Day 18 - Rubber Doesn't Always Bounce Back...

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 18 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 17 2 weeks ago, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week as well. This week we’re going to be diving back into learning about historic genocides as we learn about the Congolese genocide committed by King Leopold II of Belgium. We’ve talked about the Congolese Genocide previously on Day 11, Free Congo. But for today’s episode we’re going to go into much greater detail about this particular genocide and not just discuss it within the context of a current conflict.

Now, before we get to The Alchemist’s Table I wanted to apologize that there wasn’t a new episode last week. Sometimes you just don’t have the energy, the motivation, the spoons or the spell slots. So, I took a week off. It might happen again. And now on to the booze! Today’s libation is called Cherries Jubilee. It’s 2 oz of Islay scotch. I'd recommend a Bowmore if you’re not a huge fan of the peat. Then 1 oz of creme de cacao. 1 oz of frangelico. Add .75 oz of cherry syrup. Shake and pour overice. Top with ginger beer or a hard cider. Garnish with luxardo cherries and enjoy.

Now, with that out of the way let’s get into the Congolese Rubber Genocide.

In order to understand this genocide we first need to understand European colonialism during this time. Colonialism has taken many forms over the years and in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century it transitioned from the classic form of American colonialism into what we would consider New Colonialism. New Colonialism would rely less on direct military control of an area and would rely more on having governmental institutions in power that would directly benefit those pre existing colonial power structures.

So, near the end of the 19th century there was very little European colonial and mercantile presence in Africa. There were some port towns, to be sure, and there was trade, but very little of the African continent was under the control of European powers at this time. But, European greed for gold and, especially, ivory wouldn’t allow them to ignore African riches for much longer. The Berlin Conference was organized between November 1884 and February 1885 at the request of King Leopold II of Belgium and was organized by Otto von Bismarck of Germany.  

The primary purpose of the Berlin Conference was regulating European colonization and trade during the New Imperialism period. It might seem strange to need to differentiate New Imperialism from the forms of empire building that came before. Afterall, the methodology was largely the same. Conquest. And the reasoning was, mostly the same. Resources and land acquisition. But New Imperialism also came with a good deal of “civilizing” flavor. You might be familiar with the poem White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling. If you’re not. You can fully understand the entire mindset of 19th and 20th century colonialism simply by reading that poem.

Now, Leopold had been using the explorations of Henry Morgan Stanley, and his own organization, the International African Association to quietly try and create his own private colony in central Africa that would be called the Congo Free State, but France found out and started making moves, and then Britain and Portugal found out and began trying to grab land which led Germany to do the same. War was brewing quickly as these various European powerhouses all sought as much land, wealth, and power as they could grab. This, ultimately, would be why the Berlin Conference was called and why it was so successful. These European powers decided, instead of going to war and killing each other over Africa they’d just all meet and carve it up like a pecan pie and settle it all peaceful like.

There were 14 nations/empires in attendance at the Berlin Conference, Germany, Austria Hungary, the International Congo Society (this really means King Leopold II of Belgium), Spain, Denmark, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire. And while all 14 of those countries were in attendance at the Berlin Conference and had a say in the final decisions that were made, only 7 countries were actually going to colonize Africa once it was over.

Those countries were Belgium (really just King Leopold II, this would be his own private colony), Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, Portugal, and Italy. At the time of the Berlin Conference, in 1885, less than 10% of the African continent was under European control, but by the time World War 1 broke out only Liberia and Ethiopia were still independent. Although, Liberia certainly only existed because of US colonial power, and so doesn’t REALLY count as independent. 

Wanna know one of the most buckwild things about the Berlin Conference? I ask knowing that there is no way for you to answer or to stop me from telling you short of skipping forward by about 30 seconds. Part of the General Act, the document that was signed and ratified at the conclusion of the Berlin Conference was a commitment from the European powers involved to END AFRICAN AND ISLAMIC SLAVERY. Most of those European powers would go on to enslave the populations they conquered and colonized.

This period of New Imperialism is what we tend to call The Scramble for Africa. So far we’ve been talking about this all in fairly clinical terms, as if these European countries simply sat around a table and calmly decided who would get what land in the second largest continent on the planet and then it just happened, with no additional muss or fuss. Anyone who has studied even the barest amount of human history knows that nothing happens without muss or fuss. There were wars, and battles, and massacres that led to Europe gaining control of African territory.

We now need to talk a bit about the Congo Free State, and how King Leopold of Belgium, a frail weakling (compared to the other European powers) managed to worm his way into the conference and into one of the most lucrative colonies in Africa. The Congo Free State was a truly massive colony that was owned personally by Leopold. It was NOT, at least between the years 1885 and 1908, part of the Belgian Empire, it was not owned by the Belgian government and was ruled entirely separately, it just happened to be ruled by the King of Belgium. Leopold was able to gain this massive colony by convincing the monarchs of Europe that he was engaged in humanitarian and philanthropic work, and that the Congo Free State would be an area of free trade in Africa. He also then proceeded to lie to the leaders of Britain, Germany, France, and the US telling them all that he would give them special trade status.

Leopold maintained a guise that he was not trying to use the Congo Basin to increase his own wealth and economic and political power. He maintained that his presence in the region was, as was a huge part of the ethos of New Imperialism, to civilize the savages of the Congo Basin and to bring them closer to God and good European cultural supremacy. 

Leopold pledged to suppress the east African slave trade; promote humanitarian policies; guarantee free trade within the colony; impose no import duties for twenty years; and encourage philanthropic and scientific enterprises. Beginning in the mid-1880s, Leopold first decreed that the state asserted rights of proprietorship over all vacant lands throughout the Congo territory. In three successive decrees, Leopold promised the rights of the Congolese in their land to native villages and farms, essentially making nearly all of the CFS terres domaniales (state-owned land). Leopold further decreed that merchants should limit their commercial operations in rubber trade with the natives. Additionally, the colonial administration liberated thousands of slaves.

Four main problems presented themselves over the next few years.
Leopold II ran up huge debts to finance his colonial endeavour and risked losing his colony to Belgium.
Much of the Free State was unmapped jungle, which offered little fiscal and commercial return.
Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (part of modern South Africa), was expanding his British South Africa Company's charter lands from the south and threatened to occupy Katanga (southern Congo) by exploiting the "Principle of Effectivity" loophole in the Berlin Treaty. In this he was supported by Harry Johnston, the British Commissioner for Central Africa, who was London's representative in the region.
The Congolese interior was ruled by Arab Zanzibari slavers and sultans, powerful kings and warlords who had to be coerced or defeated by use of force. For example, the slaving gangs of Zanzibar trader Tippu Tip had a strong presence in the eastern part of the territory in the modern-day Maniema, Tanganyika and Ituri regions. They were linked to the Swahili coast via Uganda and Tanzania and had established independent slave states.

So very quickly Leopold began to renege on his promises. The first concession he made to his greed and desire for power was to establish a policy of terres vacantes. Vacant land, which was defined as any land that did not have a house or cultivated garden plot. This was, of course, most of the country. Any terres vacantes was now automatically property of the state to be portioned out to Leopold’s cronies and supporters. Next Leopold would decree that any locals harvesting rubber or ivory were only allowed to sell to the state. This was doubly enforced because most of the rubber or ivory harvesting was happening on “state owned land” and so it “mae sense” that they could only sell to the state, which now had a monopoly on those products and could set the prices at whatever they wanted. Trading companies were, obviously, pissed by this as part of the General Act of the Berlin Conference was a promise of Free Trade in Belgium.

Now, what made The Congo so special in the history of capitalist exploitation was that it was home to something that would become one of the most important natural resources in the entire world, rubber. There are only two sources of natural rubber in the world. The sap of the Hevea brasiliensis, or rubber tree that grows in the Amazon River Basin, and the sap of Landolphia owariensis, a species of woody vines that grow in the Congo. I mean, technically there are 2500 species of plants that produce natural latex and rubber, but those two are the big ones. Today 99% of natural latex and rubber comes from the Amazon, but Leopold was able to make massive profit off of his colony.

By the final decade of the 19th century, John Boyd Dunlop's 1887 invention of inflatable, rubber bicycle tubes and the growing usage of the automobile dramatically increased global demand for rubber. Now, as mentioned previously the rubber in the Congo came from vines. So while the trees in the Amazon basin could be tapped much in the same way we get Maple syrup, the Congolese workers would slash the vines and lather their bodies with the rubber latex. When the latex hardened, it would be scraped off the skin in a quite painful manner, ripping off the workers hair.

The economic system in the Congo Free State was known as the red rubber system. It was a slave economy that Leopold enforced through the use of his armed forces known as the Force Publique. The officer corp of the Force Publique was made up entirely of White Europeans, and much of their rank and file was made up of slaves captured by Arabic slavers in the Upper Congo. Many of the other soldiers were children who had been kidnapped from their villages and raised in Roman Catholic missions in conditions very similar to slavery. Each slave in the Congo Free State was required to harvest a regular quota of rubber sap. What that quota was was often arbitrarily decided based purely on profit based concerns.

Workers who refused to supply their labour were coerced with "constraint and repression". Dissenters were beaten or whipped with the chicotte, a bullship made of hippo hide, hostages were taken to ensure prompt collection and punitive expeditions were sent to destroy villages which refused. The policy led to a collapse of Congolese economic and cultural life, as well as farming in some areas.

One refugee from these horrors described the process:

We were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved ... When we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and taken away.

Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide the hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting or to stockpile them for mutiny. As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in cut-off hands.

A Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river 300 mi north of Stanley Pool:

“All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator ... From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets ... A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river ... Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.”

One junior officer in the Force Publique had this to say about the quota system:

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber ... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace ... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

Within the Congo Free State there was also rampant famine and disease that killed hundreds of thousands of people, a type of residential school where children were sent to learn to be either workers or soldiers. About 50% of the children who entered these schools died. There were also several reputable reports of Congolese people turning to cannibalism in the face of their lack of food resources. With everyone being forced to harvest rubber there was no one to farm or gather or hunt for food. It is generally accepted that over the course of Leopold’s rule in the Congo Free State, between 1885 and 1908 that at least 10 million Congolese people were killed.

The peak year for the cost of rubber was 1903, with rubber fetching the highest price and concessionary companies raking in the highest profits.

However, the boom sparked efforts to find lower-cost producers. Congolese concessionary companies started facing competition from rubber cultivation in Southeast Asia and Latin America. As plantations were begun in other tropical regions around the world, the global price of rubber started to dip. Competition heightened the drive to exploit forced labour in the Congo in order to lower production costs. Meanwhile, the cost of enforcement was eating away at profit margins, along with the toll taken by the increasingly unsustainable harvesting methods. As competition from other areas of rubber cultivation mounted, Leopold's private rule was left increasingly vulnerable to international scrutiny.

Missionaries carefully and meticulously documented the many abuses of the Congolese Red Rubber system. This would finally be noted by the international community and by the Belgian government itself as a violation of the 1885 Berlin Act which gave Leopold authority and control of the Congo as long as he: "care[d] for the improvements of their conditions of their moral and material well-being" and "help[ed] in suppressing slavery."

After 2 years of international pressure the Belgian government agreed to annex the Congo Free State and make it an official part of the Belgian Empire. The reason the debate lasted 2 years was that no one wanted to take on the responsibility of fixing everything Leopold had fucked up so royally (pun intended).

But what happened to Leopold you ask? Did he go to jail? Did he get a slap on the wrist? Was he deposed as king and sent into exile on a small island in the Pacific where he eventually died of stomach cancer? Nah, he did die though, but he died as King of Belgium. He had surgery on December 17, 1909. He had a coronary bridging performed, aiming at correcting insufficient irrigation of the myocardium. ''A few hours after the operation, a failure of the myocardium occurred leading to death the same day’’. Leopold had ruled Belgium for 44 years, which makes him, to this day, the longest reigning Belgian monarch. You also might be please to know that his funeral procession was booed by every crowd he passed. His people fucking hated him.

Exciting news y’all! We actually DO have some reviews this week! So let’s read em!

And now for the outro!

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.