ABSTRACT
Why was I looking forward to meeting Jules Marchal and why was I seeking contact with a writer who chose to remain anonymous? Because I wanted to hear from him personally about the regime of wild rubber in the Congo Free State in the time of Leopold II, which was the subject of much discussion in the Anglo-Saxon world around the turn of the twentieth century. I wanted to know more about this period of terror and the silence surrounding it that has been maintained so unyieldingly in the early accounts of Belgium’s colonial history. I was curious about what had driven him to expose it and what the response had been to his findings. In 1987, I myself had published a study on the labour system at large-scale agricultural estates on the East Coast of Sumatra in the early twentieth century (Breman 1987). In the study, I described the reign of terror which the contracted army of coolies had been subjected to on the plantations. Intrinsic to the capitalist character of the late-colonial project was the extremely high degree of exploitation. But the primitive extraction which I found in the plantation belt on the East Coast of Sumatra in the Netherlands Indies early in the twentieth century not only degraded labour, but denied the human species of those who performed it. The absence of any form of compassion with the victims meant that there was no imperative need to heed appeals to shared humanity. At the public presentation of my study in March 1987, I gave a lecture in which I drew attention to the recently published work of Michael Taussig and his discussion of the Putumayo report brought out by Roger Casement in 1905. Casement’s impressive chronicle of human rights violations was founded on evidence he had gathered during a stay in the Congo Free State preceding the publication of his report. This source led me to the detailed study by Jules Marchal of the horrendous rubber regime practiced in this and eventually to Marchal himself. My contribution to a workshop in June 1989 at the Centre for Asian Studies (CASA) in Amsterdam discussed the books published by Marchal as of that time. After the meeting, I spent the weekend at his home in Belgium. He had invited me in advance, saying that I should come to stay as we would need several days to exchange ideas on what preoccupied both of us: the colonial enterprise, earlier and later.
