Michela Wrong - In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz - Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo

The two men shared more than just a knack for large-scale extortion and lavish spending tastes. Indeed, in money matters, the present echoes the past to an almost uncanny extent. Both leaders were to prove remarkably adept at squeezing loans out of gullible creditors and luring private investors with a taste for adventure to Africa. Both covered their tracks with a system of fraudulent book-keeping. Both indulged in similar stratagems in an attempt to cheat the taxman after their deaths and both, having feathered their own nests, left Congo with a heavy burden of debts to be settled after they quit the scene.

In contrast to most African colonies, the Congo Free State was a money-maker almost from birth, thanks to Leopold’s eye on the bottom line. But the king did his best to conceal that fact, succeeding so well in obscuring the true situation that a British journal of the day erroneously reported: ‘It is by no means certain that Belgium will not tire of the Congo. Already this vast area has been a huge disappointment to the mother country. Its resources and population have not proved in any way equal to Mr Stanley’s florid accounts.’

Pleading near bankruptcy, Leopold managed to win two major loans worth a total of 32 million francs from the Belgian state in 1890 and 1895, paid out in yearly instalments. But while the faithful Van Eetvelde was drawing up fictitious budgets underestimating revenues, thereby ensuring the government maintained subsidies for a colony the public had never wanted in the first place, profitability was sharply on the rise. By 1901 ivory exports stood at 289,900 kilograms and rubber production had gone from 350 to 6,000 tonnes a year. Congo was providing more than a tenth of world production of this key raw material, bringing in somewhere between 40 and 50 million francs a year. The king also made money by issuing more than 100 million francs worth of Congo bonds, effectively printing money with the same liberality as Kinshasa’s central bank was later to show when it came to issuing notes.

When Leopold was finally forced to hand the colony over to Belgium, he did so at a high price, wheedling 50 million francs from the government in recognition of his endeavours. The Belgian government, which had always been assured it would never be sucked into the king’s African adventures, found itself agreeing to assume Congo’s 110 million francs in debts – much of that sum comprising the bonds Leopold had issued – and contribute nearly half as much again to completing the building projects the king had drawn up in Belgium.

No one will ever know for certain how much profit Leopold himself drew from the Congo Free State. He adopted the methods beloved of many a modern-day African strongman when it came to trying to hide the extent of the wealth he had accumulated. Real estate was bought through aides, money secretly funnelled into a foundation dedicated to building projects, and shadowy holding companies set up in Belgium, France and Germany. Before handing over responsibility for his African colony, Leopold was careful to burn much of the Congo documentation, protecting himself as far as he could from the scrutiny of future scholars. Belgian investigators only succeeded in unravelling the complex network of his investments in 1923.

By then the world’s attention had moved elsewhere, satisfied that the human rights abuses in Congo had halted with the Belgian’s government takeover. Not so, insisted Marchal, who aimed to challenge this comfortable myth in the book he was currently writing about the system of forced labour imposed by Belgium’s Union Minière, the company that continued running the mines in Congo’s southern Katanga region well after independence. ‘When I finished writing about Leopold, I thought it would be over for me, because I believed all those professors who said when Belgium took over everything was wonderful. But I’ve seen that things remained the same, the system was nearly as brutal, it just became more hypocritical. I now have material for another three or four books.’

Marchal’s own memories might have suggested as much. The system of forced cultivation in the cotton industry he enforced as a young man lasted until independence in 1960; use of the chicotte, that mainstay of colonial rule, was outlawed only ten months before Belgium pulled out. The officials who had worked under Leopold had a new master but largely remained in situ. Reforms were applied only slowly. It was only after the Second World War, Marchal now believed, that the Belgian Congo became ‘a colony like the others’.

Even then, Belgium hardly distinguished itself. True, it had established an infrastructure whose modernity was marvelled at by European visitors. To take just one example, Congo at independence had more hospital beds than all other black African countries combined. But daily life resembled that adopted in South Africa under apartheid rule.

The capital was divided into the indigenous quarters and the Western zone, where blacks were not allowed after a certain time and would be refused drinks in hotels and restaurants which were reserved for whites only. Referred to as ‘macaques’ (monkeys) – a term still contemptuously spat out by heavy-drinking expatriates in Kinshasa – Congolese were set the qualification of ‘évolué’ as a target. This was a certificate indicating they were Africans who had ‘evolved’ far enough to adopt European attitudes and behaviour. But it was not enough to allow them to accede to positions of responsibility and power.

Certain experiences are calculated to stick in the gullet. Long, long after independence, one of the MPR’s leading lights would sometimes recall the time when a Belgian colonial official came round to verify the cleanliness of his parents’ toilet before issuing the permit that allowed them to buy wine. In schools, children from such ‘evolved’ Congolese families would be taken aside each week to be checked for fleas, an indignity spared their white classmates.

Acting on the principle of ‘pas d’élites, pas d’ennemis’, – the theory that an educated African middle class would prove dangerously subversive – the Belgians did virtually nothing to pave the way for independence, expected in 1955 to be decades off. When the government was forced to hand over in the face of growing protests in 1960, only seventeen Congolese youths had received a university education. The withdrawal was one of the most abrupt in African history.

Why did this small European nation prove such an appalling colonial power? One gets the impression that Leopold was rushing so desperately to catch up with his foreign allies, self-restraint and principles were simply jettisoned along the way. Maybe a country in its infancy did not possess the self-confidence necessary to show magnanimity when imposing nationhood on others. As tribally divided as the nations hacked arbitrarily from Africa’s land mass by the colonisers, Belgium barely had a sense of itself, let alone itself in the novel role of master.

Marchal, convinced modern Belgium owed the Congolese some kind of reparation in recognition of its errors, even if it only took the form of a more relaxed visa system, seemed to lay the blame on a failure of imagination. A ‘small country with small horizons’, as Leopold himself contemptuously described it, Belgium regarded the Congo as a money-making opportunity, and little else, unlike colonial nations with longer imperial traditions behind them and loftier ideals.

One former ambassador – not a Belgian – put it rather more bluntly: ‘The Belgians were awful in Congo because they had no grandeur themselves. This was the Zaire of Europe, a ratty little country divided amongst itself, and it proved incapable of aspiring to the heights.’

Not long ago, strange notices began appearing over the clothes racks in the slick designer shops and perfumeries lining Boulevard de Waterloo, the broad thoroughfare that carves an ugly swathe through the heart of Brussels.