African Testimony in the Movement for Congo Reform

The Burden of Proof

Robert Burroughs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351804325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The humanitarian movement against Leopold's violent colonisation of the Congo emerged out of Europe, but it depended at every turn on African input. Individuals and groups from throughout the upper Congo River basin undertook journeys of daring and self-sacrifice to provide evidence of atrocities for the colonial authorities, missionaries, and international investigators.

Combining archive research with attention to recent debates on the relation between imperialism and humanitarianism, on trauma, witnessing and postcolonial studies, and on the recovery of colonial archives, this book examines the conditions in which colonised peoples were able to speak about their subjection, and those in which attempts at testimony were thwarted.

Robert Burroughs makes a major intervention by identifying African agency and input as a key factor in the Congo atrocities debate. This is an important and unique book in African history, imperial and colonial history, and humanitarian history.

1 Humanitarianism and diplomacy

West African migrants in the Congo Free State (c.1890–1903)

Introduction

In April 1891, at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in the rising colonial town of Lagos Island, Rev. James Johnson was met by a distantly familiar, gaunt young man bearing papers. The man, whose name is not recorded, passed to Johnson a roughly crafted envelope containing part of a letter ‘evidently intended’ for him, and signed by four men: Samuel Moses, David R. Ashley, Owen Vidal, and Zachariah Kaitell.¹ The signatories were part of a group of 396 individuals who, under Kaitell’s supervision, had travelled together to the faintly utopian-sounding Congo Free State as contracted labourers. They described their distressed condition and that of their co-workers, and asked for the British authorities presiding over Lagos to secure their passage home.

As the first written appeal against methods of colonisation in the Congo Free State signed by African hands, the note marks the beginning of a neglected corpus that this study seeks to salvage. At every turn testimony of this kind was endangered, its very survival dependent on the whim of its recipient. The letter in question is an example of this fragility since it is no longer extant and the name of its bearer apparently has not been preserved. Its former existence is proven only by the actions its recipient, Johnson. An establishment figure in the new Lagos colony, Johnson was a member of its legislative council and recently appointed assistant Bishop of the Niger Delta and Benin. Numerous young Lagosians, including members of the party now stranded in the Congo, were known to him through his proselytising work as a Pastor at St. Paul’s. The son of enslaved Africans released from the Middle Passage by the Royal Navy’s anti-slave-trade patrols, Johnson had a lifelong affiliation with British religious and imperial institutions. Still this did not prevent him from criticising colonial policies. He had recently begun correspondence with the leader of the Aborigines Protection Society, H.R. Fox Bourne, on the violence used by British officers in the Gold Coast.² On the street in Lagos a more cautious or callous person might have easily returned the fragment of text to its carrier. A cause for concern, perhaps, but too insubstantial to act upon. Would the Lagos authorities risk the opprobrium of the Foreign Office by giving credence to this uncorroborated scrap signed by absent Africans of lowly origins, Johnson may have asked himself. Nevertheless, Johnson interviewed the letter-bearer and seven other men lately returned from the Congo. All of them confirmed the substance of the letter by relating their own tales of mistreatment. For Johnson they painted a picture of intense and ubiquitous violence.

The British Foreign Office archives contain letters, affidavits, and interview materials from West Africans who ventured from their homelands to the Congo in the 1890s and early 1900s. These migrant labourers invariably experienced forms of exploitation in the fledgling Congo colony, and in seeking the protection of their own colonial governments they authored the first African appeals against colonial rule in this territory, drawing attention from both Colonial Office figures tasked with overseeing the affairs of Britain’s colonies, and from Foreign Office staff seeking intelligence on overseas interests. Numerous historical retellings overlook their protests, following instead the course of nineteenth-century humanitarian literature in focusing upon atrocities exacted upon Congolese that inhabited the main rubber-producing territories.³ L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan describe the West Africans as ‘mercenaries … used to conditions in the bush and familiar with the ways of white men’.⁴ The historians’ dismissive group sketch is at odds with the details of their lives that the migrants would volunteer to the authorities, missing, among other things, the West Africans’ sense of their entitlement to certain freedoms as British subjects. Gann and Duignan’s view is characteristic, however, of the attitudes that helped determine that the words of the West African individuals would tend to be bypassed in both contemporary and historical accounts of the Congo. In this chapter I recover the West African testimonies before examining their reception and mediation in two inter-connecting contexts: British diplomatic responses to the emerging Congo crisis in the 1890s, and the humanitarian crusade against the Congo atrocities in the early 1900s. The British ‘official mind’ did respond to the pleas by changing the immigration arrangements between British West Africa and Leopold’s colony and strengthening its consular presence. However, it also justified diplomatic restraint by questioning their reliability. In E.D. Morel’s anti-Congo tomes the West Africans play a minor part and are eclipsed in his historical retellings of the founding of the Congo Free State. Morel cites certain legal cases involving West Africans primarily to criticise Foreign Office intransigence and in calling for further British jurisdiction in Central Africa. While their testimonies anticipate in many ways the witness reportage which would prove central to Congo reform, the migrants’ words were generally held at arm’s length as Britain negotiated its position vis-à-vis colonial misrule within shifting frameworks of international cooperation and imperialistic rivalry. The entitlements the West Africans imagined for themselves as British colonial subjects remained largely imaginary.

Migrant letters: West African testimonies

In an early passage of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) the protagonist Marlow recalls the dire situation of migrants in the Lower Congo: ‘[b]rought from all recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest’.⁵ These words are sometimes quoted as evidence of Conrad’s liberal criticisms of empire, but rarely is it acknowledged that the passage refers specifically to migrant labourers from coastal ‘recesses’.⁶ It is impossible to know how many West Africans travelled to work in the Congo. Little attention has been paid to their story by the traditional historical optics on the European and Swahili-Arab penetrations of Central Africa. Gann and Duignan claim 12,452 labourers arrived ‘from other ports of Africa’, mainly on the west coast, between 1883 and 1901.⁷ Records of embarkation were not held centrally, however, and the anecdotal evidence in correspondence suggests that some groups travelled outside of official channels.⁸ Certainly, thousands of West Africans were signed up for employment of various kinds in the monarch’s territory. Most were initially taken to the seaport of Matadi to work in construction of the railway line.⁹ The majority were signed up as carpenters, bricklayers, or as general labourers. Others, including Hausas who travelled from Lagos, entered into armed service in the Force Publique, the Congo’s military forces having relied in the early years upon the importation of West African and Zanzibari soldiers before increasingly becoming indigenised.¹⁰

Johnson’s interviewees had all agreed to work as mechanics. In Lagos in August 1890, in the presence of the District Commissioner and a local barrister, they signed contracts with an agent of the Compagnie du Congo pour le Commerce et L’Industrie. Created by Albert Thys, this organisation included among its subsidiaries the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Congo. It had been established to head off the formation of a British Railway Company.¹¹ With scant legal provision the British West Africans were thrust into an arena of simmering mercantile competition. Immediately their contractual agreements were ignored. All the men were taken direct to Matadi without first rendezvousing with a British consul at Boma, as they had expected to do. Upon arrival at Matadi they were abandoned, left ‘exposed to sun and rain, and heat and cold at the wharf’ for around six weeks. When a six-strong delegation called on the company agent to ask for housing, or material with which to build shelter, they were ‘fisted and imprisoned’, bound together by the neck in a chain gang.¹² Whether on the beach or in jail, the men quickly sickened from the combination of poor diet and exposure. They were deprived of medicines, and some were refused entry into Matadi hospital – though this may have been an odd blessing given the invasive experiments which others would undergo in this institution.¹³ Denied the right to return home, many of the men were forced into armed service and sent upriver. There they were engaged in wars of so-called pacification, which frequently took the form of raids on villages, while experiencing brutality themselves at the hands of officers. Whether ‘Up Congo’ or at Matadi, pay was habitually withheld from the migrants. The few that had the curious good fortune of being invalided home were not given their full fare. The men with whom Johnson spoke further explained that their letters had been intercepted. This detail explains the incompleteness of the missive Johnson received: it had been written covertly, at pace, and left disguised by its lack of addressee.

Johnson learned from his eight interlocutors that four of the Lagos men had been killed by the brutality of company employees. Samuel Vincent (alias Oto), Ogidan, and Adebiyi had become seriously ill from exposure on Matadi beach. Unable to work, they were viciously beaten by European officials, dying in each case shortly after their assault. A fourth man, Egunleti, had been thrashed while leaving his work station to collect water for co-workers. He died eight days later in hospital, his condition having deteriorated as he lay confined to his hut for the first four days after his beating. Because the attack on Vincent took place in an office in the worker’s yard it was known by numerous witnesses when the Lagos authorities investigated Johnson’s findings.¹⁴ The onlookers noted that Vincent had charged the officers Lambert and Jerome, and their superintendent Goffin, with his murder shortly before he expired: ‘Murder, master you kill me’, as reported by Simeon Davies, an eyewitness to the assault.¹⁵

As Vincent’s words indicate, the migrants had not suffered in silence. Rebellion, however, risked violent and disproportionate reprisal. When a group of workers from Accra arose en masse to protect one of their number, they were brutally suppressed by the company’s Zanzibari soldiers and their lodgings were looted. The affray spilled over into the Lagos men’s nearby quarters. A number of the latter were robbed, beaten with sticks, and stabbed. Three of the Lagos contingent later died from the wounds they received in the attack. Months later, at the inquest in Lagos, Tom Thomas’s disfigured face and scarred body bore painful substantiation to his claim of having been hit in the face with a stick so forcefully that his eyebrow, his eyelid, and his eyeball were splayed. Falling to the floor insensible, Thomas was twice stabbed in the back.¹⁶ He and others left Matadi after this foray thanks to the successful remonstrations of their headman, Kaitell. Kaitell too had expected to leave, and had paid for his passage, but he was arbitrarily detained prior to the steamer’s launch. When he questioned the legality of his forced removal from a British vessel, Kaitell was beaten with the butt of a rifle. Though he was not from Lagos, lived apart from the regular labourers, and played an intermediary role be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on place names
• Map
• Introduction
• 1 Humanitarianism and diplomacy: West African migrants in the Congo Free State (c.1890–1903)
• 2 Behind the Casement report (1903–4): guides, interpreters, and interviewees
• 3 Before the Commission of Inquiry (1904–5): travellers and testifiers
• 4 The silencing of witnesses: the Stannard trial (1906) and the Sheppard trial (1909)
• 5 ‘Bringing hands to the English’: injured bodies as evidence
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index