Registers of Violence

Even Mark Twain took on the Congo cause. In 1905, his King Leopold's Soliloquy poked fun at the plight of the Belgian king, caught out by Kodak cameras sparking international outrage. But the famous American novelist soon "retired from the Congo," pulling back from further campaigning for the Congo Reform Association in 1906. Being "tangled up in the Congo matter" menaced his independence: "What have I been doing?" he wrote, "Dreaming? Walking in my sleep? ... I wake up and find myself tacitly committed to journeys, & speeches, & so on — perfectly appaling [sic] activities." Twain also compared himself with the masterful publicist who organized the humanitarian campaign: "I am not a bee, I am a lightning-bug. ... If I had Morel's splendid equipment of energy, brains, diligence, concentration, persistence — but I haven't; he is a 'mobile, I am a wheelbarrow."

There was good reason to liken E. D. Morel to a buzzing automobile. Entering into the immense humanitarian corpus about Leopold's Congo still takes tenacity and resilience. The stories are graphic and gruesome, the layers thick with repetition, the photographs stark, shocking, and insistent. The reasons we want to recoil are not as simple as refusing knowledge. There is an unrelenting, grisly logic to this propaganda about violence and suffering, an economy to the way it snaps images that produce horror and revulsion. Voyeurism was at play when Europeans and Americans traveled to Congo at the time. They chased to spot a mutilated person, to snap another photograph, if they could. Frederick Starr learned that none could be found anymore near Ikoko; he was advised to continue up to Abir territory instead. Anti-Leopoldian rhetoric became hackneyed, the violence often reduced into simplified stories or photographic assemblages of Congolese amputees. Pro-Leopoldian propaganda also soared, spreading images of good works and technology — bridges, engineering, schools, obedient soldiers, and efforts in civilizing, including photographs of military brass bands or schoolchildren playing as part of a fanfare. We will meet fanfares, music, and fond memories again.

Some images travel, others fade away. Many, like photographs of violence from Leopold's Congo, are repackaged and reframed over and over. Adam Hochschild's moving, redemptive King Leopold's Ghost includes some of the most recycled photographs: one of a Congolese father looking at the severed hand and foot of his young daughter; another of two youths with handless black stumps on display against white cloth. Each was part of a magic lantern show that circulated in Britain and the United States during the anti-Leopoldian campaign. The photographer was Alice Harris, a missionary at Baringa, a Congo Balolo Mission station in the Abir rubber concession territory (see figure 1.1). Her pictures and the lantern shows enabled Morel's propaganda machine to gather force, moving ever larger British and North American p