The book King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, is a book relating through its more than 360 pages “A story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa.” In fact, “It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who defied Leopold: African rebel leaders who fought against hopeless odds and a brave handful of missionaries, travellers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century’s first great human rights movement.”

However, the book raises also deep question: Did the wounds of that time ever heal or are they still paving the ways to recent cruelty, injustices, social and political turmoil and lies?

An excerpt - pages 129-131 from King Leopold’s Ghost – suggests that have been paved on hypocrisy, lies and cruelty which the RDC history has not yet healed.

                                                           ***

While Leopold grandly issued edicts banning the slave trade, virtually no visitors except George Washington Williams states the obvious: not only the porters but even the soldiers of the Force Publique [the official Congo state army] were, in effect, slaves. Moreover, under a system personally approved by the King, white state agents were paid a bonus according to the number of men they turned over to the Force Publique. Sometimes agents brought men from collaborating chiefs, who delivered their human goods in chains. In one transaction, recorded in a district commissioner’s notes, twenty-five francs per person was the price received for a half dozen teenagers delivered by two chiefs from Bongata, in 1892. Congo state officials were paid an extra bonus for “reduction in recruiting expenses” – a thinly veiled invitation to save the state money by kidnapping these men directly instead of paying chiefs for them.

Always, however, the slave system was bedecked with euphemism, used even by officers in the field. “Two boats just arrived with Seargent Lens and 23 volunteers from Engwettra in chains; two men drowned trying to escape,” wrote one officer, Luis Rousseau, in his monthly report for October 1892. Indeed, some three quarters of such “volunteers” died before they could even be delivered to Force Publique posts, a worried senior official wrote the same year. Among the solution of this “wastage” he recommended were faster transport and lightweight steel chains instead of heavy iron ones. Documents from the time repeatedly show Congo state officials ordering additional supplies of chains. One officer noted the problem of files of conscripts crossing narrow long bridges over jungle streams: when “libérés [ liberated men] chained by the neck cross a bridge, if one falls off, he pulls the whole file off and it disappears.”

White officers who bargained with village chiefs to acquire “volunteers” soldiers and porters were sometimes dealing with the same sources that had supplied the east coast Afro-Arab slave-traders. The most powerful of these Zanzibar-based slavers was the handsome, bearded, strongly built Hamed bin Muhammad el Murjebi, popularly known as Tippu Tip. His nickname was said to have come from the sound of the slave-traders’ principal instrument, the musket.

Tippu Tip was a shrewd, resourceful man who made a fortune in ivory as well as slaves, businesses he was able to expand dramatically, thanks to Stanley’s discovery of the route to upper Congo River. Leopold knew that Tippu Tip’s power and administrative acumen had made him almost the de facto ruler of the eastern Congo. In 1887, the king asked him to serve as governor of the colony’s eastern province, with the capital at Stanley Falls, and Tippu Tip accepted; several relatives occupied posts under him. At this early stage, with Leopold’s military forces spread thin, the bargain offered something to both men. […]. Although Leopold managed for most of his life to be all things to all people, the spectacle of this antislavery crusader doing so much business with Africa’s most prominent slave-dealer helped spur the first murmuring against the king in Europe.

Eventually, the two men part ways. Ambitious white state officials in the eastern Congo, without the approval of their superiors in Brussels, then fought several victorious battles against some of the Afro-Arab warlords in the region, fighting that after the fact was converted into a noble campaign against the dastardly “Arab” slave-dealers. Colonial-heroic literature elevated it to a central place in the period’s official mythology, echoes of which can be heard in Belgium to this day. However, over the years Congo military forces spilled far more blood in fighting innumerable uprisings by African, including rebels from their own ranks. Furthermore, as soon as the rogue campaign against the slaves was over, Leopold put many of them back in place as state officials.

***

A Nandi proverb of Congo say "Life can be understood backwards but we live it forwards." Of course, but a Sukuma proverb from Tanzania admonishes, "For a rash to heal, you must stop scratching it." Instead, from that time on up today, the RDC has been scratched and scratching itself in several ways: from the shameful killing of Lumumba, passing through the horrifying Simba’s revolution, up to the dictatorship of Mobutu Seseseko, an unending misgovernances of Kabila Father, Kabila son and recently the “sacred political circle” had flooded the political vacuum of the last presidential election.

Anger in the mind, smile on the teeth" – Nigeria’s Igbo people proverb -, seems to be the Congolese People’s political attitude. However, not healed, those old wound can end as foolishness and, unfortunately "Insanity can be treated but not foolishness."

Photo. Punch 1905: One of a number of the cartoon where Leopold compares notes with sultan of Turkey, also condemned for his massacres (of Armenians)