The story of the Congo Free State

by Henry Wellington Wack

State Claims Vacant Lands.

Having provided laws securing to natives the lands occupied by them, and regulated the land titles of foreigners, the State declared as its own all unoccupied lands not subject to the ownership of the native or the foreigner. This governmental possession of unoccupied territory is not only sanctioned by the most enlightened laws of the age, it is the express duty of a State to bring under its care all territory which, if abandoned, might become the object of dispute, internecine strife, and sanguinary warfare. The very element of, and respect for, ownership of lands, chattels, or other objects of material value, preserves that order which all law seeks to enforce, for which civil society is organised on foundations of equity and justice. Was it not the very principle which actuated the Berlin Conference when, in order to remove the Congo Free State from the covetous rivalry of the Powers—their disputes and possible wars—it recognised the occupants of the Congo Basin and neutralised the Congo State? If, during the twenty years that have elapsed since the Berlin Conference settled the matter, the Congo Free State had remained in the position of territory open to the pre-emption, adverse possession, invasion, and trespass of anybody, the savage European war of words, of diplomatic missiles, or perhaps of actual arms, would have been a deadly substitute for the native savagery of the African black. Civilisation without property vested in the State or its citizens is inconceivable.

Various Tenures of Land.

The categories into which the lands within the borders of the Congo Free State naturally fall have already been briefly indicated in a previous chapter. The land system includes, first, a reservation of land exclusively for the use of the public. Second, lands sold upon an official scale of prices through a Land Department composed of five members. Third, concessions of land granted for a certain term of years, or as freehold, to companies organised to develop its productivity. Fourth, grants of use extended to those who, by arrangement with the State, thereby obtain the right to work a prescribed area for india-rubber. Certain zones of rubber-bearing territory are not subject to grants of use, the State reserving therein the exclusive right to work the forests, thereby following the system in force in the Soudan and in other neighbouring colonies. Finally, there are leases of three, six, or nine years, of land for commercial purposes, and leases for twenty to fifty years of lands for agricultural uses and the establishment of missions, schools, and churches. The latter possess areas aggregating about six thousand acres.

The principal concessionary companies, operate over approximately one-fourth of the State. The lands conceded to such companies are transmitted under contracts very similar to those employed in the Soudan,[38] and provide for the improvement of the land by the erection of buildings, planting rubber vines, coffee, cocoa, breeding cattle, and collecting rubber in a manner which will not deplete the growing stock. The Congo State law imposes upon the rubber companies the duty of planting at least five hundred feet of rubber vines or trees for every ton of rubber harvested. The forests are safeguarded in respect of wood and other products, and special inspectors see to the rigorous enforcement of the law. There appears to be a different state of things in the rubber-bearing districts of British Lagos, where reckless destruction of the vines, waste, inattention, and lack of intelligent organisation have reduced the rubber yield in 1900 to one-tenth its harvest in 1896, with the decline still continuing. The same measure of rapid decline is going on in the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. “The decrease in the export of rubber from £347,721 in 1896 to £160,315 in 1899 is clearly due to the reckless and unskilful manner in which rubber was collected.”[39]

This report is corroborated by the statistics of the British Gold Coast, which in 1899 exported rubber to the value of £555,731, but in 1902 to the value of only £88,602; Lagos, 1896, £347,721, in 1901, £14,749; Sierra Leone, 1895, £86,940, in 1902, £8,192. Indeed, the table from which these quotations are made shows that the rubber exports from eight British colonies have greatly decreased since 1898, despite the increased European value of that product. It would seem that the care and skill which during these same years caused the Congo exports to rise from less than a million francs in 1886 to over fifty-four millions in 1903 were at least worth the emulation of the Gold Coast, Lagos, and Sierra Leone muddlers hiding defeat behind the humanitarian pretexts of Liverpool rubber merchants and their agents, whose conscience is as flexible as their trade product.

Concerning the concessionary scheme which prevails in the French Congo, and which the Congo Free State Government has so successfully carried out in its own territory, M. Eugène Etienne, a distinguished French scholar, Vice-President of the French Chamber of Deputies, and leader of the French colonial group, has said and written some pertinent things. The French Congo, lying on the coast west of the Free State, has been also assailed by the few interested British merchants and their religious and secular agents and reform associations for having been forbidden to trespass upon and despoil Central African territory which has so far escaped the acquisitive proclivities of John Bull. M. Etienne’s dissertation contains the following passages as applicable to the Free State as to the French Congo:

French and Belgian Systems Compared.

I stop in the enumeration of the results obtained by the Independent State of the Congo, and I will not put in the opposite column the balance sheet which gives little enough to rejoice over of the progress realised in the neighbouring French colony. Certainly from the point of view of the exploration of the country, and the management of the natives, our officials have obtained what might be called, in a formula borrowed from mechanics, the maximum of result with the minimum of expense....

The constitution of landed property in the Congo, regulated by the decree of 28th March, 1899, and the attribution of vacant lands by important lots to companies bound by a cahier des charges, form a work carefully thought out and elaborated on the advice of eminent jurists. It does honour to the Minister of the Colonies who took the initiative in the matter, my eminent colleague in the Chamber of Deputies, M. Guillain, as well as to the Councillor of State, M. Cotelle, who gave his active collaboration as President of the Commission of Concessions.