WEST, NATURAL RESOURCES AND POPULATION CONTROL POLICIES IN AFRICA IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, THE

Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2005 by Martin, Guy

According to Morel, some of the Europeans employed by the chartered companies wrote home boasting of their exploits: "One such "agent" confessed to have "killed" 150 men, cut off 60 hands, crucified women and children, and hung the remains of mutilated men on the village fence."55

The situation was not much better in the "Crown domain", i.e. the portion of the territory whose revenue the King kept for his own private use: "It was reckoned that in one district alone 6,000 natives were killed and mutilated every six months."56 As Morel rightly argues, this situation led to endemic famine, and thus, effectively, to "depopulation by starvation":

This passage (...) illustrates what has been, perhaps, the most fertile cause of depopulation, both in the Congo Free State, and in the French Congo: i.e., depopulation by starvation. That, and the colossal infant mortality induced by the well-nigh inconceivable conditions to which native life was reduced in the Congo, far exceeded the actual massacres as determining factors in the disappearance of these people.57

It thus comes as no surprise that King Leopold's elaborate system of forced labor exacted a horrendous human toll on the Congolese people. According to E.D. Morel (who remains the recognized authority on the subject), the population of the Congo fell from about 20 million in 1891 to only 8,500,000 in 1911. In other words, the King's system resulted in the death of between 10 and 11.5 million Congolese as "a very conservative estimate."58 Congolese historian Ndaywel è Nziem puts the figure even higher, at 13 million.

In the neighboring colony of the French Congo-including the territories of Ubangi-Chari, Moyen-Congo and Gabon"-, the French Government adopted the same principles and policy that King Leopold had implemented in the CFS with such deadly efficiency. As a result, between March and July 1899, two-thirds of the French Congo's territory-i.e. 650,000 sq. km., or 70 per cent of the territory- had been parceled out among 40 financial corporations (one-third of them Belgian) on a 30 years charter. As in the CFS, the Congolese peasants were coerced into rubber and ivory production through taxation, usually payable in kind. The same inhumane and degrading treatment to which the population of the CFS was widely subjected was systematically applied in the French Congo's population. French historian Jean Suret-Canale evokes the Gaud-Toque trial of 1905, in which two French colonial administrators were tried and lightly sentenced for atrocities committed against African colonial subjects. Toqué summarizes the situation prevailing in the Upper Chari region up to 1903 as follows: "(...) the system's operation was based on widespread massacre (...) We raid the villages; we kidnap women and children (...)These women and children often die of hunger or of smallpox (...)"59

Gaud's refined cruelty definitely equaled, or even surpassed the worst atrocities committed in the CFS in the name of the King. Suret-Canale recounts: