The story of the Congo Free State

by Henry Wellington Wack

It is doubtless true that the Consul deliberately incurred the certain risk of being misled owing to the manner in which he interrogated the natives, which he did, as a matter of fact, through two interpreters—“through Vinda, speaking in Bobangi, and Bateko, repeating his utterances ... in the local dialect[101]; so that the Consul was at the mercy not only of the truthfulness of the native who was being questioned, but depended also on the correctness of the translations of two other natives, one of whom was a servant of his own, and the other apparently the missionaries’ interpreter.[102] But any one who has ever been in contact with the native knows how much he is given to lying; the Rev. C. H. Harvey[103] states that:

“The natives of the Congo who surrounded us were contemptible, perfidious, and cruel, impudent liars, dishonest, and vile.”

It is also important, if one wishes to get a correct idea of the value of this evidence, to note that while Mr. Casement was questioning the natives, he was accompanied by two local Protestant English missionaries, whose presence must alone have necessarily affected the evidence.[104]

We should ourselves be going too far if from all this we were to conclude that the whole of the native statements reported by the Consul ought to be rejected. But it is clearly shown that his proofs are insufficient as a basis for a deliberate judgment, and that the particulars in question require to be carefully and impartially tested.

On examining the Consul’s voluminous Report for other cases which he has seen, and which he sets down as cases of mutilation, it will be observed that he mentions two as having occurred on Lake Mantumba[105] “some years ago.”[106] He mentions several others, in regard to the number of which the particulars given in the Report do not seem to agree,[107] as having taken place in the neighbourhood of Bonginda,[108] precisely in the country of the Epondo inquiry, where, as has been seen, the general feeling was excited and prejudiced. It is these cases which, he says, he had not time to inquire into fully,[109] and which, according to the natives, were due to agents of the La Lulonga Company. Were these instances of victims of the practice of native customs which the natives would have been careful not to admit? Were the injuries which the Consul saw due to some conflict between neighbouring villages or tribes? Or were they really due to the black subordinates of the Company? This cannot be determined by a perusal of the Report, as the natives in this instance, as in every other, were the sole source of the Consul’s information, and he, for his part, confined himself to taking rapid notes of their numerous statements for a few hours in the morning of the 5th September, being pressed for time, in order to reach K—— (Bossunguma) at a reasonable hour.[110]

Notwithstanding the weight which he attached to the “air of frankness” and the “air of conviction and sincerity”[111] on the part of the natives, his own experience shows clearly the necessity for caution, and renders rash his assertion “that it was clear that these men were stating either what they had actually seen with their eyes or firmly believed in their hearts.”[112]

Now, however, that the Consul has drawn attention to these few cases—whether cases of cruelty or not, and they are all that, as a matter of fact, he has inquired into personally, and even so without being able to prove sufficiently their real cause—the authorities will of course look into the matter and cause inquiries to be made. It is to be regretted that, this being so, all mention of date, place, and name has been systematically omitted in the copy of the Report communicated to the Government of the Independent State of the Congo. It is impossible not to see that these suppressions will place great difficulties in the way of the magistrates who will have to inquire into the facts, and the Government of the Congo trust that, in the interests of truth, they may be placed in possession of the complete text of the Consul’s Report.

It is not to be wondered at if the Government of the Congo State take this opportunity of protesting against the proceedings of their detractors who have thought fit to submit to the public reproductions of photographs of mutilated natives, and have started the odious story of hands being cut off with the knowledge and even at the instigation of Belgians in Africa. The photograph of Epondo, for instance, mutilated in the manner shown, and who has “twice been photographed,” is probably one of those which the English pamphlets are circulating as proof of the execrable administration of the Belgians in Africa. One English review reproduced the photograph of a “cannibal surrounded with the skulls of his victims,” and underneath was written: “In the original photograph the cannibal was naked. The artist has made him decent by ... covering his breast with the star of the Congo State. It is now a suggestive emblem of the Christian-veneered cannibalism on the Congo.”[113] At this rate it would suffice to throw discredit on the Uganda Administration if the plates were published illustrating the mutilations which, in a letter dated Uganda, 16th December, 1902, Dr. Castellani says he saw in the neighbourhood of Entebbe itself: “It is not difficult to find there natives without noses or ears, etc.”[114]

The truth is, that in Uganda, as in the Congo, the natives still give way to their savage instincts. This objection has been anticipated by Mr. Casement, who remarks:

“It was not a native custom prior to the coming of the white man; it was not the outcome of the primitive instincts of savages in their fights between village and village; it was the deliberate act of the soldiers of a European Administration, and these men themselves never made any concealment that in committing these acts they were but obeying the positive orders of their superiors.”[115]