ABSTRACT
The British Foreign Office archives contain letters, affidavits, and interview materials from West Africans who ventured from their homelands to the Congo in the 1890s and early 1900s. These migrant labourers invariably experienced forms of exploitation in the fledgling Congo colony, and in seeking the protection of their own colonial governments they authored the first African protests against colonial rule in this territory. The first chapter recovers witness statements and letters by West African migrant labourers in the Congo Free State. It examines their reception and mediation in two inter-connecting contexts: British diplomatic responses to the emerging Congo crisis in the 1890s, and the humanitarian crusade against the Congo atrocities in the early 1900s, in particular writings by E.D. Morel. The British ‘official mind’ did respond to the pleas by changing the immigration arrangements between British West Africa and Leopold’s colony and strengthening its consular presence, thus acting under the obligation of an imperial mandate to protect the nation’s own interests, human and economic. Under limitations imposed by international relations between Britain and its European rivals for African land, however, the official response also justified diplomatic restraint by questioning the reliability of the West African testimonies. The migrants gave detailed evidence of interpersonal violence of a kind which would soon be coveted by the Congo reformers. Yet their words were generally held at arm’s length as Britain negotiated its position vis-à-vis colonial misrule within shifting frameworks of international cooperation and imperialistic rivalry. Morel’s consultation of the West Africans’ testaments was sparing and gradual, and it focused on the diplomatic questions they raised rather than incorporating them in the broader picture of Leopoldian violence. Chapter 1 examines the complicated passage of African evidence into the nascent Congo reform movement, even when evidence was recorded in official files and publications. It observes how the dominant historical narrative of the Congo Free State has been determined by the campaigning strategies of the reformers, Morel in particular.
