The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (37 page)

Until his death Livingstone traveled by foot and oxen into the center of the continent, following the course of rivers, going up and down and around mountain ranges where no white man had ever been. Trekking through thousands of miles of pristine savannas, plateaus, deserts, lakes, streams, and rapids, he filled his journals with evocative descriptions of Africa’s flora, fauna, and people, the whole interspersed with affirmations of his abiding Christian faith. Livingstone was the first European to cross the African continent from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. In these arduous trips he discovered the beauties of Africa and the fortitude of its people. Suffering bouts with both lions and malaria, he wrote copiously about the diseases he treated, among them malaria, against which he effectively used quinine. Subsequent explorers were less fortunate. Malaria remained a deadly disease, which, as late as 2006, killed a million African babies annually.

Unwittingly Livingstone stoked the avarice of his compatriots with concrete details about a land filled with resources in mint condition. Returning to England in 1857, he published
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
, which excited readers much as
Raiders of the Lost Ark
does fans today. But Livingstone was no Indiana Jones. All agreed that he was the gentlest of men, a trait that explains how he always succeeded in winning over tribes hostile to his intrusion.

In the course of bringing his medical skill and Christian faith to those he met, Livingstone came face-to-face with a lively slave trade carried on in central Africa by Muslim and Swahili-speaking Africans. Powerful Arab leaders had penetrated Africa from both the west and east coasts during the nineteenth century, converting many tribes to their faith. They also enslaved Africans, sending them to buyers in Zanzibar, Persia, Madagascar, and plantations on the Arabian Peninsula. Livingstone devoted the last decade of his life to exposing the cruelties of the East African slave trade. When his
Zambesi and Its Tributaries
appeared in 1865, hundreds of Christians rallied to the cause of ending this nefarious trade, made even more odious to them by its Muslim imprint. Horror at this slave trade and European’s insatiable demand for ivory for their pianos, billiards, jewelry, and furniture inlays proved mutually reinforcing. The universal respect accorded Livingstone sustained a new and vigorous campaign to bring civilization to the people of the “Dark Continent,” a European conceit that covered a multitude of sins. Returning to Africa once more, Livingstone plunged into the interior, this time to find the source of the Nile. He lost all contact with European correspondents for five years, adding a fascinating mystery to his already great reputation as a humanitarian.

At this point in the story entered a Welsh immigrant from the United States, Henry Morton Stanley. A Civil War veteran, a foreign correspondent, and an amateur geographer, Stanley in 1871 accepted an assignment from the
New York Herald
to find the missing Livingstone. Knowing that Stanley had fought on both sides in the Civil War gives some idea of his versatility. His quest through central Africa took six months, but he had succeeded by the end of the year, when he did in fact greet the missing missionary with the famous salutation “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Stanley and Livingstone became household names during the next few years. They stimulated the imagination, the curiosity, and the ambition of Europeans who had come to think of the entire globe as their domain.

During the next six years Stanley continued to explore Africa, circumnavigating Lake Victoria. He located the southern sources of the Nile, ending with an epoch-making journey down the Congo River. Unlike the trusting Livingstone, Stanley traveled with a well-armed band of 190 men and displayed more the attitude of a Western master than a humble Christian. He thought much like the English who went to North America in the seventeenth century, for he considered the African continent empty of people, or at least of people who counted. Feted as one of history’s greatest discoverers when he returned to England, Stanley did his best to get the British government to claim the heart of Africa. But to no avail.
¹

The Imperial Ambitions of King Leopold of Belgium

Across the English Channel, there was a European of significance fired up by the promise of Africa that Stanley had advertised. He was Leopold II, king of the Belgians. Leopold had inherited a lot of money from his father, who had astutely promoted Belgium’s industrial enterprises, among them the first European railway system. Intent upon gaining a colony to enhance the importance of his little country, Leopold actually scoured the Indies archive in Madrid to learn just how much Spain had benefited from its colonies.
²
He kept up with news of Africa by reading his favorite newspaper, the
Times
of London, which came to him early each morning by special messenger. Here he read an English explorer declaring that Africa’s “unspeakable richness” was awaiting an “enterprising capitalist.” At the time Livingstone’s posthumous journals were horrifying readers with the graphic accounts of how unscrupulous slave traders seized African men and women, even children and sold them into slavery. Enthusiasm for stamping out a slave trade that had been pretty much unknown previously played into Leopold’s plans to create a colony in Africa. He engaged missionaries, geographers, and antislavery advocates to organize on behalf of Christianity, science, and humanitarianism. Privately he laid plans to get what he called “a slice of this magnificent African cake.”
³

Nothing will give you a greater sense of how the nineteenth-century world differs from ours than following Leopold as he managed with megalomaniacal determination to acquire for his country an African colony seventy-six times the size of Belgium. But that isn’t quite correct. For the Free State of Congo that Leopold created with such hubris was a personal possession that he ran as a company with the approval and financial assistance of the Belgian Parliament. Because Britain’s leaders showed no interest in acquiring a colony in the interior of Africa, Leopold was able to snag Stanley, the intrepid survivor of years of explorations. He put him under a five-year contract and forthwith sent him back to central Africa with the cash to build roads, establish stations through the Congo River network, buy land, and sign treaties. This Stanley did over the course of five years with great panache, persuading 450 chiefs of the Congo basin to accept his gifts in exchange for territorial rights.

Meanwhile in Europe, Leopold carried on a brilliant diplomatic campaign under the guise of furthering science and philanthropy. His International Association of the Congo was nothing but a front behind which he manipulated the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France into accepting his acquisition of a vast territory in central Africa with no restrictions on his personal sovereignty.
⁴
Leopold didn’t want to push the native inhabitants out of the land he coveted, for he had in mind using their skilled arms and strong backs to labor for him. What followed was as cruel a travesty as the world has ever seen, traceable to the West’s outsized appetite for the riches of Africa.

The Congo Free State, as Leopold styled it, was anything but free, for he established a vicious regime, exploiting the men and women as thoroughly as the slavery he had vowed to eradicate. All uncultivated land became his property, leaving most of the people landless. Backed by white soldiers and black mercenaries and working with compliant tribal chiefs, Leopold used threats of murder, backed up by the wholesale destruction of villages, to force the Congolese to collect latex from wild rubber trees, dig for diamonds, and hunt elephants for their ivory. Rubber alone made the Congo a commercial success. More like a modern CEO than a crowned head, Leopold followed market indicators closely. With astonishing ruthlessness, he sent regular shipments of rifles to his minions in the Congo. A similar melancholy tale unfolded in the Amazon basin, where professional rubber tappers brought their diseases and weapons to the indigenous population.
⁵

By the end of the century Leopold’s treatment of the Congolese had aroused critics who could not be ignored. A company employee became suspicious of what was going on. Swedish and American missionaries who were eyewitnesses to the abuse launched a crusade against Leopold’s Congo venture. People as capable of expressing themselves as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain began writing about Leopold’s mendacious brutality. The riches he monopolized stirred as well the indignation of British free traders. To add insult to injury, Leopold sustained the fiction of his benevolence by building the Tervuren Museum filled with displays of African art to celebrate the Congolese people’s liberation from paganism and slavery!
⁶
Nearing his death in 1908, Leopold ceded his fiefdom to the Belgian nation, at which point it received the name Belgian Congo.

Other European Nations in Africa

Leopold’s is the most extreme record of European rapacity, but his European neighbors lost no time joining in the plunder of Africa and its people. France, having lost New France and its holdings in India at the end of the eighteenth century, started a new empire by invading Algeria in 1830. Smarting from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War a generation later, it next sent expeditions up the Senegal River. From there France eventually succeeded in seizing the northwest quarter of Africa, four million of the continent’s some twelve million square miles, including Tunisia and Morocco.
⁷
In addition to its holdings in Africa and Indochina, France held Tahiti, where Paul Gauguin set up his studio in 1890.

Starting de novo like King Leopold, the Germans had to cast about for a colony because they had not participated in the sixteenth-century adventures in the New World. Before pushing into Africa, Germany found a place in the South Seas sun. The drastic shortage of raw cotton occasioned by the American Civil War had hit hard the Rhine Valley textile mills and the ports that depended upon cotton exports. A prominent and imaginative entrepreneur from Hamburg sent agents to the Pacific to seek spots along the equator where cotton might be grown. He managed to get a toehold in Samoa. The German government followed up by convincing Spain to sell it the majority of the islands among the Solomons, Carolines, Marianas, and Pelews. Neither France nor Great Britain was ready to cede these luxuriant South Pacific islands to Germany, so they parceled out among themselves the remaining islands in eight different groups. Farther west, Great Britain in 1898 signed a ninety-nine-year treaty with China to hold on to Hong Kong. Meanwhile back in Africa, the Germans laid claim to Togoland, Cameroon, Namibia, and Tanganyika, located on both sides of the African continent.

Italy entered this African land rush last. It acquired Libya, Eritrea, and part of Somaliland but sustained an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Ethiopians. Only Ethiopia and Liberia, the colony that Americans established for freed slaves, held on to their independence during this European free-for-all for territory. For France and Britain, the toeholds established earlier became launching pads for further global appropriations, though with markedly different styles.

More attentive to commerce than to territorial acquisition when Leopold was finalizing his plans in 1875, Great Britain tightened its control over Egypt. Britain had acquired an interest in there after the defeat of Napoleon, who had invaded the country in 1798. Formally an Egyptian dynasty ruled the country under a loose connection to the Ottoman Empire, but practically it remained within the European sphere of influence. This humiliating arrangement became a bone of contention for Egyptian nationalists, whose agitation introduced social turmoil that threatened Great Britain’s huge investment in Egypt. On top of this, more and more of the British commercial fleets began using the Suez Canal after its opening in 1869. This hundred-mile waterway joined the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Its vulnerability to violence was unacceptable to British investors. The British government ordered an invasion of Egypt in 1882, demonstrating the fusion of public and private economic interests that became increasingly conspicuous.

At the other end of the continent, Great Britain was having trouble in South Africa, which it had seized from the Dutch East India Company during the Napoleonic Wars. Cape Town played a crucial role in British overseas commerce, servicing commercial and royal fleets going to and from the Orient. Britain acquired as well a population of Dutch farmers who grew restive under British rule after Britain mounted a campaign against slavery in 1833. Some six thousand of these Afrikaners, or Boers, as they called themselves, decided to move north to establish their own settlements, taking with them some six thousand slaves and the herds of sheep and cattle that sustained them. The British were unwilling to yield sovereignty to either the Transvaal or the Orange Free State, especially after an African discovered a diamond there one day in 1867. Only a bloody conflict in the closing years of the century settled the matter in Britain’s favor, by which time Europeans had assumed control of most of the continent’s habitable land.

A great aid to the Europeans in their appropriation of African territory turned out to be the machine gun that the American Hiram Maxim had developed with them in mind! Someone had suggested to Maxim that if he wished to make money, he should “invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.” Instead they used their new Maxims against the Africans. This portable automatic machine gun fired five hundred rounds per minute, delivering the firing power of a hundred rifles, as it ingeniously used the energy of each bullet’s recoil to eject the spent cartridge case and insert the next round. In one engagement in what is now Zimbabwe, fifty British soldiers prevailed over some five thousand warriors with four Maxim guns. The repeating rifle and various improvements on the Maxim served Europe well whether in the hands of soldiers or of entrepreneurs who wished to speed up the pace of Africa’s occupation.