24 - The Crime of the Congo

Summary

Ever since Adam Hochschild wrote in 1998 that the killings and excess deaths in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885-1908), though of genocidal proportions, did not, “strictly speaking,” constitute genocide, the debate his words sparked has not abated. Historians and others have embraced or denounced the proposition that what occurred in the Congo Free State during the 33 years of its legal existence, 1885-1908, was, in fact, genocidal. Officially sanctioned colonial slaughter had many names: military (in the course of war), pacifying, punitive, retaliatory, and even salutary, to teach the colonized a lesson. At times, colonial governments killed subject peoples to eliminate groups that were deemed incorrigible. The question of intent has a strange role in the study of the pace, scale, and nature of the Congo killings, which were simultaneously genocidal, exterminationist, and the unfortunate result of a highly lethal form of economic exploitation. The logic of the system of rule and economic exploitation relentlessly tended toward atrocity and murder. Whether intentional or not, the slaughter did not end until the Congo Free State itself did, and its long-term effects reverberated for many years thereafter.