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Congo Quotes

“The black American missionary George Washington Williams, visiting in 1890, noted “the most revolting crimes” committed by the natives: “Human hands and feet and limbs, smoked and dried, are offered and exposed for sale in many of the native village markets. From the mouth of the Lomami-River to Stanley-Falls there are thirteen armed Arab camps; and in them I have seen many skulls of murdered slaves pendant from poles and over these camps floating their blood-red flag.” Oddly, Hochschild quotes Williams’ testimony against native practices to criticize the EIC for being insufficiently vigorous in its attempts to govern the territory. Heads I win, tails you lose. As this logical slip implies, a justifiably proportionate response to the scourge of the slave trade required keen efforts by the EIC to recruit and feed soldiers, clear villages in areas prone to slave raids, establish military and governance posts, and pursue slave armies to the death. “Accommodating the Arab slave traders would be a crime,” wrote the EIC captain, and later WWI hero, Jules Jacques de Dixmude in 1892.”

SlaveryCongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam HochschildGeorge Washington WilliamsJacques De Dixmude
Author:Bruce Gilley
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“The reader is lured into believing that every conflict he documents is about the drive for rubber, not the drive against slavery (or inter-tribal vendettas). One of many egregious examples will have to suffice.”

SlaveryCongoCongo Free StateBelgian CongoAdam HochschildRed Rubber
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“Hochschild describes the EIC official Léon Fiévez as a “sadist” who “terrorized” the rubber-rich Équateur district where he was commissioner. His source is the George Bricusse mentioned above. Bricusse lasted only three years in the Congo before dying of either typhoid or malaria, a common occurrence for the EIC where the annual mortality rate for European soldiers was 20 percent. In the 1894 incident recalled, Fiévez is recounting to Bricusse his desperate attempts to feed his soldiers while battling slave lords in the area. There is no mention of rubber because this particular place had little of it. The slaving business, on the other hand, is flourishing and Bricusse notes its devastation everywhere. Fiévez had arrived a few days earlier and held parlay with local chiefs. They had agreed to supply his soldiers with food for payment. They then reneged and fled into the forest. Fiévez sent his troops in pursuit and, in the ensuing fight, 100 of the chiefs’ soldiers were killed. After that, the chiefs made good on their promise.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostRed RubberLéon FiéveéQuateur District
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“This egregious example of “Belgians bad, natives good” is the conceptual foundation of King Hochschild’s Hoax. And it bleeds into what is, for most readers, the enduring imaginative impact of the book, to have put a nasty Belgian face onto Mistah Kurtz, the phantom who draws Marlow’s steamboat up the Congo river in Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. Like generations of English professors, Hochschild has misread the book as an indictment of colonialism, which is difficult to square with its openly pro-colonial declarations and the fact of the “adoring” natives surrounding the deceased Kurtz.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateHeart Of DarknessAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostJoseph Conrad
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateHeart Of DarknessAdam HochschildConradApocalypse Now
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“he main point is that Conrad realistically described the terrible things done by Belgians in the Congo. Hochschild certainly wishes this was Conrad’s purpose. He repeats an old theory that Kurtz was based on the EIC officer Léon Rom whom Conrad “may have met” in 1890 and “almost certainly” read about in 1898. Visitors noted that Rom’s garden was decorated with polished skulls buried in the ground, the garden gnomes of the Congo then. But Kurtz’s compound has no skulls buried in the ground but rather freshly severed “heads on the stakes” that “seemed to sleep at the top of that pole.” As the British scholar Johan Adam Warodell notes, none of the “exclusively European prototypes” for Kurtz advanced by woke professors and historians followed this native mode of landscape gardening. By contrast, dozens of accounts of African warlords and slavers in the Congo published before 1898 described rotting heads on poles (“a wide-reaching area marked by a grass fence, tied to high poles, which at the very top were decorated with grinning, decomposing skulls,” as one 1888 account had it). Far from being “one of the most scathing indictments of [European] imperialism in all literature,” as Hochschild declares it, Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of the absence of European imperialism in all literature. Kurtz is a symbol of the pre-colonial horrors of the Congo, horrors that the EIC, however fitfully, was bringing to an end.”

CongoCongo Free StateHeart Of DarknessAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostConradRomKurtz
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“Some people might view “King Hochschild’s Hoax,” as we might call it, as an empowering fable for modern Africans at the expense of the white man. But its debilitating effects on Africa, and on the Congo in particular, make the opposite more nearly the case. It is a callous and negligent chicotte (hippo whip) lash on the backs of all black Africans, narcissistic guilt porn for white liberals at the expense of the African. The Congolese lawyer Marcel Yabili calls it “the greatest falsification in modern history,” a compliment of sorts, I suppose.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateLiberalsAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostMarcel YabiliHuilt Porn
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“Prof. Gilley declares that my “central lie,” my “first and biggest deceit,” is to equate the État independant du Congo, the regime King Leopold II of Belgium controlled for 23 years, with colonialism.”

CongoCongo Free StateLeopold S GhostBruce GilleyKing Leopold IiHoax
Book:The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind
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“For the past 25 years, the idea of the Congo has been closely linked in the Western imagination to the 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost by the American journalist Adam Hochschild. The book is widely assigned in high schools and colleges, and it regularly tops best-seller lists in colonial, African, and Western history. Hochschild has become a sort of king of the Congo, or at least of its history. The book is reflexively cited by reputable scholars in their footnotes any time they wish to assert that it is “well known” and “beyond doubt” that sinister men in Europe wrought havoc in Africa over a century ago. Any discussion of the Congo, or of European colonialism more generally, invariably begins with the question: “Have you read King Leopold’s Ghost?” I have read it. And I can declare that it is a vast hoax, full of distortions and errors both numerous and grave. Some people might view “King Hochschild’s Hoax,” as we might call it, as an empowering fable for modern Africans at the expense of the white man.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam HochschildBruce GilleyHoaxLeopd S Ghost
Author:Bruce Gilley
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“Het privé-leengoed van koning Leopold in Congo was precies het contrafeitelijke tegenwicht tegen de koloniale overheersing en het beste argument voor kolonialisme. Zijn onvermogen om zijn inheemse rubberagenten te controleren die hun prekoloniale activiteiten van slavenhandel en gedwongen rubberoogst voortzetten, toonde de problemen aan die zouden ontstaan als Europese freelancers zouden samenwerken met inheemse krijgsheren en slavenhandelaren om regimes op te richten zonder toezicht van buitenaf.”

CongoLeopold IiBelgisch CongoKolonialismeCongo Vrijstaat
Book:The Case for Colonialism: A Response to My Critics
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“Vansina citeert een deel van een Harvard-studie over de Belgische kolonie Congo, gesticht in 1908. Het rapport citeert een eerder rapport over Belgisch Congo van 1919 waarin werd beweerd dat de bevolking “met de helft verminderd was”. Het citeert deze bewering om aan te geven dat het vrijwel zeker onjuist is. Dat komt omdat de bevolkingsschattingen voor Belgisch Congo sterk uiteenliepen en puur giswerk bleven. Ze waren van ‘weinig waarde bij het trekken van precieze conclusies’. De enige harde conclusie die het bereikte was dat de bevolking niet toenam. De oorzaken waren talrijk, waaronder slaapziekte, oorlog tussen stammen, slechte voeding, vrouwenhandel, polygamie en de arbeidsomstandigheden voor mannen in Europese industriële en commerciële ondernemingen.”

GenocideCongoLeopold IiBelgisch CongoCongo Vrijstaat
Book:The Case for Colonialism: A Response to My Critics
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“Wat mij interesseert in de reacties is dat mijn citaat van de zwarte jongeman in Congo uit Van Reybrouck — “Wanneer komen de Belgen terug?” waarvan hij meldt dat het “een veel gehoorde klaagzang” was die hij “ontelbare keren” hoorde toen hij daar was in 2010. Ze kunnen het feit duidelijk niet onder ogen zien dat veel voormalige koloniale volkeren zouden willen dat hun land terugkeerde naar koloniale heerschappij. Koloniale heerschappij was voor deze mensen niet een of ander filosofisch idee, maar een praktisch alternatief dat moest worden afgewogen tegen andere praktische alternatieven en in vergelijking daarmee vaak minder gebrekkig werd gevonden. Dergelijke ‘gevaarlijke gedachten’ moeten duidelijk worden bestreden door de uitbranders in de faculteitslounge, anders worden ze algemeen bekend.”

CongoBelgiëBelgisch CongoKolonialisme
Book:The Case for Colonialism: A Response to My Critics
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“In Belgium, secularism manifested itself in anticlericalism allied to the Freemasons. This led to the establishment of a secular university in Lubumbashi to counter the launch of the Catholic University, Lovanium, in Kinshasa. The first university courses were taught during the Second World War; this event is cut from the history of the country because it was the initiative of Catholic missionaries. For the same reasons, Jef Van Bilsen and the Manifesto of African Conscience of 30 June 1956 are cited as precursors of independence, without any mention of the Catholic bishops who had previously taken some distance from the Colony by calling for the political emancipation of Blacks and by condemning racism in all its forms. Such political rebellion by missionaries were common in Africa and it is still perpetuated within episcopal conferences.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian Congo
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
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“Scholarly studies have made missionaries the "pillars" of Belgian colonization, while, at least, evangelization and freedom of religion were compulsory programs of the Treaty of Berlin in 1885. Anticlericalism was thus militant and reductive, and falsified many aspects of history. It linked the low level, although widespread and free, of education to the racism of missionaries who would not have believed in the intellectual capacities of Blacks, even though they had started by training black priests or pastors’ counterparts.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateMissionariesAnticlericism
Author:Marcel Yabili
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“It was put in the books that Thomas Kanza was the first university graduate, but he was a secular and a Congolese from Belgium (1956). The very first graduate was Paul Panda Farnana, an agronomist trained in Belgium (1907). But considering post-secondary education, it is father Stefano Kaoze (1917) who is the first graduate trained in Congo.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian CongoPaul Panda
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
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“The obsession with seeking in Africa's colonial past the causes of all its miseries today is the work of people intimately convinced that Africa is doomed, that it is unable to take care of itself today, and that, finally, the fate of the Black will only improve if the White comes back to repair what he has done wrong: these “hidden Afro- pessimists “ are hiding, under gratuitous accusations, anger, or demand for reparation, their own disarray. This explains why their words are sterile, never accompanied by proposals for solutions to the problems they evoke. They are doing a lot of harm to Africa because they divert issues that have worth.”

ColonialismAfricaCongoAnti ColonialismMarcel Yabili
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
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“This heroism was also that of the first missionaries. They had a life expectancy of about 5 years in Congo, and some were given extremely anointing at the time of their journey to Africa. There were many young idealists. Their graves are still lined up in the Mpala locality, which overlooks Lake Tanganyika. The Catholic mission was a fort where people who fled slavers and brutality took refuge.”

AfricaCongoMissionariesCatholic MissionLake Tanganyika
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
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“Because I was sent to free the Kongo Peoples and the World Black Race. The Black Man will become White and the White Man will become Black. For the spiritual and moral foundations, as we know them today, will be deeply shaken. Wars will persist across the world. Kongo will be free and Africa too. The Black Man will become White and the White Man will become Black.”

ProphecyCongoSimon Kimbangu
Book:La Passion de Simon Kimbangu 1921-1951
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“Ik stelde voor dat ik met de koning op staande voet Leopoldstad zou verlaten en dat de regering het daags voordien gesloten vriendschapsverdrag met Kongo opnieuw zou onderzoeken. Buitenstaanders hadden blijkbaar mijn woorden opgevangen, want niet lang daarna deed de ambassadeur van Ghana een demarche bij mij met de vraag of de zaak niet min of meer kon worden bijgelegd. Ik ging daarmee akkoord. Er volgde een bijeenkomst van enkele ministers. Het voorstel was dat Lumumba tijdens de lunch die na de middag was gepland een tafelrede zou houden waarin hij hulde zou brengen aan de koning en het Belgische koloniale werk. Minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Pierre Wigny en de diplomatieke adviseur van gouverneur-generaal Cornelis Fredericq De Ridder schreven in mijn bijzijn de redevoering. Ik liet vervolgens de tekst aan Lumumba bezorgen met de vraag of hij die al dan niet aannam. Het antwoord was positief. De ambassadeur van Ghana trad hierbij als tussenpersoon op.”

CongoBelgisch CongoPatrice LumumbaLumumbaGaston EyskensLeopoldstadKoning Baudewijn
Book:Gaston Eyskens de Memoires
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“The custom of chopping hands of death enemies was a local custom and was introduced in the Congo by the Arabs from the Muslim sharia law to punish thieves. The first penal code introduced by Leopold II in 1888, strictly forbids this cruel practice. The report of "The Inquiry Commission" of 1905 is absolutely clear in this respect. Though this report was extremely severe in denouncing such crimes, King Leopold II did not hesitate to have it published - in extenso - in the "Journal Officiel de l'Etat Indépendant du Congo" and issued no less than 24 royal decrees to put an end to all those malpractices.”

SlaveryCongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateArab SlaveryArab Slave Trade
Author:André de Maere d'Aertrycke
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“At the time when the Arabs were ruling our country, they were taking us, our wives and children, as slaves. They burned our villages. The white man never burns villages and when we bring him hens or bananas, he pays us well. He also pays us fairly for the mupira (rubber) that we collect. The white man has put an end to slavery… But we, black people, nevertheless wish that the white men go home, since we are forced to maintain roads and may no longer fight neighbour tribes and eat our prisoners, because if we eat them, we are hanged!”

SlaveryCongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateArabsArab Slavery
Author:Manangame of Avakubi
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“We want to stay in Ruanda-Urundi because in the lives of peoples and people there are interests other than purely economic interests. We want to stay there just because there is still much to do, because we have begun a great human work in that country that we want to bring to a successful conclusion; because we have accepted a mission of guardianship that we want to fulfil to the end. And when the objectives laid down in the [UN] Charter are achieved, thanks to us, thanks to our help, that people will be able to decide its future in full awareness and in full freedom.”

United NationsCongoRwandaUnBurundiRuanda Urundi
Author:Pierre Ryckmans
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“Ludo De Witte states that Lumumba was the only intelligent and respectable Congolese and that all the others were only children and puppets of whites. Only a white man, even subordinated to Blacks, is an adult, conscious and responsible. These are true little racist opinions.”

CongoLumumbaLudo De Witte
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
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“Adam Hochschild caused a stir with 10 million people killed in the Leopold Holocaust. He clearly says in the introduction of his book that he had learned on a plane, the estimated population of Congo in 1880 and that he had subsequently discovered, in a library, that the figure had diminished after the red rubber episode. But he then invented and maintained the intangible toll of 10 million disappeared people by a simple calculation of subtraction between two uncertain and changing censuses.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam Hochschild
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
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“Mission work in Algeria is far from being the chief, still less it is the exclusive object of your ambition. The end and aim of our Apostolate is the evangelisation of Africa, of the whole of Africa, of that almost impenetrable interior in whose dark depths are the last hiding places of a most brutal barbarism, where cannibalism still prevails, and slavery in its most degrading forms. To this work you have consecrated yourselves by solemn vow and promise. There is not a single spot along the shores washed by the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean, where we do not find the footsteps of the messengers of God's mercy to the poor degraded sons of Cham. But although in all the countries bordering the Ocean we find numerous bodies of Apostolic Missionaries engaged in spreading the light of the Gospel, far different is it with the interior of the Dark Continent, which has hitherto seemed impossible of access. From time to time individual travellers have tried to penetrate into the depths of this mysterious land, but nearly all have perished in the attempt to. lift the veil which enshrouds those unknown regions.”

ChristianitySlaveryMissionAfricaCongoCongo Free StateAlgiers
Author:Charles Lavigerie
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“Papers from Count Jules Greindl, who was the main collaborator of Leopold II in this curious affair, the author has drawn a very precise account, supplemented by documents. To take advantage of the financial ruin of Spain to make the Philippines a kingdom of its own, distinct from Belgium and then to form a company which would exploit the islands in the name of Spain, such were the successive ideas of Leopold. They failed both for lack of capital and for the reaction of Spanish pride. But they show, in Leopold II, the progress of the colonial idea with all the aspects that will then be found in the Congolese affair. When Henry Morton Stanley discovered the Congo, Leopold was ready.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateHenry Morton StanleyBelgian ColonialismBelgian Colonial EmpireBelgian EmpireJules Greindl
Book:A la recherche d'un Etat Independent: Léopold II et les Philippines
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