Thank you for listening to The Rest is History.
For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much -loved chat community, go to therestishistory .com and join the club.
That is therestishistory .com.
Have you ever spotted McDonald's hot, crispy fries right as they're being scooped into the carton.
And time just stands still.
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock.
During tax season, your personal info travels to a lot of places, between payroll, your tax consultant, and the IRS.
If your W -2 gets exposed, that's just the ticket for identity thieves.
That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second.
If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it guaranteed or your money back.
Don't let identity thieves take you for a ride.
Save up to 40 % your first year.
Visit lifelock .com slash podcast.
Terms apply. When I was a little chap, I had a passion for maps.
I would look for hours at South America or Africa or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration.
At that time, there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map, I would put my finger on it and say, when I grow up, I will go there.
There was one, the biggest, the most blank, so to speak, that I had a hankering after.
it had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names it had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over it had become a place of darkness but there was in it one river especially a mighty big river that you could see on the map resembling
an immense snake uncoiled with its head in the sea its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land dash it all i thought to myself they can't trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water steamboats Why shouldn't I try to take charge
of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea.
The snake had charmed me.
So that is Marlowe, the hero and the narrator of Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, which was first published in Blackwood's magazine in 1899.
It famously provided the inspiration for Apocalypse Now, about the American experience in vietnam but it was originally written about the european colonial experience in africa probably the greatest the most influential possibly the most controversial book about that ever written about the moral dangers
of colonialism and also about the sense of the darkness that lurks in the heart of the human soul because the darkness in that title heart of darkness has many different levels.
There's also the darkness that is London.
So Marlow is talking about this on a boat on the River Thames, narrating it to three friends.
So the sense that the darkness in Africa is reflecting the darkness in the heart of the European is kind of at the heart of the idea of the book, isn't it, Dominic?
It is indeed, Tom. Yeah, absolutely.
And we'll get on to Heart of Darkness next week, because we'll do an episode about Joseph Conrad and about this book, which is one of the most influential books, I would argue, of the modern age.
And it's a book that I think anticipates so much of the culture of the 20th century in wrestling with kind of man's capacity for evil and the possibilities of violence and brutality that have been opened up by kind of globalization and by history.
And so we'll get onto that next week.
It's a book rooted in Conrad's own experience.
So just to give people a sense, he had visited a specific place at a specific point of time.
That place is the Congo Free State under the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium.
Conrad had visited it nine years before he wrote the book as a merchant seaman steering a boat, as Marlowe does, into the heart of Africa.
And we'll talk about his experience, as I said, next week.
But this week, we're going to look at the real history that underpins that story.
So the story of the Congo Free State, probably the darkest stain in the history of European colonialism, what Conrad himself called, and I quote, the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.
So to give people a sense, we are in Central Africa between 1885 and 1908.
It's the country that is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an enormous country, a country that is as big as Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain put together.
Indeed, it's as big as the entire United States east of the Mississippi and is actually largely unknown outside its own borders, isn't it, Tom?
I guess people have a vague sense of Congo because it became Zaire under President Mobutu, who was kind of the archetype of the kleptocratic African strongman.
And yet there's a sense that no one was quite as kleptocratic or brutal, actually, as Leopold II.
And there's a case for saying that he is the model for much that goes wrong with Africa in the wake of independence, wouldn't you say?
I would absolutely.
I would. I think lots of people would say that this is a kind of foundational moment for the Congo from which nothing ever goes right thereafter.
In that 23 year period when King Leopold is in charge of the Congo, there's a fair claim that it's one of the worst places to live that has ever existed.
There's a brilliant book on this called King Leopold's Ghost by the American writer Adam Hochschild.
We'll be borrowing from that book very liberally.
So a big shout out to Adam Hochschild's book at the beginning.
Not an uncontroversial book itself.
And in next week's bonus episode, we'll talk about some of the arguments about that book.
But anyway, in King Leopold's Ghost, he says this is one of the great mass killings in human history.
A death toll, he says, of Holocaust dimensions.
Exactly how many people die in the Congo Free State is disputed.
But it's millions, isn't it?
it's million it's almost certainly millions and some estimates would go as high as 10 million it's not just a story about horror it's a story about celebrity about international relations royalty there's a lot of sex in it there's loads of politics it's a story about modernity as well because this is a new
age it's the age of the camera so lots of photography photography is really important newspapers telegraphs and so on and actually as we're getting into in our third episode, it proves the provocation, the cause for one of the great human rights campaigns in all history, arguably the foundational human rights
campaign of the 20th century.
Yeah, you say of the 20th century.
I mean, it joins the abolitionist movement of the late 18th and early 19th century, which gets rid of slavery, with the human rights movements of the late 20th century.
And it's interesting that it's very, very Anglophone, isn't it?
It's very centered in Britain and in the United States and again yeah Britain's role in all this is really really intriguing it's quite I mean intriguingly ambivalent really it is indeed yeah it's it's such a rich and interesting story so it definitely merits a series and like all good series it needs
a riveting central character in this case a villain and history has absolutely provided us with one.
And this is King Leopold II of Belgium, who Hochschild says is as interesting, as multi -layered, as greedy, as cunning, as charming, and as untrustworthy as any of Shakespeare's villains.
And if he is the villain, the great irony is he never, ever sets foot in the Congo.
He never lays eyes on the Congo.
His villainy, as it were, is carried out from afar, which makes him a very 20th century figure.
You think of all these dictators who kill so many millions of people without ever shedding blood themselves.
But also you could say if you were an anti -capitalist that he's kind of the exemplification of great corporations now who leech money from distant parts of the world, rely on products made by slave labor.
Leopold is kind of the archetype of that as well, wouldn't you say?
He is indeed. He is.
And we'll absolutely get into that.
This is the classic example you could, you might say of the rapacity of corporate capitalism carried to its ultimate murderous extreme.
But let's start with Leopold himself.
So he was born in 1835 when Belgium had been independent from the Netherlands for five years.
So he's the son of the very first king of the Belgians, who's also called Leopold.
He's brought up at a castle called Lacan, which is outside Brussels, where he spends most of his time.
He speaks French and German and English, not interestingly Flemish, which is the language of most of his subjects.
Now, Leopold's parents, Leopold and Louise, had a pretty miserable loveless marriage, and they treated their son very, very coldly.
So if he wanted to talk to his father, he had to apply through secretary for an audience.
And when his father wanted to tell his son something, he got a secretary to do it for him.
To be fair, that is how I communicate with Katie and Eliza.
So you know what? When I was reading this, the parallels between you and King Leopold were leaping off the page.
Unbelievable. So yeah, what is it about me and 20th century monarchs?
The Kaiser, Leopold II.
Yeah, it's chilling.
So Leopold, maybe this will ring a bell with you, Tom.
He grows up a moody, kind of gangling and humorless boy.
That's me. But the thing is, even at the time, his father says of him, he's very cunning.
His father compares him with a fox.
He says, Leopold is like a fox.
He slowly and stealthily picks out his path.
Stalks the chickens.
Exactly, and then he makes his move.
So by the 1850s, Leopold is in his teens.
He's become, I think it's fair to say, an extremely awkward and unattractive young man.
Yeah. People always comment on how unbelievably tall he is.
He's a bit like Baron Trump.
He's massively tall and awkward looking.
But with less knowledge of crypto, presumably.
Presumably, yes. He's got an enormous beard and everybody comments on his absolutely enormous nose.
So Disraeli said of it, it's such a nose as a young prince has in a fairy tale, thanks to the intervention of a malignant fairy.
So he's not a looker.
I think it's fair to say.
And he's very, very charmless.
So, you know, he has to compensate for that with his cunning.
When he's 18 years old, his father takes him to Vienna to get a Habsburg bride.
And this is a 16 -year -old called Archduchess Marie Henriette, and she's great.
Yeah, she's like the Emperor Claudius and Carmen Harris, isn't she?
She has a tremendous braying laugh.
Yes, she does. She's got a great laugh.
That echoes around Belgium.
And she loves laughing.
She loves laughing.
and Leopold is shocked by this because he hates laughing.
They go to Venice on holiday and he behaves really coldly to her.
He won't let it go on a gondola that she's booked and all this and she bursts into tears.
And people see this in public.
They say, oh dear, this is an all -starred marriage.
And a month after they got married, she tells one of her friends, if God hears my prayers, I shan't go on living much longer.
That's not what you want to hear after honeymoon.
So, so much of Leopold's colonial ambitions, there is an argument that basically it stems from his own insecurity and misery, that it's a massive kind of displacement exercise.
Anyway, he doesn't actually become king of Belgium till 1865.
So he spends a lot of time waiting for his father to die.
And while he's doing that, he has this kind of gnawing insecurity that he's going to be inheriting a country that is just a sort of pathetic minnow on the world stage.
Of course, Belgium is kind of squashed between France and an increasingly unified Germany, and Leopold feels this very keenly.
He says of Belgium, petit pays, petit gens, a little country, little people, and he thinks, you know, I deserve better than the Belgian people.
And what he really wants is an empire.
He wants colonies, and he's very aggrieved that he's inheriting a kingdom that doesn't have any.
three years before he becomes king of the Belgians he goes on holiday to Spain and he goes to Seville and he spends his time in Seville he spends weeks at the great archive of the Indies going through the records looking at just how much money Spain had made from its colonies so this is the 16th century
isn't it the conquistadors the conquistadors how much money they had made from the territories they exploited and this fires his imagination He makes trips to Ceylon and to Burma to see how the British make money from their colonies He reads a book called Java or How to Manage a Colony which is all
about the Dutch in the East Indies and this is written unbelievably Have you seen the bloke who wrote this book?
Yeah, very funny JWB Money You see, if he ran a bank I'd very happily advertise his bank on the rest of the system JWB Money Bank Invest your money in it Well, you should advertise his book Money's book is all about how you get a colony to turn a profit.
You see, that's what Leopold is interested in.
Even more than the prestige and certainly a lot more than any possible civilising mission aspect of colonialism, what he cares about is cash.
And in this book, JWB Money says, the Dutch have turned a profit from Java by using forced labour to have plantations and all this kind of thing.
And Dominic, the fact that it's Dutch colonies, I mean, that must really irritate him.
Of course. They're great rivals.
The great rivals. I mean, even more than the Germans or the French having colonies.
The Dutch. Awful. So he looks at the Dutch and he says, yeah, they're very unsentimental.
They've used forced labor.
And it is clear, he writes, the only way to civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples is basically by forcing them to work so that we can make money.
So here's the great paradox.
Other Belgians don't really care about colonists.
They are very conscious they're only a small and newly independent country.
they don't even really have a merchant navy of their own.
So how could they possibly maintain a colonial empire?
But for Leopold, all of his misery, all of his loneliness and awkwardness, I think he has poured into this great project of acquiring colonialism.
He believes this is the only thing that will make him happy.
Well, it's interesting, isn't it?
That geography apparently was his only subject that he was interested in as a boy.
So it's a little bit like Marlow at the beginning of this episode, this idea of looking at the world and Marlow dreams of going on adventures there and Leopold dreams of basically grabbing bits of it and using it to make money He absolutely does indeed He reminds me, reading the book by Adam Hochschild
I was reminded of Scrooge So Scrooge who, you know, deep down what Scrooge wants, Scrooge wants love and he's become a miser and a terrible person You are a sentimentalist Well no, I don't think you can be sentimental about King Leopold II, as we will see But you're saying that all the horrors of the Congo
Is because you didn't have love as a child I think his loveless life And his obsessiveness He's not just an ordinary colonialist As we all see There is something really weirdly obsessive about him And I wonder how much of that I mean also the way he behaves As we all see His obsession with hygiene Is very
very peculiar And with very young ladies And with very very young girls There's a lot of bad things to be said I think it's fair to say about King Diopold II Anyway, 1865, he becomes king at last.
Now, for the next 10 years, he doesn't actually manage to get the empire he wants.
He investigates various schemes.
He'd like to buy a bit of Argentina.
He'd like to buy a bit of the Nile Delta.
He even talks about acquiring Fiji, but he doesn't really get anywhere.
But not Greenland. Not Greenland, no.
But in 1875, he thinks he might be onto something.
He's offered Spain cash for the Philippines for the second time.
And to his deep disappointment, they turn him down again.
And he says to one of his courtiers, OK, I'm going to have a look at Africa now.
Maybe Africa is the place.
So now at last in this story, we come to Africa.
Now, the great scramble for Africa, which people think of as a 19th century thing, is actually really only concentrated in the final decades of the 19th century.
So at this point, 1875, it hasn't happened.
The French are in Algeria.
The Portuguese are in what become Mozambique and Angola.
The British and the Burrs both have footholds in South Africa, and various countries have kind of trading ports and enclaves on the coast of West Africa.
But about three quarters of Africa, really meaning the interior, has not yet been penetrated by European empires.
For Europeans, the wealth of Africa is associated with the coast.
There's the assumption that there's nothing in the middle that would be worth the effort of colonizing.
Exactly. People just think, well, it's just impenetrable jungle.
what could possibly be there.
It's a blank space, as Conrad puts it.
But by this point, the mid 1870s, Africa is making the news in a way it hasn't ever done before.
There have been a series of very eye -catching expeditions.
And of course, the most famous one, which lots of listeners will have heard of, is the expedition by the journalist Henry Morton Stanley to find the missionary David Livingston in modern -day Tanzania in 1871, which was financed by the New York Herald.
And thanks to these new innovations of cheap newspapers and the telegraph, Stanley and Livingston become international celebrities far beyond Britain and America.
So they're making front -page news in Belgium.
And King Leopold, we know, follows the story very closely and actually kept a sort of scrapbook, including handwritten notes that he was making following Stanley's journey.
And it's interesting, isn't it, because Livingston is all about fighting slavery.
His heart is in the right place.
Stanley, a much more ambivalent figure.
I mean, he's looking for Livingston basically to make a name for himself.
Exactly, for celebrity and for money are two things which will play a big part in this story.
So the question for Leopold is, he wants a colony that will turn a profit.
Can he make money from Africa?
And the answer is yes.
Not through slavery, as you once could, but through something that is extremely fashionable and very lucrative.
And that something is ivory.
Now, the Victorians are obsessed by ivory.
It's exotic because, of course, it comes from elephant tusks.
But it's also unbelievably useful and malleable because it's really, really easy to carve ivory.
So if you went into a sort of genteel Victorian household, anywhere in the Western world, in the 1870s or 1880s, there would be the handles of cutlery.
There would be billiard balls.
There would be combs, fans.
There would be brooches.
there would be chess pieces, piano keys, false teeth.
All of these kinds of things are made of ivory.
Because Hochschild compares it actually to plastic, doesn't he?
It's such a kind of useful product, which is brilliant for the Victorians and obviously very bad news for the elephants.
Exactly. Exactly. And you can make so much money from it.
So two elephant tusks will give you hundreds of piano keys or thousands upon thousands of false teeth.
And it sounds comical, but there's an awful lot of money to be made here.
and Stanley after returning from his expedition has gone around telling people my god there is so much ivory in Equatorial Africa that the people there use it for their doorposts because it's just so plentiful So it's kind of ivory equivalent of El Dorado, that sense so this is portable wealth, which is the key
to gold in the new world wasn't it in the 16th century.
But the difference between the 16th century and now is that to acquire a colony I think you have to try much harder to present it as part of a civilizing mission so this is the high point this is of high victorianism the belief in kind of moral uplift and europe's you know right to the moral leadership
of the planets and all of all these things that we may well think of as now as being freighted with hypocrisy or of kind of you know patronizing condescension but at the time people do actually take genuinely seriously so Leopold knows that he will have to I think tick three boxes if he wants a colony
first of all he has to present it as a scientific project an intellectual project so literally filling in those blank spaces mapping what has what has previously been unknown secondly I think he has to tick the moral uplift box so he has to say well I only want a colony because I want to spread the gospel
of Christianity of course something that matters tremendously to the Victorians.
But also Dominic the spreading of Christianity is also intimately associated with the campaign to abolish slavery.
Yes that's the third thing.
Britain has been leading that campaign since the early 19th century and it has provided an absolutely crucial kind of moral justification for what has been a process of expansion of British imperial control.
So Livingstone even though he's not overtly an imperialist the fact that he is carving out a moral mission for Britain in the middle of Africa is obviously very useful from an imperial point of view.
And I guess that Leopold is, I mean, he reads the Times, doesn't he, every morning?
Yeah. He is very alert to the kind of symbiosis between that moral mission to eradicate slavery and imperialism in the British form, and he wants a bit of it.
I think you're absolutely right.
I think he absolutely sees what's going on with the other empires.
I think in Leopold's case, what makes him slightly unusual is that all the evidence we have of his letters and so on is that for him, the profit motive is all and that the rest of it is effectively just a justification for making money.
I mean, he's pretty shameless about that, I would say.
So this is how he proceeds.
And I have to say, he's a terrible man, King Leopold, but he really is a cunning and a methodical and a clever man.
A vulpine figure. He is.
So his first step is to convene a big geographical conference in Brussels at the end of 1876.
And he invites all the big celebrities of the Africa industry of the day.
So there are explorers from France and Germany.
He's got a celebrity explorer called Gerhard Rolfs who had actually had himself circumcised so that he could pass for a Muslim in the Sahara.
So, you know, somebody who had suffered for his quest.
His exploration. His exploration.
He's got the president of the British Anti -Slavery Society, sir thomas foul buxton he's got the president of the church missionary society sir john kenway he's even got the bloke who used to command the royal navy's indian ocean anti -slavery squadron so he's ticking all of those boxes he's inviting
a lot of people who are genuinely animated by what we might call humanitarian as well as imperialistic concerns and he welcomes them and And he says, you know, I dream of a crusade worthy of this century of progress to open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated to
pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples.
That word darkness again, which is going to come up throughout this series.
And he says to them, don't think that I want anything for myself.
He says, I have no ambition other than to serve Belgium.
Now, that's, as we've seen, is a lie.
He despises Belgium and as we will also see, he doesn't want to serve Belgium at all.
He only wants to serve himself.
And he says to them, look, I've assembled you because I think it would be nice for us to identify places in the blank spaces of Africa, which could be bases, which could be hospitals, they could be scientific research centres, they could be trading stations.
With an emphasis on the trading space aspect of it.
and these will be run I don't want to I mean Belgium won't run them because we don't want to we absolutely the last thing we'd want is a colony he says we'll set up an international African association and it'll be based why not base it in Brussels actually and for its first chairman I mean if no one
else wants to do it I'd very happy yeah happily pull myself forward and everybody you know they all fall for this oh what a lovely idea what a kind man I mean we're recording this the day after the Trump inauguration, where all these heads of tech companies that until Trump won the election were all
over their mission being to spread happiness and joy and promote diversity and equity.
And now they've binned all that very nakedly.
Do you think that this is the first example of kind of avaricious corporations dressing up their greed behind them?
A kind of show of piety It's got to be one of the first, hasn't it?
One of the early ones.
One of the most eye -catching early ones, definitely.
Because it is a brilliant manoeuvre.
Of course it is. If you have global ambitions.
And all these people believe it.
They completely believe it.
And here's the thing.
The International African Association, which sounds like it's a charity and which they have all endorsed, is actually a private company run by Leopold himself.
For his benefit. For his benefit.
So the only thing he doesn't have actually is the colony.
You know, he's got the association, but he doesn't have the colony And where is he going to get the colony?
Well, the answer is from the one person who wasn't there at that meeting in Brussels And this is the most famous of all African explorers We've already mentioned him, Henry Morton Stanley Now, we'll just sketch Stanley very briefly Because he really is worthy of a Arrested History series in himself
He had an amazing life, Stanley He was born in Wales in 1841 And he was born as John Rawlins' bastard he was the illegitimate son of a housemaid that's the entry that is in the book of births he spends his childhood in a workhouse he emigrates to new orleans when he's 18 years old he fought for the confederates
then he fought for the union then he joined the union navy then he he renamed himself henry morton stanley after a new orleans businessman and then he became a journalist he went to the ottoman empire went to persia he went to the Crimea.
He went to Abyssinia with a British expedition.
But most famously, the New York Herald sent him to Central Africa to find Dr.
Livingston, which he did near Lake Tanganyika in 1871.
And then he invented, almost certainly invented, this fantastic line.
So disappointing. I know, it's disappointing.
Let's pretend that he said it.
Dr. Livingston, I presume, when he met Livingston, which flashed around the world and made him a household name, a genuine international celebrity.
And he writes it up in enormously long books, doesn't he?
Yes, he does, which are great sellers.
So he gets commissioned to write one book and he ends up writing three.
That's very, nothing wrong with that, Tom.
I commend that kind of behaviour.
Very familiar. So then he went on another expedition three years later, sent this time by the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London to map the Great Lakes and to look for the source of the Nile.
And that's where he's been during Leopold's conference.
And he has begun that, hasn't he, on the East Coast of Africa, at Zanzibar and he's heading westwards and he wouldn't be the first European to have gone from east to west coast, but he is the first who does it basically by following the line of the Congo.
Exactly. An incredibly well -publicised journey, one that was followed by newspaper readers across the world as you would follow reports of great sporting fixtures or something.
Tremendous excitement.
in August 1877 Stanley reached the trading post of Boma which is on the right bank of the Congo river near the coast an extraordinary extraordinary achievement 7 000 miles Tom in three years he did on foot now Leopold has been following this with great interest and as soon as he hears the news that Stanley
has got to the west coast he sends him a telegram of congratulations and then Leopold says to his ambassador in London, this is the man.
This is the man I need to get me this colony in the heart of Africa.
However, Leopold says, we have to be careful.
And I quote, if I quite openly charged Stanley with the task of taking possession in my name of some part of Africa, the English will stop me.
I don't want to risk losing a fine chance to secure for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake so I will just give Stanley some job of exploration which will defend no one and will give us the bases and headquarters which we can take over later on oh the fox the fox so Leopold's intermediaries
and emissaries keep offering Stanley they write to Stanley and they say you know the International African Association this fake charity would love to offer you a job now Stanley turns it down at first because he wants to go back to England and to see what he could get there.
But when he gets back to London, although of course he's a big celebrity, the establishment are very suspicious of him, the royal family, the Foreign Office and so on, because they have heard reports that Stanley has treated people extremely brutally, and I think reports that are completely justified.
About half of Stanley's porters, African porters, had died on his trip of starvation or disease, and he had flogged them mercilessly and basically he'd driven them into the ground.
And this makes people very anxious.
So Richard Burton, another great explorer and not a man who, I mean, himself is prone to behaving quite extremely, but he said of Stanley that he shoots Africans as if they were monkeys.
Yeah. In a tone of great disapproval.
Yes. I mean, we keep using the word darkness.
That is a shadow of darkness over Stanley's reputation.
Absolutely it is. He's very awkward in his relationship with the other sex, isn't he?
the fairer sex he is indeed I lose track of the women he's basically left and he's kind of dreaming vaguely that he'll come back and marry them and there's a sense that he's going off into the jungle for three years so he doesn't have to deal with women exactly because they keep they will often marry
somebody else while he's gone and you can sense he comes back and he pretends to be disappointed but actually he's quite relieved anyway and there's also a class issue he says they despise me because I'm Welsh you know the English are not giving me any credence at all they don't listen to a word I say
they make up these lies about me and all of this kind of thing.
So in the summer of 1878, Stanley is very disappointed by his reaction and he gets an invitation from Leopold to visit him in Brussels.
And he says to himself, why not?
Okay, I'll go and see him.
And so on the 10th of June, 1878, Stanley walks into Leopold's office in the Royal Palace in Brussels for the meeting that will seal the fate of the Congo.
And blight the lives of millions.
We will be back after the break.
Restrictions apply.
Taxes and fees extra.
Xfinity internet required.
Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.
An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.
The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish.
There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.
the long stretches of the waterway ran on deserted into the gloom of overshadowed distances on silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sun themselves side by side the broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands you lost your way on that river as you wouldn't a desert and butted all day
long against shoals trying to find the channel till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once somewhere, far away in another existence.
So that's from Heart of Darkness.
It's Joseph Conrad's hero, Marlowe, driving a steamboat up the river Congo.
And Dominic, the thing that always strikes me about that passage is it kind of has echoes of Conan Doyle's book, The Lost World, the sense that going into the jungle is somehow to go back into the prehistoric past and in fact in the decades that follow there will be stories told of a great long -necked
dinosaur that lurks in the depths of the congo and there's a sense that conrad is kind of i mean he's articulating that in a very powerful and not uncontroversial way yeah it's a very controversial passage that's a very evocative passage that they go the deeper and deeper they go into africa the further
and further they're going back in time and for conrad's critics sort of post -colonial critics they say that is so loaded and so dodgy to be basically saying that by to visit africa the deeper you go the further backwards you travel to this kind of primeval world but we'll unpack all that um next week tom
but first of all the congo so when leopold and stanley sit down that day in june 1878 which we ended the first half with what do they actually know about this world that the comrade himself visited, this landscape, the jungle, the river, and whatnot.
Europeans have known about the existence of the River Congo for 400 years.
So the first to lay eyes on it was a Portuguese captain called Diogo Kau in 1482.
And he had been sailing south along the coast of Africa like so many Portuguese sailors did there.
You remember, Tom, their caravels with their triangular sails?
That's right. And they're putting up little kind of stone markers, aren't they?
They're putting up stone markers.
So he put one on the far bank of the Congo and what's now Angola, that King Zhao II of Portugal did order this land to be discovered and this pillar of stone to be erected by Diogo Cao, a squire of his household.
But of course, they weren't really discovering.
I mean, they were discovering from their own perspective, but they weren't the first to discover it because, of course, there were a lot of people there already.
So when the Portuguese arrived at the end of the 15th century, there were probably about 3 million people who were subjects of the kingdom of the Congo With a capital K, and that was ruled by a monarch called the Manicongo, and his capital was probably just over the border in what's now Angola And the people
of the Congo, they were farmers, they raised pigs and yams and stuff They didn't have wheels, they didn't have writing, but they did have a kind of state system they had judges, they had a calendar, they had a tax system, they used shells as currency, and they already had slavery, which was to prove
a disaster for the Congo because the Portuguese were delighted to find people, to find chiefs who were happy to sell them human beings that the Portuguese could put to work, particularly in Brazil.
So Congo becomes a huge supplier of slaves to the Portuguese.
By the 17th century, the Portuguese are probably shipping 15 ,000 slaves a year in horrific conditions, initially to Brazil.
Later on, they start selling them to North America as well.
So in the American South, about one in four of the slaves in the 19th century had roots in equatorial Africa, which includes the Kingdom of the Congo.
What the Congolese made of this is very, very hard for us to tell because until the modern era, the Congolese had no written language, Which is why this episode so far has been from a European perspective Even in King Leopold's time, in the time of the Congo Free State There is not a single memoir written
by a Congolese African So that's a problem for us as historians Because it means that African voices are silent compared with European ones Wasn't there a king?
There was a king Yes, there's a Christian king in the 16th century He writes to the Pope Yeah, he wrote to the Portuguese king and he complains about the slavery he did indeed the kind of looting of his people so i would guess from that that probably they're not thrilled about it no he wrote to the portuguese
king and he said there's no you know you're taking too many slaves there's nobody left and the portuguese king actually wrote back to him sent him a letter and said i've heard there's loads of people in the congo what are you complaining about shut up and that was the extent of this meeting of minds
between these two kings right in the years that followed the congo became prey to all kinds of inroads in the portuguese the spanish the dutch um there's lots of factionalism the civil wars and basically the kingdom falls apart but much of this is a mystery to europeans europeans can't get into the interior they know
that the congo river is a vast river it's the second largest river in africa third largest by volume in the world but they can't go up it because once you start to go upstream once you go up river very quickly the river gives way to 200 miles worth of rapids and gorges and canyons and so on.
So you have to get out of your ship and walk.
And at that point, it's very rocky terrain, what's called the Crystal Mountains.
And Europeans, as soon as they started to do that, they would get malaria or yellow fever, and they'd basically all die.
Dominic, there is a British expedition in 1816.
There is indeed. Led by a Royal Navy captain who describes the scenery as beautiful and not inferior to any on the banks of the Thames.
Yeah. Which is obviously the highest praise that an Englishman can possibly give.
But he's a good example.
He only gets a little bit of the whey and then they basically have to go back because they were all horribly ill.
So even in the 1870s, the vast basin of the Congo, we're talking about 1 .5 million square miles of territory.
So that's about what, the size of India?
Yeah, I mean it's a massive, massive stretch of land and home to, now this is very controversial but let us say somewhere between roughly eight and twelve million people it is almost completely unknown to europeans they still talk about the blank space on the map an empty space on the map which is of course
quite wrong now stanley has been through it but not all of it stanley had tracked the river for about 1 500 miles um so that's only about half the length of the congo river and he's only had limited interactions with the locals but he does know two crucial things which he's able to tell leopold that day
in the palace first of all the people of the congo they don't have anything like the military technology to resist a european takeover it's a myth that they're completely unsophisticated they have brilliant pottery they're brilliant woodworkers and so on but in terms of weapons they only have spears and arrows
and some very ancient portuguese muskets so you know an invading european force would be able to wipe the floor with them.
And the second thing, even more important, there is no one powerful state in the Congo Basin.
There are more than 200 different ethnic groups.
They speak 400 different languages and dialects.
There's a massive variety.
So some of them are pygmies who live in the forests and some of them are more settled farming peoples who live on the savannas.
But they're very fragmented and they're always fighting each other.
It's a little bit like, You know, when Cortez arrived in Mesoamerica and found there were all kinds of rivalries and things that he could exploit.
But there isn't an equivalent of the Aztecs.
There's no equivalent of the Aztecs.
There's no equivalent of that.
So it's even better than that.
For a European predator, the people of the Congo are the perfect prey.
And Dominic, isn't there one other factor that Stanley has discovered by going along the river, which is that if you can get past the rapids up kind of into the highlands, then the Congo is very, very navigable.
And there are all these kinds of tributaries.
So there are thousands and thousands of miles of navigable water.
So it's kind of like, you know, railways have been laid or something.
If you can just get your steamboat up past these rapids, then you can use the river to go very, very deep into the Congo.
And if there is raw material, say ivory or perhaps in due course rubber, then you can use it to bring it back.
Exactly. In other words, there are the lineaments of your transport infrastructure right there waiting for you.
So for Leopold, all of this is absolutely great news.
He seems to have hit it off with Stanley straight away.
Leopold spoke perfect English.
Despite his enormous nose and his gangling awkwardness, he can be charming when he wants to and he flatters Stanley.
Stanley, of course, are desperate for flattery because he hasn't had it in London.
And that autumn, 1878, Leopold says, I'd like to offer you a five -year contract.
For every year you spend in Africa, I will pay you 50 ,000 francs and I will pay for an expeditionary force to go with you up the Congo.
So, in terms of Stanley's earnings, in today's money, Leopold is effectively offering him two million pounds, a lot of money for a journalist.
And so, he's buying Stanley's knowledge, presumably.
Yes. But is he also buying Stanley's prestige as the man who knows the Congo?
The sense that if he's got Stanley with him, then the project must be a realistic one.
It must be a serious one.
I think he's buying three things, actually.
So I think he's buying Stanley's knowledge.
Stanley knows he's gone along the river.
Number two, I do think you're absolutely right.
He's buying the prestige and the celebrity.
Stanley will become the face of this charitable expedition.
Right. but the third thing is he's genuinely buying Stanley's you know Stanley's going to have to do the work he's going to have to put the work in on the ground and Leopold knows that Stanley is a hard worker is a hard worker and he drives other people very hard he says to Stanley what I want you to
do I want you to establish a station at the mouth of the Congo that will be our big base then and this will be a really important thing build a road or indeed a railway around these rapids through these mountains and basically what I want you to do, start with the road and get porters to carry disassembled
steamboats through this territory to the other side of the rapids, 200 miles, then reassemble the steamboats and then head up river on the steamboats for a thousand miles, establishing trading posts and stations and whatnot as you go.
So this is a pretty big operation.
Stanley says, fine.
Now, the fine point of this contract is deliberately ambiguous.
The contract leaves it very unclear who Stanley is working for.
Is he working for Leopold himself?
Is he working for the International African Association?
Or is he working for yet another organization called the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo, which is another of Leopold's front organizations that he has set up?
And Stanley must have known that something was a bit off about this because he demands, he says, I must have all the money up front.
And this plan to use porters to carry bits of steamship up to the Congo.
Yeah. I mean, presumably that will require a fair degree of force.
Yes. So is Stanley knowingly buying into that?
Oh, yeah. Because Stanley had employed porters on his previous journeys and that had often involved a degree of payment, but also a degree of force as well.
But to carry a steamship is a different business from carrying supplies or whatever.
I mean, that's a pretty military operation.
Remember, Leopold has promised he will pay for an expeditionary force, basically a mercenary force, to go upriver with Stanley.
But just to be clear, Stanley is walking into this with his eyes wide open.
Oh, his eyes are definitely open.
And his subordinates, they have to sign the equivalent to non -disclosure agreements.
They have to sign strict confidentiality clauses.
They can't tell anybody about what they're doing.
Again, a pretty dodgy sign, I would say.
Now, Leopold, of course, to hide this from foreign competitors.
He's paranoid that the Germans or the French will get in on the act, but he also wants to hide this from his own people.
Because remember, here's the really remarkable thing.
Unlike some of the rest of the scramble of Africa, this is not being done for Belgium.
It's not been done for the people or the government of Belgium.
It's being done for one man, King Leopold, and that's what makes it different.
so february 1879 stanley sets off and as part of the confidentiality he travels under an alias he calls himself monsieur henry so monsieur henry goes off to africa meanwhile back in belgium leopold has set up yet another organization another front group called the international association of the congo
now this people may have lost track of this point of all the different associations.
That's the point. That's what Leopold wants you to do.
Because the names are all vaguely similar.
They're very similar.
He wants you to think that this is the International African Association set up at his conference.
And that's a charitable one.
A charitable one, because it has the same flag, the same iconography.
The flag is blue with the gold star.
But this one is answerable just to him, the International Association of the Congo.
And this is the organisation that he intends will run his new fiefdom.
It's like if you set up a very sinister exploitative organization called Oxfim.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Exactly. Help the children.
Yeah, yeah. Sequarterly, you're doing nothing but evil.
Exactly. If you actually set up two groups, one called Save the Children and one called Help the Children, and Save the Children pretends to be charitable, and you've got lots of pop stars, and Help the Children is just a money -making, you're just selling merch.
Yeah, you're using them to dig out gold.
Right, exactly. Exactly.
That's exactly what it is.
Now, Leopold, whilst Danny's gone, Leopold gets his sort of tame client journalists to start placing articles about this in the world's press.
And this is brilliant.
I mean, I have to say it really is brilliant, because in each country, they sell a different message based on that country.
So in Britain, in the Times, they place articles to say that what Leopold is doing is he's setting up a kind of, and I quote, a sort of society of the Red Cross, and they'll establish kind of hospices along the banks of the Congo to help travellers and to fight slavery.
And of course people in Britain will be like, their Victorians will be all over this.
In the German papers, Leopold's agents say it's going to be a Hanseatic League of the Congo, a succession of Congolese free cities based on, and I quote, Bremen, Lübeck and Hamburg.
So lots of marzipan shops.
Marzipan, yeah. Running the line of the Congo.
That lovely kind of stepped gable architecture.
Yes. And in an American papers, Stanley has been sent to establish, and I quote, a confederation of free Negro republics.
So basically like Liberia that will become part of a United States of the Congo that will be supervised by the benevolent King Leopold.
Whenever anybody reads this, they say, God, what's not to like?
This sounds great. So kind.
Meanwhile, Stanley is hard at work and he's again, as whatever you might think of him he's good at doing it.
In two years he gets these colossal teams of workmen to carve this trail around the rapids and then to move 50 tons worth of equipment up the trail.
And once they got past the rapids they established a post at a place called Leopoldville and this is the birthplace of modern day Kinshasa which is now the capital of the Democratic Republic Congo, the largest city in Africa.
Is it? The largest city in Africa?
It is indeed. I did not know that.
And this is where they will reassemble the steamboats and then head upriver.
But at this stage, I mean, we're literally talking about like a fortified blockhouse.
I mean, that's all it is.
Fine, yes. So this is an extraordinary achievement, but in a sign of things to come, it comes at a horrendous, horrendous human cost.
So Stanley's subordinates, his workers, whether white or black, they die of disease, of exhaustion, of overwork.
One of them's eaten by a crocodile.
Because, Dominic, just to say that it's not just humans who are prone to the diseases, but pack animals as well.
Yes. So you can't use oxen or donkeys or whatever to transport stuff.
It has to be humans.
You have to use human beings.
And we know that he treated Europeans badly too.
So we have a letter from a steamboat engineer who was called Paul Nev, who fell ill, probably with malaria or yellow fever.
And Nev wrote home and he said, Stanley treats me with the sort of care a blacksmith applies To repair an implement that has broken down Through too rough usage Teeth clenched in anger He smites it again and again on the anvil And Nev died a few weeks after writing that letter Because basically Stanley
had driven him into the ground And of course if Stanley does that to the European subordinates What is he like with his African porters?
Now you mentioned Tom, how does he enforce this?
He has a private army they have a thousand rifles and they have four machine guns maxim guns and if any african um questions his instructions or if they even collapse stanley claps them in irons as an example to the others i mean it's not really a justification but just to a counterpoint um stanley
works himself in zaney hard as well doesn't he he does he's kind of relentless on his his own body and health yeah and he normally nearly dies a couple of times he has to be invalided home to Europe.
And as soon as he's got better, he comes back out.
I mean, he takes the job very seriously.
He pushes himself incredibly hard.
But in doing so, he kills quite a lot of other people.
All the time, Leopold is saying to him, hurry, hurry.
Get as much land as you can.
Get as much ivory as you can, because Leopold is terrified that the French and the Germans will beat him to it.
Now, this question of getting the land, how is Stanley going to do that?
Well as so often in the story of European colonialism, this comes down to an issue of treaties.
Leopold has enlisted the aid of the former Regis Professor of Law at Oxford University who rejoices in the name Sir Travis Twiss.
That's not a real name.
A very Dickensian name.
Yeah, that's from a novel.
Sir Travis Twiss has provided him with a legal opinion that a private company, i .e.
the international congo association is within its rights to sign treaties with african chiefs just as a sovereign country can when leopold has got that opinion he sends orders to stanley he says right start signing the treaties make them as brief as possible and in a couple of articles these chiefs
have to give us everything so as they go up river stanley will stop and he will get out and he will start talking to the local bigwigs of course when he raises the issue of treatise through various interpreters the local chiefs have no idea what he's talking about remember most of them have never seen
writing before so when danny says i'd like you to make your x your cross on this document they have no idea what they are giving away i mean as you say this is very reminiscent of episodes we've done before of course 16th century mexico or native americans great plains in the 19th century absolutely
but there's a brilliant example in the book king leopold goes to terrifying example on the 1st of april 1884 the chiefs of ngombie and mafella signed a deal with stanley leopold would give them each one piece of cloth per month so they're very excited at getting this cloth in return they give him the rights
to all their territories all tax and toll rights or game fishing mining and forest rights for all time they're giving these rights to the congo association and here is the really crucial thing the treaty that they have signed with their mark says they will assist by labor or otherwise any works improvements
or expeditions which the said association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories and this is the real kicker and this is what actually makes it different from the treaty signed with let's say native americans in the plains indians or whatever because stanley and leopold
have not just bought their land they've bought their labor forever for all time any improvement any work that the congo association wants to be carried out you have to do for them yeah and there's no mention of you know what you'll get in return here i mean this is a really kind of this they've given
away everything so as a trade deal, not brilliant.
It's a very poor trade deal, I think it's fair to say.
Stanley is great at getting these deals.
By June 1884, he has signed contracts with more than 450 different chiefs.
He sails home to Europe with the treatise in his pocket, giving these people's land and labour to King Leopold.
So Dominic, a question.
Bearing in mind what we know is going to happen, did they need them at all?
Would it have made any difference if they hadn't got these treaties yes i think it would have made a difference these treaties are not really they're not done because leopold cares what the africans think they're done to show to the rest of europe so these are are publicized yes i've got i've done all
these deals um with with local chiefs i'm very friendly with the local chiefs this is going to be for their benefit everybody wins this has been done completely legally it is not 16th century style conquistador conquest so a bit like the chinese with their belt and road belt and road yes i suppose so though
chinese listeners might might uh might raise an eyebrow yeah a lot tom but um yeah but yeah no i mean it's a it's a deal that leopold is selling as it's a deal that benefits africa it benefits me it's great everybody wins whether everybody does win we will see so he's got the treaties he's got his steam
boats going up and down the river.
What he needs now is somebody to recognize this as his because there is a problem.
While Stanley has been up the Congo, a French explorer has landed on the other side of the river, a guy called Count Pierre Savignon de Braza.
De Braza has established his own trading post on the north bank and this becomes known as Brazzaville, which today is the capital of the formerly French Republic of the Congo.
So a rival Congolese territory.
And there's a massive media row between Stanley and Brazza.
The Portuguese hear about this and the Portuguese say, what?
We were the first to the Congo.
What's going on here?
Get out. And the British say, well, if there's any dispute about this, we would really much prefer that the Portuguese have the Congo.
So this is a problem for Leopold.
He needs somebody to back him.
And he does something here very clever.
He goes outside Europe to another relatively new country like Belgium And another country that has a history of signing treaties with indigenous people Slightly one -sided treaties, some people might say That end up not being worth the paper they're written on But complemented by a love of liberty Right,
and this country is, of course, the United States of America And he has the perfect intermediary Another Dickensian character called Henry Shelton Sanford who had previously been the American ambassador to Brussels.
And Henry Shelton Sanford, if you look him up, he's got a big stovepipe hat.
He's got the moustache.
He's got the kind of gold, pince -nez glasses.
And he's got the title General, hasn't he?
He donated artillery or something to the Union during the Civil War and he uses it all the time, but it's completely bogan.
He's a fake general.
I mean, he's perfect.
And he's a massive investor in Florida.
Yeah, and he's lost loads of money.
In Florida, in Florida railroads.
So he needs money, which makes him the perfect pawn for Leopold.
He needs a rich friend.
Leopold sends him to Washington with a personal letter to the Republican president, Chester Arthur.
Leopold says, I'm setting up this colony in the Congo.
And really, it's about two things.
It's about fighting slavery and about free trade.
And as it happens, Arthur is a Republican and that's basically what the Republican Party in the 1870s and 1880s stands for.
Arthur says, Oh, my God, this sounds absolutely brilliant.
And so in April 1884, the US State Department issues the very first official recognition of Leopold's colony.
And they don't understand what it is because at this stage… Because they think it's going to be like the United States, only in Africa.
They absolutely think it's going to be the United States.
And what is worse, in the official statement, they muddle up the International Association of the Congo and the International African Association.
They use both names within about three sentences.
And of course that's exactly what Leopold wanted.
That was why he did it, because he wants everybody to be confused.
He is cunning, isn't he?
He is a fox. He is a fox.
Now at this point, when the Americans have recognised it, the French are the next to get on board.
Why? Because even though they wanted it themselves, they become paranoid that Leopold is going to run out of money and sell it to the British.
And is that because of Stanley?
Exactly. That Stanley would be the intermediary.
Hanging out in London and everything.
That is the last thing they want.
And also the French don't need to feel intimidated by Belgium, do they?
No, I guess not. I guess not.
And they kind of are still thinking, well, if the Belgians get it, at least it's not the Germans.
Next are the Germans.
Now Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, the great statesman of Germany, he sees through Leopold, I think, a little bit, because on the documents that he gets, he writes the words swindle and fantasies.
And he's not wrong, is he?
But Bismarck thinks, I don't want the French to get the Congo Or Britain So maybe if little Belgium gets it Yeah, fine It's the weakness of Belgium That Leopold is basically leveraging Even though Belgium is not going to get it But Leopold himself That's the great irony of all this All this comes to
a head At the conference in Berlin That opens at the end of 1884 So this is the great conference That marks the sort of high points The Scramble for Africa And there are delegates from America, from Russia, from the Ottoman Empire.
Of course, no Africans deciding their own destiny.
Nobody thinks that would be remotely appropriate.
Now, actually, Stanley is there as an advisor to the American delegation.
And it says something that Stanley himself feels a little bit queasy about this spectacle.
He says that the sight of all the delegates rushing to carve up Africa Reminded him of when he was on an expedition And they would kill some sort of beast And he says my porters They would rush with gleaming knives for slaughtered game And that's what these delegates are like Well I suppose to hack
off the ivory To hack off the ivory, exactly The tusks So by February 1885 the conference has reached an agreement And for Leopold it is the perfect result it's a total triumph all the powers agree that they will recognize the International Congo Association as the owner of almost all of the Congo basin and that's
the dodgy one not the humanitarian one exactly the dodgy one Leopold's private company so he has got a territory 76 times the size of Belgium and it will belong not to Belgium but to Leopold personally so at last he has the fiefdom he wanted And three months later, in May 1885, he drops all the fiction.
The International Congo Association is allowed to lapse.
The only thing that remains of it is its flag, the blue flag with the gold star.
And on the 29th of May, by royal decree, its lands, this huge stretch of territory is renamed the Etat Indépendant du Congo, the Free State of the Congo.
And Leopold is named as its founding sovereign.
in he kind of briefly considered calling himself emperor of the congo didn't he did and giving um all the various chieftains who'd signed treaties with him um outfits modeled on the uniforms of the beef eaters which i yeah be very hot yeah very sensible wearing inappropriate inappropriate exactly yeah
but now that the congo free state has been set up with leopold as its monarch for the people of the Congo, the real horror begins.
The horror, the horror, one might almost say.
And if you are a member of the Restless History Club, then you can hear the next two episodes right now.
If not, you can sign up at therestlesshistory .com and we will be back next time continuing our journey into the heart of darkness.
AVAILABLE SRIK
