Listen to the yell of leopold's ghost

I'KAISI. I( )K

KiNCi I.KOMi.trs CitlOST

LLA superb synoptic history of European misdemeanor in central Africa.13

—Jeremy Hxrdm^NtwYark't'inux Book Review i(An absorbing ;md horrifying account.'

'

Luc Santi.% San Fraudsea Chronicle

''Carefully researched and vigorously told, King Leopold's Ghost does what good

history always does — expands the memory of the human race" — I ;ritz L;mhiim

7 Houston Chronicle

LlA superb, engrossing chronicle" — Publishers. Weekly

"Hoehschild s book is a rare thing in possessing both scholarly worth and the

virtues of a novel. This is an extraordinary book" — - Uoston Sunday Clohe

"[HochschikiJ spins engrossing yarns of kings and colonels, of distant station

chiefs and feverish missionaries"

— James /Aig. Philath: Î h in hajuircr

"A remarkably engaging work of popular history: extensively researched, well

written and difficult to put down. 5 '

Scott McLcmee, Newsdtty

'Spellbinding/'

— Kobm hiylor, Seattle Posf-httt'ltiyendcr

"Hochschild has produced a history like none other. A hundred years ago, en- lightened people in the Western world were outraged by a holocaust in Africa

which left millions dead . . .Yet today not one person in a thousand could say

what the fuss was all about, unless, of course, they have already read this amaz-

ing book."

Tariq Aih Finartrial Times

"A fascinating account of the creation of the Belgian Congo by that strange, greedy cruel monarch Leopold, king of the Belgians r , ,A ha tinLing book" — K. Anthmiy Appinh, \!eu f York Review of Hooks

"A book of terrible beauty . King Leopolds Ghost is essential reading for the new ccnhiry."

'Ibm S:ni{[lioriK tfutmtw Sun

L

l loehschild has assembled the most remarkable (litres and dramatis person a e,

added a keen appreciation for sociopolitical nuances in turn-of-the-eeiHury

1 m rope and America, and produced a splendid new popular history" —

(_ I a i f C.i e rh a r c H l'\w -j# 1 1. A ffairs

"Hoehsch.ild has written a moving and important book about wickedness

trittinphant and defeated. His Leopold liter its a place amontj the s^reat

modern enemies of civilization "

— A\g\xVM\\miw t Aritvriuvt Spcctafov

:

'Adam Hochschild tells the story of the Belgian colonization in Africa with

die talent of a great journalist arid the verve of a passionate partisan. jHc|

shows the birth, around .1900. of the idea that independent, press Lire, exerted in

the name of human rights, can make die powerful give way. Something which is important to us all."

-- Je^iii Soiablin, [j: A-lorulv

"Engrossing and homtyiny . . .The book begins as an account of evil; it ends as

an account of" people of conscience."

— Philip Kennieott, Sl Li>ui$ I\^t-l)i

"

—M art in K 1 ein , ' to rot t to (Jh j he as \d Mail

^Kino Leopold's Ghost has a riveting cast of characters: heroes, villains and bit

players, all extraordinary all compelling unifies of neuroses and ambitions, all

wonderfully drawn^ — RoiKin bennect, Okwvrr

"This is a harmwing story, toid with a crisp i nc is i veriest . . .We knew-- of tins skeleton in the colonial cupboard . . . but we did not know u was quite so

— Charles Nidi oil. Daily 'R'kyjuph

i

BOOKS BY ADAM HOCHSCHILD

Half the Way Home: A Memoir ofFather and Son

The Mirror at Midnight: A South AfricanJourney

The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin

Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits^ Travels

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

wm^smmm^mm^i^". ^ ^ ^

A STORY of GREED,

TERROR, and HEROISM

in COLONIAL AFRICA

^ A MARINER BOOK

Houghton Mifflin Company

BOSTON NEW YORK

KING

LEOPOLD'S

GHOST

-«lf

First Mariner Books edition 1999 FOR

. , ^ DAVID HUNTER Copyright © 1998 by Adam Hochschild All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from

this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

215 Park Avenue South, NewYork, NewYork 10003 •

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hochschild, Adam.

King Leopold's ghost : a story of greed, terror, and heroism in

colonial Africa / Adam Hochschild. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 0-395-75924-2

isbn 0-6 1 8-00 190- 5 (pbk.)

1 . Congo (Democratic Republic)— Politics and government — 1885-1908. 2. Congo (Democratic Republic)— Politics and govern- ment. 3. Forced labor—Congo (Democratic Republic)— History

—

19th century. 4. Forced labor—Congo (Democratic Republic)— History— 20th century. 5. Indigenous peoples—Congo (Democratic Republic)— History— 1 9th century. 6. Indigenous peoples—Congo ' (Democratic Republic)— History—20th century 7. Congo (Democratic Republic)—Race relations—History— 1 9th century. 8

.

Congo (Democratic Republic)—Race relations— History— 20th cen- tury. 9. Human rights movements— History— 19th century. 10. Human rights movements—History— 20th century. I . Tide. DT655.H63 1998

967.5 DC2I 98-16813 CIP

Printed in the United States ofAmerica

QUM 15 14 13 12

Book design by Melodie Wertelet Map by Barbara Jackson, Meridian Mapping, Oakland, California Photo credits appear on page 352.

In somewhat different form, portions of chapters 9 and 19 appeared

in The New Yorker, and portions of chapters 5 and 16 in TheAmerican Scholar.

^rrsmgF-'T

CONTENTS

Introduction i

Prologue: "The Traders Are Kidnapping Our People" 6

PART i: WALKING INTO FIRE i. "I Shall Not Give Up the Chase" 21

2. The Fox Crosses the Stream jj

3. The Magnificent Cake 47

4. "The Treaties Must Grant Us Everything" 61

5. From Florida to Berlin 75

6. Under the Yacht Club Flag 88

7- The First Heretic 101

8. Where There Aren't No Ten Commandments 115 9- Meeting Mr. Kurtz 140

10. The Wood That Weeps i5o

11. A Secret Society ofMurderers 167

CONTENTS

PART II: A KING AT BAY

12. David and Goliath 183

13. Breaking into the Thieves' Kitchen 193

14. To Flood His Deeds with Day 209

15. A Reckoning 223

16. "Journausts Won't Give You Receipts*' 235

17. No Man Is a Stranger 233

18. Victory? 27$

19. The Great Forgetting 292

Notes 309

Bibliography 338

Acknowledgments 331

Index 333

KING

LEOPOLD'S

GHOST

INTRODUCTION

The beginnings of this story lie far back in time, and its reverbera- tions still sound today. But for me a central incandescent moment,

one that illuminates long decades before and after, is a young man's flash

ofmoral recognition.

The year is 1897 or 1898. Try to imagine him, briskly stepping off a

cross-Channel steamer, a forceful, burly man, in his mid-twenties, with a

handlebar mustache. He is confident and well spoken, but his British speech is without the polish of Eton or Oxford. He is well dressed, but the clothes are not from Bond Street. With an ailing mother and a wife and growing family to support, he is not the sort of person likely to get

caught up in an idealistic cause. His ideas are thoroughly conventional.

He looks— and is— every inch the sober, respectable businessman. Edmund Dene Morel is a trusted employee of a Liverpool shipping

line. A subsidiary of the company has the monopoly on all transport of cargo to and from the Congo Free State, as it is then called, the huge

territory in central Africa that is the world's only colony claimed by one

man. That man is King Leopold II of Belgium, a ruler much admired throughout Europe as a "philanthropic" monarch. He has welcomed Christian missionaries to his new colony; his troops, it is said, have fought and defeated local slave-traders who preyed on the population; and for more than a decade European newspapers have praised him for investing

his personal fortune in public works to benefit the Africans.

Because Morel speaks fluent French, his company sends him to Bel-

gium every few weeks to supervise the loading and unloading ofships on

INTRODUCTION

the Congo run. Although the officials he works with have been handling

this shipping traffic for years without a second thought, Morel begins to

notice things that unsettle him. At the docks of the big port ofAntwerp

he sees his company's ships arriving filled to the hatch covers with valu-

able cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when they cast off their hawsers to

steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager

young men in uniform line the ships' rails, what they carry is mosdy army

officers, firearms, and ammunition. There is no trade going on here. Little

or nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory. As Morel watches

these riches streaming to Europe with almost no goods being sent to

Africa to pay for them, he realizes that there can be only one explanation

for their source: slave labor.

Brought face to face with evil, Morel does not turn away. Instead, what

he sees determines the course of his life and the course of an extraordi-

nary movement, the first great international human rights movement of

the twentieth century. Seldom has one human being— impassioned, eloquent, blessed with brilliant organizing skills and nearly superhuman

energy— managed almost single-handedly to put one subject on the world's front pages for more than a decade. Only a few years after stand-

ing on the docks of Antwerp, Edmund Morel would be at the White

House, insisting to President Theodore Roosevelt that the United States

had a special responsibility to do something about the Congo. He would

organize delegations to the British Foreign Office. He would mobilize

everyone from Booker T. Washington to Anatole France to the Arch-

bishop of Canterbury to join his cause. More than two hundred mass

meetings to protest slave labor in the Congo would be held across the

United States. A larger number of gatherings in England— nearly three hundred a year at the crusade's peak— would draw as many as five thousand people at a time. In London, one letter of protest to the Times

on the Congo would be signed by eleven peers, nineteen bishops, sev-

enty-six members of Parliament, the presidents of seven Chambers of

Commerce, thirteen editors of major newspapers, and every lord mayor

in the country. Speeches about the horrors of King Leopold's Congo

would be given as far away as Australia. In Italy, two men would fight a

duel over the issue. British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, a man not

given to overstatement, would declare that "no external question for at

least thirty years has moved the country so strongly and so vehemendy."

This is the story of that movement, of the savage crime that was its

target, of the long period of exploration and conquest that preceded it,

INTRODUCTION

and of the way the world has forgotten one of the great mass killings of

recent history.

I knew almost nothing about the history of the Congo until a few years

ago, when I noticed a footnote in a book I happened to be reading.

Often, when you come across something particularly striking, you re-

member just where you were when you read it. On this occasion I was sitting, stiffand tired, late at night, in one of the far rear seats ofan airliner

crossing the United States from east to west.

The footnote was to a quotation by Mark Twain, written, the note said,

when he was part of the worldwide movement against slave labor in the

Congo, a practice that had taken five to eight million lives. Worldwide

movement? Five to eight million lives? I was starded.

Statistics about mass murder are often hard to prove. But ifthis number

turned out to be even halfas high, I thought, the Congo would have been

one ofthe major killing grounds ofmodern times.Why were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of our century's horrors? And why

had I never before heard ofthem? I had been writing about human rights

for years, and once, in the course ofhalf a dozen trips to Africa, I had been

to the Congo.

That visit was in 1961. In a Leopoldville apartment, I heard a CIA man, who had had too much to drink, describe with satisfaction exacdy how and where the newly independent country's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, had been killed a few months earlier. He assumed that any American, even a visiting student like me, would share his relief at the

assassination of a man the United States government considered a dan- gerous leftist troublemaker.In the early morning a day or two later I left

the country by ferry across the Congo River, the conversation still ring-

ing in my head as the sun rose over the waves and the dark, smooth water slapped against the boat's hull.

It was several decades later that I encountered that footnote, and with

it my own ignorance ofthe Congo's early history. Then it occurred to me that, like millions of other people, I had read something about that time

and place after all:Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness, However, with my college lecture notes on the novel filled with scribbles about Freudian

overtones, mythic echoes, and inward vision, I had mentally filed away

the book under fiction, not fact.

I began to read more. The further I explored, the more it was clear that

Pfg?:w,iwi^p iMttoDiicrroN INTRODUCTION

the Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust

dimensions. At the same time, I unexpectedly found myself absorbed by

the extraordinary characters who had peopled this patch of history Al-

though it was Edmund Dene Morel who had ignited a movement, he

was not the first outsider to see King Leopold's Congo for what it was

and to try hard to draw the world's attention to it. That role was played by

George Washington Williams, a black American journalist and historian,

who, unlike anyone before him, interviewed Africans about their experi-

ence of their white conquerors. It was another black American, William

Sheppard, who recorded a scene he came across in the Congo rain forest

that would brand itself on the world's consciousness as a symbol of

colonial brutality There were other heroes as well, one of the bravest of

whom ended his life on a London gallows. Then, of course, into the middle ofthe story sailed the young sea captainJoseph Conrad, expecting

the exotic Africa of his childhood dreams but finding instead what he

would call "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of

human conscience." And looming above them all was King Leopold II, a

man as filled with greed and cunning, duplicity and charm, as any of the

more complex villains of Shakespeare.

As I followed the intersecting lives of these men, I realized something

else about the terror in the Congo and the controversy that came to

surround it. It was the first major international atrocity scandal in the age

of the telegraph and the camera. In its mixture of bloodshed on an

industrial scale, royalty, sex, the power of celebrity, and rival lobbying and

media campaigns raging in half a dozen countries on both sides of the

Adantic, it seemed strikingly close to our time. Furthermore, unlike many

other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish con-

quistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop ofblood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that,

too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the

clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh. Although Europe has long forgotten the victims ofLeopold's Congo, I

found a vast supply of raw material to work with in reconstructing their

fate: Congo memoirs by explorers, steamboat captains, military men; the

records of mission stations; reports of government investigations; and

those peculiarly Victorian phenomena, accounts by gendeman (or some-

times lady) "travelers." The Victorian era was a golden age of letters and

diaries; and often it seems as if every visitor or official in the Congo

kept a voluminous journal and spent each evening on the riverbank

writing letters home.

One problem, of course, is that nearly all of this vast river of words is

by Europeans or Americans. There was no written language in the Congo

when Europeans first arrived, and this inevitably skewed the way that

history was recorded.We have dozens ofmemoirs by the territory's white officials; we know the changing opinions of key people in the British

Foreign Office, sometimes on a day-by-day basis. But we do not have a

full-length memoir or complete oral history of a single Congolese dur-

ing the period of the greatest terror. Instead of African voices from this

time there is largely silence.

And yet, as I immersed myself in this material, I saw how revealing it

was. The men who seized the Congo often trumpeted their killings, bragging about them in books and newspaper articles. Some kept surpris-

ingly frank diaries that show far more than the writers intended, as does a

voluminous and explicit instruction book for colonial officials. Further-

more, several officers of the private army that occupied the Congo came

to feel guilty about the blood on their hands. Their testimony, and the

documents they smuggled out, helped to fuel the protest movement.

Even on the part of the brutally suppressed Africans, the silence is not

complete. Some of their actions and voices, though filtered through the

records of their conquerors, we can still see and hear.

The worst of the bloodshed in the Congo took place between 1890

and 19 10, but its origins lie much earlier, when Europeans and Africans

first encountered each other there. And so to reach the headwaters of our

story we must leap back more than five hundred years, to a time when a

ship's captain saw the ocean change its color, and when a king received

news of a strange apparition that had risen from inside the earth.

PROLOGUE

"THE TRADERS ARE

KIDNAPPING OUR PEOPLE"

When Europeans began imagining Africa beyond the Sahara, the continent they pictured was a dreamscape, a site for fantasies of

the fearsome and the supernatural. Ranuif Higden, a Benedictine monk

who mapped the world about 1350, claimed that Africa contained one-

eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads.A geographer in the next century announced that the continent held people with one leg,

three faces, and the heads of lions. In 1459, an Italian monk, Fra Mauro,

declared Africa the home of the roc, a bird so large that it could carry an

elephant through the air.

In the Middle Ages, almost no one in Europe was in a position to

know whether Africa contained giant birds, one-eyed people, or anything

else. Hostile Moors lived on Africa's Mediterranean coast, and few Euro-

peans dared set foot there, much less head south across the Sahara. And as

for trying to sail down the west African coast, everyone knew that as soon

as you passed the Canary Islands you would be in the Mare Tenebroso, the

Sea ofDarkness.

In the medieval imagination [writes Peter Forbath], this was a

region of uttermost dread , . . where the heavens fling down

liquid sheets offlame and the waters boil . . . where serpent rocks

and ogre islands lie in wait for the mariner, where the giant hand

of Satan reaches up from the fathomless depths to seize him,

where he will turn black in face and body as a mark of God's

THE TRADERS ARE KIDNAPPING OUR PEOPLE

vengeance for the insolence of his prying into this forbidden

mystery. And even ifhe should be able to survive all these ghasdy perils and sail on through, he would then arrive in the Sea of

Obscurity and be lost forever in the vapors and slime at the edge

of the world.

It was not until the fifteenth century, the dawn of the age of ocean navigation, that Europeans systematically began to venture south, the

Portuguese in the lead. In the 1440s, Lisbon's shipbuilders developed the

caravel, a compact vessel particularly good at sailing into the wind. Al- though rarely more than a hundred feet long, this sturdy ship carried

explorers far down the west coast of Africa, where no one knew what gold, spices, and precious stones might He. But it was not only lust for

riches that drove the explorers. Somewhere in Africa, they knew, was the source of the Nile, a mystery that had fascinated Europeans since antiq-

uity. They were also driven by one of the most enduring of medieval myths, the legend of PresterJohn, a Christian king who was said to rule a vast empire in the interior of Africa, where, from a palace of translucent

crystal and precious stones, he reigned over forty-two lesser kings, in ad-

dition to assorted centaurs and giants. No traveler was ever turned away from his dinner table of solid emerald, which seated thousands. Surely

PresterJohn would be eager to share his riches with his fellow Christians

and to help them find their way onward, to the fabled wealth of India.

Successive Portuguese expeditions probed ever farther southward. In

1482, an experienced naval captain named Diogo Cao set offon the most ambitious voyage yet. As he sailed close to the west African coast, he saw

the North Star disappear from the sky once his caravel crossed the equa-

tor, and he found himselfmuch farther south than anyone from Europe nad ever been.

One day Cao came upon something that astounded him. Around his ship, the sea turned a dark, slate-tinged yellow, and brownish-yellow

waves were breaking on the nearby beaches. Sailing toward the mouth of an inlet many miles wide, his caravel had to fight a current of eight to nine knots. Furthermore, a taste of the water surrounding the ship re-

vealed that it was fresh, not salt. Cao had stumbled on the mouth of an enormous silt-filled river, larger than any a European had ever seen. The impression its vastness made on him and his men is reflected in a contem- porary account:

PROLOGUE

For the space of 20 leagues [the river] preserves its fresh water

unbroken by the briny billows which encompass it on every side;

as if this noble river had determined to try its strength in pitched

battle with the ocean itself, and alone deny it the tribute which

all other rivers in the world pay without resistance.

Modern oceanographers have discovered more evidence of the great river's strength in its "pitched battle with the ocean": a hundred-mile-

long canyon, in places four thousand feet deep, that the river has carved

out of the sea floor.

Cao went ashore at the river's mouth and erected a limestone pillar

topped with an iron cross and inscribed with the royal coat of arms and

the words: "In the year 6681 of the World and in that of 1482 since the

birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most serene, the most excellent and

potent prince, King Joao II of Portugal did order this land to be discov-

ered and this pillar of stone to be erected by Diogo Cao, an esquire in his

household."

The river where he had landed would be known by Europeans for most ofthe next five hundred years as the Congo. It flowed into the sea at

the northern end of a thriving African kingdom, an imperial federation

of two to three million people. Ever since then, geographers have usually

spelled the name of the river and the eventual European colony on its

banks one way, and that of the people living around its mouth and their

indigenous kingdom another.

The Kingdom of the Kongo was roughly three hundred miles square, comprising territory that today lies in several countries. Its capital was the

town ofMbanza Kongo— mbanza means "court"— on a commanding hilltop some ten days' walk inland from the coast and today just on the

Angolan side ofthe Angola-Congo border. In 1 491, nine years and several

voyages after Diogo Cao 's landfall, an expedition of awed Portuguese

priests and emissaries made this ten-day trek and set up housekeeping as

permanent representatives of their country in the court of the Kongo

king. Their arrival marked the beginning of the first sustained encounter

between Europeans and a black African nation.

The Kingdom of the Kongo had been in place for at least a hundred years before the Portuguese arrived. Its monarch, the ManiKongo, was

chosen by an assembly of clan leaders. Like his European counterparts,

he sat on a throne, in his case made of wood inlaid with ivory. As sym-

'THB TRADERS ARE KIDNAPPING OUR PEOPLE'

bols of royal authority, the ManiKongo carried a zebra-tail whip, had

the skins and heads of baby animals suspended from his belt, and wore a

small cap.

In the capital, the king dispensed justice, received homage, and re-

viewed his troops under a fig tree in a large public square. Whoever

approached him had to do so on all fours. On pain of death, no one was allowed to watch him eat or drink. Before he did either, an attendant

struck two iron poles together, and anyone in sight had to he face down

on the ground.

The ManiKongo who was then on the throne greeted the Portuguese warmly. His enthusiasm was probably due less to the Savior his unex-

pected guests told him about than to the help their magical fire-spouting

weapons promised in suppressing a troublesome provincial rebellion. The

Portuguese were glad to oblige.

The newcomers built churches and mission schools. Like many white

evangelists who followed them, they were horrified by polygamy; they thought it was the spices in the African food that provoked the dreadful

practice. But despite their contempt for Kongo culture, the Portuguese

grudgingly recognized in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-devel-

oped state— the leading one on the west coast of central Africa. The ManiKongo appointed governors for each ofsome half-dozen provinces,

and his rule was carried out by an elaborate civil service that included

such specialized positions as mani vangu vangu, or first judge in cases of

adultery. Although they were without writing or the wheel, the inhabi-

tants forged copper into jewelry and iron into weapons, and wove cloth-

ing out of fibers stripped from the leaves of the raffia palm tree. Accord-

ing to myth, the founder of the Kongo state was a blacksmith king, so

ironwork was an occupation of the nobility. People cultivated yams, ba-

nanas, and other fruits and vegetables, and raised pigs, cattle, and goats.

They measured distance by marching days, and marked time by the lunar

month and by a four-day week, the first day ofwhich was a holiday. The

king collected taxes from his subjects and, like many a ruler, controlled

the currency supply: cowrie shells found on a coastal island under royal

authority.

As in much of Africa, the kingdom had slavery. The nature ofAfrican

slavery varied from one area to another and changed over time, but most

slaves were people captured in warfare. Others had been criminals or

debtors, or were given away by their farnilies as part of a dowry settle-

PROLOGUE

merit. Like any system that gives some human beings total power over

others, slavery in Africa could be vicious. Some Congo basin peoples

sacrificed slaves on special occasions, such as the ratification of a treaty

between chiefdoms; the slow death of an abandoned slave, his bones

broken, symbolized the fate of anyone who violated the treaty. Some

slaves might also be sacrificed to give a dead chief's soul some company

on its journey into the next world.

In other ways, African slavery was more flexible and benign than the

system Europeans would soon establish in the New World. Over a gen-

eration or two, slaves could often earn or be granted their freedom, and

free people and slaves sometimes intermarried. Nonetheless, the fact that

trading in human beings existed in any form turned out to be cata-

strophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready to buy endless

shiploads of slaves, they found African chiefs willing to sell.

Soon enough, the slave-buyers came. They arrived in small numbers at

first, but then in a flood unleashed by events across the Adantic. In 1500,

only nine years after the first Europeans arrived at Mbanza Kongo, a

Portuguese expedition was blown off course and came upon Brazil.

Within a few decades, the Western Hemisphere became a huge, lucrative,

nearly insatiable market for African slaves. They were put to work by the

millions in Brazil's mines and on its coffee plantations, as well as on the

Caribbean islands where other European powers quickly began using the

lush, fertile land to grow sugar.

In the Kingdom of the Kongo, the Portuguese forgot the search for

Prester John. Slaving fever seized them. Men sent out from Lisbon to be

masons or teachers at Mbanza Kongo soon made far more money by

herding convoys of chained Africans to the coast and selling them to the

captains of slave-carrying caravels.

The lust for slave profits engulfed even some of the priests, who

abandoned their preaching, took black women as concubines, kept slaves

themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery. The priests

who strayed from the fold stuck to their faith in one way, however; after

the Reformation they tried to ensure that none of their human goods

ended up in Protestant hands. It was surely not right, said one, 'Tor

persons baptized in the Catholic church to be sold to peoples who are

enemies of their faith."

A village near Diogo Cao s stone pillar on the south shore of the

Congo River estuary became a slave port, from which more than five

10

"the traders are kidnapping our people"

thousand slaves a year were being shipped across the Adantic by the 1 530s.

By the next century, fifteen thousand slaves a year were exported from

the Kingdom of the Kongo as a whole. Traders kept careful records of

their booty One surviving inventory from this region lists "68 head" of

slaves by name, physical defects, and cash value, starting with the men,

who were worth the most money, and ending with: "Child, name un- known as she is dying and cannot speak, male without value, and a small

girl Callenbo, no value because she is dying; one small girl Cantunbe, no

value because she is dying."

Many of the slaves shipped to the Americas from the great river's

mouth came from the Kingdom of the Kongo itself; many others were

captured by African slave-dealers who ranged more than seven hundred miles into the interior, buying slaves from local chiefs and headmen.

Forced-marched to the coast, their necks locked into wooden yokes, the

slaves were rarely given enough food, and because caravans usually trav-

eled in the dry season, they often drank stagnant water. The trails to the

slave ports were soon strewn with bleaching bones.

Once they were properly baptized, clothed in leftover burlap cargo

wrappings, and chained together in ships' holds, most slaves from this

region were sent to Brazil, the nearest part of the New World. Starting in the 1600s, however, a growing demand tempted many ship captains

to make the longer voyage to the British colonies in North America.

Roughly one of every four slaves imported to work the cotton and

tobacco plantations of the American South began his or her journey

across the Adantic from equatorial Africa, including the Kongo kingdom.

The KiKongo language, spoken around the Congo River's mouth, is one

of the African tongues whose traces linguists have found in the Gullah

dialect spoken by black Americans today on the coastal islands of South

Carolina and Georgia.

When the Atlantic slave trade began decimating the Kongo, that nation was under the reign of a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who had gained the throne in 1 506 and ruled as Affonso I for nearly forty years. Affonso s life spanned a crucial period. When he was born, no one in the kingdom knew that Europeans existed. When he died, his entire realm was threatened by the slave-selling fever they had caused. He was a man of tragic self-awareness, and he left his mark. Some three hundred

it

s^pp^'^'TYrr' riULUOUB

years later, a missionary said, "A native of the Kongo knows the name of

three kings: that of the present one, that of his predecessor, and that of

Affonso."

He was a provincial chief in his early thirties when the Portuguese first arrived at Mbanza Kongo, in 1491. A convert to Christianity, he took on the name Affonso and some Portuguese advisers, and studied for ten years

with the priests at Mbanza Kongo. One wrote to the king of Portugal that Affonso "knows better than us the prophets, the Gospel ofour Savior

Jesus Christ, all the lives of the saints and all that has to do with our holy

mother Church. IfYour Highness saw him, You would be astonished. He speaks so well and with such assurance that it always seems to me that the Holy Spirit speaks through his mouth. My Lord, he does nothing but study; many times he falls asleep over his books and many times he forgets

to eat or drink because he is speaking of our Savior." It is hard to tell how

much of this glowing portrait was inspired by the priest s attempt to

impress the Portuguese king and how much by Affonso 's attempt to

impress the priest.

In the language of a later age, King Affonso I was a modernizer. He urgendy tried to acquire European learning, weapons, and goods in order

to strengthen his rule and fortify it against the destabilizing force of the

white arrival. Having noticed the Portuguese appetite for copper, for

example, he traded it for European products that would help him buy the

submission of outlying provinces. Clearly a man of unusual intelligence,

Affonso tried to do something as difficult in his time as in ours: to be a

selective modernizer. He was an enthusiast for the church, for the written word, for European medicine, and for woodworking, masonry, and other

skills to be learned from Portuguese craftsmen. But when his fellow king

in Lisbon sent an envoy to urge the adoption ofPortugal's legal code and

court protocol, Affonso wasn't interested. And he tried hard to keep out prospectors, fearing total takeover ofhis land ifEuropeans found the gold

and silver they coveted.

Because virtually everything we know about this part ofAfrica for the

next several hundred years comes to us from its white conquerors, King

Affonso I provides something rare and valuable: an African voice. Indeed,

his is one of the very few central African voices that we can hear at all

before the twentieth century. He used his fluency in Portuguese to dic- tate a remarkable series of letters to two successive Portuguese kings, the

first known documents composed by a black African in any European

language. Several dozen of the letters survive, above his signature, with its

mra-mMW www wmvm :.'"T*I|H

regal flourish of double underlinings. Their tone is the formal one of monarch to monarch, usually beginning "Most high and powerful prince and king my brother . . ." But we can hear not just a king speaking; we hear a human being, one who is aghast to see his people taken away in ever greater numbers on slave ships.

Affonso was no abolitionist. Like most African rulers of his time and later, he owned slaves, and at least once he sent some as a present to his "brother" king in Lisbon, along with leopard skins, parrots, and copper anklets. But this traditional exchange of gifts among kings seemed greatly different to Affonso from having tens of thousands of his previously free subjects taken across the sea in chains. Listen to him as he writes King Joao III of Portugal in 1526:

Each day the traders are kidnapping our people— children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our

own family. . . . This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. . . . We need in this king- dom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass. ... It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.

Later the same year:

Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many ofour- alack free subjects They sell them . . . after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secredy or at night. ... As soon as the captives are in the hands ofwhite men they are branded with a red-hot iron.

Again and again Affonso speaks about the twin themes of the slave trade and the alluring array of cloth, tools,jewelry, and other knickknacks that the Portuguese traders used to buy their human cargoes:

These goods exert such a great attraction over simple and igno-

rant people that they believe in them and forget their belief in God. . . . My Lord, a monstrous greed pushes our subjects, even Christians, to seize members oftheir own families, and of ours, to do business by selling them as captives.

13

PROLOGUE

While begging the Portuguese king to send him teachers, pharmacists,

and doctors instead of traders, Affonso admits that the flood of material

goods threatened his authority. His people "can now procure, in much

greater quantity than we can, the things we formerly used to keep them

obedient to us and content." Affonso's lament was prescient; this was not

the last time that lust for Europe's great cornucopia ofgoods undermined

traditional ways of life elsewhere.

The Portuguese kings showed no sympathy. King Joao III replied:

"You ... tell me that you want no slave-trading in your domains, because

this trade is depopulating your country. ... The Portuguese there, on the

contrary, tell me how vast the Congo is, and how it is so thickly popu-

lated that it seems as ifno slave has ever left."

Affonso pleaded with his fellow sovereigns as one Christian with

another, complete with the prejudices of the day. Of the priests turned

slave-traders, he wrote:

In this kingdom, faith is as fragile as glass because of the bad

examples of the men who come to teach here, because the lusts

of the world and lure ofwealth have turned them away from the

truth.Just as the Jews crucified the Son ofGod because of covet-

ousness, my brother, so today He is again crucified.