Debt and hypocrisy

Tervuren today is a green area of ​​Brussels that houses the largest ethnographic museum in the world dedicated to Africa. But it is a journey through time that reveals its disturbing side: 1897, Universal Exhibition. The King of Belgium Leopold II had done things in a big way to magnify the Congo Free State, not a colony, but a private kingdom, a personal property to be controlled and above all exploited. He had no qualms about deporting 267 women, men and children to their homeland to reproduce the life of an African village. Traditional clothes and activities behind the fence, thousands of visitors intrigued by that exotic novelty complete with food and bananas to throw, a sign prohibiting it: "Blacks are fed by the organizing committee." In short, a human zoo, horrifying to think about. Yet, the mere tip of the iceberg. Because the real abyss was consuming in the heart of the African continent.
In Congo there were no human beings, but slaves. Leopold had never set foot there, it was not necessary for his objectives. He had delegated everything to the Force Publique, a sort of colonial police, and to large concessionary companies that exploited the raw materials, guaranteeing very high incomes to the sovereign.
Rubber rubber was the real treasure thanks to very high demand from first world markets. Suffice it to say that in just five years, from 1895 to 1900, exports went from 580 to 3,740 tons.

To obtain these numbers, manpower was needed. Each village had to deliver a fixed quota to the king's emissaries, without any compensation. Those who refused or delivered smaller quantities than those requested were harshly punished, tortured with their children, raped, mutilated, killed. The complaints of the missionaries of the early 1900s speak for themselves. Edvard Vilhelm Sjöblom writes: «War is being waged against him. They destroy his rice fields and steal his food.
They cut down his plane trees, even if they haven't yet produced fruit, they often set fire to his huts and take away his valuables. Sometimes the natives are forced to pay heavy compensation. Generally the chiefs pay them with brass wire and slaves and, if there are not enough slaves, they are forced to sell their wives."

The English missionary Alice Seeley Harris used photography as a weapon of denunciation. In one of her most famous shots, a Nsala man is seen sitting on a veranda, stunned by a severed hand and foot. Those of the five-year-old daughter Boali, punished in place of her father.
It was like this for thousands of children, wives and parents. Always the same mechanism: those who didn't make enough paid for it in every sense, according to a logic of total depersonalization and annihilation. The Force Publique, for example, was authorized by the concessionary companies to kill, but with a specific agreement: for every shot fired at an indigenous person, the right hand had to be returned, as proof that it had not wasted ammunition.
< Once, a witness described a raid to punish a village that had protested, saying that the commanding officer "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades... and to hang the women and children at the palisade in the shape of a cross."

All this happened just over a hundred years ago. Practically yesterday. Does anyone still have doubts about the debt that we Europeans have with Africa? Hypocrites are those who don't respond...

Matteo Spicuglia
NP May 2024