ABSTRACT
While Chapter 3 notes the brief blossoming of Congolese protest amid the Commission of Inquiry’s tour, the fourth chapter highlights its violent suppression in two libel trials involving missionaries. The trial of the Congo Balolo Mission’s Edgar Stannard at Coquihatville in 1906 has previously been discussed in terms of European international relations, and that of the American Presbyterian missionary William H. Sheppard at Leopoldville in 1909 is remembered as a well-publicised victory for the increasingly international Congo reform movement. Chapter 4 examines the experiences of the Congolese witnesses in legal proceedings in the Congo Free State. After exploring the various challenges of giving lawful testimony in this colony using examples from the period before the Commission of Inquiry tour, the chapter then turns the spotlight on these two famous trials. At Coquilhatville, Chief Lontulu was imprisoned, harassed, and ultimately intimidated into changing his testimony, while the Kuba who undertook the lengthy voyage to Leopoldville were finally denied the opportunity to speak in court. Even as the Congo reform campaign notched successes against Leopold conditions for the peoples of the Upper Congo were by no means automatically improved. The colonial authorities continued to impose themselves in oppressive fashion. In the aftermath of the Commission of Inquiry tour, new powers were effected to try to silence both European critics of the colonial regime and their African informants. Chapter 4 proposes that the Stannard and Sheppard trials heralded the reassertion of a hard-line attitude toward legally legitimate forms of protest by Congo peoples amid the humanitarian scandal, and it explores the ways in which, by soliciting their words with little hope of improving their immediate fortunes, the Congo reform movement could compound the travails of the people in their colonial subjection.
