540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)

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The Key at Antwerp A steamer moored alongside The musical chimes ringing from the old cathedral spire The sound of the Brabant-Saint The Belgian national anthem On the quay and on the steamer's decks A jostostling motley crowd. Military uniforms, the flutter of women's dresses, ship's officers gliding to and fro, the hatches battening down, steam getting up.
Surrounded by groups of relatives or boon companions, passengers bound Congo woods. Men of whose fitness for residing and governing in tropical Africa even a novice would have doubts.
Young mostly and mostly of a poor type, undersized pallid wastrels. But here and there an older bronzed individual, one who has obviously been through all this before.

The faces of these distinctly not good to look upon.

Scarred with brutality, with cruel and lustful eyes.

Faces from which one turns with an involuntary shudder of repulsion.

So that is the scene at Antwerp. It's a great in Belgium, from where the steamships head west and south to the Congo Free State in the late 1890s, as described by a barrel-chested, handlebar-moustachioed young man called Edmund Dean Morel.
And Dominic, I hope that you admire to the way in which I evoked the sense of a barrel-chested, handlebarred, moustached young man there. Well, the one thing that was missing, so two things that were missing.
Morell was born in France and his father was French. And then he went to boarding school in England.
So you should have done an accent that was a cross between... Oh, like Theo Young-Smith.
Right, like Theo Young-Smith. That's the voice you should have done.
Theo has many qualities, but he's not barrel-chested. He's not barrel-chested.
He's not barrel-chested. So, yes, I think you captured the barrel chest very nicely there, Tom.
Congratulations. Thank you, Dominic.
The reason we're talking about this guy, Edmund de Morel, is that basically he is the hero of today's episode, isn't he? He is the man who draws the crimes of King Leopold's congo free state to the world's attention um and is probably the most effective human rights campaigner of the 20th century he establishes the template for all the human rights campaigns that have followed yeah he absolutely is he is the link between the abolitionistist movement that fought slavery in Britain, America and elsewhere a generation before, and the human rights campaigns of the later 20th century, the anti-apartheid campaign and so on and so forth. And today's episode really is the story of how he and his friends and his allies bring down Leopold's regime.
Last week, we heard about how since 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium has presided over this reign of terror in the Congo Free State in pursuit of ivory and rubber and, of course, money. And this is the story of how he loses his grip.
The Congo doesn't become independent or free, of course. It passes into Belgian government hands.
But Leopold loses this prize that he has spent all his life trying to seize and then trying to sort of hide from the world's gaze. So, yeah, this is Edmund de Morel's story, really.
So let's talk a little bit about him, Tom. He is born in Paris in 1873.
Father French, mother and English Quaker, which may be relevant yeah his father died when he was young he went to boarding school in england uh he ended up becoming a british subject and becoming a clerk and he's an obscure man when he's 18 years old he starts work for liverpool shipping company called elder dempster and as luck would have it this shipping company has the contract for the steamship trade to the Congo. They have a monopoly.
So they handle all the steamships that go to and from the Congo. And that is very much dependent on the company retaining the favour of Leopold II personally, isn't it? Exactly.
They have been given the contract by the Congo Free State, and obviously they don't want to lose it. It brings them in a lot of money.
Now, by the late 1890s, at which point Morel is in his mid-twenties, they are sending him often every month to Antwerp because, of course, he speaks French. So, you know, he's a useful employee.
He's the ideal person basically to stand there at the quayside, supervising the arrivals and departures of all these steamships. He's already interested in Africa.
Why wouldn't he be? You know, Africa is a very exotic and exciting subject in the 1890s. He thinks the Congo Free State is brilliant.
He believes what he reads in the newspapers about its civilizing mission. He actually writes articles about Africa and about the Congo Free State for industry magazines because he fancies himself as a bit of a writer.
And he says, it's got a great future. King Leopold, what a tremendous fellow, all of this kind of thing.
But also, I suppose, because he's investing his future in the company. Yeah, of course.
Why wouldn't you want to read up about business that you're involved in? Absolutely. Absolutely.
But he's standing there on the quayside at antwerp and he's watching that scene that we described earlier and he starts to become suspicious of the ships that he sees because as we described at the end of last week's episode he sees all this rubber and ivory being unloaded from the ships but nothing is going back the other way. So he kind of thinks, well, what are we trading for? What are we giving them in return? Now, at one point he's called in by the Secretary of State of the Congo, who's this, he describes as a man thin to emaciation, inhuman, bloodless, petrified.
I mean, there is a quality of Bram Stoker to quite a lot of what he's writing about. Sinister things in crates.
Exactly. I was about to say there was something of the Hollywood melodron, but actually the comparison with Dracula is a really nice one.
This man calls him in and he's absolutely furious. He says the newspapers have reported what was in one of our recent shipments back to the Congo, a huge consignment of guns.
And this sort of stuff shouldn't be appearing in the newspapers. Make sure it doesn't happen again.
And Morel is confused by this. He thinks, well, why are we shipping so many guns back to the Congo? And why can't the newspapers report it? Why is it such a big deal? I mean, it's interesting that the guy assumes that Morel would understand.
Yes, exactly. Isn't that so interesting? Well, I think a lot of people perhaps would not have been curious.
Morel has a, he's curious. So he goes away and he starts just idly almost looking into the account books, looking into the figures in the office.
And he thinks this is weird. Nothing really adds up.
The accounts that he sees, the figures written down, the ledgers, don't match what he can see coming off the ships, the massive consignments of rubber and ivory. And that's not reflected in the earnings.
And it becomes obvious to him that there's a lot of fraud going on. Somebody is skimming off the top.
And the answer, of course, is King Leopold. King Leop lying about the about the amount coming in and about how much money he's making but the other thing that becomes obvious to him once he starts going through all these kind of dusty ledgers is that consignment of guns was the not the exception it was the rule they are sending thousands and thousands of guns and rounds of ammunition to the congo and nothing else and we ended last week's episode with his great moment of revelation, a very kind of Hollywood scene.
I was giddy and appalled at the cumulative significance of my discoveries. It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder.
I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader. It would make a great film, wouldn't it? It would, absolutely.
Tabby, our assistant producer, said it reminded her of the Robert Harris novel about the Dreyfus case, an officer and a spy. And it very much has that quality.
Yeah. Yeah.
Kind of whistleblower. Exactly.
So Morel goes to see the head of the company, whose man called Sir Alfred Jones, the head of the shipping magnate. So he must be thrilled.
Of course. Sir Alfred Jones is horrified when Morel says, I found all these discrepancies and I'm extremely concerned.
Jones says, well, listen, I'll go to Brussels myself and I'll talk to the king about it. Then Jones calls in Morel a few weeks later and says, well, I've been to Brussels.
I saw the king. The king said, yes, he's very disturbed about what you've discovered.
He'll set up a commission. Exactly.
Reforms will be carried out.

And Sir Alfred says to Morel, you know, don't worry.

The Belgians are doing great things.

And we have to give them time to get their African house in order.

In the next few months, Morel finds that he's being frozen out.

He's not going to Antwerp as much as he was.

Then he's offered a promotion.

Great news.

You've done so well.

And you're going to be posted overseas.

And then he says, no, I don't want to go overseas.

I want to stay in Britain.

And then he says, no, I don't want to go overseas. I want to stay in Britain.
And then he is offered another promotion to become a consultant, pushed up the ladder of the company. And it's very clear to him that the company are now trying to shut him up.
Or to offer him a bribe. Effectively, both.
I mean, that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to either get him out of the picture or push him upstairs, push him into a back office, well-paid, stay quiet.
So in 1901, at the age of 28, he resigns from Elder Dempster. And he resigns to become a full-time writer, but not just any writer.
As he wrote himself, his goal was, and I quote, to do my best to expose and destroy what I then knew to be a legalized infamy accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for a vast destruction of human life. In other words, he has quit the company to become a full-time campaigner, to become an activist, effectively.
Now, the real puzzle is why? What is it in him that makes him want to do this? See, I don't think it's a puzzle at all. I know what you're going to say.
Well, and I think Hochschild actually agrees because he wrote a kind of second edition about this. So I think it's the influence of his mother, who's a Quaker.
And throughout this podcast, we've talked about the role played by Quakers in human rights campaigns. Abolition of slavery being the obvious example.
And although it is true, as Hoxstown says, that Morel is not conventionally religious. He doesn't attend Quaker meetings or Church of England services or anything like that.
Nevertheless, it's clear that he has absorbed values, I would say, from his parents, probably particularly from his mother, and that this is manifesting itself through his moral assumptions and his campaigning zeal. Well, that is one possible explanation.
The only downside with that is there's absolutely no evidence for it, because we do know that he's in no way personally religious, and there's no evidence that his mother did have this influence on him. So it's a supposition, and it's not an unreasonable one, but it's only a supposition.
He has values. Yes, he does.
And where do these values come from? I mean, they don't just magically materialise. Maybe they come from his boarding school, Tom.
You're underplaying the importance of the school, which is sad. Well, maybe.
I mean, you have a sense of campaigning zeal, of a particular commitment to notions of human rights, a long historical tradition. His mother belongs to that tradition.
He manifests that tradition. I would say it's the likeliest explanation.
Well, the truth of the matter, of course, is we don't know. What we do know is he does feel personally responsible because he has worked for the company.
And I think that's a huge part of this story. And it is also with his great ally, who we'll come to later.
This is the story of two men who both felt implicated because they had both been perhaps naive in some way. Well, but think of Benjamin Lay going to the Caribbean and feeling personally implicated in slavery there.
I think the parallels are very, very clear. It's a very common story, actually.
Some of the keenest abolitionists tend to be people who've been involved with the trade in some way. Anyway, at first, he struggles.
And this is something, actually, that Adam Hochschild's book doesn't really capture um that that actually at first he succeeds only because he gets funding from a rival liverpool shipping tycoon and this is a guy called john holt who's a rival of sir alfred jones and gives him the money to found his own paper the west african mail so there's a really good article on this by a scholar called dean clay and he points out that basically this is a question not just of altruism, but of business rivalry. This rival tycoon wants to bring down Elder Demster, or at least do them down a bit.
So he gives Morel the money to do his campaign. And Morel starts to pour out, not just dozens of articles, thousands of words, but millions of words.
So an enormous quantity of what we have been saying in this podcast about the Congo comes from Edmund D. Morel, because he is the single biggest source.
He's publishing books, he's publishing articles, editorials. When you look behind so many of the anecdotes and the quotations and indeed the statistics, they come from this one man.
And he never goes to the Congo. That's the thing.
Rather like King Leopold. But the extraordinary thing is he is absolutely brilliant at persuading insiders, even people within the mercenary force, the force publique, to leak material to him.
Which goes back to your question, Tom, last week about are there people who feel guilty are there people who feel who have regrets or have doubts there clearly are because from 1901 they are feeding this guy information the facts and figures and anecdotes and all of these kinds of things and i suppose the situation for them was that that if if they're feeling a sense of guilt about what they've been doing, they don't have a vent for it. But Morel's appearance on the scene provides them with just that vent.
Exactly. He gets so much information, he starts to taunt the administration of the Congo.
He'll print lists of things that their own employees have offered to sell him. He'll say, basically, here's the bullet-pointed list of the things that I'm being offered.
At one point, they issue an instruction to their subordinates. They say, stop writing things down because Morel is reprinting them in his newspaper.
He gets hold of that order, and he prints that in his newspaper as well. So he's mocking them the whole time.
But his single most powerful source, actually, this will please you, Tom? It doesn't please me, but it doesn't surprise me. Let's put it like that.
It's not from within the administration, but it's missionaries. So many of the most shocking stories that we mentioned last week about floggings, about beatings, about these horrendous atrocities, these are from Protestant missionaries, often British, American or Scandinavian.

So he said in the previous episode about the hand chopping, the most notorious manifestation of barbarism in the Congo, that these were usually from corpses, from dead people. But there is one horrible account by an American missionary where he describes seeing soldiers cut off someone's hand and, quote, while the poor heart beat strongly enough to shoot the blood from the cut arteries at a distance of fully four feet.
I mean, once you read details like that, they're kind of seared on the mind, aren't they? They are seared on the mind. And that's partly why his campaign is so effective.
So by about 1903, within two years of leaving his job, Morel has managed to, by writing and writing and writing, and he's got all these great journalistic contacts, he places pieces everywhere, he's managed to make this a political issue in Britain.

And in May 1903, the House of Commons actually holds a debate on the Congo Free State.

There is a motion to call upon the signatories to the Conference of Berlin to take measures to ensure that the Congolese people are going to be treated with greater humanity. And the motion is introduced by the Liberal MP Herbert Samuel.
And he, in his speech, so I had a look at Hansard for the text of the debate, he deplores what he calls the seething turmoil and barbarous acts of repression under King Leopold.

You know, he doesn't hold back. But the brilliant thing for us, Tom, is that he presents this as a great patriotic British endeavour to clean this up.
It's always been the boast of this country, says Herbert Samuel, not only that our own native subjects are governed on principles of justice, but that ever since the days of Wilberforce,

England has been the leader in all movements on behalf of the backward races of the earth. Here is an occasion when those responsible for our policy might pursue these great traditions and add to the annals of the good deeds of this country.
I mean, there is, of course... A lot going on there.
There's a lot going on there. But just to point out that, of course, Britain's preponderance in the anti-slavery campaign, and now as is being proposed in the campaign against the depredations in the Congo, is dependent on her global power.
Yes, of course. Dependent on the Navy and dependent by implication on the possession of her empire.
And so essentially what is being offered is a kind of form of liberal imperialism, isn't it? Absolutely it is. That the British Empire exists as a force for good.
And I mean, this is something that has been manifest in the campaign against slavery right from the time of Napoleon. So the Congress of Vienna, it is mass demonstrations in Britain that forces Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, to go to the Congress of Vienna and say, guys, I'm really sorry.
We've got to write in all this anti-slavery stuff. And kind of the same thing is happening now because the motion is carried in the Commons and it is proposed that all the countries that had been participants in the Berlin Conference should get together and press for a Congo state that is governed with humanity.
Exactly. So its supreme irony is that it's Britain's imperial position that allows it to take this view, which of course some listeners may say is rank hypocrisy, but others may say is an example of the kind of ambiguity of empire, right? Well, we'll be talking about this, won't we, in our bonus episode.
Exactly. Now, the Foreign Office, when it hears about this debate, says, OK, you know, let's not rush into anything.
Let's actually try to get some hard evidence ourselves rather than relying on us activists. We have a man on the ground in the Congo and we'll ask him to find out exactly what's going on.
And now we come to the other great hero of this story. And this is a man called Roger Casement.
And next week, Tom, I know you're going to be talking to the Irish novelist, the great prize-winning novelist, John Banville, about Roger Casement's story. He's an extraordinarily interesting figure.
There's a richly fascinating life. So John Banville will be talking about him because, in John Banville's opinion, Roger Casement is the greatest of Irishmen.
Right. High praise.
Because we should mention he's the British consul, but he is Irish. Yes.

So just very quickly on Casement, because we'll be doing him next week.

Casement's born to a Protestant family in Dublin.

He went to the Congo when he was 19 years old.

He is implicated.

He had worked for Henry Morton Stanley as a surveyor. He'd worked on the route for Leopold's railway.

Casement is a very handsome, striking man, an enormous black beard, great sense of natural dignity, very polite. He's a great talker.
Everybody comments about his voice, says what a beautiful voice he has. No sense of humour whatsoever, I think it is fair to say, which is always a good thing in an activist, by the way.
You don't want them to be sort of ironic. You want them to be earnest.
And everybody always remarks how kind and gentle he is. Even when he first arrived in the Congo, people said he's very nice to the Africans.
People said he was too nice. He gives away too much.
Joseph Conrad had met him in his journey in 1890. Well, they'd gone together on the Rue de Belge, the steamship.
They had hung out together. Conrad had written his journal that um casement was most intelligent and very sympathetic and casement undoubtedly had heard stories about the darkness because we know that in 1887 he'd been in the steamboat with a belgian officer who said ah life in the congo is brilliant i pay my my men five brass rods for every severed head they bring me well i think is, isn't it, on the darkening sense Conrad has of imperialism derives a lot from Casement.
So Casement had joined the British Colonial Service. He'd worked elsewhere in Africa.
And then in 1901, the Foreign Office sent him back to the Congo as Britain's consul. And before going to the Congo, he went to see King Leopold in Brussels.
King Leopold said, oh, brilliant. I hope you have a great time in the Congo.
If you've got any issues, come to me first. If you saw anything wrong.
I'm the father of the Congolese. Exactly.
Casement goes to the Congo and quite clearly he's very disturbed by what he sees. He says it's beastly.
He starts asking the foreign office if he can go on a fact-finding trip to the interior. And for various reasons, it doesn't happen.
But then after this commons debate, they say, okay, you can go. Please go and find out what on earth is going on.
So Casement goes off on this mission. He is not, I think it's fair to say, a happy or a well man.
He's got malaria. He's got dysentery.
He's also plagued. I'm sure you'll talk about this with John Banville, Tom.
He's plagued by doubt and guilt because Casement is gay. And his sexuality is a kind of a torment to him in many ways.
You know, he has all these sort of agonies of fear and doubt and whatnot. Anyway, he goes upriver by steamboat.
He spends three months in the interior. Have you seen this? for company he has a bulldog called john and he has a servant called hairy bob and hairy bob can cook only three dishes chicken custard and boiled sugar chicken and custard is delicious well i mean if you've got dysentery is this the ideal diet that's my question no wonder his casement is so miserable so he goes into the interior, and what he finds is even worse than he feared.
And we know this from his daily diary. The country a desert, no natives left.
I walked into villages and saw the nearest one. Population dreadfully decreased.
Only 93 people left out of many hundreds. And then a really sort of moving entry in its way.
August the 30th, 16 men, women, and children up from a village in Boye, close to the town. Infamous.
The men were put in the prison. The children let go at my intervention.
Infamous. Infamous, shameful system.
Now, all the time he is sending dispatches back to London and he says, oh, this is dreadful. Leopold has, and I quote, put the natives on a path to their final extinction and the universal condemnation of civilized mankind.
And you can well imagine the Foreign Office getting these, thinking, oh, come on, oh no, because they don't want to cause a huge fuss. But also lurking in that sense of the shameful system, the infamous shameful system, I mean, is the system that he's talking about specifically the Belgian Congo, or is it the broader apparatus of imperialism per se? Encasement is on a kind of journey, isn't he, that will lead him to condemn not just Leopold's empire in the Congo, but imperialism full stop.
Exactly. Because of that, of course, is the worry for the Foreign Office and for the british government generally is that you know sure look into the congo free state but stop there you know you shouldn't be looking into other colonies because of course that colonists are perfect anyway he gets back to london eventually goes back to england in 1903 he writes his report he actually finished the report coming home from a country house weekend with weekend with his old pal Joseph Conrad.
Now his report is written in this kind of legalese. Hogschild describes it, I thought, in fascinating terms, the language that amnesty and similar groups would later make their own formal and sober, assessing the reliability of various witnesses, filled with references to laws and statistics and accompanied by appendices and depositions.
And that's the key, isn't it? That it's not written in a tone of moral outrage. It's sober, cool, designed to appeal to bureaucrats and functionaries.
But you mentioned the depositions. So at the end, he has kind of witness statements that go into all the horrors.
And the Foreign Office is really shocked by the witness statements. The British ambassador to Belgium says, can't believe that the belgians would have done this there are there are cultivated people even under a tropical sky surely the belgians couldn't have lowered themselves to this anyway this report is finally published britain sends copies at the beginning of 1904 to every signatory to the conference of berlin even leopold can't ignore this i mean this is a big story and he says well i'll set up my own commission to investigate it that's his usual ploy and in the second half we'll see how that turns out for him but casement is not yet finished he now really has the zeal of a convert he gets in touch with morel they have dinner in london and they talk until two o'clock in the morning.
And Morel gave a wonderful, a wonderful, vivid account of their first meeting, which I will read. He said, from the moment our hands gripped and our eyes met, mutual trust and confidence were bred and the feeling of isolation slipped from me like a mantle.
Here was a man indeed, one who would convince those in high places of the foulness of the crime committed on a helpless race. Morel said in his memoir, you know, I often see him casement now in imagination as I saw him at that memorable interview crouching over the fire in the otherwise unlighted room, unfolding in a musical soft, almost even voice in language of peculiar dignity and pathos, the story of a vile conspiracy.
And as Casement talks in this beautiful voice of his, Morel said, I believe that I saw those hunted women clutching their children, flying, panic-stricken to the bush, the blood flowing, the ghastly tally of severed heads and all this kind of thing you know casement's

casement skill as a storyteller is so important this voice that everyone talks about exactly now casement says to him that night and afterwards look i think we should set up a big new organization devoted to the congo and casement says to him you know the congo is is different from other campaigns. The Congo is a unique evil.

And if we can rouse the British people, the world might be roused.

Britain had played that part before, meaning in the campaign against slavery.

Could we raise a throbbing in that great heart of hers?

Right.

This is a tremendous story.

It's about kindness, but it's also about how brilliant Britain is.

But this is, I mean, will become the key point of divergence between Morel and Casement. Exactly.
Because for Morel, Congo is sui generis. It's hideous.
It has nothing to do with the broader imperial context. And Casement will come to a very different conclusion.
Yeah. And listeners, we'll discuss this in the bonus episode.
Is the Congo unique or is the Congo symptomatic of the crimes of imperialism? And this is an issue for historians to this day. And indeed for moralists and theologians.
Exactly. Ongoing debate at the moment.
Very, very, very bitter debate, I think is fair to say. So anyway, Morel says, look, I mean, the new organization, I don't really have the money to set this up casement says here's a check for 100 pounds which he can't afford it's more than a month's salary for casement a lot of money morel uses this to buy a typewriter and the congo reform association is born one of the great human rights campaigning organizations now after this casement slightly drops out of the story.
The Foreign Office give him a promotion. They promote him to consul in Lisbon.
So off he goes to Portugal. Which he doesn't like because he finds it too civilised.
Yes, it's boring. He and Morel are still great pals.
They had a code. They had nicknames for each other.
So Casement was Tiger. Morel was Bulldog.
And Leopold was the King of Beasts. You see, I find that odd because I would have thought that casement would be the bulldog because he's got john his bulldog uh but morel is more he looks like a bulldog yeah he looks like a bulldog and maybe there's a sort of patriotic thing there you know he's got a british bulldog with his barrel chest maybe but i think of john okay i don't think casement is a tiger if you're going to be an animal casement's not a tiger no i think he'suma.
A puma? Yeah. Because he goes to South America, and he's a kind of man of the shadows.
Yes, I suppose. Yes, I can see that.
Anyway, that's… But it's good to have a dog in the story. I love a dog on the rest of his history.
We're very keen on dogs. So Morel throws himself into this new association.
It has its first meeting in Liverpool, of course, the great shipping port in 1904, and it gets 1,000 people. Now, it's slightly different from other human rights campaigns, and this is perhaps why it's more effective.
It's a very establishment campaign. He has all kinds of endorsements from earls and viscounts, especially bishops.
He loves a bishop, and he loves an MP. Bishop's very big in the anti-apartheid campaign.
Indeed. He loves an MP.
And he never, Morrell never criticises the British Empire or colonialism per se. He loves Britain.
He loves Britain's empire. So that's not just a tactical move.
He genuinely thinks Britain is top nation and also top nation for kindness. And that's why Britain is peculiarly well equipped to lead this campaign.
I think he genuinely thinks this. And he is, for somebody who basically was a shipping clerk, he turns out to be absolutely brilliant at running this campaign.
He works incredibly hard. He writes 600 letters a month, which is 20 letters a day on average.
He's a brilliant speaker.

He will talk without notes to audiences of thousands,

week after week after week.

He's great at tailoring his message to different audiences.

So to businessmen, he will talk about Leopold as monopoly betrays free trade.

To bishops, he says, it's our Christian duty.

To audiences of the sort of common people, he says, it's Britain's responsibility as top nation to lead the world. He always makes sure he has MPs from different parties sitting on the platform, as well as all the local bigwigs.
He's great at wooing rich supporters. So the Cadbury's chocolate family, we did a podcast about them last year.
They're Quakers. They see themselves as great philanthropists.
He gets loads of donations from them. He likes a celebrity.
So Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes creator, he gets Conan Doyle to rallies. He gets him to write his own book on the Congo, the crime of the Congo.
I mean, the thing about that is Conan Doyle is very keen, say, on the war against the birds in in South Africa, that the British are fighting. So he sees no contradiction between supporting British imperialism in South Africa and excoriating Belgian imperialism in the Congo.
What a perfect recruit. Probably the most famous writer of the day.
Very patriotic. You know, you can't write him off as a do-gooding, bleeding-hearted.
You loves a campaigning cause Conan Doyle but there's no doubt that he also loves Britain so the perfect perfect person to have and Morel also knows the value of the modern image so it's Morel who really pioneers the use of slideshows with all these pictures of people with their hands cut off, and this is, in a way, the highlight of his rallies.

It's the bit that everyone's been waiting for and that everyone will remember. He shows them the pictures, and that's the thing that really, really has an effect.
AJP Taylor, the great historian, himself from a dissenting background, said that Morell was, in his view, the single best, most effective activist, most effective leader of a campaign in British history. And I don't think he's wrong, actually.
I mean, the thing is that he is kind of going with the grain of British public opinion. Part of their patriotism is a sense that this is the country that abolished the slave trade.
They're on the side of the angels, all of that. But in government, there is still a kind of a slight cynicism, a slightly more Machiavellian approach to things.
So there's a Belgian newspaper editor who is quoted by Hoxheld who once shrewdly remarked that Lord Salisbury, who was prime Minister throughout much of this period, and I quote,

is not a man to care much about the fate of the blacks, any more than that

of the Armenians or the Bulgarians.

And Morel himself writing about

Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary, of course,

in the build-up to the... Great hero of yours,

Tom. Great hero of mine,

great fisherman, great bird watcher.

However,

Morel does say of Sir Edward Grey that he would act only when kicked, and if the process of kicking is stopped, he will do nothing. And basically, Morel sees it as his job to do that kicking.
But as kickers go, he's probably the best kicker, or one of the best kickers. The Johnny Wilkinson of moral kicking.
And not just in Britain. So by the middle of the 1900s, there are branches of his association in France, in Germany, in the countries of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in Australia, in New Zealand.

And he has put the issue of the Congo Free State on the front pages of newspapers in almost every country on earth.

So the question is, is this enough to trouble Leopold? How will the king fight back? Can I just read what you've put in your notes, the concluding question? So just a quote, this is what you've written, Dominic. So the tide seems to be turning, but will this be enough to trouble Leopold? How will he fight back? And how does it involve one of the, and now Capitals, fattest men in history.
The fattest men in history.

Come back after the break

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This is American missionaries.

This is Frank British. These meddlesome American missionaries, these frank British consuls, these blabbing Belgian-born traitor officials, those tiresome parrots are always talking.
They have told how for twenty years I have ruled the Congo state, seizing and holding the state as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private swag. Mine, solely mine, claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves, the rubber, the ivory, and all the other riches of the land.
mine, mine solely, and gathered for me by the men, the women, and the little children, and the compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation, and the altar. These pests, they have kept nothing back.
They have revealed these and yet other details which shame should have kept them silent about since they were exposures of a king a sacred personage and immune from reproach by the right of his appointment to his great office by God himself so that was King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, as ventriloquized by Mark Twain in his satirical monologue, King Leopold's Soliloquy, which he published in 1905. Mark Twain, of course, one of the greatest American writers, and we've already had a lot of great writers in this series, but it's good to get Twain in, isn't it?

Definitely.

So it comes Twain a little bit because Twain joins the campaign against the Congo Free State.

But first of all, well, how's Leopold?

How's he reacted to all this?

I mean, I think it's fair to say he probably does think what the words that Twain has put into his mouth.

Leopold is now, he turned 60 in 1895.

He's a very rich man, but he's very unpopular in Belgium. He has all these villas on the French Riviera.
He's got a massive yacht. He spends a lot of his time in the south of France.
A lot of Belgians say to themselves, well, he's got this massive colony, all this money, but we're not seeing any benefits from it. Dominic, what about his love life? Well, he's disgraced himself to him, I think.
He's let Belgium down. So he has got this new mistress who is exceedingly controversial.
She's a young French prostitute called Caroline de Lacroix, or Lacroix, the different versions of her name. They probably met when he was 65 and she was 16.
They probably met at a brothel or hotel in Paris. Am I right that she was probably pimped by a guy who'd been her lover? That's right.
Who's a former soldier called Antoine Emmanuel Durieux. And as we will see, he remains very much on the scene.
He's always lurking in the background, adding to the general quality of moral property. Now, Leopold's wife, who of course he hated, died in 1902, and he now becomes completely obsessed with Caroline.
He installed her near his castle at Lacken outside Brussels. He spent millions of francs on jewels and clothes for her.
He gave her a retinue of servants. I mean, disgracefully, Tom, he took her with him to Queen Victoria's funeral, which was an enormous scandal.
She bore him two children in 1909 and 1910. And actually, far more than the issue of the Congo Free State, this is what destroys his reputation in Belgium.
But the two issues become slightly conflated in the world's press. So when her second son was born, there was some issue with his hand.
I'm not exactly sure what it was, but whether he had a withered arm or what it was. But anyway, there's an issue with his hand.
And Punch magazine in England, then very, very popular, published a cartoon showing Leopold holding this baby with a kind of injured hand. And he's surroundedrican corpses with severed hands and the caption says vengeance from on high in other words god has punished you for what you've done to these people yeah that's that's pretty punchy yeah that's literally literally yeah exactly so now leopold is very upset by all this of course and he does something very.
He employs a PR campaign of his own. They place articles in the newspapers about abuses in British colonies, i.e.
he's saying, you are the most dreadful hypocrites. You know, you think I'm bad.
Look at what you're doing in Nigeria or Sierra Leone or Africa. He's got a point.
Well, we'll discuss whether he's got a point in the bonus episode. But it's fair to say, I think it's absolutely fair to say all european empires have skeletons rattling around in their closets he's not wrong about that that's for sure he gets his tame shipping companies to sponsor books and articles he sets up lobby groups with i mean all with these sort of comical names the committee for the protection of interest in africa yeah the federation for the defense Belgian Interests Abroad.
You know, all of these groups that, again, sound very contemporary, don't they? I mean, the kind of thing you see all the time. Well, it's what South Africa did during the apartheid campaign.
Of course. And I suppose it's also, to a degree, kind of what big tobacco or big oil tend to do.
Of course it is. Of course it is.
They subsidise magazines, which he does. He has a magazine called New Africa, the truth about the Congo free state.
You know, this is classic. You know, it's so common now, but at the time it is groundbreaking.
And he spends a lot of money on journalists. And then we know about this because we have the paper trail of his attempts to bribe the German press.
Entertainingly, his chief agent in Germany, who was a guy called Ludwig van Stoib, claimed that the Belgians were very slow about handing over, about reimbursing him for his costs. And he wrote to Brussels and said, where's my reimbursement? And he said, now you keep asking me for receipts.
Obviously, I don't have any receipts. Yeah, it's all underhand.
Because I'm giving people cash giving people cash brown envelopes or whatever by the way one issue for leopold is that um our old friend the kaiser in germany the kaiser absolutely despises leopold he called him satan and mammon in one person is this the same kaiser who is leading the country that is simultaneously practicing genocide in Namibia? That's the man. Right.
Okay. Yeah.
I think there's a fair bit of double standards. Pot kettle.
Exactly. Now, the battle moves in about 1904 to America.
America, of course, was the first country to recognize the Congo Free State. It's a bit of an embarrassment, do you think? Yes, I think so.
And Edmund D. Morrell says, you know, the United States has a special responsibility to address this because they are the country that basically opened the door to Leopold getting this territory.
But also, as in the abolitionist movement, that there is a kind of congruity, a moral congruity between British and American takes on this. Absolutely.
So missionaries will often do tours, speaking tours, British missionaries in America, American missionaries in Britain. There is a sense of, dare I say, a special relationship, a sort of moral relationship on this front.
So in 1904, Morel goes to America. He meets Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.
He recruits Mark Twain. Twain is then in his 60s.
He's probably the most famous author in America. He's all in on the campaign.
He's a man who knows the world. I mean, he's been around the world.
He can absolutely understand how this could happen. And he's a great activist.
He's a great campaigner, Twain. He goes to Washington three times to lobby the president, to lobby Congress.
And it becomes this huge crusade. Petitions signed by thousands of people, by governors, by senators, university presidents, and so on.
Now, Leopold, again, doesn't take this line down. He fights back.
He mounts a lobbying campaign in America. He offers Congo concessions to the Guggenheim family, to John D.
Rockefeller. He gives artifacts to the American Museum of Natural History because he knows that J.P.
Morgan is on the board. And he pays American academics to defend him.
So to give you just one example, a guy called Frederick Starr from the University of Chicago, he's paid by Leopold to write a series of articles for the Chicago Tribune called The Truth About the Congo Free State. But then Leopold makes a terrible mistake, and Tom, we promised a very large man, and now he rumbles, he looms into view.
How large is he? Just so we get that established. He's about 21 stone.

I don't know what that is in American measurements.

So you've,

you're so heavy.

One journalist said he made president Taft look like a top worker in a team

of acrobats.

Exactly.

President Taft is famously large.

He's the fattest president in American history.

And this bloke makes Taft look like a kind of gym.

Like a sylph.

Exactly.

So this guy is called Colonel.

I mean,

you couldn't make it up.

He's called Colonel Henry I. Kowalsalski and leopold takes him on as his chief lobbyist and pays him the equivalent of about a million dollars a year today 100 000 francs now kowalski has a series of problems one he's a total fraud and two he's a narcoleptic so And this may be related, I think, Tom, to his fatness.
So he will fall asleep unexpectedly. He's a lawyer.
He'll fall asleep in court. He falls asleep when he's waiting to meet people in hotel lobbies.
And he also, I read, falls asleep in the street. So he'll be like walking down the street or something.
And, well, I don't know. Is he still standing up? Does he fall over? I mean, he's a large man.
Don't sheep go to sleep standing up? Standing up, exactly. So you'd hope that he wouldn't fall.
There's sort of tremors. Yes.
Echoing across New York. Anyway, the Belgian ambassador, when he hears that Leopold has employed this guy, says, what? This man is a notorious fraud.
Like, don't, what are we doing? So basically after the first year the belgians don't renew this guy kowalski's contract you know we've actually no we've changed our minds kowalski when he's not asleep is outraged by this and do you know what he does he goes straight to the newspaper baron william randolph hearst and he says i've've been working as a paid lobbyist for King Leopold II of Belgium. Would you like the story? And to Leopold's horror, in December 1906, the New York American, one of Hearst's papers, banner headline on its front page, King Leopold's amazing attempt to influence our Congress exposed.
And Kowalski has told them everything everything including the fact that he's been paying a staffer on the senate foreign relations committee to basically derail congressional resolutions on the congo and for every day for a week hearst's papers lead with the congo pictures of the severed hands shocking missionary accounts the's a massive story. And basically, by the time it's all over, Leopold has comprehensively lost American public opinion.
Because I remember when that campaign is launched that leads to the United States being the first country to recognize Leopold's jurisdiction over the Congo, somebody said, oh, he's the kind of person who gives kings a good name yeah but presumably the fact that he is a king actually just makes him seem even worse in american eyes yeah an evil corrupt european king i mean it's a he's the perfect villain isn't he with his sort of 12 year old mistress or whatever she is i mean it's it's a terrible, he is a very bad standard bearer for European colonialism. I think it's fair to say.
So Leopold has probably only one card left now. Remember that he had set up one of his little fake commissions to investigate the casement report.
So this has three judges on it. There's one Italian, there's one Belgian, and there's one swiss and leopold is pretty confident that they will fall into line because the italian bloke already works in the congo as his chief appeal court judge so he thinks well what could possibly go wrong and unbelievably to his complete horror the judges they take it far too seriously they say well we'll obviously go to the congo and investigate the abuses it's like you know oh no they go up the river by steamboat joseph conrad style they talk to 400 witnesses they talk to africans who've been flogged with the chicot they talk to people who've been held hostage all of this kind of thing you know leopold meanwhile is lurking back in Brussels, waiting for their report.
And he starts to hear rumours that one of the judges, we don't know which one, has started crying during the interviews, has been so moved by the stories. That's a very bad sign for Leopold.
Then a terrible sign. The judges come back and they go to brief the governor general.
So that's in Leopoldville.

I guess it's in Leopoldville at this point. Um, or Boma, the original capital.

I'm not sure which this is a guy called Mr. Costumans.

They go to brief him about their findings. Costumans,

when they leave Costumans office,

Costumans is so shocked that he doesn't speak to anybody for days.

And then two weeks later, he cuts his throat with a razor and kills himself. I mean, it's interesting that it seems genuinely to have shocked him.
Well, of course, if he's the governor general, he probably hasn't even gone upriver into the interior and seen what's going on. But the impression I've had is that everybody there knows what's going on.
I think there are people who probably work in the, who are, as it were, civil servants who perhaps have just closed their eyes. Do you think? I don't know.
He perhaps, in part of it, I think it's very common in history. You have people who are part of their mind.
They kind of know what's going on, but they've, you know, they've closed that door. Maybe it's guilt.
Maybe it's guilt. Yeah.
As well as shock. I don't know.
So the report came out in November 1905 and again it's a very loyally kind of report not sensational at all. The individual statements were not released the witness statements they actually weren't open to researchers until the 1980s.
But they do preserve the voices of the Congolese. So throughout this story we've been saying we haven't got them but now we do have them yeah do you want to read a couple of extracts tom um to give you a sense so you yeah so you've not included the most shocking but here's a flavor so he's talking about an official he told his sentries to tie us to two trees with our feet off the ground our arms were stretched over our heads we were hanging in this way several days and nights.
Whilst we hung there, three sentries and the white man beat us in the private parts on the neck and other parts of the body with big hard sticks till we fainted. When I was very small, the soldiers came to make war in my village because of the rubber.
A soldier used a knife to cut off my right hand and took it away. So again, there is testimony to living people having their hands cut off it's not just corpses i saw that he was carrying other cut off hands the same day my father and mother were killed and i know that they had their hands cut off so i mean living dead it's all about the hands and then a final one i knew jungi well the white man held his head while nikoi standing at his feet hit him with a cane finally nikoi kicked jungi several times and told him to get up when he didn't move akate said to the white man this man is dead you've killed him the white man replied i don't give a damn the judges are white men like me so no wonder they kept him hidden in belgium so that report really was leopold's last chance to recapture the narrative.
And obviously he completely failed. By this point, he's become an even more grotesque figure than ever.
He's in his early seventies. He's a massive hypochondriac.
He's riding around Belgium on a gigantic tricycle, drinking decanters of hot water, which he thinks are good for his health. Everyone in Belgium hates him.
And once this Kowalski business comes out in America, and then the reports,

obviously by his own tame judges, he realizes the game is up. And effectively at this point,

he realizes, I'm going to have to get rid of the Congo and I want my money back. And so he decides he's going to sell it to the Belgian state.
The one thing, of course, at the beginning,

he didn't want to do. Now, unfortunately, for those of us who would like to see justice done,

Let's go. and so he decides he's going to sell it to the Belgian state.
The one thing, of course, at the beginning he didn't want to do. Now, unfortunately, for those of us who would like to see justice done, Leopold is in a very strong position here.
This has been horrendous publicity for Belgium. Dominic, I mean, important just to say that there are a lot of Belgians who have also been participating in this campaign.
A lot of journals, a lot of magazines, a lot of newspapers. So it's not like there are Belgians who are not appalled by what's been going on, just like everyone else.
Of course, especially in their Belgian politicians who are absolutely mortified by this and horrified that the name of their country has been associated with this. Absolutely.
I mean, this isn't... Because this has been King Leopold's project.
There have been Belgians involved. You're absolutely right.
There have been Belgians who have blown the whistle and there have been Belgians who have been really, really shocked and campaigned against it. But for the Belgian government, I mean, could you get worse publicity for a small country? Obviously you couldn't.
And the British and the Americans are putting them under intense pressure. You cannot let Leopold sell this to France or Germany.
We don't want the French or the Germans to get hold of the Congo and all of its rubber and all of this. So the Belgians decide under this Anglo-American pressure, they're going to have to buy it off him themselves.
And they do. Because of his dodgy accounts, the negotiations take ages, more than a year.
But but in march 1908 they finally agree they will pay him 50 million francs which is the equivalent of billions of pounds or dollars today thankfully leopold doesn't have very long to spend his winnings because he died in december 1909 probably of cancer of course leopold beingopold, his death is a massive scandal because it turned out that he'd secretly married

his mistress, Caroline, just before his death,

and he'd left her most of his fortune,

not his daughter's.

Because we talked about that this was the great ambition

of his life, was to disinherit his daughters.

And also, just to add that seven months

after Leopold's death, Caroline,

who is now enormously rich, marries Durieux. The pimp.
The pimp. And I think Hoxchild says that Durieux may well be the most successful pimp in the history of pimping.
My words. He kind of reaps in the largest financial reward.
Because basically, I mean, he's made millions and millions

and millions.

There's a massive scandal,

a huge legal battle,

three-way legal battle

between Leopold's daughters,

Garoline,

and the Belgian government

for control of his estate.

I can't believe Robert Harris

hasn't written a novel about this.

But the thing is,

you see,

it ends up being forgotten

because just five years

after his death,

plucky little Belgium

becomes, you know, the casus belli for Britain in the First World War. And it has a new king now, his nephew, Albert.
And he becomes the great symbol of Belgian resistance, doesn't he? So everybody is like, let's forget Leopold ever existed. So the Belgian royal family get what kind of great war washed, I suppose.
They do get, yes, they do get great war washed, exactly. So let's just say very quickly about what happened to the other characters in this story.
Stanley, at the time, actually came out of this pretty untainted by the Congo scandal. He'd become an MP, a liberal unionist MP.
He died in 1904. So round about the time, the furore is reaching its peak.

But it never really seemed to sort of engulf him. Although, of course, now, you know, modern historians and biographers, when they write about Stanley, I mean, obviously, the Congo plays a very large part in his story.
There was a big debate, wasn't there, whether to remove a statue of him from his birthplace in Wales. That's right.
Yeah. I think they kept the statue.
I think it's still there. uh casement who we'll be hearing lots more about next week with you and john banville

um he ended up becoming the champion of another great humanitarian campaign. So rubber workers in the Peruvian Amazon.
He's a great champion of them. He's knighted in 1911, but then he becomes absorbed by another cause, which is Irish freedom.
An extraordinary story.

And he ends up on a U-boat with a load of guns trying to smuggle weapons in.

Kind of three days before the Easter Rising.

I mean, spoiler alert, he's hanged for high treason.

Most of his Congo allies plead for clemency.

Morel pleads for clemency.

Conan Doyle pleads for clemency.

But interestingly, Joseph Conrad did not and refused. And Conrad said Casement had taken honours from Britain.
He'd represented Britain. We got a knighthood, hadn't we? He had then betrayed Britain and he got what was coming to him.
So Conrad's a pretty conservative figure, so that's not necessarily surprising. Morel carried on campaigning about the Congo, even after being taken over by the Belgians.
We'll come to that in just a second. But he was radicalized eventually, a little bit like Casement.
So in the First World War, Morel is probably the best known pacifist in Britain. And he ended up being sent to prison for sending pacifist pamphlets to Switzerland, which was in breach of the Defense of the Realm Act.
He ends up joining the Labour Party. He stood for Labour in Dundee in 1922.
He beat Winston Churchill at the House of Commons. It's amazing how all these figures kind of intersect.
They connect. I know there's a great book to be written about, you know, imagine a book with characters like Conrad, Casement, Morell, Churchill, all of these, Mark Twain.
Anyway, he died tragically of a heart attack two years after being elected to parliament when he was just 51. So that was the end of him.
But his legacy, of course, is a tradition of human rights activism that never really goes away. And obviously, we're still very familiar with to this day.
But before we close, we should just a word about the Congo. Because the real question, of course, is how does it change? What changes after Leopold is gone? It's definitely true that when the Belgians take it over, there are fewer reports of atrocities.
We don't have the same reports of burned villages, people being taken hostage. It doesn't seem to have been the severing of hands, all of that stuff.
However, a lot of the caste in the Congo are the same people, the same officials, the same station chiefs. The force publique continues with the same name.
The rubber trade continues, and there is still forced labor. Even after the First World War, the Belgian Congo is notoriously brutal.
They're still using the chicots. They're still using forced labour.
The focus has moved now to mining, copper, tin, and gold. But the conditions in those mines are pretty horrific, and thousands of people die.
There's Tintin in Congo, Hergé, I think his second Tintin book. And he goes there, and it turns out all to be the fault of Al Capone yeah and Tintin in the Congo you can't get it you have to order it especially you can't get it now it's been withdrawn from sort of general sale in children's bookshops it's seen only as a kind of historical curiosity because the portrait of Belgian colonialism and of the people in the Congo is seen as um for 21st century children, which I can completely understand, I have to say.
Even in the Second World War, when obviously Belgium is one of the Allies, there's still forced labour. And the colonial government demands 120 days per person of forced labour from its African population to meet the Allies' demands for rubber, for their

trucks, for their Jeeps, for their tyres of their aeroplanes and so on.

So, you know, there is that dark side to the Allied war effort.

Now, some scholars have tried to make a case for the Belgian Congo and have said, you know,

great public health campaigns, trying to eliminate sleeping sickness and yellow fever and things like that.

And there's perhaps a degree of truth in that.

But one thing that people always say about their con is, you know, look at the results, judge us on the legacy.

And the truth of the matter is, if you look at what became of the Belgian Congo after 1960, after independence, I i think it would be very very hard to say that's a record to be proud of wouldn't you and the role played by belgium in upholding it as a territory supplying western needs it's taken up by the united states doesn't't it? Yes. CIA-sponsored assassinations,

backing for Mobutu,

who's, I mean, the kind of,

the parody of a kleptocrat.

And I think we said this right at the beginning,

that in a way,

Mobutu is the real heir of King Leopold II.

He is indeed.

He is indeed.

So there's obviously still loads to talk about.

And actually in Thursday's episode,

we'll be going back to the book that we began with,

which is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A great subject for a history podcast because it's one of the most influential works of fiction ever written.
Conrad himself is a fantastic character. Extraordinary man.
And the impact of that book is really, really worth talking about.

So that's what we're doing on Thursday.

But for our Rest is History Club members,

a day earlier on Wednesday,

we'll be discussing the deeper questions

from this series.

So we'll be asking about the death toll.

How many people died in the Congo Free State?

And is it fair to call it,

as some people do, a genocide?

Is it fair to see it as representative of European colonialism generally? So in other words, does this tell us something very dark about European imperialism? And should we perhaps revise the sort of canonical version? And what are the controversies that surround Adam Hochschild's book, the book on which we've based so much of the series. So that's for Rest is History club members.

And if you want to join,

you can just head to therestishistory.com

and then you'll hear it.

Thank you very much, Dominic.

Brilliant.

Amazing, amazing sweep

of a terrible story.

As I say, we'll be back

in our next episode

with Heart of Darkness.

And then next week,

there'll be also a bonus

on Roger Casement.

So lots of Congo.

But for now bye bye

bye