind of three days before the Easter Rising.

• 56:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, spoiler alert, he's hanged for high treason. Most of his Congo allies plead for clemency, Morel, pleads for clemency, Conan Doyle pleads for clemency, but interestingly, Joseph Conrad did not and refused. And Conrad said, Casement had taken honours from Britain, he'd represented Britain.

• 56:49Tom Holland?

  We got a knighthood, hadn't we?

• 56:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  He had then betrayed Britain and, you know, he got what was coming to him. So Conrad's a pretty conservative figure, so that's not necessarily surprising. Morel carried on campaigning about the Congo even after it had been taken over by the Belgians. We'll come to that in just a second. But he was radicalised eventually, a little bit like Casement. So in the First World War, Morel is probably the best-known pacifist in Britain. And he ended up being sent to prison for sending pacifist pamphlets to Switzerland, which was in breach of the Defence of the Realm Act. He ends up joining the Labour Party. He stood for Labour in Dundee in 1922. He beat Winston Churchill at the House of Commons.

• 57:28Tom Holland?

  It's amazing how all these figures kind of intersect.

• 57:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  In their connect. I know there's a great book to be written about, you know, imagine a book with your characters like Conrad, Casement, Morel, Churchill, all of these, Mark Twain. Anyway, he died tragically of a heart attack two years after being elected to Parliament when he was just 51. So that was the end of him. But his legacy, of course, is a tradition of human rights activism that never really goes away. And obviously, we're still very familiar with to this day. But before we close, we should just a word about the Congo. Because the real question, of course, is how does it change? What changes after Leopold is gone? It's definitely true that when the Belgians take it over, there

• 58:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  are fewer reports of atrocities. We don't have the same reports of burned villages, people being taken hostage. It doesn't seem to have been the severing of hands, all of that stuff. However, a lot of the caste in the Congo are the same people, the same officials, the same station chiefs. The forced public continues with the same name. The rubber trade continues, and there is still forced labour. Even after the First World War, the Belgian Congo is notoriously brutal. They're still using the chicots, they're still using forced labour. The focus has moved now to mining, copper, tin and gold. But the conditions in those mines are pretty horrific and thousands of people die.

• 58:55Tom Holland?

  And this Tintin in Congo, Hergé, one of the, I think his second Tintin book. And he goes there and it turns out all to be the fault of Al Capone.

• 59:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and Tintin in the Congo, you can't get it, you have to order it specially. You can't get it now. It's been withdrawn from sort of general sale in children's bookshops. It's seen only as a kind of historical curiosity because the portraits of Belgian colonialism.

• 59:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  And of the people in the Congo is seen as inappropriate for our 21st century children, which I can completely understand, I have to say. Even in the Second World War, when obviously Belgium is one of the Allies, there's still forced labour and the colonial government demands 120 days per person of forced labour from its African population to meet the Allies' demands for rubber for their trucks, for their Jeeps, for their tyres of their aeroplanes and so on. So, you know, there is that dark side to the Allied war effort. Now, some scholars have made a case, tried to make a case for the Belgian Congo and have said, you know, great public health campaigns, trying to eliminate sleeping sickness and yellow fever and things like that.

• 1:00:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there's perhaps a degree of truth in that. But one thing that people always say about their con is, is, you know, look at the results, judge us on the legacy. And the truth of the matter is, if you look at what became of the Belgian Congo after 1960, after independence, I think it would be very, very hard to say that's a record to be proud of, wouldn't you, Tom?

• 1:00:30Tom Holland?

  And the role played by Belgium in upholding it as a territory supplying Western needs is taken up by the United States, doesn't it?

• 1:00:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 1:00:43Tom Holland?

  CIA sponsored assassinations, backing for Mabutu, who's, I mean, the kind of the parody

• 1:00:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Tom Holland?

  of a kleptocrat. And I think we said this right at the beginning, that in a way, Mabutu is the, is the real heir of

• 1:00:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of King Leopold.

• 1:00:59Tom Holland?

  Of Leopold the Second.

• 1:01:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is indeed, he is indeed. So there's obviously still loads to talk about. And actually, in Thursday's episode, we'll be going back to the book that we began with, which is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a great subject for a history podcast because it's one of the most influential works of fiction ever written. Conrad himself is a fantastic character.

• 1:01:20Tom Holland?

  Extraordinary man.

• 1:01:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it, the impact of that book is really, really worth talking about. So but that's what we're doing on Thursday. But for our Rest is History Club members, a day earlier on Wednesday, we'll be discussing the deeper questions from this series. So we'll be asking about the death toll. How many people died in the Congo Free State? And is it fair to call it, as some people do, a genocide? Is it fair to see it as representative of European colonialism generally? So in other words, does this tell us something very dark about European imperialism? And should we perhaps revise the sort of canonical version? And, you know, what are the controversies that surround Adam Hockstall's book? The book on which we've based so much of the series. So that's for Rest is History club members.

• 1:02:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  And if you want to join, you can just head to therestishistory.com and then you'll hear it.

• 1:02:10Tom Holland?

  Thank you very much, Dominic. Brilliant, amazing, amazing sweep of a terrible story. As I say, we'll be back in our next episode with Heart of Darkness. And then next week, there'll be also a bonus on Roger Casement. So lots of Congo. But for now, bye bye.

• 1:02:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bye bye.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  The Great Game, Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

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

• 1:03:01Speaker 05

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play?

• 1:03:12Tom Holland?

  You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order or frago.

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  A frago that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  New from Goldhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 1:03:41Speaker 05

  You're my soldier, are you Sergeant Tom MacDuff, Duffy? An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons. Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two tight friendly key. Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.