Crimes of

Commission
and Omission
Bambi
­Ceuppens

5
 CRIMES OF COMMISSION
AND OMISSION
Remembering Belgian Mass Violence
and Forgetting Congolese

—  Bambi Ceuppens

For an explanation of the nomenclature

used in this essay, see p. 150.

86
 CLOISTERED MEMORIES
In 2002, a Belgian parliamentary commission
of inquiry concluded that the Belgian govern-
ment at the time bore moral responsibility for
the assassination of Patrice Emery Lumumba,
Congo’s first democratically elected Prime
Minister, on 17 January 1961, less than
half a year after the country had gained inde-
pendence. Louis Michel, the federal Minister
of Foreign Affairs, offered apologies to the
family of Patrice Lumumba and the Congolese
people on behalf of the Belgian government.
In 2010, one week before King Albert was due
to visit Congo on the 50th anniversary of its
independence, Michel gave an interview to a
Belgian magazine in which he described King
Leopold II as an ambitious and visionary hero.
First, he denied any suggestion that the king
had transformed his colony into a vast labour
camp, before adding that this was the way
things were done at the time. He went on to say
that people tend to exaggerate when ­describing
the situation in the Congo Free State (CFS) and
refused to condemn Leopold II.
Until 1998, when the Dutch and French
translations of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story
of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial
Africa, written by American journalist Adam
Hochschild, were published, it was widely
argued that the violence that occurred in the
CFS was the subject of colonial amnesia or
historical taboo in Belgium. I consider it more
useful to argue that it has long been affected
by what French historian Benjamin Stora has
called a cloistered remembering: ‘cloistered
memories’ are truncated, skewed and frag-
mentary, made up of legends and stereotypes
elaborated out of fear of telling the truth. The
violence experienced in the CFS has never
been forgotten: it has been ‘discovered’ every
decade or so and subsequently buried, only to
be ‘rediscovered’ again another ten years later.
In Flanders, for instance, acclaimed writer
Hugo Claus caused outrage in 1970 with his
play Het leven en de werken van Leopold II.
In 1985, historian and anthropologist
Daniel Vangroenweghe published Rood
Rubber: Leopold II en zijn Kongo (subse-
quently translated into French and English),
while historian Vita Foutry and producer
Jan Neckers exposed Leopold II’s violent rule
in the television series Als een wereld zo groot
waar uw vlag staat gepland (‘Like a world this
87
big where your flag is planted’ – the title of
Belgian Congo’s colonial anthem). Around
the same time, former diplomat Jules Marchal
started writing a number of books, in Dutch
and French, on Leopold II’s reign of terror
in the CFS. His French publications served
as the major source for Hochschild’s book,
which seems to have firmly lifted the
cloistered remembering that characterised
Belgium’s dealings with this troubling period
until the end of the 20th century.
On the francophone side, historian J­ ean-Luc
Vellut reminds us (in an online paper that
has since been taken offline) that the widely
­respected francophone historian Jean
Stengers co-edited the history of the
­humanitarian ­campaign against the CFS by
the British ­activist Edmund Dene Morel, and
was instrumental in publishing the critical
study written by British historian Ruth Slade
about the English-speaking missions in the
CFS at the Académie des Sciences coloniales
of Brussels. He also mentions that, in the
1980s, the African chair at the Catholic
University of Louvain-la-Neuve published
a French translation of the 1904 report by
the British diplomat Roger Casement, which
had exposed the abuses associated with the
rubber trade, as well as the 1930 memoirs of
the Danish officer Knud Jaspersen, which is
one of the most explicit documents on the local
workings of the rubber system in the Congo.
I can only speculate on the reasons why these
scholarly publications did not come to wider
public attention in francophone Belgium.
One reason (but certainly not the only one)
why public debate about CFS atrocities was
usually smothered as quickly as such atrocities
were repeatedly ‘discovered’, is that Belgian
memories of such episodes have long been
dominated by narrow, simplified, mythologised
forms of cloistered ­memory, associated with
ex-colonialists. For them, Leopold II remains
the founding father of Belgium’s colonial
history, the visionary genius who gave little
Belgium an enormous and rich colony; and
they are always quick to dismiss any criticism
as propaganda on the part of Britons and
Americans who tried to get their hands on
Congo’s natural resources.
As former colonisers grow old, younger
­authors with no direct memories of the
88
colonial past have come to dominate public
discourse on the period. This could be seen
as marking a shift from communicative to
­cultural memory – that is, from the inter-
change of direct (biographical) memory of
the recent past between contemporaries, to
recalled history. The reality is more complex.
Insofar as the colonial period is the subject
of public conversation at all in Belgium, it is
generally limited to the two violent transition
periods already mentioned: the violence in
the CFS that forced Leopold II to hand control
over to the Belgian state; and the violence
in the aftermath of Congolese independence,
with particular emphasis on the assassination
of Lumumba.
Public debate on these topics is based
almost exclusively on texts written by non-­
professional historians such as Marchal, but
also by sociologist Ludo De Witte, who wrote
two books in Dutch about the involvement
of the Belgian government in Lumumba’s
assassination (one book was subsequently
translated into English and French, among
other languages).
Many Belgian academic historians are
very quick to point out all that is wrong
with such books. But if, as they often insist,
they have long been aware of Leopold II’s
brutal rule of the CFS, they have failed to
publish well-documented, readable books
on the ­topic aimed at the general public.
The ­success of Hochschild’s bestseller,
whatever its many shortcomings, indicates
an appetite in Belgium (and elsewhere) for
well-written works about the era.
The lack of such books by Belgian academic
historians on the most violent period in
Belgian history stands in sharp contrast
to the almost endless number of recent
publications by their colleagues researching
World War II, which have, among other things,
put two persistent myths to rest: the Walloon
myth that Walloons were idealistic resistance
fighters; and the Flemish myth that Flemish
nationalists who collaborated with the
Nazis were naive idealists, oblivious of Nazi
atrocities and driven only by their desire for
an independent Flanders. Such is the shadow
that World War II still casts on Flemish society
that public discourse about the presence
89
of colonial monuments and street names
invariably soon gives way to discussions
about streets named after Flemish nationalist
collaborators during the war. The five streets
named after Cyriel Verschaeve, a Flemish
priest who was condemned in absentia after
the war for having collaborated with the Nazis,
prompt more reaction than the 22 streets
named after Leopold II and the many more
that take their names from men who served
or worked in the CFS on his behalf. To date,
only a small number of municipalities have
decided to change the names of streets (and
a tunnel in Brussels) named after Leopold II.
In 2019, a year before the reopening of
the Royal Museum for Central Africa in
Tervuren, the Flemish Roads & Traffic Agency
announced that it would plant 600 Acer
Leopoldii trees near the museum – without
consulting the museum director, who
­wondered why, of all possible tree species,
they should have chosen this particular one.
It may seem surprising that the transforma-
tion from communicative to cultural memory
has occurred with World War II, but has still
not materialised with the colonial period that
ended less than 15 years after the war’s end.
Among many possible explanations is the fact
that Belgians of Congolese origin constitute a
very small minority in a country that lacks
a unified public sphere and by extension, a
unified public debate. Since they constitute,
in the words of Flemish linguist Michael
Meeuwis, not so much an invisible as an
absent category, they are barely considered
in discussions about Belgium and Congo’s
shared colonial past.
The focus on the violent episodes that ­preceded
and followed Belgium’s colonisation of Congo,
combined with the continuing influence
of photographs diffused by the colonial
authorities in the aftermath of World War II,
go some way to explaining why many Belgians
remain convinced that the Belgian Congo
was a ‘model colony’. In his popular book
Het Belgisch labyrint, Geert Van Istendael
claims that, compared to Leopold II’s reign
of terror, the religious missions and industrial
enterprises that provided social and medical
care under Belgian rule were a blessing for
Congolese. He adds that Belgian rule was so
outstanding that the Belgian Congo became
one of the best equipped and organised
colonies in Africa, limiting his criticism to
the decision not to form a Congolese elite.
It does not seem to occur to Van Istendael
that if one uses Leopold II’s reign as a
benchmark, many of the most deprived of
the world’s inhabitants would be considered
reasonably well off, and he seems wholly
oblivious to the racism that underpinned the
Belgian colonial system, the forced labour,
the brutal suppression of religious movements
(which were considered a threat to the colonial
order), rebellions, strikes and so on.
When considering Belgian colonisation
of Congo, many Belgians differentiate the
actions of supposedly idealistic, well-meaning
individuals from the overall ideological
and political structures in which they
functioned, in the same way that Flemings
remained for a long time apologetic about
Flemish nationalist collaborators under Nazi
occupation; others still refuse to condemn
colonialism outright. In 2019, federal Prime
Minister Charles Michel (son of Louis Michel)
apologised for the abduction of children born
in Belgian Africa from ­sexual relationships
between European (usually male) and African
(usually female) parents. But he considered
the proposition by the UN Working Group of
Experts on People of African Descent that
the Belgian government apologise for the
colonisation of Congo ‘strange’. Given how
widespread opinions like Van Istendael’s still
are, one could argue that there’s little point
in asking the Belgian government to apologise
for the colonisation of Congo as long as many
Belgians remain in thrall to the myth of the
Belgian Congo as a ‘model colony’.
A PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE
For many Belgians who are well aware that
Leopold II was not exactly a benevolent ruler
of his private fiefdom, he has become a figure
of hate who vies with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot
for the dubious title of the greatest mass mur-
derer in human history. In this approach, the
‘evil genius’ Leopold II has simply replaced
the ‘good genius’ lauded by Louis Michel
and so many ex-colonialists. A focus upon
the intentions, actions and psychology of a
single man cannot make us understand what
happened in a country as huge as Congo, even
if he was its ultimate ruler. Jean-Luc Vellut
condemns Jules Marchal’s books, which he
dismisses as Greuelgeschichte: a pornography
90
of violence that never once tries to offer
an explanation for the atrocities committed.
This point is well made and I will return to
it in more detail later. Meanwhile, it is worth
mentioning that the focus on the brutality
associated with the rubber trade tends to
obscure other types of abuse that character-
ised Leopold II’s occupation and colonisation
of Congo: the military response to Congolese
attacks, mutinies and rebellions; the construc-
tion of the first railway at great human cost;
the war against Arab-Swahili slave traders; the
mental, physical and/or sexual abuse suffered
by Congolese men, women and children at
the hand of individual Europeans. The terror
inflicted upon Congolese who did not meet the
rubber collection quotas took various forms:
abductions, burning of villages, executions,
flogging with the infamous chicotte, forced
­incest, holding women at ransom, murder, rape,
torture… But the abiding image of Leopold II’s
rule over the CFS remain the photographs of
severed hands, first revealed by the British
missionary Alice Seeley Harris in 1904.
Alone, or in combination with images of
a bearded Leopold II, these images now
circulate online not only to denounce the
king’s reign over the CFS, but also to come
to his defence. Although generally opposed
to the monarchy as a symbol of the Belgian
state they want to destroy, members of the
white, far-right, Flemish nationalist identitar-
ian movement Schild & Vrienden now reclaim
Leopold II as yet another white man who has
been unjustly vilified. The memes they employ
include a colonial-era photograph of a white
man being carried by black porters in a ‘tipoy’,
and a drawing of a man without hands, his
arm stumps covered with blood, to which one
person responded online ‘Doe het opnieuw,
Leo!’ (‘Do it again, Leo!’). In 2018, two young
black women watching African-American
­singer Kendrick Lamar perform at a music
festival in Flanders were harassed by white
men, who hurled racist abuse and sang a
song containing these lines: ‘Olie [rubber]
aftappen, handjes kappen / De Congo is van
ons’ (‘Tapping oil [rubber], cutting off hands,
/ Congo is ours’). Zuhal Demir, a member of the
Flemish nationalist party N-VA (New Flemish
Alliance) and Secretary of State for Equal
Opportunities at the time, publicly invited
the young men to accompany her to the Royal
Museum for Central Africa, to show them the
91
error of their ways, but did not publicly address
the two young women who had been the victim
of their physical threats and verbal abuse.
A more recent meme on social media,
­referring to the coronavirus pandemic,
­depicts Leopold II following instructions
to wash hands by emptying a bucket full
of severed hands into a bathtub.
Such casual references to mutilations meted
out to Congolese are obscene, but not really
surprising: they follow logically from the reduc-
tion of Leopold II’s reign over the CFS to a hor-
ror story, based on Harris’s horror photos and
magic lantern shows that were meant to shock
white people into revulsion and action. By using
a medium that Congolese were unfamiliar with
at the time and staging pictures of Congolese
victims of violence, she deprived them of
agency. The contrast between Harris’s photos
and those taken by African photographers in
the CFS and later on, is striking. At the time,
Congolese who lived in areas of rubber produc-
tion had no more control over the ways in which
they were represented to the outside world than
over their lives and livelihood. This is brought
home most forcefully by another photograph
that is reproduced less often, which shows
Harris, dressed all in white, at the top of
what one can only describe as a mountain of
Congolese children; the image plays both on
the opposition between white (light) and black
(darkness) and high (Christianity, ‘civilisation’)
and low (‘heathendom’, ‘savagery’).
And so, ever since Harris’s photos were first
seen, the violent rubber exploitation has been
framed as a conflict between the powers of evil
and good, the latter being mainly represented
by ‘white saviours’ who, apart from Harris, tend
to be male. The clearest example of this is the
extent to which Adam Hochschild portrays
Edmund Dene Morel (a young shipping
company official who went on to form the
Congo Reform Association, which exposed
the atrocities in the CFS) as an unblemished
hero, even though the allusion to some of his
‘strange ideas’ suggests that Hochschild was
well aware that after World War I Morel spear-
headed a racist campaign against the presence
of what he called ‘the black plague’ – French
colonial troops in the Rhineland – on the
grounds that their animal sexuality would
pose a threat to European women.
92
Horror stories can be used not only to make
people feel guilty, but also to take pleasure
in their feelings of guilt. Matthias De Groof,
a Flemish cinema studies researcher and
filmmaker, makes this point in his incisive
­criticism of Black, the first part of a trilogy
of plays entitled The Sorrows of Belgium
(after Hugo Claus’s acclaimed 1983 novel
The Sorrow of Belgium) by playwright and
director Luk Perceval, about three national
traumas. Black zooms in on Leopold II’s
reign over the CFS and takes inspiration from
‘one of the first travellers to Congo in history:
African-American William Henry Sheppard,
billed as the “Black Livingstone”’. The
suggestion that only someone from outside
Africa could be perceived as one of the first
travellers to Congo (even when focusing on
white travellers, this overlooks the arrival of
the Portuguese at the Congo estuary at the
end of the 15th century) gives an indication
of Perceval’s ethnocentric approach (and
lack of historical knowledge). While Perceval
ostensibly wants to elevate Sheppard to the
class of white ‘explorers’ and ‘saviours’, he
accords him only a minor role. The real ‘stars’
of the play are white protagonists stripped
of any ambiguity that could have provided
an ­insight into colonial evil, who harass the
black actors and submit them to a torrent
of racist and sexist abuse, in a deliberate
attempt to allow a white audience to indulge
in a combination of guilt and pleasure. It does
not seem to have occurred to Perceval that
the audience may not be exclusively white
or that even white members of the public
may not get their kicks out of this kind of
pornographic representation of abuse.
In Heart of Darkness, the 1899 novella by
the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad that is
an indictment of Leopold II’s colonisation of
the CFS, the narrator Charles Marlow says of
Congolese: ‘Well, you know, that was the worst
of it – this suspicion of their not being inhu-
man.’ Like E.D. Morel and the Belgian socialist
politician Emile Vandervelde, who also helped
expose Leopold II’s reign of terror in the CFS,
Conrad did not question Leopold II’s right (and
by extension, the right of white Europeans
in general) to colonise Africans. In a similar
vein, Perceval is driven by a visceral fury
against Leopold II’s violent rule, but his rage is
accompanied by what British historian Bernard
Wasserstein has called an imaginative failure;
to the extent that his play simply reproduces
the very violence he wants to denounce, he
fails to recognise Congolese and the black
actors in his play as human beings like himself.
Following on from the German anthropologist
Johannes Fabian, I would call this an act of
commission rather than omission.
In horror stories about the CFS, the corollary
of the transformation of Leopold II from
visionary genius to evil genius is the reduction
of Congolese to either (grateful) receivers
of the ‘civilisation’ or unfortunate victims of
the violence that the king and his ‘pioneers’
subjected them to. Stalin allegedly once
observed that if one man dies of hunger, it
is a tragedy, but if millions die, it’s merely
a statistic. This is true only up to a point:
it would seem that this happens only if people
are not offered the opportunity to glimpse the
individual behind the statistics. Photographs
of mass violence may shock, sicken or numb
us, but they lack the power to move us. What
moves us are images, memories, music,
objects, songs, sounds and statements that
individualise victims and in doing so, allow
us to identify with them.
The one photo by Alice Seeley Harris that has
the power to move us shows a Congolese man
called Nsala looking at the severed hand and
foot of his five-year-old daughter, Baoli, who
was killed, and allegedly cannibalised, by the
members of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber
Company militia. But the power of this image
is diminished by our realisation that it was
carefully staged in order to manipulate the
feelings of a white public; the aim was to make
them feel bad in order to propel them into
action rather than to understand and share
Nsala’s pain. This has been the problem with
images used in campaigns by white protag-
onists against crimes committed against
black people and in favour of colonising or
developing them, since at least the start of
the abolitionist movement in the 18th century.
The 1787 medallion designed by the British
potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood for
the British anti-slavery campaign undermines
its caption ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’
by showing an enslaved African on his knees
in front of an unseen white person who
is supposed to liberate him. Following on
from Czech philosopher Tomáš Kulka, we
can relegate such images to the category
93
of kitsch, in as much as they show an emotion-
ally charged subject that is instantly and easily
understandable but does not substantially
enrich the viewer’s associations with the
subject in question. By contrast, artworks,
diaries, drawings, mundane objects and
photographs that speak about the everyday
life of victims, without any direct link to the
pain and violence they have endured, have the
power to remind us of our common humanity.
History is written by the victors. On the one
hand, the collections of colonial museums
were put together on the basis of what
American anthropologist James Clifford has
called a ‘salvage paradigm’: colonisers tried
to ‘save’ as many objects as possible that
testified to precolonial culture before they
inevitably disappeared under the colonisers’
‘civilising’ influence. On the other hand,
in the midst of the destruction wrought on
populations during the brutal rubber trade
in the CFS, it did not occur to those very
same colonisers to salvage music, stories,
memories or objects that could speak about
the people whose lives they were destroying.
Neither did subsequent generations of
­colonisers try to keep the memory of the
atrocities alive by trying to find such archives.
This does not mean that there are no African
voices telling the story in their own words,
as Hochschild writes. The abuses came to
light on the basis of statements by Congolese.
The commission of inquiry set up by
Leopold II in 1904 collected 260 testimo-
nies. In 1958, some 170 men from Équateur
remembered the brutal rubber trade in essays
written in the context of a contest organised
by the Flemish missionary Edmond Boelaert.
In an article about World War II in the Belgian
Congo, published in 1983, Gustaaf Hulstaert,
another Flemish missionary, wrote that the
forced cultivation of rubber during the war
evoked memories of the rubber exploitation
in the CFS. An old Congolese woman I know
remembers a song that she learned as a child
about the rubber system, but I am not aware
of any research that tries to investigate such
memories systematically. Some testimonies
from the 1904 inquiry are on display in the
Royal Museum for Central Africa, but these
and other Congolese oral sources have not
yet been made available to the general public
in written form.
94
According to Czech writer Milan Kundera,
the struggle against power is the struggle
of memory against forgetting. Paraphrasing
Johannes Fabian, we could argue that histo-
rians’ forgetting about Congolese memories
about Leopold II’s reign of terror means
forgetting that Congolese remember.
MASS VIOLENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF
EUROPEAN OVERSEAS COLONIALISM
If Belgian academic historians such as
Jean-Luc Vellut accuse amateur historians
of ­producing little more than Greuelgeschichte
when dealing with the CFS (the German
word Geschichte means both ‘history’ and
‘story’, so the term can be translated as both
‘horror history’ and ‘horror stories’), many of
his colleagues are quick to point out that the
mass violence that characterised Leopold II’s
CFS does not constitute genocide since there
was no intention to exterminate the Congolese
population. However, if simply describing
the violence that Europeans meted out to
Congolese under Leopold II’s reign should not
be the aim of academically trained historians,
then deciding if that violence c­ onstitutes geno-
cide should not be their purpose either, since
it offers us as little in the way of understanding
as endless descriptions of violent acts.
One problem with the current definition
of genocide is that it takes for granted what
should be questioned, i.e. the existence of
distinct ‘races’ or ethnic groups. Australian
historian Patrick Wolfe rightfully points out
that one cannot say that genocide targets
particular races since ‘races’ (and, I would
argue, many ethnic groups) are made in
the targeting itself. What is to be gained by
stopping a discussion in its tracks by remind-
ing one’s interlocutors that the mass murders
in Cambodia did not constitute a genocide
because they did not target an ethnic group?
How does such a position allow us to gain
any understanding of that tragedy?
Analysing the mass violence in the CFS only
in terms of the legal definition of genocide
also has the perverse effect of setting the
bar for what constitutes racism very high. In
Belgian public debate, genocide is first and
foremost associated with the extermination of
Jews (and to a lesser extent Rom, Roma and
Sinti) during World War II, which was driven
by racism against these groups. This close
95
association between genocide and racism
tends to obscure the existence of colonial
racism, in that many Belgians seem to assume
that expressions and actions are not racist if
they do not show a desire for and/or attempt
at genocide. The first and, to date, last book
published (in 1998) about racism in Flanders
does not have a single chapter that deals with
colonial racism or the CFS or the Belgian
Congo. Flemish historian Marnix Beyen, one
of the book’s editors, writes that associating
black people with physicality is not negative,
but quite the contrary, since this evaluation
is also linked to the idea that they are closer
to nature. By the same token, of course,
one could argue that proclaiming that white
people are more cerebral and therefore have
more ‘advanced’ cultures is not racist either.
Beyen’s observation shows how worryingly
little he knows of the international literature on
racism for the co-editor of a book on the topic.
Genocide, in the sense of a conscious and
deliberate attempt to exterminate an ethnic
group, is generally considered to be the most
serious crime that human beings can commit.
Steering debate about mass violence in the
CFS towards this legal definition can be a way
to minimise what happened there. This is all
the more heinous, considering that the legal
definition of genocide does not hinge on the
number of victims; there are mass murders
that have claimed fewer lives that are still
recognised as constituting acts of genocide.
Rather than focusing upon the legal definition
of genocide as set out in the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations
General Assembly on 9 December 1948,
Belgian historians would do better to return
to the writings of Polish lawyer Raphael
Lemkin, who formulated the term ‘genocide’
in 1943/44. Lemkin initially defined it
more broadly (the systematic attempt to
destroy a group’s ethnic, national, political
or socio-economic structures and its culture,
including the banning of languages, the
destruction of religious objects or historical
monuments), but such a definition was not
acceptable to colonial powers at the time.
Australian historian Dirk Moses describes
Lemkin’s coinage of genocide as the culmina-
tion of a long tradition of European legal and
political critiques of colonisation and empire,
going as far back as Bartolomé de las Casas,
the 16th-century Spanish colonist and priest
who became famous for describing and
condemning the atrocities that Europeans
committed against Native Americans. Lemkin
himself described the killings of Herero in
German Africa and Congolese in the CFS
as colonial genocides.
An understanding of Leopold II’s occupation,
conquest and colonisation of Congo can
be gained by comparing it not only to the
European colonisation of most of sub-­Saharan
Africa during the second half of the 19th
century, but also the European colonisation
of the Americas and Australia/Oceania.
The first phase of the European colonisation
of Africa has been called ‘colonialism on the
cheap’; in the aftermath of the Industrial
Revolution, it forcefully integrated Africans
into the capitalist economy, driven by the need
for African natural resources for the develop-
ment of new industries, as well as new markets
for the goods produced by those same indus-
tries. Leopold II, as well as British, French and
Portuguese colonisers, initially used conces-
sionary companies to open up t­ erritories, set
up a rudimentary administration, invest in
railways and introduce Africans to the cash
economy in order to build up markets for
European manufactured goods. Motivated by
the search for short-term private profit, these
companies made few long-term investments in
administration, roads or railways and violently
exploited both human and natural resources.
If (with the exception of the Germans in
Southwest Africa) Europeans did not try to
exterminate African peoples with the aim of
replacing them with European settlers, many
had what Lemkin called a genocidal intent,
which could be inferred from circumstances
in which mass death was highly probable and
reasonably foreseeable. Lemkin made the
argument with reference to labour camps,
as opposed to concentration camps, in Nazi
Germany, and it can be extended to certain
periods/events during the European coloni-
sation of the Americas, Africa and Australia/
Oceania. If the colonisers did not always set
out to deliberately wipe out the local popula-
tion, they had such a complete and criminal
disregard for their lives that the threshold for
abusing, maiming, raping, torturing or killing
96
them was very low, and/or they created con-
ditions in which locals’ lives were considered
dispensable or at any rate not worth protecting
from epidemics, famine and so on.
Discussions limited to the legal definition
of genocide obscure the fact that millions
of Congolese lost their lives without any
­deliberate attempt to exterminate entire
­ethnic groups, and crimes were committed
on a massive scale. Even if ‘only’ half a million
Congolese died directly or indirectly as the
result of violence associated with Leopoldian
rule, and even if there was no intent to kill
them because of their ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’,
one can hardly claim such a high death toll
was accidental. It is not because they were
not killed as part of an attempt of ethnic
­extermination that there was no criminal
intent: one does not abuse, maim, rape,
terrorise, torture or kill people or raze their
villages to the ground because one does not
want them to come to any harm. Europeans
and their African auxiliaries submitted
Congolese to some of the most sadistic forms
of torture the human mind can imagine.
Leopold II legitimised the invasion, occupa-
tion and colonisation of Congo in terms of the
need to bring light into its alleged darkness,
to ‘civilise’ its populations and to protect and
save them from Arab-Swahili slave traders.
The supposedly more ‘civilised’ Europeans
turned out to be much more ‘savage’ vis-à-vis
the Congolese, compared to the way these
­so-called ‘savages’ treated them. Their com-
plete disregard for the sanctity of Congolese
human lives was a crime of commission. If
they did not deliberately set out to wipe them
all out, their actions resulted in the direct or
indirect death of millions because they did
not put any value on their human dignity and
did not care whether they lived or died. Why
did they do what they did? How could they do
what they did? There is not a single answer
to these questions, but one reason is that
they knew they could act with impunity. In
a colonial context, European men who would
have to bow to the authority of their (military)
superiors at home could become potentates,
controlling regions bigger than most European
states, holding the power of life and death
over their colonial subjects. The British judge
Lord Acton wrote that ‘power tends to corrupt,
and absolute power corrupts completely. […]
97
98
There is no worse heresy than that the office
sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at
which […] the end learns to justify the means.’
Moreover, Europeans could commit acts of
violence against the inhabitants of overseas
­territories that would never have been con-
doned in Europe, because they were deemed
to belong to another, inferior ‘race’ with a lower
level of culture, if any culture at all. It explains
why in colonial settings most victims of mass
violence were civilians, whereas, in Europe,
World War II was the first conflict to have more
victims among civilians than among soldiers.
It explains why, at the time that the gentleman’s
code held sway, Europeans had no qualms
fighting Congolese who, by and large, had
no standing armies and whose ­weapons
were no longer a match for European arms
after the Industrial Revolution. As far as the
African auxiliaries who committed atrocities is
concerned, an analysis of mass violence in war,
genocides, prisons and so on invariably shows
the importance of leading by example: a fish
rots from the head down, as the saying has it.
The absolute power that Europeans held
went to the heads of many and drove them
out of their minds. They were not only drunk
on p­ ower, they were probably very often also
literally drunk, or high – as Johannes Fabian
describes in Out of Our Minds, his book on
European ‘explorers’ in Central Africa at the
end of the 19th century. Rather than being
clear-minded and self-controlled, they were
very often ‘out of their minds’: extremely tired
or afraid; suffering from delusions of grandeur;
raging against or contemptuous about the
Africans they encountered; suffering and
feverish with tropical diseases; intoxicated
by alcohol or by arsenic, opiates, opium or
quinine. During an expedition to Katanga
from 1898 to 1900, Congolese porters had
to ­carry more than 850 loads weighing more
than 20 tonnes, including 120 litres of alcohol
that were consumed well before the expedition
ended. The diary of Charles Lemaire, the party’s
Belgian leader, is a catalogue of diseases
(asthma, diarrhoea, dysentery, migraine,
kidney pain, malaria, toothache, vomiting...)
for which the only available cures were alcohol
used as medicine, quinine, opium and purges.
And even where no crimes of commission
were committed, crimes of omission certainly
99
were. Faced with many people on the run
from the terror, succumbing to disease and
famine, Europeans could have acted in order
to put an end to the situation but failed to do
so, because they did not care.
Most Belgians know that crimes of omission
are punishable by law; and the revulsion
against Michelle Martin shows the extent to
which they can consider them on a par with
crimes of commission. On 24 June 1995,
Marc Dutroux (who, coincidentally, spent
the first years of his life in the Belgian Congo)
abducted two eight-year-old classmates,
Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo, and locked
them up in a dungeon in his house where he
repeatedly subjected them to sexual abuse,
which he also recorded. When Dutroux was
imprisoned in December of that same year,
his wife Michelle Martin failed to feed them
as Dutroux had asked her to do. While she did
feed the dogs, the two girls starved to death.
If Martin could have saved the children, but
failed to do so, Dutroux never set out to kill
them by starvation at the time, although it
is certain that he would have killed them later.
But few Belgians would deem that a mitigating
factor. What makes Martin’s crime all the more
wicked in the eyes of many Belgians is that
she was a mother herself; if one can somehow
imagine a man abusing children for his sexual
gratification, it is hard to wrap one’s mind
around the image of a mother who fails to feed
children who are in her care, whether by her
own choice or not. The thought of the deaths
of Julie and Mélissa is simply unbearable,
whatever the intentions of the perpetrators.
CONCLUSION
in the aforementioned article that is no
longer available online, Jean-Luc Vellut
writes scathingly:
The argument that naive positivist visions
of knowledge hold sway over much of
historical production in Belgium will not
be disputed here. In the Congo field,
in ­particular, non-professional historians
candidly interpret history as a collection
of facts or events culled at the best of times
from primary ‘sources’ accepted as reflec-
tions of Reality and of Truth. In the prolific
world of self-taught colonial historians,
a superb ignorance of the contribution of
social sciences to an analysis of context
 coexists with bibliographical neglect and
indifference to methodology, and gener-
ally to the requirements of a disciplined
approach to an evaluation of the past.
He is right. But again, books by non-profes-
sional historians that are not up to academic
standards would perhaps not be so successful
if professional historians had written acces-
sible books on the subject. In order to move
from Greuelgeschichte, more is needed
than a catalogue of the often sick violence
that Europeans and their African auxiliaries
subjected Congolese to; such atrocities must
be analysed and interpreted in relation to the
wider colonial context and in relation to the
full richness of Congolese history and culture.
The almost exclusive focus in Belgian public
debate on politics and, more specifically, the
violent transition periods in Congolese history
results in an almost complete lack of knowl-
edge about Congolese history and culture,
and thus reinforces the colonial image of a
‘dark heart’ to be enlightened by Europeans.
Enslavement, colonisation and mass violence
have this in common: no matter how much
their proponents may try to legitimise such
actions, there are no examples in human
history of groups who have invited others
to enslave or colonise them or kill them on
a massive scale. The argument that what
happened in the CFS should be judged in
its context is faulty insofar as it assumes that
there is only a single context – that is, the
Belgian context; if there were, the term itself
would be superfluous and we could excuse
100
any type of mass violence, including slavery
and genocide. Any context should also include
the Congolese context. And we have no reason
to think that they found the violence inflicted
upon them justifiable and acceptable.
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness prefigures the
conventional colonial trope of an idealistic
European who, under the influence of
the t­ ropical sun, becomes a murderous
tyrant against a population that readily
­acknowledges him as their superior and
submits to his authority. By using their own
notion of material technology as a yardstick,
Europeans thought that they could come up
with a hierarchy of different human cultures
and societies, and took it for granted that
when confronted with Europeans with their
‘superior’ culture, colonised peoples would
inevitably succumb voluntarily. It did not
occur to Europeans writing about colonialism
that the colonised would – and did – go on
to dispute the right of Europeans to colonise
them; and that they did so because they
had all the creative, intellectual and moral
capacities that all members of the species
Homo Sapiens share and which allowed
colonial subjects to ­develop cultures as rich
and complex as the Europeans’ own, includ-
ing fully developed legal systems. In order to
fully grasp Kurtz’s explanation – ‘The horror!
The horror’ – in Heart of Darkness, we must
fully grasp the full humanity of Congolese
as expressed in their culture at the time,
which makes the atrocities committed during
Leopold II’s reign over the Congo Free State
the horror they truly were.