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

Sly omission blurred effortlessly into blatant wishful thinking. In the Memorial Hall, where the paint was peeling off the ceiling, labels promised to reveal ‘the King’s intentions towards the Congo’. But the anti-slavery medals struck at Leopold’s behest made the same point as the rusting slave chains in the glass cases and the melodramatic tableaux vivants, all buxom negro wenches and noble savages wincing under the whip of the sneering Arab overseer. Leopold, it seemed, colonised the Congo not for commercial reasons or vainglorious imperialist ambition, but to snuff out the barbaric slave trade that for centuries had robbed central Africa of its strongest and its best.

I had expected rose-coloured spectacles, but this complacent rewriting of Belgium’s past took me by surprise. No explanation here, then, for why things went so wrong under Mobutu. This was a tale – the wall frieze commemorating the hundreds of young Belgians who found their graves in the Congo Free State made clear – of selfless commitment and higher motives.

From this self-satisfied tableau, one item nonetheless grabbed my attention. Under the roll-call of dead heroes, an 1884 painting by Edouard Manduau, a painter unknown to me, injected an incongruous note. The artist, who had clearly been somewhat disturbed by his brush with the Congo, had painted a native being held to a post. On his knees, writhing, he is being whipped until the blood flows down his back. Looking on without expression is a white man, scientifically taking notes.

In the whole museum, it was the only object on display that had the sour ring of truth. Those bright oils, that unexpected depiction of what was clearly an everyday, a banal event, pointed in a very different direction, one that would show how the seeds of Mobutism found fertile ground in which to sprout.

Jules Marchal knew all about watching coolly as a man was whipped. As a young district commissioner working in the Congo in the 1950s, he used to order labourers who had failed to meet the cotton quotas set by the Belgian state to be punished with the chicotte, a whip made from a strip of hippopotamus hide that had been dried in the sun. Applied sparingly, it flayed the skin and left permanent scars; used enthusiastically, it could kill.

‘We would tour the country, taking our prison with us and then we’d call the villagers to assemble and we would beat three or four of our prisoners to show them what could happen to them,’ he recalled, with a rueful shake of the head. ‘I used that punishment very sparingly. But its effect was terrible. We were so proud to be members of the administrative service, we felt so powerful. But all our power had its roots in the chicotte.’

Shame and guilt have a long reach. Nearly half a century after the events, Marchal was still trying to expunge what he did as a thoughtless young administrator flush with the excitement of an exotic posting and overwhelmed by new responsibilities. Long since retired, he had dedicated the previous twenty years to contradicting the version of history presented at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, a white-washing so clumsy it prompted an explosion of exasperated contempt. ‘It’s ridiculous! They even show an Arab trader whipping a slave! Absurd,’ he snorted.

I had spotted Mr Marchal’s name in the historical section of one of Brussels’s bookshops, something of a miracle in itself, I was subsequently to discover, given his self-imposed low profile. His name had also cropped up in King Leopold’s Ghost , the bestseller by US author Adam Hochschild, which was creating a stir amongst the Brussels intelligentsia in 1998. After my visit to the museum, I wanted to meet the man campaigning, virtually single-handed, to awaken a slumbering national conscience.

He had given me careful instructions over the phone, speaking with that slight Belgian twang that always sounds vaguely comic to anyone used to hearing French as spoken by Parisians. ‘You want to get off at St Truiden. But make sure if you take the train to Liège that you sit in the right part, as the train splits in two and some of my visitors have gone missing that way.’

An hour and a half out of the capital, I was already a world away from the smart shopping streets of French-speaking Brussels. This was fruit-producing Flanders, proud of its Flemish identity and language, resentful and suspicious of Francophone dominance. The train slid past frosty piles of mangelwurzels, snow-dusted fields and rows of denuded orchards, stopping at every sleepy station.

Now a portly pensioner, Mr Marchal had a distinguished career behind him. After nearly two decades in Zaire, he became a diplomat, rising to the rank of ambassador. His were not the easy postings: he served in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Chad, Niger and Liberia. His wife, who nonetheless remembered their years in Africa with huge nostalgia, still drove the ageing blue Mercedes that was the ambassador’s car on their last foreign assignment.

His earlier responsibilities made his new role as iconoclast all the more unexpected. For Mr Marchal, the former career diplomat, was busy energetically kicking the system that had sustained him. Trawling through the national archives, basing his findings on official memoranda, private correspondence, diaries kept by Belgian colonial agents, he was bent on exposing what he believed was the most brutal colonial system ever practised on a continent which saw more than its fair share of oppressive regimes.

While he worked with passionate commitment, he felt unhappy enough about the devastating light his discoveries shed on his former employers to shun the public stage. His first books had been published under a pseudonym. Some, printed by a company set up by his wife, verged on vanity publishing. Resolutely factual, the bare bones on which other, more florid writers – Mr Marchal hoped – would some day base their work, the volumes only featured on the shelves of the largest and most specialised Belgian bookshops. In the absence of active promotion, sales of 700 counted as a good result and Marchal was happy to hand out remaindered stock. ‘I have to tell these things because they are true, I want to put history right. But I cannot promote my message as an ordinary author does. It is too sad,’ he explained. ‘Whatever you do, please don’t present me as a traitor who is trying to bring down my country.’

Marchal had been accused by academic contemporaries studying the era of drawing up a ‘personalised charge sheet’. Indeed, he was near-obsessed with the qualities, or lack of them, of the man he saw as holding the key to Congo’s dark story. Certainly, the huge central African land mass that today occupies 905,000 square miles, nearly eighty times the size of Belgium, its colonial master, would never have been defined as a nation at all had it not been for the determination of the Duke of Brabant to acquire a colony.

Even as a young man, waiting in the wings for his father to die, the man who was to become Leopold II had taken careful note of how England, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands had all built their power and wealth on a panoply of colonies, using foreign resources to rise above what often seemed the limitations of geography and natural assets.

His country was young, its sense of self-identity distinctly shaky. He was only the second monarch of an independent Belgian state, whose people had staged a revolution in 1830, turning their backs on centuries of Spanish, Austrian, French and Dutch rule. Despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm on the part of the population, he was determined to use a colony to transform his tiny country, divided by religion and language, into a world power commanding respect.

‘No country has had a great history without colonies,’ Leopold wrote to a collaborator. ‘Look at the history of Venice, of Rome and Ancient Greece. A complete country cannot exist without overseas possessions and activity.’ Scouring the world, he had looked at China, Guatemala, Fiji, Sarawak, the Philippines and Mozambique as possible candidates, but had been stymied at every turn. Then, cantering to the rescue like a moustachioed crusader, had come Henry Morton Stanley.