The Casement Report 9

The Casement Report 9

The work of organization has since been going on over the whole country

by the more and more effective occupation of the territory; posts and

stations have been multiplied, and now number 215; the work of the

administrative, judicial, and sanitary authorities has expanded;

transport facilities have been introduced; two lines of railways have

been laid in the Lower Congo, and there are others either being

constructed or proposed in the Upper Congo; seventy-nine steamers and

boats have been put on the river and its affluents; 1,500 kilom. of

telegraph and telephone lines have been laid; carriage roads have been

built, on which the use of automobiles will put an end to the system of

carriers (“portage à dos d’homme”); vaccine institutes have been

established with a view to putting a stop, through the increased use of

lymph, to the ravages of small-pox; water-works have been built in

important centres, such as Boma and Matadi; hospitals for blacks and

whites have been founded at different posts, as also Red Cross stations

and a bacteriological institute; importation of spirituous liquors and

trade in them has been prohibited almost everywhere, while the

importation of alcoholic drinks made with absinthe, as also trade in

them, have been forbidden everywhere; the trade in improved fire-arms

and ammunition for them has been absolutely forbidden; cattle have been

introduced at all the stations, and model farms have been established;

Sanitary Commissions have been instituted whose duty it is to watch over

the requirements of the elements of public health.

 

This general development is necessarily accompanied by an improvement of

the conditions in which the native lives, wherever he comes into contact

with the European element. Materially, he is better housed, better clad,

and better fed; he is replacing his huts by better built and healthier

dwelling-places; thanks to existing transport facilities, he is able to

obtain the produce necessary to satisfy his new wants; workshops have

been opened for him, where he learns handicrafts, such as those of the

blacksmith, carpenter, mechanic, and mason; he extends his plantations,

and, taking example by the white man, learns rational modes of

agriculture; he is always able to obtain medical assistance; he sends

his children to the State school-colonies and to the missionary schools.

Steps have been taken to safeguard the individual liberty of the blacks,

and especially to prevent labour contracts between blacks and

non-natives degenerating into disguised slavery. It is on this point

that the Decree of the 8th November, 1888, enters into the most minute

details concerning the length of the engagement, the form of the

contract, and the payment of wages. Recent legislation in French Congo,

which has very properly been praised by the English organs, has been

dictated by the like solicitude for the natives.

 

The native is free to seek by work the remuneration which contributes to

the increase of his well-being. One of the objects, indeed, of the

general policy of the State is to aim at the regeneration of the race by

impressing them with the high idea of the necessity of work. It is

intelligible that Governments, conscious of their moral responsibility,

should not advocate the right of the inferior races to be idle, which

would entail the continuance of a social system opposed to civilization.

The Congo State aims at carrying out its educational mission by

requiring the native to contribute, by means of a tax in kind, for

which, however, payment is made to him, to the development of the State

forests; the amount of such payments was, in the Budget for 1903, nearly

3,000,000 fr. The legality of such a system of developing the State

property rests not only on the universal principle which attributes to

the State the possession of ownerless lands, but also on the cession

which the local Chiefs have made to the State, by peaceful methods and

Treaties, of such political and land rights as they may have possessed;

and on the fact that it is the State itself which has revealed to the

natives the existence of those natural riches of which they were

ignorant by showing them how to work; it is the State, too, which has

bound itself, equally with private persons, to plant and replant, and

thus to insure the preservation and perpetuity of those natural riches

which the carelessness of some and the lust of gain of others could not

have failed to destroy.

 

 

Page 165.

 

The system which the State has followed, while forwarding the economical

development of the country, has at the same time caused a considerable

commercial movement, inasmuch as the exports now amount to a value of

50,000,000, and 5,000 tons of rubber from the Congo forests are sold

every year at Antwerp to the highest bidder.

 

Whatever may have been said this prosperity has not been attained to the

detriment of the native. It has been asserted that the native

populations must of necessity be badly treated because they are

subjected on the one hand to military service, and on the other to the

payment of certain taxes.

 

Military service is no more slavery in the Congo than anywhere else

where the system of conscription is in force. The manner in which the

public forces are recruited and organized has formed the subject of the

most minute legislative provisions, with a view to the avoidance of

abuses. As a matter of fact military service is not a heavy burden to

the population, from whom it only takes one man in 10,000. To show the

errors which have been believed in regard to the public forces it is

necessary once more to point out that they are composed entirely of

regular troops, and there are no “irregular levies” composed of

undisciplined and barbarous elements. Care has been taken gradually to

get rid of posts of black soldiers, and at the present moment every

military post is commanded by a white officer. The increase in the

number of officials has allowed of giving European officers to all

detachments of these forces.

 

In regard to contributions in kind which are levied on the native by the

authorities, such taxes are as legitimate as any other. They do not

impose on the native burdens of a different or heavier kind than the

forms of impost enforced in the neighbouring Colonies, such as the hut

tax. The native thus bears his share of the public burden as a return

for the protection afforded him by the State, and this share is a light

one since on an average it means for the native no more than forty hours

of work a-month.

 

It is unfortunately true that acts of violence have been committed

against the natives in the Congo, as everywhere else in Africa: the

Congo State has never sought either to deny or to conceal them. The

detractors of the State show themselves to be prejudiced when they quote

these acts as the necessary consequence of a bad system of

administration, or when they assert that they are tolerated by the

higher authorities. Whenever any European official has been guilty of

such acts he has been punished by the Courts, and a certain number of

Europeans are at this moment in the prisons of the State expiating their

offences against the penal laws which protect the life and person of the

native. If the enormous extent of the Congo State is taken into account,

such cases are the exception, as is obvious from the fact that recent

publications attacking the Congo State have been obliged, in support of

their indictment, to take up incidents nearly ten years old, and even to

have recourse, amongst others, to the testimony of a commercial agent

actually condemned for his excesses against the blacks. It is worthy of

remark that the Catholic missionaries have never called attention to

this general system of cruelty which is imputed to the State, and if

judicial statistics demonstrate the stern measures that have been taken

by the Criminal Courts, it does not follow that there is more crime in

the Congo than in other Central African Colonies.

 

 

 

 

No. 3.

 

_Mr. Casement to the Marquess of Lansdowne._--(_Received December 12._)

 

My Lord,

 

_London, December 11, 1903._

 

I HAVE the honour to submit my Report on my recent journey on the Upper

Congo.

 

I left Matadi on the 5th June, and arriving at Léopoldville on the 6th,

remained in the neighbourhood of Stanley Pool until the 2nd July, when I

set out for the Upper Congo. My return to Léopoldville was on the 15th

September, so that the period spent in the Upper River was one of only

two and a-half months, during which time I visited several points on the

Congo River itself, up to the junction of the Lulongo River, ascended

that river and its principal feeder, the Lopori, as far as Bongandanga,

and went round Lake Mantumba.

 

Although my visit was of such brief duration, and the points touched at

nowhere lay far off the beaten tracks of communication, the region

visited was one of the most central in the Congo State, and the district

in which most of my time was spent, that of the Equator, is probably one

of the most productive. Moreover, I was enabled, by visiting this

district, to contrast its present day state with the condition in which

I had known it some sixteen years ago. Then (in 1887) I had visited most

of the places I now revisited, and I was thus able to institute a

comparison between a state of affairs I had myself seen when the natives

lived their own savage lives in anarchic and disorderly communities,

uncontrolled by Europeans, and that created by more than a decade of

very energetic European intervention. That very much of this

intervention has been called for no one who formerly knew the Upper

Congo could doubt, and there are to-day widespread proofs of the great

energy displayed by Belgian officials in introducing their methods of

rule over one of the most savage regions of Africa.

 

Admirably built and admirably kept stations greet the traveller at many

points; a fleet of river steamers, numbering, I believe, forty-eight,

the property of the Congo Government, navigate the main river and its

principal affluents at fixed intervals. Regular means of communication

are thus afforded to some of the most inaccessible parts of Central

Africa.

 

A railway, excellently constructed in view of the difficulties to be

encountered, now connects the ocean ports with Stanley Pool, over a

tract of difficult country, which formerly offered to the weary

traveller on foot many obstacles to be overcome and many days of great

bodily fatigue. To-day the railway works most efficiently, and I noticed

many improvements, both in the permanent way and in the general

management, since the date of my last visit to Stanley Pool in January

1901. The cataract region, through which the railway passes, is a

generally unproductive and even sterile tract of some 220 miles in

breadth. This region is, I believe, the home, or birthplace, of the

sleeping sickness--a terrible disease, which is, all too rapidly, eating

its way into the heart of Africa, and has even traversed the entire

continent to well-nigh the shores of the Indian Ocean. The population of

the Lower Congo has been gradually reduced by the unchecked ravages of

this, as yet, undiagnosed and incurable disease, and as one cause of the

seemingly wholesale diminution of human life which I everywhere observed

in the regions revisited, a prominent place must be assigned to this

malady. The natives certainly attribute their alarming death-rate to

this as one of the inducing causes, although they attribute, and I think

principally, their rapid decrease in numbers to other causes as well.

Perhaps the most striking change observed during my journey into the

interior was the great reduction observable everywhere in native life.

Communities I had formerly known as large and flourishing centres of

population are to-day entirely gone, or now exist in such diminished

numbers as to be no longer recognizable. The southern shores of Stanley

Pool had formerly a population of fully 5,000 Batekes, distributed

through the three towns of Ngaliema’s (Léopoldville), Kinchasa, and

Ndolo, lying within a few miles of each other. These people, some twelve

years ago, decided to abandon their homes, and in one night the great

majority of them crossed over into the French territory on the north

shores of Stanley Pool. Where formerly had stretched these populous

native African villages, I saw to-day only a few scattered European

houses, belonging either to Government officials or local traders. In

Léopoldville to-day there are not, I should estimate, 100 of the

original natives or their descendants now residing. At Kinchasa a few more may be found dwelling around one of the European trading depôts, while at Ndolo none remain, and there is nothing there but a station of the Congo Railway Company and a Government post.