• One historian estimates that between 1890 and 1910 the African population of the Congo Free State declined by nearly 10 million souls.* The public learned of the brutal conditions in the Congo through the efforts of reformers and journalists. George Washington Williams (1849–1891), an African American Baptist minister, lawyer, and historian, was dazzled, as were many others, by the noble humanitarian goals that Leopold II claimed to have for the Congo, but when Williams visited the Congo in 1890 he was sickened by what he saw. His public letter to King Leopold, excerpted below, offers one of the earliest firsthand accounts of the horrors of the Congo. Edmund Morel (1873–1924), a British clerk, was similarly galvanized to undertake a campaign against Leopold after noticing that nearly 80 percent of the goods that his shipping firm sent to the Congo were weapons, shackles, and ammunition, while arriving ships were filled with cargoes of rubber, ivory, and other high-value goods.

George Washington Williams, “An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II,” 1890

“Your Majesty’s Government has been, and is now, guilty of waging unjust and cruel wars against natives, with the hope of securing slaves and women, to minister to the behests of the officers of your Government. . . . I have no adequate terms with which to depict to your Majesty the brutal acts of your soldiers upon such raids as these. The soldiers who open the combat are usually the bloodthirsty cannibalistic Bangalas, who give no quarter to the aged grandmother or nursing child at the breast of its mother. There are instances in which they have brought the heads of their victims to their white officers on the expeditionary steamers, and afterwards eaten the bodies of slain children. In one war two Belgian Army officers saw, from the deck of their steamer, a native in a canoe some distance away. He was not a combatant and was ignorant of the conflict . . . upon the shore, some distance away. The officers made a wager of £5 that they could hit the native with their rifles. Three shots were fired and the native fell dead, pierced through the head, and the trade canoe was transformed into a funeral barge and floated silently down the river.”

Edmund Morel, from King Leopold’s Rule in Africa, 1904

“One of the most atrocious features of the persistent warfare of which year in year out the Congo territories are the scene, is the mutilation both of the dead and of the living which goes on under it. . . . The first intimation that Congo State troops were in the habit of cutting off the hands of men, women, and children in connection with the rubber traffic reached Europe through the Rev. J. B. Murphy, of the American Baptist Missionary Union, in 1895. He described how the State soldiers had shot some people on Lake Mantumba . . . , “cut off their hands and took them to the Commissaire.” The survivors of the slaughter reported the matter to a missionary at Irebu, who went down to see if it were true, and was quickly convinced by ocular demonstration. Among the mutilated victims was a little girl, not quite dead, who subsequently recovered. In a statement which appeared in the [London] Times, Mr. Murphy said, “These hands — the hands of men, women, and children — were placed in rows before the Commissary, who counted them to see that the soldiers had not wasted cartridges.””

Sources: George Washington Williams, “An Open Letter to Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, July 18, 1890,” in John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 245–246, 250–251; Edmund D. Morel, King Leopold’s Rule in Africa (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), pp. 110–111.

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