ABSTRACT
Free State employees all had to sign strict undertakings of secrecy, which their conditions of employment made it almost impossible for them to break. In 1890, however, the first chink of light appeared, when a black American, 'Colonei' George Washington Williams, undertook a tour of the Congo in the hope that he would find it another Liberia, suitable for American emigration. In March 1895 The Times was able to devote a long and ponderous article to the question of Belgian annexation of the Congo, without so much as a hint that anything untoward might be happening there. The Congo was almost totally absent from the public eye for some three years, when further critical reports surfaced from two American Presbyterian missionaries, William Morrison and William Sheppard. They described the pillaging of towns, the removal of people to serve as forced labour and the imposition of an onerous food tax.
