ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 explores one of key episodes in the history of the Congo Free State, leading eventually to annexation by the Belgian Government: the tour and report by Leopold’s own Commission of Inquiry into abuses of colonial rule. The Belgian king had instructed a tripartite travelling investigation in the wake of Roger Casement’s damaging account of the colony. The Commissioners published a sober, detached report, which does not share Casement’s interest in other voices. Nonetheless it indicted several areas of the administration of colonial rule in the Congo Free State. Its conclusions are the result of a substantial tour and of dialogue with local peoples who contributed to the inquiry at key locations, a process facilitated by the efforts of Congolese evangelists to secure testifiers. The weight and intensity of this evidence made it impossible, so European missionaries claimed, for the commissioners to exculpate the colony even had they wished to. Amid this flourishing of testimony appeared new forms of witness, including the collection of bundles of sticks as tallies of murders in Anglo-Belgian India-Rubber Co. territories. Chapter 3 analyses these forms of self-representation, situating them in the history of African counting practices and pondering their obscurity in relation to the dominant, European-authored texts of atrocities, such as the famous ‘atrocity photographs’. As a depiction of violence that demands debate and action, the sticks contrast the other materials produced as evidence by the Commission of Inquiry. In the end, the Commission abstained from drawing directly on any forms of African testimony in their published report, failing to quote from the hundreds of witness statements that they had collected. Chapter 3 concludes by recalling the circumstances in which the African evidence produced for the Commission came to be overlooked, and explores how it has continued to be unheeded in more recent historical writings in favour of metaphorical understandings of the archive as a space of forgetting.
