Document 25-5: ROGER CASEMENT AND DAVID ENGOHAHE, Victims of Belgian Congo Atrocities (ca. 1904–1905)

The Brutality of Colonial Rule

In 1903, the British consul Roger Casement investigated abuses in the Congo Free State for the British government. The Congo Free State was the private holding of King Leopold II of Belgium from 1885 to 1908, and under Leopold’s control the extraction of rubber led to gross human rights abuses. Casement’s report led to a public outcry in Europe. The report, upheld by an independent commission in 1905 and verified through later research, detailed the mutilation and murder practiced by Leopold’s representatives to ensure rubber production. Here, an excerpt from Casement’s report shows the testimony of eyewitness David Engohahe — a member of the Bolia ethnicity — detailing the violence employed to ensure the continued profits from rubber cultivation. The photograph of three residents of the Congo shows the human cost of the atrocities Engohahe describes.

At the time the district headquarters of the Basengele13 was at Mbongo.14 When the rubber was prepared you took it to Mbongo. . . . The State man15 would stretch [the lengths of rubber] . . . out, and if they split he would reject them and throw them to one side. At the end of the count, if the rubber was bad, out of a village complement of 25 men he might shoot 5, out of 30, perhaps 10; and perhaps 20 out of 50. It was dreadful persecution. He then sent the rest of the men back to the forest to collect more rubber to make up the quota. . . . He forbad us to harvest the things in our own gardens so much so that our immediate forefathers did not eat manioc.16 He forbad us the palm nuts in our own trees, and the plantains and all the garden produce, and sugar cane. It was all kept for his soldiers and his followers. . . . Many fled and some were mutilated. I myself saw a man at Likange who had had both his hands cut off. Sometimes they cut them at the wrist, sometimes farther up . . . with a machete. Also there is a Muboma17 . . . who has a long scar across the back of his neck. There is another man called Botei at Ihanga with the same sort of scar, where they wounded him maliciously, expecting him to die. They didn’t cut his head off, they didn’t get to the bone, but expected him to bleed to death. It was sheer cruelty; the State treated us abominably.

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© Everett Collections Inc./Alamy.

Roger Anstey, “The Congo Rubber Atrocities: A Case Study,” African Historical Studies, 4:1 (1971): 72.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. How does Engohahe connect the production of rubber to the presence or absence of subsistence agriculture?
  2. How does the system of labor described here compare or contrast with your impression of slavery in the Americas?
  3. Engohahe describes Leopold’s representative as “the State man,” but Leopold operated the territory as his own private holding rather than as a colony of Belgium. How might Leopold’s relationship to the territory change your impression of the abuses described here?
  4. What is the effect of the photograph? Does it look posed or natural? What might have been the purpose of this photograph?