CHAPTER 5, THE ROLES OF ARAB-SWAHILI MERCHANTS AND THE CONGO FREE STATE

Section: Cannibal Acts Tolerated or Ignored by the Congo Free State

In 1885, the Belgian King Leopold II had managed to gain control over the Congo as his “private colony” by suggesting that his purposes were entirely disinterested and philanthropic, but nothing could have been further from the truth. While “suppression of the slave trade . . . and an improvement in the well-being of Africans” were among the declared goals of the Free State, in practice these principles were all but ignored.41 Instead, the Free State government soon got busy extracting as much commercial gain from the Congo region and its inhabitants as possible. The British diplomat Roger Casement notes: “The Government, so far as I could judge, is conducted almost exclusively on commercial principles, and, even judged by that standard, it would appear that those principles are somewhat short-sighted,” with short-term wealth extraction being favored over long-term improvement of the country.42

Because anything that did not help to improve the earnings of the administration was neglected, the suppression of slavery and cannibalism ranked low among the priorities of Free State officials. In 1902, slaves were still “almost daily” openly “exposed for sale” in some cities.43 Nor were cannibal acts consistently prosecuted. Edgar Canisius (1865–?) and Guy Burrows (1861–1912) were two Free State officials who later turned whistleblowers, writing a book that documented the ultra-exploitative mode of operations of the government. Burrow writes that, when he was stationed near the Mongala River, a right-bank tributary which joins the Congo about four hundred kilometers upriver (northeast) of the Ubangi, he and his colleagues “were well aware that scores of slaves were being sold to supply meat to the people on the other side of the river. They were smuggled up a small creek called the Dolo, in the neighbourhood of which the consumption of man-meat was said to be enormous.”44

Burrows would have liked to stop the deadly trade, but he failed to convince the government to take action. Most other officials, and likewise the private companies licensed to work in the area, were busy extracting as much rubber as possible, he complains. They cared little what the natives did to each other as long as they continued to supply it. And so, even after more than ten years of colonial rule, “the ancient traffic in slaves for the shambles flourishes unhindered.”45

Around the same time, adds Canisius, the Budja (or Budza) people—a Bangala subgroup like their neighbors, the already mentioned Boloki46—were still “known to be exceedingly fond of human flesh, and the number of slaves annually killed among them for food must be very large.” The government, considering them too warlike to get into conflict with, tended to leave them alone, instead “preferred to wage war upon the weaker and more docile of the tribes,” who could more easily be subdued and exploited for commercial gain.47

Free State officials did not just turn a blind eye towards cannibalism among the population, they also accepted such acts among native fighters recruited into their army or considered as “auxiliaries.” In 1892, conflicts between the Swahilo-Arab merchants and the Free State administration about who should control the eastern parts of the country erupted into open warfare. After two years the fighting ended with the victory of the Free State troops.

A detailed description of the war was published by Sidney Hinde, who had participated as a captain of the Free State Forces.48 Both sides relied largely on native forces who in some cases were accustomed to cannibalism. Hinde describes this frankly, even highlighting the positive aspects he found in the habit, noting that, by “dispos[ing] of all the dead, leaving nothing even for the jackals,” the cannibals “saved us, no doubt, from many an epidemic.”49 After fights, all the killed and wounded left on the battlefield were routinely “cut up to furnish a banquet in the evening to the victorious survivors.” To his “disgust,” Hinde found “that the camp followers and friendlies made no difference in this respect between the killed and wounded on their own side or the enemy’s.” Eating one’s own relatives was forbidden, as he observed in one incident. Another time he witnessed how those who had accidentally eaten the dead wife of an important chief were executed and consumed as punishment. In general, however, enmity was no precondition for cannibal acts.50

Like Hinde, many Free State officials seem to have accepted the cannibal acts of their allies and supporters as something that was unfortunate, but that had to be accepted for the time being. Oscar Michaux, a Belgian official already accustomed to local customs, had to calm down another European after the latter, “straight out from Europe,” had seen “a human leg being cooked.”51 Subsequently, he wrote that he “explain[ed] as well as I could that I knew it was horrible, but still, for the moment, we had to pretend not to see it, so as not to be obliged to interfere.”52

Nyangwe is a town in the Maniema region which had been one of the main centers of the Swahilo-Arabs. The conquest of this town was followed by days of cannibal feasting, in which hundreds of the slain were consumed, as Hinde graphically describes.53 Sometime later, riots broke out among the surviving population, which were quickly and brutally suppressed. Emile Lémery, another young Belgian official stationed in the town, wrote home that “certainly a thousand people were killed in a few hours [in retaliation]. Happily Gongo’s men, cannibals par excellence, ate them up at the same rate. It’s horrible but exceedingly useful and hygienic. . . . I should have been horrified at the idea in Europe! but it seems quite natural to me here.”54

Considering this almost positive attitude, it is not so surprising that in the years that followed the Free State administration seems to have done little to stamp out cannibal customs even among the native soldiers it employed. And the brutally exploitative regime established by the administration gave soldiers with such customs new opportunities to satisfy them. In the early 1890s, a system of forced labor, justified as a head tax, was set up whereby all native inhabitants of the colony had to regularly deliver certain quantities of rubber—one of the most valuable resources that could be found in the region—to the government.55

If the quota was not met, the Free State military was summoned to terrorize the population into submission. The required work was so extensive that it was often nearly impossible to deliver the requested quota, but that only increased the wrath of the government officials. In some cases, whole villages were ravaged by punitive expeditions.56 Edmund Dene Morel (1873–1924) was a British journalist who wrote a series of articles and books that helped to expose the crimes of the Free State government to the European public. In the 1890s, he had acquired firsthand knowledge of the local situation while working as a clerk for a Liverpool shipping firm that did business with the Free State; additionally, he asked missionaries who had been allowed to work in the Congo to send him their accounts.

Kenred Smith of the British Baptist Missionary Society wrote him that, in June 1898, he visited a village that had just been hit by a punitive expedition because its inhabitants had not fulfilled their rubber quota. He “saw mutilated bodies or parts of bodies representing some twenty people, and new-made graves bringing up the number to at least thirty.” The survivors told him that at least two hundred people been killed in this and and some nearby villages and that “a cannibal feast [had] followed the slaughter.” He reported this to the local administration but did not receive any response.57

Five years later, another group of Baptist missionaries arrived in a village on the Congo River that had been “occupied by a party of Congo Government soldiers under two white officers.” As one of them reported to Morel, they saw “the native soldiers of the administration, under the very eyes of their officers, engaged in mutilating dead bodies of natives who had just been killed.” They were in the process of dismembering several bodies, one of them a child, “and human limbs were lying within a few yards of the [mission] steamer as she sought to make fast. . . . A State soldier was seen drawing away the legs and other portions of a human body. Another soldier was seen standing by a large native basket in which were the viscera of a human body.” Two officers who were present quickly ordered the missionaries to leave the beach and move on.58