In response to persistent
allegations of abuse and exploitation of the native inhabitants of
the so-called "Congo Free State" ruled by King Leopold II of
Belgium, the British Consul in the colony, Roger Casement,
was assigned by the British government to conduct an
investigation. Despite the fact that his report to the British
Parliament confirmed the accusations, the atrocities in the Congo
continued more or less unabated.
Excerpts from The Casement Report (1904)
“They
had endured such ill-treatment at the hands of the Government
officials and soldiers that nothing had remained but to be killed
for failure to bring in rubber or to die in their attempts to
satisfy the demands.”
“A widow came and declared that she had been forced to sell her
daughter, a little girl about ten.… I found on returning that the
statements made with regard to the girl were true.… The girl had
again changed hands and was promised in sale to a town whose
people are open cannibals.”
“At a village I touched at up the Lulanga River…the people
complained that there was no rubber left in their district, and
yet that the La Lulanga Company required of them each fortnight
[every two weeks] a fixed quantity they could not supply. Three
forest guards of that company were quartered, it was said, in this
village, one of whom I found on duty, the two others, he informed
me, having gone to Mampoka to convoy the fortnight's rubber. No
livestock of any kind could be seen or purchased in this town,
which had only a few years ago been a large and populous
community, filled with people and well stocked with sheep, goats,
ducks and fowls. Although I walked through most of it, I could
only count ten men, with their families. There were said to be
others in the part of the town I did not visit, but the entire
community I saw were living in wretched houses and in visible
distress.”
“The population of the lake-side towns would seem to have
diminished within the last ten years by 60 or 70 percent. It was
in 1893 that the effort to levy an india rubber imposition [tax]
in this district was begun, and for some four or five years this
imposition could only be collected at the cost of continual
fighting. Finding the task of collecting india rubber a well-nigh
impossible one, the authorities abandoned it in this district, and
the remaining inhabitants now deliver a weekly supply of
foodstuffs for the up-keep of the military camp at Irebu, of the
big coffee plantation at Bikoro.”
“In the past they escaped in large numbers to the French
territory, but many were prevented by force from doing this, and
numbers were shot in the attempt.”
R.R., a Congolese interviewed by Casement: “I ran away with two
old people, but they were caught and killed, and the soldiers made
me carry the baskets holding their cut-off hands. They killed my
little sister, threw her in a house, and set it on fire.”
A refugee from the rubber-producing regions, interviewed by
Casement “We had to go further and further into the forest to find
the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up
cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved. Wild
beasts—leopards—killed some of us when we were working away in the
forest, and others got lost or died from exposure and starvation,
and we begged the white man to leave us alone, saying that we
could get no more rubber, but the white men and their soldiers
said: 'Go! You are only beasts yourselves.'”
U.U., a Congolese interviewed by Casement: “As we fled, the
soldiers killed ten children, in the water. They killed a lot of
adults, cut off their hands, put them in baskets, and took them to
the white man, who counted 200 hands…. One day, soldiers struck a
child with a gun-butt, cut off its head, and killed my sister and
cut off her head, hands and feet because she had on rings.”
Source:
https://www.arlingtonschools.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=34195&dataid=40517&FileName=GHIIH%20Belgian%20Congo%20Primary%20Sources%20HW.pdf