CHAPTER V CLOTHES, CULTURE, AND CAOUTCHOUC IN CONGO To the romance and drama in the story of imperialist worldpolitics, no normal human being can be entirely insensible, nor should he be. But the romantic element is incidental, and should not obscure the chief goal of this study-a factual analysis of the twentieth century's gravest problem. The aim of the following fourteen chapters is to present the world drama of imperialism, that the reader may judge for himself of the rôles which ideals and interests have played. The tale may be told more clearly and interestingly, and its significance will be more easily appreciated, if we discard the customary chronological method, and instead of flitting back and forth between Asia and Africa, between the West Indies and the East, take one region at a time. Africa may well come first; then by easy stages the journey may proceed to the Near East and Middle East, to Southern Asia and the Far East, thence to the Pacific and to Latin America, and finally back to Europe. Then, and then only, shall we be in a position for generalized conclusions. THE FIVE AFRICAS There are five Africas. The northern coastland, washed by the Mediterranean, is temperate, more like southern Europe than like Central Africa. It does not belong to the so-called "Dark Continent'; on the contrary, it is a white man's country, inhabited by Arabs and Berbers, and mixed races, fairly advanced in civilization, and linked with Europe by more than two millenniums of history. South of the coastland lies the desert beltthe Sahara, the Libyan Desert, and the Nubian Desert-a region of parched and shifting sands, with here and there a palmy oasis to which Arab caravans resort for refreshment. Here the dusky white of Arab and Berber blends and contends with the black of the Sudanese negro; it is a racial transition region. Farther south is true black man's Africa. Stretching across the continent from Cape Verde in the west to the Nile on the east is the Sudan ("land of the blacks") a belt of grasslands, prairies, forests, and rivers, a land inhabited by fairly dense and capable negro populations, skillful in primitive tillage and handicrafts. Next comes Central Africa, an equatorial land of drenching rains, dense jungles, tropical fevers; this, too, is black man's country, inhabited by barbarous negro tribes, and only the cool uplands are fit for white colonization. Finally, the southern tip of the continent emerges into a temperate zone, and its highlands, its rolling plains and upland prairies, invite the white settler. Before 1875 not one-tenth of this, the second-largest continent, had been appropriated by the civilized nations of Europe. France had conquered Algiers, on the northern coast, in 1830, and had annexed the surrounding region. Great Britain had taken Cape Colony from Holland in 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, and had annexed in 1843 the smaller and younger colony of Natal. Portugal had inherited historic claims to the region called Mozambique, on the eastern coast, and Angola, on the western coast, but the claims were undefined, and Portuguese authority had not been actively asserted in the interior. In addition, along the western coast there were a number of footholds, barely more than trading posts, in the possession of the French (Senegal, Gabun, Ivory Coast), the British (Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Lagos, the Niger delta), the Portuguese (Portuguese Guinea, Angola, and the islands of Principe and Sao Thome), and the Spaniards (Rio de Oro and Spanish Guinea). Better than words, the accompanying sketch-map shows how little of Africa had been taken, before the mad scramble for colonies occurred in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Intrepid explorers opened up the continent for conquest. Exploration was one of the ways in which nineteenth-century Europe gave vent to its scientific enthusiasm and at the same time found relief from the prosaic propriety and industrialism which were robbing European life of romance in measure as they added to its comfort. The public was fascinated by the thrilling adventures and bizarre experiences of explorers, while to minute descriptions of strange beasts, of pygmy races, of tropical flora, at least a respectful attention was given. The returning explorer was received and petted by royalty, lionized by society, listened to by academies of science, and enrichedif fortunate by the sale of books describing his travels. Space forbids any attempt to do justice to the explorations of Mungo Park, Major Laing, Caillé, Clapperton, Denham, Nachtigal, Hornemann, Rohlfs and Barth in the Sahara and Sudan; of Burton and Speke, Grant and Baker, Dr. Schweinfurth and Karl von der Decken in the Nile Valley and the eastern lake region; of du Chaillu in Gabun; of David Livingstone in the Zambesi valley; of Stanley and de Brazza in the Congo. These and many others aroused the interest of Europe in Africa. Not only in the scientific aspects of the explorations, in the quest for the elusive sources of the Nile River, in the mapping out of hitherto uncharted wilderness, in the discovery of the manlike but ferocious gorilla, was there keen public interest, but also in the possibilities of commerce, the question of slavery, and the opportunity for missionary work. Livingstone, a missionary at the start, and a missionary at heart even to the end, felt that he was blazing the trail for the gospel. Stanley, though far from being a missionary himself, was at pains to point out the need and the opening for Christianity in pagan Africa. As regards commerce, most of the explorers were convinced of Africa's immense potentialities. In glowing superlatives they described the amazing fertility of Africa's rich soil; with ready intuition they divined the existence of minerals in fabulous abundance; Africa was indeed El Dorado. The question of slavery merits further explanation. From the days of John Hawkins-that pious sixteenth-century seacaptain who enjoined his men to "Love one another" and "serve God daily" while he kidnapped African negroes, to sell to Spanish colonists in America-down to the nineteenth century, a systematic trade in West-African negroes had been conducted by European slave-traders. With awakening conscience, however, France, during the Revolution of 1789, had abolished slavery in French colonies; Denmark, in 1792, and the United States, in 1794, prohibited the slave trade; Great Britain in 1811 had forbidden British subjects to engage in the traffic; Sweden followed in 1813, Holland the next year; and the Congress of Vienna had proclaimed Europe's general, but ineffec tive, abhorrence of the commerce in men. But an illegal traffic still persisted. Moreover the Arab slave-traders who terrorized tropical Africa were under no compunction to obey European laws, and continued their business. Blood-curdling were the tales told by European explorers, in the nineteenth century, regarding the Arab slave trade. As I write I recall reading, as a boy, descriptions of Arab attacks on unsuspecting negro villages; the most likely negroes were seized, the others wantonly slaughtered; then the captives were linked in a long chain by a forked stick and cross-bar holding the neck of each; those that attempted to escape, or faltered on the long marches acrosscountry, were killed, and their bones marked the trails. Here was an evil for Christian Europe to stamp out. Explorers and missionaries urged their governments to action. How much of the "crusade" against slavery was sincere, how much mere moral mask for imperialism, it is not easy to discover. Perhaps the fairest judgment is that a sincere desire to extirpate the slave traffic at first reinforced the economic and patriotic motives for conquest, and later was used to justify it. LEOPOLD'S ALTRUISM The story of the Congo Basin reads like a romance, a romance with its touches of pathos and its lapses into bathos. It begins when Henry Morton Stanley, with a little band of Arab guides and negro porters, plunged into the African wilderness on the eastern coast, to push his way through prairie, jungle, and swamp, braving the poisoned darts of savages and the more perilous fever of the tropics, until he had reached the upper stretches of the Congo River, and followed that mighty stream down its long, winding course to the Atlantic. The three white men who started with him perished before the journey's end, and his four hundred porters had dwindled to a hundred and fifteen. But Stanley hastened back to Europe with manuscript for his publishers and, for the public, news of his discovery of the vast Congo basin.1 (The news traveled before him. When his steamer stopped at Marseilles in January 1878, he was met by Baron Greindl and General Sandford, who came in the name of King Leopold II of Belgium, offering to do "something sub'H. M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent (London, 1878). KING LEOPOLD I HAD A RELATIVE OF THE ECONOMIC |