Into the Light from the Heart of Darkness

Fifty years ago this week, the U.N. General Assembly ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As with most statements of principle, its lofty ideals far surpassed the morals of its signers, who included assorted Latin American dictatorships and European colonial powers. Yet, the declaration was a milestone, and it has become a benchmark that many countries, including newly democratic South Africa, have looked to in writing their constitutions.

Before the declaration, governments made all sorts of similarly noble proclamations, though usually the human rights involved turned out not to apply to women, slaves and the colonized. But gradually these exceptions were challenged by great popular movements: against slavery, for women’s suffrage, for Indian independence. The implication of all of them was that human rights were universal; there can be no exceptions.

It is surprising to realize how recent this notion of universality is. Even many of the British and American abolitionists who fought slavery in the 19th century were outraged at the idea that women wanted to attend the meetings of abolitionist organizations. John Stuart Mill, the great theorist of human liberty, felt that autocracy was a perfectly fine mode of government when dealing with “barbarians.” Almost everyone in Europe felt that any European country had the right to seize colonial territory around the world, regardless of the wishes of the people who lived there.

Curiously, we have almost completely forgotten one of the most important campaigns that broadened our notion of human rights: the Congo reform movement. At the beginning of this century, it was the most vocal, best-organized human-rights movement in the world, active for nearly a decade in both the United States and Europe. In the long stretch of time between the abolitionists of the early- and mid-19th century and the worldwide pressure on South Africa to end apartheid of the 1970s and ‘80s, the Congo campaign was the only human-rights movement to operate on a truly international stage.

Furthermore, this movement was crucial in establishing the template for the way organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch operate today. This method includes the careful gathering and sifting of evidence; reliance on sworn testimony by eyewitnesses; the use of photographs and physical evidence to prove atrocities; and the faith that such methods of truth-telling can move large numbers of people to demand action.

The European scramble for Africa was a brutal business, and the bloodiest part was the seizure of the Congo. Between 1880 and 1920, its population was slashed in half, roughly from 20 million to 10 million people, according to estimates. For most of this period, the territory was the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, making it the world’s only privately owned colony.

The invention of inflatable tires for bicycles and cars ignited a world rubber boom in the 1890s, and the Congo’s rain forest was extremely rich in wild rubber. To gather it, the king’s large private army rampaged from village to village, holding women hostage to force the men to go deep into the forest, for days or weeks at a time, to gather high monthly quotas of rubber. Villagers who didn’t meet quotas were slaughtered en masse. With most adults turned into forced laborers or hostages, there were few people to hunt, fish or raise crops, and famines raged. To avoid forced labor, hundreds of thousands fled to remote areas. Tens of thousands more were killed when the army suppressed rebellions. Among the traumatized, half-starving population, disease killed millions more.

For a time, the outside world knew little about what was happening in the Congo. One remarkable man changed this. Edmund Dene Morel was in his mid-20s, a junior official of a British shipping line that had the monopoly on cargo traffic to and from the Congo. Every few weeks, his company sent him to the Belgian port of Antwerp to supervise the loading and unloading of ships on the Congo run. Morel noticed that vessels arrived laden with enormously valuable cargoes of ivory and rubber but returned to Africa carrying no trading goods. Instead, they ferried mainly soldiers, firearms and ammunition. With horror, he realized there could be only one possible source of all this rubber and ivory: forced labor, on a massive scale. He was right.

Morel quit his job and, within a few years, became the greatest British investigative journalist of his time. A man of torrential energy, he devoted a decade of 16-hour days to putting the story of Congo rubber slavery on the world’s front pages. A file of more than 4,000 clippings about Congo atrocities from U.S., British and European newspapers, beginning in 1902, testifies to Morel’s passion.

Morel was also a masterful organizer. In the United States, he convinced Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington to join the lecture circuit to denounce King Leopold’s regime. In England, he made a speaking tour with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Urged on by Morel, both Twain and Doyle wrote books on the subject. On the continent, men and women wept on seeing Morel’s slide show of Congo horrors. Missionaries joined forces with Morel’s Congo Reform Assn. and showed audiences whips and chains they had brought back from the colony.

Everyone from the archbishop of Canterbury to U.S. university presidents joined the crusade. Between 1904 and 1913, the brutalities in the Congo were denounced at more than 1,000 mass meetings in the United States and Europe. Forced labor in the Congo was the subject of everything from hymns to children’s books. Protests were held as far away as Australia. In Italy, two men fought a duel over the issue.

Like most great human-rights agitators, the Congo reformers, as they were called, did not quickly accomplish their aims. They saved some lives, but the forced-labor system remained as long as the price of rubber was high and changed only slowly after that. Nonetheless, it was the first time that millions of people in the United States and Europe concerned themselves with the fate of people in Africa. In an age that romanticized colonial warfare, it was the first time many Americans and Europeans realized that colonialism was founded on the systematic theft of African land, labor and lives.

The Congo reform movement also transformed the people who took part in it. Morel had begun his working life as a thoroughly conventional businessman. Brought face to face with evidence of slave labor, he grew and changed. In 1909, he correctly predicted the horrendous consequences that would flow from Britain’s establishing the newly independent Union of South Africa, with an all-white legislature. Morel saw enough imperial machinations in Africa to become a skeptic when World War I began. He was one of the few people on either side who said openly that the war was not worth millions of lives. The British government censored his writing, tapped his phone and sent him to prison for six months of hard labor. Unbowed, he remained a leader of the British antiwar movement and was elected to Parliament after the war.

The movement also transformed the life of Roger Casement, an Irishman who had become British consul in the Congo in 1900. A few years later, the British government asked Casement to investigate the atrocity charges. Casement traveled deep into the rain forest and produced a detailed, well-documented report that added much fuel to the fire. On his journey, he began thinking: Ireland is also a colony. Ten years later, he resigned from the British consular service and threw himself into the cause of Irish independence.

In 1916, his former employers, the British government, ordered him hanged. Casement viewed the struggle for freedom in his native Ireland as having something in common with the struggle for freedom in Africa. He expressed this view in a ringing speech during the trial at which he was sentenced to death. The speech had a profound effect on the young Jawaharlal Nehru, who went on to lead the drive for Indian independence. It was one of many ways that the effects of the Congo reform movement rippled through the century.

If today you go looking for the photographic slides that Morel and his fellow Congo reformers used to such effect, you can find them. They are in two dusty wooden boxes on the shelves of a London organization called Anti-Slavery International, founded in 1839 as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. It is the oldest human-rights organization on Earth. In the same room where the slides are stored, young men and women pack boxes with posters, pamphlets and videocassettes about child labor in South Asia, women in household slavery in the Middle East, child prostitution in Thailand, genital mutilation of women in Africa and the exploitation of immigrant domestic servants in England.

At the time of the Congo reform movement 100 years ago, the idea of full human rights--social, political and economic--was profoundly threatening to most countries. It still is.