Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo

Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts

Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts

Colonial Exploitation in the Congo

JULES MARCHAL

Translated by Martin Thom

Introduced by Adam Hochschild

This paperback edition published by Verso 2017

First published by Verso 2008

Translation © Martin Thom 2008, 2017

Introduction © Adam Hochschild 2008, 2017

First published as Travail forcé pour l’huile de palme de Lord Leverhulme: L’histoire du Congo

1910–1945, tome 3 by Editions Paula Bellings 2001

Copyright © Editions Paula Bellings 2001

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors and translator have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-631-1 (PB)

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-632-8 (UK EBK)

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Contents

Introduction by Adam Hochschild

List of Abbreviations

1 The Early Years (1911–1922)

A magnate, purportedly a philanthropist, launches himself upon the Congo

First beginnings at Lusanga

The duplicity, and the claims of the HCB

A note on the relocation of the Luba of the Kasai

2 The Lejeune Report (1923)

The moving of villages

The Lejeune report

Reactions to the Lejeune report

3 The Establishment of a Monopoly in the Circles (1924–1926)

Monopoly achieved through the swindle of tripartite contracts

The Portuguese of Bumba protest

Hyacinthe Vanderyst and the ownership of the palm groves

Lode Achten and the tripartite contracts

4 In Barumbu Circle (1917–1930)

Forced labour in wretched conditions (1917–1924)

The Mill Hill Fathers against the State and the HCB (1925–1926)

Alexis Bertrand in Barumbu circle (1930)

5 In the Basongo and Lusanga Circles (1923–1930)

Echoes of Basongo circle (1923–1927)

In Lusanga circle (1927–1930)

6 The Portuguese of Bumba Against the HCB, Act Two (1928–1930)

Petitions and reactions

The Budja of Bumba-East robbed of their palm groves

7 The Compagnie du Kasai Proves to be Worse Than the HCB (1927–1930)

Doctor Mouchet’s reports

The Daco report on the Compagnie du Kasai

The experiences of Doctor Raingeard

The response to the doctors’ reports

8 Pierre Ryckmans’ Report on Lusanga (1931)

Ryckmans encounters recruits headed for the Offitra and Brabanta

Ryckmans’ report on Lusanga

9 The Revolt of the Pende (1931)

The revolt

The defining features of the repression

Eugène Jungers on the spot

Balance sheet and aftermath

10 The Lusanga HCB Transformed Into a Model Employer (1931–1932)

The moving of villages—the third phase

Labour contracts and supply contracts

11 Coercion and Consolidated Monopolies (1933–1935)

Reign of terror in the Kamtsha-Lubue

The sidelining of the Daco report—the protection of the oil mills

A major new HCB project

The prolongation of the tripartite contracts

12 The Years Between 1935 and 1939

The planting of palm trees in collaboration

Georges Mortehan’s report

A further modification in the 1911 Convention

13 The Apogee of Forced Labour During the War (1940–1945)

Afterword

Sources

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION*

Adam Hochschild

The territory that Jules Marchal writes about in this book has had one of the most violent and unhappy histories of any on the African continent. Parts of that history have become better known in recent years, but not the chapter of it that he tells here, involving the raw materials that fed the factories of the great Lever Brothers soap empire. As with so much of the history of central Africa, it is a story of atrocities hidden from view, of white men in Africa portraying themselves to the world as philanthropists, of human suffering that lay behind a product millions of Europeans and Americans used daily, and, above all, a story of forced labour.

To set Marchal’s account in context, it is first worth carefully reviewing the long chain of events, over several centuries, that preceded the period about which he writes.

The country that is today the Democratic Republic of Congo largely consists of the great swathe of central Africa drained by the Congo River. The river is the world’s second biggest; only the Amazon carries more water. It descends over more than 200 miles of enormous intermittent rapids before pouring into the Atlantic Ocean, and, until late in the nineteenth century, these rapids blocked the efforts of European explorers to get their boats on to the upper reaches of the river and the tributaries they presumed must flow into it.

The rapids did not, however, prevent exploitation of the region’s people by outsiders. Portuguese mariners first landed near the great river’s mouth in 1482; missionaries, soldiers and adventurers soon followed, and by several decades later thousands of Africans were being shipped every year as slaves from this area to the New World. The land that surrounded the river’s mouth and extended some distance inland and to the south, the kingdom of Kongo, was controlled by a ruler known as the ManiKongo. In 1506, a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba took the throne. He learned Portuguese and took on the name of Affonso. During the nearly 40 years of his rule, he saw his kingdom decimated by the slave trade. An eloquent set of letters from Affonso to successive kings of Portugal are the first known documents written by a black African in a European language. Each day, Affonso wrote in desperation to King João III of Portugal in 1526, the traders are kidnapping our people—children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family … Our land is entirely depopulated.

Affonso’s pleas were in vain. For several centuries the Atlantic slave trade continued to victimise both the people of his kingdom and Africans living for hundreds of miles into the interior. All told, several million Africans were taken from the region around the river’s mouth and its hinterland, chiefly to work on the plantations of Brazil.

Similarly, over an even longer period of time, Arab and Afro-Arab slave traders had been ravaging the east coast of Africa, buying slaves as far inland as the eastern side of the Congo River basin, and shipping them to the Arab and Islamic world. Slave ship captains and traders could buy slaves so easily on both coasts because most people in Africa south of the Sahara Desert lived in slave societies. The ethnic groups of the Congo River basin were no exception; Affonso himself, for example, owned slaves. In some ways indigenous African slavery was less brutal than slavery in the Americas: slaves were more status objects than a source of labour; they could often intermarry with free people and could frequently earn their freedom after several generations. But in other ways, African slavery was harsh: slaves were sometimes killed in human sacrifice rituals—many might be slain when an important chief died, for example, to give his soul company on its journey to the next world. When a treaty was made between two rival tribes or groups, a slave might have his bones broken and be left to die painfully in a remote spot, as a symbol of what might happen to anyone who broke the treaty. People could become slaves in Africa as a punishment for a crime, or as payment for a family debt, or, most commonly, by being captured as prisoners of war. The widespread heritage of indigenous slavery would eventually mean that when the Congo became notorious as the site of forced labour systems run by King Leopold II of Belgium and his successors, and by private companies like the one described in this volume, there were local chiefs willing to collaborate in supplying these labourers.

Soon after the Atlantic slave trade finally came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, the major part of Europe’s conquest and colonisation of Africa began. The Scramble for Africa, as it is often called, was one of the greatest land grabs in history—and one of the swiftest. In 1870, roughly four fifths of sub-Saharan Africa was governed by local chiefs, kings or other indigenous rulers. A mere 40 years later, in 1910, nearly all of this vast expanse of territory had become colonies or protectorates controlled by European countries or, as in South Africa, by white settlers. The bloodiest single phase of Africa’s colonisation was centred on the territory known, from the river that flowed through it, as the Congo.

Besides the river’s huge rapids, heat and tropical diseases had long kept the Congo’s interior a mystery to Europeans. The big step forward for them—although arguably a step backward for Africans—came between 1874 and 1877, when the British explorer-journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) made an epic journey across Africa from east to west. Stanley’s travels made him a great celebrity. He was also a brutal taskmaster, quick to flog his porters or to lay waste any African villages that threatened to impede his progress, and, at all times, to shoot first and ask questions later. These traits were visible in the best-selling books he wrote about his journeys, but biographers and historians did not begin to focus on them until some three quarters of a century after his death, in a world that had left outright colonialism behind.

Despite the dead bodies he left in his wake, Stanley’s crossing of Africa was a rare and difficult feat for a European at the time. He also became the first man to map most of the course of the Congo River. For much of his journey he floated down it, noting with great awe that its many tributaries potentially constituted, in the age of steamboats, a built-in transportation network of thousands of miles for whoever could take control of the region.

There has been a surprisingly consistent pattern in the Congo over the centuries. Outsiders want some commodity the territory possesses. They extract the commodity, causing the deaths of thousands or millions of people in the process. They justify their seizure by portraying themselves as generous-hearted. A few brave souls blow the whistle and portray the exploitation that is going on. The world sometimes briefly pays attention. Then the cycle begins again with a new commodity. All this is happening today, incidentally: more than four million Congolese have died in war-related violence since 1997, while local warlords and multinational corporations extract billions of dollars’ worth of gold, uranium, timber, diamonds, coltan and other minerals.

The first such commodity to be extracted was human beings, and Europeans happily justified the slave trade by saying that they were introducing Africans to civilisation, the dignity of labour, and Christianity: those taken to Brazil from the Congo were often quickly baptised first. Affonso was the first whistle-blower, but the world did not pay him much attention. This book concerns a later wave of exploitation that began in 1911, orchestrated by William Lever of Britain, later Lord Leverhulme. At home he had a reputation as an enlightened employer, because of the relatively good working and living conditions of his labourers. But overseas, he was all business, looking for a place where he could acquire palm oil for his soap more cheaply than in the British colonies in West Africa, where it could only be bought from local Africans at market prices. He settled on the Congo. There were pitifully few whistle-blowers to draw the world’s attention to the resulting exploitation, and this book is the first up-close, comprehensive look at how Lever’s Congo operations worked and at the human suffering they inflicted.

Between the end of the South Atlantic slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century and the beginning of Lever’s operations some 60 or 70 years later came the most painful chapter of all in Congo history. It merits going into in some detail, because it so ruthlessly established the pattern of state confiscation of land and imposition of forced labour that made Lever’s Congo empire possible—and which drew him to the territory in the first place.

Henry Morton Stanley had hoped that the Congo’s colonial master would be Britain, but the British were coping with various rebellions and crises elsewhere in their empire and had little interest in adding to it the Congo, with its troublesome rapids, heat, malaria and sleeping sickness. Someone who did lust after this territory, however, was King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold (1835–1909) had taken his country’s throne in 1865. An imposing, bearded, august man of great charm, ruthlessness and greed, he was openly frustrated at heading such a small country, and, moreover, at doing so at a time in history when western European monarchs were rapidly losing power to elected parliaments. He had long wanted a colony where he could rule supreme, and in Stanley he saw someone who could help secure it for him. The Belgian government at the time did not want colonies, which seemed an extravagance for a small nation with no navy and no merchant fleet. To Leopold, the Belgian cabinet’s lack of desire for colonies posed no problem; if they weren’t interested, he would acquire one of his own.

Leopold courted and flattered Stanley, and before long persuaded the explorer to return to the Congo as the king’s agent. Although Stanley is conventionally remembered as the man who had years earlier found the missing explorer David Livingstone, by far his greatest impact on history came from the five years he spent staking out the Congo for Leopold. From 1879 to 1884 he set up riverbank outposts, built a road around the rapids, and, using small steamboats that exhausted African porters had carried up the road in pieces, travelled up and down the river network. Alternately passing out gifts and displaying the power of his men’s repeating rifles, Stanley forced or bamboozled hundreds of African chiefs into signing away their land to King Leopold II. Virtually all were illiterate and had little or no idea of what they were agreeing to.

Stanley returned to Europe with these treaties in 1884. Meanwhile, Leopold had already begun an ultimately successful campaign to persuade first the United States, and then the nations of Europe, to recognise his claim. With a great mastery of public relations, he presented himself as a philanthropist earnestly striving to abolish the Arab slave trade which still flourished in East Africa. Making a profit, he implied, was the farthest thing from his mind. Leopold made further progress towards his goal at a diplomatic conference in Berlin in 1884–85 at which the European powers began the process of dividing the spoils in Africa. By the spring of 1885 most major nations had recognised his claim to the Congo. He then proclaimed its existence as the greatly misnamed État Indépendant du Congo, or, as it was known in English, the Congo Free State. He took the title of King-Sovereign, sometimes in future years referring to himself as the Congo’s proprietor. His was the world’s only major colony owned by one man.

Over the following two decades, Leopold asserted his control of the vast territory. Its inhabitants were armed only with spears or antiquated muskets left over from slave-trading days, while the king put together a 19,000-man private army. With black soldiers under European officers, the army was equipped with repeating rifles, machine guns, Krupp cannon, and steamboats for fast transport on the river network. Army posts sprang up along the riverbanks.

The royal conquest met frequent resistance. In the far south, for example, a chief named Mulume Niama led warriors of the Sanga people in a rebellion that killed one of the king’s officers. Congo State troops pursued them, trapping Mulume Niama and his soldiers in a large cave. They refused to surrender, and when Leopold’s troops finally entered the cave three months later, they found 178 bodies. Nzansu, a chief in the region near the great Congo River rapids, led rebels who killed a hated colonial official and pillaged several State posts, although they carefully spared the homes of nearby Swedish missionaries with whom they had good relations. Nzansu’s men fought on sporadically for five years more, and no record of his fate exists.

The regime also faced resistance from within its own army, whose resentful African conscripts sometimes joined forces with the rebel groups they were supposed to be suppressing. The largest mutiny involved 3,000 troops and an equal number of auxiliaries and porters, and continued for three years. The rebels displayed a courage worthy of a better cause, acknowledged the army’s official history—which, remarkably, devoted fully one quarter of its pages to the various campaigns against mutineers from the army’s own ranks.

In the early years, what Leopold and the agents he sent to Africa sought most avariciously was ivory. Because it was durable and could be carved into a variety of shapes, ivory served some of the uses of plastic today, but with the added cachet of its exotic origin. It was used to make jewellery, piano keys, small statuary and even, in a faint echo of its original use to the elephant, false teeth. Like illegal drugs in a later era, ivory had high value and low bulk: thousands of false teeth could be made from a single tusk.

From the very beginning of Leopold’s colony, the foundation of its economy, as in most of colonial Africa, was forced labour—something that would continue well after the king’s death, into the era of Lord Leverhulme’s palm-oil enterprise that Jules Marchal writes about in this book. The black soldiers of Leopold’s private army were conscripts, often sent to posts hundreds of miles away from their villages so that they could not easily desert and go home. The porters who carried the ivory tusks out of the interior and carried back everything from ammunition to bottles of wine for the European ivory agents were forced labourers. So were the workers who built a railway around the impassable river rapids. The woodcutters who travelled with each steamboat to gather fuel for its boilers—up to several dozen men for a larger boat—were forced labourers. Convoys of sullen men in chains, force-marched from remote villages to wherever colonial officials needed them, were part of business as usual in central Africa. The conquest of the earth, the character Marlow says in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, based on six months Conrad spent in the Congo in 1890, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

In Europe and North America few did much looking. Most people continued to think of Leopold as the philanthropic king who was fighting the evil Arab slave traders. Very little information on the true nature of the Congo Free State, especially the way it was founded upon forced labour, reached the outside world. This was a pattern that also would be repeated in the later period of the Lever Brothers’ empire described in these pages: brutal exploitation in the Congo itself, and much talk in Europe about uplift and civilisation that Europeans were bringing to the benighted natives.

The first person to fully expose King Leopold II’s regime was a remarkable American visitor, George Washington Williams. Williams, like Conrad, spent some six months in the Congo in 1890, and in early August of that year their steamboats probably crossed paths in Stanley Pool, a bulge in the Congo River at what was then the small post of Leopoldville.

Williams was an American Civil War veteran, a historian and journalist, a Baptist minister, a lawyer, and the first black member of the Ohio state legislature. As a journalist, he had interviewed King Leopold II in Brussels, and, like almost everyone, was charmed by the apparently modest and altruistic monarch. But when, on a trip around Africa, Williams reached the Congo, he was appalled to find what he called the Siberia of the African Continent. He took extensive notes and was virtually the only early visitor to interview Africans about their white colonisers. From Stanley Falls, a thousand miles up the river, Williams wrote one of the great documents of human rights reporting, An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo. It was the first comprehensive eyewitness indictment of the regime and its forced labour system. Published in many American and European newspapers, it caused Leopold considerable embarrassment. The uproar would doubtless have been prolonged had Williams lived to write the book he was planning on the Congo, but, sadly, he died of tuberculosis on his way home from Africa, at the age of 41. This first brave critic of the Congo regime also fired off several other letters from Africa, and in one of them, to the American Secretary of State, he used a phrase not commonly heard again until the Nuremberg trials more than half a century later. Leopold, Williams declared, was guilty of crimes against humanity.

Ivory remained valuable, but in the early 1890s a much larger source of Congo wealth suddenly loomed. A few years before, the industrialised world had seen the invention of the inflatable bicycle tyre, followed by that of the automobile. In addition, the network of telephone and telegraph wires starting to span the globe needed rubber insulation, and thousands of types of industrial machinery needed rubber belts or other parts. An international rubber boom began. In tropical territory everywhere, planters rushed to set up rubber plantations. But new rubber trees can require as much as 15 years to reach the point when they can be tapped. This created a time window during which vast amounts of money could be made by whoever had land where rubber grew wild. No one owned more such land than King Leopold II, for the equatorial African rain forest, rich in wild rubber vines, covered roughly half of his Congo Free State.

These spongy vines were hundreds of feet long; one might twine upwards around a palm or other tree to a hundred feet or more above the ground, where it could get some sunlight, then wind and branch its way through the limbs of half a dozen more trees. The vines were scattered quite widely and sparsely through the forest. Even with a forced labour system in place, how could villagers be compelled to disperse for miles to gather the sap that these vines produced? Leopold’s officials quickly devised a harshly effective system. The army would send a detachment of soldiers into a village and seize the women as hostages. To secure their wives’ release, the men of each village would then have to go into the forest to begin the painstaking job of tapping the wild rubber vines and collecting the slow, milky drip of sap. They were given a monthly quota to fulfil, and, as rubber prices soared in Europe, the quotas rose as well. All the rubber vines near each village were soon drained dry, which meant that men sometimes had to walk for days to reach fresh vines. Eventually, men could be gone as long as several weeks out of each month, in the urgent scramble to reach their quota and get their wives briefly released. Discipline was pitiless: villagers who failed to gather enough rubber, like reluctant military conscripts or disobedient porters before them, fell victim to the notorious chicotte, a whip made of sun-dried hippopotamus hide with razor-sharp edges. A hundred lashes of the chicotte—a common punishment—could be fatal. Colonial officials earned bonuses that were based on how much rubber was collected in the area each controlled, a system that rewarded ruthless, devastating plunder.

The forced labour system for gathering rubber was at the core of a tremendous death toll in the Congo during and immediately after Leopold’s rule. Many of the male forced labourers were in effect worked to death. Large numbers of women hostages—frequently raped by the regime’s soldiers during their captivity—starved. And, with the women chained up in compounds and much of the male population off in the forest desperately trying to meet their monthly rubber quota, the birth rate plummeted. Few able-bodied adults were left in the villages to harvest food, hunt, or fish. Famine spread. Local uprisings against the regime erupted more frequently. They continued to do so over some two decades, and occasionally recurred later as well; tens of thousands more people died as the army suppressed them. A large but unknown number of additional men, women and children fled the forced labour regime, but they had nowhere to go except to more remote parts of the rain forest, where there was little food or shelter. Years later, travellers would come upon their bones.

The greatest toll of all came as soldiers, caravans of porters, and refugees from the rubber terror all moved back and forth across the country, bringing new diseases to people with no resistance to them. Many illnesses, particularly sleeping sickness, became far more lethal for people weakened by trauma and hunger. As the experience of those in Nazi and Soviet concentration camps would show decades later, in a regime of terror, it does not always require firing squads or gas chambers to cause the death of millions.

Unlike many other human rights catastrophes in history, what happened in Leopold’s Congo was seen by outside witnesses—some of them with cameras. These were the missionaries.

To curry diplomatic favour, Leopold had allowed several hundred Protestant missionaries into the territory—British, American and Swedish. Most made no protest, but some were outraged at the forced labour system. In articles in church magazines and in speeches in the United States and Europe on visits home, they described what they had seen: Africans whipped to death, rivers full of corpses, and—a detail that quickly seared itself into the world’s imagination—piles of severed hands. For the white officers of Leopold’s army often demanded of their black conscripts a dead rebel’s hand in return for each bullet issued to the soldier, as proof that it had been used as ordered and not wasted in hunting, or worse yet, saved for use in a mutiny. If a soldier had fired at someone and missed, he would sometimes cut the hand off a living person, so as not to have to brave his officer’s wrath. Missionaries photographed a number of people without hands, some of them children. One American missionary saw a soldier slice off someone’s hand while the poor heart beat strongly enough to shoot the blood from the cut arteries.

Around 1900, Leopold’s most formidable enemy surfaced in Europe, and suddenly the concerned missionaries had someone who could carry their stories to a far wider audience. A British shipping company had the monopoly on all cargo traffic between the Congo and Belgium, and every few weeks it sent to the Belgian port of Antwerp a burly, mustachioed junior official, Edmund Dene Morel. There he would supervise the unloading of a ship arriving from Africa and its loading for the voyage back. Morel, in his mid-twenties at the time, noticed that when his company’s ships steamed in from the Congo, they were filled to the hatch covers with enormously valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when the ships turned around and headed to Africa, they carried no merchandise in exchange. Nothing was being sent to the Congo to pay for the goods flowing to Europe. Instead, the ships carried soldiers and large quantities of firearms and ammunition. Standing on the dock at Antwerp, Morel realised that before his shocked eyes lay irrefutable proof that a forced labour system was in operation 4,000 miles away. I was giddy and appalled at the cumulative significance of my discoveries, he wrote later. It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman. This young shipping clerk’s stunning moment of realisation gave rise to the first great international human rights movement of the twentieth century.

Morel went to the head of the steamship company to protest. The man tried to promote him to another job in another country. When that didn’t work, his boss tried to pay Morel some money to stay quiet. That didn’t work either. Morel soon quit his job and in short order turned himself into the greatest British investigative journalist of his time. He was filled, he wrote, with determination to do my best to expose and destroy what I then knew to be a legalised infamy … accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for a vast destruction of human life. For a dozen years, from 1901 to 1913, working sometimes 14 to 16 hours a day, he devoted his formidable energy and eloquence to putting the story of forced labour in King Leopold’s Congo on the world’s front pages. In Britain, where returned missionaries had already begun to find large audiences for their slide shows of Congo atrocities, Morel founded the Congo Reform Association. Affiliated groups quickly sprang up in the United States and other countries.

After Morel orchestrated a protest resolution by the House of Commons in 1903, the British government, in response, asked its representative in the Congo to investigate his charges. The British consul, a black-bearded Irishman named Roger Casement, who later in life was to die on the gallows as an Irish patriot, took the assignment seriously. Renting a missionary steamboat, he spent more than three months travelling in the interior. He produced an excoriating, detailed report, complete with sworn testimony, which was in many ways a model for the reports that began to be produced more than 50 years later by Amnesty International and other human rights organisations. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the efforts of Morel, Casement, key missionaries and their supporters succeeded in making the forced labour system of King Leopold’s Congo the most widely publicised human rights scandal of its time. The king was condemned in the press, poets thundered against him, and cartoonists throughout Europe portrayed him surrounded by human skulls and severed hands.

Leopold himself never went to the Congo. Something of a hypochondriac, he always worried about germs. And perhaps he had good reason to do so, for Europeans had not yet found ways of combating all the major tropical diseases. Leopold knew—and kept secret—statistics which showed that before 1900, about one third of all white men who went to the Congo ended up succumbing to disease and dying there. The king chose to stay in Europe, where he spent his Congo profits on grand buildings and public monuments in Belgium, a huge array of clothes for his teenaged mistress, and an expanding array of properties on the French Riviera.

As a result of the international agitation over the atrocities, Leopold was finally pressured into relinquishing his private ownership of the Congo, reluctantly transferring it to the Belgian State in 1908—while making Belgium pay him for so doing. He died the following year, having made a profit from the territory conservatively estimated as equal to more than $1.1 billion in the American dollars of a century later.

Although the human rights violations in Leopold’s Congo were egregious and the avaricious king an easy villain to target, in a sense, the protest movement’s focus on that territory alone was unfair. For the king’s system of exploitation became a model for surrounding colonies which also had rain forests rich in wild rubber—Portuguese-controlled Angola, the Cameroons under the Germans, and the French Congo, part of French Equatorial Africa, across the river from Leopold’s Congo. Seeing what profits Leopold was reaping from forced labour, officials in the other colonies soon adopted exactly the same system—including women hostages, male forced labour and the chicotte—with equally high death rates. Forced labour of one kind or another was widely used in most parts of the continent until several decades into the twentieth century, although seldom with such fatal consequences as during the rubber boom in central Africa. This book describes the forced labour that, unknown to almost all Europeans, lay behind the production of something that millions of them used every day, soap.

After