ABSTRACT
The questions which form the epigraph to this chapter, from the concluding attack upon the Congo’s “modern slavers” in E.D. Morel’s Red Rubber (1906), typify how late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century humanitarians recalled their nation’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery to portray themselves as “the race of Wilberforce”, who might reawaken the antislavery movement.1 Morel and his colleagues conceived of humanitarianism as a mantle passed on by succeeding generations who had answered God’s calling. Donation slips inserted in Congo Reform Association pamphlets feature the plea: “All I can say in my solitude is, May Heaven’s rich blessing come down on everyone who will help to heal this open sore of the world”, slavery. The words were those of Britain’s most famous mid-nineteenth-century explorer and opponent of slavery, David Livingstone, as they were inscribed on Livingstone’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.2 In making such references, Congo reformers forged self-affi rming connections between their work and that of earlier generations of humanitarians whose crusades against the slave trade and slavery are generally remembered as successes.
