King Leopold's Ghost

Chapter 16 returns to Henry Morton Stanley, who died on May 10, 1904. With Stanley gone and Morel’s influence increasing, Leopold responded by distributing free pamphlets called The Truth About the Congo in the sleeping compartments of the Compagnie Internationale de Wagons-lit, a company in which he was a major shareholder. Leopold also “showed himself to be as much a master of the mass media as his archenemy Morel” (237). He published accounts of atrocities and abuses in British colonies like India, South Africa, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Australia, and put pressure on Sir Alfred Jones, Morel’s former boss at Elder Dempster, to “dampen British criticism” (237). Jones in turn convinced two writers—Viscount William Mountmorres and Mary French Sheldon—to travel to Congo and write about its lawfulness and “delights” (237). Leopold also secretly bribed “editors and reporters all over Europe” (239) to print articles that were favorable to the king and his Congo.

Leopold successfully manipulated many of the press outlets in Europe; however, “the outpouring of criticism spread rapidly” (241). Morel’s movement in the U.S., for example, counted the president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, along with Booker T. Washington and Mark Twain among its supporters. Morel even “made shrewd use of Senator John Tyler Morgan” (242), the racist Alabama senator “who had helped to engineer U.S. recognition of Leopold’s Congo twenty years earlier” (242), and was able to build a movement for Congo reform in the U.S. that rivaled England’s.

In response, Leopold “leaped into action” (243), targeting American senators and “other influential Americans by promising them a share of the loot” (243). However, he “made a rare and disastrous misstep” (245) when he hired lobbyist Henry Kowalsky, a narcoleptic and “flamboyant trial lawyer […] whose showman’s dazzle attract[ed] a roster of famous friends and acquaintances” (245). The Belgian minister to the United States, however, saw Kowalsky as a “shyster” and likely to cause scandal. He, along with Congo state officials tried to put him off by offering him a trip to Nigeria instead, which Kowalsky refused, after which they let his contract with Leopold expire. Kowalsky responded by writing beseeching and flattering letters to Leopold, and though Leopold kept him on retainer, Kowalsky knew he was being spurned. In late 1906, he published an exposé, the headline of which read: “King Leopold’s Amazing Attempt to Influence Our Congress Exposed” (248). The exposure of the king’s methods, along with the revelation that Kowalsky had used the king’s money to bribe “Thomas G. Garrett, a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to help derail Congo protest resolutions” (249) served to be “a major setback for Leopold” (249).

The chapter ends with Hochschild’s account of another of Leopold’s grave mistakes. He created a new “Commission of Inquiry” comprised of three judges, all of whom were thought to be neutral and ineffectual, as “none of the three judges knew any African language or even enough English to talk directly to the highly critical British and American missionaries” (250). The commissioners spent months in the Congo taking a total of 370 depositions, and the findings led to the territory’s acting governor general committing suicide, while one of the judges broke down and cried during testimony. As Hochschild observes, “what was intended to be a sham investigation had slipped out of [Leopold’s] control and become a real one” (251).

The Commission’s report “repeated almost every major criticism made by Casement and Morel” (251), but Leopold “understood brilliantly that what matters, often, is less the substance of a political event than how the public perceives it” (251). And so, Leopold released, in advance of the full report, a brief summary to the press, purported to come from the “West African Missionary Association” (251). It was only days later, Hochschild observes, after “reporters and editors had time to read the full text of the report in French, did they realize that the so-called summary had little to do with the report” (251), and that the “West African Missionary Association” did not exist.

Chapter 17 continues to consider the impact of the Commission of Inquiry’s report on the Congo, noting that “King Leopold II’s rule [was] at last caught naked” (253), as there “could be no excuse” made in the face of so much “raw, unedited testimony” (253). The problem was, as always, that Leopold knew how to do damage control. In this case, the stories told by African witnesses were simply suppressed. They were not published or directly quoted from, so that no one read them until the 1980s, when people were “at last permitted to read and copy them freely” (255)—almost a hundred years after the fact.

At this point, Hochschild returns to the aging king, who at the time of the Commission’s report was seventy; he preferred to live abroad rather than in Belgium, and his eccentricities had increased with age. Even living abroad, however, he could not escape from the pressure on him to “divest himself of the country he considered his private property” (257), and so he eventually gave in to “the Belgian solution” (257), which was to transfer governance of the Congo to Belgium. “Giving in” (253) for Leopold meant making Belgium “pay dearly” (253); by the end of years-long negotiations, Belgium had agreed to “assume [Congo’s] 110 million francs’ worth of debts [… and] pay 45.5 million francs toward completing certain of the king’s pet building projects” (259). The Belgian government also agreed to pay Leopold “in installments, another fifty million francs” (259), funds which “were to be extracted from the Congo itself” (259).

Congo’s fate decided, Hochschild shifts his focus back to William Sheppard, who was still working as a missionary deep in the Congo rainforest and, along with his white boss William Morrison, still the “most outspoken of any of the American Congo missionaries” (260). In 1909, Sheppard and Morrison were sued for libel by the rubber company—and “de facto government of the area” (260)—for a piece they published in 1908 about the company’s treatment of the Kuba people. Sheppard was represented by Èmile Vandervelde, “leader of the Belgian socialists” (263), who spoke eloquently in his defense for over two hours, a speech that Morrison described as “’a marvel of eloquence, invincible logic, burning sarcasm, and pathetic appeal for justice to be done” (264) that moved many in the courtroom to tears. In the end, Hochschild reports, the judge decided in Sheppard’s favor only because it would have been politically risky not to, given that the powerful United States was paying close attention to the verdict.

Hochschild then returns to Leopold who, “less than two months after the Sheppard trial, […] fell gravely ill” (265). He quickly and secretly married his long-time mistress Catherine, refused to see his estranged daughters, and died in December, 1909. Leopold “was little mourned by his people” (266) and his widow remarried within a year to “her original boyfriend and pimp”.

From there, Hochschild returns to Roger Casement who, in the wake of his report on the Congo, has become the British consul in Santos, Brazil. He also pursued his interest in Irish independence, claiming “that ‘it was only because I was an Irishman that I could understand fully, I think, the whole scheme of wrongdoing at work in the Congo’” (268). As Hochschild notes, Casement “had come to feel that Ireland, like the Congo, was a colony, and that there, too, the core injustice was the way the colonial conquerors had taken the land” (268). So when the opportunity to “repeat his famous Congo investigative journey” (269) in “the remote Putumayo region of Peru” (269) came up, he went and “got the job done” (269-70). For going above and beyond his duties, he received a knighthood.

The final section of the chapter is devoted to Morel and his efforts to maintain public interest in the Congo Reform movement after Leopold’s death. He was joined this time by Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, who was “one of the few people in Europe whose denunciations were even more impassioned than Morel’s” (271). Morel’s challenge was that “he had lost his villain” (271) and with him the symbolic figure of reproach upon which reformers could focus their efforts. “Morel tried valiantly to keep his followers focused on the issue of land ownership, so much more important but so much less dramatic than Leopold’s personal villainy had been” (272). But because improvements were seen in the Congo and “[r]eports of atrocities against rubber workers slowed to a trickle” (273), Morel’s movement was considered a success and, by extension, complete, and the Congo Reform Association held its last meeting in June of 1913.