Adam Hochschild

These forest-dwellers were sometimes seminomads: if a group of Pygmies, for instance, killed an elephant, that site became a temporary settlement for a week or two of feasting, since it was easier to move a village than a dead elephant.

WHILE HIS POWER overseas was on the rise, at home Leopold’s family life grew worse. He increasingly found refuge in the beds of various mistresses, one of whom Belgians promptly nicknamed “Queen of the Congo.” In April 1885, only six weeks after his diplomatic triumph at Berlin, the king was named in a British courtroom as one of the clients of a high-class “disorderly house” prosecuted at the urging of the London Committee for the Suppression of the Continental Traffic in English Girls. Leopold had paid £800 a month, a former servant of the house testified, for a steady supply of young women, some of whom were ten to fifteen years old and guaranteed to be virgins. A Paris newspaper reported rumors that Leopold had secretly crossed to England in his yacht and paid a royal sum to the house’s madam to be sure his name was not mentioned again. More likely, what made the case close with unusual speed was that the Prince of Wales was said to be another of the establishment’s customers. The British home secretary sent a special observer to the court, apparently a veiled message to all concerned that the less said, the better. After pleading guilty, the madam of the house got off with a remarkably light fine.

A Force Publique officer who passed through Fiévez’s post in 1894 quotes Fiévez himself describing what he did when the surrounding villages failed to supply his troops with the fish and manioc he had demanded: “I made war against them. One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies at the station ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people … but that allowed five hundred others to live.”
With “humanitarian” ground rules that included cutting off hands and heads, sadists like Fiévez had a field day.

Why, then, did the killings go on for so long? The same irrationality lies at the heart of many other mass murders. In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed, and many millions more died in the far-flung camps of the gulag. So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941.

Then, calling in his chits, Leopold threatened to take away his friend Sir Alfred Jones’s lucrative Congo shipping contract if Jones did not manage to dampen British criticism.
Jones promptly went to work. He paid £3000 for long trips to the Congo by two travelers. One was his friend Viscount William Mountmorres, a young man who indirectly owed Jones his job. Mountmorres obligingly published a favorable book about the Congo in 1906: “It is astounding to witness the whole-hearted zeal with which the officials … devote themselves to their work.” While Mountmorres acknowledged some excesses, he found most of the Congo “to be well and humanely-governed.” Mountmorres’s volume reminds one of Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s famously cheerful account of their visit to the young Soviet Union. Like the Webbs, Mountmorres assumed that any laws and regulations on the books were carefully followed.

Leopold courted Aldrich and other influential Americans by promising them a share of the loot. He gave major Congo concession rights to Aldrich, the Guggenheim interests, Bernard Baruch, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the financier Thomas Ryan, a close friend and former legal client of Secretary of State Root. A letter of advice to the king from one of his American agents made clear the strategy Leopold was following: “Open up a strip of territory clear across the Congo State from east to west for benefit of American capital. Take the present concessionaires by the throat if necessary, and compel them to share their privileges with the Americans. In this manner, you will create an American vested interest in the Congo which will render the yelping of the English agitators and the Belgian Socialists futile.” Leopold also gave more than three thousand Congo artifacts to the American Museum of Natural History, knowing that J. P Morgan was on its board.