From 1885 to 1908, many atrocities were committed in the Congo Free State (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) under the absolute rule of King Leopold II of Belgium. These atrocities were particularly associated with the labour policies, enforced by colonial administrators, used to collect natural rubber for export. Combined with epidemic disease, famine, mass population displacement, and falling birth rates caused by these disruptions, the atrocities contributed to a sharp decline in the Congolese population. These atrocities have sometimes been described as a genocide, though this characterization is disputed. Modern estimates of the magnitude of the population decline ranges from 1.2 million to 10 million people.
At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the European powers recognized the claims of a supposedly philanthropic organisation run by Leopold II, to most of the Congo Basin region. Leopold had long-held ambitions for colonial expansion. The territory under Leopold's control exceeded 2,600,000 km2 (1,000,000 mi2), more than 85 times the territory of Belgium; amid financial problems, it was directed by a tiny cadre of administrators drawn from across Europe. Initially the quasi-colony proved unprofitable and insufficient, with the state always close to bankruptcy. The boom in demand for natural rubber, which was abundant in the territory, created a radical shift in the 1890s—to facilitate the extraction and export of rubber, all vacant land in the Congo was nationalised, with the majority distributed to private companies as concessions. Some was kept by the state. Between 1891 and 1906, the companies were allowed free rein to exploit the concessions, with the result being that forced labour and violent coercion were used to collect the rubber cheaply and maximise profit. The Free State's military force, the Force Publique, enforced the labour policies. Individual workers who refused to participate in rubber collection could be killed and entire villages razed.
The main direct cause of the population decline was disease, which was exacerbated by the social disruption caused by the atrocities of the Free State. A number of epidemics, notably African sleeping sickness, smallpox, swine influenza and amoebic dysentery, ravaged indigenous populations. In 1901 alone it was estimated that 500,000 Congolese had died from sleeping sickness. Disease, famine and violence combined to reduce the birth-rate while excess deaths rose.
The severing of workers' hands achieved particular international notoriety. These were sometimes cut off by Force Publique soldiers who were made to account for every shot they fired by bringing back the hands of their victims. These details were recorded by Christian missionaries working in the Congo and caused public outrage when they were made known in the United Kingdom, Belgium, the United States, and elsewhere. An international campaign against the Congo Free State began in 1890 and reached its apogee after 1900 under the leadership of the British activist E. D. Morel. On 15 November 1908, under international pressure, the Government of Belgium annexed the Congo Free State to form the Belgian Congo. It ended many of the systems responsible for the abuses. The size of the population decline during the period is the subject of extensive historiographical debate; there is an open debate as to whether the atrocities constitute genocide.
Background
Establishment by Leopold II
Years before he became King of Belgium in 1865, Leopold II had pressed Belgian political leaders to support an overseas colony as a way to increase Belgium's standing among the world's great powers. In 1860, as Duke of Brabant, he presented the Belgian finance minister Walthère Frère-Orban, who was a vocal opponent of colonial projects, with a paperweight inscribed "Belgium needs a colony" (French: Il faut à la Belgique une colonie). In private remarks from this period, Leopold cited the Dutch East Indies as a model of colonial profitability and lamented that Belgium "doesn't exploit the world", adding that colonialism was "a taste we have got to make her learn".
Although Leopold expressed interest in acquiring lands in Abyssinia, Egypt, or Argentina, his proposals found little traction in Belgian politics, where colonial ventures were widely treated as costly, high-risk projects with unclear national benefit. Many Belgian politicians, such as Émile Vandervelde, campaigned against an overseas colony for economic and moral reasons. Leopold thus pursued the idea of a Congo colony largely as a personal enterprise rather than a state program.
According to historian Adam Hochschild, sub-Saharan Africa was "a logical place for an aspiring colonialist to look". Although the British and Boers controlled what is now South Africa, and Portugal and other powers claimed coastal pockets, about 80 percent of the entire land area of Africa was still under indigenous rulers. Crucially, for Leopold, the "equatorial heart of the continent" was the "biggest blank space on the map".
After turning his attention to Central Africa, he convened the Brussels Geographic Conference of 1876 and created the International African Association (AIA), publicly framed as a scientific and humanitarian body dedicated to exploration, anti-slavery, and "civilizing" work in the Congo Basin. However, the association actually functioned as an instrument for Leopold's territorial ambitions. In 1878, he hired Henry Morton Stanley to explore the Congo River system, establish stations, and secure treaties with local rulers on Leopold's behalf.
I do not want to risk losing a fine chance to secure for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake.
— Leopold, in a private letter to his envoy (1877).
Between 1879 and 1882, Leopold reorganized his Congo operations under the International Association of the Congo, seeking formal international recognition for a single independent entity in the basin. During the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, European leaders officially recognised Leopold's control of the notionally-independent Congo Free State on the grounds that it would be a free trade area and buffer state between British and French spheres of influence. European powers subsequently acknowledged Leopold as sovereign of the 2.35 million square kilometer colony, held by him in personal union with Belgium rather than as a Belgian colony.
Economic and administrative situation
Ultimately the state's policy towards its African subjects became dominated by the demands which were made—both by the state itself and by the concessionary companies—for labour for the collection of wild produce of the territory. The system itself engendered abuses ...
— Ruth Slade (1962)
The Free State was intended, above all, to be profitable for its investors and Leopold in particular. Although its sponsors expected the venture to net "quick and easy" profits, initial ivory exports failed to return as much money as investors had hoped and the colonial administration was frequently in debt. Historian Jean Stengers described the state before 1890 as a financially "frail creature that needed aid", running its course in "relative calm" with minimal governance.
However, the invention of the inflatable rubber tyre around 1890 spurred a boom in worldwide demand for natural rubber. Stengers contends that the popularity of rubber provided Leopold with "miraculous deliverance" from near-bankruptcy, and transformed the state into a highly profitable enterprise. This shift was formalized by a series of controversial and "unscrupulous" decrees between 1891 and 1892, through which the King nationalized approximately 99 percent of the country and its wild resources, effectively killing free trade and instituting a state-enforced monopoly.
As the Free State forcibly compelled Congolese males to harvest wild rubber, which could then be exported to Europe and North America, exports skyrocketed over 500%, recasting what had been an unexceptional colonial system into a lucrative cash cow for Leopold. The state's domain revenue increased from roughly 150,000 francs in 1890 to more than 18 million francs by 1901. According to Belgian Historian David Van Reybrouck, this transformation marked the beginning of a universal reign of terror that resulted in violence, horror, and death on an "exponentially greater scale" than previously seen.
Leopold exercised total personal control over the state's administration without much delegation to subordinates. African chiefs played an important role by implementing government orders within their communities. Throughout much of its existence, however, Free State presence in the territory that it claimed was inconsistent, with its few officials concentrated in a number of small and widely dispersed "stations" which controlled only small amounts of hinterland. In 1900, there were just 3,000 white people in the Congo, of whom only half were Belgian. The Free State was perpetually short of administrative staff and officials, who numbered between 700 and 1,500 during the period.
To facilitate economic extraction from the Free State, land was divided up under the so-called "domain system" (régime domanial) in 1891. All vacant land, including forests and areas not under cultivation, was decreed to be "uninhabited" and thus in the possession of the state, leaving many of the Congo's resources (especially rubber and ivory) under direct colonial ownership. Concessions were allocated to private companies. In the north, the Société Anversoise was given 160,000 km2 (62,000 sq mi), while the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR) was given a comparable territory in the south. The Compagnie du Katanga and Compagnie des Grands Lacs were given smaller concessions in the south and east respectively. Leopold kept 250,000 km2 (97,000 sq mi) of territory known as the "Crown Domain" (Domaine de la Couronne) under personal rule, which was added to the territory he already controlled under the Private Domain (Domaine privé).
Thus most economic exploitation of the Congolese interior was undertaken by Leopold and the major concessionaires. The system was extremely profitable and ABIR made a turnover of over 100 per cent on its initial stake in a single year. The King made 70 million Belgian francs' profit from the system between 1896 and 1905. The Free State's concession system was soon copied by other colonial regimes, notably those in the neighbouring French Congo.
In the early years of the Free State, much of the administration's attention was focused on consolidating its control by fighting the African peoples on the Free State's periphery who resisted the Free State's rule. These included the tribes around the Kwango, in the south-west, and the Uele in the north-east. Some of the violence of the period can be attributed to African groups using colonial support to settle scores or white administrators acting without state approval.
Red rubber system and the Force Publique
Leopold had used African mercenaries since at least 1879, but in 1888, he formally organized them into the Force Publique, a colonial army for his new state. By the late 1890s, it had grown to more than 19,000 soldiers and consumed more than 50% of the state's budget; it was the most powerful army in Central Africa. The force was at once counter-guerrilla, an army of occupation, and a corporate labour police force, divided mainly into small garrisons alongside riverbanks. Several dozen black soldiers, recruited from as far afield as Zanzibar, Nigeria, and Liberia typically served under one or two white officers. The initial handful of military posts quickly grew to 183 by 1900, and to 313 by 1908.
Because most of the Free State's revenue came from rubber exports, the administration developed a labour regime, criticized at the time as the "red rubber system", to maximize rubber extraction. Forced labour was imposed as a form of taxation, engendering what some modern historians have described as a "slave society", since companies relied increasingly on the forcible mobilization of Congolese workers to meet rubber quotas. The state appointed African intermediaries, known as capitas, to organize and supervise labourers. Pressure to raise output and profits led officials to set quotas centrally and often arbitrarily, with little regard for available labour or workers' welfare.
In concessionary territories, private companies that had purchased extraction rights from the state could employ almost any methods they chose to increase production and profit, with minimal state oversight. Furthermore, according to historian David Gibbs, the lack of a developed bureaucracy produced an atmosphere of "informality" throughout the state in regard to the operation of enterprises, which facilitated further abuses. Treatment of labourers (especially the duration of service) was not regulated by law and instead was left to the discretion of officials on the ground. The Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR) and the Société Anversoise du Commerce au Congo were particularly noted for the harshness with which their officials treated Congolese workers.
Rubber extraction relied on compulsory quotas enforced by both colonial armies and company militias. The Force Publique acted as a corporate labour police force and its soldiers saw to the collection of the rubber tax in areas controlled directly by the Free State (such as in the Crown Domain). In the territories allotted to concessionaires, collection was managed by armed guards known as "sentries", which were essentially the company's militia force. The red rubber system emerged with the creation of the concession regime in 1891 and lasted until 1906 when the concession system was restricted. At its height, it was heavily localised in the Équateur, Bandundu, and Kasai regions.
Atrocities
Forced labour
The historian Jean Stengers described regions controlled by concession companies as "veritable hells-on-earth". In ABIR territory, a normal quota was three to four kilos of dried rubber per adult male per fortnight. Because the rubber vines near most villages were rapidly exhausted, gatherers were forced to travel farther into the jungle to get enough rubber; an official in the Mongala basin estimated gatherers needed to spend about twenty four days of all-day labour per month in the forest to meet quotas.
In the Congo, raw rubber comes in the form of coagulated sap, which is the solid material derived from the syrup-like latex of the long spongy vine of the Landolphia genus. The process of collecting this product was intensely physically painful because, to make the liquid latex dry and coagulate, gatherers had to spread the substance on their arms, thighs, and chest, and the ensuing act of pulling or tearing off the dried rubber from the hairy parts of the body was excruciating. Force Publique officer Louis Chaltin wrote that Africans disliked making rubber and "must be compelled" to do it.