540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Rest Is History, Episode 540 – Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)

Release Date: February 17, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 540 of The Rest Is History, hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland delve deeper into the harrowing tale of the Congo Free State under King Leopold II. This episode, titled Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3), focuses on Edmund Morel, a pivotal figure in exposing the atrocities committed in the Congo, and his collaboration with Roger Casement in combating Leopold's exploitative regime.

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Edmund Morel: From Obscurity to Human Rights Champion

Dominic Sandbrook introduces Edmund Morel as the central hero of the episode. Morel, born in Paris in 1873 to a French father and English Quaker mother, becomes a British subject and works as a clerk for the Liverpool shipping company Elder Dempster. His role involves overseeing steamship operations to the Congo, which implicitly meant maintaining a beneficial relationship with King Leopold II.

At [03:49], Tom Holland narrates Morel's growing suspicions:

"Morel is standing there on the quayside at Antwerp and he's watching that scene... he starts to become suspicious of the ships that he sees."

Morel's investigative curiosity leads him to uncover discrepancies in the company's accounts versus the shipments of rubber and ivory—indications of rampant fraud orchestrated by Leopold.

Upon confronting his superiors, including Sir Alfred Jones, Morel faces resistance and subtle intimidation meant to silence him. By [11:44], Hochschild's insights are discussed, suggesting that Morel's moral compass may have been influenced by his Quaker upbringing, although this remains speculative.

Ultimately, in 1901, Morel resigns from Elder Dempster, dedicating himself to exposing the Congo Free State's atrocities. He declares his mission as:

"to do my best to expose and destroy what I then knew to be a legalized infamy accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for a vast destruction of human life." ([11:44])

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Roger Casement: The Investigative Ally

Casement's background is briefly explored by Sandbrook at [20:46]. Born into a Protestant Dublin family, Casement worked in the Congo and later became Britain's consul. His firsthand experiences and subsequent reports were crucial in bringing Leopold's crimes to light. Despite facing personal struggles, including his sexuality, Casement's dedication never wavered.

A meeting between Morel and Casement is vividly recounted:

"From the moment our hands gripped and our eyes met, mutual trust and confidence were bred." ([27:18])

Together, they established the Congo Reform Association, significantly amplifying the campaign against Leopold.

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Campaign Strategies and Public Mobilization

Morel's exceptional campaign strategies are highlighted, emphasizing his ability to marshal support across various societal strata. He tailored his messaging to resonate with businessmen, clergy, and the general public, securing endorsements from influential figures like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Notably, Morel pioneered the use of visual propaganda, showcasing graphic images of mutilated victims, which had a profound impact on public perception ([33:49]).

One of the most effective moments in the campaign, as Sandbrook notes, was the pivotal incident involving Colonel Henry I. Kowalski—a corrupt and narcoleptic lobbyist hired by Leopold. Kowalski's betrayal led to a media frenzy:

"In December 1906, the New York American, one of Hearst's papers, ran a headline: 'King Leopold's Amazing attempt to influence our Congress exposed.'" ([46:22])

This exposé shattered American public opinion in favor of Leopold, marking a significant turning point in the campaign.

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King Leopold II's Countermeasures and Downfall

Despite his initial resistance, Leopold's attempts to reclaim control faltered under mounting pressure. His personal scandals, including his controversial relationship with Caroline Delacroix, further tarnished his image. The culmination of these efforts forced Leopold to relinquish control of the Congo to the Belgian government in 1908 for a staggering sum of 50 million francs. Leopold's death in 1909 marked the end of his direct involvement, but his legacy remained tainted.

At [50:52], Sandbrook reveals the tragic end of the commission investigating Leopold's regime:

"They talk to 400 witnesses... Two weeks later, [Costermans] cuts his throat with a razor and kills himself."

This haunting development underscored the depth of the atrocities and the personal toll on those confronting the truth.

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Legacy and Continuing Atrocities

While Morel's efforts led to Leopold's downfall, the legacy of brutality continued under Belgian administration. Sandbrook acknowledges that although overt reports of atrocities diminished, forced labor and exploitation persisted, particularly in mining sectors.

The episode concludes by connecting historical events to contemporary issues, drawing parallels between past and present forms of exploitation and highlighting the enduring struggle for genuine human rights.

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Notable Quotes

• Morel on his mission:

  "to do my best to expose and destroy what I then knew to be a legalized infamy accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for a vast destruction of human life." ([11:44])

• Casement describing Morel's impact:

  "From the moment our hands gripped and our eyes met, mutual trust and confidence were bred." ([27:18])

• Conan Doyle on Morel:

  "Morel was the single best, most effective activist, most effective leader of a campaign in British history." ([33:49])

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Conclusion

Episode 540 of The Rest Is History provides an intricate and emotionally charged account of Edmund Morel's crusade against King Leopold II's Congo Free State. Through meticulous research and engaging storytelling, Sandbrook and Holland illuminate the complexities of early human rights activism and its enduring implications. The episode underscores the power of individual conviction and the profound impact one man can have in unveiling systemic atrocities.

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Transcript

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Thank you for listening to the Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community. Go to therestishistory.com and join the club that is thereestishistory.com have you ever spotted McDonald's hot crispy fries right as they're.

[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

The quay at Antwerp. A steamer moored alongside the musical chimes ringing from the old cathedral spire, the sound of the Brabanton, the Belgian national anthem on the quay and on the steamer's decks a jostling motley crowd, military uniforms, the flutter of women's dresses, ship's officers gliding to and fro, the hatches battening down steam getting up surrounded by groups of relatives or boon companions, passengers bound Congo woods, men of whose fitness for residing and governing in tropical Africa even a novice would have doubts. Young mostly, and mostly of a poor type, undersized, pallid wastrels. But here and there an older bronzed individual, one who has obviously been through all this before. The faces of these distinctly not good to look upon, scarred with brutality, with cruel and lustful eyes. Faces from which one turns with an involuntary shudder of repulsion.

So that is the scene at Antwerp. It's great port in Belgium from where the steamships head west and south to the Congo Free State in the late 1890s as described by a barrel chested, handelbar, mustachioed young man called Edmund Dean Morel and Dominic. I hope that you admired the way in which I evoked the sense of a barrel chested, handlebar mustached young man there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, the one thing that was missing. So two things that were missing. Morel was born in France and his father was French, and then he went to boarding school in England. So you should have done an accent that was a.

[Tom Holland]

Like Theo Young Smith.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right? Like Theo Young Smith. That's the voice you should have done.

[Tom Holland]

Theo has many qualities, but he's not barrel chested.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He's not barrel chested, not barrel tested. So, yes, I think you, you captured the barrel chest very nicely there, Tom. Congratulations.

[Tom Holland]

Thank you, Dominic. The reason we're talking about this guy, Edmund de Morel, is that basically he is the hero of today's episode, isn't he? He is the man who draws the crimes of King Leopold's Congo Free State to the world's attention and is probably the most effective human rights campaigner of the 20th century. He establishes the template for all the human rights campaigns that have followed.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, he absolutely is. He is the link between the abolitionist movement that fought slavery in Britain, America and elsewhere a generation before, and the human rights campaigns of the later 20th century, the anti apartheid campaign, and so on and so forth. And today's episode really is the story of how he and his friends and his allies bring down Leopold's regime. Last week we heard about how since 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium has presided over this reign of terror in the Congo Free State in pursuit of ivory and rubber and, of course, money. And this is the story of how he loses his grip. The Congo doesn't become independent or free, of course. It passes into Belgian government hands. But Leopold loses this prize that he has spent all his life trying to seize and then trying to sort of hide from the world's gaze. So, yeah, this is Edmond de Morel's story, really. So let's talk a little bit about him, Tom. He is born in Paris in 1873. Father French mother and English Quaker, which may be maybe relevant. Yeah, his father died when he was young. He went to boarding school in England. He ended up becoming a British subject and becoming a clerk. And he's an obscure man. When he's 18 years old, he starts work for a Liverpool shipping company called Elder Dempster. And as luck would have it, this shipping company has the contract for the steamship trade to the Congo. They have a monopoly. So they handle all the steamships that go to and from the Congo and.

[Tom Holland]

That is very much dependent on the company retaining the favor of Leopold ii. Personally, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. They have been given the contract by the Congo Free State, and obviously they don't want to lose it. It brings them in a lot of money. Now, by the late 1890s, at which point Morel is in his mid-20s, they are sending him often every month to Antwerp because, of course, he speaks French. So, you know, he's a useful employee. He's the ideal person, basically, to stand there at the quayside supervising the arrivals and departures of all these steamships. He's already interested in Africa. Why wouldn't he be? You know, Africa is a very exotic and exciting subject in the 1890s. He thinks the Congo Free State is brilliant. He believes what he reads in the newspapers about its civilizing mission. He actually writes articles about. About Africa and about the Congo Free State for industry magazines, because he fancies himself as a bit of a writer, and he says it's got a great future. King Leopold was a tremendous fellow, all of this kind of thing.

[Tom Holland]

But also, I suppose, because he's investing his future in the company.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, of course.

[Tom Holland]

Why wouldn't you want to read up about business that you're involved in?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Absolutely, absolutely. But he's standing there on the quayside at Antwerp and he's watching that scene that we described earlier, and he starts to become suspicious of the ships that he sees, because, as we described at the end of last week's episode, he sees all this rubber and ivory being unloaded from the ships, but nothing is going back the other way. So he kind of thinks, well, what are we? What are we trading for? What are we giving them in return? Now, at one point, he's called in by the Secretary of State of the Congo, who's this he describes as a man thin to emaciation, inhuman, bloodless, petrified.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, there is a quality of Bram Stoker to quite a lot of what he's writing about. Sinister things in crates.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. I was about to say there was something of the Hollywood Melodron, but actually the comparison with Dracula is a really nice one. This man calls him in and he's absolutely furious. He says, the newspapers have reported what was in one of our recent shipments back to the Congo, a huge consignment of guns, and this sort of stuff shouldn't be appearing in the newspapers. Make sure it doesn't happen again. And Morell is confused by this. He thinks, well, why are we shipping so many guns back to the Congo? Why? And why can't the newspapers report it? Why is it. Why is it such a big Deal.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, it's interesting that the guy assumes that Morel would understand.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, exactly. Isn't that so interesting? Well, I think a lot of people perhaps would not have been curious. Morel has a. He's curious. So he goes away and he starts just idly, almost looking into the account books, looking into the figures in the office. And he thinks, this is weird. Nothing really adds up. The accounts that he sees, the figures written down, the ledgers don't match what he can see coming off the ships, the massive consignments of rubber and ivory, and that's not reflected in the earnings. And it becomes obvious to him that there's a lot of fraud going on. Somebody is skimming off the top. And the answer, of course, is King Leopold. King Leopold is lying about the amount coming in and about how much money he's making. But the other thing that becomes obvious to him once he starts going through all these kind of dusty ledgers is that consignment of guns was the. Not the exception, it was the rule. They are sending thousands and thousands of guns and rounds of ammunition to the Congo and nothing else. And we entered last week's episode with his great moment of revelation. A very kind of Hollywood scene. I was giddy and appalled at the cumulative significance of my discoveries. It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, it would make a great film, wouldn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It would, absolutely. Tabby, our assistant producer, said it reminded her of the Robert Harris novel about the Dreyfus case. An officer and a. And a spy. And it very much has that quality.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, kind of whistleblower.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. So Morel goes to see the head of the company, who's a man called Sir Alfred Jones, the head of the ship, the shipping magnate.

[Tom Holland]

So he must be thrilled.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of course, Sir Alfred Jones is horrified when Morel says, I found all these discrepancies and I'm extremely concerned. Jones says, well, listen, I'll go to Brussels myself and I'll talk to the King about him. Then Jones calls in Morell a few weeks later and says, well, I've been to Brussels. I saw the King. The King said, yes, he's very disturbed about what you've discovered.

[Tom Holland]

He'll set up a commission.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. Reforms will be carried out. And Sir Alfred says to Morel, you know, don't worry. The Belgians are doing great things, and we have to give them time to get their African house in order in the next few months. Morel finds that he's being frozen out. He's not going to Antwerp as much as he was then. He's offered a promotion. Great news, you've done so well and you're going to be posted overseas. And then he says, no, I don't want to go overseas, I want to stay in Britain. And then he is offered another promotion to become a consultant, pushed up the ladder of the company. And it's very clear to him that the company are now trying to shut.

[Tom Holland]

Him up or to offer him a bribe.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Effective or both. I mean, that's both. That's what they're trying to do. They're trying to get him out. Either get him out of the picture or push him upstairs, push him into a back office. Well paid, stay quiet. So in 1901, at the age of 28, he resigns from Elder Dempster and he resigns to become a full time writer, but not just any writer as he wrote himself. His goal was, and I quote, to do my best to expose and destroy what I then knew to be a legalized infamy accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for a vast destruction of human life. In other words, he has quit the company to become a full time campaigner, to become an activist, effectively. Now the real puzzle is why. What is it in him that makes him want to do this?

[Tom Holland]

See, I don't think it's a puzzle at all.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I know what you're going to say.

[Tom Holland]

Well, and I think Hochschild actually agrees because he, he, he wrote a kind of second edition about this. So I think it's the influence of his mother, who's a Quaker. And throughout this podcast we've talked about the role played by Quakers in human rights campaigns. Abolition of slavery being the obvious example. And although it is true, as Hochschild says, that Morel is not conventionally religious, he doesn't attend Quaker meetings or Church of England services or anything like that. Nevertheless, it's clear that he has absorbed values, I would say, from his parents, probably particularly from his mother, you know, and that this is manifesting itself through his moral assumptions and his campaigning zeal.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, that's the only, that is one possible explanation. The only downside with that is there's absolutely no evidence for it because we do know that he's in no way personally religious and there's no evidence that his mother did have this influence on him. So it's a supposition and it's not an unreasonable one, but it's only a supposition.

[Tom Holland]

He has values. And where do these values come from? I mean, they don't just magically materialize.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Maybe they come from his boarding school. Tom, you're underplaying the importance of a school.

[Tom Holland]

I don't think so. Well, maybe. I mean, you have a sense of campaigning zeal, of a particular commitment to notions of human rights, a long historical tradition. His mother belongs to that tradition. He manifests that tradition. I would say it's the likeliest explanation.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, the truth of the matter, of course, is we don't know. What we do know is he does feel personally responsible because he has worked for the company. And I think that's a huge part of this story. And it is also with his great ally, who we'll come to later. This is the story of two men who both felt implicated because they had both been perhaps naive in some way.

[Tom Holland]

Well, but think of Benjamin Lay going to the Caribbean and feeling personally implicated in slavery there. I think. I think the parallels are very, very clear.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's a very common story, actually. Some of the keenest abolitionists tend to be people who've been involved with the trade in some way. Anyway, at first he. He struggles. And this is something actually, that Adam Hochscha's book doesn't really capture, that. That actually, at first, he succeeds only because he gets funding from a rival Liverpool shipping tycoon. And this is a guy called John Holt, who's a rival of Sir Alfred Jones and gives him the money to found his own paper, the West African Mail. So there's a really good article on this by a scholar called Dean Clay. And he points out that basically this is a question not just of altruism, but of business rivalry. This rival tycoon wants to bring down Elder Dempster, or at least do them down a bit. So he gives Morel the money to do his campaign, and Morel starts to pour out not just, you know, dozens of articles, thousands of words, but millions of words. So an enormous quantity of what we have been saying in this podcast about the Congo comes from Edmond D. Morrell, because he is the single biggest source. He's publishing books, he's publishing articles, editorials. When you look behind so many of the anecdotes and the quotations and indeed the statistics, they come from this one man. And he is. He never goes to the Congo. That's the thing. Rather like King Leopold. But the extraordinary thing is he is absolutely brilliant at persuading insiders, even people within the mercenary force, the Force Publique, to leak material to him which Goes back to your question, Tom, last week about are there people who feel guilty? Are there people who feel, who have regrets or have doubts? There clearly are, because from 1901 they are feeding this guy information, the facts and figures and anecdotes and all of these kinds of things.

[Tom Holland]

And I suppose the situation for them was that, that if, if they're feeling a sense of guilt about what they've been doing, they don't have a vent for it. But Morel's appearance on the scene provides them with just that vent.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. He gets so much information that he starts to taunt the administration of the Congo. He'll print lists of things that people that their own employees have offered to sell him. He'll say, basically here, the bullet pointed list of the things that I'm being offered. At one point they issue an instruction to their subordinates. They say, stop writing things down because Morel is reprinting them in his newspaper. He gets hold of that. He prints that in his newspaper as well. So he's sort of, he's mocking them the whole time. But his single most powerful source, actually. This will please you, Tom.

[Tom Holland]

Doesn't please me, but it doesn't surprise me. Let's put it like that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's not from within the administration, but it's missionaries. So many of the most shocking stories that we mentioned last week about floggings, about beatings, about these horrendous atrocities, these are from Protestant missionaries, often British, American or Scandinavian.

[Tom Holland]

So we said in the previous episode about the hand chopping, the most notorious manifestation of barbarism in the Congo, that these were usually from corpses, from dead people. But there is one horrible account by an American missionary where he describes seeing soldiers cut off someone's hand and to quote, while the poor heart beat strongly enough to shoot the blood from the cut arteries at a distance of fully four feet. I mean, once you read details like that, they're kind of seared on the mind, aren't they?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They are seared on the mind. And that's partly why his campaign is so effective. So by about 1903, within two years of leaving his job, Morel has managed to by writing and writing and writing. And he's got all these great journalistic contacts. He places pieces everywhere. He's managed to make this a political issue in Britain. And in May 1903, the House of Commons actually holds a debate on the Congo Free State. There is a motion to call upon the signatories to the Conference of Berlin to take measures to ensure that the Congolese people are going to be treated with greater humanity. And the motion is introduced by the Liberal MP Herbert Samuel. And he, in his speech. So I had to look at Hansard for the text of the debate. He deplores what he calls the seething turmoil and barbarous acts of repression under King Leopold. You know, he doesn't hold back. But the brilliant thing for us, Tom, is that he presents this as a great patriotic British endeavour to clean this up. It's always been the boast of this country, says Herbert Samuel, not only that our own native subjects are governed on principles of justice, but that ever since the days of Wilberforce, England has been the leader in all movements on behalf of the backward races of the earth. Here is an occasion when those responsible for our policy might pursue these great traditions and add to the annals of the good deeds of this country.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, there is, of course, a.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Lot going on there.

[Tom Holland]

There's a lot going on there. But just to point out that of course, Britain's preponderance in the anti slavery campaign and now, as is being proposed in the campaign against the. The depredations in the Congo, is dependent on her global power. Yes, of course, dependent on the Navy and dependent by implication on the possession of her empire. And so essentially what is being offered is a kind of form of liberal imperialism, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Absolutely.

[Tom Holland]

It is that the British Empire exists as a force for good. And I mean, this is, this is something that has been manifest in the campaign against slavery right from the, the time of Napoleon. So the Congress of Vienna, it, it is mass demonstrations in Britain that forces Lord Castleray, the Foreign Secretary, to go to the Congress of Vienna and say, guys, I'm really sorry, I've, you know, we got to write in all this anti slavery stuff.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And kind of the same thing is happening now because the motion is carried in, in the Commons and it is proposed that all the countries that had been participants in the Berlin conference should get together.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And press for a. A Congo state that is governed with humanity.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly, exactly. So supreme irony is that it's Britain's imperial position that allows it to take this view, which of course, some listeners may say is though is rank hypocrisy, but others may say is an example of the kind of ambiguity of, of, of empire.

[Tom Holland]

Right, well, we'll be talking about this, won't we, in our, our bonus episode.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. Now, the Foreign Office, when it hears about this debate, says, okay, you know, let's not rush into anything. Let's actually try to get some Hard evidence ourselves rather than relying on us activists. We have a man on the ground in the Congo and we'll ask him to find out exactly what's going on. And now we come to the other great hero of this story, and this is a man called Roger Casement. And next week, Tom, I know you're going to be talking to the Irish novelist, the great prize winning novelist, John Banville about Roger Casement's story. He's an extraordinarily interesting figure. There's a richly fascinating life.

[Tom Holland]

So John Banville will be talking about him because in John Banville's opinion, Roger Casement is the greatest of Irishmen.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right. So high praise.

[Tom Holland]

So, because we should mention he's, he's, he's the British Consul, but he is Irish.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes. So just very quickly on Casement because we'll be doing him next week. Casement, born to a Protestant family in Dublin, he went to the Congo when he was 19 years old. He is implicated he had worked for Henry Morton Stanley as a surveyor. He'd worked on the route for Leopold's Railway. Casement is a very handsome, striking man. An enormous black beard, great sense of natural dignity, very polite. He's a great talker. Everybody comments about his voice, says, what a beautiful voice. He has no sense of humor whatsoever. I think it is fair to say, which is always a good thing in an activist, by the way. You don't want them to be sort of ironic, you want them to be earnest. And everybody always remarks how kind and gentle he is. Even when he first arrived in the Congo, people said he's kind of, he's very nice to the, to the Africans. People said he was too nice. He gives away too much. Joseph Conrad had met him in his journey in 1890.

[Tom Holland]

Well, they'd gone together on the, the Roi de Belges, the, the steamship.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They had hung out together. Conrad had written in his journal that Casement was most intelligent and very sympathetic. And Casement undoubtedly had heard stories about the darkness because we know that in 1887 he'd been on the steamboat with a Belgian officer who said, oh, life in the Congo is brilliant. I pay my, my men five brass rods for every severed head they bring me.

[Tom Holland]

Well, I think the assumption is, isn't it, on the darkening sense Conrad has of, of imperialism derives a lot from Casement.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So Casement had joined the British Colonial Service. He'd worked elsewhere in Africa. And then in 1901, the Foreign Office sent him back to the Congo as Britain's consul. And before going to the Congo, he Went to see King Leopold in Brussels. King Leopold said, oh, brilliant. I hope you have a great time in the Congo. If you've got any issues, come to me first. You know, if you saw anything wrong.

[Tom Holland]

I'm the father of the Congolese.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. Casement goes to the Congo and quite clearly he's very disturbed by what he sees. He says it's beastly. He, he starts asking the Foreign Office if he can go on a fact finding trip to the interior. And for various reasons it doesn't happen. But then after this commons debate, they say, okay, you can go. Please go and find out what on earth is going on. So Casement goes off on this mission. He is not, I think it's fair to say, a happy or a well man. He's got malaria, he's got dysentery. He's also plagued, I'm sure you'll talk about this with John Banville, Tom. He's plagued by doubt and guilt because Casement is gay. And his sexuality is a kind of a torment to him in many ways. You know, he's got. Has all these sort of agonies of fear and doubt and whatnot. Anyway, he goes upriver by steamboat. He spends three months in the interior. Have you seen this? So for company, he has a bulldog called John and he has a servant called Hairy Bob. And Hairy Bob can cook only three dishes. Chicken custard and boiled sugar.

[Tom Holland]

Chicken and custard is delicious.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, I mean, if you've got dysentery, is this the ideal diet? That's my question. No wonder his casement's so miserable. So he goes into the interior and what he finds is even worse than he feared. And we know this from his daily diary. The country a desert, no natives left. I walked into villages and saw the nearest one. Population dreadfully decreased. Only 93 people left out of many hundreds. And then a really sort of moving entry in its way. August 30, 16 men, women and children tied up from a village Mboye, close to the town. Infamous. The men were put in the prison. The children let go at my intervention. Infamous, infamous, shameful system. Now all the time he is sending dispatches back to London and he says, look, this is dreadful. Leopold has, and I quote, put the natives on a path to their final extinction and the universal condemnation of civilized mankind. And you can well imagine the Foreign Office getting these and thinking, oh, come on. Oh, no. Because they don't want to cause a huge fuss.

[Tom Holland]

But also lurking in that sense of the shameful system, the infamous, shameful system. I mean, is, is the system that he's talking about, specifically the Belgian Congo, right? Or is it the broader apparatus of imperialism per se?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly.

[Tom Holland]

And Casement is on a kind of journey, isn't he, that will lead him to condemn not just Leopold's empire in the Congo, but imperialism full stop.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly, exactly. Because that, of course, is the worry for the Foreign Office and for the British government generally, is that, you know, sure, look into the Congo Free State, but stop there, you know, you shouldn't be looking into other colonies because, of course, our colonies are perfect. Anyway, he gets back to London eventually goes back to England. In 1903, he writes his report. He actually finished the report coming home from a country house weekend with his old pal Joseph Conrad. Now, his report is written in this kind of legalese Hog Child describes it.

[Tom Holland]

I thought, in fascinating terms the language that Amnesty and similar groups would later make their own, formal and sober, assessing the reliability of various witnesses, filled with references to laws and statistics and accompanied by appendices and depositions. And that's the key, isn't it? That not written in a tone of moral outrage, it's sober, cool, designed to appeal to bureaucrats and, and functionaries.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But you mentioned the depositions. So at the end he has kind of witness statements that, that, that go into all the horrors. And the Foreign Office are really shocked by the witness statements. The British ambassador to Belgium says, I can't believe that the Belgians would have done this. They're. They're a cultivated people, even under a tropical sky. Surely the Belgians couldn't have lowered themselves to this. Anyway, this report is finally published. Britain sends copies at the beginning of 1904 to every signatory to the Conference of Berlin. Even Leopold can't ignore this. I mean, this is a big story. And he says, well, I'll set up my own commission to investigate it. That's his usual ploy. And in the second half we'll see how that turns out for him. But casement is not yet finished. He now really has the zeal of a convert. He gets in touch with Morel. They have dinner in London and they talk until 2:00 in the morning. And Morel gave a wonderful, a wonderful vivid account of their first meeting, which I will read. He said, from the moment our hands gripped and our eyes met, mutual trust and confidence were bred. And the feeling of isolation slipped from me like a mantle. Here was a man, indeed, one who would convince those in high places of the foulness of the crime committed on a helpless race. Morel said in his memoir, you know, I often see him, Casement now, in imagination, as I saw him at that memorable interview, crouching over the fire in the otherwise unlighted room, unfolding in a musical, soft, almost even voice, in language of peculiar dignity and pathos, the story of a vile conspiracy. And as Casement talks in this beautiful voice of his, Mirel said, I believe that I saw those hunted women clutching their children, flying panic stricken to the bush, the blood flowing, the ghastly tally of severed heads and all this kind of thing, you know, Casement's. Casement's skill as a storyteller is so important.

[Tom Holland]

This voice that everyone talks about.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. Now, Casement says to him that night and afterwards, look, I think we should set up a big new organization devoted to the Congo. And Casement says to him, you know, the Congo is, is different from other campaigns. The Congo is a unique evil. And if we can rouse the British people, the world might be roused. Britain had played that part before, meaning, in the campaign against slavery. Could we raise a throbbing in that great heart of hers?

[Tom Holland]

Right.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

This is a tremendous story. It's about kindness, but it's also about how brilliant Britain is.

[Tom Holland]

But, but this is, I mean, will become the key point of divergence between Morel and Casement.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly.

[Tom Holland]

Because for Morel, Congo is sui generis. It's, it's so. It's hideous. It has nothing to do with the broader imperial context. And Casement will come to a very different conclusion.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. And listeners, we'll discuss this in the bonus episode. Is the Congo unique or is the Congo symptomatic of the crimes of imperialism? And this is an issue for historians.

[Tom Holland]

To this day and indeed for moralists and theologians.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly.

[Tom Holland]

Ongoing debate at the moment.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Very, very. A very bitter debate, I think is fair to say. So anyway, Morel says, look, I mean, the new organization, I don't really have the money to set this up. Casement says, here's a check for £100.

[Tom Holland]

Which he can't afford.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's more than a month's salary for Casement. A lot of money. Morel uses this to buy a typewriter. And the Congo Reform association is born, one of the great human rights campaigning organizations. Now, after this, Casement slightly drops out of the story, the Foreign Office give him a promotion. They promote him to consul in Lisbon. So off he goes to Portugal, which.

[Tom Holland]

He doesn't like because he finds it too civilized.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, it's boring. He and Morel are still great pals. They had a code, they had nicknames for each Other. So Casement was tiger, Morel was bulldog, and Leopold was the king of beasts.

[Tom Holland]

You see, I find that odd because I would have thought that Casement would be bulldog because he's got Jon, his bulldog.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But Morel is more.

[Tom Holland]

He looks like a bulldog.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, he looks like a bulldog. And maybe there's a sort of patriotic thing there, you know, he's got a British bulldog with his barrel chest.

[Tom Holland]

Maybe. But I think of Jon.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay. I don't think Casement is a tiger if you're going to be an animal. Casement's not a tiger.

[Tom Holland]

No.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think he's a puma.

[Tom Holland]

A puma?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. Because he goes to South America and he's a kind of man of the shadows.

[Tom Holland]

Yes, I suppose. Yes, I can see that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Anyway, that's.

[Tom Holland]

But it's good to have a dog in the story.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I love a dog. On the rest is history. We're very keen on dogs. So Morel throws himself into this new association. It has its first meeting in Liverpool, of course, the great shipping port in 1904. And it gets a thousand people. Now, this is. It's slightly different from other human rights campaigns, and this is perhaps why it's more effective. It's a very establishment campaign. He has all kinds of endorsements from earls and viscounts, especially bishops. He loves a bishop and he loves an mp.

[Tom Holland]

Bishop's very big in the anti apartheid campaign.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Indeed. He loves an mp and he never. Morell never criticizes the British Empire or colonialism per se. He loves Britain. He loves Britain's empire.

[Tom Holland]

So that's not just a tactical move.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He genuinely thinks Britain is top nation and also top nation for kindness and that that's why Britain is peculiarly well equipped to lead this campaign. I think he genuinely thinks this, and he is. For somebody who basically was a shipping clerk, he turns out to be absolutely brilliant at running this campaign. He works incredibly hard. He writes 600 letters a month, which is 20 letters a day on average. He's a brilliant speaker. He will talk without notes to audiences of thousands, you know, week after week after week. He's great at tailoring his message to different audiences so as to businessmen. He will talk about Leopold as Monopoly betrays free trade. To bishops, he says it's our Christian duty. To audiences of the sort of common people, he says it's Britain's responsibility as top nation to lead the world. He always makes sure he has mps from different parties sitting on the platform, as well as all the local bigwigs. He's great at wooing rich supporters so the Cadbury's Chocolate family, we did a podcast about them last year. They're Quakers, they see themselves as great philanthropists. He gets loads of donations from them. He likes a celebrity. So Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes creator, he gets Conan Doyle to rallies, he gets him to write his own book on the Congo, the Crime of the Congo.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, the thing about that is Conan Doyle is very keen, say on the war against the birds in South Africa that the British are fighting. So he sees no contradiction between supporting British imperialism in South Africa and excoriating Belgian imperialism in, in the Congo.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

What a perfect recruit. Probably the most famous writer of the day. Very patriotic. You know, you can't write him off as a do gooding, bleeding hearted. You know, he loves a campaigning cause, Conan Doyle, but there's no doubt that he also loves Britain. So the perfect, perfect person to have. And Morel also knows the value of the modern image. So it's Morel who really pioneers the use of slideshows with all these pictures of people with their hands cut off. And this is in a way the highlight of his rallies. It's the bit that everyone's been waiting for and that everyone will remember. He shows them the pictures and that's the thing that really, really has and effect. AJP Taylor, the great historian himself from a dissenting background, said that Morel was in his view the single best, most effective activist, most effective leader of a campaign in British history. And I don't think he's wrong, actually.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, the thing is that he is kind of going with the grain of British public opinion. Part of their patriotism is a sense that, you know, this is the country that abolished the slave trade. They're on the side of the angels, all of that. But. But in government there is still a kind of a slight cynicism, a slightly more Machiavellian approach to things. So there's a Belgian newspaper editor who is quoted by Hoxel, who once shrewdly remarked that Lord Salisbury, who is, you know, prime minister for throughout much of this period, is, and I quote, is not a man to care much about the fate of the blacks any more than that of the Armenians or the Bulgarians. And Morell himself, writing about Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary, of course, in the.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Build up to the great hero of.

[Tom Holland]

Your great hero of mine, great fisherman, great bird watcher. However, Morel does say of Sir Edward Grey that he would act only when kicked and if the process of kicking is stopped, he will do nothing. And basically Morel sees it as his job to do that kicking.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But as kickers go, he's probably the best kicker or one of the best kickers.

[Tom Holland]

The Johnny Wilkinson. Yes, moral kicking.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And not just in Britain. So by the middle of the 1900s, there are branches of his association in France, in Germany, in the countries of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in Australia, in New Zealand. And he has put the issue of the Congo Free State on the front pages of newspapers in almost every country on earth. So the question is, is this enough to trouble Leopold? How will the king fight back?

[Tom Holland]

Can I just read what you've put in your notes? The concluding question. So just to quote, this is what you've written, Dominic So the tide seems to be turning. But will this be enough to trouble Leopold? How will he fight back? And how does it involve one of the and now capital's fattest men in history?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The fattest men in history. Come back after the break to meet this extraordinary man.

[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Mark Twain]

These meddlesome American missionaries. These Frank British consuls, these blabbing Belgian born traitor officials, those tiresome parrots are always talking. They have told how for 20 years I have ruled the Congo state, seizing and holding the state as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private swag. Mine, solely mine. Claiming and holding its millions of people.

[Tom Holland]

Is my private property.

[Mark Twain]

My serfs, my slaves, the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land. Mine, mine solely and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilacion and the altar. These pests, they have kept nothing back. They have revealed these and yet other details which shame should have kept them silent about since they were exposures of a king, a sacred personage and immune from reproach by right of his appointment to his great office by God himself.

[Tom Holland]

So that was king Leopold ii, King of the Belgians, as ventriloquized by Mark Twain in his satirical monologue, King Leopold's Soliloquy, which he published in 1905. Mark Twain, of course, one of the greatest American writers and we've already had a lot of great writers in this series. But it's good to get Twain in, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Definitely. So it comes Twain a little bit because Twain joins the campaign against the Congo Free State. But first of all, well, how's Leopold? How has he reacted to all this? I mean, I think it's fair to say he probably does think what the words that Twain has put into his mouth. Leopold is now, he turned 60 in 1895. He's a very rich man, but he's very unpopular in Belgium. He has all these villas on the French Riviera. He's got a massive yacht. He spends a lot of his time in the south of France. A lot of Belgians say to themselves, well, he's got this massive, you know, colony, all this money, but we're not seeing any benefits from it.

[Tom Holland]

Dominic, what about his love life?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, he's disgraced himself, Tom. I think he's let himself. He's let Belgium down. So he has got this new mistress who is exceedingly controversial. She's a young French prostitute called Caroline Delacroix or Lacroix, the different versions of her name. They probably met when he was 65 and she was 16. They probably met at a brothel or hotel in Paris.

[Tom Holland]

And am I right that she was probably pimped by a guy who'd been her lover?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's right.

[Tom Holland]

Who's a former soldier called Antoine Emmanuel Duryeux. And as we will see, he remains very much on the scene. He's always lurking in the background, adding to the general quality of moral probity.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Now, Leopold's wife, who of course he hated, died in 1902. And he now becomes completely obsessed with Caroline. He installed her near his castle at Lacan, outside Brussels. He spent millions of francs on jewels and clothes for her. He gave her a retinue of servants. I mean, disgracefully, Tom. He took her with him to Queen Victoria's funeral, which was a shocking, enormous scandal. She bore him two children in 1909 and 1910. And actually, far more than the issue of the Congo Free State, this is what destroys his reputation in Belgium. But the two issues become slightly conflated in the world's press. So when her second son was born, there was some issue with his hand. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but whether it was a. He had a withered arm or what it was. But anyway, there's an issue with his hand. And Punch magazine in England then very, very popular, published a cartoon showing Leopold holding this baby with a kind of injured hand. And he's surrounded by African corpses with severed hands. And the caption says, vengeance from on high. In other words, God has punished you for what you've done to these people.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, that's.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's pretty punchy.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. Well, literally.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Literally, yeah, exactly. So now, Leopold is very upset by all this, of course, and he does something very modern. He employs a PR campaign of his own. They place articles in the newspapers about abuses in British colonies, I. E. He's saying, you are the most dreadful hypocrites. You know, you think I'm bad? Look at what you're doing in Nigeria or Sierra Leone or Africa.

[Tom Holland]

He has. He's got a point.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, we'll discuss whether he's got a point in the bonus episode. But it's fair to say. I think it's absolutely fair to say all European empires have skeletons rattling around in their closets. He's not wrong about that, that's for sure. He gets his tame shipping companies to sponsor books and articles. He sets up lobby groups with. I mean, all with these sort of comical names. The Committee for the Protection of Interests in Africa. Yeah. The Federation for the Defense of Belgian Interests Abroad. You know, all of these groups. That, again, sound very contemporary, don't they? I mean, the kind of thing you see all the time.

[Tom Holland]

Well, it's what South Africa did during the apartheid campaign, of course. And I suppose it's also, to a degree, kind of what big Tobacco or Big Oil tend to do.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of course it is. Of course it is. They subs or they subsidize magazines, which he does. He has a magazine called New Africa, the Truth about the Congo Free State. You know that. That these. This is classic. You know, it's so common now, but at the time, it is groundbreaking. And he spends a lot of money on journalists. And then we know about this because we have the paper trail of his attempts to bribe the German press entertainingly. His chief agent in Germany, who was a guy called Ludwig van Stoib, claimed that the Belgians were very slow about handing over, about reimbursing him for his costs. And he wrote to Brussels and said, where's my reimbursement? And he said, now you keep asking me for receipts. Obviously, I don't have any receipts because.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, it's all underhand because I'm giving.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

People cash, brown envelopes or whatever. By the way, one issue for Leopold is that our old friend the Kaiser in Germany, the Kaiser absolutely despises Leopold. He called him Satan and Mammon in one person.

[Tom Holland]

Is this the same Kaiser who is leading the country that is simultaneously practicing genocide in Namibia?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's the man.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right.

[Tom Holland]

So, okay.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, I think there's a fair bit of double standards in this. Exactly. Now, the battle moves in about 1904 to America. America, of course, was the first country to recognize the Congo Free State.

[Tom Holland]

It's a bit of an embarrassment. Do you think?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, I think so. And Edmond D. Morrell says, you know, the United States has a special responsibility to. To. To address this because they are the country that basically opened the door to Leopold getting this territory. And.

[Tom Holland]

But also, is it the. The. As in the abolitionist movement, that there is a kind of congruity, a moral congruity between British and American takes on this?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Absolutely. So missionaries will often do tour speaking tours. British missionaries in America, American missionaries in Britain. There is a sense of, dare I say, a special relationship, a sort of moral relationship on this front. So in 1904, Morel goes to America. He meets Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. He recruits Mark Twain. Twain is then in his 60s. He's probably the most famous author in America. He's all in on the campaign. He goes.

[Tom Holland]

And he's a man who knows the world. I mean, he's been around the world. He's seen. He can absolutely understand how this could happen.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And he's a great activist, he's a great campaigner. Twain, he goes to Washington three times to lobby the president, to lobby Congress. And it Becomes this huge crusade. Petitions signed by thousands of people, by governors, by senators, university presidents and so on. Now, Leopold again doesn't take this lying down. He fights back. He mounts a lobbying campaign in America. He offers Congo concessions to the Guggenheim family, to John D. Rockefeller. He gives artifacts to the American Museum of Natural History because he knows that JP Morgan is on the board. And he pays American academics to defend him. So to give you just one example, a guy called Frederick Starr from the University of Chicago. He's paid by Leopold to write a series of articles for the Chicago Tribune called the Truth about the Congo Free State. But then Leopold makes a terrible mistake. And tomy promised a very large man. And now he. He rumbles, he looms into view.

[Tom Holland]

How large is he? Just so we get that he's established.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He'S about 21 stone. I don't know what that is in American measurements.

[Tom Holland]

So you've, you've so heavy. One journalist said he made President Taft look like a top worker in a team of acrobats.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly.

[Tom Holland]

President Taft is famously large.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Here's fattest president in American history. And this bloke makes Taft look like a kind of gymnast. Exactly. So this guy is called Colonel. I mean, you couldn't make it up. He's called Colonel Henry I. Kowalski. And Leopold takes him on as his chief lobbyist and pays him the equivalent of about a million dollars a year today, 100,000 francs. Now, Kowalski has a series of problems. One, he's a total fraud. And two, he's a narcoleptic. So, and this may be related, I think, Tom, to his fatness. So he will fall asleep unexpectedly. He's a lawyer. He'll fall asleep in court. He falls asleep when he's waiting to meet people in hotel lobbies. And he also, I read, falls asleep in the street. So he'll be like walking down the street or something or. And well, I don't know, what does he. Is he still standing up? Is he fall over? I mean, he's a large man.

[Tom Holland]

Don't sheep go to sleep standing up?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Standing up. Exactly. So you'd hope that he wouldn't fall. The sort of tremors. Yes, Echoing across New York. Anyway, the Belgian ambassador, when he hears that Leopold has employed this guy, says what? This man is a notorious fraud. Like don't. What are we doing? So basically, after the first year, the Belgians don't renew this guy Kowalski's contract. You know, actually, no, we've changed our minds. Kowalski, when he's not asleep, is outraged by this. And do you Know what he does? He goes straight to the newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst and he says, I've been working as a paid lobbyist for king of the 2nd of Belgium. Would you like the story? And to Leopold's horror, in December 1906, the New York American, one of Hearst's papers ban a headline on its front page. King Leopold's Amazing attempt to influence our Congress exposed. And Kowalski has told them everything. Including the fact that he's been paying a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to basically derail congressional resolutions on the Congo. And for every day for a week, Hearst's papers lead with the Congo. Pictures of the severed hands, shocking missionary accounts, the works. It's a massive story. And basically by the time it's all over, Leopold has comprehensively lost American public opinion.

[Tom Holland]

Because I remember when that campaign is launched that leads to the United States being the first country to recognize Leopold's jurisdiction over the Congo. There was somebody said, oh, he's the kind of person who gives kings a good name.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

But presumably the fact that he is a king actually just makes him seem even worse in American eyes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

An evil, corrupt European king. I mean it's a. He's the perfect villain, isn't he? With his sort of 12 year old mistress or whatever she is. I mean it's a terrible. He is a, he is a very bad standard bearer for European colonialism, I think it's fair to say. So Leopold has probably only one card left. Now. Remember that he had set up one of his little fake commissions to investigate the casement report. So this has three judges on it. There's one Italian, there's one Belgian, there's one and there's one Swiss. And Leopold is pretty confident that they will fall into line because the Italian bloke already works in the Congo as his chief appeal court judge. So he thinks, well, what could possibly go wrong? And unbelievably, to his complete horror, the judges, they take it far too seriously. They say, well, we'll obviously go to the Congo and we'll investigate the abuses. He's like, you know, oh no. They go up the river by steamboat, Joseph Conrad style. They talked to 400 witnesses. They talked to Africans who'd been flogged with the chicot. They talk to people who've been held hostage, all of this kind of thing, you know. Leopold meanwhile is back lurking back in Brussels, waiting for their report. And they start, he starts to hear rumors that one of the judges, we don't know which one, has started crying during the interviews. He's been so moved by the stories. That's a very bad sign for Leopold then. A terrible sign. The judges come back and they go to brief the governor General.

[Tom Holland]

So that's in Leopoldville.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I guess it's in Leopoldville at this point. Or Boma, the original capital. I'm not sure which. This is a guy called Mr. Kostermans. They go to brief him about their findings. Costermans. When they leave Costerman's office, Costermans is so shocked that he doesn't speak to anybody for days. And then two weeks later, he cuts his throat with a razor and kills himself.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, that it's interesting that it seems genuinely to have shocked him.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, of course, if he's the governor General, he probably hasn't even gone upriver into the interior and seen what's going on.

[Tom Holland]

But the impression I've had is that everybody there knows what's going on.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think there are people who probably work in the. Who are, as it were, civil servants, who perhaps have just closed their eyes. Do you think? I don't know. He. Perhaps in part of it. I think it's. It's very common in history. You have people who. In part of their mind, they kind of know what's going on, but they've. You know, they've. They've closed that door.

[Tom Holland]

Maybe it's guilt.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Maybe it's guilt. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

As well as shock. I don't know.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So the report came out in November 1905. And again, it's a very lawyerly kind of report. Not sensational at all. The individual statements were not released. The witness statements, they actually weren't open to researchers until the 1980s, but they.

[Tom Holland]

Do preserve the voices of the Congolese. So throughout this story, we've been saying we haven't got them, but now we do have them.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. Do you want to read a couple of extracts, Tom, to give people a sense of it?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. So you. Yeah. So you've not included the most shocking, but here's a flavor. So he's talking about an official. He told his sentries to tie us to two trees with our feet off the ground. Our arms were stretched over our heads. We were hanging in this way several days and nights. Whilst we hung there, three sentries and the white man beat us in the private parts on the neck and other parts of the body with big hard sticks till we fainted. When I was very small, the soldiers came to make war in my village because of the rubber. A soldier used a knife to cut off my right hand and took it away. So again, there is testimony to living people having their hands cut off. It's not just corpses. I saw that he was carrying other cut off hands the same day my father and mother were killed. And I know that they had their hands cut off. So I mean living dead, it's all about the hands. And then a final one. I knew Djungi well. The white man held his head while Nikoi, standing at his feet, hit him with a cane. Finally, Nikoi kicked Jungi several times and told him to get up. When he didn't move, Akate said to the white man, this man is dead. You've killed him. The white man replied, I don't give a damn. The judges are white men like me. So no wonder they kept them hidden in Belgium.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So that report really was Leopold's last chance to recapture the narrative and obviously he completely failed. By this point, he's become an even more grotesque figure than ever. He's in his early 70s, he's a massive hypochondriac. He's riding round Belgium on a gigantic tricycle, drinking decanters of hot water which he thinks are good for his health. Everyone in Belgium hates him. And once this Kowalski business comes out in America, and then the reports, obviously by his own tame judges, he realizes the game is up. And effectively at this point, he realizes I'm going to have to get rid of the Congo and I want my money back. And so he decides he's going to sell it to the Belgian state. The one thing, of course, that at the beginning he didn't want to do. Now, unfortunately for those of us who would like to see justice done, Leopold is in a very strong position here. This has been horrendous publicity for Belgium, Dominic.

[Tom Holland]

I mean, important just to say that there are a lot of Belgians who have also been participating in this campaign. A lot of journals, a lot of magazines, a lot of newspapers. So it's not like there are Belgians who are not appalled by what's been going on, just like everyone else, of.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Course, especially in their Belgian politicians, who are absolutely mortified by this and horrified that the name of their country has been associated with this. Absolutely. I mean, this isn't because this has been King Leopold's project. There have been Belgians involved. Be absolutely right. There have been Belgians who have blown the whistle and there have been Belgians who have been really, really shocked and campaigned against it. But for the Belgian government, I mean, could you get worse publicity for a small country? Obviously you couldn't. And the British and The Americans are putting them under intense pressure. You cannot let Leopold sell this to France or Germany. We don't want the French or the Germans to get hold of the Congo and all of its rubber and all of this. So the Belgians decide under this Anglo American pressure, they're going to have to buy it off him themselves. And they do because of his dodgy accounts. The negotiations take ages, more than a year. But in March 1908 they finally agree they will pay him 50 million francs, which is the equivalent of billions of pounds or dollars today. Thankfully, Leopold doesn't have very long to spend his winnings because he died in December 1909, probably of cancer. Of course, Leopold being Leopold, his death is a massive scandal because it turned out that he'd secretly married his mistress Caroline just before his death and he'd left her most of his fortune, not.

[Tom Holland]

His daughters, because we talked about that this was the great ambition of his life, was to disinherit his daughters. And also just to add that seven months after Leopold's death, Caroline, who is now enormously rich, marries Durieux the pimp old pimp. And I think Hochschild says that Durot may well be the most successful pimp in the history of pimping. My word, he kind of reaps in the largest.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Financial reward because basically, I mean he's made millions and millions and millions.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There's a massive scandal, a huge legal battle, three way legal battle between Leopold's daughters Garoline and the Belgian government for control of his estate. It's a terrible.

[Tom Holland]

I can't believe Robert Harris hasn't written a novel about this.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But the thing is it ends up being forgotten because just five years after his death, plucky little Belgium becomes, you know, the casus belli for Britain in the First World War. And it has a new king now, his nephew Albert. Albert.

[Tom Holland]

And he becomes the great symbol of Belgian resistance, doesn't he?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So everybody is like let's, let's forget Leopold ever existed.

[Tom Holland]

So the kind of the belt and royal family get what kind of Great War washed, I suppose they do get.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, they do get Great War washed, exactly. So let's just say very quickly about what happened to the other characters in this story. Stanley at the time actually came out of this pretty untainted by the Congo scandal. He'd become an MP, a Liberal Unionist MP. He died in 1904. So round about the time the furore is reaching its peak. But it never really seemed to sort of engulf him. Although of course now you know modern historians and biographers, when they write about Stanley, I mean, obviously the Congo plays a very large part in his story.

[Tom Holland]

There was a big debate, wasn't there, whether to remove a statue of him from his birthplace in Wales?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's right, yeah.

[Tom Holland]

I think they kept the statue. I think it's still there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Casement, who we'll be hearing lots more about next week with you and John Banville. He ended up becoming the champion of another great humanitarian campaign. So rubber workers in the Peruvian Amazon, he's a great champion of them. He's knighted in 1911. But then he becomes absorbed by another cause, which is Irish freedom. An extraordinary story. And he ends up on a U boat with a load of guns, trying to smuggle weapons in kind of three.

[Tom Holland]

Days before the Easter Rising.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I mean, spoiler alert, he's hanged for high treason. Most of his Congo allies plead for clemency. Morel pleads for clemency. Conan Doyle pleads for clemency. But interestingly, Joseph Conrad did not and refused. And Conrad said Casement had taken honours from Britain. He'd represented Britain.

[Tom Holland]

We got a knighthood, hadn't he?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He had then betrayed Britain and, you know, he got what was coming to him. So Conrad's a pretty conservative figure, so that's not necessarily surprising. Morel carried on campaigning about the Congo even after being taken over by the Belgians. We'll come to that in just a second. But he was radicalized eventually, a little bit like Casement. So in the First World War, Morel is probably the best known pacifist in Brit. And he ended up being sent to prison for sending pacifist pamphlets to Switzerland, which was in breach of the Defence of the Realm Act. He ends up joining the Labour Party. He stood for Labour in Dundee in 1922. He beat Winston Churchill at the House of Commons.

[Tom Holland]

Amazing how all these figures kind of intersect.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They connect. I know there's a great book to be written about. You know, imagine a book with your characters like Conrad, Casement, Morell, Churchill, all of these. Mark Twain. Anyway, he died tragically of a heart attack two years after being elected to Parliament when he was just 51. So that was the end of him. But his legacy, of course, is a tradition of human rights activism that never really goes away. And obviously we're still very familiar with to this day. But before we close, we should just a word about the Congo, because the real question, of course, is how does it change? What changes after Leopold is gone? It's definitely true that when the Belgians take it over, There are fewer reports of atrocities. We don't have the same reports of burned villages, people being taken hostage. It doesn't seem to have been the severing of hands, all of that stuff. However, a lot of the cast in the Congo are the same people, the same officials, the same station chiefs. The Force Publique continues with the same name. The rubber trade continues, and there is still forced labor. Even after the First World War, the Belgian Congo is notoriously brutal. They're still using the chicot. They're still using forced labor. The focus has moved now to mining copper, tin and gold. But the conditions in those mines are pretty horrific, and thousands of people die.

[Tom Holland]

There's some Tintin in Congo. Hershey, one of the, I think, his second Tintin book. And he goes there and it turns out all to be the fault of Al Capone.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, And Tintin and Congo. You can't get it. You have to order it especially. You can't get it now. It's been withdrawn from sort of general sale in children's bookshops. It's seen only as a kind of historical curiosity because the portrait of Belgian colonialism and of the people in the Congo is seen as inappropriate for 21st century children, which I can completely understand, I have to say. Even in the Second World War, when obviously Belgium is one of the allies, there's still forced labor. And the colonial government demands 120 days per person of forced labor from its African population to meet the allies demands for rubber, for their trucks, for their jeeps, for their tires, of their aeroplanes and so on. So, you know, there is that dark side to the allied war effort. Now, some scholars have made a case, tried to make a case for the Belgian Congo and have said great public health campaigns trying to eliminate sleeping sickness and yellow fever and things like that. And there's perhaps a degree of truth in that. But one thing that people always say about their colonies is look at the results. Judge us on the legacy. And the truth of the matter is, if you look at what became of the Belgian Congo after 1960, after independence, I think it would be very, very hard to say. That's a record to be proud of, wouldn't you, Tom?

[Tom Holland]

And the role played by Belgium in upholding it as a territory supplying Western needs gets taken up by the United States, doesn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

CIA sponsored assassinations, backing for Mobutu, who's. I mean, the kind of. The parody.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Of a kleptocrat. And I think we said this right at the beginning that in a way Mobutu is the real heir of King of Leopold ii.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He is indeed. So there's obviously still loads to talk about. And actually in Thursday's episode, we'll be going back to the book that we began with, which is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a great subject for a history podcast because it's one of the most influential works of fiction ever written. Conrad himself is a fantastic character, extraordinary man, and the impact of that book is really, really worth talking about. So that's what we're doing on Thursday, but for our rest is History Club members a day earlier. On Wednesday, we'll be discussing the deeper questions from this series. So we'll be asking about the death toll. How many people died in the Congo Free State, and is it fair to call it, as some people do, a genocide? Is it fair to see it as representative of European colonialism generally? So, in other words, does this tell us something very dark about European imperialism? And should we perhaps revise the sort of canonical version? And, you know, what are the controversies that surround Adam Hochschaard's book, the book on which we based so much of the series? So that's for rest is History Club members. And if you want to join, you can just head to therestishistory.com and then you'll hear it.

[Tom Holland]

Thank you very much, Dominic. Brilliant, amazing, amazing sweep of a terrible story. As I say. We'll be back in our next episode with Heart of Darkness. And then next week there'll be also a bonus on Roger Casement. So lots of Congo, but for now, bye.