ABSTRACT
Pressure of public opinion abroad put an end to the private colonial enterprise of Leopold II of Belgium. The abolition of the Congo Free State was ultimately due to the continuous flow of information concerning scandals that were perpetrated there. The Belgian people remained convinced that these stories were strongly exaggerated. J. Stengers is one of the later colonial historiographers who is of the same opinion. He argues that E.D. Morel, as leader of the anti-Leopold campaign, had turned public opinion in Belgium against himself by carrying things too far; his stories of severed hands were exaggerations to the point that they bore no relation to reality. Stengers is prepared to call the theme of punitive mutilation ‘a legend’. When professionals entrusted with the recording of colonial history express themselves in this way, it is hardly surprising that the horrors committed by Leopold’s agents are swept aside in more popular writing on Belgium’s presence in the Congo as nothing but a war of propaganda against the energetic royal pioneer. This, for example, is the tenor of H. Eynikel’s Onze Kongo: Portret van een koloniale samenleving (Our Congo: Portrait of a colonial society), published only a few years ago. The author, perhaps inspired by the trauma of decolonization which is still a sensitive issue, pays tribute to the Belgian mission of civilization in Central Africa. The atrocities that were practised, if acknowledged at all, are explained in terms of crimes and customs not tolerated by the authorities. It took some time before this savagery was brought to an end. Agents of British and German imperialism exaggerated the nature and scale of excesses, underestimating and misrepresenting the positive results of infrastructural and institutional development achieved by the early pioneers, among whom King Leopold II was the prime hero (Eynikel 1983: 53-71).
